Oh yes, I forgot about the "Corporations get a free pass for their bad decisions, and the government should be blamed, as long as they can show they were trying to make a profit" excuse.
Perhaps BP would have been better off investing its money in keyboardless locked-down netbooks? Or genetically engineered soybeans? Or a whole host of other activities that are profitable but don't risk destroying significant parts of the ecosystem?
Hey, I've an idea: maybe BP could invest in this "alternative fuels" thingie. It would have the added benefit that their ads would suddenly become truthful!
I don't think current or previous versions of Firefox are bloated as such. The complaints have more to do with the UI and the responsiveness/memory usage of the system rather than the feature set or the physical size of the product.
I would, I have to say, be saddened if Firefox drifted away from its current UI to a more Safari or Chrome inspired UI. I've used both for short periods of time, never felt at home, and always come back. What's needed is for the bugs to be fixed. It would be nice to see certain under-the-hood architectural changes done too (we can argue about what that should compromise, but I'd personally like to see it running over a managed code system with future plug-ins required to be delivered in managed-code form, but that's a whole other debate), but right now I'd settle for something that doesn't use 50% CPU simply because I have a lot of tabs open.
If you introduce a viable, usable, public transport system (not asking for much, just regular, frequent (every 20 minutes OK?), buses, running from, say, 6am to 11pm, with bus-stops within half an mile of every populated part of the cities) here in and around Stuart, Florida, I'll use it. If you can make those buses run all night, and ensure adequate links to other cities, so much the better.
Alas, the Right has been in charge of transportation policy for the last few decades, what buses there are are run on a charity basis and are neither frequent nor likely to go where you need them to, planning policies make it uneconomic for private industry to run proper bus services, and as for other alternatives like cycling, the car centric planning makes cycling extremely dangerous in this area. Walking five miles to work every day is equally unrealistic.
Oh, and before you come up with the usual crap about how I'm just saying it or whatever, evidence shows the opposite. People in cities with real public transportation tend to use it in preference to cars where they can. In Britain I didn't bother having a car, I didn't want one, bicycles, buses and trains took me everywhere I wanted to go, while cars were expensive, stress inducing, and unpleasant.
I *hate* driving. Anyone sane and rational does. There's a reason why property prices within cities with good PT systems tends to be sky high, even now. Alas, transportation policy has never been set by the rational, and within the US public transportation has been deprecated and in large part made barely usable by people with ideological attachments to one of the worst forms of transportation ever invented.
It's a safe bet that fifty years from now, someone with a ten-digit Slashdot user ID will post a story about how clueless we were in 2010 about the earth-shattering importance of something few of us have heard of today except as a scientific curiosity.
Meh, I'm still pretty sure the iPad isn't going anywhere...
I'm guessing he's assuming you'd be powering an electric car with mains electricity (using a battery or an extremely long extension cord) in which case the non-oil based power sources are likely to be coal (which supposedly contains some radioactive material) and Nuclear (whose radioactivity is more obvious.)
Or he might be referring to Solar power, which I'm told, by a friend of mine who's the CEO of BP, actually involves a giant Nuclear Fusion reaction and enormous amounts of radioactivity across the electromagnetic spectrum being let loose across the entire Earth with no shielding whatsoever. Dangerous stuff this Solar nonsense, oil is much safer;-)
Again, I think you're missing the point. Every security system can be circumvented. That's not misleading, a judge doesn't give a rats ass whether the system needs to be circumvented by the world's greatest computer hacker getting a blow-job from Halle Berry while John Travolta holds a gun to his head, from a room above a bar in a country 5,000 miles away, or whether it's done via the simple act of throwing a brick through the window and accessing the hardware directly.
You think that matters, because you're a computer geek, and so you see things through a geek's perspective. Judges don't.
What the law generally wants to see is that you didn't let someone in, you didn't leave it open, you took steps to make it clear to anyone trying to get access that they'd need to hack in when they do.
You switched off the SSID broadcast. You locked the door of your house. By doing both, you made a pro-active attempt to secure your network. Do those, and no judge in their right mind is going to say you were facilitating.
With respect, you're basically changing the subject. This isn't a game of oneupmanship!
