What this has to do with making science popular? I have no idea, and maybe that is a silly quest anyhow. Some people are trapped for whatever reason and don't seem to be interested in the "truth", but rather tend to be more interested in a sense of stability in the world that does not challenge what they already are familiar with - which happens to be the antithesis of the goals of science, I think. The question "Are you a Scientist?" maybe could be replaced by "Are you committed to discovering the truth - no matter what you already believe?". I would also question whether it is really in the domain of science to sell science to those who are not interested
Well... here's where I turn to Dawkins (in his written word, not his spoken; he has very little patience for the indoctrinated, which is of course understandable). In his books he quite eloquently espouses the appeal of a life spent in pursuit of knowledge, and the wonderful purity of trying to do good for its own sake, and realising that we DO have power over our own lives and our own choices.
He also has an awesome knack for breathing life into what may previously have been thought of as fairly dusty subjects. Even though I already considered myself an undoubted atheist and moderately well-versed in the ways life worked, I was nonetheless engrossed in his treatment of natural selection in The Blind Watchmaker! I actually just took it down off the shelf last night because it's been 6 months since I read it last, and funnily enough it's the only non-fiction book I've ever considered RE-RE-reading (I have a good memory for books, I hardly ever put any through a second iteration).
His TV appearances and debates are enjoyable for a difference reason - it's funny seeing stupid ideas get shot down, but it's in his written work that he really shines, since there he can truly be an illustrative, positive force, and not just The De-stupidator.:)
Thanks man, for your optimism that the scientific process will eventually make progress towards the truth.
Well, it's not really optimism but rather a feature of the scientific method if you think about it - while it certainly is POSSIBLE for false information to enter the repository that we call 'scientific knowledge', and this certainly happens on a regular enough basis with small things (as people pose and test new hypotheses, and they are then refuted or confirmed as the years pass), the overall trend will ALWAYS be an increase in the breadth (range) and resolution (accuracy or precision) of our knowledge. The scientific method, when applied properly, is inherently self-correcting.:)
Now, this can be likened somewhat to certain open source projects, which while yes they may be available for anyone to scrutinise and attempt to submit improvements (like scientific knowledge), there may always be areas that don't receive much attention, and these bit can contain 'bugs' for some time... but as soon as those parts become relevant and more frequently used, the bugs will be ironed out relatively quickly.
Even if every country in the world converted to official theocracies tomorrow, I believe this progressive course would not be significantly slowed unless they started killing scientists and people who think like scientists.
I've been getting impatient and have been missing that side of the big picture, and taking this whole scientific truth thing way to seriously! I gotta chill out - we'll get there eventually.
Sure thing matey - we all stand on the shoulders of giants... some generations are destined to be the equivalent of giant human pyramids (great leaps in the collective knowledge), while others may have to settle for being shoulder pads (little incremental refinements);)
Though maybe we have limited lifespans precisely for the reasons you stated that it is so easy for people to get trapped in limited ideas, so it is natures way of giving us a way out.
I think it has more to do with our metabolisms, but ok.:)
A changing of the guard if you will that eventually allows new ideas to enter and allows the religions to fall away and be replaced by new ideas.
I pray to the Sacred Spaghetti that this day may come sooner rather than later!
Whatever happens, I certainly plan on moving to Sweden before I start a family - they have one of the only school systems I would consider putting my own children through (pretty much anywhere else I'd homeschool). They also have a lower mindvirus infection rate than most other countries.;)
Al Gore is a boob, yes we agree on that. But, Al Gore did what you and I did not do, have conviction and yell from the treetops.
He can afford really good treetops though. And louder shouting. In many languages.
As soon as I saw this topic, my first thought was "holy crap, that's a lot of comments in a short time", and my second was a memory of that Sliders episode where actors and jocks weren't glorified, but the biggest nerds were the superstars with the big ad deals etc - I want to live in that world, lol.
