I'm talking about truly intelligent agents.. think the equivalent of hiring an intern to read your email (Would I be optimistic to say most interns could catch 99% of current spam by reading it?) But maybe this is a few years off...
Hmm, like the average CEO's secretary. One step beyond the gmail/veepul "wisdom of crowds" distributed labor approach which is currently the state of the art.
It still doesn't scale, though, unless you are going to institute slavery. Not everyone can afford to pay a real thinking mind to filter their email, and when you talk about something smart enough to beat spammers you are probably talking about sentient creatures.
It's really really cheap to use genetic algorithms and free email accounts to defeat any non-sentient filtering method. Set up your parameters and forget it until the bell rings, then send 50 million emails out from your botnet. Profit!
Well, yeah, the staff at the big ISPs is typically not really competent to run a large network. The pay is too crappy - my employer hires the talented ones away by paying normal industry salaries, and they're not the only ones doing it. Very few major ISP employees have any deep understanding of Internet protocols, and certainly none of their PHBs do.
The irony is that cable companies are too greedy to pay big salaries, and they are competing for workers who can get big salaries elsewhere, so their operations are so poorly run that they are only profitable because they're paying off politicians to obtain regional monopolies, but the cost of buying off politicians is rising now that the regions are mostly already monopolized. In the long run, they'd have all been better off if they'd hired expensive geniuses and played by the rules instead of attempting short-term subversion of the free market. In my area, Verizon FiOS is eating Comcast's lunch, and only because they provide an infinitesimally less horrible alternative.
Are you saying that you want the ISPs to monitor and filter traffic?
No, that's exactly the guaranteed-fail strategy they are pursuing.
I want them to use the Internet as designed - identify malefactors (which is trivially easy using their existing equipment) and disconnect them.
ISPs who are too retarded to figure out that this is a huge profit making opportunity (that'd be most of them) should ponder this question: How much would anti-malware vendors pay comcast to have all zombie PCs restricted to a special subnet, where the PC owners would be unable to do anything but visit designated anti-malware sites?
If comcast (for example) eliminated their malicious traffic they'd regain 80% or more of their bandwidth, and they'd have no need to filter anything else.
Maybe the answer is smarter (sentient/AI?) systems that truly act as your agent.. The current filtering tools seem quite hit and miss..
They are typically 100% effective for the few hours it takes the spammers to fuzz them.
Spammers have gmail accounts, hotmail accounts, etc. etc. and whenever you put a new "sentient/AI" or any other system in place they just hammer their own accounts until something gets through, then they spam everybody with whatever technique worked.
The amount of effort required to break any anti-spam system (except a few forms of permission based, white-list style ones) will always be many orders of magnitude less than the amount of effort required to build such a system. You really can't win with a filtering strategy as long as spamming remains profitable and reasonably risk-free.
People being the way we are, we will probably continue to fail to make spamming unprofitable so we should focus on increasing the risks. I think the CEOs of corporations that harbor and enable spammer botnets should be flogged, tarred and feathered... are you listening Comcast? Rogers? Cox?
remember: everything PhDs do is art. everything. including using their alma mater's mascot name as their password. art, i tell you!
Years ago (when I still worked in science) I got a call from the US military. It seems one of our scientists was attacking one of their systems.
Since the scientist in question was on the other side of the world on a field trip at the time, it seemed likely that someone had compromised his account, and I shut it down.
When I eventually asked the scientist if was using a strong password, he was proud to recite a long dog-latin linnean binomial. It was very difficult to spell or pronounce.
Of course, that was also the first word you saw if you searched for his name on the Internet (using WAIS, since this was before commercial search engines). This particular scientist was the world's foremost authority on the organism with that difficult name, and had published dozens of papers on it.
To put it in modern geek terms, it was like this guy was Bill Gates, his userid was gates, and his password was microsoft.
The idea that criminal hackers might actually look up his name came as a total surprise to this world-famous scientist with multiple PhDs...