The issue here is that you're liable because you made no effort to secure the router. Any effort, no matter how token, would change that as long as it was done in good faith. No court is going to expect you to take extreme precautions, because virtually every method you might choose is circumventable even if, at the end of the day, it involves someone throwing a brick through your window and hooking up a wire. Yes, it's more likely the hacker will find another victim than try to break your security, but in all honesty, that's true if you made a token effort to secure your network anyway. An unsecured network with a SSID of "linksys" will always be the first choice of anyone trying to casually get an internet connection. Courts look for some security, not perfect security, because there's no such thing.
That's the point I was trying to make, and why I made the explanation in response to your original comment.
The guy decides to really secure his network. He disables broadcasting the SSID, and implements WPA2 encryption. This, however, provides access only to a small non-Internet connected mini-network with no DHCP and one machine, identified by IP address only, which only responds (ie no pinging) to a specific IP address using the ports needed for an IPsec VPN. The VPN, in turn, uses 1024 bit blowfish encryption and requires a SecureID password to initiate the connection. The VPN provides access to the outside world, but requires you already know the IP addresses of the DNS server and default router, none of which are in an easily guessable netblock.
The system is also set up so any unauthorized activity results in the outside connection being dropped (ie any attempts to guess the passwords result in the wireless router shutting itself down. And, just to add that extra special extra layer of security, the owner switches off the entire system when he leaves to go on vacation.
So an elite hacker comes along and has access to the network within thirty seconds. How does he do it? How does he circumvent all these security measures?
Answer: he throws a brick through the window, enters the house, and HOOKS HIS LAPTOP UP TO THE DSL MODEM.
Virtually every security device can be circumvented.
It's safe to say he didn't. If he had configured his router to not broadcast the SSID, then he would, legally (in most jurisdictions, I assume Germany is no different), have taken proactive steps to secure his network (even if they were token efforts) and we wouldn't have a story.
Virtually every security device can be circumvented, and as a result the question usually comes down to "Did you make an effort or not?" For much the same reason, DVD's CSS system was still considered an access control mechanism whose circumvention was illegal long after it was cracked and details posted throughout the Internet. (I say was not to make people relax and think it isn't now, but because the DVD CCA has pretty much given up on enforcing it.)
I'm going to stick my neck out and suggest it's more a case of someone deciding not to check for errors in a bit of code.
In Twitter, you can have either protected tweets or unprotected tweets. If the former, then if someone wants to follow you, they have to request it, and you can either "accept" them following or deny it.
It looks to me that the commands are sent in-band, and that the command "accept " is related to the above code. What isn't happening is any check that the person identified ever actually sent a request in the first place.
So, this isn't an evil conspiracy to send people advertising (was BAG being serious?), and I doubt it's test code either. The above just "fits" with everything we know about twitter.
Nah, they just need to make 'em cheaper and more populist. If what you were saying was true, then art house cinema would be the most profitable movie system in the world.
I doubt Fear Factor is that expensive, reality shows tend to be popular with TV execs because they're both high ratings and cheap.
The better question is whether shows like House, Family Guy, {Dark Angel|Firefly|T:SCC|Dollhouse|Other canceled cult show}, 24, Castle, Chuck, etc, are more enjoyable than Mr Bean, which, to me, is yes, in large part because I can't stand Mr Bean!
That's not to say I don't agree budgets couldn't be cut. Dollhouse proved that, the second series was considerably better than the first (despite being a tiny fraction of the cost) and had it not been for the subject matter I think it'd have attracted a huge audience. But even then, we're still looking in the high six digits, for a dollar a pop we'd still have to find close to a million people to buy each episode, rather than watch it passively because it's free. And with a typical successful prime time show getting around ten million viewers, it's hard for me to believe that the majority of shows would get a million paying viewers, especially if the budgets were cut.
They sell DVDs long after they've recouped most or all of the revenue from the TV networks who in turn get it from advertising. And as I said earlier, with DVDs you don't pay $1-2 per episode you want, you may $1-2 per episode on the disc. The unsubtle difference is that you end up paying money you wouldn't if it was a-la carte.
Not sure the Microsoft comparison is helpful, but...
Here's the deal with TV. Virtually all TV shows cost a lot to make. They're not movie style budgets, but they're pretty high anyway. Dollhouse's second season cost around $700,000 per episode to make, which was considered "unbelievably cheap" by the industry, and is actually one of the major reasons why Fox signed it. More usually, TV shows cost somewhere in the region of two to three million dollars per 45 minute episode. The most obscene costs I'm personally aware of (though I don't work in the industry) is the Dark Angel first season opener, about 90 minutes of television that cost $20 million.
