A bit late; I visited serials.ws 6 months ago and was surprised to see it ask to install some sort of "xxxtoolbar" under firefox. Apparently %5 market share is big enough to be worth the effort already..
That's the problem with the law. Everybody says "this is common-sense; this is fair; this is what I do, therefore it must be what the law says" and when you tell them they're wrong they don't believe you. Most people in NZ think they have the legal right to rip their own CD's to play on their computer or iPod. They don't, and I'd like to see the law changed but since everybody does it and nobody ever gets arrested for it people won't even believe that it's actually NOT ALLOWED under the law.
What you need is your own website where you can set people right on copyright..
I know of another law-type person (paralegal, actually) who got fed up with arguing about copyright, GPL, etc.. on slashdot and set up her own website to get away from it. Pamela Jones; you might have heard of her:)
I was going to suggest a slightly modified swastika, perhaps with curved sides and four colour panels. But then I noticed that Microsoft is already using that design...
Not quite. You need at least a P90 to play 128kbps MP3 -> 44100/16/stereo. A 486 can almost manage if you cut back to 22050/16/mono. This is best-possible-case, with a dedicated player such as dosamp, or init=/bin/bash and using mpg123..
Prior art; I hacked up a php script that would generate an email address, encoding the time and IP into a moderately short alphanumeric string in order to better identify address harvesters. How to do it was obvious to me at the time (about 6 years ago?)
The basic concept is the same; big numbers to shorter string.. just because it's co-ordinates instead of an IP address should make no difference at all.
unfortunately for your argument, the US patent office has a different definition of "novel."
and that definition is...?
I'll save you the bother of looking it up; it has to be non-obvious to anyone having reasonable knowledge and skill in the area.
Ask any geek to solve the problem of encoding a large number into a memorable URL. 100% of them would come up with a scheme similar to this. Most would immediately suggest base64 and quickly discover that urls have some character limitations (case and most punctuation) and scale down the allowable characters accordingly.
Many geeks also know already that some characters (O/0, l/1) are visually confusing and would avoid those characters for any scheme where the sequence may need to be printed out or retyped by hand..
Well, I simply can't agree with the guy. In _some_ cases it may be simply a matter of stupidity, but there's no doubt in my mind that most of the time Microsoft intentionally breaks standards in weird and undocumented ways because they know that they have a near-monopoly (in all areas; desktop, browsers, office software, and naive end users). Most end-users will assume Microsoft's way is the standard and everything else is broken.
was that comment made _before_ or _after_ Microsoft got caught detecting the Opera browser and returning a stylesheet so broken that no browser (even MSIE) would display the page properly?
Sounds like the Microsoft car. "This car has preformed an illegal operation and will be shut down".. and if a reboot doesn't fix it, you have to reinstall the engine.
If you own the car, why is it illegal to drive without wearing seatbelts? Why is it illegal to fit red and blue flashing lights? Why is it illegal to remove the numberplates?
The stats pages no longer show up on any search engines, so a) The spammers get no 'pagerank' from those links (which is what they do it for) and b) they can't find the stats pages.
I was getting shitloads of referer spam; within a week (as soon as google updated) it dropped to nothing. I've had no referer spam AT ALL since then.
Perhaps they'll start just crawling the entire web, but it appears that at the moment they do a google search to find pages that post their referer stats.
even if it doesn't; what's to stop the zombie process from intercepting outbound smtp traffic (as most virus scanners already do) and sniffing the password the first time you send a legitimate email?
Forcing mail through the ISP's mailserver is a great first step; clearly enough ISP's are doing this that it's come to the attention of the malware writers.
The next step is to limit outbound mail at the ISP; 20 messages per day for ordinary home users should be plenty, and you can allow more (as many as you need, 20 messages at a time) by going to a webpage somewhere (no standard; leave it to each ISP to decide the best method for this).
Commercial accounts decide for themselves what's a reasonable limit; pay a deposit and you can have 'no limit' but if you get infected you forfeit the deposit..
Another idea might be to scan outbound mail for known viruses, likely virus attachments (who the hell legitimately mails screensavers and/or control panel components..?) and 'spam indicators' (large variety of different from addresses, etc). If it looks suspicious and/or there's an unreasonable amount of it, block all further mail until someone checks it out and turns it on again..
