and the our "right-thinking left-wing friends" never say shit about it?
Actually, we do. A lot. It just never gets to the news. I'm too young, but my parents have spoken up on every conflict there was.
In the case of Iraq, Amnesty International had a huge body of knowledge about the atrocities committed by Saddam.
Unfortunately, when Ronald Reagan decided Saddam was the good guy, and sent Donald Rumsfeld to shake hands with him, it gets really, really hard to say otherwise. Furthermore, when Saddam gassed the Kurds at Halabja, the Reagan administration blamed Iran, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and voted down every condemnation of Iraq, but inside and outside the US.
OK, but that's history. How about today? Now that Saddam's gone, there are other dictators that should follow. For example Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan. The democratic opposition had great hopes when America entered Central Asia. Unfortunately, you let them down. Islam Karimov is now one of the cherished allies in the "coalition". With US support, he has semented his power. Perhaps it is not too much to ask that you at least stop supporting the worst dictators on the planet, and let the people have a chance to get rid of them themselves?
I realize anti-Americanism is popular, but...
Uhm, no, you missed the point. It's not anti-americanism to tell America it's wrong. OK, you can find anti-americanism, and it is a fair amount of around, on the form: "America is headed for the quagmire (hehe)". But it is not anti-americanism to say that "America is headed for the quagmire, and we have to work with america to change its course". The latter is far more common than the former.
The difference between America and China is that America is a democracy and it has a free press. Those two things should make it possible to get through to America far more easily than to China. So, the reason why America is addressed is that there are certain values it tends to uphold. That's not anti-americanism, to the contrary, it is recognition. But it also demands of you that you realize that your current President is wiping his ass with your constitution, and that you get rid of him. Nobody else can do that but you.
Am I automatically criminal when I'm supposed to pay such payments when buying CDRs?
Quite the contrary. At least that's the idea in Norway. You pay the tax because making personal copies is your right, but it is a right you have to pay money for (which is a bit weird, but there are many much more weird things coming from lawyers on these topics).
I'm nevertheless against the idea, because cheap media makes it possible for anyone to distribute their own material. A tax raises the barrier to entry for independent musicians. However you do it, there'll be many more who deserve their cut of the money from the tax than can ever get anything, so this is effectively a tax which takes from the many small and give to the few large ones. Which is bad for cultural diversity.
Around here, what leading legal scholars have said is that "do you want the tax, or do you want DRM?"
Problem is of course that the same scholars are unwilling to discuss a ban on DRM, which is the only natural thing to do if this is how one likes it.
Actually, it was a funny coincidence. The keyring I mentioned, is the keyring of public keys of people that are close to me in my web of trust, or that I've bumped into on mailing lists, and therefore decided to download their key to see if I can get a good path, or people who have written software I use, for the same reason. It is not the same as the 848 keys Werner quoted, that's an entirely different set...
The one key I found belonged to a Debian developer, whose key I signed on a keysigning party this summer. He had apparently not gotten an e-mail from Werner, but he responded to me with a revocation certificate shortly after I sent him a message.
Yeah, I was really happy it wasn't me, now that I've gathered all those nice signatures on my key...
Come to think of it, I managed to go into the women's room at Copenhagen Airport Kastrup once...:-) I had had a really terrible flight, because I had a bad cold, which had filled up all the channels in my head with some goo. For those who haven't experienced this: During landing, the changing pressure for the last 10 minutes or so makes it feel like somebody is jumping on your head and pulling your eyebrows out one hair at a time... IT HURTS!
So, half in coma, I just went into the first bathroom I could find. Nobody else was there when I got in, but a lady came in when I got out. Whoops. Slightly embarrased. But then, I don't think unisex bathrooms would actually hurt anyone. There are parts of the world where unisex saunas are quite common.
Uhm, I visited the site, and he hadn't actually made in predictions, it said.... Just vague hints, and then yep, retrofitting makes it all seem so great. We've seen it all before.
Using XHTML strict is not practical and would create non-backward compatible pages. HTML 4.01 transitional is practical because these unreasonable expectations are absent.
I must respectfully disagree. I think that the only things that are hard to do backwards-compatible with Strict are crap anyway. For those who want to use and old browser, a black-on-grey page will meet their need perfectly well. Besides, Transitional was termed Transitional in 1997. It is time to move on now. Six years with no evolution is far too long.
May I remind everyone to read and understand TimBL's Cool URI's don't change. It's not that hard to design systems where you do not have to change the URI every 100 days, folks.
The P element can be omitted in 4.01 Transitional but not in Strict. That is, you have to have a block-level element inside the BLOCKQUOTE, not necessarily P, but that's usually what you want. Specification.
