"Uuh...but the article said the referer URLs to those votes
included their usernames."
Actually, if you had read the article carefully, you would know
that it said that several of the voters had referer URLs that
included their username. "Several" is different from "all".
Futhermore, referer URLs are not necessarily looked at by an automated
system that raises a red flag and blocks multiple vote attempts from a
single IP. Referer URLs are more likely looked at after the fact.
Without a better description of what criteria ZDnet was using, it's
hard to say anything about the votes that didn't come from the "PLEASE
STOP AND VOTE FOR.NET!" email.
"You must not have read the article. It almost certainly was not a
script."
You're completely, utterly, and totally wrong. While the article does
discuss people manually following a link from an email, the article
also contains the following quote:
"There is also clear evidence of automated voting, with scripts
attempting to post multiple times."
First, I'm sure we've all seen "please vote for X" campaigns on the
internet. Just because it happens to be Microsoft employees in this
case doesn't make it particularly more interesting.
Second, Microsoft uses proxying for Internet-related stuff, which
could make the multi-vote issue appear to be worse than it actually
is, as many separate users would come from a single IP.
Third, yes, it seems someone ran a script from within the
microsoft.com domain. That could've been anyone in the company with a
PC. My bet is on "random stupid employee". If it were an actual
conspiracy, I doubt they would've done it from something within the
microsoft.com domain.
In short, it's the same bullshit that happens with every web poll.
While it doesn't reflect well on the company, it almost certainly is
the evil marketing conspiracy that everyone makes it out to be.
"My question is, did Mr. Schwartzman know that Mr Shifman was
sending out multiple e-mails when he made his complaint to
Mr. Shifman's ISP."
Other than guesses based on the impersonal content of the email and
the recipient address not being associated with a typical
resume-receiving operation, I don't think he could've known for sure.
Similarly, it's theoretically possible, for example, for someone like
me to take a copy of Make Money Fast and send it to CmdrTaco.
However, Mr. Schwartzman didn't close down Mr. Shifman's ISP account.
If it was closed, it was closed by the abuse desk at Mr. Shifman's
ISP. They should've been able to determine whether or not Mr. Shifman
was sending out bulk email. It takes 30 seconds to do an fgrep on the
mail logs for mail sent from Mr. Shifman's account. If they see tens
of thousands of hits, they know something's not quite kosher.
"The guy just presented an alternative viewpoint to this whole case
- one which he obviously researched"
One which he didn't research very well. His points about the various
anti-spam people all knowing each other are legitimate. However, that
potential conflict of interest is explicitly stated in one of Laura
Atkins's emails in the exchange -- Shifman points out that the site
she referenced wasn't on the search engines, and she mentions the
common Usenet group.
He also defends Shifman's targeted spamming of HR departments.
However, when presented with evidence refuting the targeted nature of
the spam job, Shifman simply ignores it. Further evidence against the
spam job being targeted was provided in other comments in Slashdot.
All-in-all, while the original poster did raise an interesting point
or two, his position is poorly thought out (at best) or clever
trolling (at worst).
"If it's another FPS, how can it NOT be cookie-cutter ?"
Half-Life was an FPS that managed to avoid being cookie-cutter, through the inclusion of plot and scripting. Most FPSes at the time consisted of "You're on a strange world. Go fight.", while Half-Life had a more immersive feel to it. The technology behind it may have been nothing revolutionary, but the overall effect was anything but cookie-cutter.
Thief redefined the term FPS to mean "first person sneaker". It's technically the same sort of game as Quake or Doom, but a few tweaks to the rules of the world result in entirely different gameplay.
Just because most FPS games have been content to go with very straight-forward games, there're significant changes that can be made to avoid being cookie-cutter.
"I don't see anything wrong with the police searching, or spying
on, someone if they first get a warrant."
That's all nice and good, but just to clarify, you quoted text about
the FBI being armed with a "court order" as opposed to a
"search warrant". It's my understanding that a search warrant
has a higher standard of justification that must be met before a judge
may issue it.
