I should re-read Screwtape, as it is a lovely bit of craft at several levels.
I agree with you that people are generaly far too willing to give up their freedom (or someone else's freedom).
Unfortunately, my observation of homeowner's associations is that they exhibit all the worst traits of democracy, melded with the worst kinds of 'cliques'. Perhaps that hasn't been your experience. Many times a community can come together and do some things that individuals can't do on their own. Unfortunately, that same community can often be quite oppresive to those people that elect to stay within it for whatever (valid or not) reason.
The solution of course is StarTrek teleporters, so I can live in the middle of nowhere without being cut off from society (and/or spending even MORE time commuting than I already do).
I've seen this sentiment several times so far on this topic... and it makes me chuckle.
I'm going to make an assumption for a moment, which is not intended as a slight, just something to clarify a guess of mine. The assumption I'm going to make is that you are relatively new (within the last 10 years) to 'heavy use' of computers. I assume this because you seem to take the current ease of 'alternate OS install' for granted. This has not always been the case, and I'm not sure that I see that it logically must always be the case.
In order for Trusted Computing (DRM, whatever TLA du jour) to actually work, it needs to be integrated at the unflashable firmware level of the base hardware of any computer it could work on. That doesn't mean that it will be entirely implimented as ROMs, just that 'boot phase 1' IS implimented there. There is no way to transition from the state of 'Running Untrusted Code' to the state of 'Running Trusted Code'. You can go from 'Off' to 'Running Trusted Code', but the second you run any untrusted code, the only way to get back to trusted is powercycle. Mind you, I don't know that this strict requirement would actually be the way it is implimented in real devices. Real devices are quite often implimented with less than ideal compromises. Interestingly, I suspect that a strict impilimentation will also require a non-spoofable time source (without which, a compromised key can never be revoked).
So if you grant that a proper TC enviroment will start in trusted code, with no chance to flash - then the logical 'boot phase 2' is to check the flashable BIOS for validity and only then run it. At this point, you are still in trusted code. 'boot phase 3' is to load the OS from disk, verify it, and then run.
If I'm making a TC machine, I don't allow the flashed BIOS to do anything other than "load TC OS" or "Install TC OS from CD". Sure, I could make option number three be "load untrusted OS from CD", and that would be awefully handy for the 'mess around with the innards' users... but there is nothing about TC which requires that option to be there. Do you really think that the liscense that I have with the IntProp holder that allows my machine to actually interoperate with other TC devices (that is the whole point, right?) will allow me to have option three in there?
So in 2014, here are your options:
Use 6 year old computers
Use computers with TC built into the firmware (don't install Windows 2012? Fine... have fun with your paperweight)
Build computers that can't run TC. Can't run TC, so they can't send email to anyone that does. Can't use commodity chipsets. Can't use commodity BIOS. Can't use commodity storage devices.
Someone will probably say: "Oh, but what about the inevitable lousy implimentations that will be done cheap and dirty in offshore houses, perhaps even without any legal permission to use the IP?". That shady bunch has two choices: 1.) Use someone else's keys [once discovered, original keys revoked, new keys issued to legit publisher, now ShadyKeys can't communicate with legit TC users, end of profit for ShadyInc] or 2.) Aquire ShadyKeys legit but then do a lousy job. Lousy job uncovered, keys revoked, same as #1.
I submit that one purpose of TC is to tie the ability to do all the things that the great unwashed masses actually want to do (play games, chat, watch TV, watch movies, email, browse porn) into 'staying up to date with the latest keys'. Once you have done that, it's trivial to technically impliment "you can't listen to 'Britney at Carnigie Hall 2010' or email your Mom unless you accept that your computer can't play 'The Professional Director's Cut 2006' since that was widely pirated". Those that can prove they purchased The Prof. 2006 (that's one thing TC gives you - verifiable receipts that can be stored solely on the users machine) will get a free copy of The Prof. 2011 [now with even MORE LucasType(tm) post-release storyline revisions].
