Since a large number of people would check "Do not broadcast the SSID" following their manufacturer's manual on security,
What manual says to do this? Turning off SSID broadcast is *not* a security measure in any sense, at all.
For one thing, the SSID is included in every single packet that the access point sends out. Period. So getting it is easy with or without the SSID broadcast.
For another thing, turning off SSID doesn't prevent anybody from connecting to the network. It will prevent stupider displays like Windows's wireless page from showing that access point as available, assuming no other AP has the same SSID being broadcast, but if they select that SSID from another AP or if they put it in manually, then they'll connect to your network just fine.
If you want security, enable WPA. Turning off SSID, filtering by MAC address, these are not security related adjustments, and add precisely nothing to your overall security strategy. They might be a way to keep your idiot neighbor from connecting to your network by accident, but they won't keep anybody from connecting to your network on purpose.
The only advantage of this is that it's collaborative... and as other users have pointed out, quite a lot of the commands on the site are crap and need moderation of some sort.
But your browser has this built in already.
-If you use IE, you can set up these type of search shortcuts using TweakUI. -If you use Firefox/Mozilla, you can create bookmarks that implement these sort of shortcuts. There's some examples in your bookmarks menu when you first install Firefox, just look at those for how to do it.
In both cases, after creating them, you can just type "shortcut search terms" in the address to make it do that "search". Doesn't have to be a search of course, it can be any kind of HTTP GET that you want. I have several defined.. -g for quick googling -imdb for movie lookups -imdbq for movie quote lookups -snpp to search the simpsons archives.. -And so on.;)
And what good does that do, exactly? What do you do to correct it?
You can get your ISP to stop letting spammers use their network, or you can switch ISPs and thus stop financially supporting spammers. That's the whole point.
If you've ever actually been blocked by an RBL, you'd know this. It's very, very clear and simple to understand. "Message blocked because this IP is listed by RBL-name-here" or what have you. Go to any of their webpages and it's explained very clearly and simply.
You can't talk about this in absolutes because you don't know how people use e-mail. E-mail is forwarded by third parties, still, to this day. There are instances in which mail does not go directly from point A to point B.
No, there are not. Even if a mail relay is being used, it's being used inside a private network before making it out to the main systems. And RBL's would not impact these transactions because they would only be accepting mail from specific known systems in any case.
But there is no case anywhere where you should be using the relay of some other unrelated party to send email. Period. Email should go from you to your ISP to the other guys ISP to the other guy. Why you'd stick a random relay in there I have no idea.
And if you are thinking that setting up forwarding on your webmail account is "relaying", then you don't understand the discussion in the first place.
Consider for example an autoforwarding filter
Consider that this is irrelevant and NOT what an RBL does. If your home ISP is subscribing to a blacklist that blocks email from your work, as in your example, then WTF would you continue to use that ISP? You could complain to your ISP to fix the problem, or you could get the people at your work to switch to another ISP (the reason your work got blacklisted) or whatever.
I mean, you're introducing so much bullshit into this that you're missing the whole point. RBL's don't block in that way, they block point to point transactions. An RBL won't block because of the email content, it blocks because of the IP of the sending machine. If an RBL is blocking work to home, it's going to block *everything* from your work to your home, not just stuff that you got forwarded through your frickin' email program.
However, the core issue of spam blacklists deliberately targetting innocents
No blacklist out there delibrately targets innocents. Not one. They target "spam-friendly" ISPs and users of those ISPs because those users are paying money to those ISPs. These users are not "innocent". They are financially supporting an ISP that allows spammers to operate. They may not know this, but after they get blocked they usually find out pretty quickly.
It is perfectly acceptable to go after these users as targets, because they are contributing to the problem whether they are aware of it or not.
The Rear Window captioning system does this sort of thing. On the back of the theater, there's an LCD panel that displays the captions. People who want to see the captions get this transparent acrylic panel thing which can attach to the seat in front of them and is adjustable. You attach the thing, adjust the angle right, and you will see the words from behind you superimposed on the screen in front of you. Works great, by all accounts.
I can't see paying more than $7.50 USD to see a movie at a theater, ever. Actually, if I go to the movies, then I usually go on the weekend before 5 PM, when it only costs $5 USD.
So, you are saying that physically torturing a child isn't a crime, but just looking at an image made by someone else without your consent or approval may be a crime?
Of course. If you think differently, then, well, you're wrong. Anybody who can equate "spanking" with "torture" is an idiot.
The use of pain as a motivational stimulus is not only sensible, but natural. Pain is a powerful, effective, and most importantly, built-in way to teach a developing child how to behave.
Think about what happens when a child touches a hot stove. They never do that again, for sure. Hell, I still have a noticable adverse reaction to touching an electric stove coil even when I know for an absolute fact that it's not hot.
