It's not that hard to calculate a checksum of each message body that goes through a mail or news server. Once a particular checksum value appears, say, 100 times in a short period (or in 10 newsgroups, etc.), you know you have a problem. At this point you could simply warn the user that the same message has hit X number of other people, from Y number of senders, so Joe Schmoe probably did *not* just send her a picture of his naked wife, or you could simply block that checksum until things die down.
Maybe there's something I'm missing here.
You're missing mailing lists. Opt-in mailing lists, unfortunately act almost precisely the same way as spam. If there's a 100 users on your system subscribed to a list, then it won't be so crazy for the same message to flip through 100 times. And that's legitamate. The biggest problem with any sort of censoring, even of spam, is false positive blocks.
I've been wanting something like that awhile for myself. And not just for email virus's, but just some common plaace for virus info. I never found anything, though.
What if the babysitter is trying to tell me there's been an emergency at home, and my phone doesn't even vibrate?
You'll have to give her the number of the restaurant, just like in the old days, and _maybe_, just _maybe_, she'll only use that in an emergency.
See... the thing about the db result limitations is that in reality, they're meaningless. It's been deomonstrated that benchmark results of various databases make very poor comparisons, as the database functionality is largely proprietary an varies a heck of alot between what benchmarks are drawn. The companies put up the limitiations to protect themselves from undue criticism. The fact of the matter is, that you need to know _your_ database, and convince IBM and Oracle to both loan you a their db's for a trial period, and you can run personal benchmarks over your application. But your results bear little to zero weight against any other corporation's application.
You know, there are a lot of hearing impaired people out there that use close captioning. It seems selfish to take their bandwidth away just for a better picture on a $5,000 TV. Now, if all the hearing impaired were given broadband so that they could download the closed captioning, that might work.
I think the idea was that the closed captioning space was over-allotted, and that the extra space can be utilized by the HDTV simulcast.
The fundamental assumption of strong encryption is that the attacker knows everything except the specific secret key. The algorithm should be secure regardless. This is true for things like one time pads, Triple-DES, etc. etc. provided the secret key is long enough.
Certainly obfuscating the decryption adds some security, but this is only security through obscurity. It adds less additional security than keeping the encryption algorithm secret. It adds far less than choosing a decent key-size. Heck, it adds less additional security than adding a single bit to the secret key, probably.
The basic problem is that you can never trust security-through-obscurity. If I am protecting trade documents, for example, I may be able to keep my secret key secret but I'm not likely to be able to protect the details of the algorithm (here I'm counting the algorithm itself and the additional obfuscation at the end) because ex-employees or partner companies or some such will necessarily need details of the algorithm.
All Good points. Except:
On top of that, unless your obfuscation is truly secure, you can tell when you've decrypted most files. Most files compress. By definition, strongly-encrypted files do not. So you could see how much entropy is in your test decryption. 8 bits per byte? Then you probably haven't successfully decrypted yet.
For the exact reason you mentioned, strongly-encrypted files do use compression. It provides a higher entropy before the data goes in. Compressed data is effectively random data, and there's nothin wrong with encrypting random data. The only thing I can imagine you mean is that strongly-encrypted files, in the purist sense, are uncompressed. But certainly in Practical applications (hehe. shameless plug: Cypherus), the content is compressed when encrypted.
Believe me, the record company "breaks even", at the very least, on nearly every album put out, regardless of whether or not the band makes enough to pay back their advance. Keep in mind that with lesser selling albums, the record company isn't putting as much marketing money into them, yet is selling the cd for the same price - which means, of course, more profit per unit for the record company. (The musicians, of course, get no increase in their royalties, but hey, who needs them?)