You know... this answers a question I've had for a long time. I got my professional start as a computer admin on an HP 3000. In the HP 3000 world, the tech staff that really know their stuff (outside of HP itself, and a few US software vendors) seem to be Russian. I never knew why - but if your comment is correct... well. For those that don't know, HP MPE systems were minicomputers with five 9s. In fact, there is one about 10 ft away from me right now.
Wow... you can outrun police radio in your car? Now if only there was a highway to Mars, you could could get a job with Apple and do the service.
I know what you ment, it just struck me as funny. And yes, I do realize you didn't quite state that you can outrun the police.
And worst case, police can always wait for you^H^H^Hhypothetical fleers (sp? that can't be right) to run out of gas/solar/hydro/french-fry-oil/banana-peels[That's Mr Fusion to you buddy!].
1.) Solar panels - I read this as a subtle point of design: The machines haven't the imagination to look up and see beyond the clouds.
2.) matrix interface in Machine City - you don't think they can manufacture one quickly? Perhaps the interface itself is actually standard machine IO, and the modules embedded in people are to make the people compatible with the machine IO?
Now some more details:
- Why do machines need any towers at all? They don't have petrified grits, er, I mean, they don't have to impress any neighbors with their wealth and power. Do you really think there is any other reason to build a tower today?
- 5 miles of bedrock... and they decided to go through the front entrance instead of going around to where the soft squishy bits were?
- Multiple boring machines but they all decided to come into one spot instead of a multi-front attack?
- Humans have the tech to restart/reset their ship by pumping what looks a lot like a handbrake mounted on the ceiling... but they somehow can't figure out how to wind up a mechanical spring when they have power to spare and then just have a pushbutton restart? Especially since pumping too fast causes it to fail.
- One woman working on her own can make at least 6 rockets in a few hours. From what I can tell, there was only one other woman willing to do this.
- Their infantry consists of a hallway of maybe a dozen people. And only two teams actually make an effort. "Where's my infantry" indeed.
- After the pep-talk/APU rally - some number of the APUs seem to have gone off to take a coffee break, as there seem to be a lot fewer of them when it comes time to actually shoot the guns.
Anyway... I'm a fool cause I went to see it a second time.
Oh, and my comment is off-topic to the article, but not off-topic to the parent. Guess that makes me doubly-evil, huh?
And, just what is the impact when the in-game resources gained for sale are gathered via exploiting game bugs? And when the exploit of those bugs causes two problems for 'regular' players: 1.) disruption of service be the exploit itself, 2.) swelling the supply of said resource, hence lowering the price to the point that only players willing to exploit are able to gather enough of the resource to actually make an in-game profit.
My point? Just as Walmart has made 'being the proprietor of a 5-and-dime store' decidedly less fun, these 'big money store' operations make being a crafter/supplier much less fun in-game.
I will start by freely admitting that I am just a hobby level dabbler when it comes to linguistics. The reason I asked 'when the pinnacle was', and the reason I asked about the term 'IM' was to gently point out two things:
1.) It is impossible to define 'best English', because as long as it is a living language, it will continue to evolve. It is the nature of the beast.
2.) While distinctions may become blurred, reducing the total word count in actual use, there are also social forces at work that create new meanings for old words as well as new words. Witness 'bad' and 'phat'. You can make the argument that those are just slang and so don't count. To that, I say that slang is one of the mechanisms for creating both new words and new meanings for old words. How did the slang term 'geek' go from describing a person that performs a certain circus act to whatever it means today? By undergoing an evolutionary process. Some slang words stick and become part of the language, some don't.
Tell me this - if we all learn as preschool children that the word 'pasta' has two meanings - one of them a foodstuff and the other a body bearing, then what makes this a problem? How is this fundamentally different from the word 'pound'? A verb, a unit of measure and a unit of currency (in some places, and admittedly moving out of official use, but certainly still part of English today).
"Little Johnny, please go get me a pound of butter." Without more information, Little Johnny should ask for clarification, just as his elevator riding compatriot did.
While ignorance of 'the rules' can be one factor in language evolution, surprisingly enough it is not the major factor. If you ever get a chance, have a history or language buff talk to you in Middle English sometime.