The balance problem is trivally corrected by actually parsing the HTML in the post, then inserting the proper closing tags at the end.
Yes, that's true! But it is not simply the balance problem I'm addressing. People may for example use the BLOCKQUOTE element, but don't realize that it should be a P element within it. There are quite a lot of small things like that.
but no one is asking for slash pages+posts to validate,
I do...:-)
The point is, tidy should be able to do that job easily, unless I've misunderstood something. Except in rather rare cases, tidy will ensure that the XHTML is well-formed, rewrite the stuff that doesn't, that it does not contain elements that are not in the spec, and that should be sufficient to ensure that the whole document validates, given that the template is good.
Demanding people submit validated HTML is simply going to chase a lot of people away from posting at all. A blog's job is not to make posting difficult.
This is a very important point. Indeed, if this is the result, it would be wrong. However, I'm quite sure this would not be the result, Tidy would be transparent to the user and a help.
But there is another challenge, and that's the posts people write. Anybody care about their code?
For example, quoting, to do it properly, one should write: <blockquote><p>blah, blah</p></blockquote>. That's an awful lot of typing.
A page is not going to validate unless the posts are correct.
The way I have planned to do this on one of my sites, is to make sure that every time somebody clicks "Preview" or "Submit", the post is handled to Tidy for sanity checks and conversion. By using preview, you can correct you're code, but you can never submit something that isn't well-formed.
I'm using Perl too, not Slashcode, but AxKit. Nevertheless, a good Perl implementation of Tidy is still lacking. There is a HTML::Tidy project page on Sourceforge, but it hasn't really gotten off the ground.
Does anybody else want to work on this, or do you have other ideas for cleaning up posts?
This is a very important point that needs emphasis. In fact, Debian Developers need to meet and Debian users need to meet developers to exchange signatures. That's out best defense.
I would also like to see signature checks built into dpkg.
This is our achilles heel, and I would be surprised if trojan writers would not be exploiting it soon. They can write trojans and have relatively many install it, especially as long as we have to live with many backports.
Now, I attended the Oslo Debconf keysigning party (I'm a user living in Oslo). It was quite good. We really need more of those. Unfortunately, there is some kind of watermark imprinted in the middle of my face on my passport, and that made it hard to see, and I didn't get as many signatures as I hoped for. Also, I didn't really like the keysigning procedure.
Wow. He spammed me really bad even here in Norway... I have had to add four specialized filters to me SpamAssassin setup, and one of them was "Phillies", just for him. So that means I can remove that, and I guess at least one of the people they got was a vermin.
Yeah, file sharing has legitimate uses, but then, Kazaa has a history as spyware, and the P2P network can, I would be surprised if it isn't soon used, as a network for an uberworm. Uninstall the crap now, yeah, and while you're at it, remove the windows partition too.
The problem in this field is that there are solutions that look good in theory, but there bump up practical issues when you start implementing them. And once practical issues come up, then you need to assure that people don't start cutting corners.
That's the main problem with nuclear energy, not that it is not technically sound, the problem is that people are much too inclined to ignore engineers and cut corners. Especially for profit.
I would like to see more research into accellerator based fusion. There you operate on sub-critical material, and you beam it untill you have stable iron or nickel. That's a much more elegant solution than anything that exists today, but very little research has been done.
Folks, does spam really work? Have you ever responded to spam? Really? I've responded to a few spams, and most of the time, it is really, really difficult to get in contact with them. In the very few cases where I have gotten through, guess what, the guy who actually was selling a product, he was scammed too. Some of them have actually sued the spammer afterwards.
What is the source of the info that spam works? That's right, it's the spammers. Spammers tell you that spam works. Bzzzzt! Rule #1: Spammers lie!
Who are the spammer's customers? No, not you who get the spam. The spammer's customers are those who order spam services. And there are enough idiots who buy spam services to make those 180 spammers very wealthy.
Even though the spammer's customer get burnt once and stop, well, some of them are probably stupid enough to try several times anyway, there are enough of these morons to keep it going for a very long time.
They're not making a single sale, not even 0.0001%, but that doesn't matter, because the spammer got his money, and that's why this continues.
So, if you want to end spam, forget the spammers: Go after those who purchase spam services instead.
Well, that's my theory. It may not hold up, but after all, this is/.!:-)
Paypal and checks.... I'd rather not let Paypal anywhere near my money, and checks, well, around here, they look at you like you whacked a 75-year-old, because those are the only people who are still using them...
But then, creating a cash-flow is very, very important. The problem is, there is no feasible solution to ship relatively small amounts of money around the globe. If we can solve that problem, and make it easy to send some cash here and there, it would certainly help not only free software developers, but authors and artists as well.