The human nervous system is wired to experience pain and learn from it. It's built-in at a very deep level. Using this built-in stimulus/response mechanism to teach is not only natural and correct, but it's the most effective way to do it.
I'm not saying this method should be used on all occassions, just that yes, it should be used. You cannot properly raise a child without the occassional spanking. Parents who don't spank their kids when necessary are the ones committing child abuse. They're not raising their children correctly.
We're pretty sure at this point there's never going to be another way to do it. With our knowledge of physics at this point, if we're ever going to do it, this is how we're going to do it, Sci-Fi channel notwithstanding.
Yes, well, the smart money isn't on your "pretty sure" bet. We really don't know as much about the ultimate nature of reality as you think we do.
The guys who work on this stuff have good ideas based on number systems we think are required to build a radio receiver. It should be recognizable as a non-noise signal if anyone is listening. It may take untold round-trips to establish communication.
The problem here is that you're still just guessing. You can come up with ideas based on numbers all you like, in the end, you still really don't know. You cannot possibly know. Perhaps its a very good guess, but it's still a guess.
Nothing that we send out that has noise-like characteristics is going to make it out of our solar system, at least with any detection technology that we know about. If an alien is sending out noise-like signals that happen to make it here they're using way too much power. The only thing that should make it here is an intentional signal.
Again, you're guessing. You know absolutely nothing about this other hypothethical species, and yet you're saying that they won't be detectable? That's just a guess. Might not be right. You can't even quantify the odds on that guess.
My point, overall, is that you think you know more than you actually do. In point of fact, you really know nothing at all about what this alien race might be or do. It's all a web of guesswork. You may think it's got good odds of being the truth, but in reality you cannot possibly know the truth so anything you say about it is just your opinion. Others disagree.
Email was never designed to be a reliable system to begin with, and thinking that it was is a fairly foolish thing to do. It's a best effort system. Simple as that.
Funnily enough, no RBL has ever stopped me from getting email from places where I've made purchases or what have you.
Of course it's censorship. It's preventing person A from seeing the website set up by person B. Actually, it's preventing person A from sending email to person B, but I get your point. Whether it be email or web surfing, it's the same concept.
But you missed my point. Person B is subscribing (paying money to) person C who runs the ISP/mailserver. If person B dislikes the service, they can switch providers to person D, who blocks nothing at all.
Free market economics at work.
Personally, I don't think ends justify means, and if they did I think I'd start with an end like eliminating child pornography, or terrorism, or something.
If you want to set up a list to help people block this sort of thing, feel free. Maybe ISPs will subscribe to your list. There's nothing preventing you, or me, or anybody else from setting up such a list. There's nothing preventing anybody from using such a list.
But don't fool yourself about the means you're supporting.
What means? Individuals setting up lists? Individuals using those lists? What, exactly, is wrong with this means? I see absolutely nothing wrong with people choosing to block things that they don't want to see.
Because you act like something is being suppressed without any consent here. This stuff ain't automatic. It ain't built in. Somebody chooses to block mail in this fashion.
If somebody wants to make a list which will let people block information about X, whatever X is, then I have absolutely no problem with it. They're making a list as they see fit.
If people then want to use this list to block X from their systems, then I also have absolutely no problem with it. Their system, they can block anything they choose by any means they choose. Not my say.
Now, if the people who make the list decide to block whole ISPs because they host information about X, you say I'm supposed to have a problem with it? Bullshit.
It's their list. They can do whatever the hell they want to do with it. The people who use their list, well, they can do that too if they so choose. I don't see how I should have any say in how they run their list. If they want to block entire ISPs that host blogs of people who have political views they disagree with, then I may consider it dumb, and I certainly won't use their list, but I'm not going to say that they shouldn't make such a list.
They can list any damn thing they please. The only choice I have to make is whether or not their list is useful for me to use or not.
RBL's are useful to a large number of people. This is why they exist. If the notion of blocking whole ISPs works for the people who use that list, then so be it.
If I was to get blocked, and I thought it was unfair, then I'd be angry, sure. I'd try to argue my end of it and I'd try to get removed from the list. But never, EVER, would I say that they have no right to list me on their list or that other people have no right to use that list to block me.
Now, if they blocked me because I used a specific ISP that these people didn't like, then it would motivate me to decide whether using that ISP was worth being on that list or not. You pick your side. You support the ISP or not. That's it. Just bitching about it doesn't help anything, because what they put on their list and how other people use that list is totally out of your hands.
Paul hasn't been shot. Emails he tried to send have not been delivered. Drawing a comparison between physical violence and the fact that a guy can't send email is rather disingenious.
What's worse is that you still got the analogy wrong. Nobody has attacked Paul. His mail server is fine. HE CAN STILL SEND EMAIL. Other people, however, can CHOOSE to reject his email because of his IP being on a list. Nobody's touched his servers.