It grates on me whenever I see people misusing the few scraps of English that I recall from my days in the public education system. Unfortunately, perhaps for myself as well as for you, English is a living natural human language. What this means in this context is that, unlike French, the definition of English is not what is written in any book, but rather it is the collective use of all English speakers. This holds for both written as well as spoken English. When will 'ax' be an acceptable pronunciation of 'ask'? When enough people do it for it to be accepted use.
Like it or not, English evolves. To say 'The English language is being eroded gradually by ignorance.' is to misunderstand what a living language is. It's like viewing the Apalacian mountains and assuming that all the Earth will one day wear down to a single ground-level, because those particular mountains are being eroded with time. If you subscribe to the notion that English is being eroded down to the level of grunts and growls, please tell me when exactly the pinacle of English was. I'm especially curious to know what the commonly understood, pure and proper, term was at that time that we use the eroded and butchered term 'IM' for now.
Back on topic, I use the MS ergo keyboard, a Sony VAIO keyboard (most of the time) and a Datadesk keyboard (keys are in radial lines to match your fingers, instead of staggered) - and find them fairly easy to switch between.
Coming late to this, I half suspect this will just end up lost in with all the other comments, however...
Looking at the tecCHANNEL article, on the last page prior to 'premium-land', they mention that they are using SOAP to wrap around an RPC. Now, I know that Microsoft has a wonderful record of carefully planning for and preventing remote exploits, so I suppose it is all conjecture; but I do have to wonder just how carefully they are validating their input. After all, it is an understandable mistake to expect at first blush that they are controlling both ends of the communication, so why bother to check for malformed and dangerous input. Especially since users will never see either side of this communication - only the end result.
I suppose it is possible that.NET makes all of this process totally safe from typos, implimentation errors and design flaws.
And they say no good deed goes unpunished:
You can pay for a Windows client here. Mind you, I'm probably subversive, since I use a client with AntiCapitolist Liscensing.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but reading the article makes it sound just like IRC to me.
cliquey little channels? check.
play music in the background? check.
emoticons? check.
swap files? check.
chat and be online all the time? check.
Makes me wonder if perhaps MS is glad to have seen the recent attacks on DalNET - now they can say 'sign up for threedegrees, we never get attacked because we are too cool' or some such marketspeak.
By the way, all of the items in the checklist have both positive and negative implications.
Notes: Background Music on IRC? Yep - on the more social/chatty channels, I've seen all kinds of CTCP or in channel requests that look like "please play this music, and if you don't have it, fetch it from me via DCC" - I'm assuming that some clients have automated support for this, and they word the request such that you can still do it manually if you really want (clue for commercial software vendors that think you need a new protocol for every new feature - it's called interoperability and backwards compatibility)
Emoticons? But winks are animated! Um... yeah, so? Perhaps somebody doesn't quite understand yet - slang originates from exclusivity of communication, not 'ooo, shiney!'. Because you can make up ASCII emoticons on the fly, just as you can with slang, I actually think that the ASCII version is a better tool for the communication purpose. Maybe I'm giving the youth of today too much credit, but I don't really think they are willing to accept the limitation to language fluidity. So some will use winks, and some will use ASCII emoticons within the contect. Of course, I'm not sure how much the 'new great thing' factor will play into this.
I do this, started a while back (August). It works well most of the time. There are several situations that it doesn't work for me for:
Work related stuff - my job requires me to communicate with people that may very well be irate already - since I would rather decrease their iritation, this is a bad approach.
Mailing lists that change thier From (or Reply-To or Sender or Return-Path - I check all four for matches) header and then get ticked off at me for sending them a message explaining how to get on my whitelist. Some charming person was annoyed enough about this to go to my signup webpage, and put in three abusive email addresses complaining about it - but not actual email address so I could let them know that I fixed it and apologize. Oh well.
Confirmation loops (as metioned by a reply to you above) - if two people use this same scheme neither will ever know about the other person's 'signup here' message.
When you want the email but have no idea where it is coming from. For example: sign up with an airline for a frequent flier account. You want to add thier 'From' to your whitelist, but you don't know what it is going to be until after you get it. In this case, I simply turn off the filter entirely until I get the expected email. Yes, this does mean I get spam during that time.