"Nintendo has *ALWAYS* tried to keep piracy to a minimum with their
proprietary formats. This is a good thing by the way."
Yes and no. I agree that reducing piracy is important. I disagree,
however, that proprietary formats are 100% good. Projects such as
porting FreeBSD to the Dreamcast and creating homebrew PSX games are
predicated on being able to create media that is runnable by the
machine.
Unfortunately, "hacker friendly" (in the traditional, non-negative
sense) is always going to be somewhat synonymous with "pirate
friendly". Even worse, a game console has little incentive to promote
a hacker friendly system but a very large incentive to block a pirate
friendly one.
Re:Ability to tag friend or foe
on
Slashdot Code Update
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
"But with the ability to assign "Friend or Foe" you essentially
gain the ability to make the No-Mans-Land of the comments into an area
that only reflects your own views and opinions."
Allow me to offer a few counter-examples:
A poster insists on including his/her sig in every post as actual post
content rather than via the post mechanism. There are some people,
myself included, who choose to browse with signatures turned off.
However, since the sig's being included as part of the post, it
circumvents the signature filter. Marking someone who does this as a
foe wouldn't have anything to do with me reinforcing my own opinions
on a Slashdot issue. Instead, it would be a purely stylistic concern.
Another good example was a troll who was pimping his humor site
(ridiculopathy.com -- delibrately left unlinked to reduce traffic).
At times, he would pass off the site's postings as legitimate articles
related to the current Slashdot article. It got old fast, but your
average mod was occasionally suckered in. I would've loved to have
been able to killfile the guy and be done with it.
My final example is one of my biggest pet peeves -- anti-DMCA jokes.
Now I dislike the DMCA, so on a raw opinion level, I agree with the
posters. The problem, however, is the raging stupidity inherent in
the jokes. 99% of them are the exact same premise, something similar
to "Oh no! I'm violating the DMCA by opening a can of Coke." Besides
being painfully repititious, these jokes generally have nothing to do
with circumvention of a copy control device. Given the number of
legitimate grievances people have against the DMCA, I'm unable to
figure out why people insist on diluting their credibility by
protesting fictional ones.
People who disagree with me on an issue, on the other hand, are
usually quite interesting. If they're capable of substantiating their
point with actual reasoning, it's a valuable post. For example, even
though I'm disagreeing with the post that this is in response to, I
have no reason to tag the poster as a foe. The poster raises a very
interesting question, and the moderation of that post up to a 5 is, in
my mind, legitimate.
"2. How many of you think that you could decipher the structure of
the command (given the motivation)?"
Depending on how the protocol's set up, this may not even be
necessary. If replaying a previous set of movement commands causes
the satellite to move some more, you've already lost that battle. The
net result is that an attacker can drive the satellite off course and
deplete its fuel reserves, making it a floating piece of junk.
Of course it may be that there's a sequence number in the commands
that needs to be updated (most likely to prevent inadvertent
duplicates due to transmission problems). In that case, it'd actually
require some deciphering effort. Still, remember that you lose as
soon as someone figures out enough of your protocol to move the
satellite around. An attacker doesn't need to figure out every little
detail.
Finally, there's always the social engineering approach. If the
attacker can get the protocol by creatively lying to people at your
organization (or just by getting a job there), then not only do you
lose, but the attacker would have enough information to theoretically
do something really fun (like trying to get the satellite to
reenter the atmosphere in such a way that the attacker can watch the
light show). That further cranks up the attacker's motivation to
carry out the plan.
"I will now take the opportunity to ask if Slashdot editors wouldn't please enter the new age and use updated acronyms?:-)
[...]
http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gc i213612,00.html"
Why don't you try catching up with the late 20th century by using an anchor tag for your link?
Unlike your pointless pedantry over GMT vs. UTC, the lack of an anchor tag poses a significant inconvenience to people actually interested in following the link in your post.
