Well let's see. Ibragimov makes a few claims such as "it's bullshit!", "it's a coincidence!" and gives a very brief outline of how SendSafe works, revealling nothing not in the report. He also claims he's not been spoken by any law enforcement agency regarding the matter, which is possibly true. Hardly a point by point rebuttal is it, and never mind the maxim "spammers lie" which means everything he says will be taken with a huge pinch of salt.
The only interesting comment I found is that his company is currently having difficulties due to trojans, something that the SendSafe forums seem to confirm. That seems quite probable, but it hardly helps his case - why, exactly, would trojans be causing his SendSafe business any problems? Unless, of course, it might be something to do with other trojans that he didn't write such as NetSky/Sasser preventing SoBig getting as many hosts as it used to? Given that there was a spat between the various trojan authors, complete with a possible Russian connection, just before Sven Jaschen was arrested that at least seems entirely plausible to me.
Then again, New Mexico is currently showing as a swing to Bush according to CNN's 52% of reported precincts, which would cancel out Nevada. I'll say one thing for this Electoral College system you have over there in the US; it certainly keeps the tension up until the bitter end...
It was a bit flakey earlier on, appeared to briefly go down (DNS and all) but it's been fine ever since. Then again, I am in the UK, so perhaps they have put some geographical based IP filtering in place to alieviate some of the load. Anyway, they are currently showing Bush at 247 and Kerry at 195, but some of their data is *way* out of date compared to CNN, yet some appears to be ahead.
"Don't count your chickens" is right! At the moment the states appear to be going *exactly* as they did in 2000. With only five electoral votes between Bush & Gore in 2000, all it will take is one state to swing to Kerry, and at the moment New Hampshire is starting to look like it might just be that one state... Hell, it's flip-flopped between Bush and Kerry so many times, it's only fitting it should end up Democrat.;)
Typo first; the patent is actually for a "Method and apparatus for spherical panning", not "planning" (GameDAILY got this wrong too) and appears to have originally been assigned to Tektronix, perhaps best known for making printers and, IIRC, UNIX Terminals.
To quote the abstract from the USPTO page: "A graphics display terminal performs a pan operation with respect to a view motion center to effectuate spherical panning, thereby providing perspective and non-perspective views. Three dimensional instructions stored in terminal memory are re-transformed in accordance with a panned direction. Also a zoom feature is provided so that displayed images may be magnified as desired." Which makes it totally clear... NOT!
But even then, think about it: each time you hit a page with a link to some doubleclick url, you end up hitting port 80 of your own machine
Which is why the smarter ones amongst us mapped it (and numerous others) to 0.0.0.0 instead. I've yet to find a single IP stack where that isn't the network equivalent of/dev/null.
4: WHY exactly is global warming bad? Wont it give more landmass (eg, melts permafrost siberia) and lessen the "nice tropical -120F on antartica?
Actually, that's not necessarily the case. During the last ice age the effect of all the additional water being locked up in the arctic ice cap caused the sea levels to fall. As a result land that is currently underwater was exposed by the declining sea level, forming amongst other things the land bridge from the European mainland to the British Isles. As the ice age came to an end and the ice sheets melted, those areas of land were again submerged, opening up the Irish Sea and, sometime later, the English channel. This is why there are fewer species of mammals in Ireland than there are in the UK mainland; they never got the chance to cross the land bridges before they were submerged by the melting ice.
Of course, saying there is going to be more or less land kind of misses the point. What's the use of having an extra few million square km of land, if it's under an icesheet a few km thick? Or if we go the other way, having a nice warm, but somewhat smaller, Eurasia/North America if all the lands around the equator get to become an infertile desert like the Sahara? Those are two extreme examples of course, the reality is likely to fall somewhere in between; but gains in one area of the globe will still be off set by losses in another.
Lots of people get confused over this, not suprising given the off hand way this gets used to promote the viewpoints that global warming will or will not cause the sea levels to rise due to the ice caps melting. The basic fact is that a lump of ice, whether it's an ice cube in a glass or an iceberg in an ocean, will displace it's own mass of water. So, if our iceberg weighs 1m tonnes, then the volume of water it will be displacing will also weigh 1m tonnes. If it melts, then then water level will not change in the slightest, if we ignore other factors such as evaporation and so on. The part of an iceberg visible above the water level is the additional volume created by the property of water to expand when it is frozen.