Dead trees are 'easily accessable', they're just not computer-searchable. It seems to be good enough for my local telephone company, if I wanted a searchable CDrom of the telephone directory it would cost me several hundred dollars. The less convenient dead-tree version is given away for free..
"Certainly you can never underestimate the level of malicious people out there"
And he can?
Of course he can; Microsoft has been GROSSLY UNDERESTIMATING the motivation, depth of knowledge, speed to exploit, and I guess overall 'level' of malicious people for years.
Crushed recycled glass (often sold as 'artificial sand' for fishtanks) does the job. You could also use roadmarking beads. Or you could go buy the proper blasting media and all the gear, but for a one-off project you probably just want to use what you can find lying around. Compressor, electrical tape and plastic tube are stuff you probably already have in your garage.
Ideally one would should or could set a limit on the number of emails per day with their ISP. For example, most people don't go over about 20 per day. If more than 20 are sent, then some sort of confirmation must be given.
So why not just DO THAT and forget about the stupid payment system? Limit each zombied box to about the number of messages a person would normally send and you would greatly reduce the spam problem.
I think IBM ought to just take all the data that SCO wants, dump it on a big slag of a hard disk in tarred text form, and dump it in SCO's lap.
Hard disk? Way too convenient! They need to print it. On a crappy old daisy-chain printer, partly because it's cheap but mostly because the 'ribbon imprint' and bad alignment of those fsckers makes OCR near impossible..
Alternatively, mask it with PVC tape then etch the glass by sandblasting it. You only need a small compressor, some plastic tubing and a bag of very fine artificial sand, as used in fishtanks. Quite a lot safer than hydrofluric acid.
Slashdot Mirror
A bit late; I visited serials.ws 6 months ago and was surprised to see it ask to install some sort of "xxxtoolbar" under firefox. Apparently %5 market share is big enough to be worth the effort already..
That's the problem with the law. Everybody says "this is common-sense; this is fair; this is what I do, therefore it must be what the law says" and when you tell them they're wrong they don't believe you. Most people in NZ think they have the legal right to rip their own CD's to play on their computer or iPod. They don't, and I'd like to see the law changed but since everybody does it and nobody ever gets arrested for it people won't even believe that it's actually NOT ALLOWED under the law.
:)
What you need is your own website where you can set people right on copyright..
I know of another law-type person (paralegal, actually) who got fed up with arguing about copyright, GPL, etc.. on slashdot and set up her own website to get away from it. Pamela Jones; you might have heard of her
Not as silly as it sounds (for small distances at least..)
Oops wrong link, try this one
Not as silly as it sounds (for small distances at least..)
2 42 27.shtml?tid=126&tid=133&tid=186&tid=95
http://science.slashdot.org/science/04/03/31/22
I was going to suggest a slightly modified swastika, perhaps with curved sides and four colour panels. But then I noticed that Microsoft is already using that design...
Not quite. You need at least a P90 to play 128kbps MP3 -> 44100/16/stereo. A 486 can almost manage if you cut back to 22050/16/mono. This is best-possible-case, with a dedicated player such as dosamp, or init=/bin/bash and using mpg123..
Been there; done it; nobody printed a T-shirt..
When you go to a secure page Firefox highlights the URL yellow.
When you go to a page with anything but ordinary ASCII characters perhaps it could highlight the URL blue, or red, or something...
Prior art; I hacked up a php script that would generate an email address, encoding the time and IP into a moderately short alphanumeric string in order to better identify address harvesters. How to do it was obvious to me at the time (about 6 years ago?)
The basic concept is the same; big numbers to shorter string.. just because it's co-ordinates instead of an IP address should make no difference at all.
unfortunately for your argument, the US patent office has a different definition of "novel."
and that definition is...?
I'll save you the bother of looking it up; it has to be non-obvious to anyone having reasonable knowledge and skill in the area.
Ask any geek to solve the problem of encoding a large number into a memorable URL. 100% of them would come up with a scheme similar to this. Most would immediately suggest base64 and quickly discover that urls have some character limitations (case and most punctuation) and scale down the allowable characters accordingly.
Many geeks also know already that some characters (O/0, l/1) are visually confusing and would avoid those characters for any scheme where the sequence may need to be printed out or retyped by hand..
