IMHO, this URL is better than a CD-ROM. You can't lose it. You can't scratch it. You can't leave it in your office when you need it at home. You can give it to your friends and still keep it for yourself.
On the other hand a CD-ROM does not become useless when the publisher forgets to renew a domain registration (as in this case).
Large collection of legitimate e-mail needed more?
on
SpamArchive.org Launched
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't thing that a large archive of spam is hard to come by. You don't need to publicly invite submissions either - just acquire a domain and hosting with catchall e-mail service, set up e-mail forwarding to an address for your database, then publish several addresses under that domain where spammers are bound to pick them up (newsgroups, FFA lists) and register them with services who sell their e-mail lists with a lot of different demographic information vectors. You'll get as much input as you have a use for.
For calibrating spam filters you'll probably only want spam from the last few months as spam does evolve - e.g. it's mostly herb*l vi*gra these days.
What is at least equally needful but much more hard to come by is a large, representative collection of legitimate e-mail, to test spam filters for false positives. This collection would need to cover diverse languages, cultures and contexts (private, business/x-industry, business/y-industry, system error messages, automatic notification messages etc.)
What is hard about this collection of legitimate e-mail is that the privacy of both sender and recipient is affected, and that, if confidential information is masked or deleted, the e-mail isn't the original one and spam filters might evaluate it differently.
There is one subset of legitimate e-mail available: public archives of mailing lists. But these e-mails don't cover the style of e-mail in other contexts.
Just because they might get a monopoly in the mobile market doesn't mean the EU has the right to preemptively sue them...
Which is where the main error in the Slashdot articla comes in. The Slashdot article speaks of a suit where the referenced article correctly mentions a case
Antitrust measures by the EU commission work differently from antitrust measures by the US government.
The procedure in Europe is that the EU commission can, after reviewing evidence and submissions, impose, as an administrative not judicial measure, limitations on the company/companies concerned, e.g. not to do a certain merger.
If the company concerned won't go along, the company must sue. That's the other way round from the US where the government must bring the suit.
For example in the German speaking world (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) you can be sued if you refer to someone with a doctorat without mentioning 'Dr.'.
Not really. I don't know of any law to this effect, and anyone who'd take legal steps to enforce the use of his/her Dr. would make a laughing stock of himself/herself.
In informal contexts the Dr. is often dropped. When it's used, though, it is also used when it isn't a medical one. Quite a few German physicians don't have a doctorate anyway.
The legal risk is rather in the reverse case: calling yourself Dr. $name when you don't have a doctorate (or when you have a foreign doctorate which isn't certified as equivalent to a German doctorate by the state higher education department) is a criminal offence IIRC.
[...] Then, the registrar verifies the information by sending an email to the contact addresses that must be replied to within a certain timeframe. If the email bounces or there is no reply, the domain gets suspended (out of the DNS database until the problem is rectified). [...]
Fine for avoiding outdated addresses, but it would mean a lot of corporations dropping off the Net every now and then. There have been all those instances of domains put on hold because its owner did no manage to pay a yearly bill in time...
Closed systems can be verified by comparing the input to the output. But US voting system is based on anonymous votes. There is no way to verify that the output correctly matches the input....
That should not be impossible. Verification could be on the following lines:
Voter inputs vote.
Voting station prints out an audit slip for the voter to look at (through a window) but not take out.
Voter confirms that the vote is correct (in which case the vote is counted, and the audit slip is dropped in a tamper-proof container) or cancels the vote (in which case the audit slip is given to the voter)
This should guarantee to the voter that an accurate record of the vote has been retained (even if the software should be faulty or subverted), and the correctness of the count can be easily checked by looking at the audit slips in the tamper-proof container.
Then, you can just teach the users to save everything in "My Documents". Backup each user's "My Documents" folder every night and call it a day.
An improvement on this would be to use another folder than the Windows "My Documents" folder, with a company-specific name, as viruses, trojans, etc., are apt to look for the My Documents folder.
A good thing no US studio bought the rights
on
Enigma
·
· Score: 2, Funny
...or we'd have the story transposed to an US setting, never mind history.
With a centralized, standard voting system like Germany's open source plan, I would just have to know how to rig one system.
You might succeed, if you managed to subvert the central system, to have an incorrect result announced to the media on election day.
However this would soon be corrected, as the raw data for the permanent result will be published from the voting district level upwards.
