If you think those tactics are worthwhile, you're fooling yourself. We live in a world now where it's more economical to replace things entirely, rather than upgrade or maintain them, including code, and your mediocre job.
My advice to you is to check out how you look in a smart neon blue vest with a name tag. It'll be your next uniform the way you're going.
I find it really disturbing that programmers are so insecure they need to deliberately make their code difficult to understand. That's just stupid. If you're a good programmer, you will have job security. If you're a crappy programmer, all the obfusification in the world won't give you job security.
Digg is neat because it allows you to submit a story and make it accessible, and you can manipulate the content to make it to the front page. This results sometimes in timely stories getting listed first, but it also results in a lot of FUD and partisian crap that starts flamewars.
Slashdot is neat because the comment moderation system has proven to be a very reliable way of filtering noise from user comments, and slashdot has the most sophisticated user base of any site I've seen on the web. Unlike Digg, you will almost always get more information in comments and you have a way of getting right to the meat of the issue with the rankings. Digg is more of a free-for-all.
Then there's Fark, which is another useful link service, that IMO, gets more traffic than Slashdot and Digg combined. For some unknown reason, Fark doesn't have as much noise in its comment section as one might expect given the amount of users they have. Then again, Fark is not a good source of additional info on a story as much as it is a good source of amusing one-liners. However, Fark does have one neat feature that explains why Digg is getting attention, and what could be done to improve Slashdot, and this is TotalFark. The ability to see all stories submitted by users (whether they're approved or not) is a tremendous value. If Slashdot added a totalfark-like feature, where premium users could see all submitted stories, then I think Slashdot would have the best of both worlds. I haven't donated in awhile so maybe this feature already exists, but last time I checked, it didn't.
It wouldn't be too difficult IMO, to alter Slashdot to apply the comment moderation and meta-moderation system to un-approved articles and spawn a totalSlashdot-esque site where users could bypass the editors' sometimes heavy-handed approval process.
Dig is like the web-equavelent of e-mail forwarding. Due to the way the system is designed, stories get high visility regardless of whether they are truthful or total FUD. In fact, Digg is fast becoming a web site that where articles are spammed into prominence by various ideological and political groups.
Digg has not even hit mainstream yet and it's already becoming painfully obvious that the site's ranking system is fatally flawed. Snopes is likely going to have to create a new category just to dispell the plethora of rumors and falsehoods that seem to commonly appear on the front page of Digg.
It's a nice concept, but there's a good reason why most sites don't let any anonymous user have the power to pick what should appear on the front page.
I've never seen any game, much less a dynamic MMORPG, go through as many fundamental changes as SWG. The combat systems, the crafting systems, the mission systems, the classes, the level system, mob experience, item decay, penalties for death, etc., have all changed more times than a Sand Giant's underwear.
My question is, when will you all know that SWG is dead? You didn't do this with EQ when it started losing market share. You created a new game; you didn't insist on trying to hack the original product into something dramatically different. So why is this horse on life support? Is it Sony or some special contract you have with Lucas? No other game developer has ever spent so much time and energy trying to desperately patch a system which has never worked, ever, since day one. Who will be ultimately responsible for pulling the plug on this project, and what's the real reason behind not spawning this sinking ship into a new game, built from the ground up based on what you know does and does not work?
..is who's behind motivating some of America's so-called "greatest minds" to waste their time investigating such pointless pursuits, when there are soft drink machines in dorm buildings, whose current inventory of Mountain Dew is not known.
I can see charging for the show IF there are no commercials. If they want to make people pay for the shows and make money off advertising and product placement, forget that. I have pretty much given up on DVDs now because I can't stand the 15 minutes of ads prior to the disc menu. The same thing for movie theatres. You can't have it both ways and consumers are rebelling against obnoxious, never-ending advertising practices.
Star Wars Galaxies is dead, unfortunately. It was broken a long time ago. It's really a shame because the game has so much potential, but the developers have tinkered with the gameplay to such a degree, very little makes sense any more. There are entire classes of characters who now seem to have no usefulness due to changes within the system; there are stats on file with characters and devices in the world which either don't function any more, or keep changing their name, purpose, requirements, etc., that nothing makes sense any more. There are botched missions which are impossible to solve, and have been for months or years; Other missions end in the middle and toss you into an entirely different glass-eating class that is separate from your dicipline and makes no sense; there are NPCs that exist solely to trigger cleanup and salvage of legacy game flags that stand out like a Dairy Queen on the Death Star.
