No, its business. Anyone who sits around complaining that the ad servers don't know what they want need to stop and think -- where would they get that information? Oh yes, from all of the data mining that we're equally abhorrent about. Same with television, meatspace fliers, etc. Believe me the ad companies would LOVE to only show you stuff you're interested (even more so in the real world where price per ad is significantly higher than on the internet). They just run into problems with the whole privacy thing whenever they start wanting to gather information about people.
That said, there's really no excuse for big annoying flash ads anymore. Google has proven to a great extent that you can generate a hell of a lot of money with unobtrusive, small text ads placed in a side bar (and out of the way of the normal flow of your site. Sure your page designers have 5-10% less screen space to work with, but I'm sure they'll manage). Annoying flash ads just make me install adblock.
On the other hand, maybe that's just me. They might be morally ambiguous, but large scale advertisers aren't generally stupid -- way too much competition in the field for that. Its just like spam in that sense -- you spew your big annoying flash ad across 100million page views, and if only 1/10% of the people click through (intentionally or not), then you've still got 100,000 "views".
No. Ordinary people don't even know what "chaotic systems" are. Ordinary people have no idea what the ice caps melting will eventually imply.
But we have a bunch of very smart people who do complicated experiments in controlled environments, who then take the results of those experiments and do their best to extrapolate them to a global scale over a span of decades or centuries. Some of them will be wrong, but some will most likely be right. It only takes one or two "right" scenarios to change our planet beyond the ability to support "life as we know it" (which doesn't imply supporting no life at all, though it could.)
And we have a bunch of people telling us that there's nothing to see here please move along, or promoting cheap quick-fix solutions that could potentially make things worse in the long run. (Often and I'm sure entirely coincidentally, these are the same people who would have to put up the biggest stake in order for a cleanup to really work on a large scale.)
The only things we really know for sure is that we have exactly one example of a planet that supports life as we know it, that its changing faster than current research suggests it should, and that our own actions have a high probability of being a major cause of the fast-tracked change.
So the question is: do YOU want to risk your only planet (or your grandchildren's only planet if it takes that long) on the slim chance that the scientists are the ones who are wrong? Unfortunately there's currently an overwhelming "yes" from the people in charge. I'm sure its another coincidence that they're frequently the same people (or have ties to the same people) who tell us that science is wrong.
Ordinary people believe what they're told. If they're told two contradictory things, they'll take a brief glance at the available information and choose whichever side seems the most obvious to them regardless of the basis of that particular side.
Many, if not most, ordinary people these days will tend to fall on the side of the scientists if you ask them what they believe (its a lot easier to believe that making things hot melts ice than it is to believe a politician is telling the truth!) Then they'll get in their non-carpooled SUV, drive 20 miles to get to their suburban home and turn the AC to full because they don't understand the basis.
I freely admit to falling into the category of "ordinary people" when it comes to climate change. I listen to what I'm told, then pick my side based on what makes the most sense to me (I'd bet the tone of my comment suggests which side that is). Maybe its just the programmer in me, but I like to look at it in terms of worst case scenarios:
- O(science is wrong): Nothing changes and life goes on. A few large corporations have to spend 0.1% of their budget for 5 years implementing cleanup plans that turn out to be useless. Theres a bit less smog in LA.
- O(stakeholders are wrong): All life on earth is wiped out within the next century or two. No one is alive to care about the smog in LA.
Now of course worst case isn't necessarily the most likely case, but I'd still rather not take the chance. I hope to have grandkids someday and I'd prefer if they have a planet to live on. Its a good thing that I'm not really fond of SUVs.
The more information your CAPTCHA gives, the easier it is to break (providing it doesn't also require more information to solve).
The easiest and best way to "fix" CAPTCHAs for people who are otherwise discriminated against due to disability is simply have an email (or even phone or snail mail) link that they could use to get a manual registration put through. Yes this is a bit of an extra inconvenience for them, but so what? If they really want to access your site, they'll go ahead with it. Much as it sucks for them, people with disabilities are likely to be far more used to inconveniences in their everyday life, so they'll probably be less annoyed by one more inconvenience than your average person. Our society in general does its best to assist disabled persons and give them as much of a normal life as is possible under their circumstances and under the constraints of resources available to us (money, knowledge of their condition, etc). In general however, the world is built for the average person and the special cases get well, special cased in most circumstances. There's no logical reason why websites should be held to a stricter standard.
Manual registration assumes that you're looking at a comparatively small proportion of the users (ie: something thats manageable by a human without severely disrupting their normal daily tasks). If you put a visual CAPTCHA on a site targeted for blind people, you're obviously not doing it right. For the other 99.999% of the sites out there that are targeted at average people, the 0.01% of legitimate users who come through and are blind is probably a low enough amount that you can handle it manually. And I'm assuming you (or your spam filter) are smart enough to reject authorization if you get 800 requests in an hour when you typically only get 8 per year legitimately.
As for all of the people who sit there promoting culturally neutral CAPTCHAs.. who really cares? If your target audience is Americans, then you're completely justified using a CAPTCHA thats culturally geared to Americans (and in fact its probably better for you as you'll be slowing down Chinese and Russian spammers).
On the other hand if you run an international website, then you'll probably want an internationally-neutral CAPTCHA. But then again, you've probably got separate pages for various target languages already, so you'd still be justified using multiple language-focused CAPTCHAs to go with the various language-focused versions of your site.
CAPTCHA is just as doomed as anti-virus and anti-malware programs (excluding the tinfoil hat possibilities of Norton and AVG creating the viruses themselves) -- that is to say, it isn't doomed at all. It will be an eternal race between CAPTCHA creators to make new CAPTCHAs, and spammers or other miscreants to break them.
We can't stop spammers. At least not as long as we value privacy and/or have poor enforcement in any single country on the planet. We're stuck with the same "solution" we have against other forms of crime -- deterrence. Make it harder, riskier, or uneconomic for the spammers to operate. Unfortunately we can't easily make it riskier without destroying online privacy, and we can't make it less economic without destroying the fundamentals of the internet, but we can certainly make it harder for them to operate via technical means. CAPTCHAs are that means. Can CAPTCHAs be improved? Certainly. Will an improved CAPTCHA method stop spam? Certainly not. But we can make it harder for them. As I posted earlier, a very easy way is simply switch CAPTCHAs once in a while. Of course this means you'd need a fairly large set of CAPTCHAs that are technically diverse enough to cause the spammers a need to re-break it. Combine that with slowing down the spammer's ability to re-break (a short page load delay would do wonders).