Believe you? Why in gods name should I belive you? Anyway... just like with filmmaking, you don't know necessarilly know what'll hit and what'll miss before you produce and sell the piece, so you can't scale your marketing and production costs ahead of time. Grab a book on the financials of filmmaking sometime. It works the same way. (Historically... since distribution channels are completely different with unmetered broadband, things are different now). The record companies take losses all over the place, which is what allows them to keep more of the profits for themselves and less for the government. It's actually a neat maneuver. I think there was a Slashdot article on software companies (microsoft) doing the same thing a few months ago. Long story short, record producing has a big risk/reward ratio, but you really do need a huge capital investment to start on. It's just like VC's. I don't hear Slashdotters clamouring about how all the Venture Capitalists get to keep all the money and software developers have to rot in their little Jettas. (Which is true, by the way)
Why should an industry that is worth $40 billion USD only be provided with product by, oh, let's say, less than 50,000 musicians. And let us also say that less than 1,000 of those musicians make more than $1,000,000 USD per year.
Where does the rest of that money go?
Production, Recording, equipment, marketing, distribution, pre-established networking, sales, investment return, and, most importantly, covering for albums that did not sell enough to break even. (which is most of them)
Where would we be now if Mr Grog Caveman said 'It's against the law to reverse engineer my heat generating device (fire(tm))?
Just to play Devil's Advocate, I've got to point out that our dear freind grog didn't have to sell fire to survive. He needed to get fire out there so that other people would be able to survive, and help him survive. So, of course, grog would want to spread it around for free. But now, we're past the point of survival. By a long shot. (At least in America, et al) And so now we're into the grey area of "nobody needs my stuff, although it may be beneficial to them". Since they don't need it, there's a question raised as to whether or not I should have to give it to them, or we can arrange a trade where it's mutually beneficial. (I want money, you want my shizit.)
I don't think America (or any other nation) has hit on the right answer, yet, but it's important to remember that things are different, right now, from both Mr. Grok Caveman's day and Utopia.
Gee. It's as if we hadn't had those for awhile already... Minidiscs do exactly that. And they're edging more toward $2.50 per cart. There's a bunch of players that are happy to pretend they're a Rio, too, so you can just write MP3 files's to them, and they're internally converted.
If you want to fight for free speech, start with fighting against things like trying to force the Boy Scouts to accept athiests and homosexuals---even if you think they should.
Um... the issue at hand in that isn't that the organization *must* take in atheists and homosexuals. Fact of the matter is that the Boy Scouts are, in some sense, publically funded, and thereby have no right to discriminate membership on the matter of religion.
Yeah... just to make things clear, _without_ sounding too much like a dick, the article was begotten via PR Newsiwire, which is a press release channel. It's basically Microsoft's official spin on it. Nothing more, nothing less, and having nothing to do with journalism.
Your DNA isn't needed so much as your willingness to submit it. By submitting your DNA without protest, you silently advocate that a criminal's DNA be on file, when he first COMMITS a crime (which is when it is needed)... not after he gets caught. If you don't submit your DNA to the database, however, you allow a future criminal to make that same choice as you, and thereby make it more difficult to catch him when he does commit a crime.
Your suicide isn't needed so much as your willingness to submit it. By killing yourself without protest, you silently advocate that a murderer kills himself before he gets the chance to kill someone else. If you don't kill yourself first, then you allow a future murderer to be alive, and thereby allow him/her to murder.
The difference being that in one, you just extend a trust in the state that you have already established, and the other... Basically, you already chose for the government to have the ability to investigate and enforce crimes. Your analogy is kinda funny... but not really accurate at all...
What we need is DNA hashing of some sort. Sure the database contains unique identifiers for every individual, but it doesn't provide further information about the individual's genetic code.
Not sure how well it would actually work, though, since I assume that most DNA db lookups in criminal investigations are fuzzy and not exact. But it's a thought.
If your DNA were needed to get criminals off the street, then you must be a criminal. Personally, I am not one. My DNA is of no use for crime prevention, and I resent the implication that it is needed.
Your DNA isn't needed so much as your willingness to submit it. By submitting your DNA without protest, you silently advocate that a criminal's DNA be on file, when he first COMMITS a crime (which is when it is needed)... not after he gets caught. If you don't submit your DNA to the database, however, you allow a future criminal to make that same choice as you, and thereby make it more difficult to catch him when he does commit a crime.