It's really sad to see this game go down the tubes, and you can tell SOE is desperately trying to keep it from sinking, but it seems everything they do just makes things worse. They should just put it out of its misery.
If you ask me, the whole station pass scheme is designed to not lose subscribers due to a crappy game that's part of their arsenal -- this way they can give you some other distraction in case their efforts fail, and they can claim X thousand subscribers even though very few may actually play a particular MMORPG.
The first worm that simply utilises the standard mail API will effectively bypass any port 25 blocking.
The first major worm that does this will probably expose its author very quickly.
There are many reasons why worms don't use the standard SMTP path:
1. They need to operate in previously unknown IP space to get around RBLs.
2. If they routed through known SMTP gateways, their presence would be more critically logged, making it easy to track the injection point for the worm, and thus catch the author.
3. Routing through a standard SMTP gateway means they will get the ISPs attention much quicker, and if the ISP has a main mail server RBL'd, they're going to be much more proactive in keeping these things from happening in the future.
4. Most ISPs have systems in place to throttle mass-mailing through their servers. Spammers want to send mail out faster than an ISP's standard server will allow.
5. ISPs are often filtering mail going through their servers. It's possible an attempt by a worm to propagate via the SMTP API might trigger alarms and have the e-mail stripped of its payload.
Yes, *legitimate* mail servers have to be listening on port 25, but IP space where there shouldn't be rogue SMTP traffic doesn't need to be routing port 25.
The thing that really gets me is that every major ISP can usually tell within a few minutes, if a client has turned into a spam zombie. It's not a stretch to easily identify a dramtically-different pattern from a host and notify the customer that their computer might be compromised. I keep waiting for some ISP to automate such a system. It would be a huge competitive advantage.
All these worms are written by spammers who want to turn the machines into zombied SMTP servers. They want to disable other exploitive processes.
If all major ISPs filtered port 25 traffic (like AOL does) from anyplace other than their in-house SMTP gateways, you'd see worm activity drop to almost nothing. It's all about spamming. And the feds don't seem to care. Sooner or later, the major broadband providers will act responsibly and stop their clients from becoming spam zombies, then there won't be much of a need for these worms to be released. That's what they're all about: spamming.
I know better than to use Symantec AV now. Perhaps this latest bout of negligence may help convince others to jump that sinking ship.
I'm also noticing that instead of commentary from Symantec, you have Trend Micro people being consulted to comment on this worm.
It's obvious Symantec is too slow to be effective in dealing with these things. Time and time again, I find that AVG catches things that Symantec doesn't even recognize. Buh Bye Norton.
Ahh, doors.. that brings back memories. I wrote about a dozen door programs that were used by various BBS's. At one point I sold a copy of one of my doors to Bell Atlantic to use as a prototype for an early version of their electronic yellow pages (I was like 17 and reps from the telco flew down to meet me and stuck a NDA in my face - it was cool). I also had the United Nations using one of my database-oriented door programs to manage a server for collecting environmental data.
It's really cool how in the early days of computing there were some big institutions experimenting with BBSes. You tend to hear mostly about hobbyists but a lot of companies were using BBSes as well.
Please purchase the DVD if you can. I did and it's slick. It's a wonderful collection of historic data and you'd be helping out this guy who has spent more than the last decade compiling all this information. I'm sure he's not going to get anywhere near the amount of money he put into the project back, but every little bit helps.
Well, the 75% was just an example - the main point of what I was trying to say is there are other alternative punishments that would be more effective than sitting in a prison for a few years. Hit them where it hurts: financially.
Talk to a lawyer about civil penalties. Ask him how easy it is to dance around and get out of paying things. In situations like this, these people don't have the money to pay the fines. They are specialists and hiding their income and resources. Civil penalties don't mean squat to someone whose living is engaging in unethical behavior. It's a walk in the park to declare bankruptcy or transfer your assets to someone else, or to simply disappear and pop up elsewhere and continue your business.