There IS one non-technical measure that could be pursued without interfering with normal users' lives too much, and without having to directly determine the spammer's identity -- follow up on the spam. Somewhere, somehow, these spams have to be selling something (or nobody would make any money off it and we wouldn't have this problem!) And for them to make money, there has to be someone who receives the money -- follow the money trail and nab that person. Trace THEIR payment money to the spammer. Some of these steps might be hampered by jurisdiction (if the targets reside out of the country) but it should be doable. Rather than stop the spammers, stop the people who pay them and they'll go away on their own when their revenue stream dries up.
This would take a task force of sorts who intentionally go out and try to get themselves spammed so that they could follow up on it. Public submission would have too many false positives to be effective I would imagine. Again, it won't be a perfect solution (as with any crime, there will always be some small amount of people who commit it, especially when money is involved), but once again I'll note that our goal is deterrence, not complete prevention.
Sadly, this fails in two ways: - Its not random. Somebody has to enter all of these phrases and possible answers into a database, which means that there are a finite number of them (and probably a computationally low finite number at that -- maybe a few thousand at most). Brute force or a small army of cheap outsourced labor will have your CAPTCHA broken in days if not hours.
- It has multiple choice answers. Forget the wasted time and effort of searching Google. Just pick one. You have a 33% of being correct, and you also have just added that result to your dictionary for the next time the question comes up. Even if the non-correct answers are randomized, the correct answer still has to be in the list of possibilities so seeing the question two or three times will give you a statistically good chance of solving the riddle. This point is actually meaningless however when the first issue is taken into account though (you can't have a static list of answers for a random question!)
Any non-random CAPTCHA immediately falls victim to a (relatively) simple trial-and-save dictionary attack, regardless of whether its based on text or pictures or smells or anything else. The 3d CAPTCHA from TFA would be broken (to a spammer-acceptable level) within a few days if it was used on a site that some spammer REALLY wanted to hit -- its basically the same idea as yours except using a 3d picture rather as opposed to a text phrase. Figuring out a rotation between two 2d projections of a 3d object isn't all THAT hard (again, within acceptable limits, and especially given a small finite list of possibilities) providing that its not a degenerate case (looking at that axe blade-on for example) but most degenerate cases would be hard for a human to pick out as well.
The only true save for CAPTCHAs is diversity -- there are so many different methods and possibilities out there that you rarely see two major sites using the same one. That means spammers have to break a new one for every site they want to spam. And its fairly easy for a site to switch CAPTCHAs (or at least it could be with a good site layout). Some spammer figured out how to OCR your randomly-colored-lines-on-text CAPTCHA? Switch to 3d rotations. They figure that out, switch to 3d rotations with random polka-dots. On your end its a few lines of code to switch plugins (which you'd probably be quick to set up if this became a regular problem on your site). On the spammer's end is a whole new world of OCR or dictionary building or whatever method they need for the CAPTCHA style-of-the-month. Also, implement a short (5sec or so) delay when loading the CAPTCHA. It has to be short enough that a human could just chalk it up to server or internet lag. This won't stop spammers, but it will mean they have to spend more time in order to break your CAPTCHA (because they have a minimum of 5sec between attempts, rather than the 100-200ms or so that normal net lag would give them -- meaning it will take them 25-50 times longer to break your CAPTCHA, give or take). Maybe even make it start taking 15 or 20 seconds if you see some threshhold of attempts in a certain time (say 100 in a minute.. actual numbers of course will depend on your expected human traffic -- you don't want to inconvenience legitimate users too much or they'll just go elsewhere).
There's an important phrase I've used a couple of times though -- "acceptable". A spammer likely wouldn't care a whole lot if 5% or even 50% of their messages don't get through -- most of the time they're paying very little incremental cost per message, if anything (botnets make it pretty much free). All of their cost is in breaking the CAPTCHA or other security, including the development of botnet clients and the such. Once their software has been developed they couldn't care less if they send 1 million or 10 million messages (except perhaps as an accounting measure if they charge their client per message, but thats really a (business) politics issue, not an economic or technical one).
such requests should be limited to the add-on website OR DISTRIBUTION SITE and should not appear in the game.
Of course its up to curse.com and whoever to actually implement the charge-throughs (or simply not allow direct downloads for addons that wish to charge), but Blizzard themselves isn't denying the fact that users mostly go to curse.com or wowinterface.com or similar.
On the other hand, if curse & friends decide not to bother, it will make it extremely hard for new addons to get exposure if they want to charge.
It seems that certain IMs just gained popularity in certain parts of the world for whatever reason. I was in the Philippines a few months ago and yahoo is the "IM synonym" there. ICQ used to be the big thing in my circle of friends back in the late 90s (it was pretty much the ONLY thing back then). Then moved to yahoo for a while (does ICQ even have webcam support in 2007?) and its sort of settled on MSN as my non-geek friends started to pile up. Don't really know why that came to be -- whether its just because its packaged with Windows or because they had far superior webcam support for a while there, or perhaps some other factor -- as I was one of the last people I know to switch up to MSN (back in my "lets hate on M$ cause its cool" party-lining days:P).
Its actually a bit more nefarious than that -- the real problem is that there's no real exit solution for existing customers -- its rare to get less than a 2 year contract anymore, and they're pushing 3 year contracts as much as possible too. And once you're locked in, they make the contract-breaking "fee" close to, if not more, expensive than actually living out the contract.
And once your contract HAS expired, we have effectively three mobile companies up here (at least in the west don't know if the eastern end is any better), all of which offer almost identical (overly expensive) deals, so the only thing you'll get from attempting to switch companies is a few months cheaper and a new phone -- at the cost of another 2 or 3 year contract and having to change phone numbers, new sign-up fees where applicable, and all the other great hassles.
So yes new customers are much more valuable -- simply because they do everything in their power to make sure existing customers are unable or find little value in changing, and currently "everything in their power" is quite a great amount thanks to very little competition and almost no government intervention. Our only real option to get out of the mobile phone mess up here is to just not have one. If number portability ever makes it up here (been promised for like 2 years now) it might loosen the market a little bit but I have my doubts.
There was one episode.. DS9 I think but I could be wrong (I'm not a huge trekkie) where the various main races (human, klingon, cardassian, etc) were racing (no pun intended) to find some super secret knowledge that had been hidden by some proto-race and the knowledge turned out to be that all of the various planets had been populated by the same proto-race and that the differences between the races had evolved since that time.. or something along those lines....