Oh, also, I remember how much it sucked finding out there were people smarter than me (I mean, by more than a little bit) when I was about 13-14... but at least then it was still just a handful of people I'd met online and offline, plus a few hundred people I'd just heard about... I can't imagine what it must be like to be more ignorant than most of the people you meet, that must be so scary and depressing *shudder*
The sooner the masses get educated the sooner we divert at least SOME of our resources away from 'defence' and into more worthwhile pursuits, though I doubt the reigning oligarchic corporatocracy would allow such a farce (in their eyes) to come about.:( They haven't been constantly diluting the education and upping the mass-meds to try and make people SMART, after all.:/
One of the good things about science is that even if a new (fundamental) idea is hard to get accepted, at least you know that *eventually* it'll make it into the paradigm... since in time more and more people will 'discover' the same truths as yourself (if it's correct and supported by experimentation etc).
The same cannot be said for getting new moralities or updates ways of thinking added into a religion or other doctrine of societal behaviour.. since many such human-borne mindvirus botnets have internal checksum tests that attempt to reject access to the network from nodes that have defective/altered installations - or attempt a reinstall with factory defaults.
Experts Exchange doesn't have their useful content (answers) actually concealed - you just have to scroll down past 2 pages of ads and categories and voila, there it is. At least, this has been the case the dozen or so times I've searched for something and clicked through to them from Google so far this year, and I don't use any agent switcher or any other funky stuff (just NoScript and latest FF, if they obscure it through javascript then that'd be why).
I always get a chuckle when people complain about them, since as far as I can tell, they're being defeated by a scrollbar:D
I live in Portugal and never heard of a "large "net cafe" industry around here. Most people access net from home, school or the office.
He's probably thinking as a tourist.
No, I was going on information from Portugese members of the MMORPGs I used to play.
Citizens of several countries (Poland, Portugal, Brazil, Philippines, a few others) tended to be quite nationalistic in-game and tagged their nicks with BR, pl, etc, so it made them easier to identify, and though perhaps I'm wrong about Portugal certainly the BR/PH often mentioned they were playing in groups rather than at home.
This made it more interesting when people got ripped off, of course, since it meant the targets were very concentrated - infect or hard-hack one machine, get 50 accounts.. from what I hear heads did roll (figuratively);)
I have an excellent write-up of a 'hack-back' we performed against a pissant who installed keyloggers on some comps at the local nerd hangout to do just this (steal MMORPG accs) a few years back - I'll post it sometime if it's appropriate:)
At first I thought, "No, wait, maybe he's talking about computer ownership in Japan..." but I see that's not statistically different from US/Aus either:
On a side note, there are certainly several countries where many people who have access to computers and the net don't have their OWN computers; making use of large 'net cafe' industries instead - Brazil, Portugal and the Phillipines, for instance. This would play havoc with the idea of restricting the syncing of ONE device to only ONE computer, and requiring a device to be wiped if it syncs with another comp, a la Apple.
didn't get to read the article because it requires a fucking registration and I'm unwilling to register just to read this tripe
PrefBar allows you to change your user-agent, you may be able to use it to impersonate a GoogleBot (they seem to be indexed by google so it's worth a shot). I can't test it just now as I have 58 tabs open and some of them have large flash videos loaded, but this may be just the thing to facilitate your tripe-viewing in future.:)
Disclaimer: I have ass-burgers, so I'm allowed to make relevant puns. You know, like Chris Rock can make jokes about those of his melanin-endowed persuasion being delinquent and a drain on society, or wops and lebs can make awesome shows like Pizza.:D
people complain bugs and cheats. Yet according to this research paper, we should not be worry about bugs/ cheats as they are not considered an important factor.