Ok. I know it was only part of a joke in the original post, but as a previous developer of SnB, I've gotta pass along the link to the actual lab and software:
Let's set the record straight: My racial group does not choose to be less educated...we simply don't always have access to the same resources growing up as whites. That can't possibly be understood by someone who's never attended public school in a major city (I'm from Detroit). I took freshman EECS with 3 hundred white guys that had been taking C classes since the 9th grade, and the only exposure I'd had to any form of high-level programming was self-taught. Poor K-12 education == Poor SAT/ACT != quality higher education. This uneven playing field is the reason for the small numbers of us in the tech industry...I guarantee he's either got parents as priviliged as most of yours, or he worked his ASS off to get to where he is now.
Ok. Working your ass off is necessarry for _everybody_ who wants to be succcessful. Those 300 white guys who had been taking C for four years had in an advantage in the class, maybe, but that doesn't mean much. Most of learning is done OUTSIDE of acadameia.
I'm white. I grew up in a crappy public school in a little rural town. Nobody in the town knew jack about computers, and there were no programming classes. We has one AP course as of when I graduated two years ago. I'm from a single-parent family, and that parent was disabled, so our income was shit. At peak, for the three of us (my mom, my sister, and myself) we made $12k annually. I had a poor k-12 education. But I worked my ass off to make sure that it didn't limit me. I had an interest in success and I overwhelmed my obstacles. Everybody's got to do it. Those kids in your EECS class got fed the training they needed, but that doesn't make them _more_ qualified than you or me who worked our ass off. In fact, without a little bit of trials and tribulations behind them, they're probably less qualified.
But what I really disagree with what you said is your supposition that:
That is simply not true. I had the shittiest education a white guy can get. But I flew out of high school with a 1540 SAT, and a year worth of work programming in a lab (with an hour-long commute) doing computational crystallography. I then made it into Caltech, moved to California (from New York). Incidentally, I soon realized that Caltech was not that great anyway, and dropped out and got a dot-com job while I support some artistic urges. So the way I see it, there's no necessary correlation between formal education, SAT scores, and quality higher education. You're simply wrong. What school you went to means nothing if you don't care about what you're trying to do, and you're not willing to work your ass off.
It's got nothing to do with being black or white or rich or poor or what education you were offered. It's about determination and being willing to work for what you want. For everyone. Get over it.
Ok. When a co-employee of mine left for another gig, I had to do research into what they were doing in order to see if there were any possible intellectual property issues to be dealt with. He had left for a company much like SafeWeb, although I won't mention the name here.
The basis idea is that thye act as a full-scale proxy for all your requests. That means that everything you do goes through them. And they are pretty thourough. every url gets changed on the pass through, if it's just going via a cgi-script, and then there are a few companies that actually act as right-out http-proxies.
Anyway...
Here are a few other thoughts about the technical details. One area of concern is how through are they about redirecting web requests, for example I was thinking this currently would not foil a web-bug.
Yeah. they do actually. The web bug acts just like any other document being requested. The people who placed the web bug will only get SafeWeb's redirector machine ALOT. But not you.
I wonder what type of servers they are using. Sounds like they need lots of SSL processing
Yeah. you're definately right on that one. In fact, they need alot of processing just to reinterpret all the html data... It's a huge effort, and I'm not sure how SafeWeb is handling cost, but I find it very unlikely that it's a model that could possibly succeed using just ad revenue. It's really compute-intensive (and bandwidth-intensive) to have everyone's traffic run through and edited by your machines.
It's funny that you made so many comparison's to the Matrix's choreography. The same choreographer designed these scenes, too.
That is all. Thanks you.
1 signifies dialing a long-distance call, a toll call in all cases except 1-800, 1-500, 1-888, 1-8NN. 0 signifies an operator-assisted call. If the FCC would change this so that you could be dialing crosstown into a different area code and dial a 1 or 0 but not be making a long-distance or operator assisted call.
Actually, where they're trying to change the meaning of '1' is in the first digit of you current 7 digit number. that way, people can have numbers like:
818-178-3453
which they can't now, because when they're in 818 and they only use a 7 digit number, the system would think they're trying to make a long distance call and wait for four more numbers...
That's all.
Of course, I'm against it anyway, because I don't want to remember 10 digits for every number. "7 +/- 2" anyone?