By the way, I don't set up infinite loops, nor can my messages be used to repeatedly annoy a user by remote control, because I send one 'signup' message out to any given email address only once per 14 days.
In my case, I do not hold onto the message for later delivery - I ditch it immediately. This is in fact rather rude and I wouldn't advocate that anyone else do it this way, but it is simpler to program and I'm a lot ruder than that in RL.
I've considered this, but my outbound SMTP (on the same host my MUA runs on) doesn't run on the same host as my inbound SMTP server. The database that houses the whitelist is not TCP/IP reachable from anywhere, including the inbound SMTP server.
If you really mean 'whitelist anyone I request authentication from' - that is definitely something I don't want to do. I don't want Mary's (automatic) request for authentication (or vacation notice) to mark her as 'good'.
For me, the primary concern is that allowed 'out of the blue' contacts come from actual humans, not machines. If an 'out of the blue' contact gets lost due to crossed authentication mechanisms, then so be it - for personal use. Perhaps as authentication mechanisms become widespread I may change my mind on this.
For work use, this isn't acceptable, so I (unfortunately) still use the 'd' solution to spam there.
Paul didn't get Mary's confirmation: Yes, you are correct. In fact there is generally a similar issue: How do I sign up to a new mailing list? I turn off the gauntlet when I am expecting an inbound email from someone that I actually want to hear from that isn't likely to 'get it'. For home use, I'm perfectly comfortable with this lack of convenience. For commercial use, it isn't acceptable (this is in fact why I haven't put it in place at work).
And yes, thinking about it, the web front-end to authentication does not really help with loops. Perhaps I've muddled my purposes here. The primary motivation of the web authentication is because I am a little leery of the "Just hit reply in your email program to confirm your identity" meme.
And the way that hax0r session should look is as follows:
Trying 24.147.236.80... Connected to www.draconis.com. Escape character is '^]'. 220 www.draconis.com ESMTP helo leet.hax0r 250 www.draconis.com mail from: <|/bin/rm -rf> 250 ok rcpt to: <tundras@draconis.com> 250 ok data 354 go ahead Subject: gotcha!
. 250 ok 1029764932 qp 20495 quit 221 www.draconis.com Connection closed by foreign host.
At least, that's what it looks like when I copy it from the xterm right over here...
How exactly this is any different from the fetid masses that abuse whois, I am not sure.
This reminds me of another aspect of my 'spam stance' - anyone that claims (in the return address) to be me gets silently dropped. If I want to remind myself of something, it won't be by sending myself an email.
It may just be modern myth, but I do believe that the Secret Service is supposed to investigate any threat seriously. Just as it isn't too bright an idea to joke about having a gun when waiting in line at the security check in an airport, this doesn't sound too bright to me.
My guess is that the post was a joke, but I also wouldn't be too surprised if the poster in question gets a little bit of face-to-face time with the Secret Service.
If you think that Slashdot would resist the Secret Service, think again. This is exactly the sort of thing that most rational people (particularly the people in a position to obstruct the SS tracking down the poster to a real-live-body) would agree is a valid exception to the anonymity that they may normally defend.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with you that people are generaly far too willing to give up their freedom (or someone else's freedom).
Unfortunately, my observation of homeowner's associations is that they exhibit all the worst traits of democracy, melded with the worst kinds of 'cliques'. Perhaps that hasn't been your experience. Many times a community can come together and do some things that individuals can't do on their own. Unfortunately, that same community can often be quite oppresive to those people that elect to stay within it for whatever (valid or not) reason.
The solution of course is StarTrek teleporters, so I can live in the middle of nowhere without being cut off from society (and/or spending even MORE time commuting than I already do).
I'm going to make an assumption for a moment, which is not intended as a slight, just something to clarify a guess of mine. The assumption I'm going to make is that you are relatively new (within the last 10 years) to 'heavy use' of computers. I assume this because you seem to take the current ease of 'alternate OS install' for granted. This has not always been the case, and I'm not sure that I see that it logically must always be the case.