All well and good - we can have all the floating ice in the world melt and the sea levels won't be effected in the slightest. However, not all ice is floating freely on an ocean - a good deal of it lies over land; if the ice on the northern areas of Eurasia, North America, and the Antarctic land mass melts, or moves as a glacial flow to warmer climes and melts, then the water that is produced will eventually flow into the seas. That ice melt *will* contribute to a rise in the oceans, and it's kind of difficult to imagine a scenario where just the free floating ice melts, while that over land remains unaffected.
This hit the SpamAssassin mailling list a couple of days ago, the only difference is the location of the file which might help explain the Stanford reference. In the original the line was:
Whoever is behind this certainly seems to be doing a very sloppy job of it. Yahoo, Melbourne IT, Stanford, hosting at "everyone.net"; hardly a who's who of dodgy companies and "bullet proof" service providers, is it? Frankly, I'm expecting to be reading a Slashdot story about a bust by the end of the week, and that's being generous.
SCO thinks IBM put its code into AIX and exceeded the bounds of their contract. Wonderful; a whole year of FUD and wild claims about Linux and we've come full circle and are back to the original reason for the case - breach of contract. Unless IBM then took that same code out of AIX and put it into Linux, the OSS community is free and clear on this point no matter what the outcome in court. The only problem I have with this outcome is that if it's shown that IBM *did* exceed the terms of the contract and put some code into AIX that it shouldn't have done, then SCO is going to get damages. You can bet your ass SCO won't be paying any damages for the defamation of Linux and the GPL in the mean time.
Then again, it could just be another fluff piece to try and boost the stock price up from yet another 52-week low. On the subject of which, the price of SCOX is now at almost exactly the same level it was right before Linux got dragged kicking and screaming into the court case and things went crazy...
Damn! Forgot to cover the ampersand... Each successive call of the command *also* spawns a seperate instance of itself, behaving in the same manner. Exponential growth and recursion too!
Yeah, it's a fork bomb with tiny amount of obfuscation, if you can call using a non-alpha character as a function name obfuscation. Things become clearer if you format it properly, and replace the user defined function name ":" with "foo", like this:
#!/bin/bash foo() { foo | foo & };
foo
So, we define a function, "foo", which runs "foo" piped into itself as a background task, then call "foo", and off we go. Essentially you are trying to execute the infinitely long command line of:
Just stand in front of one of the advertising panels and no one is going to risk taking a potshot at you in case they miss and get whisked off to buy some dumb widget... Worst of all, if the ads are proxied through the game server instead of being downloaded directly from the advertising company, it's going to be a little bit more tricky to block them. Particularly if doing so involves reverse engineering the game protocol as that potentially puts you on the wrong side of the DMCA and its equivalents...
Re:If You Want a Serious Answer... Don't Get Cute
on
Rob Pike Responds
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Well, as the guy who asked the question, I'm not so sure that the analogy to MAD (or Mutually Assured Destruction for those to young to remember) is all that extreme. Comparing an IP patent to an ICBM, yes, but the analogy was to the arms race, not the devastation that each causes. How many times have we seen a patent lawsuit dissolve into a cross licensing deal with a mere token financial settlement, if any? Patent's are not being used to protect the inventors rights, they are being used to deter potential IP lawsuits: you sue us, and we'll sue you right back with *our* IP portfolio...
The fact of the matter is that software patents are not going to go away, something that I touched upon in the original question. Aside from that, thier main use, so far at least, seems to be either for dying companies too leech some more existance from a more successful one, or too browbeat a smaller competitor into competition through the threat of legal costs they cannot sustain. Whether you think that is equivalent to the intent of a patent; essentially granting the inventor a reward for their efforts, no matter how stupid or obvious that invention might seem, is another matter.
Patents in general, and software patents in particular, are undeniably a big issue in the IT world at the moment. That Rob Pike dismissed the entire question out of hand leaves me with two more possible conclusions to yours: He's pro-IP patents, but is afraid to admit to it on Slashdot, although to be fair he'd *would* get savaged in the comments. Alternatively, he is anti-IP patents, but is afraid to admit it where his employers might see - which would say a lot about his employers if that is the case.