From TFA, it looks as if the study is conducted as a meta-analysis of game reviews, which are often conducted in a very short space of time, so the likelihood of picking up on bugs or experiencing the effects of cheats is undoubtedly much lower than a 'real' player would face. This is especially so in the case of games where the major bugs/hacks aren't discovered or widely exploited until AFTER the game has been reviewed, grown a large membership, etc. I have been involved in several MMORPGs where the in-game economy has been exploited (through newly-discovered bugs) in a matter of weeks or even days, to the point of uselessness, a year or more after the games inception. In some of these, the bugs were known and being abused for long periods of time by people who actually made real money off the game, they just kept it to themselves for as long as they could, but as soon as a noob discovered it or it was leaked, it was a free-for-all. Incidentally, one of the most popular of these had dodgy graphics even when it was first released, but boasts hundreds of thousands of fanatical players.. Despite all the bugs and garbage you have to put up with, there's a great community around most MMORPGs.
Maybe since everyone has to deal with the same shitty glitches it helps bring them together? lol.
at which point the social aspects of the game will be very diminished, which is an interestinng downside to this new trend of social gaming.
Or you could look at it another way - once the game is no longer being hyped by advertisers, most of those who remain will be real fans of the game (and thus usually people who don't need help or beg for sh*t etc), or people introduced to the game by those already fans (thus won't be needing help from you either), or those doing the same thing as you (who I guess would at least *tend* to be more intelligent, though of course not all bargain hunters are Einstein).. So theoretically it can be a positive.
If you disagree on point two, please tell us what color you think they are if not black. Also explain why point one is acceptable to you and point two is not, without contradicting yourself. Thanks.
Okay, a few points [note: I'm not any of the ACs here, I'm a Pseudonymous Coward instead;)].
Firstly, I have heard the word 'nigger' used to refer to white/brown/black/yellow/blue people (yeah, those smurfs on welfare!).
nigga, niggah etc. al.(noun)1.describes an ignorant, uneducated, foolish individual regardless of race, color, religion, sexual orientation, etc. 2. endearing term between two or more individual to describe a friendship or bond. 1. Shut up, you nigger 2. Chris, you my nigga. - Urban Dictionary (definition #4)
Secondly, most people who call themselves 'black' are brown. Yes, BROWN. As in, what you get if you use the HTML color code 'brown' (produces #802A2A). I have met many brown people but only several people who were truly black - and they were Sudanese, not 'African-American' - which is also a BS term ("Oh, you have dual citizenship? May I see your passport?") - but I'll stop that rant right there.
Third, his statement was posed in the form of "A is B", and seemingly you took it upon yourself to extrapolate "All B's are A" from it, which is a logical fallacy. I would personally discount his implication that "All A's are B", but your objection appears to reject the notion that "Some B's are A", which is most definitely a true assertion which makes your outright rejection obviously incorrect.
Finally, what the frack does this have to do with online gaming? If I knew there were a bunch of brown-o-phobes in a particular server, I would join up with a decidedly over-tanned avatar just to laugh at their reactions when they get pwned by a pseudonigger. Idiots with ridiculous bigotries are fun to abuse:)
Now me, I AM a racist and I freely admit that. I frequently state my dislike of people due to their race (ie. blacks, Mexicans, Chinese, Indians, English and Australians) because I deem them to be low-class, unintelligent, unhygienic, sub-humans who should be wiped from the face of the planet.
I have often wondered why they haven't followed the money trail to find the people behind the "Antivirus 20xx" nonsense. I know I would certainly like to read a news story about the untimely death of the people involved.
They (FBI, and their equivalents in the dozen other countries widely affected) know exactly where it's coming from, it's just not in their jurisdiction.