These guys need to go to prison. Civil penalties are completely useless.
1. Spammers are routinely violating laws that are criminal in nature, and are subject to criminal fines, such as jail time.
2. Civil penalties have consistently demonstrated to be completely ineffective against spammers. They are either unintimidated by civil penalties, or there is no real incentive for civil prosecution of spammers because in most cases it costs more to take legal action than you can collect from the spammer under any circumstances.
You do the crime, you do the time. This guy deserves to go to jail. It may be a "white collar" crime, but it is still a crime, and more spammers need to face criminal charges in order to send a signal to those still operating that they will be hunted down. Right now almost all the virus/worm activity is the work of spammers. That is clearly criminal in nature, and I look forward to a few of those guys getting sent to a federal, pound-you-in-the-ass prison, the sooner the better, the longer the better.
Every time one of those sleazebags goes to prison, the chances of us getting less spam and worms increases. At some point, we'll crack the main network of these scumbags and you'll see spam traffic drop dramatically, and base Internet services will probably improve by a factor of two to five times more bandwidth and response time across the backbone.
I am the bane of my family because I tend to build systems in the living room, with the intent of moving them elsewhere in the house, but they end up staying in the living room much longer than originally planned. In the past I made efforts to accomodate a PC into the main home entertainment area. I got a large monitor from government surplus that doubled as a computer/tv monitor and I could switch back and forth from the PC to the TV, but that didn't satisfy the need to run both. I've thought about a coffee table that might have a monitor buried underneath a glass top -- that sounds kind of cool, but I think the angle you'd have to arch your neck to see the monitor might cause some strain. So I end up with a monitor or a laptop on the coffee table. What I've done is put wheels on my coffee table so I can roll it close to the sofa if I want to mess with the PC while laying back, or sit on the floor at the foot of the sofa and work the tv and the computer. That has proven to be the most versatile setup for me so far.
Can you imagine trying to learn regular expressions without sample code? Yea, it can be done, but like many areas of programming, examples can demonstrate subtle nuances that are not obvious in mere references.
Bogged down by sample code??
on
Spring Into PHP 5
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
A smarter approach is to learn the language basics in sequence as rapidly as possible, not getting bogged down in excessive sample code.
Excuse me? Maybe I'm an anomoly, but I can't think of a better way to learn a language than by example. This suspiciously sounds like and excuse to cover up the fact that the book doesn't offer adequate material to show how one can code in real-world environments.
When I look for a good programming book, be it an introduction, advanced tutorial or reference, the use of lots of examples is one of the main standards by which I judge the value of the publication.
At least if he declared bankruptcy, the court would regulate the payment and dissolution of assets. But the terms of the settlement dictate he will dismiss his filing, so that makes it even less likely Microsoft will get paid IMO.
They specialize in moving around and hiding their resources so that they can't be easily tracked. If Richter can do it with e-mail, he can do it with any money he has. Whether he declares bankruptcy or not, I don't expect Microsoft to see $7M. I don't think Richter ever had $7M in the first place. Spammers don't make that kind of money. If they did, there would be a lot more of them than they are, and the stuff they would be promoting would be more substantive than home mortgage affilliate schemes and penis enlargement pills.
Spammers are no different than Rappers or Late-night, get-rich-quick spokespeople. They create the illusion of wealth in order to lend credibility to their efforts. Unfortunately, when you watch those videos of spammers on boats and driving Lambos, they're rented, just like the fancy beach house all those make-fast-money people use as the setting for their infomercial. It's all a big crock.
I'm not saying these people don't make money, but it's nowhere near as much as they'd lead you to believe. Their whole modus operandi is about deception so they're sure as hell going to misrepresent their net worth as well.
This is a huge boon to that loser Richter, to even think that he was willing to "settle" paying someone $7M. He comes off like he has the money. There's no way in hell he does IMO.
Slashdot Mirror
"Oh yea"
If you think those tactics are worthwhile, you're fooling yourself. We live in a world now where it's more economical to replace things entirely, rather than upgrade or maintain them, including code, and your mediocre job.
My advice to you is to check out how you look in a smart neon blue vest with a name tag. It'll be your next uniform the way you're going.