To use your crappy analogy, nobody's shot anybody. Instead, they've put his address on a list and then people who want to know about where the bad parts of town are can read that list and think that Paul is bad because he lives there too. Then they can throw mail he sent them away based on that.
What they do is allow others to block email between two diffrent people, simply because they run the mail servers that sit between them.
If you're a user who is getting mail from a mail server that has RBL's on it, then you either own/run the mail server or you pay money to somebody who owns/runs the mail server.
Period.
In the case where you're paying money to somebody, then you're either: a) For the idea, in which case you have no complaints or b) Against the idea, in which case you can stop paying money to the person who owns the mail server (the ISP) and switch to somebody else.
If B was actually a significant proportion of users, then ISP's wouldn't use these blocklists. Free market economics at work.
The fact of the matter is that B is not a significant proportion of users. The people complaining about this sort of thing are people who get mail they SEND blocked because the receiver is using an ISP that uses these blocklists. And you know, the sender of mail has no real say in the matter as to whether the mail they send gets delivered or not, in this case.
The solution of switching ISPs to somebody who isn't spam friendly and thus won't get blocked never seems to be taken seriously. Again, free market economics are at work here.
Because RBL's work. The concept of collateral damage works. If it didn't work, then ISPs would not use these lists. They don't have to. No system comes setup to use these RBLs enabled by default. ISPs have to enable them or set them up. And they do that because they work. It's real simple here.
Look at what happened with Family Guy and Cartoon Network. CN/Adult Swim picked up Family Guy after it was well and truly cancelled, showed the episodes repeatedly, and after a couple of years, somebody at FOX finally noticed that the rating for freakin' Family Guy repeats were actually pretty decent. The DVD sales numbers probably didn't hurt either. Result: Family Guy gets new episodes again after a 2 or 3 year hiatus, the same people get to make American Dad and somehow talk Fox into letting Cartoon Network air American Dad episodes less than a week after their First Run on Fox.
Fox might be wising up a bit in this respect. If Firefly does well on Sci-Fi, and Serenity does well, then it's not entirely implausible that it could make a comeback.
Anywhere there's a Dell store is a Nexus point for them. If I had a Dell computer (home section) shipped to my home in TN, I'd get charged sales tax because there's a big Dell store (over in Nashville, I think). If I had it shipped to my parents place in AR, no sales tax, they have no Dell store in AR. And TN sales tax is pretty high too (no state income tax).
If you don't know what a hash function is, then turn in your nerd credentials now.
Basically, they provided an example case where one of these recent methods to generate hash function collisions can be turned into a "real world" attack.
It's a very simple example case, but it demonstrates the point effectively. The point is that these recently discovered methods to generate collisions quickly are a real threat to any software using them as a method for digital signatures and such.
The real world application here is that it is possible, probably in several good ways, to generate a couple of different files that have the same hash and also have meaningful data in them. The attacks found that generate seemingly random data with the same hashes can be used in ways that will let them apply to non-random, purposefully designed data.
The example they use is where some secretary gets her boss to sign a document, and then uses his signature on another document which gives her access she shouldn't have. It's a way to forge a digital signature on a document by having them sign another one that you specially crafted.
Detectability is actually probably much better than you think, because artifically made radio signals have a tendancy to be polarized, whereas natural ones generally don't.
But yes, you're basically right. An omnidirectional source at 10 light years would need to be a billion watts to be received by something like Arecibo. However, if it was highly directional and sent by something like Arecibo, then it would only need to be a kilowatt.
If you assume that your receiver has done something like scatter some receivers out in space and made an interferometer about 1 AU wide (stick some radio receivers in the same orbit on the other side of the sun, for example), you can get to where you can detect that 1 megawatt on an omni from 10 LY. We don't have that sort of thing, although it's not beyond our capability to build it if we wanted.
So, which would you think is better then? A megawatt radio broadcast from the ground, which then has to travel through a couple hundred miles of atmosphere (which is largely transparent on those frequencies, BTW) and out into space in an omnidirectional manner, or a floating space probe with about as much broadcasting power as a lightbulb, but with nearly no interference to get in its way? Which will be more detectable at, say, 10 light years away?
If you answered the rock station, then you win a cookie. However, if the question was based on, say, 100 light years or so, then it would have been a trick question, as neither one would have been detectable by somebody with our current level of technology.
We've only had the technology for a century and we're immature and scared. Interesting theory. Not actually true, but interesting nonetheless.