"In the early and mid-1990s, criminal groups provided protection to businesses and enforced contracts when the state was too weak and corrupt to do so. In the process, they actually helped sustain private enterprise, albeit at a high cost to business. The emergence of an economic market for private protectionâ"in which criminal groups compete among themselves as well as with other newly formed private security agentsâ"has stabilized the business-criminal relationship. Recently, criminal networks have taken a more businesslike approach to maximizing profit" - http://www.worldpolicy.org/journal/articles/wpj04-1/sokolov.htm
The following article is the best writeup I've seen thus far on this threat, and provides some insight on the financials:
"If these stats are to be believed, one affiliate was able to install 154,825 copies of AV XP 08 in ten days' time, and 2,772 of those copies were actually purchased by the victims. This only represents a one to two percent conversion rate, but with the generous commission structure, was enough to earn the affiliate $146,525.25 for that time period. At that rate, the affiliate could be expected to earn over 5 million U.S. dollars a year, simply by maintaining a large botnet and forcing AV XP 08 installs on 10,000 to 20,000 computers a day." - http://www.secureworks.com/research/threats/rogue-antivirus-part-2/
Kinda makes a guy reconsider his chosen career... Until you consider the mortality rate of Mafiya members, and the hordes of angry noobs wherever you go;)
So Russian phishers actually care about uptime? Who woulda thunk it!:p
In other news, when millions upon millions of computers are in botnets, some of them are probably going to be non-windows systems. Shock, horror. Related reading.
Slashdot Mirror
Wouldn't you be putting your net negative charge in the net positive charge?
Hey don't push your politics on me, man!
What this has to do with making science popular? I have no idea, and maybe that is a silly quest anyhow. Some people are trapped for whatever reason and don't seem to be interested in the "truth", but rather tend to be more interested in a sense of stability in the world that does not challenge what they already are familiar with - which happens to be the antithesis of the goals of science, I think. The question "Are you a Scientist?" maybe could be replaced by "Are you committed to discovering the truth - no matter what you already believe?". I would also question whether it is really in the domain of science to sell science to those who are not interested
Well... here's where I turn to Dawkins (in his written word, not his spoken; he has very little patience for the indoctrinated, which is of course understandable). In his books he quite eloquently espouses the appeal of a life spent in pursuit of knowledge, and the wonderful purity of trying to do good for its own sake, and realising that we DO have power over our own lives and our own choices.
He also has an awesome knack for breathing life into what may previously have been thought of as fairly dusty subjects. Even though I already considered myself an undoubted atheist and moderately well-versed in the ways life worked, I was nonetheless engrossed in his treatment of natural selection in The Blind Watchmaker! I actually just took it down off the shelf last night because it's been 6 months since I read it last, and funnily enough it's the only non-fiction book I've ever considered RE-RE-reading (I have a good memory for books, I hardly ever put any through a second iteration).
His TV appearances and debates are enjoyable for a difference reason - it's funny seeing stupid ideas get shot down, but it's in his written work that he really shines, since there he can truly be an illustrative, positive force, and not just The De-stupidator. :)
Thanks man, for your optimism that the scientific process will eventually make progress towards the truth.
Well, it's not really optimism but rather a feature of the scientific method if you think about it - while it certainly is POSSIBLE for false information to enter the repository that we call 'scientific knowledge', and this certainly happens on a regular enough basis with small things (as people pose and test new hypotheses, and they are then refuted or confirmed as the years pass), the overall trend will ALWAYS be an increase in the breadth (range) and resolution (accuracy or precision) of our knowledge. The scientific method, when applied properly, is inherently self-correcting. :)
Now, this can be likened somewhat to certain open source projects, which while yes they may be available for anyone to scrutinise and attempt to submit improvements (like scientific knowledge), there may always be areas that don't receive much attention, and these bit can contain 'bugs' for some time... but as soon as those parts become relevant and more frequently used, the bugs will be ironed out relatively quickly.
Even if every country in the world converted to official theocracies tomorrow, I believe this progressive course would not be significantly slowed unless they started killing scientists and people who think like scientists.
I've been getting impatient and have been missing that side of the big picture, and taking this whole scientific truth thing way to seriously! I gotta chill out - we'll get there eventually.