Throw away any test charts into the corner of the room
Toss any rulers on top of the test charts
Newspapers? - on top of the rulers
Avoid any brick walls
Pick up camera (and attach lens if applicable)
Go outside (yes, it really does exist!)
Shoot numerous pictures of various subjects, at varying apertures, focal lengths and durations. Using a flash for some of the shots would be a good idea too.
Make some nice large prints of your efforts
Do the prints look OK to you? If they do, congratulations - consider the test passed, and you might even have a few prints you can actually use for something as well. If not *now* it's time to retrieve the test charts, rulers etc.
Seriously, the only people that really need these charts are people that are designing or calibrating imaging systems. A charming term that I think was coined over on DPReview to describe everyone else is "measurebator". Believe me, if you've got a lens bad enough to make a difference visible in a print, then you'll know it without any test charts. I had a lens that backfocussed, a Nikon zoom lens I got for my film camera some years ago. I picked up the problem without test charts just fine (I often focus on an eye in portraits), and so out came the rulers, or in my case a newspaper. The largest focussing error in the series of test shots that I took was less than 2mm at a range of 3m.
Needless to say, I've never touched a test chart, or any facsimilie thereof, since then. The *only* chart that I do have is a Gretag Macbeth colour chart (it's a grid of 24 coloured squares) to get colour balance correct. I also have a couple of Kodak Grey cards for setting white balance if you want to nit pick and call one of those a "chart".
According to the press release, the Epson has a "3.8-inch Photo Fine LCD" at a resolution of 212 ppi. Assuming that's the diagonal, and extrapolating from the photo that gives a size of about 6"x3.5", which is not too bad really. I'm not too sure about "killing" the iPod, but it might just steal some sales from Vosonic's XS drive range. I'm certainly leaning more towards the Epson for a bulk storage device to accompany my DSLR on field trips right now...
I thought this was planned to be a four episode mini-series.
I don't know whether that's how it was shot or not, but it's being aired as two double length episodes of about 90 minutes each instead of four regular episodes.
"UCE", or Unsolicited Commercial Email, is a particular class of Spam - those that clearly involve some kind of commerce or trade such as peddling "Generic Viagra". Another is UBE, or Unsolicited Bulk Email, which refers to those without a definable commercial aspect, but usually entail some sort of scam or attempt to subvert the readers email/web client.
Um, no, that's largely China and maybe the Korean peninsula, although it does extend far enough to the North to encompass Vladivostok I think. Still, I suppose they have a better excuse than we do here Europe... That big red blob is mainly over the lowlands of Holland and surrounding areas, so it's either tulips or the output from the "coffee" shops of Amsterdam. I'm thinking it's probably not the tulips.;)
True enough, but I didn't go into that because it's not entirely on-topic for the discussion at hand. SPF and the like have almost zero impact on the problem of spam as they are intended to stop the problem of joe-jobs and social engineering emails claiming to be from "admin@your.bank.com". Indeed, there's nothing to stop a spammer publishing SPF records for their domains, as several of them do in the hope that someone will think that adds some legitimacy to the email.
I publish SPF records for all my personal domains, yet even so I'm getting about 100 DSN failure messages a day as a result of virus backscatter where my domain was spoofed as the sender. My MTA rejects the email with a "user unknown" failure on the "Rcpt To:" of course, and it's not that much traffic either, but that's not the point. If all of the ISPs concerned would implement SPF (not to mention stop sending bounces when they have already ID'd the email as a trojan) then that number would fall to zero. Not only that, but the ISP concerned wouldn't have had to deal with the spam or trojan in the first place - every one wins except for the trojan writer or spammer, and there's nothing wrong in that.
Once again, there seems to be some confusion over this in the linked articles, both of which were written after the situation stabilised, so for those that don't know:
SPF (Sender Permitted From) is one of the original DNS based schemes for verifying an IP was authorised to send an email. It is an open standard using text only records that was proposed by Meng Wong of pobox.com and is still going just fine with many big mail domains (Hotmail, Gmail...) using it.