The staff in the voting districts (which usually cover about 100-1000 registered voters) is made up of volunteers, mostly of nonpolitical city employees but also of party activists who volunteer to keep an eye on things. Occasionally, when appointed staff members have fallen sick, an early voter might get drafted. We are usually 8-10 persons and very, very unlikely to find anything in common to conspire for.
The counting of votes is open to the public (even if usually nobody, or the janitor of the school where the voting office is, looks in).
When we have counted, held a vote on any unclear ballot papers and the sums add up, we phone the results in to the city level. These results are further aggregated to the electoral district level and then, presumably, transmitted to Berlin in order to be processed by the software in question. Then we write up the protocol, package and seal the ballot papers into the voting box, and go home.
The local election commission (staffed by the town and by party representatives) later breaks the seal, reviews the unclear ballot papers (usually less then 1%), and perhaps also samples some votes for recounts. The result of the local election commission is the final one, and is aggregated into the federal final result. If I rightly recollect from the last federal elections, both the preliminary and the final results were published in our local paper on the voting district level. Of course we voting district volunteers would notice if results diverged from what we got on the evening of the election.
From the published voting-district level all calculations can be done with pen and paper, and will be by hopeful candidates who just did not get in.
The major safeguards of such a system are that the calculation of the final result can be checked by anyone on the outside. Of course, significantly, this only remains true if we stay with pen-and-paper ballots. The cost of that is that (at a rough guess) 1 % - 2 % of the voters have to serve in the voting offices
In the newest high-speed (ICE) trains of Deutsche Bahn there are both no-mobile-phone-use carriages (enforcement not by jammers but by fellow passengers) and carriages with repeaters for mobile phone signals.
To have repeaters is a good idea IMO as this allows the mobile phones to reduce their transmitting power.
BTW I wonder if the Japanese trains also have metal vapour coated windows. It used to be difficult to get a mobile connection from an ICE train. If I recollect correctly Deutsche Bahn at first replaced the windows on some cars, before they went for repeaters.
And don't forget the heavy railroad accident in Germany some years ago; how many people were killed at that time? about 150? Or was it more like 300?
101 killed, actually (it was on 1998-06-03 at Eschede). About as much as were killed in the next five days on Germany's roads with much less attention by the media.
Would it not be a better idea for Deutsche Bahn to use their excess cash to:
Secure Their Systems
Find Better Ways to Transport Radioactive Waste
Secure their system how? You cannot prevent physical access to about 44,000 kilometers (27,000 miles) of track. There is also no way around the requirement for railway safety equipment to fail to the safe side, i.e. to stop trains when sabotaged.
Find better ways to transport radioactive waste how? First of all, DB probably would be thankful if the government did not require using the safest way (i.e. by rail, where there is a rail line) to transport radioactive waste. As they are not free to decline the contract they are surely not being paid enough to make all the disruption worth their while.
Then, obviously, there is also the thought, often voiced in Germany by well meaning people: Why don't they simply address the grievances which make people commit politically motivated violence and sabotage?
In my opinion that cannot be done. If everything that the pamphlet concerned refers to as objectionable activities of German Rail (not only radioactive waste transport, but also conveying conscripts to army barracks, armaments transports and the transport of rejected asylum seekers back over the border) were to be abolished, these people could be relied on to think of other reasons. After all transporting people to work and to their vacations also serves The System. And it is very easy, if you put your mind to it, to be outraged by the transport of any given kind of material by rail.
And movies not based on books are routinely novelized; in fact movie -> book is way more common than (good) book -> movie
Sadly even movies based on a book will be novelized nowadays (Planet of the Apes: original novel by Pierre Boulle; movie novelization by William T. Quick).
I just hope that the film rights deal for LotR did not include novelization rights...
In Germany, a contract is not valid until it is notarized, giving it the backing of the state. The notary serves the purpose of actually seeing the person sign the written contract.
That is not the case, actually. Buying groceries would be somewhat onerous if all contracts needed to be notarized. For most classes of contracts it is not even a requirement that the contract is in writing. Most Germans only need real estate sales and wills notarized. I suppose the formal requirements for contracts are roughly the same as in other European countries.
That's really harmless. For one thing it makes for some chuckles when people get it wrong, and then we Germans should not complain, or the English-speaking world might decide to make us pay license fees for our use of English words.
Isn't this illegal somehow? If I have a product - a perfectly legal product - which I want to sell, why can't I showcase it an industry meeting?