Slashdot Mirror
It's not that hard to calculate a checksum of each message body that goes through a mail or news server. Once a particular checksum value appears, say, 100 times in a short period (or in 10 newsgroups, etc.), you know you have a problem. At this point you could simply warn the user that the same message has hit X number of other people, from Y number of senders, so Joe Schmoe probably did *not* just send her a picture of his naked wife, or you could simply block that checksum until things die down. Maybe there's something I'm missing here.
You're missing mailing lists. Opt-in mailing lists, unfortunately act almost precisely the same way as spam. If there's a 100 users on your system subscribed to a list, then it won't be so crazy for the same message to flip through 100 times. And that's legitamate. The biggest problem with any sort of censoring, even of spam, is false positive blocks.
-Andrew
I've been wanting something like that awhile for myself. And not just for email virus's, but just some common plaace for virus info. I never found anything, though.
-Andrew
What if the babysitter is trying to tell me there's been an emergency at home, and my phone doesn't even vibrate?
You'll have to give her the number of the restaurant, just like in the old days, and _maybe_, just _maybe_, she'll only use that in an emergency.
-Andrew
See... the thing about the db result limitations is that in reality, they're meaningless. It's been deomonstrated that benchmark results of various databases make very poor comparisons, as the database functionality is largely proprietary an varies a heck of alot between what benchmarks are drawn. The companies put up the limitiations to protect themselves from undue criticism. The fact of the matter is, that you need to know _your_ database, and convince IBM and Oracle to both loan you a their db's for a trial period, and you can run personal benchmarks over your application. But your results bear little to zero weight against any other corporation's application.
-Andrew
You know, there are a lot of hearing impaired people out there that use close captioning. It seems selfish to take their bandwidth away just for a better picture on a $5,000 TV. Now, if all the hearing impaired were given broadband so that they could download the closed captioning, that might work.
I think the idea was that the closed captioning space was over-allotted, and that the extra space can be utilized by the HDTV simulcast.
-Andrew
The fundamental assumption of strong encryption is that the attacker knows everything except the specific secret key. The algorithm should be secure regardless. This is true for things like one time pads, Triple-DES, etc. etc. provided the secret key is long enough.
Certainly obfuscating the decryption adds some security, but this is only security through obscurity. It adds less additional security than keeping the encryption algorithm secret. It adds far less than choosing a decent key-size. Heck, it adds less additional security than adding a single bit to the secret key, probably.
The basic problem is that you can never trust security-through-obscurity. If I am protecting trade documents, for example, I may be able to keep my secret key secret but I'm not likely to be able to protect the details of the algorithm (here I'm counting the algorithm itself and the additional obfuscation at the end) because ex-employees or partner companies or some such will necessarily need details of the algorithm. All Good points. Except:
On top of that, unless your obfuscation is truly secure, you can tell when you've decrypted most files. Most files compress. By definition, strongly-encrypted files do not. So you could see how much entropy is in your test decryption. 8 bits per byte? Then you probably haven't successfully decrypted yet.
For the exact reason you mentioned, strongly-encrypted files do use compression. It provides a higher entropy before the data goes in. Compressed data is effectively random data, and there's nothin wrong with encrypting random data. The only thing I can imagine you mean is that strongly-encrypted files, in the purist sense, are uncompressed. But certainly in Practical applications (hehe. shameless plug: Cypherus), the content is compressed when encrypted.
-Andrew
Believe me, the record company "breaks even", at the very least, on nearly every album put out, regardless of whether or not the band makes enough to pay back their advance. Keep in mind that with lesser selling albums, the record company isn't putting as much marketing money into them, yet is selling the cd for the same price - which means, of course, more profit per unit for the record company. (The musicians, of course, get no increase in their royalties, but hey, who needs them?)