Well, I simply can't agree with the guy. In _some_ cases it may be simply a matter of stupidity, but there's no doubt in my mind that most of the time Microsoft intentionally breaks standards in weird and undocumented ways because they know that they have a near-monopoly (in all areas; desktop, browsers, office software, and naive end users). Most end-users will assume Microsoft's way is the standard and everything else is broken.
was that comment made _before_ or _after_ Microsoft got caught detecting the Opera browser and returning a stylesheet so broken that no browser (even MSIE) would display the page properly?
Sounds like the Microsoft car. "This car has preformed an illegal operation and will be shut down".. and if a reboot doesn't fix it, you have to reinstall the engine.
If you own the car, why is it illegal to drive without wearing seatbelts? Why is it illegal to fit red and blue flashing lights? Why is it illegal to remove the numberplates?
You own the car. You don't own the road.
Always a fun thing to do. As a special bonus, you can sometimes get free backup copies this way. I have two!
I added /stats/ to my robots.txt.
The stats pages no longer show up on any search engines, so a) The spammers get no 'pagerank' from those links (which is what they do it for) and b) they can't find the stats pages.
I was getting shitloads of referer spam; within a week (as soon as google updated) it dropped to nothing. I've had no referer spam AT ALL since then.
Perhaps they'll start just crawling the entire web, but it appears that at the moment they do a google search to find pages that post their referer stats.
But if you consistently turn up for work with a hangover, I don't think you'd be working there long.
even if it doesn't; what's to stop the zombie process from intercepting outbound smtp traffic (as most virus scanners already do) and sniffing the password the first time you send a legitimate email?
Forcing mail through the ISP's mailserver is a great first step; clearly enough ISP's are doing this that it's come to the attention of the malware writers.
The next step is to limit outbound mail at the ISP; 20 messages per day for ordinary home users should be plenty, and you can allow more (as many as you need, 20 messages at a time) by going to a webpage somewhere (no standard; leave it to each ISP to decide the best method for this).
Commercial accounts decide for themselves what's a reasonable limit; pay a deposit and you can have 'no limit' but if you get infected you forfeit the deposit..
Another idea might be to scan outbound mail for known viruses, likely virus attachments (who the hell legitimately mails screensavers and/or control panel components..?) and 'spam indicators' (large variety of different from addresses, etc). If it looks suspicious and/or there's an unreasonable amount of it, block all further mail until someone checks it out and turns it on again..
You can only compare Greyhound (and Yellow Cab) to Amtrak if you factor in the expenses the government spends in maintaining roads.
What, they get their gas tax-free?
Dead trees are 'easily accessable', they're just not computer-searchable. It seems to be good enough for my local telephone company, if I wanted a searchable CDrom of the telephone directory it would cost me several hundred dollars. The less convenient dead-tree version is given away for free..
Q276304 - Error Message: Your Password Must Be at Least 18770 Characters and Cannot Repeat Any of Your Previous 30689 Passwords
A Microsoft Windows error message as reported by comp.risks 21.37
"Certainly you can never underestimate the level of malicious people out there"
And he can?
Of course he can; Microsoft has been GROSSLY UNDERESTIMATING the motivation, depth of knowledge, speed to exploit, and I guess overall 'level' of malicious people for years.
Perhaps that's not what he meant..
Crushed recycled glass (often sold as 'artificial sand' for fishtanks) does the job. You could also use roadmarking beads. Or you could go buy the proper blasting media and all the gear, but for a one-off project you probably just want to use what you can find lying around. Compressor, electrical tape and plastic tube are stuff you probably already have in your garage.
Ideally one would should or could set a limit on the number of emails per day with their ISP. For example, most people don't go over about 20 per day. If more than 20 are sent, then some sort of confirmation must be given.
So why not just DO THAT and forget about the stupid payment system? Limit each zombied box to about the number of messages a person would normally send and you would greatly reduce the spam problem.
I think IBM ought to just take all the data that SCO wants, dump it on a big slag of a hard disk in tarred text form, and dump it in SCO's lap.
Hard disk? Way too convenient! They need to print it. On a crappy old daisy-chain printer, partly because it's cheap but mostly because the 'ribbon imprint' and bad alignment of those fsckers makes OCR near impossible..
Alternatively, mask it with PVC tape then etch the glass by sandblasting it. You only need a small compressor, some plastic tubing and a bag of very fine artificial sand, as used in fishtanks. Quite a lot safer than hydrofluric acid.