I find it really disturbing that programmers are so insecure they need to deliberately make their code difficult to understand. That's just stupid. If you're a good programmer, you will have job security. If you're a crappy programmer, all the obfusification in the world won't give you job security.
There are differences between a NERD and a GEEK.
If Geeks are fashionable, it's a fad. Nerds on the other hand, are timeless and always in style among those in the know.
Digg is neat because it allows you to submit a story and make it accessible, and you can manipulate the content to make it to the front page. This results sometimes in timely stories getting listed first, but it also results in a lot of FUD and partisian crap that starts flamewars.
Slashdot is neat because the comment moderation system has proven to be a very reliable way of filtering noise from user comments, and slashdot has the most sophisticated user base of any site I've seen on the web. Unlike Digg, you will almost always get more information in comments and you have a way of getting right to the meat of the issue with the rankings. Digg is more of a free-for-all.
Then there's Fark, which is another useful link service, that IMO, gets more traffic than Slashdot and Digg combined. For some unknown reason, Fark doesn't have as much noise in its comment section as one might expect given the amount of users they have. Then again, Fark is not a good source of additional info on a story as much as it is a good source of amusing one-liners. However, Fark does have one neat feature that explains why Digg is getting attention, and what could be done to improve Slashdot, and this is TotalFark. The ability to see all stories submitted by users (whether they're approved or not) is a tremendous value. If Slashdot added a totalfark-like feature, where premium users could see all submitted stories, then I think Slashdot would have the best of both worlds. I haven't donated in awhile so maybe this feature already exists, but last time I checked, it didn't.
It wouldn't be too difficult IMO, to alter Slashdot to apply the comment moderation and meta-moderation system to un-approved articles and spawn a totalSlashdot-esque site where users could bypass the editors' sometimes heavy-handed approval process.
Dig is like the web-equavelent of e-mail forwarding. Due to the way the system is designed, stories get high visility regardless of whether they are truthful or total FUD. In fact, Digg is fast becoming a web site that where articles are spammed into prominence by various ideological and political groups.
Digg has not even hit mainstream yet and it's already becoming painfully obvious that the site's ranking system is fatally flawed. Snopes is likely going to have to create a new category just to dispell the plethora of rumors and falsehoods that seem to commonly appear on the front page of Digg.
It's a nice concept, but there's a good reason why most sites don't let any anonymous user have the power to pick what should appear on the front page.
I've never seen any game, much less a dynamic MMORPG, go through as many fundamental changes as SWG. The combat systems, the crafting systems, the mission systems, the classes, the level system, mob experience, item decay, penalties for death, etc., have all changed more times than a Sand Giant's underwear.
My question is, when will you all know that SWG is dead? You didn't do this with EQ when it started losing market share. You created a new game; you didn't insist on trying to hack the original product into something dramatically different. So why is this horse on life support? Is it Sony or some special contract you have with Lucas? No other game developer has ever spent so much time and energy trying to desperately patch a system which has never worked, ever, since day one. Who will be ultimately responsible for pulling the plug on this project, and what's the real reason behind not spawning this sinking ship into a new game, built from the ground up based on what you know does and does not work?
..is who's behind motivating some of America's so-called "greatest minds" to waste their time investigating such pointless pursuits, when there are soft drink machines in dorm buildings, whose current inventory of Mountain Dew is not known.
I can see charging for the show IF there are no commercials. If they want to make people pay for the shows and make money off advertising and product placement, forget that. I have pretty much given up on DVDs now because I can't stand the 15 minutes of ads prior to the disc menu. The same thing for movie theatres. You can't have it both ways and consumers are rebelling against obnoxious, never-ending advertising practices.
I guess maybe I'm a little better than moderately respectable. Oh well. No reason to live now.
Shouldn't those guys get more than one medal? One for each of the internets?
Star Wars Galaxies is dead, unfortunately. It was broken a long time ago. It's really a shame because the game has so much potential, but the developers have tinkered with the gameplay to such a degree, very little makes sense any more. There are entire classes of characters who now seem to have no usefulness due to changes within the system; there are stats on file with characters and devices in the world which either don't function any more, or keep changing their name, purpose, requirements, etc., that nothing makes sense any more. There are botched missions which are impossible to solve, and have been for months or years; Other missions end in the middle and toss you into an entirely different glass-eating class that is separate from your dicipline and makes no sense; there are NPCs that exist solely to trigger cleanup and salvage of legacy game flags that stand out like a Dairy Queen on the Death Star.