We're not sending radio signals designed to be picked up by other civilizations because it would be pointless to do so.
a) It'd take 4 years to get to another star, and that's one that we're pretty sure lacks life anyway. To get to the best candidates, you're looking at 50-100 years or so. Given the rate of technological advance, it seems almost more plausible that we'd figure out a way to *go there* faster than the message would get there. Okay, those nasty laws of physics are indeed a problem, I admit.
b) There's two ways to send a signal: Directional or not. An omni-directional signal makes the most sense, given that you want to contact anybody, but in that case the power drops by the cube of the distance, meaning that the power you need to pump into it to be heard that far away is somewhat staggering. We don't have that kind of power. We could do it directionally, because then it falls off much less, but in which direction do you point your signal? Pick a star.
c) What signal do you send? You can postulate a lot of ways to send a signal that would be universal enough to be picked up, but they all suffer from the same flaw, that being that you're just guessing. You really don't know if some other species will really be able to recognize it for what it is.
So, it takes a long time, and a hell of a lot of power, with an uncertain, but probably very very small, chance of success. Now, is it really so hard to figure out why we don't send coherent signals but just listen instead?
What SETI is listening for is both coherent, obvious, signals that might be sent by somebody out there, but they're not stupid. They're also listening for anything that's non-random noise. A lot of what we do send out incidentally is noise-like, but only at first glance. It has a non-random component that analysis can identify. What do you think the whole point of SETI@Home is? It's to identify sources of noise that are not random, to see where to pay more attention to.
Voyager I & II send a coherent signal that's free of noise from earch, for example.
Voyager 1 and 2 send that signal back to here, or were designed to originally. And the signal strength on that is extremely small. Your average rock radio station puts out way more power.
However, I think this system feels very fragile as so much depends on the metadata.
This is the biggest obstacle to relational file sytstems, of course. Without good metadata, everything becomes hard to find.
The solution to this is multi-layered. 1. Index everything. All the content. Not just the first few words of the document, but every word in the file. This takes storage space and time, but space is cheap and getting cheaper and computer speeds are already pretty far above what most people can reasonably use anyway; slowness in computer systems is due to sloppy coding and design more than it is anything else. 2. Keep good metadata. Just as it's hard to find something in a folder hierarchy when you don't remember where you put it, it's going to be hard to find something when you didn't put good keywords on it. This will take some effort by the user, of course. 3. Build it alongside or on top of existing filesystems. Nothing prevents you from building a relational filesystem for files already in a hierarchial system, or using both simultaneously. The disk is a big flat space already, any organizational structure is added on top of that. This will make transition simpler, or simply let people choose how they prefer to work.
What I'm wondering is what is broken with the whole directory/folder design?
It doesn't scale. Not from the filesystem standpoint, you can stick a couple hundred thousand files in a directory just fine with some filesystems.
But from a human mental organizational standpoint, it just doesn't scale to the number of files and amount of data that we are starting to have and use and store.
My laptop, for example, has a couple hundred thousand files on it. I have several thousand emails stored. Lots of data, in all sorts of places. Finding something is a bit of a bitch, because sometimes I can't recall if it was emailed to me or if I saw it in a document or if I heard it in an audio/video file, etc. Why should all of these be differently stored and indexed? Why can't I search all of them at once?
With a good metadata structure and indexing, the problem is solved. Everything is described by metadata in some way. Everything has been indexed into a database. I can search that database and pull up a list of matches.
When you go searching for info on the web, you search on keywords. It turns out that human beings are pretty good at picking out keywords to find content. We have to be, so much data comes our way all the time that without filtering it down to essentials, we wouldn't be able to function properly. So it's somewhat more natural to organize data like this anyway.
The problem, of course, is that metadata doesn't grow on trees. Quite a lot of it can be autogenerated, and you can write systems to index most content automatically as well. But you still need to be able to add metadata yourself. This is analogous to your idea of "I keep my files well organized".. You still would need to do that, however now you would just need to keep your files well labeled with metadata. Which makes a bit more sense to some people. Instead of defining a structure of folders, now you can define a structure of, say, keywords. You can redefine it on the fly.
If you want to view those keywords *as* folders, then you can. Nothing prevents that. Simple example is GMail. You define labels which show up on the left as links, kinda like folders full of emails. But a single email can have multiple labels and thus appear in multiple folders.
Or look at del.icio.us. You can define many keywords for each link you add, and then pull up different lists by treating them as folders: http://del.icio.us/yourname/bookmark would give a list of all the links that you gave the "bookmark" keyword to. http://del.icio.us/yourname/bookmark+games gives all the links you gave bookmark and games keywords to. How you see that organization is basically up to you, with proper design.
The idea is basically to separate the underlying organization from the view of that organization. Hierachical directory structures tie very tightly to the view of those structures. Relational database structures based on metadata do not tie to any particular view of the data at all.
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Since a large number of people would check "Do not broadcast the SSID" following their manufacturer's manual on security,
What manual says to do this? Turning off SSID broadcast is *not* a security measure in any sense, at all.