Believe you? Why in gods name should I belive you? Anyway... just like with filmmaking, you don't know necessarilly know what'll hit and what'll miss before you produce and sell the piece, so you can't scale your marketing and production costs ahead of time. Grab a book on the financials of filmmaking sometime. It works the same way. (Historically... since distribution channels are completely different with unmetered broadband, things are different now). The record companies take losses all over the place, which is what allows them to keep more of the profits for themselves and less for the government. It's actually a neat maneuver. I think there was a Slashdot article on software companies (microsoft) doing the same thing a few months ago. Long story short, record producing has a big risk/reward ratio, but you really do need a huge capital investment to start on. It's just like VC's. I don't hear Slashdotters clamouring about how all the Venture Capitalists get to keep all the money and software developers have to rot in their little Jettas. (Which is true, by the way)
-Andrew
Why should an industry that is worth $40 billion USD only be provided with product by, oh, let's say, less than 50,000 musicians. And let us also say that less than 1,000 of those musicians make more than $1,000,000 USD per year.
Where does the rest of that money go?
Production, Recording, equipment, marketing, distribution, pre-established networking, sales, investment return, and, most importantly, covering for albums that did not sell enough to break even. (which is most of them)
-Andrew
Where would we be now if Mr Grog Caveman said 'It's against the law to reverse engineer my heat generating device (fire(tm))?
Just to play Devil's Advocate, I've got to point out that our dear freind grog didn't have to sell fire to survive. He needed to get fire out there so that other people would be able to survive, and help him survive. So, of course, grog would want to spread it around for free. But now, we're past the point of survival. By a long shot. (At least in America, et al) And so now we're into the grey area of "nobody needs my stuff, although it may be beneficial to them". Since they don't need it, there's a question raised as to whether or not I should have to give it to them, or we can arrange a trade where it's mutually beneficial. (I want money, you want my shizit.)
I don't think America (or any other nation) has hit on the right answer, yet, but it's important to remember that things are different, right now, from both Mr. Grok Caveman's day and Utopia.
-Andrew
Gee. It's as if we hadn't had those for awhile already... Minidiscs do exactly that. And they're edging more toward $2.50 per cart. There's a bunch of players that are happy to pretend they're a Rio, too, so you can just write MP3 files's to them, and they're internally converted.
-Andrew
If you want to fight for free speech, start with fighting against things like trying to force the Boy Scouts to accept athiests and homosexuals---even if you think they should.
Um... the issue at hand in that isn't that the organization *must* take in atheists and homosexuals. Fact of the matter is that the Boy Scouts are, in some sense, publically funded, and thereby have no right to discriminate membership on the matter of religion.
-Andrew
Just keep in mind, that product ID's aren't exactly new© There's bar codes and serial numbers all over everything you own© The difference here is that there's a different way of reading that number©
If, for instance, a ID scanner needed to be within a foot of the device, it would be as bad as some of you are making out© Just because their dropping a chip into your stuff, doesn't mean they'll have it transmit the ID to there base station 2000 miles away© The power consumption, alone, would render that useless©
This technology will just allow the Tech Repair guy to wave a wand over your unit and see repair info on it, without having to hunt down the serial number printed on the 3rd IC from the lower left hand side©
-Andrew
Just keep in mind, giving products unique IDs is something which has happened all the time in the past© Intel did it© Microsoft did it© Don't be surprised© On the other hand, these companies tend to not be able to get away with these ids once the public notices©
Um©© hate to break it to ya, but product ID's have been used by just about every manufacturer for a long time© Called serial numbers© The difference with Intel was that it was no longer just printed on the board for human reference, but accessble by the big evil corporations and hackers behind the internet©
-Andrew
2 The stupidity of the audience doesn't impose restrictions on free speach© When the first admendment says "congress shall make no law © © ©" That means NO LAW©
I never said there needed to be, or is there, a law© I said that people need to take personal responsibility when excersing their right to free speech, to be sure that it doesn't infringe unfairly upon anyones one fundamental right of the US Constitution:
To allow citizens: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness©