It's really sad to see this game go down the tubes, and you can tell SOE is desperately trying to keep it from sinking, but it seems everything they do just makes things worse. They should just put it out of its misery.
If you ask me, the whole station pass scheme is designed to not lose subscribers due to a crappy game that's part of their arsenal -- this way they can give you some other distraction in case their efforts fail, and they can claim X thousand subscribers even though very few may actually play a particular MMORPG.
The first worm that simply utilises the standard mail API will effectively bypass any port 25 blocking.
The first major worm that does this will probably expose its author very quickly.
There are many reasons why worms don't use the standard SMTP path:
1. They need to operate in previously unknown IP space to get around RBLs.
2. If they routed through known SMTP gateways, their presence would be more critically logged, making it easy to track the injection point for the worm, and thus catch the author.
3. Routing through a standard SMTP gateway means they will get the ISPs attention much quicker, and if the ISP has a main mail server RBL'd, they're going to be much more proactive in keeping these things from happening in the future.
4. Most ISPs have systems in place to throttle mass-mailing through their servers. Spammers want to send mail out faster than an ISP's standard server will allow.
5. ISPs are often filtering mail going through their servers. It's possible an attempt by a worm to propagate via the SMTP API might trigger alarms and have the e-mail stripped of its payload.
Yes, *legitimate* mail servers have to be listening on port 25, but IP space where there shouldn't be rogue SMTP traffic doesn't need to be routing port 25.
The thing that really gets me is that every major ISP can usually tell within a few minutes, if a client has turned into a spam zombie. It's not a stretch to easily identify a dramtically-different pattern from a host and notify the customer that their computer might be compromised. I keep waiting for some ISP to automate such a system. It would be a huge competitive advantage.
It makes perfect sense.
All these worms are written by spammers who want to turn the machines into zombied SMTP servers. They want to disable other exploitive processes.
If all major ISPs filtered port 25 traffic (like AOL does) from anyplace other than their in-house SMTP gateways, you'd see worm activity drop to almost nothing. It's all about spamming. And the feds don't seem to care. Sooner or later, the major broadband providers will act responsibly and stop their clients from becoming spam zombies, then there won't be much of a need for these worms to be released. That's what they're all about: spamming.
I know better than to use Symantec AV now. Perhaps this latest bout of negligence may help convince others to jump that sinking ship.
I'm also noticing that instead of commentary from Symantec, you have Trend Micro people being consulted to comment on this worm.
It's obvious Symantec is too slow to be effective in dealing with these things. Time and time again, I find that AVG catches things that Symantec doesn't even recognize. Buh Bye Norton.
Ahh, doors.. that brings back memories. I wrote about a dozen door programs that were used by various BBS's. At one point I sold a copy of one of my doors to Bell Atlantic to use as a prototype for an early version of their electronic yellow pages (I was like 17 and reps from the telco flew down to meet me and stuck a NDA in my face - it was cool). I also had the United Nations using one of my database-oriented door programs to manage a server for collecting environmental data.
It's really cool how in the early days of computing there were some big institutions experimenting with BBSes. You tend to hear mostly about hobbyists but a lot of companies were using BBSes as well.
Please purchase the DVD if you can. I did and it's slick. It's a wonderful collection of historic data and you'd be helping out this guy who has spent more than the last decade compiling all this information. I'm sure he's not going to get anywhere near the amount of money he put into the project back, but every little bit helps.
Well, the 75% was just an example - the main point of what I was trying to say is there are other alternative punishments that would be more effective than sitting in a prison for a few years. Hit them where it hurts: financially.
Talk to a lawyer about civil penalties. Ask him how easy it is to dance around and get out of paying things. In situations like this, these people don't have the money to pay the fines. They are specialists and hiding their income and resources. Civil penalties don't mean squat to someone whose living is engaging in unethical behavior. It's a walk in the park to declare bankruptcy or transfer your assets to someone else, or to simply disappear and pop up elsewhere and continue your business.