Why should that be illegal? CeBIT is a trade show for IT in an office/business context. MP3 appliances, OTOH, are consumer electronics - the very field that Deutsche Messe AG is trying to move to the separate CeBIT Home fair, like CeBIT itself was separated from the main Hannover fair event in the 80s.
Would it be illegal for the organizers of an automobile trade show to prohibit booths showing diswashers? Obviously not.
Slashdot Mirror
IMHO, this URL is better than a CD-ROM. You can't lose it. You can't scratch it. You can't leave it in your office when you need it at home. You can give it to your friends and still keep it for yourself.
On the other hand a CD-ROM does not become useless when the publisher forgets to renew a domain registration (as in this case).
I don't thing that a large archive of spam is hard to come by. You don't need to publicly invite submissions either - just acquire a domain and hosting with catchall e-mail service, set up e-mail forwarding to an address for your database, then publish several addresses under that domain where spammers are bound to pick them up (newsgroups, FFA lists) and register them with services who sell their e-mail lists with a lot of different demographic information vectors. You'll get as much input as you have a use for.
For calibrating spam filters you'll probably only want spam from the last few months as spam does evolve - e.g. it's mostly herb*l vi*gra these days.
What is at least equally needful but much more hard to come by is a large, representative collection of legitimate e-mail, to test spam filters for false positives. This collection would need to cover diverse languages, cultures and contexts (private, business/x-industry, business/y-industry, system error messages, automatic notification messages etc.)
What is hard about this collection of legitimate e-mail is that the privacy of both sender and recipient is affected, and that, if confidential information is masked or deleted, the e-mail isn't the original one and spam filters might evaluate it differently.
There is one subset of legitimate e-mail available: public archives of mailing lists. But these e-mails don't cover the style of e-mail in other contexts.
Just because they might get a monopoly in the mobile market doesn't mean the EU has the right to preemptively sue them...
Which is where the main error in the Slashdot articla comes in. The Slashdot article speaks of a suit where the referenced article correctly mentions a case
Antitrust measures by the EU commission work differently from antitrust measures by the US government.
The procedure in Europe is that the EU commission can, after reviewing evidence and submissions, impose, as an administrative not judicial measure, limitations on the company/companies concerned, e.g. not to do a certain merger.
If the company concerned won't go along, the company must sue. That's the other way round from the US where the government must bring the suit.
For example in the German speaking world (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) you can be sued if you refer to someone with a doctorat without mentioning 'Dr.'.
Not really. I don't know of any law to this effect, and anyone who'd take legal steps to enforce the use of his/her Dr. would make a laughing stock of himself/herself.
In informal contexts the Dr. is often dropped. When it's used, though, it is also used when it isn't a medical one. Quite a few German physicians don't have a doctorate anyway.
The legal risk is rather in the reverse case: calling yourself Dr. $name when you don't have a doctorate (or when you have a foreign doctorate which isn't certified as equivalent to a German doctorate by the state higher education department) is a criminal offence IIRC.
Fine for avoiding outdated addresses, but it would mean a lot of corporations dropping off the Net every now and then. There have been all those instances of domains put on hold because its owner did no manage to pay a yearly bill in time...
That should not be impossible. Verification could be on the following lines:
This should guarantee to the voter that an accurate record of the vote has been retained (even if the software should be faulty or subverted), and the correctness of the count can be easily checked by looking at the audit slips in the tamper-proof container.
Then, you can just teach the users to save everything in "My Documents". Backup each user's "My Documents" folder every night and call it a day.
An improvement on this would be to use another folder than the Windows "My Documents" folder, with a company-specific name, as viruses, trojans, etc., are apt to look for the My Documents folder.
...or we'd have the story transposed to an US setting, never mind history.
You might succeed, if you managed to subvert the central system, to have an incorrect result announced to the media on election day.
However this would soon be corrected, as the raw data for the permanent result will be published from the voting district level upwards.
The staff in the voting districts (which usually cover about 100-1000 registered voters) is made up of volunteers, mostly of nonpolitical city employees but also of party activists who volunteer to keep an eye on things. Occasionally, when appointed staff members have fallen sick, an early voter might get drafted. We are usually 8-10 persons and very, very unlikely to find anything in common to conspire for.
The counting of votes is open to the public (even if usually nobody, or the janitor of the school where the voting office is, looks in).