Disclaimers on inflammatory jokes is no different than ratings for music, movies, tv, and games© None of these are required by law© It's a responsibility that big, scary, corporate america ¥or in this case, site operators take on in order to protect the individual©
-Andrew
So©©© here's the tricky part©©© Is bonsaikitten©com a parody? Yeah© Most of us tech-head-humor people see that immediately©
Does everyone see that? Nope© There's a good lot of reasonable people out there that are convinced that the internet is the publishing house all things evil and unholy© They're very skeptical and cautious of things that aren't right being published on the web© Animal Cruelty is one of those things©©©
Can you blame them for caution? No©
Can you blame them for ignorance? Probably© At least a little© But there's alot of people out there who are ignorant of alot of different things© It's pretty excussable©
What's the FBI doing in this case? Investigating© They're not shutting the site down with no grounds, they're investigating© People don't believe that bonsaikittens©com is a joke, and you are not going to be able to convince them that© The only people that probably can are an authority of some sort© In this case the FBI©
How could this have been avoided altogether while still excercising free speech? With a frickin' discalimer© If you want to say or depict something inflammatory, but untrue, it is your responsibility to disclaim that falseness© It doesn't mean putting a big tag at the top of every page saying "This is fake©"© A nice little discalimer in an 'about' page or something would do fine© People who become upset with what you have to say can at least verify that it isn't true©
Don't you remember that old civics class lesson about how rights come with responsibility? Then quit whining and take responsibility for deluding people©
-Andrew
How about Minidisc player/recorders? They have optical out©©©you could either get an optical->analog converter, or get a sound card which accepts optical link cables©
Yeah© I've got to go with a recommendation for minidisc recorders too:
1© The media's alot cheaper, ¥unless you have a laptop handy to download all the mp3's too©
2© They're about the same size as mp3 players / recorders© which is alot smaller than the dat recorders I've seen© ¥is size his issue? DAT is really good on other counts©©© :
3© I don't want to start a war here, but minidisc recordings ¥ATRAC-3 are higher quality than most ¥though, truely, not all mp3s©
4© Minidisc recorders with good solid state buffers ¥most have 40 second buffers, are as close to solid state as you probably need to get, if rough terrain is an issue©
5© And despite what 'vraptor' said, you don't need an optical link to get the sound out of the minidisc recorder© It's better, of course, if you can keep your D->A->D chaining minimal, but almost every minidisc player has an analog out line© ¥For headphones, if nothing else
Hope that helps!
-Andrew
Yeah... just to make things clear, _without_ sounding too much like a dick, the article was begotten via PR Newsiwire, which is a press release channel. It's basically Microsoft's official spin on it. Nothing more, nothing less, and having nothing to do with journalism.
Your DNA isn't needed so much as your willingness to submit it. By submitting your DNA without protest, you silently advocate that a criminal's DNA be on file, when he first COMMITS a crime (which is when it is needed)... not after he gets caught. If you don't submit your DNA to the database, however, you allow a future criminal to make that same choice as you, and thereby make it more difficult to catch him when he does commit a crime.
Your suicide isn't needed so much as your willingness to submit it. By killing yourself without protest, you silently advocate that a murderer kills himself before he gets the chance to kill someone else. If you don't kill yourself first, then you allow a future murderer to be alive, and thereby allow him/her to murder.
The difference being that in one, you just extend a trust in the state that you have already established, and the other... Basically, you already chose for the government to have the ability to investigate and enforce crimes. Your analogy is kinda funny... but not really accurate at all...
What we need is DNA hashing of some sort. Sure the database contains unique identifiers for every individual, but it doesn't provide further information about the individual's genetic code.
Not sure how well it would actually work, though, since I assume that most DNA db lookups in criminal investigations are fuzzy and not exact. But it's a thought.
If your DNA were needed to get criminals off the street, then you must be a criminal. Personally, I am not one. My DNA is of no use for crime prevention, and I resent the implication that it is needed.
Your DNA isn't needed so much as your willingness to submit it. By submitting your DNA without protest, you silently advocate that a criminal's DNA be on file, when he first COMMITS a crime (which is when it is needed)... not after he gets caught. If you don't submit your DNA to the database, however, you allow a future criminal to make that same choice as you, and thereby make it more difficult to catch him when he does commit a crime.