I believe you just described the basics of the copyright system!.. "As long as both parties understand what it is they are exchanging.".. Check. We both understand that under current copyright, and even DRM schemes, that the purchaser is exchanging some amount of money for limited usage of the product. The only question is exactly how limited, and thats something thats still being "negotiated" on a grand scale between the public (via "wallet voters", public interest groups, etc) and the producers (via RIAA, MPAA, etc). The government happens to be the mediator of these negotiations (although they seem to have a bad habit of following where the money leads rather than being completely unbiased, but thats another issue). DRM is just one argument in the negotiations. One that the the producers are pressing hard for, and one that the consumers are slowly pushing back against, but its still just a single argument brought to the table. And, if you don't happen to like the "deal" that public negotiations come out with, there's absolutely nothing stopping you from going to the IP owner and attempting to make your own deal. Sure its unlikely the RIAA will bother (as an individual most of us don't have the money or power to make a deal thats in their interest), but you might be able to do something like this with individual authors (providing they still own the rights to their works). "Fair use" as a concept is simply a point on the consumer side of the table, and certainly isn't intrinsic to copyright in general.
Now you argue that copyright nullifies the author's ability to make a deal with you that benefits both yourself and the author. This is entirely incorrect. Copyright nullifies YOUR ability to use the author's work in a manner that the author doesn't agree upon. To use your 30 day expiry example, lets say that the "property" you agree to use for 30 days comes in the form of a poem printed on ordinary paper. In order for the agreement to be beneficial on both sides, the author must be able to deny you access to the poem after the 30 days are expired. Ethically you would be required to burn or tear up the paper after 30 days so that neither yourself nor anyone else could still access the "property". Unfortunately in our world, there are far too many people who are not ethical. They would keep the original, or make a copy unknown to the author even if the author required the physical paper to be returned (remember, the "property" is the words of the poem, NOT the dead tree). Not to mention if you have an exceptionally good memory, there's no way the author, or even yourself without some incredibly good memory repression skills, could prevent you from "using" his works after the 30 days even if you were being as ethical as you possibly could. This is the kind of trickiness that copyright attempts to deal with. And then there's the entire question of what "using" implies. Reciting only to yourself? To your friends? In public on a street corner?
Copyright as it stands is a blanket restriction granted to the author at the time when he or she creates a work of art against unauthorized use. Copyright does NOT prevent the author from granting another party authorization to use the work. Patents follow the same ideal since you brought them up -- they grant a blanket restriction to an inventor against the unauthorized production of his invention, but does not prevent him from authorizing another party to produce the invention.
The trouble with copyright (and patents) is the extent to which they are currently granted. Patents (particularly in the tech industry) are obsoleted by newer technology and newer patents years, even decades before they expire. Similarly with copyrights, artwork has passed beyond the public's eye and beyond most people's memories decades before they expire. Does Disney REALLY need to worry about someone pirating a 1914 Steamboat Willy silent animation? They certainly aren't going to be making much money off of it by now,
.. "users/people want computers to behave like toasters"..
I hate this analogy. This is like saying "users/people want pipe organs to behave like kazoos" or, since cars seem to always be the great analogy for computers (why?), it would be like saying "users/people want their fully-loaded hummer to behave like a pogo stick". In all three cases, the complexity scale between the two options is so large that the comparison is meaningless.
Sure we can probably do a lot more to "humanize" error messages and remove things like C: (Local Disk) from your average user's day to day operations, and Microsoft, Apple, loads of universities and I'm sure countless others pour likely millions of dollars per year into UI research in hopes of moving towards this goal. But in the long run, if a user's disk is full when you go to save a file, there's absolutely no safe way for the program to continue without the user being informed and making a decision. You don't want to just not save the file, and you really don't want to go blitzing whatever random file you like off of their hard drive to make room. You might be able to do a quick once-over on the "disk cleanup" utility before bugging the user (oops.. "why does saving a file take 10 minutes today and it only took a second yesterday!?!") but at some point you're just going to have to inform the user that the drive is full and they're going to have to figure out how to deal with it.
I also have a question for the article's author and everyone else who says things like "error messages should explain everything so that its easy like a car". Do YOU know whats wrong when that little red engine light comes on? Reducing the number of error messages via more robust software practices would be great (wait.. who wants to pay 10x more to cover the extra QA time?) but they'll never go away. There will always be some level at which you simply cannot get around the fact that an error occurred, as in the example above of a full disk when saving a file.
Oh, and even being a computer guy and knowing what the options do, I STILL can't remember which one "Hibernate" and which one "Stand By" is without trying them. That said, hibernate should really be the default "off" mode -- there's no real reason to have to reload everything every time you turn on your computer!
I use Telus as well, and while I've not yet had any reason to drop their service, I can tell you that you in no way shape or form need to use their install CDs. Their service is based on MAC address, and if you connect up with an unregistered MAC, you get a 10.x.x.x IP and all website addresses get redirected to their "online customer assistance" form-based registration system. Now its been quite a while since I've needed to bother with that myself, so there might be some sort of legalese embedded in there somewhere, but the point is the legalese embedded in the "install" CD never needs to be seen in order to use their service.
Theres an even uglier side occasionally as well. Its not unheard of (although I don't know the frequency) for their technicians to install the software for you, often without informing you of what they're doing, never mind giving you the time to read through 15 pages of legal BS. This probably affects cable-based ISPs more than phone-based in most areas (for Telus at least, you can just go buy a package, plug in the modem, and call them up -- if you're in an available service area they just flick a switch and the DSL signal comes pouring in no technician needed), but its still a rather unacceptable way of "accepting" a contract.
On the other hand, theres not much stopping you from getting your 17 year old daughter (or 16 or 15 or whatever the legal limit is in your area) to make the call. I doubt it'll be terribly likely for the guy on the other end of the phone to bother checking age -- bam instant contract nullification! (well ok I'm no laywer.. I'm not entirely sure if knowingly getting a minor to do your dirty work completely absolves you of the responsibility in a contract case..;))
Its been a while, but from what I recall the fundamental unit generally used in economics is "Utility", not "Dollars". In the case of most corporations, utility = pleased shareholders, which almost always equals largest profit. If for some reason the shareholders of some large corporation (at least the ones with enough shares to swing the vote) unanimously decided that exploiting third world child labour should no longer be done regardless of the cost of changing, they would still stop doing that. Its unlikely that any large corporation will ever have a significant number of shareholders caring about more than the stock price, but _IF_ that happened, the company would change policies to match. It wouldn't surprise me to any degree if there were lots of smaller companies out there that gave up a little bit of profit in exchange for other factors that their controlling shareholders deemed important.
In this case, Craig is the controlling "shareholder" (the article didn't say whether its a corp or privately owned, but either way, it follows Craig's wishes). The utility of the company therefore equates to pleasing Craig, who has decided that he's best pleased by having a happy userbase.
The root idea of replacing "Dollars" with "Utility" when speaking in general terms can answer a lot of "why are they ignoring a potential source of income?" or "why did they just get new chairs for all of their staff when the old ones weren't broken?"-type questions. Money, for better or worse, happens to be the world's most common expression of the very vaguely defined unit Utility, but they are not ALWAYS equal.