I agree with your characterizaion of the Arabs' poor treatment of the Palestinians, but when you then label Israel "a loyal US Ally/Satellite" I have to wonder if you know about the Israeli spies who've been stealing political, economic and military secrets from the US for decades now.
And frankly, I wish they didn't "advance[ the] US Agenda in the mideast" since access to cheap oil stagnated our culture and technology for 30 years.
Oh yeah, let's give him a break. Oops, he's been by hit by a bus. Where's his disaster recovery plan? That's right, there isn't one.
My bet is, it's sitting right in the middle of his old desk blotter, in a fat manila folder marked "Disaster Recovery and Service Continuity Plans". These clowns would never find it there in a million years. The infamous missing passwords are probably in a letter-size envelope in the top left desk drawer, too.
Webkit isn't a browser, genius, it's a rendering engine. It's more akin to building a car from the ground up using an ENGINE from a Toyota and everything else being your own design.
It makes me so proud to have you call me a genius. Hey, I'm a genius, everybody!
from the ground up, english idiom:
From the most basic level to the highest level; completely: designed the house from the ground up; learned the family business from the ground up.
see also: from stem to stern, from scratch, from start to finish
Maybe someone could do some actual physics/engineering to back up the anecdotal story. I didn't think platinum was particularly strong, so if that happened with a platinum ring then it seems like it would happen with gold. This sounds like a great question for prof to put on a midterm - "Does the ring break or do you tie off the stump, and run to the ER with a bucket of ice containing said finger"
yeah, it's a really great test question, since it touches on the different ways you can measure metal strength. A thin silver ring would snap almost instantly, and a wide 24K gold one would stretch like taffy until your finger slipped out; you'd only get a nasty cut. What combination of properties would overcome the strength of human tendon and cartilage?
And you're right about anecdotes, too. It's unsubstantiated hearsay to folks reading this, but I was there when he got rushed off to the hospital, so for me it's pure empirical data.
Good advice! now where can I get a metal that's softer than flesh? or weaker than calcium phosphate?
For a finger ring, you only need something that will deform significantly before the tendon fails. Try 24K gold, or a soft 18K alloy (depending on what you alloy it with, it can get harder or softer). Lead's probably not the best choice...
Alternatively, use an unclosed ring of hard metal, or a ring thin enough to break. I've had two sterling silver rings break on my fingers without my fingers being damaged. Er, that's not entirely true, one of them pinched me hard enough to draw blood when the break snapped closed again, but hopefully you get my point.
I'm sorry, but this will happen with any ring made of any metal, be it gold or silver or aluminum. The real problem here is not the difference in the hardness of the platinum versus the steel, but the difference in hardness between the ring and his soft, fleshy finger.
I think you misunderstood me. We are in agreement about the nature of the problem, but you are incorrect when you characterize "any metal" as being tougher than a human finger joint. I have a nice red gold band on my finger that I think I could tear apart with my bare hands (though I am not going to do so to prove my point). I believe this because I've accidentally stretched it twice and I forced it back to size using my bare hand and a blowspike set in the hardy of my anvil (I don't have a cone mandrel). I have broken other metals up with my bare hands on occasion, and I have broken metal objects by accidentally stepping on them (which proves that the falling weight of a human body can cause metal to fail).
I'm pretty sure that I cannot tear the finger off a human as easily as I can tear apart soft metals. But I'm not planning to perform the experiment...
After he'd been wearing it a couple decades, one day he slipped and started to fall in a parking lot. His hand was resting on the top of a metal fence post, and as it slipped off, the metal rod clamped to the post (that held a run of chain-link fence to it) found its way between his finger and the ring.
The ring was well fitted, so when the steel was deflected inwards by the stronger platinum, gravity caused the steel to slice him to the bone. Then he was hanging by one damaged finger with his full weight held by the steel rod inside the ring.