Ok. I know it was only part of a joke in the original post, but as a previous developer of SnB, I've gotta pass along the link to the actual lab and software:
http://www.hwi.buffalo.edu/SnB/
Let's set the record straight: My racial group does not choose to be less educated...we simply don't always have access to the same resources growing up as whites. That can't possibly be understood by someone who's never attended public school in a major city (I'm from Detroit). I took freshman EECS with 3 hundred white guys that had been taking C classes since the 9th grade, and the only exposure I'd had to any form of high-level programming was self-taught. Poor K-12 education == Poor SAT/ACT != quality higher education. This uneven playing field is the reason for the small numbers of us in the tech industry...I guarantee he's either got parents as priviliged as most of yours, or he worked his ASS off to get to where he is now.
Ok. Working your ass off is necessarry for _everybody_ who wants to be succcessful. Those 300 white guys who had been taking C for four years had in an advantage in the class, maybe, but that doesn't mean much. Most of learning is done OUTSIDE of acadameia.
I'm white. I grew up in a crappy public school in a little rural town. Nobody in the town knew jack about computers, and there were no programming classes. We has one AP course as of when I graduated two years ago. I'm from a single-parent family, and that parent was disabled, so our income was shit. At peak, for the three of us (my mom, my sister, and myself) we made $12k annually. I had a poor k-12 education. But I worked my ass off to make sure that it didn't limit me. I had an interest in success and I overwhelmed my obstacles. Everybody's got to do it. Those kids in your EECS class got fed the training they needed, but that doesn't make them _more_ qualified than you or me who worked our ass off. In fact, without a little bit of trials and tribulations behind them, they're probably less qualified.
But what I really disagree with what you said is your supposition that:
Poor K-12 education == Poor SAT/ACT != quality higher education
That is simply not true. I had the shittiest education a white guy can get. But I flew out of high school with a 1540 SAT, and a year worth of work programming in a lab (with an hour-long commute) doing computational crystallography. I then made it into Caltech, moved to California (from New York). Incidentally, I soon realized that Caltech was not that great anyway, and dropped out and got a dot-com job while I support some artistic urges. So the way I see it, there's no necessary correlation between formal education, SAT scores, and quality higher education. You're simply wrong. What school you went to means nothing if you don't care about what you're trying to do, and you're not willing to work your ass off.
It's got nothing to do with being black or white or rich or poor or what education you were offered. It's about determination and being willing to work for what you want. For everyone. Get over it.
Ok. When a co-employee of mine left for another gig, I had to do research into what they were doing in order to see if there were any possible intellectual property issues to be dealt with. He had left for a company much like SafeWeb, although I won't mention the name here.
The basis idea is that thye act as a full-scale proxy for all your requests. That means that everything you do goes through them. And they are pretty thourough. every url gets changed on the pass through, if it's just going via a cgi-script, and then there are a few companies that actually act as right-out http-proxies.
Anyway...
Here are a few other thoughts about the technical details. One area of concern is how through are they about redirecting web requests, for example I was thinking this currently would not foil a web-bug.
Yeah. they do actually. The web bug acts just like any other document being requested. The people who placed the web bug will only get SafeWeb's redirector machine ALOT. But not you.
I wonder what type of servers they are using. Sounds like they need lots of SSL processing
Yeah. you're definately right on that one. In fact, they need alot of processing just to reinterpret all the html data... It's a huge effort, and I'm not sure how SafeWeb is handling cost, but I find it very unlikely that it's a model that could possibly succeed using just ad revenue. It's really compute-intensive (and bandwidth-intensive) to have everyone's traffic run through and edited by your machines.
That's all I've got for now. I'm sleepy. -Andrew
It's funny that you made so many comparison's to the Matrix's choreography. The same choreographer designed these scenes, too. That is all. Thanks you.
1 signifies dialing a long-distance call, a toll call in all cases except 1-800, 1-500, 1-888, 1-8NN. 0 signifies an operator-assisted call. If the FCC would change this so that you could be dialing crosstown into a different area code and dial a 1 or 0 but not be making a long-distance or operator assisted call.
Actually, where they're trying to change the meaning of '1' is in the first digit of you current 7 digit number. that way, people can have numbers like:
818-178-3453 which they can't now, because when they're in 818 and they only use a 7 digit number, the system would think they're trying to make a long distance call and wait for four more numbers...
That's all.
Of course, I'm against it anyway, because I don't want to remember 10 digits for every number. "7 +/- 2" anyone?
-Andrew I