Caller-ID is the original closed standard Microsoft proposal that uses XML records. It goes beyond SPF in its scope, but is encumbered by numerous pending patents which Microsoft has yet to adequately disclose.
Sender-ID is a derivation of Caller-ID, also by Microsoft, that was proposed to the IETF as a potential "standard" mechanism for acheiving DNS based sender validation. Owing to it sharing many of the same patent issues of Caller-ID and a failure of the parties in the MARID working group at the IETF to arrive at a compromise that open source developers were happy with, Caller-ID was rejected.
Caller-ID and Sender-ID are currently languishing in Redmond, with Microsoft yet to make any announcements about whether or not it intends to implement them anyway. SPF-Classic on the otherhand is still gaining momentum, with tens of thousands of domains registered as having SPF records, plus an unknown number of unregistered ones. SPF-Classis is also supported by most MTAs and anti-spam solutions, either directly or via a plug-in, and is most likely to become the "default standard" as things stand.
Try telling that to the inmates of Belmarsh Prison who have been imprisoned under our shiny new anti-terrorism laws here in the UK. True, maybe some or even all of them should be in there and the evidence really is truly sensitive and could, for instance, compromise an undercover asset if made public. Even so, they are still being held without being formally charged with anything at all in many cases.
With so many of your ideas being used with such ubiquity in modern operating systems, what is your stance on the issue of patenting of software and other "intellectual property" concepts? Assuming that business isn't going to let IP patents go away as they strive to build patent stockpiles reminiscent of the nuclear arms buildup during the cold war, how would you like to see the issue resolved?
The actual refuse is simply loaded up into the used Progress supply pods which are then de-orbited and burn up in the atmosphere. The stuff piling up on the station ideally wants to be returned to Earth, either for servicing (spacesuits are expensive), scientific analysis or proper disposal. Getting this sh^Htuff back to Earth ideally requires the shuttle, since the manned Russian Soyuz craft barely have room for the crews they are exchanging. True, you could jettison the stuff, but when even a paint fleck can cause significant collision damage at the kind of velocities involved, what do you think a broken exercise bike is going to do?
Slashdot Mirror
The only interesting comment I found is that his company is currently having difficulties due to trojans, something that the SendSafe forums seem to confirm. That seems quite probable, but it hardly helps his case - why, exactly, would trojans be causing his SendSafe business any problems? Unless, of course, it might be something to do with other trojans that he didn't write such as NetSky/Sasser preventing SoBig getting as many hosts as it used to? Given that there was a spat between the various trojan authors, complete with a possible Russian connection, just before Sven Jaschen was arrested that at least seems entirely plausible to me.
Then again, New Mexico is currently showing as a swing to Bush according to CNN's 52% of reported precincts, which would cancel out Nevada. I'll say one thing for this Electoral College system you have over there in the US; it certainly keeps the tension up until the bitter end...
It was a bit flakey earlier on, appeared to briefly go down (DNS and all) but it's been fine ever since. Then again, I am in the UK, so perhaps they have put some geographical based IP filtering in place to alieviate some of the load. Anyway, they are currently showing Bush at 247 and Kerry at 195, but some of their data is *way* out of date compared to CNN, yet some appears to be ahead.
"Don't count your chickens" is right! At the moment the states appear to be going *exactly* as they did in 2000. With only five electoral votes between Bush & Gore in 2000, all it will take is one state to swing to Kerry, and at the moment New Hampshire is starting to look like it might just be that one state... Hell, it's flip-flopped between Bush and Kerry so many times, it's only fitting it should end up Democrat. ;)
To quote the abstract from the USPTO page: "A graphics display terminal performs a pan operation with respect to a view motion center to effectuate spherical panning, thereby providing perspective and non-perspective views. Three dimensional instructions stored in terminal memory are re-transformed in accordance with a panned direction. Also a zoom feature is provided so that displayed images may be magnified as desired." Which makes it totally clear... NOT!
Which is why the smarter ones amongst us mapped it (and numerous others) to 0.0.0.0 instead. I've yet to find a single IP stack where that isn't the network equivalent of /dev/null.