Overall, I'd guess that none of those changes are "good" or "bad" in themselves. The earth's been through periods of high temps and periods of low temps and still seems to be kicking. What's generally considered "bad" is when the kind of changes that typically take thousands or tens of thousands of years happen within centuries or even decades. Cockroaches would probably survive as another responder wrote. Humans would probably survive as we have the ability to adapt the environment (locally at least) to our needs, even in extreme conditions. Other animals? Plantlife? Who knows. Some might be able to adapt quickly enough. Some would be kept alive by us human types for foodstock and other needed resources. Many would probably perish.
I think (skipping the MS conspiracy theory, which is probably true but not actually necessary) that the difference here is installing properly licensed software. I would guess that those 80% that want the OS preinstalled are already getting it (as are likely the 20% that don't want it) -- just that the copy they're getting is the same copy everyone else is getting. And as long as MS (or whoever else for that matter) provides volume licensing to anywhere in China, someone somewhere will get ahold of a CD and the code which would limit the ability of technological wrist-slaps ala XP's registration and hardware change thingy.
Yes, but thats the point in itself. In the real world, you AREN'T necessarily in the "same damn system". Dice rolling is probably a bad example as its pretty hard to consistently get 6's unless the dice are loaded (ie: cheating) but we'll assume that theres someone out there with the magical 6-roller that doesn't involve cheating.
He only has the time to roll 40 times a week because he has a real job/family/you name it but manages to roll a 6 every time.
Then you have the guy who dropped out in grade 9, lives in his parents basement, and does nothing but roll dice and drink mountain dew from 3pm when he wakes up until 6am when he can't keep his eyes open anymore. He manages to roll say 900 times a week, with your typical 1/6 chance, giving him 150 6's.
Now looking just at the total number of 6's, the second guy kicked ass (almost 4x as many!) but if rolling 6's was their job, he's wasted over 20x the amount of resources (dice rolls) and each roll took him significantly longer to boot -- this guy would get fired for incompetance if he didn't start improving his rolling habits (well the time issue can be handled by forcing him to salary, and heck might even look like he's "doing more".. requiring 20x the resources though to do the same job is not something most employers would easily overlook!)
In WoWland though, he's not just put up with -- he's given a dice with a couple extra 6's on it to replace those pesky 1 and 2 sides that noone wants to see. I suppose this would be a good thing in meatspace too (he's now getting 12x as many 6's as the guy with a real life instead of just 4x.. if you keep pushing that up until he's got nothing but 6's on his dice, he's now getting 24x 6's for only 20x the amount of rolls). Unfortunately in the real world we can't usually come up with some magic method of producing "dice" with more than one 6 on them (to solidify the analogy.. basically in most cases we don't have tools available to make someone 24x more productive than they are with current tools -- and even if we did we'd give them to both guys and really pump up production).
Software tends to be a bit of a different beast as 20x "resources" is still generally an insignificant cost (some lights and computers on longer than they need to be -- but who turns off their computer anyway?). It still falls to the issue of not being able to produce a "dice" with 6 6's on it though.. the guy who can consistently pump out near-perfect strings of 6's theoretically should still have some advantage over the guy who works 16 hour days 7 days a week until he burns himself out.. doesn't always work that way but thats another issue!)
What would be cool is if they'd add some 1- or 2- player instances that would drop equip thats at least remotely comparable to the 40- player raids. Presumably the new instances would be of similar difficulty (scaled to the combat potential of 1 or 2 players of course). Probably have to put some sort of timer on them (can only do the instance once a day or week or whatever) to prevent people from doing nothing but eq bombing it (somewhat compensating for the fact that 40 player raids tend to take a long time to organize)
Are you sure about that? A good attack goes undetected and almost all of these "12-minute" style attacks are simply probing for potential zombies -- they hit an IP on an interesting port (or ports), log it on some guy's box somewhere as open or secure, and go onto the next one. 6months later you end up as part of a DDoS attack on hated-site-of-the-week.
Try installing firewall software with decent logging capability. My eyes were certainly opened when I first installed Zonealarm years ago. Got like a hundred probes in the first hour or two. No idea how many pre-Zone probes carried a payload with them.
Now getting an actual infection in 12 minutes.. I suppose its possible. If you're open there's no reason why one of those probes can't throw in a backdoor or other nasty while its at it. Just that most of them don't because they prefer to remain as undetectable as possible until payload time.
Of course nowadays I'm behind a good old NAT. Can't wait until we see the first virus attacking common router models though. Should be fun!
Uhh, no. This is actually a fairly good idea. To get around this, the virus would have to know how to access this "sign up" page (including your logins an passwords) as well as how to format the data to put in there. In effect, this would be almost identical (from an user/self-admin point of view) as having a common NAT device -- you log into a particular web address, punch in a login/password, an go configure your settings. I already have to punch in my MAC in order to get my IP address.. I can't see it being an outrageous idea to add in some port forwarding & triggering fields. Default to having some of the common ones open (UPnP for MSN, ports for the other common messengers, whatever for common games, etc) to cut down on the new customer support calls, etc. Of course, this would imply the common user getting informed about ports... might be better to block common "bad" ports by default (21, 23, 25, 80, etc) and leave the >1023 open.. something like that anyways. Certainly would beat the blanket blocking of these ports that I'm currently having to live with.
There's an even more serious problem with the argument. Drunk driving is an active offense. You have to consciously make the choice to drink and you have to (semi-?) consciously make the choice to drive while drunk.
Letting yourself get infected is a passive offense -- all you have to do is nothing. And nothing is a fairly easy thing to do when you don't even understand the risks (regardless of how many times you're told, in some cases...)
Its tempting to bring out the old "this is like guns being banned because you might shoot someone" argument, but really its not like that at all..
Its more along the lines of knives being banned because there's a possibility that some nefarious teenager will break into your dorm, steal the knife, and use it to slash your neighbor's porn collection..
But then again this is the real world and most teenagers would probably just steal the porn in the first place and be done with it.
Read the article closely.. this is attempting to map where the _recipients_ are, not the senders.
Unsurprisingly enough, it matches fairly well with the areas that I'd think to be more densely net-connected. Except Australia. Thought more of that one would be lit up, but then I don't know Australian geography all that well so maybe its true that there's only a handful of smallish areas along the coastline with high concentrations of net users.
makes you less geeky and considerably wrong to boot:P. The reciprocal is 1/2419200 == ~4.1336e-7 or ~413.36nHz.. the original 380nHz would be somewhere between 30 and 31 days in a "cycle".
