Go to the music store and buy a CD which has copy protection. Take it home, open it, attempt to play it on your stereo. If it works, try it in the car, in the bathroom CD, at your parents place. Once you find a machine which won't play it, return the CD to the store as defective. They'll give you another copy. A few days later, you can take that back, as defective.
Eventually they'll refuse to give you another CD. If they don't refund your purchase pricee, you can charge the store with theft. If you've been dealing with a national chain, make it a class action suit.
If a nation publishes a law in a format which I cannot legally read except by purchasing a specific product, and I refuse to make that purchase, how can I be expected to obey the law?
But they HAVE to piss away stockholder cash on SOMETHING.... MS has so much cash stashed away, the government will go broke printing more bills unless SM buys stuff.
You don't have IE download the web page. The page is downloaded by a program/script in C, C++, java, Perl, Python, Ruby which does not attempt to interpret the page, but simply scans it for includes and images from the same web site. The program is presented to the user as a rough text/image thumbnail. If it is spam, no need to view it through IE; if it is not spam, no need to view it through IE.
Very true, but it's trivial to have your defense program trim down the URL.
If the URL is http://www.f*%&-me.com/ident?id=Peekaboo, just visit the root. If that takes you to geocities.com, the account will be wiped out soon enough. Very soon, hosted web pages will included a clause making the users liable for bandwidth. It wouldn't take a host long to dedermine which page is responsible for the sudden 10000000% increase in traffic, and their legal budget will be bigger than that of most people they host.
The other factor I intended to mention is the cost to ISPs.
Every time you make a spammer serve a gigabyte of web page, ISPs and Internet BackBone servers have to transport that bandwidth.
Earthlink, Rogers, etc. would love to eliminate the 50% of email which is spam ( last year 15%, next year 87% ). But are they willing to increase their http bandwidth by 25% as part of the solution?
This is something I've been considering since Graham's Bayesian Filter article appeared last autumn.
Whether it's Spam Assassin or Bayesian filters, conventional defense mechanisms attempt to prevent spam from getting through. If IBM or AOL succeed, the savings are significant, both in terms of employees'/subscribers' time, network bandwidth, hard drive storage, etc. But for individuals, the effect is purely local. One person stops receiving spam, after the first few.
Unfortunately, there is no effect on the spammers. The majority of people are unprotected, so visit the web site, buuy the product, etc. What do they care whether Paul Graham visits their site or not?
What is needed is to inflict a penalty on the spammer for sending the spam. One ideda which has been passed about is intrroducing a low fee for email. Your first 10,000 messages each month are free, but after that each one costs a penny, nickel, dime. Ordinary users won't be affected, only those attempting to send millions of emails. But what about corporations? Obviously, IBM, GM, AT&T send many emails. So this method stops those who try to send 5000000 messages through a user account, but what about someone who has their own corporation? For that matter, what about AOL? AOL users send more than 10000 messages, between them. Yes,I know, none of us care about AOL, but still.
Now a spam message is an invitation to visit a web site. They WANT you to go to their website. They're not going to make a sale over email, but if you see their pr0n for yourself, you might sign up. So the solution is for everyone to visit their web site. Since you are so interested in their product, you want your software to fetch their website every hour, so you will know quickly when any changes occur. Suddenly, sending spam has a cost: web site bandwidth.
Some people might object to the spammer being paid for 'pay-per-view' banners, but there is a simple defense against that. Just set your software to only fetch same-site images and includes. Of course you want to fetch more than the tiny frameset.... you need to fetch the large images, maybe even the same-site linked pages. On the other hand, few people pay much for banners which do not provide click-through. It won't take many days of a million clicks an hour to convince the remainder to change their policy.
The big risk, in my opinion, is people spamming out a URL to mount a DDoS attack, slashdotting someone they don't like. My solution is a combination of Google and Gnutella. Check your peers for copies of the web site. If it is not available, or if your peers cannot agree on the size or checksum of the page, or if a random number returns a wrong value, go check on what Google, Yahoo, Altavista or the Way Back machine have to say about the site. Of course, these sites may not be totally delighted to offer a portion of their bandwidth to protecting the internet, but life is hard. If a couple of these sites disagree on what the page looks like, or the random nunmber is still rolling snake-eyes, visit the page itself. This way, the load on Joe's Shoe Repair is limited to a forgivable level.