Now, the business model the studios use is to initially sell these shows to TV networks, who have exclusivity over a period of time and can sell advertising. This recovers, say, $1 million per episode within the US, and another million or so overseas. After that, they can start to look for additional revenue streams, such as repeats in syndication and DVD sales to recover the difference.
So to get to the point about DVD sales, yeah, it's about $1 per episode, but you're committing to buy all the episodes, even the bad ones (pity the Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles "fan" who wants to purchase both of the decent episodes in Season Two, but has to buy all of them instead), which the a-la carte model advocated here doesn't allow for, and you're buying it after the studio has had time to (indirectly) use advertising (that you've probably seen yourself as most people buy DVD sets of shows they've already watched) to fund a major chunk of the cost of the show.
And imagine, for a second, that the studios decided the broadcasters weren't worth bothering about, and they should just sell shows online direct to viewers. Ignoring the logistics of that at the moment (and it's a temporary thing), it's far from obvious that most people would happily switch from ad-supported TV to a-la carte buying of individual episodes. Ad supported TV requires no commitment on a viewer's part, which makes viewers happier to try the system and watch new shows. The chances of any substantial show managing to attract three million paying viewers is fairly slim.
This is why you're never going to see the studios switch to a $1 per episode immediate download system for the types of content you watch today. You're either going to see a dramatic reduction in costs, with Whedon leading the way, or you're going to see downloads at that pricing limited to shows that have been broadcast, syndicated, and released on DVD, long ago.
And if anyone doubts this, they should ask themselves why it isn't being done already. The studios don't have a monopoly on dramatic productions, virtually every film student has the equipment needed to produce a professional level production. And plenty are yearning for the opportunity to make that great show that none of the studios are interested in. The talent is there, but nobody is willing to invest the money, and they're not prepared to do it because the business model doesn't make sense.
Can I just say how nice it is to see a comment of mine has two replies, open it, and find that they're both legitimate;-) Geez, in my case this has only been going on for less than a week in my case, I can't imagine how you feel!
I don't think that's going to happen. I just followed a link presumably posted by clone, clicked on Parent a few times, and got to this.
It looks like exactly the same thing we've been tracking here: the bogus legal threats, the spamming of testimonials, the demands critics prove they have arbitrary qualifications... and it's from one month ago, from what I can figure out from an entirely unrelated argument.
I waded into this a few days ago, tried a different tack to get APK to behave normally (well, my first few comments were constructive, now I'm trying to make it clear he's causing information about his more dubious activities to be spread further if he continues this), but I'm having no luck either. The man is either stupid, or psychotic.
Oh look, it's the troll that's been stalking Clone53421, Squiggleslash, and Tom Hudson, and now GMHowell.
For those new to this, the troll is someone claiming to be a defender of a certain Alexander Peter Kowalski, the author of a tool, apkapp2backgrounddaemonprocessengine, generally considered malware by a large number of anti-malware companies and organizations.
Mr Kowalski, or his admirer, got upset because someone had the audacity to link to a threat describing Kowalski's attempts to remove some embarrassing comments posted under his name. Rather than deal with it maturely, this person has been attempting to stalk said poster and those who pointed out Kowalski wasn't doing himself any favors.
So if you see these comments posted as replies to clone, squiggleslash, Tom Hudson, or GM Howell, now you know why they're appearing. And if you feel like joining in, well, come on in, the water's lovely!
Ask Nir Sofer or Dr. Mark Russinovich of Microsoft if their wares have been also classifed that way by antivirus or antispyware companies. Of course, now I can ask you what was asked of you before:
And I'll repeat the same answers. Your software wasn't fleetingly classified as malware, it still is classified as malware, and has been, from what I can figure out, for several years. It continues to be so long after you've made legal threats to those same organizations.
And my privacy being what it is, no I'm not going to list every single application I've developed, magazine article I've had published, or anything similar, but I will point out, again, that I no more need to write malware and write articles promoting snake-oil solutions to viruses to criticize your stalking and harassment of your critics, than Jon Stewart needs to run a major, corrupt, corporation in order to criticize Kenneth Lay.