"I'm planning a marathon viewing of the classic "Dark Screen.""
I found the avant-garde nature of the show particularly intriguing at first, but it became obvious that the shows writers ran out of ideas after the first season. Still, it's amazing that they did that show on such a low budget.
"Sure there is, its the internal economic justification of the manager in charge of the gift card program. The boss is likely to hear about this, and when (s)he does (s)he will either change the program or get canned."
Or not. There's a quote in the MSNBC article from one of the anonymous company's executives that dismisses the risks addresses in the article. It appears that they don't care enough to fix the problem, even now that it's been highlighted. If they'd been explicitly named in the article, it wouldn't have been nearly as easy for them to shrug it off, and prudent consumers could avoid the company if it continued to engage in such risky behavior.
Go back and look at my post. Now look at what it was in response to.
I no more believe that script kiddies aren't criminals than Swift
believed that people should eat Irish babies. It's some pretty
blatant (or so I believed) satire directed at the absurdity of the
previous poster's argument where he/she defines terrorism strictly in
terms of bodycount. That's why I quoted exactly what I was referring
to.
Futhermore, I would think something as absurd as saying script kiddies
aren't criminals would raise people's red flags, helping them identify
the intent. You obviously caught on to the absurdity of it, but you
missed the parody part which shifts it from trolling to satire.
"Now, in the name of 'preventing cheating' and tying in a gamer for
a monthly service fee, I can see alot of the games becoming more
"corporate-controlled"."
Maybe, maybe not. However, it's worth pointing out that the majority
of games that require a monthly service fee (EverQuest, Ultima Online,
Asheron's Call, Dark Age of Camelot, Anarchy Online, World War II
Online) are those where the server's usually providing significant
extra processing (running NPCs and such) and is definitely handling
several orders of magnitudes more players than you see on other
servers.
Several recent games have had free central servers (battle.net and
Half-Life come to mind), but the extent of the corporate control
extends to anti-piracy, autoupdates, and providing an official list of
games (which I personally find a lot easier than dealing with GameSpy
back in my Quake2 days). A monthly subscription fee in the absence of
some additional value would have a very hard time competing with the
existing one-time fee games -- people are used to forking over $50 and
being done with it, unless there's a single game server with literally
thousands of people in a single shared world.
"As long as you send all your customer data to one way crypto
heaven (MD5, SHA1), whats the big deal?"
How does that solve the problem? The customer data has to be sent to
Surepay once per month. Encrypting it one-way creates a situation
where customer data can be verified, but can not be reproduced. The
customer data can't be sent to Surepay without being reproduced. So
the one-way hash is worthless, unless I've missed something.
"On the other hand, it's just a level away from the work of Tom
Green, too, whom I won't dignify with a link."
You mean the guy responsible for an increased awareness about testicular cancer?
While most of his antics are immature "look at me" stunts, he did use
the attention people gave him to bring attention to a very serious
problem. Admittedly, it was something that he had a personal stake in
(just as Michael J. Fox has a personal stake in Parkinson's research
and Christopher Reeve has one in spinal injury research), but he did
do some societal good.
"Yeah, but like you said, this is a level of refinement away.
Comparing this guy to Micheal Moore is like comparing my golf game to
Tiger Woods'."
True enough. But I'm still trying to provide at least some validation
for the technique. The post I replied to could be converted to the
analogy of, "What's the point at smacking a little white ball around a
big green field?" My reply, by citing someone who actually gets it
right, is trying to show that sometimes that little white ball gets
hit into the hole on the far side of the field. A lot more people
appreciate golf (even if some people deride it as not being a sport)
versus the number of people who at least appreciate what this guy's
attempting to do.
Futhermore, there's at least some hope for the guy. Just as someone
can get better at golf, this guy can hopefully learn from his mistakes
and refine the process a bit. While I'm not going to automatically
give him a gold star for effort, he does have some theoretical
potential. Maybe he'll do some direct good. Maybe not. Either way,
he's at least spawned an interesting Slashdot discussion.