Actually, that's not necessarily the case. During the last ice age the effect of all the additional water being locked up in the arctic ice cap caused the sea levels to fall. As a result land that is currently underwater was exposed by the declining sea level, forming amongst other things the land bridge from the European mainland to the British Isles. As the ice age came to an end and the ice sheets melted, those areas of land were again submerged, opening up the Irish Sea and, sometime later, the English channel. This is why there are fewer species of mammals in Ireland than there are in the UK mainland; they never got the chance to cross the land bridges before they were submerged by the melting ice.
Of course, saying there is going to be more or less land kind of misses the point. What's the use of having an extra few million square km of land, if it's under an icesheet a few km thick? Or if we go the other way, having a nice warm, but somewhat smaller, Eurasia/North America if all the lands around the equator get to become an infertile desert like the Sahara? Those are two extreme examples of course, the reality is likely to fall somewhere in between; but gains in one area of the globe will still be off set by losses in another.
All well and good - we can have all the floating ice in the world melt and the sea levels won't be effected in the slightest. However, not all ice is floating freely on an ocean - a good deal of it lies over land; if the ice on the northern areas of Eurasia, North America, and the Antarctic land mass melts, or moves as a glacial flow to warmer climes and melts, then the water that is produced will eventually flow into the seas. That ice melt *will* contribute to a rise in the oceans, and it's kind of difficult to imagine a scenario where just the free floating ice melts, while that over land remains unaffected.
Whoever is behind this certainly seems to be doing a very sloppy job of it. Yahoo, Melbourne IT, Stanford, hosting at "everyone.net"; hardly a who's who of dodgy companies and "bullet proof" service providers, is it? Frankly, I'm expecting to be reading a Slashdot story about a bust by the end of the week, and that's being generous.
Then again, it could just be another fluff piece to try and boost the stock price up from yet another 52-week low. On the subject of which, the price of SCOX is now at almost exactly the same level it was right before Linux got dragged kicking and screaming into the court case and things went crazy...
Damn! Forgot to cover the ampersand... Each successive call of the command *also* spawns a seperate instance of itself, behaving in the same manner. Exponential growth and recursion too!
Just stand in front of one of the advertising panels and no one is going to risk taking a potshot at you in case they miss and get whisked off to buy some dumb widget... Worst of all, if the ads are proxied through the game server instead of being downloaded directly from the advertising company, it's going to be a little bit more tricky to block them. Particularly if doing so involves reverse engineering the game protocol as that potentially puts you on the wrong side of the DMCA and its equivalents...
The fact of the matter is that software patents are not going to go away, something that I touched upon in the original question. Aside from that, thier main use, so far at least, seems to be either for dying companies too leech some more existance from a more successful one, or too browbeat a smaller competitor into competition through the threat of legal costs they cannot sustain. Whether you think that is equivalent to the intent of a patent; essentially granting the inventor a reward for their efforts, no matter how stupid or obvious that invention might seem, is another matter.
Patents in general, and software patents in particular, are undeniably a big issue in the IT world at the moment. That Rob Pike dismissed the entire question out of hand leaves me with two more possible conclusions to yours: He's pro-IP patents, but is afraid to admit to it on Slashdot, although to be fair he'd *would* get savaged in the comments. Alternatively, he is anti-IP patents, but is afraid to admit it where his employers might see - which would say a lot about his employers if that is the case.
- Throw away any test charts into the corner of the room
- Toss any rulers on top of the test charts
- Newspapers? - on top of the rulers
- Avoid any brick walls
- Pick up camera (and attach lens if applicable)
- Go outside (yes, it really does exist!)
- Shoot numerous pictures of various subjects, at varying apertures, focal lengths and durations. Using a flash for some of the shots would be a good idea too.
- Make some nice large prints of your efforts
- Do the prints look OK to you? If they do, congratulations - consider the test passed, and you might even have a few prints you can actually use for something as well. If not *now* it's time to retrieve the test charts, rulers etc.