My comments, and the comments of others here, stand by themselves. I have no idea whether you're too stupid to understand that concept (which seems possible, because if you're to be taken at face value then you've gone about defending yourself against some great slight to your reputation in the most inanely stupid way possible), or whether you're just trying to stir the pot even further, but the people reading this are listening to what's being said, not taking sides based upon who they think has the better qualifications; but even if they did think the way you're claiming to think, and did this through some superficial claim of qualifications, engaging in a kind of ad-hominem reading/comprehension system, they'd still be taking the side of those you're harassing, because it's a choice between someone whose qualifications are "unknown" (though Tom has actually been fairly public about his legal experience and success with the legal system), and someone who has software classified as malware to their name, and who's written articles promoting evidently idiotic solutions to virus protection online. They'd trust Jon Stewart over Kenneth Lay.
Glad you posted this. I didn't get a chance to see it before it was deleted. Good comment from Clone and I'm not sure why it was deleted.
BTW, are you going to set your virtual lawyer, you know, the one you said was on retainer, on yourself now that you've posted that? That would help everyone, keep legal fees down and stuff because you already know your own IP address so you will not need the subpoena to obtain it, and identify the person behind it.
I love the gall of this guy, stalks multiple people on Slashdot for a few days and then accuses one of his victims of "stalking" him because he posted on another forum.
Your point is, what, exactly? That RealClimate removes what it believes to be false statements from the comments?
And why is that bad when the site itself aims to report the actual science and correct the numerous myths and falsehoods being spread by the anti-science people? If RealClimate was putting itself forward as a debating chamber with no views on the legitimacy of the scientific method, that'd be one thing. But it's not, it undermines the aims of the site if the site, albeit through comments made by third parties in the comments section, becomes an amplifier for the very myths and lies its trying to debunk.
If a website that promotes mathematics kept removing comments arguing that integration involves changing x^2 into x/2, using obscufication to promote the lie, would you have a problem with that? Does the fact that a more vocal group have chosen to lie about climate science change that principle?
Slashdot Mirror
Oh yes, I forgot about the "Corporations get a free pass for their bad decisions, and the government should be blamed, as long as they can show they were trying to make a profit" excuse.
Perhaps BP would have been better off investing its money in keyboardless locked-down netbooks? Or genetically engineered soybeans? Or a whole host of other activities that are profitable but don't risk destroying significant parts of the ecosystem?
Hey, I've an idea: maybe BP could invest in this "alternative fuels" thingie. It would have the added benefit that their ads would suddenly become truthful!
I don't think current or previous versions of Firefox are bloated as such. The complaints have more to do with the UI and the responsiveness/memory usage of the system rather than the feature set or the physical size of the product.
I would, I have to say, be saddened if Firefox drifted away from its current UI to a more Safari or Chrome inspired UI. I've used both for short periods of time, never felt at home, and always come back. What's needed is for the bugs to be fixed. It would be nice to see certain under-the-hood architectural changes done too (we can argue about what that should compromise, but I'd personally like to see it running over a managed code system with future plug-ins required to be delivered in managed-code form, but that's a whole other debate), but right now I'd settle for something that doesn't use 50% CPU simply because I have a lot of tabs open.
Yup. And OpenVMS is going to be the Enterprise operating system of choice. HP didn't buy DEC just to sit on it... ;-)
Well, there's that whole Jeremiah Wright thing that's rather a dead giveaway...
If you introduce a viable, usable, public transport system (not asking for much, just regular, frequent (every 20 minutes OK?), buses, running from, say, 6am to 11pm, with bus-stops within half an mile of every populated part of the cities) here in and around Stuart, Florida, I'll use it. If you can make those buses run all night, and ensure adequate links to other cities, so much the better.
Alas, the Right has been in charge of transportation policy for the last few decades, what buses there are are run on a charity basis and are neither frequent nor likely to go where you need them to, planning policies make it uneconomic for private industry to run proper bus services, and as for other alternatives like cycling, the car centric planning makes cycling extremely dangerous in this area. Walking five miles to work every day is equally unrealistic.
Oh, and before you come up with the usual crap about how I'm just saying it or whatever, evidence shows the opposite. People in cities with real public transportation tend to use it in preference to cars where they can. In Britain I didn't bother having a car, I didn't want one, bicycles, buses and trains took me everywhere I wanted to go, while cars were expensive, stress inducing, and unpleasant.