If you calculate the strength of your wife's finger joint relative to her weight (and she's not barsoomian or emaciated or something) you'll see that the next thing that happens is the finger pops right off. Luckily for my dad, he is quite strong, so he grabbed the chain-link with his other hand and only got his finger stretched to un-natural length.
The doctors fixed it, so it wasn't as bad as getting your silk tie caught in a generator, but it was still a real wake-up call. Unbreakable ring on breakable finger has a very bad failure mode.
Get her a really nice soft metal ring with a beautiful design. High-carat gold is really much redder than the common stuff - it's noticeably prettier - and you can always inlay it with something that's not a continuous band.
If you go to a construction site an find a worker using a hammer to actually drive in nails in the US, you better start looking for a blue police box or something. Pneumatic nail guns have replaced the hammer for this long ago.
Not in my neighborhood. I see people swinging hammers all the time. I've never seen a "police box" AFAIK though.
like asking a workman whether a new hammer would make his job any more profitable. That doesn't mean it's not an investment anyway.
Yes, if the new hammer improves ergonomics to the point where the workman can do more work in less time, or the old hammer was so non-ergonomic it was going to cost him dearly in medical bills late in life, profit is not necessarily going to be immediately measurable in dollars.
Eventually, though, the money spent on the new hammer might pay off in happier children (Dad has more time for his kids) or a happier retirement (Dad does not have a useless right arm at age 70). I'd consider that a good investment, myself.
It's well known that satellite-grade solar panels require more energy to create than they produce in their entire lifetime, so it was a valid question by NickFortune.
Huh? Where did you get this entirely false idea?
Oh, wait, you're factoring in the amount of energy required to shoot them into orbit, and only counting panels that are actually used for satellites, where they have far less lifespan than they would have on earth, due to extreme temperature cycling and lack of a protective atmospheric blanket. That way you can pretend to have an actual point.
DO NOT USE YOUR OWN PROPERTY. Rent a venue that has proper insurance. I like the Thunderguards Motorcyle Hall, personally.
MAKE EVERYBODY SIGN A WAIVER. Get a big scary guy, preferably with fresh bruises and fake blood trickling out of the corner of his mouth or eye, to staff the table where the waivers will be signed. If anybody asks him about it, he should say somebody tried to get in without signing and had to be stomped. Said guy has been taken to hospital, of course.
DON'T BRING ANYTHING YOU CAN'T AFFORD TO LOSE. If your life will be diminished by losing that switch, laptop, jacket, or cables, don't bring it.
Following these simple guidelines should let you have a fun time without stressing out. Keep in mind that you'll not be playing any LAN games, because somebody will have to be dealing with the inevitable emergencies that the public bring to any party (blown circuit breakers, burst colostomy bags, alcohol poisoning, you name it).
Considering that Perl was originally intended to replace sed, awk, and many twisty shell languages, all different in many projects, saying that rewriting something from Perl into sed obfuscates it is exactly the point.
Nice advent reference, Mr. Mischief.
In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they aren't.
The regex we're talking about is a buggy implementation of bash's basename function. Rewriting it from bash into perl obfuscated it, but that's not a shortcoming of the language, it's a design decision made by the programmer.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm talking about truly intelligent agents.. think the equivalent of hiring an intern to read your email (Would I be optimistic to say most interns could catch 99% of current spam by reading it?) But maybe this is a few years off...
Hmm, like the average CEO's secretary. One step beyond the gmail/veepul "wisdom of crowds" distributed labor approach which is currently the state of the art.
It still doesn't scale, though, unless you are going to institute slavery. Not everyone can afford to pay a real thinking mind to filter their email, and when you talk about something smart enough to beat spammers you are probably talking about sentient creatures.
It's really really cheap to use genetic algorithms and free email accounts to defeat any non-sentient filtering method. Set up your parameters and forget it until the bell rings, then send 50 million emails out from your botnet. Profit!