Seriously, the only people that really need these charts are people that are designing or calibrating imaging systems. A charming term that I think was coined over on DPReview to describe everyone else is "measurebator". Believe me, if you've got a lens bad enough to make a difference visible in a print, then you'll know it without any test charts. I had a lens that backfocussed, a Nikon zoom lens I got for my film camera some years ago. I picked up the problem without test charts just fine (I often focus on an eye in portraits), and so out came the rulers, or in my case a newspaper. The largest focussing error in the series of test shots that I took was less than 2mm at a range of 3m.Needless to say, I've never touched a test chart, or any facsimilie thereof, since then. The *only* chart that I do have is a Gretag Macbeth colour chart (it's a grid of 24 coloured squares) to get colour balance correct. I also have a couple of Kodak Grey cards for setting white balance if you want to nit pick and call one of those a "chart".
According to the press release, the Epson has a "3.8-inch Photo Fine LCD" at a resolution of 212 ppi. Assuming that's the diagonal, and extrapolating from the photo that gives a size of about 6"x3.5", which is not too bad really. I'm not too sure about "killing" the iPod, but it might just steal some sales from Vosonic's XS drive range. I'm certainly leaning more towards the Epson for a bulk storage device to accompany my DSLR on field trips right now...
I don't know whether that's how it was shot or not, but it's being aired as two double length episodes of about 90 minutes each instead of four regular episodes.
"UCE", or Unsolicited Commercial Email, is a particular class of Spam - those that clearly involve some kind of commerce or trade such as peddling "Generic Viagra". Another is UBE, or Unsolicited Bulk Email, which refers to those without a definable commercial aspect, but usually entail some sort of scam or attempt to subvert the readers email/web client.
U nsolicited? Check!
C ommericial? Check!
E mail? Check!
That spells "spam" in my book. I think I'll just add an entry to my SMTP access list now, and get it over with:
yelp.com ERROR:"554 Use Google, you dumb fsck!"
That should do it. :)
Um, no, that's largely China and maybe the Korean peninsula, although it does extend far enough to the North to encompass Vladivostok I think. Still, I suppose they have a better excuse than we do here Europe... That big red blob is mainly over the lowlands of Holland and surrounding areas, so it's either tulips or the output from the "coffee" shops of Amsterdam. I'm thinking it's probably not the tulips. ;)
I publish SPF records for all my personal domains, yet even so I'm getting about 100 DSN failure messages a day as a result of virus backscatter where my domain was spoofed as the sender. My MTA rejects the email with a "user unknown" failure on the "Rcpt To:" of course, and it's not that much traffic either, but that's not the point. If all of the ISPs concerned would implement SPF (not to mention stop sending bounces when they have already ID'd the email as a trojan) then that number would fall to zero. Not only that, but the ISP concerned wouldn't have had to deal with the spam or trojan in the first place - every one wins except for the trojan writer or spammer, and there's nothing wrong in that.
Caller-ID and Sender-ID are currently languishing in Redmond, with Microsoft yet to make any announcements about whether or not it intends to implement them anyway. SPF-Classic on the otherhand is still gaining momentum, with tens of thousands of domains registered as having SPF records, plus an unknown number of unregistered ones. SPF-Classis is also supported by most MTAs and anti-spam solutions, either directly or via a plug-in, and is most likely to become the "default standard" as things stand.
Try telling that to the inmates of Belmarsh Prison who have been imprisoned under our shiny new anti-terrorism laws here in the UK. True, maybe some or even all of them should be in there and the evidence really is truly sensitive and could, for instance, compromise an undercover asset if made public. Even so, they are still being held without being formally charged with anything at all in many cases.
With so many of your ideas being used with such ubiquity in modern operating systems, what is your stance on the issue of patenting of software and other "intellectual property" concepts? Assuming that business isn't going to let IP patents go away as they strive to build patent stockpiles reminiscent of the nuclear arms buildup during the cold war, how would you like to see the issue resolved?
The actual refuse is simply loaded up into the used Progress supply pods which are then de-orbited and burn up in the atmosphere. The stuff piling up on the station ideally wants to be returned to Earth, either for servicing (spacesuits are expensive), scientific analysis or proper disposal. Getting this sh^Htuff back to Earth ideally requires the shuttle, since the manned Russian Soyuz craft barely have room for the crews they are exchanging. True, you could jettison the stuff, but when even a paint fleck can cause significant collision damage at the kind of velocities involved, what do you think a broken exercise bike is going to do?