I *hate* driving. Anyone sane and rational does. There's a reason why property prices within cities with good PT systems tends to be sky high, even now. Alas, transportation policy has never been set by the rational, and within the US public transportation has been deprecated and in large part made barely usable by people with ideological attachments to one of the worst forms of transportation ever invented.
Meh, I'm still pretty sure the iPad isn't going anywhere...
I'm guessing he's assuming you'd be powering an electric car with mains electricity (using a battery or an extremely long extension cord) in which case the non-oil based power sources are likely to be coal (which supposedly contains some radioactive material) and Nuclear (whose radioactivity is more obvious.)
Or he might be referring to Solar power, which I'm told, by a friend of mine who's the CEO of BP, actually involves a giant Nuclear Fusion reaction and enormous amounts of radioactivity across the electromagnetic spectrum being let loose across the entire Earth with no shielding whatsoever. Dangerous stuff this Solar nonsense, oil is much safer ;-)
Again, I think you're missing the point. Every security system can be circumvented. That's not misleading, a judge doesn't give a rats ass whether the system needs to be circumvented by the world's greatest computer hacker getting a blow-job from Halle Berry while John Travolta holds a gun to his head, from a room above a bar in a country 5,000 miles away, or whether it's done via the simple act of throwing a brick through the window and accessing the hardware directly.
You think that matters, because you're a computer geek, and so you see things through a geek's perspective. Judges don't.
What the law generally wants to see is that you didn't let someone in, you didn't leave it open, you took steps to make it clear to anyone trying to get access that they'd need to hack in when they do.
You switched off the SSID broadcast. You locked the door of your house. By doing both, you made a pro-active attempt to secure your network. Do those, and no judge in their right mind is going to say you were facilitating.
With respect, you're basically changing the subject. This isn't a game of oneupmanship!
The issue here is that you're liable because you made no effort to secure the router. Any effort, no matter how token, would change that as long as it was done in good faith. No court is going to expect you to take extreme precautions, because virtually every method you might choose is circumventable even if, at the end of the day, it involves someone throwing a brick through your window and hooking up a wire. Yes, it's more likely the hacker will find another victim than try to break your security, but in all honesty, that's true if you made a token effort to secure your network anyway. An unsecured network with a SSID of "linksys" will always be the first choice of anyone trying to casually get an internet connection. Courts look for some security, not perfect security, because there's no such thing.
That's the point I was trying to make, and why I made the explanation in response to your original comment.
OK. Let me give you an example.
The guy decides to really secure his network. He disables broadcasting the SSID, and implements WPA2 encryption. This, however, provides access only to a small non-Internet connected mini-network with no DHCP and one machine, identified by IP address only, which only responds (ie no pinging) to a specific IP address using the ports needed for an IPsec VPN. The VPN, in turn, uses 1024 bit blowfish encryption and requires a SecureID password to initiate the connection. The VPN provides access to the outside world, but requires you already know the IP addresses of the DNS server and default router, none of which are in an easily guessable netblock.
The system is also set up so any unauthorized activity results in the outside connection being dropped (ie any attempts to guess the passwords result in the wireless router shutting itself down. And, just to add that extra special extra layer of security, the owner switches off the entire system when he leaves to go on vacation.
So an elite hacker comes along and has access to the network within thirty seconds. How does he do it? How does he circumvent all these security measures?
Answer: he throws a brick through the window, enters the house, and HOOKS HIS LAPTOP UP TO THE DSL MODEM.
Virtually every security device can be circumvented.
It's safe to say he didn't. If he had configured his router to not broadcast the SSID, then he would, legally (in most jurisdictions, I assume Germany is no different), have taken proactive steps to secure his network (even if they were token efforts) and we wouldn't have a story.
Virtually every security device can be circumvented, and as a result the question usually comes down to "Did you make an effort or not?" For much the same reason, DVD's CSS system was still considered an access control mechanism whose circumvention was illegal long after it was cracked and details posted throughout the Internet. (I say was not to make people relax and think it isn't now, but because the DVD CCA has pretty much given up on enforcing it.)
Thanks for posting this. It was a great mash-up of all of your cliches and ridiculous phrases and arguments and helped immeasurably when I wrote this
I'm going to stick my neck out and suggest it's more a case of someone deciding not to check for errors in a bit of code.