"Of course OSS doesn't have to worry about piracy"
I don't know about that. Under the GPL, for example, the "price" of
redistributing a binary copy of the software must be paid by the
distributor in the form of source availability. The "cost" helps
"fund" further OSS development.
In the commercial world, the "price" of redistributing a binary copy
of the software must be paid by the recipient in the form of cash.
The cost helps pay off the previous debts incurred while writing the
software and helps fund further commercial software development. It
does, admittedly, also provide cash to the company that produced the
software, that company's investors, and that company's employees (both
by provided the funds necessary to continue paying their salary
and through stock options).
Either group can be hit by "piracy" (in slightly different forms). In
both cases, that piracy hinders future software development and
ignores the legally-protected stipulations of the software's
creator/owner.
I hate to nitpick, but it's not exactly "countless". If you press the
start button and look at scrolling statistics, it'll tell you just how
many people you've wasted. Admittedly, it does include the ones that
you kill via other means, but it should give you a rough idea. I've
already broken the 1k barrier in my game.
"If you're going to be insulted about that, why aren't you insulted
that you can't leave without going through the registers, or that they
lock the door after hours, or that the "Employees Only" areas are only
for employees?"
Unlike cameras, your other examples don't infringe on the tenuous (and
poorly defined) personal right to privacy. What this guy's doing
(with admittedly questionable implementation) is to highlight the
privacy infringement going on. He's not forcing it to stop. He's not
claiming it should be outlawed. He's just using videotaping to bring
attention to videotaping, which has a certain poetic justice to it.
Now if a lot of people feel uncomfortable with such videotaping
when it's pointing out to them, and if he gets sufficient media
coverage, then companies will be forced to react to the negative
publicity. If a lot of people don't care about such videotaping, then
nothing'll happen.
In short, it's a rallying call for an issue that everyone's already
semi-aware of, but which people may not have really thought about.
It's also even more of an issue now. Just look at a recent "Ask
Slashdot", where someone wanted to indefinitely archive footage
from over 1000 cameras. Even though the application there may or may
not have been a privacy infringing one, the technology is definitely
there to exacerbate the privacy problem.
"Watch the video. This guy is just acting like a jerk, and the
people he talks to pretty much just laugh at him."
While I can't watch the video here and the political ramblings on the
webpage sometimes wandered off into the slightly kookier side of the
issue, I wouldn't completely discount the value of acting like a jerk.
Such behavior is just a level of refinement away from the brilliant
social satire done by Michael Moore,
the genius behind "TV Nation" and "The Awful Truth".
One such example of his behavior (from the first season of "The Awful
Truth") was heading to the headquarters of an insurance company that
had refused to pay for a life-saving liver transplant for one of their
policy holders. The policy contained two conflicted clauses, and the
company had chosen the least expensive option (rejecting the claim).
Attempts to resolve the matter via traditional grievance procedures
had failed, and the person in need of the liver wouldn't have survived
the multiple years necessary for a court battle.
So Mr. Moore, with the man who needed the transplant, went to the
office and gave out invitations to the man's inevitable funeral. He
harassed employees. He made a pest of himself. He even held a mock
funeral down in the street once getting thrown out. Obnoxious? Yes.
Funny? Hell, yes. Effective? Well, the insurance company authorized
the liver transplant, and the guy was in the audience (post
transplant) for the host segment of the show.
The point is that sometimes the deck is stacked so heavily in favor of
large companies that acting like a jerk is your only resort. The
result is to (hopefully) focus a large amount of negative publicity at
the company so that they can't ignore it. Anything else tends to get
lost in the crowd. A company could care less if one person writes a
letter complaining about their use of video surveilance. But if that
one person sits in a store and videotapes the surveilance system, in
clear view of all the other shoppers, it's suddenly an incident that
must be addressed.
