The Tor Browser Bundle for Linux has FF spoofing its user-agent as "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:17.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/17.0", for some reason. So the script will run on Linux and try to download the attack even if the attack might not succeed.
Except it's not stripping characters out, it's misinterpreting UTF-8 as single-byte characters. Seeing a quotation mark turn into three characters is indicative of this. Although I do see two of the characters then lost their accent marks, so some kind of stripping or substitution is going on.
So it's not just complete ignorance on the part of Slashdot's coders. It's intentional, but half-assed, so it makes things even uglier.
The typo in the article evidences that they were using UTF-8. If a quotation mark is turned into three separate characters, that's the tell-tale that it was UTF-8 (multibyte) and not a Windows code page (all single-byte encodings).
"Smart parentheses" add no value to a document, either. They're just fluff. We should start using | for both opening and closing parentheses, no? We could even use the same symbol in place of "smart brackets" and "smart braces."
Yes, professional-looking typography is such a blight. Instead we should use kludges invented for typewriters and held over since the 1960s in computer charsets because of 7-bit character size limitations.
Perhaps we should go back to using 'O' for '0' and 'l' for '1', too.
That bug is caused by Slashdot still refusing to implement this 20-year-old technology. I mean, this being some sort of cutting-edge tech blog and all, who'd expect them to properly support a character-encoding technology that came out two decades ago?
I question how the motivation behind developing this app differs from, say, developing an app to allow others to publicly geotag homes of people believed to belong to a particular religion or political party.
There's one obvious difference: This kind of paranoia and bigotry is popular among left-leaning types, so it's all good.
One consequence of this shift is that soon no one will know what a book's "real" price is. Price will be determined by demand...
That is the "real" price. Basic economics. Any other price than one set by demand is artificial (as in "price-fixing"). If prices are dropping due to the advent of Amazon, there are a number of possible causes: Decreasing marginal cost of creating each book (especially since the marginal cost of an e-book is probably less than a few millionths of a cent), supply increasing faster than demand, more complete/accurate information traversing the market thus more quickly setting an accurate price than before, or a combination of some or all these factors.
In other words, the price mechanism is working exactly as expected. The poor obsolescent publishers and book stores don't like it because they can't keep up, but this is exactly how a free market is supposed to work. There's no story here, other than to report that yet another group of buggy-whip makers are bemoaning their own demise and trying to contrive a reason it's a bad thing.
"For decades the United States of America has been one of the strongest defenders of the human right to seek asylum. Sadly, this right, laid out and voted for by the U.S. in Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is now being rejected by the current government of my country."
Snowden worked for the U.S. Government for how long and never learned the U.S. motto of "do as we say, not as we do"? He actually thinks things like laws and human rights apply to the U.S. Government?
I guess rapidly increasing the Firefox version number to the point of meaninglessness actually did pay off. I await Chrome 20,000 any day now, and Firefox once again playing catch-up.
Then the tax credit system as a whole needs to be dealt with. If you think the system of giving people back some of their stolen money is evil, then the government doing so in a discriminatory manner just compounds that, no?
And today is exactly ten years since SCOTUS issued its Lawrence v. Texas ruling, another landmark case in getting the government out of people's bedrooms.
Unfortunately the Tenth Amendment is completely meaningless nowadays, just like the other nine ahead of it. The feds' expansive treatment of the interstate commerce clause has been around at least since Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111 (1942), in which the feds stated that someone growing his own wheat was subject to federal regulation because it "affected" interstate commerce.
Since 1942 the Supreme Court rulings have only moved us further away from the Tenth Amendment's original intent, not back toward it. Some states have tried to push back, for example New Hampshire's HCR 6 in 2011. But even if it passed, I'm sure the feds would have promptly ignored it.
There is federal law defining this. 18 USC 2256, 2257.
Many states are being coerced into adopting parallel state statutes. New Hampshire here passed one 3-4 years ago. But since anything posted on the Internet the feds can easily claim "travelled in interstate commerce," the feds will apply their laws regardless of what any state says.
A lot of people are misunderstanding what Google is developing here.
This is not "automated" censorware that would make its own decisions as to what should be censored. It's not going to analyze images and decide to censor them on its own (which would result in the kind of false positives you claim).
It's censorware that would, once a live human Google employee has viewed a piece of content and made the decision that that particular content is to be suppressed, globally remove all copies of the same content from Google's database. See, one of the major obstacles censors face nowadays is the so-called "Streisand effect," where suppressing a piece of offensive content results in dozens, sometimes thousands, of people mirroring the content and publicizing their mirrors. If people want the information, they'll get it; censorship always fails, and in many cases completely backfires.
But, software like this will ensure that in the future, if a corporation or a government wants to suppress information, they will be able to do so.
Of course, Google and others will only use this censorware to go after CP, which as we all know "everyone" hates, so I guess everything is okay.
It's not rare. However, what can be seen from that article is that (a), people aren't out there trying to meticulously dig it up using search engines, but are instead setting up massive filesharing websites to be used amongst themselves, and (b), the mention of "extensive encryption" in the article means most of the content is probably on Tor, Freenet, and similar services. In other words, what Google is doing will be absolutely useless to actually go after CP. But it will make them look good, look like they're "doing something," which is all any politically-astute entity really cares about---and it will provide them with perfect cover for trying out some new censorship and surveillance software they're developing for who-knows-what.