Hm, that article was short on details. I remember hearing these things in the Norwegian media, but with a little more references to the source. And, I think I tracked it down to come from someone/.ers normally don't like. Don't remember exactly who it was, but it might have been BSA or something. That made me conclude it was mostly FUD. But since I'm not giving the references myself, you might want to track it down yourself..:-)
As a followup to this Brazilian move, Norway's largest newspapers, Dagbladet has right now a story on the top of their frontpage, reading (my translation): "Throws out Bill Gates: Brazil, Germany, Spain, Isreal and Mexico, wants to drop the Microsoft license. This is how you can do it as well: read more."
Then they go on with very positive reviews of different free software packages, before concluding with a link to a very positive review of SuSE Personal 9.0.
True, I know that, see my other comment in this thread. However, patenting is a very inefficient way of publishing, seen from the perspective of the general public. If you just publish the idea without the patent process, you can have the info out in no time, but the patent process delays this.
I see at as just another research project. The people have researched how to foil spam filters. Why? For the same reason I just ran nessus against my server, to better guard against attacks. Finding a way to foil spam filters is just as legitimate as writing something like nessus, sure it can be used to break in, but it is important if you want to improve system security.
What we should do now is to read the patent, understand where the weaknesses are, and improve the filters now, before the spammers start using it (OK, from/.ers reaction, it seems like they just patented adding random rubbish, not exactly new, but did those/.ers actually perform a analysis of the patent?)
It's harder to explain why they patented it rather than just published. Probably, they have some sort of incentive program: Employees get a bonus for patents. It is quite common. You get the bonus regardless of whether it is useful or not, it is the size of the company's patent portefolio that counts on the stock market. So, they just patented it.
It is not because they are disorganized, evil spammers, or not even because they plan to go after spammers, it is simply because the research was done, and the incentives in the organization says "patent, don't publish".
I'm not sure I understood the last part here.... I must also admit I didn't RTFP. Which community? Us (as in FOSS)?
From the parent's text, it looks like the e-mail channel method (which is an approach to the problem I don't like for various reasons), is mentioned in the patent as a reference only, to an ACM Comm paper, so that is not patented (I presume). So, that idea is something we can us if we like.
I think it seems like the patent is simply a research-project: They have researched methods that spammers may use to get through current filters. That they've done this research doesn't imply that they will actually use it, to the contrary, they've done this research for the same reason that other security research (e.g. attacks), is being done: To be better at defending against it.
For the community, it is worthwhile to note that it is the counter-counter-measures that has been patented, not the counter-counter-counter-measures... Which means, we are free to implement counter-counter-counter-measures. In fact, reading the patent to some extent enables us to do that (which is the good thing about the patent system when it works, it makes it possible to publish information) Yep, it is an arms-race, and it is insane.
What may be harder to understand is why they patented it rather than just publish it. It would be strange if they actually planned to sue spammers for patent infringement, as spammers are not the easiest to find, and a lot of people are allready eager to whack them for other reasons. If they did this, it would be cool, of course.
I think it is more likely that AT&T has some sort of incentive program. Employees get some bonuses for patents that are granted, so when you've got an idea, you might as well patent it and get a raise... It might be as simple as that.
Well, that's a matter for politicians. I said "follow the money", because if it does, the liability would not apply to the individual developer, but to the distributor who takes money for the product. This distinction is very important.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, we do. A lot. It just never gets to the news. I'm too young, but my parents have spoken up on every conflict there was.
In the case of Iraq, Amnesty International had a huge body of knowledge about the atrocities committed by Saddam.
Unfortunately, when Ronald Reagan decided Saddam was the good guy, and sent Donald Rumsfeld to shake hands with him, it gets really, really hard to say otherwise. Furthermore, when Saddam gassed the Kurds at Halabja, the Reagan administration blamed Iran, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and voted down every condemnation of Iraq, but inside and outside the US.
OK, but that's history. How about today? Now that Saddam's gone, there are other dictators that should follow. For example Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan. The democratic opposition had great hopes when America entered Central Asia. Unfortunately, you let them down. Islam Karimov is now one of the cherished allies in the "coalition". With US support, he has semented his power. Perhaps it is not too much to ask that you at least stop supporting the worst dictators on the planet, and let the people have a chance to get rid of them themselves?
Uhm, no, you missed the point. It's not anti-americanism to tell America it's wrong. OK, you can find anti-americanism, and it is a fair amount of around, on the form: "America is headed for the quagmire (hehe)". But it is not anti-americanism to say that "America is headed for the quagmire, and we have to work with america to change its course". The latter is far more common than the former.