For one thing, the SSID is included in every single packet that the access point sends out. Period. So getting it is easy with or without the SSID broadcast.
For another thing, turning off SSID doesn't prevent anybody from connecting to the network. It will prevent stupider displays like Windows's wireless page from showing that access point as available, assuming no other AP has the same SSID being broadcast, but if they select that SSID from another AP or if they put it in manually, then they'll connect to your network just fine.
If you want security, enable WPA. Turning off SSID, filtering by MAC address, these are not security related adjustments, and add precisely nothing to your overall security strategy. They might be a way to keep your idiot neighbor from connecting to your network by accident, but they won't keep anybody from connecting to your network on purpose.
The only advantage of this is that it's collaborative... and as other users have pointed out, quite a lot of the commands on the site are crap and need moderation of some sort.
;)
But your browser has this built in already.
-If you use IE, you can set up these type of search shortcuts using TweakUI.
-If you use Firefox/Mozilla, you can create bookmarks that implement these sort of shortcuts. There's some examples in your bookmarks menu when you first install Firefox, just look at those for how to do it.
In both cases, after creating them, you can just type "shortcut search terms" in the address to make it do that "search". Doesn't have to be a search of course, it can be any kind of HTTP GET that you want. I have several defined..
-g for quick googling
-imdb for movie lookups
-imdbq for movie quote lookups
-snpp to search the simpsons archives..
-And so on.
And what good does that do, exactly? What do you do to correct it?
You can get your ISP to stop letting spammers use their network, or you can switch ISPs and thus stop financially supporting spammers. That's the whole point.
If you've ever actually been blocked by an RBL, you'd know this. It's very, very clear and simple to understand. "Message blocked because this IP is listed by RBL-name-here" or what have you. Go to any of their webpages and it's explained very clearly and simply.
You can't talk about this in absolutes because you don't know how people use e-mail. E-mail is forwarded by third parties, still, to this day. There are instances in which mail does not go directly from point A to point B.
No, there are not. Even if a mail relay is being used, it's being used inside a private network before making it out to the main systems. And RBL's would not impact these transactions because they would only be accepting mail from specific known systems in any case.
But there is no case anywhere where you should be using the relay of some other unrelated party to send email. Period. Email should go from you to your ISP to the other guys ISP to the other guy. Why you'd stick a random relay in there I have no idea.
And if you are thinking that setting up forwarding on your webmail account is "relaying", then you don't understand the discussion in the first place.
Consider for example an autoforwarding filter
Consider that this is irrelevant and NOT what an RBL does. If your home ISP is subscribing to a blacklist that blocks email from your work, as in your example, then WTF would you continue to use that ISP? You could complain to your ISP to fix the problem, or you could get the people at your work to switch to another ISP (the reason your work got blacklisted) or whatever.
I mean, you're introducing so much bullshit into this that you're missing the whole point. RBL's don't block in that way, they block point to point transactions. An RBL won't block because of the email content, it blocks because of the IP of the sending machine. If an RBL is blocking work to home, it's going to block *everything* from your work to your home, not just stuff that you got forwarded through your frickin' email program.
However, the core issue of spam blacklists deliberately targetting innocents
No blacklist out there delibrately targets innocents. Not one. They target "spam-friendly" ISPs and users of those ISPs because those users are paying money to those ISPs. These users are not "innocent". They are financially supporting an ISP that allows spammers to operate. They may not know this, but after they get blocked they usually find out pretty quickly.
It is perfectly acceptable to go after these users as targets, because they are contributing to the problem whether they are aware of it or not.
The Rear Window captioning system does this sort of thing. On the back of the theater, there's an LCD panel that displays the captions. People who want to see the captions get this transparent acrylic panel thing which can attach to the seat in front of them and is adjustable. You attach the thing, adjust the angle right, and you will see the words from behind you superimposed on the screen in front of you. Works great, by all accounts.
I can't see paying more than $7.50 USD to see a movie at a theater, ever. Actually, if I go to the movies, then I usually go on the weekend before 5 PM, when it only costs $5 USD.
So, you are saying that physically torturing a child isn't a crime, but just looking at an image made by someone else without your consent or approval may be a crime?
Of course. If you think differently, then, well, you're wrong. Anybody who can equate "spanking" with "torture" is an idiot.
The use of pain as a motivational stimulus is not only sensible, but natural. Pain is a powerful, effective, and most importantly, built-in way to teach a developing child how to behave.
Think about what happens when a child touches a hot stove. They never do that again, for sure. Hell, I still have a noticable adverse reaction to touching an electric stove coil even when I know for an absolute fact that it's not hot.
The human nervous system is wired to experience pain and learn from it. It's built-in at a very deep level. Using this built-in stimulus/response mechanism to teach is not only natural and correct, but it's the most effective way to do it.