Slashdot Mirror
The Tor Browser Bundle for Linux has FF spoofing its user-agent as "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:17.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/17.0", for some reason. So the script will run on Linux and try to download the attack even if the attack might not succeed.
Except it's not stripping characters out, it's misinterpreting UTF-8 as single-byte characters. Seeing a quotation mark turn into three characters is indicative of this. Although I do see two of the characters then lost their accent marks, so some kind of stripping or substitution is going on.
So it's not just complete ignorance on the part of Slashdot's coders. It's intentional, but half-assed, so it makes things even uglier.
Based on the quality of some of the articles that appear on here nowadays, no, it's a blog. Or maybe it's an advertising venue.
The typo in the article evidences that they were using UTF-8. If a quotation mark is turned into three separate characters, that's the tell-tale that it was UTF-8 (multibyte) and not a Windows code page (all single-byte encodings).
"Smart parentheses" add no value to a document, either. They're just fluff. We should start using | for both opening and closing parentheses, no? We could even use the same symbol in place of "smart brackets" and "smart braces."
Yes, professional-looking typography is such a blight. Instead we should use kludges invented for typewriters and held over since the 1960s in computer charsets because of 7-bit character size limitations.
Perhaps we should go back to using 'O' for '0' and 'l' for '1', too.
Maybe you should read the article.
That bug is caused by Slashdot still refusing to implement this 20-year-old technology. I mean, this being some sort of cutting-edge tech blog and all, who'd expect them to properly support a character-encoding technology that came out two decades ago?
Because our public electric grid is such a shining example of modernity, right?
And if only he hadn't gotten caught, he'd be on his way to federal office in no time.
This kind of surveillance is fortunately illegal for the police to do in New Hampshire.
Nice article summary. Still don't support that 1998 technology called "UTF-8," do ya, Slashdot?
Well of course they're storing them in the clear. How else could they send them to the NSA?
That's what they tell you, eh?
There's one obvious difference: This kind of paranoia and bigotry is popular among left-leaning types, so it's all good.
That is the "real" price. Basic economics. Any other price than one set by demand is artificial (as in "price-fixing"). If prices are dropping due to the advent of Amazon, there are a number of possible causes: Decreasing marginal cost of creating each book (especially since the marginal cost of an e-book is probably less than a few millionths of a cent), supply increasing faster than demand, more complete/accurate information traversing the market thus more quickly setting an accurate price than before, or a combination of some or all these factors.
In other words, the price mechanism is working exactly as expected. The poor obsolescent publishers and book stores don't like it because they can't keep up, but this is exactly how a free market is supposed to work. There's no story here, other than to report that yet another group of buggy-whip makers are bemoaning their own demise and trying to contrive a reason it's a bad thing.
Snowden worked for the U.S. Government for how long and never learned the U.S. motto of "do as we say, not as we do"? He actually thinks things like laws and human rights apply to the U.S. Government?
I guess rapidly increasing the Firefox version number to the point of meaninglessness actually did pay off. I await Chrome 20,000 any day now, and Firefox once again playing catch-up.
Then the tax credit system as a whole needs to be dealt with. If you think the system of giving people back some of their stolen money is evil, then the government doing so in a discriminatory manner just compounds that, no?
And today is exactly ten years since SCOTUS issued its Lawrence v. Texas ruling, another landmark case in getting the government out of people's bedrooms.
Because the argument he's making is from the 1940s.
Unfortunately the Tenth Amendment is completely meaningless nowadays, just like the other nine ahead of it. The feds' expansive treatment of the interstate commerce clause has been around at least since Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111 (1942), in which the feds stated that someone growing his own wheat was subject to federal regulation because it "affected" interstate commerce.
Since 1942 the Supreme Court rulings have only moved us further away from the Tenth Amendment's original intent, not back toward it. Some states have tried to push back, for example New Hampshire's HCR 6 in 2011. But even if it passed, I'm sure the feds would have promptly ignored it.
There is federal law defining this. 18 USC 2256, 2257.
Many states are being coerced into adopting parallel state statutes. New Hampshire here passed one 3-4 years ago. But since anything posted on the Internet the feds can easily claim "travelled in interstate commerce," the feds will apply their laws regardless of what any state says.
A lot of people are misunderstanding what Google is developing here.
This is not "automated" censorware that would make its own decisions as to what should be censored. It's not going to analyze images and decide to censor them on its own (which would result in the kind of false positives you claim).
It's censorware that would, once a live human Google employee has viewed a piece of content and made the decision that that particular content is to be suppressed, globally remove all copies of the same content from Google's database. See, one of the major obstacles censors face nowadays is the so-called "Streisand effect," where suppressing a piece of offensive content results in dozens, sometimes thousands, of people mirroring the content and publicizing their mirrors. If people want the information, they'll get it; censorship always fails, and in many cases completely backfires.
But, software like this will ensure that in the future, if a corporation or a government wants to suppress information, they will be able to do so.
Of course, Google and others will only use this censorware to go after CP, which as we all know "everyone" hates, so I guess everything is okay.
It's not rare. However, what can be seen from that article is that (a), people aren't out there trying to meticulously dig it up using search engines, but are instead setting up massive filesharing websites to be used amongst themselves, and (b), the mention of "extensive encryption" in the article means most of the content is probably on Tor, Freenet, and similar services. In other words, what Google is doing will be absolutely useless to actually go after CP. But it will make them look good, look like they're "doing something," which is all any politically-astute entity really cares about---and it will provide them with perfect cover for trying out some new censorship and surveillance software they're developing for who-knows-what.