Well, yeah, the staff at the big ISPs is typically not really competent to run a large network. The pay is too crappy - my employer hires the talented ones away by paying normal industry salaries, and they're not the only ones doing it. Very few major ISP employees have any deep understanding of Internet protocols, and certainly none of their PHBs do.
The irony is that cable companies are too greedy to pay big salaries, and they are competing for workers who can get big salaries elsewhere, so their operations are so poorly run that they are only profitable because they're paying off politicians to obtain regional monopolies, but the cost of buying off politicians is rising now that the regions are mostly already monopolized. In the long run, they'd have all been better off if they'd hired expensive geniuses and played by the rules instead of attempting short-term subversion of the free market. In my area, Verizon FiOS is eating Comcast's lunch, and only because they provide an infinitesimally less horrible alternative.
Are you saying that you want the ISPs to monitor and filter traffic?
No, that's exactly the guaranteed-fail strategy they are pursuing.
I want them to use the Internet as designed - identify malefactors (which is trivially easy using their existing equipment) and disconnect them.
ISPs who are too retarded to figure out that this is a huge profit making opportunity (that'd be most of them) should ponder this question: How much would anti-malware vendors pay comcast to have all zombie PCs restricted to a special subnet, where the PC owners would be unable to do anything but visit designated anti-malware sites?
If comcast (for example) eliminated their malicious traffic they'd regain 80% or more of their bandwidth, and they'd have no need to filter anything else.
Maybe the answer is smarter (sentient/AI?) systems that truly act as your agent.. The current filtering tools seem quite hit and miss..
They are typically 100% effective for the few hours it takes the spammers to fuzz them.
Spammers have gmail accounts, hotmail accounts, etc. etc. and whenever you put a new "sentient/AI" or any other system in place they just hammer their own accounts until something gets through, then they spam everybody with whatever technique worked.
The amount of effort required to break any anti-spam system (except a few forms of permission based, white-list style ones) will always be many orders of magnitude less than the amount of effort required to build such a system. You really can't win with a filtering strategy as long as spamming remains profitable and reasonably risk-free.
People being the way we are, we will probably continue to fail to make spamming unprofitable so we should focus on increasing the risks. I think the CEOs of corporations that harbor and enable spammer botnets should be flogged, tarred and feathered... are you listening Comcast? Rogers? Cox?
remember: everything PhDs do is art. everything. including using their alma mater's mascot name as their password. art, i tell you!
Years ago (when I still worked in science) I got a call from the US military. It seems one of our scientists was attacking one of their systems.
Since the scientist in question was on the other side of the world on a field trip at the time, it seemed likely that someone had compromised his account, and I shut it down.
When I eventually asked the scientist if was using a strong password, he was proud to recite a long dog-latin linnean binomial. It was very difficult to spell or pronounce.
Of course, that was also the first word you saw if you searched for his name on the Internet (using WAIS, since this was before commercial search engines). This particular scientist was the world's foremost authority on the organism with that difficult name, and had published dozens of papers on it.
To put it in modern geek terms, it was like this guy was Bill Gates, his userid was gates, and his password was microsoft.
The idea that criminal hackers might actually look up his name came as a total surprise to this world-famous scientist with multiple PhDs...
I agree with your characterizaion of the Arabs' poor treatment of the Palestinians, but when you then label Israel "a loyal US Ally/Satellite" I have to wonder if you know about the Israeli spies who've been stealing political, economic and military secrets from the US for decades now.
And frankly, I wish they didn't "advance[ the] US Agenda in the mideast" since access to cheap oil stagnated our culture and technology for 30 years.
I email copies of everything to multiple free on-line email accounts at AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo!, and Juno.
Without the passphrase to the 9162 Kb encryption key I used, good luck doing anything with them!
OK, I'm lying. Really I just write everything to hard disks and then I delete anything I haven't used in a decade whenever I rebuild the server.
The novell server walled up in the closet for years is well documented. http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20010409S0012 for example.
It was a Novell version 3.11 Netware box. If it'd been VMS it would never have been found, since it would have always worked perfectly ;) .