Slashdot Mirror
No, its business. Anyone who sits around complaining that the ad servers don't know what they want need to stop and think -- where would they get that information? Oh yes, from all of the data mining that we're equally abhorrent about. Same with television, meatspace fliers, etc. Believe me the ad companies would LOVE to only show you stuff you're interested (even more so in the real world where price per ad is significantly higher than on the internet). They just run into problems with the whole privacy thing whenever they start wanting to gather information about people.
That said, there's really no excuse for big annoying flash ads anymore. Google has proven to a great extent that you can generate a hell of a lot of money with unobtrusive, small text ads placed in a side bar (and out of the way of the normal flow of your site. Sure your page designers have 5-10% less screen space to work with, but I'm sure they'll manage). Annoying flash ads just make me install adblock.
On the other hand, maybe that's just me. They might be morally ambiguous, but large scale advertisers aren't generally stupid -- way too much competition in the field for that. Its just like spam in that sense -- you spew your big annoying flash ad across 100million page views, and if only 1/10% of the people click through (intentionally or not), then you've still got 100,000 "views".
No. Ordinary people don't even know what "chaotic systems" are. Ordinary people have no idea what the ice caps melting will eventually imply.
But we have a bunch of very smart people who do complicated experiments in controlled environments, who then take the results of those experiments and do their best to extrapolate them to a global scale over a span of decades or centuries. Some of them will be wrong, but some will most likely be right. It only takes one or two "right" scenarios to change our planet beyond the ability to support "life as we know it" (which doesn't imply supporting no life at all, though it could.)
And we have a bunch of people telling us that there's nothing to see here please move along, or promoting cheap quick-fix solutions that could potentially make things worse in the long run. (Often and I'm sure entirely coincidentally, these are the same people who would have to put up the biggest stake in order for a cleanup to really work on a large scale.)
The only things we really know for sure is that we have exactly one example of a planet that supports life as we know it, that its changing faster than current research suggests it should, and that our own actions have a high probability of being a major cause of the fast-tracked change.
So the question is: do YOU want to risk your only planet (or your grandchildren's only planet if it takes that long) on the slim chance that the scientists are the ones who are wrong? Unfortunately there's currently an overwhelming "yes" from the people in charge. I'm sure its another coincidence that they're frequently the same people (or have ties to the same people) who tell us that science is wrong.
Ordinary people believe what they're told. If they're told two contradictory things, they'll take a brief glance at the available information and choose whichever side seems the most obvious to them regardless of the basis of that particular side.
Many, if not most, ordinary people these days will tend to fall on the side of the scientists if you ask them what they believe (its a lot easier to believe that making things hot melts ice than it is to believe a politician is telling the truth!) Then they'll get in their non-carpooled SUV, drive 20 miles to get to their suburban home and turn the AC to full because they don't understand the basis.
I freely admit to falling into the category of "ordinary people" when it comes to climate change. I listen to what I'm told, then pick my side based on what makes the most sense to me (I'd bet the tone of my comment suggests which side that is). Maybe its just the programmer in me, but I like to look at it in terms of worst case scenarios:
- O(science is wrong): Nothing changes and life goes on. A few large corporations have to spend 0.1% of their budget for 5 years implementing cleanup plans that turn out to be useless. Theres a bit less smog in LA.
- O(stakeholders are wrong): All life on earth is wiped out within the next century or two. No one is alive to care about the smog in LA.
Now of course worst case isn't necessarily the most likely case, but I'd still rather not take the chance. I hope to have grandkids someday and I'd prefer if they have a planet to live on. Its a good thing that I'm not really fond of SUVs.
The more information your CAPTCHA gives, the easier it is to break (providing it doesn't also require more information to solve).
The easiest and best way to "fix" CAPTCHAs for people who are otherwise discriminated against due to disability is simply have an email (or even phone or snail mail) link that they could use to get a manual registration put through. Yes this is a bit of an extra inconvenience for them, but so what? If they really want to access your site, they'll go ahead with it. Much as it sucks for them, people with disabilities are likely to be far more used to inconveniences in their everyday life, so they'll probably be less annoyed by one more inconvenience than your average person. Our society in general does its best to assist disabled persons and give them as much of a normal life as is possible under their circumstances and under the constraints of resources available to us (money, knowledge of their condition, etc). In general however, the world is built for the average person and the special cases get well, special cased in most circumstances. There's no logical reason why websites should be held to a stricter standard.
Manual registration assumes that you're looking at a comparatively small proportion of the users (ie: something thats manageable by a human without severely disrupting their normal daily tasks). If you put a visual CAPTCHA on a site targeted for blind people, you're obviously not doing it right. For the other 99.999% of the sites out there that are targeted at average people, the 0.01% of legitimate users who come through and are blind is probably a low enough amount that you can handle it manually. And I'm assuming you (or your spam filter) are smart enough to reject authorization if you get 800 requests in an hour when you typically only get 8 per year legitimately.
As for all of the people who sit there promoting culturally neutral CAPTCHAs.. who really cares? If your target audience is Americans, then you're completely justified using a CAPTCHA thats culturally geared to Americans (and in fact its probably better for you as you'll be slowing down Chinese and Russian spammers).
On the other hand if you run an international website, then you'll probably want an internationally-neutral CAPTCHA. But then again, you've probably got separate pages for various target languages already, so you'd still be justified using multiple language-focused CAPTCHAs to go with the various language-focused versions of your site.
CAPTCHA is just as doomed as anti-virus and anti-malware programs (excluding the tinfoil hat possibilities of Norton and AVG creating the viruses themselves) -- that is to say, it isn't doomed at all. It will be an eternal race between CAPTCHA creators to make new CAPTCHAs, and spammers or other miscreants to break them.
We can't stop spammers. At least not as long as we value privacy and/or have poor enforcement in any single country on the planet. We're stuck with the same "solution" we have against other forms of crime -- deterrence. Make it harder, riskier, or uneconomic for the spammers to operate. Unfortunately we can't easily make it riskier without destroying online privacy, and we can't make it less economic without destroying the fundamentals of the internet, but we can certainly make it harder for them to operate via technical means. CAPTCHAs are that means. Can CAPTCHAs be improved? Certainly. Will an improved CAPTCHA method stop spam? Certainly not. But we can make it harder for them. As I posted earlier, a very easy way is simply switch CAPTCHAs once in a while. Of course this means you'd need a fairly large set of CAPTCHAs that are technically diverse enough to cause the spammers a need to re-break it. Combine that with slowing down the spammer's ability to re-break (a short page load delay would do wonders).
There IS one non-technical measure that could be pursued without interfering with normal users' lives too much, and without having to directly determine the spammer's identity -- follow up on the spam. Somewhere, somehow, these spams have to be selling something (or nobody would make any money off it and we wouldn't have this problem!) And for them to make money, there has to be someone who receives the money -- follow the money trail and nab that person. Trace THEIR payment money to the spammer. Some of these steps might be hampered by jurisdiction (if the targets reside out of the country) but it should be doable. Rather than stop the spammers, stop the people who pay them and they'll go away on their own when their revenue stream dries up.