In Twitter, you can have either protected tweets or unprotected tweets. If the former, then if someone wants to follow you, they have to request it, and you can either "accept" them following or deny it.
It looks to me that the commands are sent in-band, and that the command "accept " is related to the above code. What isn't happening is any check that the person identified ever actually sent a request in the first place.
So, this isn't an evil conspiracy to send people advertising (was BAG being serious?), and I doubt it's test code either. The above just "fits" with everything we know about twitter.
Nah, they just need to make 'em cheaper and more populist. If what you were saying was true, then art house cinema would be the most profitable movie system in the world.
I doubt Fear Factor is that expensive, reality shows tend to be popular with TV execs because they're both high ratings and cheap.
The better question is whether shows like House, Family Guy, {Dark Angel|Firefly|T:SCC|Dollhouse|Other canceled cult show}, 24, Castle, Chuck, etc, are more enjoyable than Mr Bean, which, to me, is yes, in large part because I can't stand Mr Bean!
That's not to say I don't agree budgets couldn't be cut. Dollhouse proved that, the second series was considerably better than the first (despite being a tiny fraction of the cost) and had it not been for the subject matter I think it'd have attracted a huge audience. But even then, we're still looking in the high six digits, for a dollar a pop we'd still have to find close to a million people to buy each episode, rather than watch it passively because it's free. And with a typical successful prime time show getting around ten million viewers, it's hard for me to believe that the majority of shows would get a million paying viewers, especially if the budgets were cut.
They sell DVDs long after they've recouped most or all of the revenue from the TV networks who in turn get it from advertising. And as I said earlier, with DVDs you don't pay $1-2 per episode you want, you may $1-2 per episode on the disc. The unsubtle difference is that you end up paying money you wouldn't if it was a-la carte.
Not sure the Microsoft comparison is helpful, but...
Here's the deal with TV. Virtually all TV shows cost a lot to make. They're not movie style budgets, but they're pretty high anyway. Dollhouse's second season cost around $700,000 per episode to make, which was considered "unbelievably cheap" by the industry, and is actually one of the major reasons why Fox signed it. More usually, TV shows cost somewhere in the region of two to three million dollars per 45 minute episode. The most obscene costs I'm personally aware of (though I don't work in the industry) is the Dark Angel first season opener, about 90 minutes of television that cost $20 million.
Now, the business model the studios use is to initially sell these shows to TV networks, who have exclusivity over a period of time and can sell advertising. This recovers, say, $1 million per episode within the US, and another million or so overseas. After that, they can start to look for additional revenue streams, such as repeats in syndication and DVD sales to recover the difference.
So to get to the point about DVD sales, yeah, it's about $1 per episode, but you're committing to buy all the episodes, even the bad ones (pity the Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles "fan" who wants to purchase both of the decent episodes in Season Two, but has to buy all of them instead), which the a-la carte model advocated here doesn't allow for, and you're buying it after the studio has had time to (indirectly) use advertising (that you've probably seen yourself as most people buy DVD sets of shows they've already watched) to fund a major chunk of the cost of the show.
And imagine, for a second, that the studios decided the broadcasters weren't worth bothering about, and they should just sell shows online direct to viewers. Ignoring the logistics of that at the moment (and it's a temporary thing), it's far from obvious that most people would happily switch from ad-supported TV to a-la carte buying of individual episodes. Ad supported TV requires no commitment on a viewer's part, which makes viewers happier to try the system and watch new shows. The chances of any substantial show managing to attract three million paying viewers is fairly slim.
This is why you're never going to see the studios switch to a $1 per episode immediate download system for the types of content you watch today. You're either going to see a dramatic reduction in costs, with Whedon leading the way, or you're going to see downloads at that pricing limited to shows that have been broadcast, syndicated, and released on DVD, long ago.
And if anyone doubts this, they should ask themselves why it isn't being done already. The studios don't have a monopoly on dramatic productions, virtually every film student has the equipment needed to produce a professional level production. And plenty are yearning for the opportunity to make that great show that none of the studios are interested in. The talent is there, but nobody is willing to invest the money, and they're not prepared to do it because the business model doesn't make sense.
Can I just say how nice it is to see a comment of mine has two replies, open it, and find that they're both legitimate ;-) Geez, in my case this has only been going on for less than a week in my case, I can't imagine how you feel!