The difference between America and China is that America is a democracy and it has a free press. Those two things should make it possible to get through to America far more easily than to China. So, the reason why America is addressed is that there are certain values it tends to uphold. That's not anti-americanism, to the contrary, it is recognition. But it also demands of you that you realize that your current President is wiping his ass with your constitution, and that you get rid of him. Nobody else can do that but you.
Quite the contrary. At least that's the idea in Norway. You pay the tax because making personal copies is your right, but it is a right you have to pay money for (which is a bit weird, but there are many much more weird things coming from lawyers on these topics).
I'm nevertheless against the idea, because cheap media makes it possible for anyone to distribute their own material. A tax raises the barrier to entry for independent musicians. However you do it, there'll be many more who deserve their cut of the money from the tax than can ever get anything, so this is effectively a tax which takes from the many small and give to the few large ones. Which is bad for cultural diversity.
Around here, what leading legal scholars have said is that "do you want the tax, or do you want DRM?" Problem is of course that the same scholars are unwilling to discuss a ban on DRM, which is the only natural thing to do if this is how one likes it.
The one key I found belonged to a Debian developer, whose key I signed on a keysigning party this summer. He had apparently not gotten an e-mail from Werner, but he responded to me with a revocation certificate shortly after I sent him a message.
Yeah, I was really happy it wasn't me, now that I've gathered all those nice signatures on my key...
I think the discussion just ended.
So, half in coma, I just went into the first bathroom I could find. Nobody else was there when I got in, but a lady came in when I got out. Whoops. Slightly embarrased. But then, I don't think unisex bathrooms would actually hurt anyone. There are parts of the world where unisex saunas are quite common.
Uhm, I visited the site, and he hadn't actually made in predictions, it said.... Just vague hints, and then yep, retrofitting makes it all seem so great. We've seen it all before.
I must respectfully disagree. I think that the only things that are hard to do backwards-compatible with Strict are crap anyway. For those who want to use and old browser, a black-on-grey page will meet their need perfectly well. Besides, Transitional was termed Transitional in 1997. It is time to move on now. Six years with no evolution is far too long.
May I remind everyone to read and understand TimBL's Cool URI's don't change. It's not that hard to design systems where you do not have to change the URI every 100 days, folks.
The P element can be omitted in 4.01 Transitional but not in Strict. That is, you have to have a block-level element inside the BLOCKQUOTE, not necessarily P, but that's usually what you want. Specification.
Yes, that's true! But it is not simply the balance problem I'm addressing. People may for example use the BLOCKQUOTE element, but don't realize that it should be a P element within it. There are quite a lot of small things like that.
I do... :-)
The point is, tidy should be able to do that job easily, unless I've misunderstood something. Except in rather rare cases, tidy will ensure that the XHTML is well-formed, rewrite the stuff that doesn't, that it does not contain elements that are not in the spec, and that should be sufficient to ensure that the whole document validates, given that the template is good.
This is a very important point. Indeed, if this is the result, it would be wrong. However, I'm quite sure this would not be the result, Tidy would be transparent to the user and a help.
Taco, it's Taco's fault! I swear! Uhm, ok, no, my bad... :-) But then, my excuse is that English is not my native language! :-)
I hope they implement ASAP.
But there is another challenge, and that's the posts people write. Anybody care about their code? For example, quoting, to do it properly, one should write: <blockquote><p>blah, blah</p></blockquote>. That's an awful lot of typing.
A page is not going to validate unless the posts are correct.
The way I have planned to do this on one of my sites, is to make sure that every time somebody clicks "Preview" or "Submit", the post is handled to Tidy for sanity checks and conversion. By using preview, you can correct you're code, but you can never submit something that isn't well-formed.
I'm using Perl too, not Slashcode, but AxKit. Nevertheless, a good Perl implementation of Tidy is still lacking. There is a HTML::Tidy project page on Sourceforge, but it hasn't really gotten off the ground.
Does anybody else want to work on this, or do you have other ideas for cleaning up posts?
For me, it has a valid signature and I fully trust the key.
I would also like to see signature checks built into dpkg.
This is our achilles heel, and I would be surprised if trojan writers would not be exploiting it soon. They can write trojans and have relatively many install it, especially as long as we have to live with many backports.
Now, I attended the Oslo Debconf keysigning party (I'm a user living in Oslo). It was quite good. We really need more of those. Unfortunately, there is some kind of watermark imprinted in the middle of my face on my passport, and that made it hard to see, and I didn't get as many signatures as I hoped for. Also, I didn't really like the keysigning procedure.