Oh yeah, let's give him a break. Oops, he's been by hit by a bus. Where's his disaster recovery plan? That's right, there isn't one.
My bet is, it's sitting right in the middle of his old desk blotter, in a fat manila folder marked "Disaster Recovery and Service Continuity Plans". These clowns would never find it there in a million years. The infamous missing passwords are probably in a letter-size envelope in the top left desk drawer, too.
In fact, you just proved you are smarter than all of these guys.
Oh, sorry, that wasn't much of a compliment, was it?
I've had the pole transformer explode next to my house twice now. Two different houses & transformers, not the same one twice.
Not only are they tremendously loud and bright, they shake the earth when they blow, too.
Warning signs to watch for: It'll buzz loudly for months before exploding, and sometimes they will leak PCB-laden fluids down the sides for weeks.
Webkit isn't a browser, genius, it's a rendering engine. It's more akin to building a car from the ground up using an ENGINE from a Toyota and everything else being your own design.
It makes me so proud to have you call me a genius. Hey, I'm a genius, everybody!
from the ground up, english idiom:
From the most basic level to the highest level; completely: designed the house from the ground up; learned the family business from the ground up.
see also: from stem to stern, from scratch, from start to finish
They used webkit and built it from the ground up.
Hey, I built my own car from the ground up.
I used a brand new Toyota and one of those 8-ball shifter knobs from Pep Boys - I sure am a great mechanic!
Maybe someone could do some actual physics/engineering to back up the anecdotal story. I didn't think platinum was particularly strong, so if that happened with a platinum ring then it seems like it would happen with gold. This sounds like a great question for prof to put on a midterm - "Does the ring break or do you tie off the stump, and run to the ER with a bucket of ice containing said finger"
yeah, it's a really great test question, since it touches on the different ways you can measure metal strength. A thin silver ring would snap almost instantly, and a wide 24K gold one would stretch like taffy until your finger slipped out; you'd only get a nasty cut. What combination of properties would overcome the strength of human tendon and cartilage?
And you're right about anecdotes, too. It's unsubstantiated hearsay to folks reading this, but I was there when he got rushed off to the hospital, so for me it's pure empirical data.
Excellent point! You don't want to get paralyzed by overpreparation. My mom's still wearing her platinum band and she's never had a problem.
I just figured the guy ought to know the story.
Good advice! now where can I get a metal that's softer than flesh? or weaker than calcium phosphate?
For a finger ring, you only need something that will deform significantly before the tendon fails. Try 24K gold, or a soft 18K alloy (depending on what you alloy it with, it can get harder or softer). Lead's probably not the best choice...
Alternatively, use an unclosed ring of hard metal, or a ring thin enough to break. I've had two sterling silver rings break on my fingers without my fingers being damaged. Er, that's not entirely true, one of them pinched me hard enough to draw blood when the break snapped closed again, but hopefully you get my point.
I'm sorry, but this will happen with any ring made of any metal, be it gold or silver or aluminum. The real problem here is not the difference in the hardness of the platinum versus the steel, but the difference in hardness between the ring and his soft, fleshy finger.
I think you misunderstood me. We are in agreement about the nature of the problem, but you are incorrect when you characterize "any metal" as being tougher than a human finger joint. I have a nice red gold band on my finger that I think I could tear apart with my bare hands (though I am not going to do so to prove my point). I believe this because I've accidentally stretched it twice and I forced it back to size using my bare hand and a blowspike set in the hardy of my anvil (I don't have a cone mandrel). I have broken other metals up with my bare hands on occasion, and I have broken metal objects by accidentally stepping on them (which proves that the falling weight of a human body can cause metal to fail).
I'm pretty sure that I cannot tear the finger off a human as easily as I can tear apart soft metals. But I'm not planning to perform the experiment...
My dad has a platinum wedding band.