In order for Trusted Computing (DRM, whatever TLA du jour) to actually work, it needs to be integrated at the unflashable firmware level of the base hardware of any computer it could work on. That doesn't mean that it will be entirely implimented as ROMs, just that 'boot phase 1' IS implimented there. There is no way to transition from the state of 'Running Untrusted Code' to the state of 'Running Trusted Code'. You can go from 'Off' to 'Running Trusted Code', but the second you run any untrusted code, the only way to get back to trusted is powercycle. Mind you, I don't know that this strict requirement would actually be the way it is implimented in real devices. Real devices are quite often implimented with less than ideal compromises. Interestingly, I suspect that a strict impilimentation will also require a non-spoofable time source (without which, a compromised key can never be revoked).
So if you grant that a proper TC enviroment will start in trusted code, with no chance to flash - then the logical 'boot phase 2' is to check the flashable BIOS for validity and only then run it. At this point, you are still in trusted code. 'boot phase 3' is to load the OS from disk, verify it, and then run.
If I'm making a TC machine, I don't allow the flashed BIOS to do anything other than "load TC OS" or "Install TC OS from CD". Sure, I could make option number three be "load untrusted OS from CD", and that would be awefully handy for the 'mess around with the innards' users... but there is nothing about TC which requires that option to be there. Do you really think that the liscense that I have with the IntProp holder that allows my machine to actually interoperate with other TC devices (that is the whole point, right?) will allow me to have option three in there?
So in 2014, here are your options:
Someone will probably say: "Oh, but what about the inevitable lousy implimentations that will be done cheap and dirty in offshore houses, perhaps even without any legal permission to use the IP?". That shady bunch has two choices: 1.) Use someone else's keys [once discovered, original keys revoked, new keys issued to legit publisher, now ShadyKeys can't communicate with legit TC users, end of profit for ShadyInc] or 2.) Aquire ShadyKeys legit but then do a lousy job. Lousy job uncovered, keys revoked, same as #1.
I submit that one purpose of TC is to tie the ability to do all the things that the great unwashed masses actually want to do (play games, chat, watch TV, watch movies, email, browse porn) into 'staying up to date with the latest keys'. Once you have done that, it's trivial to technically impliment "you can't listen to 'Britney at Carnigie Hall 2010' or email your Mom unless you accept that your computer can't play 'The Professional Director's Cut 2006' since that was widely pirated". Those that can prove they purchased The Prof. 2006 (that's one thing TC gives you - verifiable receipts that can be stored solely on the users machine) will get a free copy of The Prof. 2011 [now with even MORE LucasType(tm) post-release storyline revisions].
In a w
You know... this answers a question I've had for a long time. I got my professional start as a computer admin on an HP 3000. In the HP 3000 world, the tech staff that really know their stuff (outside of HP itself, and a few US software vendors) seem to be Russian. I never knew why - but if your comment is correct... well. For those that don't know, HP MPE systems were minicomputers with five 9s. In fact, there is one about 10 ft away from me right now.
Wow... you can outrun police radio in your car? Now if only there was a highway to Mars, you could could get a job with Apple and do the service.
s Mr Fusion to you buddy!].
I know what you ment, it just struck me as funny. And yes, I do realize you didn't quite state that you can outrun the police.
And worst case, police can always wait for you^H^H^Hhypothetical fleers (sp? that can't be right) to run out of gas/solar/hydro/french-fry-oil/banana-peels[That'
A couple of points on this:
1.) Solar panels - I read this as a subtle point of design: The machines haven't the imagination to look up and see beyond the clouds.
2.) matrix interface in Machine City - you don't think they can manufacture one quickly? Perhaps the interface itself is actually standard machine IO, and the modules embedded in people are to make the people compatible with the machine IO?
Now some more details:
- Why do machines need any towers at all? They don't have petrified grits, er, I mean, they don't have to impress any neighbors with their wealth and power. Do you really think there is any other reason to build a tower today?
- 5 miles of bedrock... and they decided to go through the front entrance instead of going around to where the soft squishy bits were?