Also, be sure to sign up at Biglumber.
Wow. He spammed me really bad even here in Norway... I have had to add four specialized filters to me SpamAssassin setup, and one of them was "Phillies", just for him. So that means I can remove that, and I guess at least one of the people they got was a vermin.
Yeah, file sharing has legitimate uses, but then, Kazaa has a history as spyware, and the P2P network can, I would be surprised if it isn't soon used, as a network for an uberworm. Uninstall the crap now, yeah, and while you're at it, remove the windows partition too.
That's the main problem with nuclear energy, not that it is not technically sound, the problem is that people are much too inclined to ignore engineers and cut corners. Especially for profit.
I would like to see more research into accellerator based fusion. There you operate on sub-critical material, and you beam it untill you have stable iron or nickel. That's a much more elegant solution than anything that exists today, but very little research has been done.
What is the source of the info that spam works? That's right, it's the spammers. Spammers tell you that spam works. Bzzzzt! Rule #1: Spammers lie!
Who are the spammer's customers? No, not you who get the spam. The spammer's customers are those who order spam services. And there are enough idiots who buy spam services to make those 180 spammers very wealthy.
Even though the spammer's customer get burnt once and stop, well, some of them are probably stupid enough to try several times anyway, there are enough of these morons to keep it going for a very long time.
They're not making a single sale, not even 0.0001%, but that doesn't matter, because the spammer got his money, and that's why this continues.
So, if you want to end spam, forget the spammers: Go after those who purchase spam services instead.
Well, that's my theory. It may not hold up, but after all, this is /.! :-)
But then, creating a cash-flow is very, very important. The problem is, there is no feasible solution to ship relatively small amounts of money around the globe. If we can solve that problem, and make it easy to send some cash here and there, it would certainly help not only free software developers, but authors and artists as well.
Hm, that article was short on details. I remember hearing these things in the Norwegian media, but with a little more references to the source. And, I think I tracked it down to come from someone /.ers normally don't like. Don't remember exactly who it was, but it might have been BSA or something. That made me conclude it was mostly FUD. But since I'm not giving the references myself, you might want to track it down yourself.. :-)
Then they go on with very positive reviews of different free software packages, before concluding with a link to a very positive review of SuSE Personal 9.0.
Not bad at all. A lot of people will see this...
True, I know that, see my other comment in this thread. However, patenting is a very inefficient way of publishing, seen from the perspective of the general public. If you just publish the idea without the patent process, you can have the info out in no time, but the patent process delays this.
What we should do now is to read the patent, understand where the weaknesses are, and improve the filters now, before the spammers start using it (OK, from /.ers reaction, it seems like they just patented adding random rubbish, not exactly new, but did those /.ers actually perform a analysis of the patent?)
It's harder to explain why they patented it rather than just published. Probably, they have some sort of incentive program: Employees get a bonus for patents. It is quite common. You get the bonus regardless of whether it is useful or not, it is the size of the company's patent portefolio that counts on the stock market. So, they just patented it.
It is not because they are disorganized, evil spammers, or not even because they plan to go after spammers, it is simply because the research was done, and the incentives in the organization says "patent, don't publish".
I'm not sure I understood the last part here.... I must also admit I didn't RTFP. Which community? Us (as in FOSS)? From the parent's text, it looks like the e-mail channel method (which is an approach to the problem I don't like for various reasons), is mentioned in the patent as a reference only, to an ACM Comm paper, so that is not patented (I presume). So, that idea is something we can us if we like.
I think it seems like the patent is simply a research-project: They have researched methods that spammers may use to get through current filters. That they've done this research doesn't imply that they will actually use it, to the contrary, they've done this research for the same reason that other security research (e.g. attacks), is being done: To be better at defending against it.
For the community, it is worthwhile to note that it is the counter-counter-measures that has been patented, not the counter-counter-counter-measures... Which means, we are free to implement counter-counter-counter-measures. In fact, reading the patent to some extent enables us to do that (which is the good thing about the patent system when it works, it makes it possible to publish information) Yep, it is an arms-race, and it is insane.
What may be harder to understand is why they patented it rather than just publish it. It would be strange if they actually planned to sue spammers for patent infringement, as spammers are not the easiest to find, and a lot of people are allready eager to whack them for other reasons. If they did this, it would be cool, of course.
I think it is more likely that AT&T has some sort of incentive program. Employees get some bonuses for patents that are granted, so when you've got an idea, you might as well patent it and get a raise... It might be as simple as that.
Well, that's a matter for politicians. I said "follow the money", because if it does, the liability would not apply to the individual developer, but to the distributor who takes money for the product. This distinction is very important.