I'm not saying this method should be used on all occassions, just that yes, it should be used. You cannot properly raise a child without the occassional spanking. Parents who don't spank their kids when necessary are the ones committing child abuse. They're not raising their children correctly.
We're pretty sure at this point there's never going to be another way to do it. With our knowledge of physics at this point, if we're ever going to do it, this is how we're going to do it, Sci-Fi channel notwithstanding.
Yes, well, the smart money isn't on your "pretty sure" bet. We really don't know as much about the ultimate nature of reality as you think we do.
The guys who work on this stuff have good ideas based on number systems we think are required to build a radio receiver. It should be recognizable as a non-noise signal if anyone is listening. It may take untold round-trips to establish communication.
The problem here is that you're still just guessing. You can come up with ideas based on numbers all you like, in the end, you still really don't know. You cannot possibly know. Perhaps its a very good guess, but it's still a guess.
Nothing that we send out that has noise-like characteristics is going to make it out of our solar system, at least with any detection technology that we know about. If an alien is sending out noise-like signals that happen to make it here they're using way too much power. The only thing that should make it here is an intentional signal.
Again, you're guessing. You know absolutely nothing about this other hypothethical species, and yet you're saying that they won't be detectable? That's just a guess. Might not be right. You can't even quantify the odds on that guess.
My point, overall, is that you think you know more than you actually do. In point of fact, you really know nothing at all about what this alien race might be or do. It's all a web of guesswork. You may think it's got good odds of being the truth, but in reality you cannot possibly know the truth so anything you say about it is just your opinion. Others disagree.
Email was never designed to be a reliable system to begin with, and thinking that it was is a fairly foolish thing to do. It's a best effort system. Simple as that.
Funnily enough, no RBL has ever stopped me from getting email from places where I've made purchases or what have you.
Of course it's censorship. It's preventing person A from seeing the website set up by person B.
Actually, it's preventing person A from sending email to person B, but I get your point. Whether it be email or web surfing, it's the same concept.
But you missed my point. Person B is subscribing (paying money to) person C who runs the ISP/mailserver. If person B dislikes the service, they can switch providers to person D, who blocks nothing at all.
Free market economics at work.
Personally, I don't think ends justify means, and if they did I think I'd start with an end like eliminating child pornography, or terrorism, or something.
If you want to set up a list to help people block this sort of thing, feel free. Maybe ISPs will subscribe to your list. There's nothing preventing you, or me, or anybody else from setting up such a list. There's nothing preventing anybody from using such a list.
But don't fool yourself about the means you're supporting.
What means? Individuals setting up lists? Individuals using those lists? What, exactly, is wrong with this means? I see absolutely nothing wrong with people choosing to block things that they don't want to see.
Because you act like something is being suppressed without any consent here. This stuff ain't automatic. It ain't built in. Somebody chooses to block mail in this fashion.
:thumbsup:
You, sir, are correct, and just got off my foe list for your wonderfully insightful post.
If somebody wants to make a list which will let people block information about X, whatever X is, then I have absolutely no problem with it. They're making a list as they see fit.
If people then want to use this list to block X from their systems, then I also have absolutely no problem with it. Their system, they can block anything they choose by any means they choose. Not my say.
Now, if the people who make the list decide to block whole ISPs because they host information about X, you say I'm supposed to have a problem with it? Bullshit.
It's their list. They can do whatever the hell they want to do with it. The people who use their list, well, they can do that too if they so choose. I don't see how I should have any say in how they run their list. If they want to block entire ISPs that host blogs of people who have political views they disagree with, then I may consider it dumb, and I certainly won't use their list, but I'm not going to say that they shouldn't make such a list.
They can list any damn thing they please. The only choice I have to make is whether or not their list is useful for me to use or not.
RBL's are useful to a large number of people. This is why they exist. If the notion of blocking whole ISPs works for the people who use that list, then so be it.
If I was to get blocked, and I thought it was unfair, then I'd be angry, sure. I'd try to argue my end of it and I'd try to get removed from the list. But never, EVER, would I say that they have no right to list me on their list or that other people have no right to use that list to block me.
Now, if they blocked me because I used a specific ISP that these people didn't like, then it would motivate me to decide whether using that ISP was worth being on that list or not. You pick your side. You support the ISP or not. That's it. Just bitching about it doesn't help anything, because what they put on their list and how other people use that list is totally out of your hands.
Your analogy is freakin' terrible.
Paul hasn't been shot. Emails he tried to send have not been delivered. Drawing a comparison between physical violence and the fact that a guy can't send email is rather disingenious.
What's worse is that you still got the analogy wrong. Nobody has attacked Paul. His mail server is fine. HE CAN STILL SEND EMAIL. Other people, however, can CHOOSE to reject his email because of his IP being on a list. Nobody's touched his servers.