If that person then puts his/her videotape up on the web, you've just
magnified that publicity. If that site gets slashdotted, kick the
audience up another order of magnitude. If the footage is interesting
enough (either via humor or insight) that you've get television
coverage, your audience has skyrocketed, and the company is forced to
respond.
Still, sometimes acting like a jerk is just plain obnoxiousness, but
if done right, it's the key to humorously getting your point across.
"I mean how long did the RIAA think all this could last? Lets see
what exactly do they do? They write the music right? No wait. They
play it? Again no. So then... they record it? Nope."
Amen! I think we should apply this standard to other industries, as
well. How long does my employer think he can last? Let's see what
exactly does he do? Does he design the part? No wait, he hires an
engineer for that. Does he build the prototype? Again no, that's the
guys in the toolroom. So then... he mass produces it? Nope, it's a
bunch of factory workers.
I mean seriously, all he's supplying is money, management, and the
physical resources necessary for manufacture. Oh, and he pays for ads
in industry magazines, in an effort to artificially inflate our market
share. Everything else is done by employees that see little more than
an hourly wage.
"As soon as one realizes this fact, computer gaming becomes rather
pointless, and the ex-gamer goes on to other things in life."
What, you mean that manipulation of atoms in an effort to produce a
partial duplicate of your genetic code and/or collect lots of
important pieces of paper (either in physical or digital form)? As
soon as one realizes this fact, life becomes rather pointless, and the
ex-human goes on to the next level of spiritual existence.
Admittedly, most people won't recognize this until nanotechnology
matures to the point where it's the gameshark of the physical world.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, if you had read the article carefully, you would know that it said that several of the voters had referer URLs that included their username. "Several" is different from "all".
Futhermore, referer URLs are not necessarily looked at by an automated system that raises a red flag and blocks multiple vote attempts from a single IP. Referer URLs are more likely looked at after the fact. Without a better description of what criteria ZDnet was using, it's hard to say anything about the votes that didn't come from the "PLEASE STOP AND VOTE FOR .NET!" email.
You're completely, utterly, and totally wrong. While the article does discuss people manually following a link from an email, the article also contains the following quote:
"There is also clear evidence of automated voting, with scripts attempting to post multiple times."
Second, Microsoft uses proxying for Internet-related stuff, which could make the multi-vote issue appear to be worse than it actually is, as many separate users would come from a single IP.
Third, yes, it seems someone ran a script from within the microsoft.com domain. That could've been anyone in the company with a PC. My bet is on "random stupid employee". If it were an actual conspiracy, I doubt they would've done it from something within the microsoft.com domain.
In short, it's the same bullshit that happens with every web poll. While it doesn't reflect well on the company, it almost certainly is the evil marketing conspiracy that everyone makes it out to be.
Other than guesses based on the impersonal content of the email and the recipient address not being associated with a typical resume-receiving operation, I don't think he could've known for sure. Similarly, it's theoretically possible, for example, for someone like me to take a copy of Make Money Fast and send it to CmdrTaco.
However, Mr. Schwartzman didn't close down Mr. Shifman's ISP account. If it was closed, it was closed by the abuse desk at Mr. Shifman's ISP. They should've been able to determine whether or not Mr. Shifman was sending out bulk email. It takes 30 seconds to do an fgrep on the mail logs for mail sent from Mr. Shifman's account. If they see tens of thousands of hits, they know something's not quite kosher.
One which he didn't research very well. His points about the various anti-spam people all knowing each other are legitimate. However, that potential conflict of interest is explicitly stated in one of Laura Atkins's emails in the exchange -- Shifman points out that the site she referenced wasn't on the search engines, and she mentions the common Usenet group.
He also defends Shifman's targeted spamming of HR departments. However, when presented with evidence refuting the targeted nature of the spam job, Shifman simply ignores it. Further evidence against the spam job being targeted was provided in other comments in Slashdot.
All-in-all, while the original poster did raise an interesting point or two, his position is poorly thought out (at best) or clever trolling (at worst).