Sure thing matey - we all stand on the shoulders of giants... some generations are destined to be the equivalent of giant human pyramids (great leaps in the collective knowledge), while others may have to settle for being shoulder pads (little incremental refinements) ;)
Though maybe we have limited lifespans precisely for the reasons you stated that it is so easy for people to get trapped in limited ideas, so it is natures way of giving us a way out.
I think it has more to do with our metabolisms, but ok. :)
A changing of the guard if you will that eventually allows new ideas to enter and allows the religions to fall away and be replaced by new ideas.
I pray to the Sacred Spaghetti that this day may come sooner rather than later!
Whatever happens, I certainly plan on moving to Sweden before I start a family - they have one of the only school systems I would consider putting my own children through (pretty much anywhere else I'd homeschool). They also have a lower mindvirus infection rate than most other countries. ;)
Al Gore is a boob, yes we agree on that. But, Al Gore did what you and I did not do, have conviction and yell from the treetops.
He can afford really good treetops though. And louder shouting. In many languages.
As soon as I saw this topic, my first thought was "holy crap, that's a lot of comments in a short time", and my second was a memory of that Sliders episode where actors and jocks weren't glorified, but the biggest nerds were the superstars with the big ad deals etc - I want to live in that world, lol.
Oh, also, I remember how much it sucked finding out there were people smarter than me (I mean, by more than a little bit) when I was about 13-14... but at least then it was still just a handful of people I'd met online and offline, plus a few hundred people I'd just heard about... I can't imagine what it must be like to be more ignorant than most of the people you meet, that must be so scary and depressing *shudder*
The sooner the masses get educated the sooner we divert at least SOME of our resources away from 'defence' and into more worthwhile pursuits, though I doubt the reigning oligarchic corporatocracy would allow such a farce (in their eyes) to come about. :( They haven't been constantly diluting the education and upping the mass-meds to try and make people SMART, after all. :/
Check this out too. I think you will love it:
http://www.youstupidrelativist.com/
Ew, furry alert :/
j/k, this is cool stuff lol
One of the good things about science is that even if a new (fundamental) idea is hard to get accepted, at least you know that *eventually* it'll make it into the paradigm... since in time more and more people will 'discover' the same truths as yourself (if it's correct and supported by experimentation etc).
The same cannot be said for getting new moralities or updates ways of thinking added into a religion or other doctrine of societal behaviour.. since many such human-borne mindvirus botnets have internal checksum tests that attempt to reject access to the network from nodes that have defective/altered installations - or attempt a reinstall with factory defaults.
This also works on experts exchange
Experts Exchange doesn't have their useful content (answers) actually concealed - you just have to scroll down past 2 pages of ads and categories and voila, there it is. At least, this has been the case the dozen or so times I've searched for something and clicked through to them from Google so far this year, and I don't use any agent switcher or any other funky stuff (just NoScript and latest FF, if they obscure it through javascript then that'd be why).
I always get a chuckle when people complain about them, since as far as I can tell, they're being defeated by a scrollbar :D
I live in Portugal and never heard of a "large "net cafe" industry around here. Most people access net from home, school or the office.
He's probably thinking as a tourist.
No, I was going on information from Portugese members of the MMORPGs I used to play.
Citizens of several countries (Poland, Portugal, Brazil, Philippines, a few others) tended to be quite nationalistic in-game and tagged their nicks with BR, pl, etc, so it made them easier to identify, and though perhaps I'm wrong about Portugal certainly the BR/PH often mentioned they were playing in groups rather than at home.