To use your crappy analogy, nobody's shot anybody. Instead, they've put his address on a list and then people who want to know about where the bad parts of town are can read that list and think that Paul is bad because he lives there too. Then they can throw mail he sent them away based on that.
What they do is allow others to block email between two diffrent people, simply because they run the mail servers that sit between them.
If you're a user who is getting mail from a mail server that has RBL's on it, then you either own/run the mail server or you pay money to somebody who owns/runs the mail server.
Period.
In the case where you're paying money to somebody, then you're either:
a) For the idea, in which case you have no complaints or
b) Against the idea, in which case you can stop paying money to the person who owns the mail server (the ISP) and switch to somebody else.
If B was actually a significant proportion of users, then ISP's wouldn't use these blocklists. Free market economics at work.
The fact of the matter is that B is not a significant proportion of users. The people complaining about this sort of thing are people who get mail they SEND blocked because the receiver is using an ISP that uses these blocklists. And you know, the sender of mail has no real say in the matter as to whether the mail they send gets delivered or not, in this case.
The solution of switching ISPs to somebody who isn't spam friendly and thus won't get blocked never seems to be taken seriously. Again, free market economics are at work here.
Because RBL's work. The concept of collateral damage works. If it didn't work, then ISPs would not use these lists. They don't have to. No system comes setup to use these RBLs enabled by default. ISPs have to enable them or set them up. And they do that because they work. It's real simple here.
Look at what happened with Family Guy and Cartoon Network. CN/Adult Swim picked up Family Guy after it was well and truly cancelled, showed the episodes repeatedly, and after a couple of years, somebody at FOX finally noticed that the rating for freakin' Family Guy repeats were actually pretty decent. The DVD sales numbers probably didn't hurt either. Result: Family Guy gets new episodes again after a 2 or 3 year hiatus, the same people get to make American Dad and somehow talk Fox into letting Cartoon Network air American Dad episodes less than a week after their First Run on Fox.
Fox might be wising up a bit in this respect. If Firefly does well on Sci-Fi, and Serenity does well, then it's not entirely implausible that it could make a comeback.
Anywhere there's a Dell store is a Nexus point for them. If I had a Dell computer (home section) shipped to my home in TN, I'd get charged sales tax because there's a big Dell store (over in Nashville, I think). If I had it shipped to my parents place in AR, no sales tax, they have no Dell store in AR. And TN sales tax is pretty high too (no state income tax).
If you don't know what a hash function is, then turn in your nerd credentials now.
Basically, they provided an example case where one of these recent methods to generate hash function collisions can be turned into a "real world" attack.
It's a very simple example case, but it demonstrates the point effectively. The point is that these recently discovered methods to generate collisions quickly are a real threat to any software using them as a method for digital signatures and such.
The real world application here is that it is possible, probably in several good ways, to generate a couple of different files that have the same hash and also have meaningful data in them. The attacks found that generate seemingly random data with the same hashes can be used in ways that will let them apply to non-random, purposefully designed data.
The example they use is where some secretary gets her boss to sign a document, and then uses his signature on another document which gives her access she shouldn't have. It's a way to forge a digital signature on a document by having them sign another one that you specially crafted.
Detectability is actually probably much better than you think, because artifically made radio signals have a tendancy to be polarized, whereas natural ones generally don't.
But yes, you're basically right. An omnidirectional source at 10 light years would need to be a billion watts to be received by something like Arecibo. However, if it was highly directional and sent by something like Arecibo, then it would only need to be a kilowatt.
If you assume that your receiver has done something like scatter some receivers out in space and made an interferometer about 1 AU wide (stick some radio receivers in the same orbit on the other side of the sun, for example), you can get to where you can detect that 1 megawatt on an omni from 10 LY. We don't have that sort of thing, although it's not beyond our capability to build it if we wanted.
So, which would you think is better then? A megawatt radio broadcast from the ground, which then has to travel through a couple hundred miles of atmosphere (which is largely transparent on those frequencies, BTW) and out into space in an omnidirectional manner, or a floating space probe with about as much broadcasting power as a lightbulb, but with nearly no interference to get in its way? Which will be more detectable at, say, 10 light years away?
If you answered the rock station, then you win a cookie. However, if the question was based on, say, 100 light years or so, then it would have been a trick question, as neither one would have been detectable by somebody with our current level of technology.
We've only had the technology for a century and we're immature and scared.
Interesting theory. Not actually true, but interesting nonetheless.