Half-Life was an FPS that managed to avoid being cookie-cutter, through the inclusion of plot and scripting. Most FPSes at the time consisted of "You're on a strange world. Go fight.", while Half-Life had a more immersive feel to it. The technology behind it may have been nothing revolutionary, but the overall effect was anything but cookie-cutter.
Thief redefined the term FPS to mean "first person sneaker". It's technically the same sort of game as Quake or Doom, but a few tweaks to the rules of the world result in entirely different gameplay.
Just because most FPS games have been content to go with very straight-forward games, there're significant changes that can be made to avoid being cookie-cutter.
That's all nice and good, but just to clarify, you quoted text about the FBI being armed with a "court order" as opposed to a "search warrant". It's my understanding that a search warrant has a higher standard of justification that must be met before a judge may issue it.
Yes and no. I agree that reducing piracy is important. I disagree, however, that proprietary formats are 100% good. Projects such as porting FreeBSD to the Dreamcast and creating homebrew PSX games are predicated on being able to create media that is runnable by the machine.
Unfortunately, "hacker friendly" (in the traditional, non-negative sense) is always going to be somewhat synonymous with "pirate friendly". Even worse, a game console has little incentive to promote a hacker friendly system but a very large incentive to block a pirate friendly one.
Allow me to offer a few counter-examples:
A poster insists on including his/her sig in every post as actual post content rather than via the post mechanism. There are some people, myself included, who choose to browse with signatures turned off. However, since the sig's being included as part of the post, it circumvents the signature filter. Marking someone who does this as a foe wouldn't have anything to do with me reinforcing my own opinions on a Slashdot issue. Instead, it would be a purely stylistic concern.
Another good example was a troll who was pimping his humor site (ridiculopathy.com -- delibrately left unlinked to reduce traffic). At times, he would pass off the site's postings as legitimate articles related to the current Slashdot article. It got old fast, but your average mod was occasionally suckered in. I would've loved to have been able to killfile the guy and be done with it.
My final example is one of my biggest pet peeves -- anti-DMCA jokes. Now I dislike the DMCA, so on a raw opinion level, I agree with the posters. The problem, however, is the raging stupidity inherent in the jokes. 99% of them are the exact same premise, something similar to "Oh no! I'm violating the DMCA by opening a can of Coke." Besides being painfully repititious, these jokes generally have nothing to do with circumvention of a copy control device. Given the number of legitimate grievances people have against the DMCA, I'm unable to figure out why people insist on diluting their credibility by protesting fictional ones.
People who disagree with me on an issue, on the other hand, are usually quite interesting. If they're capable of substantiating their point with actual reasoning, it's a valuable post. For example, even though I'm disagreeing with the post that this is in response to, I have no reason to tag the poster as a foe. The poster raises a very interesting question, and the moderation of that post up to a 5 is, in my mind, legitimate.
Depending on how the protocol's set up, this may not even be necessary. If replaying a previous set of movement commands causes the satellite to move some more, you've already lost that battle. The net result is that an attacker can drive the satellite off course and deplete its fuel reserves, making it a floating piece of junk.
Of course it may be that there's a sequence number in the commands that needs to be updated (most likely to prevent inadvertent duplicates due to transmission problems). In that case, it'd actually require some deciphering effort. Still, remember that you lose as soon as someone figures out enough of your protocol to move the satellite around. An attacker doesn't need to figure out every little detail.
Finally, there's always the social engineering approach. If the attacker can get the protocol by creatively lying to people at your organization (or just by getting a job there), then not only do you lose, but the attacker would have enough information to theoretically do something really fun (like trying to get the satellite to reenter the atmosphere in such a way that the attacker can watch the light show). That further cranks up the attacker's motivation to carry out the plan.
[...]
http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_g
Why don't you try catching up with the late 20th century by using an anchor tag for your link?
Unlike your pointless pedantry over GMT vs. UTC, the lack of an anchor tag poses a significant inconvenience to people actually interested in following the link in your post.