After he'd been wearing it a couple decades, one day he slipped and started to fall in a parking lot. His hand was resting on the top of a metal fence post, and as it slipped off, the metal rod clamped to the post (that held a run of chain-link fence to it) found its way between his finger and the ring.
The ring was well fitted, so when the steel was deflected inwards by the stronger platinum, gravity caused the steel to slice him to the bone. Then he was hanging by one damaged finger with his full weight held by the steel rod inside the ring.
If you calculate the strength of your wife's finger joint relative to her weight (and she's not barsoomian or emaciated or something) you'll see that the next thing that happens is the finger pops right off. Luckily for my dad, he is quite strong, so he grabbed the chain-link with his other hand and only got his finger stretched to un-natural length.
The doctors fixed it, so it wasn't as bad as getting your silk tie caught in a generator, but it was still a real wake-up call. Unbreakable ring on breakable finger has a very bad failure mode.
Get her a really nice soft metal ring with a beautiful design. High-carat gold is really much redder than the common stuff - it's noticeably prettier - and you can always inlay it with something that's not a continuous band.
If you go to a construction site an find a worker using a hammer to actually drive in nails in the US, you better start looking for a blue police box or something. Pneumatic nail guns have replaced the hammer for this long ago.
Not in my neighborhood. I see people swinging hammers all the time. I've never seen a "police box" AFAIK though.
like asking a workman whether a new hammer would make his job any more profitable. That doesn't mean it's not an investment anyway.
Yes, if the new hammer improves ergonomics to the point where the workman can do more work in less time, or the old hammer was so non-ergonomic it was going to cost him dearly in medical bills late in life, profit is not necessarily going to be immediately measurable in dollars.
Eventually, though, the money spent on the new hammer might pay off in happier children (Dad has more time for his kids) or a happier retirement (Dad does not have a useless right arm at age 70). I'd consider that a good investment, myself.
It's well known that satellite-grade solar panels require more energy to create than they produce in their entire lifetime, so it was a valid question by NickFortune.
Huh? Where did you get this entirely false idea?
Oh, wait, you're factoring in the amount of energy required to shoot them into orbit, and only counting panels that are actually used for satellites, where they have far less lifespan than they would have on earth, due to extreme temperature cycling and lack of a protective atmospheric blanket. That way you can pretend to have an actual point.
I get it now, carry on with your propaganda.
DO NOT USE YOUR OWN PROPERTY. Rent a venue that has proper insurance. I like the Thunderguards Motorcyle Hall, personally.
MAKE EVERYBODY SIGN A WAIVER. Get a big scary guy, preferably with fresh bruises and fake blood trickling out of the corner of his mouth or eye, to staff the table where the waivers will be signed. If anybody asks him about it, he should say somebody tried to get in without signing and had to be stomped. Said guy has been taken to hospital, of course.
DON'T BRING ANYTHING YOU CAN'T AFFORD TO LOSE. If your life will be diminished by losing that switch, laptop, jacket, or cables, don't bring it.
Following these simple guidelines should let you have a fun time without stressing out. Keep in mind that you'll not be playing any LAN games, because somebody will have to be dealing with the inevitable emergencies that the public bring to any party (blown circuit breakers, burst colostomy bags, alcohol poisoning, you name it).
Yah, there are at least five ways to do it that don't involve creating a regex that nobody can debug without pulling up a man page...
Considering that Perl was originally intended to replace sed, awk, and many twisty shell languages, all different in many projects, saying that rewriting something from Perl into sed obfuscates it is exactly the point.
Nice advent reference, Mr. Mischief.
In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they aren't.
The regex we're talking about is a buggy implementation of bash's basename function. Rewriting it from bash into perl obfuscated it, but that's not a shortcoming of the language, it's a design decision made by the programmer.
It's Occam's razor for Pete's sake
William of Ockham (1287-1347) lived well before the standardization of spelling, although he did indeed hie from the town of Ockham.
"Entia non sunt multiplicanda sine necessitate."