This would take a task force of sorts who intentionally go out and try to get themselves spammed so that they could follow up on it. Public submission would have too many false positives to be effective I would imagine. Again, it won't be a perfect solution (as with any crime, there will always be some small amount of people who commit it, especially when money is involved), but once again I'll note that our goal is deterrence, not complete prevention.
Sadly, this fails in two ways:
- Its not random. Somebody has to enter all of these phrases and possible answers into a database, which means that there are a finite number of them (and probably a computationally low finite number at that -- maybe a few thousand at most). Brute force or a small army of cheap outsourced labor will have your CAPTCHA broken in days if not hours.
- It has multiple choice answers. Forget the wasted time and effort of searching Google. Just pick one. You have a 33% of being correct, and you also have just added that result to your dictionary for the next time the question comes up. Even if the non-correct answers are randomized, the correct answer still has to be in the list of possibilities so seeing the question two or three times will give you a statistically good chance of solving the riddle. This point is actually meaningless however when the first issue is taken into account though (you can't have a static list of answers for a random question!)
Any non-random CAPTCHA immediately falls victim to a (relatively) simple trial-and-save dictionary attack, regardless of whether its based on text or pictures or smells or anything else. The 3d CAPTCHA from TFA would be broken (to a spammer-acceptable level) within a few days if it was used on a site that some spammer REALLY wanted to hit -- its basically the same idea as yours except using a 3d picture rather as opposed to a text phrase. Figuring out a rotation between two 2d projections of a 3d object isn't all THAT hard (again, within acceptable limits, and especially given a small finite list of possibilities) providing that its not a degenerate case (looking at that axe blade-on for example) but most degenerate cases would be hard for a human to pick out as well.
The only true save for CAPTCHAs is diversity -- there are so many different methods and possibilities out there that you rarely see two major sites using the same one. That means spammers have to break a new one for every site they want to spam. And its fairly easy for a site to switch CAPTCHAs (or at least it could be with a good site layout). Some spammer figured out how to OCR your randomly-colored-lines-on-text CAPTCHA? Switch to 3d rotations. They figure that out, switch to 3d rotations with random polka-dots. On your end its a few lines of code to switch plugins (which you'd probably be quick to set up if this became a regular problem on your site). On the spammer's end is a whole new world of OCR or dictionary building or whatever method they need for the CAPTCHA style-of-the-month. Also, implement a short (5sec or so) delay when loading the CAPTCHA. It has to be short enough that a human could just chalk it up to server or internet lag. This won't stop spammers, but it will mean they have to spend more time in order to break your CAPTCHA (because they have a minimum of 5sec between attempts, rather than the 100-200ms or so that normal net lag would give them -- meaning it will take them 25-50 times longer to break your CAPTCHA, give or take). Maybe even make it start taking 15 or 20 seconds if you see some threshhold of attempts in a certain time (say 100 in a minute.. actual numbers of course will depend on your expected human traffic -- you don't want to inconvenience legitimate users too much or they'll just go elsewhere).
There's an important phrase I've used a couple of times though -- "acceptable". A spammer likely wouldn't care a whole lot if 5% or even 50% of their messages don't get through -- most of the time they're paying very little incremental cost per message, if anything (botnets make it pretty much free). All of their cost is in breaking the CAPTCHA or other security, including the development of botnet clients and the such. Once their software has been developed they couldn't care less if they send 1 million or 10 million messages (except perhaps as an accounting measure if they charge their client per message, but thats really a (business) politics issue, not an economic or technical one).
Lets try that again:
such requests should be limited to the add-on website OR DISTRIBUTION SITE and should not appear in the game.
Of course its up to curse.com and whoever to actually implement the charge-throughs (or simply not allow direct downloads for addons that wish to charge), but Blizzard themselves isn't denying the fact that users mostly go to curse.com or wowinterface.com or similar.
On the other hand, if curse & friends decide not to bother, it will make it extremely hard for new addons to get exposure if they want to charge.
Sam will be Senile Sooner?
It seems that certain IMs just gained popularity in certain parts of the world for whatever reason. I was in the Philippines a few months ago and yahoo is the "IM synonym" there. ICQ used to be the big thing in my circle of friends back in the late 90s (it was pretty much the ONLY thing back then). Then moved to yahoo for a while (does ICQ even have webcam support in 2007?) and its sort of settled on MSN as my non-geek friends started to pile up. Don't really know why that came to be -- whether its just because its packaged with Windows or because they had far superior webcam support for a while there, or perhaps some other factor -- as I was one of the last people I know to switch up to MSN (back in my "lets hate on M$ cause its cool" party-lining days:P).
Its actually a bit more nefarious than that -- the real problem is that there's no real exit solution for existing customers -- its rare to get less than a 2 year contract anymore, and they're pushing 3 year contracts as much as possible too. And once you're locked in, they make the contract-breaking "fee" close to, if not more, expensive than actually living out the contract.
And once your contract HAS expired, we have effectively three mobile companies up here (at least in the west don't know if the eastern end is any better), all of which offer almost identical (overly expensive) deals, so the only thing you'll get from attempting to switch companies is a few months cheaper and a new phone -- at the cost of another 2 or 3 year contract and having to change phone numbers, new sign-up fees where applicable, and all the other great hassles.
So yes new customers are much more valuable -- simply because they do everything in their power to make sure existing customers are unable or find little value in changing, and currently "everything in their power" is quite a great amount thanks to very little competition and almost no government intervention. Our only real option to get out of the mobile phone mess up here is to just not have one. If number portability ever makes it up here (been promised for like 2 years now) it might loosen the market a little bit but I have my doubts.
There was one episode.. DS9 I think but I could be wrong (I'm not a huge trekkie) where the various main races (human, klingon, cardassian, etc) were racing (no pun intended) to find some super secret knowledge that had been hidden by some proto-race and the knowledge turned out to be that all of the various planets had been populated by the same proto-race and that the differences between the races had evolved since that time.. or something along those lines....
I believe you just described the basics of the copyright system! .. "As long as both parties understand what it is they are exchanging." ..
Check. We both understand that under current copyright, and even DRM schemes, that the purchaser is exchanging some amount of money for limited usage of the product. The only question is exactly how limited, and thats something thats still being "negotiated" on a grand scale between the public (via "wallet voters", public interest groups, etc) and the producers (via RIAA, MPAA, etc). The government happens to be the mediator of these negotiations (although they seem to have a bad habit of following where the money leads rather than being completely unbiased, but thats another issue). DRM is just one argument in the negotiations. One that the the producers are pressing hard for, and one that the consumers are slowly pushing back against, but its still just a single argument brought to the table.