I found the avant-garde nature of the show particularly intriguing at first, but it became obvious that the shows writers ran out of ideas after the first season. Still, it's amazing that they did that show on such a low budget.
Or not. There's a quote in the MSNBC article from one of the anonymous company's executives that dismisses the risks addresses in the article. It appears that they don't care enough to fix the problem, even now that it's been highlighted. If they'd been explicitly named in the article, it wouldn't have been nearly as easy for them to shrug it off, and prudent consumers could avoid the company if it continued to engage in such risky behavior.
Ooh. Name-calling.
Go back and look at my post. Now look at what it was in response to. I no more believe that script kiddies aren't criminals than Swift believed that people should eat Irish babies. It's some pretty blatant (or so I believed) satire directed at the absurdity of the previous poster's argument where he/she defines terrorism strictly in terms of bodycount. That's why I quoted exactly what I was referring to.
Futhermore, I would think something as absurd as saying script kiddies aren't criminals would raise people's red flags, helping them identify the intent. You obviously caught on to the absurdity of it, but you missed the parody part which shifts it from trolling to satire.
They aren't criminals! Not to say that virus writers don't do damage, but how can you compare a computer glitch to armed robbery, rape, and murder?
Maybe, maybe not. However, it's worth pointing out that the majority of games that require a monthly service fee (EverQuest, Ultima Online, Asheron's Call, Dark Age of Camelot, Anarchy Online, World War II Online) are those where the server's usually providing significant extra processing (running NPCs and such) and is definitely handling several orders of magnitudes more players than you see on other servers.
Several recent games have had free central servers (battle.net and Half-Life come to mind), but the extent of the corporate control extends to anti-piracy, autoupdates, and providing an official list of games (which I personally find a lot easier than dealing with GameSpy back in my Quake2 days). A monthly subscription fee in the absence of some additional value would have a very hard time competing with the existing one-time fee games -- people are used to forking over $50 and being done with it, unless there's a single game server with literally thousands of people in a single shared world.
How does that solve the problem? The customer data has to be sent to Surepay once per month. Encrypting it one-way creates a situation where customer data can be verified, but can not be reproduced. The customer data can't be sent to Surepay without being reproduced. So the one-way hash is worthless, unless I've missed something.
You mean the guy responsible for an increased awareness about testicular cancer? While most of his antics are immature "look at me" stunts, he did use the attention people gave him to bring attention to a very serious problem. Admittedly, it was something that he had a personal stake in (just as Michael J. Fox has a personal stake in Parkinson's research and Christopher Reeve has one in spinal injury research), but he did do some societal good.
True enough. But I'm still trying to provide at least some validation for the technique. The post I replied to could be converted to the analogy of, "What's the point at smacking a little white ball around a big green field?" My reply, by citing someone who actually gets it right, is trying to show that sometimes that little white ball gets hit into the hole on the far side of the field. A lot more people appreciate golf (even if some people deride it as not being a sport) versus the number of people who at least appreciate what this guy's attempting to do.
Futhermore, there's at least some hope for the guy. Just as someone can get better at golf, this guy can hopefully learn from his mistakes and refine the process a bit. While I'm not going to automatically give him a gold star for effort, he does have some theoretical potential. Maybe he'll do some direct good. Maybe not. Either way, he's at least spawned an interesting Slashdot discussion.
I don't know about that. Under the GPL, for example, the "price" of redistributing a binary copy of the software must be paid by the distributor in the form of source availability. The "cost" helps "fund" further OSS development.
In the commercial world, the "price" of redistributing a binary copy of the software must be paid by the recipient in the form of cash. The cost helps pay off the previous debts incurred while writing the software and helps fund further commercial software development. It does, admittedly, also provide cash to the company that produced the software, that company's investors, and that company's employees (both by provided the funds necessary to continue paying their salary and through stock options).
Either group can be hit by "piracy" (in slightly different forms). In both cases, that piracy hinders future software development and ignores the legally-protected stipulations of the software's creator/owner.