This made it more interesting when people got ripped off, of course, since it meant the targets were very concentrated - infect or hard-hack one machine, get 50 accounts.. from what I hear heads did roll (figuratively) ;)
I have an excellent write-up of a 'hack-back' we performed against a pissant who installed keyloggers on some comps at the local nerd hangout to do just this (steal MMORPG accs) a few years back - I'll post it sometime if it's appropriate :)
At first I thought, "No, wait, maybe he's talking about computer ownership in Japan..." but I see that's not statistically different from US/Aus either:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_Internet_users (there's no direct computer ownership listing)
On a side note, there are certainly several countries where many people who have access to computers and the net don't have their OWN computers; making use of large 'net cafe' industries instead - Brazil, Portugal and the Phillipines, for instance. This would play havoc with the idea of restricting the syncing of ONE device to only ONE computer, and requiring a device to be wiped if it syncs with another comp, a la Apple.
didn't get to read the article because it requires a fucking registration and I'm unwilling to register just to read this tripe
PrefBar allows you to change your user-agent, you may be able to use it to impersonate a GoogleBot (they seem to be indexed by google so it's worth a shot). I can't test it just now as I have 58 tabs open and some of them have large flash videos loaded, but this may be just the thing to facilitate your tripe-viewing in future. :)
Are you claiming to be a better tool?
Holy $DIETY. That site made my brain bleed.
So you're already a convert? Let it all out, brother! ;)
"Corn?? When the hell did we have corn?? ... Bugger, out of paper towels!"
Bull, as far as I am concerned:
How long have you known you're autistic?
.
.
.
.
Disclaimer: I have ass-burgers, so I'm allowed to make relevant puns. You know, like Chris Rock can make jokes about those of his melanin-endowed persuasion being delinquent and a drain on society, or wops and lebs can make awesome shows like Pizza . :D
You place multiplayer capabilities at #374? Seriously?
Yeah, sheesh.. #373 is the ability to select "scrambled" or "sunny side up" for your Hero's breakfast before hitting the road. o.O
people complain bugs and cheats. Yet according to this research paper, we should not be worry about bugs/ cheats as they are not considered an important factor.
From TFA, it looks as if the study is conducted as a meta-analysis of game reviews, which are often conducted in a very short space of time, so the likelihood of picking up on bugs or experiencing the effects of cheats is undoubtedly much lower than a 'real' player would face. This is especially so in the case of games where the major bugs/hacks aren't discovered or widely exploited until AFTER the game has been reviewed, grown a large membership, etc. I have been involved in several MMORPGs where the in-game economy has been exploited (through newly-discovered bugs) in a matter of weeks or even days, to the point of uselessness, a year or more after the games inception. In some of these, the bugs were known and being abused for long periods of time by people who actually made real money off the game, they just kept it to themselves for as long as they could, but as soon as a noob discovered it or it was leaked, it was a free-for-all. Incidentally, one of the most popular of these had dodgy graphics even when it was first released, but boasts hundreds of thousands of fanatical players.. Despite all the bugs and garbage you have to put up with, there's a great community around most MMORPGs.
Maybe since everyone has to deal with the same shitty glitches it helps bring them together? lol.
at which point the social aspects of the game will be very diminished, which is an interestinng downside to this new trend of social gaming.
Or you could look at it another way - once the game is no longer being hyped by advertisers, most of those who remain will be real fans of the game (and thus usually people who don't need help or beg for sh*t etc), or people introduced to the game by those already fans (thus won't be needing help from you either), or those doing the same thing as you (who I guess would at least *tend* to be more intelligent, though of course not all bargain hunters are Einstein).. So theoretically it can be a positive.
I seriously doubt I'll be getting a 360 until I find one in bin for $30.
Jeez!! You must really be in a posh part of town - around here things in bins are free. O.o
If you disagree on point two, please tell us what color you think they are if not black. Also explain why point one is acceptable to you and point two is not, without contradicting yourself. Thanks.
Okay, a few points [note: I'm not any of the ACs here, I'm a Pseudonymous Coward instead ;)].
Firstly, I have heard the word 'nigger' used to refer to white/brown/black/yellow/blue people (yeah, those smurfs on welfare!).
nigga, niggah etc. al.(noun)1.describes an ignorant, uneducated, foolish individual regardless of race, color, religion, sexual orientation, etc.