I don't think that's going to happen. I just followed a link presumably posted by clone, clicked on Parent a few times, and got to this.
It looks like exactly the same thing we've been tracking here: the bogus legal threats, the spamming of testimonials, the demands critics prove they have arbitrary qualifications... and it's from one month ago, from what I can figure out from an entirely unrelated argument.
I waded into this a few days ago, tried a different tack to get APK to behave normally (well, my first few comments were constructive, now I'm trying to make it clear he's causing information about his more dubious activities to be spread further if he continues this), but I'm having no luck either. The man is either stupid, or psychotic.
For those new to this, the troll is someone claiming to be a defender of a certain Alexander Peter Kowalski, the author of a tool, apkapp2backgrounddaemonprocessengine, generally considered malware by a large number of anti-malware companies and organizations.
CA
PestPatrol
SpywareDB ("Dangerous!")
Freedom Anti-Spyware
Spycheck (Spanish-language) - "Recomendacion: DESACTIVAR Y ELIMINAR"
Spyware No-More("Threat risk: High risk", "Advice: Remove This is a very high risk threat and should be removed immediately as to prevent harm to your computer and / or to protect your privacy")
Mr Kowalski, or his admirer, got upset because someone had the audacity to link to a threat describing Kowalski's attempts to remove some embarrassing comments posted under his name. Rather than deal with it maturely, this person has been attempting to stalk said poster and those who pointed out Kowalski wasn't doing himself any favors.
So if you see these comments posted as replies to clone, squiggleslash, Tom Hudson, or GM Howell, now you know why they're appearing. And if you feel like joining in, well, come on in, the water's lovely!
And I'll repeat the same answers. Your software wasn't fleetingly classified as malware, it still is classified as malware, and has been, from what I can figure out, for several years. It continues to be so long after you've made legal threats to those same organizations.
And my privacy being what it is, no I'm not going to list every single application I've developed, magazine article I've had published, or anything similar, but I will point out, again, that I no more need to write malware and write articles promoting snake-oil solutions to viruses to criticize your stalking and harassment of your critics, than Jon Stewart needs to run a major, corrupt, corporation in order to criticize Kenneth Lay.
My comments, and the comments of others here, stand by themselves. I have no idea whether you're too stupid to understand that concept (which seems possible, because if you're to be taken at face value then you've gone about defending yourself against some great slight to your reputation in the most inanely stupid way possible), or whether you're just trying to stir the pot even further, but the people reading this are listening to what's being said, not taking sides based upon who they think has the better qualifications; but even if they did think the way you're claiming to think, and did this through some superficial claim of qualifications, engaging in a kind of ad-hominem reading/comprehension system, they'd still be taking the side of those you're harassing, because it's a choice between someone whose qualifications are "unknown" (though Tom has actually been fairly public about his legal experience and success with the legal system), and someone who has software classified as malware to their name, and who's written articles promoting evidently idiotic solutions to virus protection online. They'd trust Jon Stewart over Kenneth Lay.
Oops, ignore the second paragraph. 99% of the AC posts are from you know who, and I misread it as a result.
Glad you posted this. I didn't get a chance to see it before it was deleted. Good comment from Clone and I'm not sure why it was deleted.
BTW, are you going to set your virtual lawyer, you know, the one you said was on retainer, on yourself now that you've posted that? That would help everyone, keep legal fees down and stuff because you already know your own IP address so you will not need the subpoena to obtain it, and identify the person behind it.
*crunch* *crunch* this popcorn is delicious!
I love the gall of this guy, stalks multiple people on Slashdot for a few days and then accuses one of his victims of "stalking" him because he posted on another forum.
Please keep going, this is hilarious!
Except elephants have trunks.
Your point is, what, exactly? That RealClimate removes what it believes to be false statements from the comments?
And why is that bad when the site itself aims to report the actual science and correct the numerous myths and falsehoods being spread by the anti-science people? If RealClimate was putting itself forward as a debating chamber with no views on the legitimacy of the scientific method, that'd be one thing. But it's not, it undermines the aims of the site if the site, albeit through comments made by third parties in the comments section, becomes an amplifier for the very myths and lies its trying to debunk.
If a website that promotes mathematics kept removing comments arguing that integration involves changing x^2 into x/2, using obscufication to promote the lie, would you have a problem with that? Does the fact that a more vocal group have chosen to lie about climate science change that principle?