And, if you don't happen to like the "deal" that public negotiations come out with, there's absolutely nothing stopping you from going to the IP owner and attempting to make your own deal. Sure its unlikely the RIAA will bother (as an individual most of us don't have the money or power to make a deal thats in their interest), but you might be able to do something like this with individual authors (providing they still own the rights to their works). "Fair use" as a concept is simply a point on the consumer side of the table, and certainly isn't intrinsic to copyright in general.
Now you argue that copyright nullifies the author's ability to make a deal with you that benefits both yourself and the author. This is entirely incorrect. Copyright nullifies YOUR ability to use the author's work in a manner that the author doesn't agree upon. To use your 30 day expiry example, lets say that the "property" you agree to use for 30 days comes in the form of a poem printed on ordinary paper. In order for the agreement to be beneficial on both sides, the author must be able to deny you access to the poem after the 30 days are expired. Ethically you would be required to burn or tear up the paper after 30 days so that neither yourself nor anyone else could still access the "property". Unfortunately in our world, there are far too many people who are not ethical. They would keep the original, or make a copy unknown to the author even if the author required the physical paper to be returned (remember, the "property" is the words of the poem, NOT the dead tree). Not to mention if you have an exceptionally good memory, there's no way the author, or even yourself without some incredibly good memory repression skills, could prevent you from "using" his works after the 30 days even if you were being as ethical as you possibly could. This is the kind of trickiness that copyright attempts to deal with. And then there's the entire question of what "using" implies. Reciting only to yourself? To your friends? In public on a street corner?
Copyright as it stands is a blanket restriction granted to the author at the time when he or she creates a work of art against unauthorized use. Copyright does NOT prevent the author from granting another party authorization to use the work. Patents follow the same ideal since you brought them up -- they grant a blanket restriction to an inventor against the unauthorized production of his invention, but does not prevent him from authorizing another party to produce the invention.
The trouble with copyright (and patents) is the extent to which they are currently granted. Patents (particularly in the tech industry) are obsoleted by newer technology and newer patents years, even decades before they expire. Similarly with copyrights, artwork has passed beyond the public's eye and beyond most people's memories decades before they expire. Does Disney REALLY need to worry about someone pirating a 1914 Steamboat Willy silent animation? They certainly aren't going to be making much money off of it by now,
.. "users/people want computers to behave like toasters" ..
I hate this analogy. This is like saying "users/people want pipe organs to behave like kazoos" or, since cars seem to always be the great analogy for computers (why?), it would be like saying "users/people want their fully-loaded hummer to behave like a pogo stick". In all three cases, the complexity scale between the two options is so large that the comparison is meaningless.
Sure we can probably do a lot more to "humanize" error messages and remove things like C: (Local Disk) from your average user's day to day operations, and Microsoft, Apple, loads of universities and I'm sure countless others pour likely millions of dollars per year into UI research in hopes of moving towards this goal. But in the long run, if a user's disk is full when you go to save a file, there's absolutely no safe way for the program to continue without the user being informed and making a decision. You don't want to just not save the file, and you really don't want to go blitzing whatever random file you like off of their hard drive to make room. You might be able to do a quick once-over on the "disk cleanup" utility before bugging the user (oops.. "why does saving a file take 10 minutes today and it only took a second yesterday!?!") but at some point you're just going to have to inform the user that the drive is full and they're going to have to figure out how to deal with it.
I also have a question for the article's author and everyone else who says things like "error messages should explain everything so that its easy like a car". Do YOU know whats wrong when that little red engine light comes on? Reducing the number of error messages via more robust software practices would be great (wait.. who wants to pay 10x more to cover the extra QA time?) but they'll never go away. There will always be some level at which you simply cannot get around the fact that an error occurred, as in the example above of a full disk when saving a file.
Oh, and even being a computer guy and knowing what the options do, I STILL can't remember which one "Hibernate" and which one "Stand By" is without trying them. That said, hibernate should really be the default "off" mode -- there's no real reason to have to reload everything every time you turn on your computer!
I use Telus as well, and while I've not yet had any reason to drop their service, I can tell you that you in no way shape or form need to use their install CDs. Their service is based on MAC address, and if you connect up with an unregistered MAC, you get a 10.x.x.x IP and all website addresses get redirected to their "online customer assistance" form-based registration system. Now its been quite a while since I've needed to bother with that myself, so there might be some sort of legalese embedded in there somewhere, but the point is the legalese embedded in the "install" CD never needs to be seen in order to use their service.
;))
Theres an even uglier side occasionally as well. Its not unheard of (although I don't know the frequency) for their technicians to install the software for you, often without informing you of what they're doing, never mind giving you the time to read through 15 pages of legal BS. This probably affects cable-based ISPs more than phone-based in most areas (for Telus at least, you can just go buy a package, plug in the modem, and call them up -- if you're in an available service area they just flick a switch and the DSL signal comes pouring in no technician needed), but its still a rather unacceptable way of "accepting" a contract.
On the other hand, theres not much stopping you from getting your 17 year old daughter (or 16 or 15 or whatever the legal limit is in your area) to make the call. I doubt it'll be terribly likely for the guy on the other end of the phone to bother checking age -- bam instant contract nullification! (well ok I'm no laywer.. I'm not entirely sure if knowingly getting a minor to do your dirty work completely absolves you of the responsibility in a contract case..
Its been a while, but from what I recall the fundamental unit generally used in economics is "Utility", not "Dollars". In the case of most corporations, utility = pleased shareholders, which almost always equals largest profit. If for some reason the shareholders of some large corporation (at least the ones with enough shares to swing the vote) unanimously decided that exploiting third world child labour should no longer be done regardless of the cost of changing, they would still stop doing that. Its unlikely that any large corporation will ever have a significant number of shareholders caring about more than the stock price, but _IF_ that happened, the company would change policies to match. It wouldn't surprise me to any degree if there were lots of smaller companies out there that gave up a little bit of profit in exchange for other factors that their controlling shareholders deemed important.
In this case, Craig is the controlling "shareholder" (the article didn't say whether its a corp or privately owned, but either way, it follows Craig's wishes). The utility of the company therefore equates to pleasing Craig, who has decided that he's best pleased by having a happy userbase.
The root idea of replacing "Dollars" with "Utility" when speaking in general terms can answer a lot of "why are they ignoring a potential source of income?" or "why did they just get new chairs for all of their staff when the old ones weren't broken?"-type questions. Money, for better or worse, happens to be the world's most common expression of the very vaguely defined unit Utility, but they are not ALWAYS equal.