I hate to nitpick, but it's not exactly "countless". If you press the start button and look at scrolling statistics, it'll tell you just how many people you've wasted. Admittedly, it does include the ones that you kill via other means, but it should give you a rough idea. I've already broken the 1k barrier in my game.
Unlike cameras, your other examples don't infringe on the tenuous (and poorly defined) personal right to privacy. What this guy's doing (with admittedly questionable implementation) is to highlight the privacy infringement going on. He's not forcing it to stop. He's not claiming it should be outlawed. He's just using videotaping to bring attention to videotaping, which has a certain poetic justice to it.
Now if a lot of people feel uncomfortable with such videotaping when it's pointing out to them, and if he gets sufficient media coverage, then companies will be forced to react to the negative publicity. If a lot of people don't care about such videotaping, then nothing'll happen.
In short, it's a rallying call for an issue that everyone's already semi-aware of, but which people may not have really thought about. It's also even more of an issue now. Just look at a recent "Ask Slashdot", where someone wanted to indefinitely archive footage from over 1000 cameras. Even though the application there may or may not have been a privacy infringing one, the technology is definitely there to exacerbate the privacy problem.
While I can't watch the video here and the political ramblings on the webpage sometimes wandered off into the slightly kookier side of the issue, I wouldn't completely discount the value of acting like a jerk. Such behavior is just a level of refinement away from the brilliant social satire done by Michael Moore, the genius behind "TV Nation" and "The Awful Truth".
One such example of his behavior (from the first season of "The Awful Truth") was heading to the headquarters of an insurance company that had refused to pay for a life-saving liver transplant for one of their policy holders. The policy contained two conflicted clauses, and the company had chosen the least expensive option (rejecting the claim). Attempts to resolve the matter via traditional grievance procedures had failed, and the person in need of the liver wouldn't have survived the multiple years necessary for a court battle.
So Mr. Moore, with the man who needed the transplant, went to the office and gave out invitations to the man's inevitable funeral. He harassed employees. He made a pest of himself. He even held a mock funeral down in the street once getting thrown out. Obnoxious? Yes. Funny? Hell, yes. Effective? Well, the insurance company authorized the liver transplant, and the guy was in the audience (post transplant) for the host segment of the show.
The point is that sometimes the deck is stacked so heavily in favor of large companies that acting like a jerk is your only resort. The result is to (hopefully) focus a large amount of negative publicity at the company so that they can't ignore it. Anything else tends to get lost in the crowd. A company could care less if one person writes a letter complaining about their use of video surveilance. But if that one person sits in a store and videotapes the surveilance system, in clear view of all the other shoppers, it's suddenly an incident that must be addressed.
If that person then puts his/her videotape up on the web, you've just magnified that publicity. If that site gets slashdotted, kick the audience up another order of magnitude. If the footage is interesting enough (either via humor or insight) that you've get television coverage, your audience has skyrocketed, and the company is forced to respond.
Still, sometimes acting like a jerk is just plain obnoxiousness, but if done right, it's the key to humorously getting your point across.
Amen! I think we should apply this standard to other industries, as well. How long does my employer think he can last? Let's see what exactly does he do? Does he design the part? No wait, he hires an engineer for that. Does he build the prototype? Again no, that's the guys in the toolroom. So then... he mass produces it? Nope, it's a bunch of factory workers.
I mean seriously, all he's supplying is money, management, and the physical resources necessary for manufacture. Oh, and he pays for ads in industry magazines, in an effort to artificially inflate our market share. Everything else is done by employees that see little more than an hourly wage.
What, you mean that manipulation of atoms in an effort to produce a partial duplicate of your genetic code and/or collect lots of important pieces of paper (either in physical or digital form)? As soon as one realizes this fact, life becomes rather pointless, and the ex-human goes on to the next level of spiritual existence.
Admittedly, most people won't recognize this until nanotechnology matures to the point where it's the gameshark of the physical world.