These guys need to go to prison. Civil penalties are completely useless.
1. Spammers are routinely violating laws that are criminal in nature, and are subject to criminal fines, such as jail time.
2. Civil penalties have consistently demonstrated to be completely ineffective against spammers. They are either unintimidated by civil penalties, or there is no real incentive for civil prosecution of spammers because in most cases it costs more to take legal action than you can collect from the spammer under any circumstances.
You do the crime, you do the time. This guy deserves to go to jail. It may be a "white collar" crime, but it is still a crime, and more spammers need to face criminal charges in order to send a signal to those still operating that they will be hunted down. Right now almost all the virus/worm activity is the work of spammers. That is clearly criminal in nature, and I look forward to a few of those guys getting sent to a federal, pound-you-in-the-ass prison, the sooner the better, the longer the better.
Every time one of those sleazebags goes to prison, the chances of us getting less spam and worms increases. At some point, we'll crack the main network of these scumbags and you'll see spam traffic drop dramatically, and base Internet services will probably improve by a factor of two to five times more bandwidth and response time across the backbone.
Interesting topic.
I am the bane of my family because I tend to build systems in the living room, with the intent of moving them elsewhere in the house, but they end up staying in the living room much longer than originally planned. In the past I made efforts to accomodate a PC into the main home entertainment area. I got a large monitor from government surplus that doubled as a computer/tv monitor and I could switch back and forth from the PC to the TV, but that didn't satisfy the need to run both. I've thought about a coffee table that might have a monitor buried underneath a glass top -- that sounds kind of cool, but I think the angle you'd have to arch your neck to see the monitor might cause some strain. So I end up with a monitor or a laptop on the coffee table. What I've done is put wheels on my coffee table so I can roll it close to the sofa if I want to mess with the PC while laying back, or sit on the floor at the foot of the sofa and work the tv and the computer. That has proven to be the most versatile setup for me so far.
Can you imagine trying to learn regular expressions without sample code? Yea, it can be done, but like many areas of programming, examples can demonstrate subtle nuances that are not obvious in mere references.
A smarter approach is to learn the language basics in sequence as rapidly as possible, not getting bogged down in excessive sample code.
Excuse me? Maybe I'm an anomoly, but I can't think of a better way to learn a language than by example. This suspiciously sounds like and excuse to cover up the fact that the book doesn't offer adequate material to show how one can code in real-world environments.
When I look for a good programming book, be it an introduction, advanced tutorial or reference, the use of lots of examples is one of the main standards by which I judge the value of the publication.
At least if he declared bankruptcy, the court would regulate the payment and dissolution of assets. But the terms of the settlement dictate he will dismiss his filing, so that makes it even less likely Microsoft will get paid IMO.
Hey, do you guys know what spammers do?
They specialize in moving around and hiding their resources so that they can't be easily tracked. If Richter can do it with e-mail, he can do it with any money he has. Whether he declares bankruptcy or not, I don't expect Microsoft to see $7M. I don't think Richter ever had $7M in the first place. Spammers don't make that kind of money. If they did, there would be a lot more of them than they are, and the stuff they would be promoting would be more substantive than home mortgage affilliate schemes and penis enlargement pills.
Spammers are no different than Rappers or Late-night, get-rich-quick spokespeople. They create the illusion of wealth in order to lend credibility to their efforts. Unfortunately, when you watch those videos of spammers on boats and driving Lambos, they're rented, just like the fancy beach house all those make-fast-money people use as the setting for their infomercial. It's all a big crock.
I'm not saying these people don't make money, but it's nowhere near as much as they'd lead you to believe. Their whole modus operandi is about deception so they're sure as hell going to misrepresent their net worth as well.
This is a huge boon to that loser Richter, to even think that he was willing to "settle" paying someone $7M. He comes off like he has the money. There's no way in hell he does IMO.
Yea..yea..yea... I RTFA..
Just because Richter agreed to not declare bankruptcy doesn't mean that he'll ever pay Microsoft.
The fact that he was in the process of declaring bankruptcy indicates he probably doesn't have the funds in the first place.
Bankruptcy is just one way to avoid paying creditors. There are many others.