Overall, I'd guess that none of those changes are "good" or "bad" in themselves. The earth's been through periods of high temps and periods of low temps and still seems to be kicking. What's generally considered "bad" is when the kind of changes that typically take thousands or tens of thousands of years happen within centuries or even decades.
Cockroaches would probably survive as another responder wrote. Humans would probably survive as we have the ability to adapt the environment (locally at least) to our needs, even in extreme conditions. Other animals? Plantlife? Who knows. Some might be able to adapt quickly enough. Some would be kept alive by us human types for foodstock and other needed resources. Many would probably perish.
I tend to prefer U-S-er myself ;)
*waits to burn*
I think (skipping the MS conspiracy theory, which is probably true but not actually necessary) that the difference here is installing properly licensed software. I would guess that those 80% that want the OS preinstalled are already getting it (as are likely the 20% that don't want it) -- just that the copy they're getting is the same copy everyone else is getting. And as long as MS (or whoever else for that matter) provides volume licensing to anywhere in China, someone somewhere will get ahold of a CD and the code which would limit the ability of technological wrist-slaps ala XP's registration and hardware change thingy.
Yes, but thats the point in itself. In the real world, you AREN'T necessarily in the "same damn system". Dice rolling is probably a bad example as its pretty hard to consistently get 6's unless the dice are loaded (ie: cheating) but we'll assume that theres someone out there with the magical 6-roller that doesn't involve cheating.
He only has the time to roll 40 times a week because he has a real job/family/you name it but manages to roll a 6 every time.
Then you have the guy who dropped out in grade 9, lives in his parents basement, and does nothing but roll dice and drink mountain dew from 3pm when he wakes up until 6am when he can't keep his eyes open anymore. He manages to roll say 900 times a week, with your typical 1/6 chance, giving him 150 6's.
Now looking just at the total number of 6's, the second guy kicked ass (almost 4x as many!) but if rolling 6's was their job, he's wasted over 20x the amount of resources (dice rolls) and each roll took him significantly longer to boot -- this guy would get fired for incompetance if he didn't start improving his rolling habits (well the time issue can be handled by forcing him to salary, and heck might even look like he's "doing more".. requiring 20x the resources though to do the same job is not something most employers would easily overlook!)
In WoWland though, he's not just put up with -- he's given a dice with a couple extra 6's on it to replace those pesky 1 and 2 sides that noone wants to see. I suppose this would be a good thing in meatspace too (he's now getting 12x as many 6's as the guy with a real life instead of just 4x.. if you keep pushing that up until he's got nothing but 6's on his dice, he's now getting 24x 6's for only 20x the amount of rolls). Unfortunately in the real world we can't usually come up with some magic method of producing "dice" with more than one 6 on them (to solidify the analogy.. basically in most cases we don't have tools available to make someone 24x more productive than they are with current tools -- and even if we did we'd give them to both guys and really pump up production).
Software tends to be a bit of a different beast as 20x "resources" is still generally an insignificant cost (some lights and computers on longer than they need to be -- but who turns off their computer anyway?). It still falls to the issue of not being able to produce a "dice" with 6 6's on it though.. the guy who can consistently pump out near-perfect strings of 6's theoretically should still have some advantage over the guy who works 16 hour days 7 days a week until he burns himself out.. doesn't always work that way but thats another issue!)
For me, GTA is about how I can do the most spectacular flips/crashes/etc, typically with the motorbikes :P..
What would be cool is if they'd add some 1- or 2- player instances that would drop equip thats at least remotely comparable to the 40- player raids. Presumably the new instances would be of similar difficulty (scaled to the combat potential of 1 or 2 players of course). Probably have to put some sort of timer on them (can only do the instance once a day or week or whatever) to prevent people from doing nothing but eq bombing it (somewhat compensating for the fact that 40 player raids tend to take a long time to organize)
Are you sure about that? A good attack goes undetected and almost all of these "12-minute" style attacks are simply probing for potential zombies -- they hit an IP on an interesting port (or ports), log it on some guy's box somewhere as open or secure, and go onto the next one. 6months later you end up as part of a DDoS attack on hated-site-of-the-week.
Try installing firewall software with decent logging capability. My eyes were certainly opened when I first installed Zonealarm years ago. Got like a hundred probes in the first hour or two. No idea how many pre-Zone probes carried a payload with them.
Now getting an actual infection in 12 minutes.. I suppose its possible. If you're open there's no reason why one of those probes can't throw in a backdoor or other nasty while its at it. Just that most of them don't because they prefer to remain as undetectable as possible until payload time.
Of course nowadays I'm behind a good old NAT. Can't wait until we see the first virus attacking common router models though. Should be fun!
Uhh, no. This is actually a fairly good idea. To get around this, the virus would have to know how to access this "sign up" page (including your logins an passwords) as well as how to format the data to put in there.
In effect, this would be almost identical (from an user/self-admin point of view) as having a common NAT device -- you log into a particular web address, punch in a login/password, an go configure your settings. I already have to punch in my MAC in order to get my IP address.. I can't see it being an outrageous idea to add in some port forwarding & triggering fields. Default to having some of the common ones open (UPnP for MSN, ports for the other common messengers, whatever for common games, etc) to cut down on the new customer support calls, etc.
Of course, this would imply the common user getting informed about ports... might be better to block common "bad" ports by default (21, 23, 25, 80, etc) and leave the >1023 open.. something like that anyways. Certainly would beat the blanket blocking of these ports that I'm currently having to live with.
There's an even more serious problem with the argument. Drunk driving is an active offense. You have to consciously make the choice to drink and you have to (semi-?) consciously make the choice to drive while drunk.
Letting yourself get infected is a passive offense -- all you have to do is nothing. And nothing is a fairly easy thing to do when you don't even understand the risks (regardless of how many times you're told, in some cases...)
Its tempting to bring out the old "this is like guns being banned because you might shoot someone" argument, but really its not like that at all..
Its more along the lines of knives being banned because there's a possibility that some nefarious teenager will break into your dorm, steal the knife, and use it to slash your neighbor's porn collection..
But then again this is the real world and most teenagers would probably just steal the porn in the first place and be done with it.
Read the article closely.. this is attempting to map where the _recipients_ are, not the senders.
Unsurprisingly enough, it matches fairly well with the areas that I'd think to be more densely net-connected. Except Australia. Thought more of that one would be lit up, but then I don't know Australian geography all that well so maybe its true that there's only a handful of smallish areas along the coastline with high concentrations of net users.
makes you less geeky and considerably wrong to boot :P. The reciprocal is 1/2419200 == ~4.1336e-7 or ~413.36nHz.. the original 380nHz would be somewhere between 30 and 31 days in a "cycle".