When we have counted, held a vote on any unclear ballot papers and the sums add up, we phone the results in to the city level. These results are further aggregated to the electoral district level and then, presumably, transmitted to Berlin in order to be processed by the software in question. Then we write up the protocol, package and seal the ballot papers into the voting box, and go home.
The local election commission (staffed by the town and by party representatives) later breaks the seal, reviews the unclear ballot papers (usually less then 1%), and perhaps also samples some votes for recounts. The result of the local election commission is the final one, and is aggregated into the federal final result. If I rightly recollect from the last federal elections, both the preliminary and the final results were published in our local paper on the voting district level. Of course we voting district volunteers would notice if results diverged from what we got on the evening of the election.
From the published voting-district level all calculations can be done with pen and paper, and will be by hopeful candidates who just did not get in.
The major safeguards of such a system are that the calculation of the final result can be checked by anyone on the outside. Of course, significantly, this only remains true if we stay with pen-and-paper ballots. The cost of that is that (at a rough guess) 1 % - 2 % of the voters have to serve in the voting offices
In the newest high-speed (ICE) trains of Deutsche Bahn there are both no-mobile-phone-use carriages (enforcement not by jammers but by fellow passengers) and carriages with repeaters for mobile phone signals.
To have repeaters is a good idea IMO as this allows the mobile phones to reduce their transmitting power.
BTW I wonder if the Japanese trains also have metal vapour coated windows. It used to be difficult to get a mobile connection from an ICE train. If I recollect correctly Deutsche Bahn at first replaced the windows on some cars, before they went for repeaters.
And don't forget the heavy railroad accident in Germany some years ago; how many people were killed at that time? about 150? Or was it more like 300?
101 killed, actually (it was on 1998-06-03 at Eschede). About as much as were killed in the next five days on Germany's roads with much less attention by the media.
Would it not be a better idea for Deutsche Bahn to use their excess cash to:
Secure their system how? You cannot prevent physical access to about 44,000 kilometers (27,000 miles) of track. There is also no way around the requirement for railway safety equipment to fail to the safe side, i.e. to stop trains when sabotaged.
Find better ways to transport radioactive waste how? First of all, DB probably would be thankful if the government did not require using the safest way (i.e. by rail, where there is a rail line) to transport radioactive waste. As they are not free to decline the contract they are surely not being paid enough to make all the disruption worth their while.
Then, obviously, there is also the thought, often voiced in Germany by well meaning people: Why don't they simply address the grievances which make people commit politically motivated violence and sabotage?
In my opinion that cannot be done. If everything that the pamphlet concerned refers to as objectionable activities of German Rail (not only radioactive waste transport, but also conveying conscripts to army barracks, armaments transports and the transport of rejected asylum seekers back over the border) were to be abolished, these people could be relied on to think of other reasons. After all transporting people to work and to their vacations also serves The System. And it is very easy, if you put your mind to it, to be outraged by the transport of any given kind of material by rail.
And movies not based on books are routinely novelized; in fact movie -> book is way more common than (good) book -> movie
Sadly even movies based on a book will be novelized nowadays (Planet of the Apes: original novel by Pierre Boulle; movie novelization by William T. Quick).
I just hope that the film rights deal for LotR did not include novelization rights...
That is not the case, actually. Buying groceries would be somewhat onerous if all contracts needed to be notarized. For most classes of contracts it is not even a requirement that the contract is in writing. Most Germans only need real estate sales and wills notarized. I suppose the formal requirements for contracts are roughly the same as in other European countries.
AOL also acquired the Open Directory [dmoz.org] when they bought Netscape.
There were dire predictions from some Open Directory editors at the time. Up to now AOL has not interfered. Smart of them IMO.
shouldn't this be
= (T1-T2)/T1
as you'd get more than 100% efficiency otherwise for T1 > 2 * T2 ?
That's really harmless. For one thing it makes for some chuckles when people get it wrong, and then we Germans should not complain, or the English-speaking world might decide to make us pay license fees for our use of English words.
Isn't this illegal somehow? If I have a product - a perfectly legal product - which I want to sell, why can't I showcase it an industry meeting?
Why should that be illegal? CeBIT is a trade show for IT in an office/business context. MP3 appliances, OTOH, are consumer electronics - the very field that Deutsche Messe AG is trying to move to the separate CeBIT Home fair, like CeBIT itself was separated from the main Hannover fair event in the 80s.
Would it be illegal for the organizers of an automobile trade show to prohibit booths showing diswashers? Obviously not.