- Multiple boring machines but they all decided to come into one spot instead of a multi-front attack?
- Humans have the tech to restart/reset their ship by pumping what looks a lot like a handbrake mounted on the ceiling... but they somehow can't figure out how to wind up a mechanical spring when they have power to spare and then just have a pushbutton restart? Especially since pumping too fast causes it to fail.
- One woman working on her own can make at least 6 rockets in a few hours. From what I can tell, there was only one other woman willing to do this.
- Their infantry consists of a hallway of maybe a dozen people. And only two teams actually make an effort. "Where's my infantry" indeed.
- After the pep-talk/APU rally - some number of the APUs seem to have gone off to take a coffee break, as there seem to be a lot fewer of them when it comes time to actually shoot the guns.
Anyway... I'm a fool cause I went to see it a second time.
Oh, and my comment is off-topic to the article, but not off-topic to the parent. Guess that makes me doubly-evil, huh?
My point? Just as Walmart has made 'being the proprietor of a 5-and-dime store' decidedly less fun, these 'big money store' operations make being a crafter/supplier much less fun in-game.
It's a shame.
1.) It is impossible to define 'best English', because as long as it is a living language, it will continue to evolve. It is the nature of the beast.
2.) While distinctions may become blurred, reducing the total word count in actual use, there are also social forces at work that create new meanings for old words as well as new words. Witness 'bad' and 'phat'. You can make the argument that those are just slang and so don't count. To that, I say that slang is one of the mechanisms for creating both new words and new meanings for old words. How did the slang term 'geek' go from describing a person that performs a certain circus act to whatever it means today? By undergoing an evolutionary process. Some slang words stick and become part of the language, some don't.
Tell me this - if we all learn as preschool children that the word 'pasta' has two meanings - one of them a foodstuff and the other a body bearing, then what makes this a problem? How is this fundamentally different from the word 'pound'? A verb, a unit of measure and a unit of currency (in some places, and admittedly moving out of official use, but certainly still part of English today).
"Little Johnny, please go get me a pound of butter." Without more information, Little Johnny should ask for clarification, just as his elevator riding compatriot did.
While ignorance of 'the rules' can be one factor in language evolution, surprisingly enough it is not the major factor. If you ever get a chance, have a history or language buff talk to you in Middle English sometime.
Like it or not, English evolves. To say 'The English language is being eroded gradually by ignorance.' is to misunderstand what a living language is. It's like viewing the Apalacian mountains and assuming that all the Earth will one day wear down to a single ground-level, because those particular mountains are being eroded with time. If you subscribe to the notion that English is being eroded down to the level of grunts and growls, please tell me when exactly the pinacle of English was. I'm especially curious to know what the commonly understood, pure and proper, term was at that time that we use the eroded and butchered term 'IM' for now.
Back on topic, I use the MS ergo keyboard, a Sony VAIO keyboard (most of the time) and a Datadesk keyboard (keys are in radial lines to match your fingers, instead of staggered) - and find them fairly easy to switch between.
Looking at the tecCHANNEL article, on the last page prior to 'premium-land', they mention that they are using SOAP to wrap around an RPC. Now, I know that Microsoft has a wonderful record of carefully planning for and preventing remote exploits, so I suppose it is all conjecture; but I do have to wonder just how carefully they are validating their input. After all, it is an understandable mistake to expect at first blush that they are controlling both ends of the communication, so why bother to check for malformed and dangerous input. Especially since users will never see either side of this communication - only the end result.
I suppose it is possible that .NET makes all of this process totally safe from typos, implimentation errors and design flaws.
So, externally this will be marketted as 'threedegrees', but when you go to Help -> About, it will be Microsoft Chat 2.0?
- cliquey little channels? check.
- play music in the background? check.
- emoticons? check.
- swap files? check.
- chat and be online all the time? check.
Makes me wonder if perhaps MS is glad to have seen the recent attacks on DalNET - now they can say 'sign up for threedegrees, we never get attacked because we are too cool' or some such marketspeak.By the way, all of the items in the checklist have both positive and negative implications.