2. endearing term between two or more individual to describe a friendship or bond.
1. Shut up, you nigger
2. Chris, you my nigga. - Urban Dictionary (definition #4)
Secondly, most people who call themselves 'black' are brown. Yes, BROWN. As in, what you get if you use the HTML color code 'brown' (produces #802A2A). I have met many brown people but only several people who were truly black - and they were Sudanese, not 'African-American' - which is also a BS term ("Oh, you have dual citizenship? May I see your passport?") - but I'll stop that rant right there.
Third, his statement was posed in the form of "A is B", and seemingly you took it upon yourself to extrapolate "All B's are A" from it, which is a logical fallacy. I would personally discount his implication that "All A's are B", but your objection appears to reject the notion that "Some B's are A", which is most definitely a true assertion which makes your outright rejection obviously incorrect.
Finally, what the frack does this have to do with online gaming? If I knew there were a bunch of brown-o-phobes in a particular server, I would join up with a decidedly over-tanned avatar just to laugh at their reactions when they get pwned by a pseudonigger. Idiots with ridiculous bigotries are fun to abuse :)
Now me, I AM a racist and I freely admit that. I frequently state my dislike of people due to their race (ie. blacks, Mexicans, Chinese, Indians, English and Australians) because I deem them to be low-class, unintelligent, unhygienic, sub-humans who should be wiped from the face of the planet.
Only those groups? Why not go all the way? :)
I have often wondered why they haven't followed the money trail to find the people behind the "Antivirus 20xx" nonsense. I know I would certainly like to read a news story about the untimely death of the people involved.
They (FBI, and their equivalents in the dozen other countries widely affected) know exactly where it's coming from, it's just not in their jurisdiction.
Code from within the 2009 version: ..." - http://sunbeltblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/russian-don-infect-themselves.html
"00420214 - Don`t install on Rus:; 00420234 - Russian or Ukrainian Windows detected. Exiting
"In the early and mid-1990s, criminal groups provided protection to businesses and enforced contracts when the state was too weak and corrupt to do so. In the process, they actually helped sustain private enterprise, albeit at a high cost to business. The emergence of an economic market for private protectionâ"in which criminal groups compete among themselves as well as with other newly formed private security agentsâ"has stabilized the business-criminal relationship. Recently, criminal networks have taken a more businesslike approach to maximizing profit" - http://www.worldpolicy.org/journal/articles/wpj04-1/sokolov.htm
The following article is the best writeup I've seen thus far on this threat, and provides some insight on the financials:
"If these stats are to be believed, one affiliate was able to install 154,825 copies of AV XP 08 in ten days' time, and 2,772 of those copies were actually purchased by the victims. This only represents a one to two percent conversion rate, but with the generous commission structure, was enough to earn the affiliate $146,525.25 for that time period. At that rate, the affiliate could be expected to earn over 5 million U.S. dollars a year, simply by maintaining a large botnet and forcing AV XP 08 installs on 10,000 to 20,000 computers a day." - http://www.secureworks.com/research/threats/rogue-antivirus-part-2/
Kinda makes a guy reconsider his chosen career... Until you consider the mortality rate of Mafiya members, and the hordes of angry noobs wherever you go ;)
"It's like something else is heating the atmosphere besides the sun."
The orbiting teapot must have boiled! ;)
So Russian phishers actually care about uptime? Who woulda thunk it! :p
In other news, when millions upon millions of computers are in botnets, some of them are probably going to be non-windows systems. Shock, horror. Related reading.
No no no, he's talking about the Lizardmen Evil Overlords, don't let them in! :(
Mirrored the PDF Here for anyone interested (though as I mentioned, the HTML page has the useful info). :)
Rule 1: DO NOT talk to police.
One top quality vid (well, content-wise if not visually) gives an entertaining, in-depth breakdown of the reasons why not, Here.