We're not sending radio signals designed to be picked up by other civilizations because it would be pointless to do so.
a) It'd take 4 years to get to another star, and that's one that we're pretty sure lacks life anyway. To get to the best candidates, you're looking at 50-100 years or so. Given the rate of technological advance, it seems almost more plausible that we'd figure out a way to *go there* faster than the message would get there. Okay, those nasty laws of physics are indeed a problem, I admit.
b) There's two ways to send a signal: Directional or not. An omni-directional signal makes the most sense, given that you want to contact anybody, but in that case the power drops by the cube of the distance, meaning that the power you need to pump into it to be heard that far away is somewhat staggering. We don't have that kind of power. We could do it directionally, because then it falls off much less, but in which direction do you point your signal? Pick a star.
c) What signal do you send? You can postulate a lot of ways to send a signal that would be universal enough to be picked up, but they all suffer from the same flaw, that being that you're just guessing. You really don't know if some other species will really be able to recognize it for what it is.
So, it takes a long time, and a hell of a lot of power, with an uncertain, but probably very very small, chance of success. Now, is it really so hard to figure out why we don't send coherent signals but just listen instead?
What SETI is listening for is both coherent, obvious, signals that might be sent by somebody out there, but they're not stupid. They're also listening for anything that's non-random noise. A lot of what we do send out incidentally is noise-like, but only at first glance. It has a non-random component that analysis can identify. What do you think the whole point of SETI@Home is? It's to identify sources of noise that are not random, to see where to pay more attention to.
Voyager I & II send a coherent signal that's free of noise from earch, for example.
Voyager 1 and 2 send that signal back to here, or were designed to originally. And the signal strength on that is extremely small. Your average rock radio station puts out way more power.
Deliberate broadcasts suffer from none of the drawbacks you describe.
Are we delibrately broadcasting coherent radio signals that are explicitly designed to be picked up by another civilization?
Why not?
QED.
However, I think this system feels very fragile as so much depends on the metadata.
This is the biggest obstacle to relational file sytstems, of course. Without good metadata, everything becomes hard to find.
The solution to this is multi-layered.
1. Index everything. All the content. Not just the first few words of the document, but every word in the file. This takes storage space and time, but space is cheap and getting cheaper and computer speeds are already pretty far above what most people can reasonably use anyway; slowness in computer systems is due to sloppy coding and design more than it is anything else.
2. Keep good metadata. Just as it's hard to find something in a folder hierarchy when you don't remember where you put it, it's going to be hard to find something when you didn't put good keywords on it. This will take some effort by the user, of course.
3. Build it alongside or on top of existing filesystems. Nothing prevents you from building a relational filesystem for files already in a hierarchial system, or using both simultaneously. The disk is a big flat space already, any organizational structure is added on top of that. This will make transition simpler, or simply let people choose how they prefer to work.
What I'm wondering is what is broken with the whole directory/folder design?
It doesn't scale. Not from the filesystem standpoint, you can stick a couple hundred thousand files in a directory just fine with some filesystems.
But from a human mental organizational standpoint, it just doesn't scale to the number of files and amount of data that we are starting to have and use and store.
My laptop, for example, has a couple hundred thousand files on it. I have several thousand emails stored. Lots of data, in all sorts of places. Finding something is a bit of a bitch, because sometimes I can't recall if it was emailed to me or if I saw it in a document or if I heard it in an audio/video file, etc. Why should all of these be differently stored and indexed? Why can't I search all of them at once?
With a good metadata structure and indexing, the problem is solved. Everything is described by metadata in some way. Everything has been indexed into a database. I can search that database and pull up a list of matches.
When you go searching for info on the web, you search on keywords. It turns out that human beings are pretty good at picking out keywords to find content. We have to be, so much data comes our way all the time that without filtering it down to essentials, we wouldn't be able to function properly. So it's somewhat more natural to organize data like this anyway.
The problem, of course, is that metadata doesn't grow on trees. Quite a lot of it can be autogenerated, and you can write systems to index most content automatically as well. But you still need to be able to add metadata yourself. This is analogous to your idea of "I keep my files well organized".. You still would need to do that, however now you would just need to keep your files well labeled with metadata. Which makes a bit more sense to some people. Instead of defining a structure of folders, now you can define a structure of, say, keywords. You can redefine it on the fly.
If you want to view those keywords *as* folders, then you can. Nothing prevents that. Simple example is GMail. You define labels which show up on the left as links, kinda like folders full of emails. But a single email can have multiple labels and thus appear in multiple folders.
Or look at del.icio.us. You can define many keywords for each link you add, and then pull up different lists by treating them as folders: http://del.icio.us/yourname/bookmark would give a list of all the links that you gave the "bookmark" keyword to. http://del.icio.us/yourname/bookmark+games gives all the links you gave bookmark and games keywords to. How you see that organization is basically up to you, with proper design.
The idea is basically to separate the underlying organization from the view of that organization. Hierachical directory structures tie very tightly to the view of those structures. Relational database structures based on metadata do not tie to any particular view of the data at all.