Notes: Background Music on IRC? Yep - on the more social/chatty channels, I've seen all kinds of CTCP or in channel requests that look like "please play this music, and if you don't have it, fetch it from me via DCC" - I'm assuming that some clients have automated support for this, and they word the request such that you can still do it manually if you really want (clue for commercial software vendors that think you need a new protocol for every new feature - it's called interoperability and backwards compatibility)
Emoticons? But winks are animated! Um... yeah, so? Perhaps somebody doesn't quite understand yet - slang originates from exclusivity of communication, not 'ooo, shiney!'. Because you can make up ASCII emoticons on the fly, just as you can with slang, I actually think that the ASCII version is a better tool for the communication purpose. Maybe I'm giving the youth of today too much credit, but I don't really think they are willing to accept the limitation to language fluidity. So some will use winks, and some will use ASCII emoticons within the contect. Of course, I'm not sure how much the 'new great thing' factor will play into this.
- Work related stuff - my job requires me to communicate with people that may very well be irate already - since I would rather decrease their iritation, this is a bad approach.
- Mailing lists that change thier From (or Reply-To or Sender or Return-Path - I check all four for matches) header and then get ticked off at me for sending them a message explaining how to get on my whitelist. Some charming person was annoyed enough about this to go to my signup webpage, and put in three abusive email addresses complaining about it - but not actual email address so I could let them know that I fixed it and apologize. Oh well.
- Confirmation loops (as metioned by a reply to you above) - if two people use this same scheme neither will ever know about the other person's 'signup here' message.
- When you want the email but have no idea where it is coming from. For example: sign up with an airline for a frequent flier account. You want to add thier 'From' to your whitelist, but you don't know what it is going to be until after you get it. In this case, I simply turn off the filter entirely until I get the expected email. Yes, this does mean I get spam during that time.
By the way, I don't set up infinite loops, nor can my messages be used to repeatedly annoy a user by remote control, because I send one 'signup' message out to any given email address only once per 14 days.In my case, I do not hold onto the message for later delivery - I ditch it immediately. This is in fact rather rude and I wouldn't advocate that anyone else do it this way, but it is simpler to program and I'm a lot ruder than that in RL.
If you really mean 'whitelist anyone I request authentication from' - that is definitely something I don't want to do. I don't want Mary's (automatic) request for authentication (or vacation notice) to mark her as 'good'.
For me, the primary concern is that allowed 'out of the blue' contacts come from actual humans, not machines. If an 'out of the blue' contact gets lost due to crossed authentication mechanisms, then so be it - for personal use. Perhaps as authentication mechanisms become widespread I may change my mind on this.
For work use, this isn't acceptable, so I (unfortunately) still use the 'd' solution to spam there.
And yes, thinking about it, the web front-end to authentication does not really help with loops. Perhaps I've muddled my purposes here. The primary motivation of the web authentication is because I am a little leery of the "Just hit reply in your email program to confirm your identity" meme.
And the way that hax0r session should look is as follows:
At least, that's what it looks like when I copy it from the xterm right over here...How exactly this is any different from the fetid masses that abuse whois, I am not sure.
This reminds me of another aspect of my 'spam stance' - anyone that claims (in the return address) to be me gets silently dropped. If I want to remind myself of something, it won't be by sending myself an email.
- 14 day timer on outgoing notices - i.e. I send one and then silently discard all other incoming email from that address until 'good'
- The authentication is via web, not email.
Want to see how it works? Just email me. I'm confident enough that I'll put my real email here: tundras@draconis.comIt may just be modern myth, but I do believe that the Secret Service is supposed to investigate any threat seriously. Just as it isn't too bright an idea to joke about having a gun when waiting in line at the security check in an airport, this doesn't sound too bright to me. My guess is that the post was a joke, but I also wouldn't be too surprised if the poster in question gets a little bit of face-to-face time with the Secret Service. If you think that Slashdot would resist the Secret Service, think again. This is exactly the sort of thing that most rational people (particularly the people in a position to obstruct the SS tracking down the poster to a real-live-body) would agree is a valid exception to the anonymity that they may normally defend.