Once a page, or a few alternate pages are obtained, the user needs to examine them, to determine whether to co-operate with the email by visiting the web site, every day, every hour, every ten minutes.
If the page obtained from the web site is different from the archived copy, user interaction is required. The possibility remains that we are visiting an innocent web site which has been mis-represented. On the other hand, what about web sites that strive to protect themselves by having insignificant varying components. Banner ads rotate, for example, so not fetching those improves comparability. if included components change, while a major portion remains unchanged, we are still dealing with the same web site. If minor text segments change, but the bulk is constant, we can continue downloading on a regular basis. How about if the site changes grgadually
China has a large number of people in close proximity to farm animals, and most of these people do not have good sanitation.
I suspect it's more relevant that rural Chinese live in relatively close proximity to a wide range of animals. In North America and Europe, farmers are regularly exposed to cows, sheep, goats, pigs... a dozen animal types, perhaps. HIV/AIDS migrated from monkeys to humans, in Africa. Since China is the world's largest country with a variety of climates: southern, northern, desert, mountaineous, with a large variety of native animals, the potential for exposure to animal diseases is significant.
If you can't get a faculty sponsor, organize a group through the local library.
Of course you can talk about aspects of computing that interest you, give presentations to others in the group on CS topics.
How about seekign out donations of old computers, configuring them with Linux, making them available to local charity & community groups, church/synagogue/mosque groups? Lots of people who could use a computer and can't afford one, let alone the MS software.
Become known as someone who understands computers CAN lead to summer jobs and part-time consulting work through the year. I've noticed on person at Perlmonks.com (Japhy) is 19, got started with perl at 15, regularly publishes articles; I doubt he has a McJob at his uuniversity.
I started off as a C/C++ programmer, after about 8 yearss I got into Perl instead, for much the same reasons he objects to using C for a mail client.
C/C++ is wonderful for implmenting operating systems, programming languages, servers that need to be fast, and libraries/modules.
For a program which spends its time waiting for the user to click on a key, it doesn't matter whether it's implemented in CRAY assembler or GWBasic---it's still waiting for the user to click a key. Of course, once an action has been selected, efficiency becomes more of a criterion. Efficiency can be achieved by appropriate coding in high-level languages and by passing CPU-intensive tasks to library functions.
The links at the top of the page give away what it's all about, don't thay? I hope the Pattent Office is paying royalties for those. Do they use 'one-click'?
In the mid 80's I worked in a video duplication agency.. a place studios came to to get 20,000 copies of 'Kansas City' or Alien, 300 copis of the tape showing an interesting dental surgery to send out to subscribing dentists, etc.
I those days, many people put garbage in the 'vertical sync' signal, which wouldn't affect the display of the movie, but would produce garbage if you tried to dub the movie on your boring home VCR.
I have no idea who won that war, since I could never figure out why people would want to use up a $5 cassette on a movie they could rent for that price.... Who would want to watch any movie more than two or three times at most, more often,,once is enough.
So the studios put garbage in the table of contents section of the disk, users come up with ways to decode it anyway. Studios demonstrate their total deddication to profits, fans display their insatiable need to listen to music.... Hmm, is this picture looking strange? Do studios figure out how to supply a craving for music, or do studios go out of business?
Take that back or we'll come burn the White House, like we did in 1812!
You're right, we consider the accused's right to an unbiased jury or greater importance than the news-reader's / news-viewer's right to titillating news frrom a preliminary hearing. And if US reporters are unwilling to abide by our laws, our judges are not required to admit them.
Seems to me, if there's a public API, you can read a decrypted data stream with your custom software, and do whatever you want with it....such as save it to an unencrypted disk.
If you can't do that, it only raises the complexity a little. Write a program which pretends to be the sound device, and receive the data stream from their propietary playback software.
I give it a week after release before it's cracked.
In the original focus of Perl as a Reporting Language, an important component was the format. While use of Perl has grown over recent years, that feature has just about disappeared from common use.
Have you considered modifying format to make it more representative of modern needs?
I've wondered for some time why the military doesn't make available simplified versions of their flight simulators, tank simulators, navy bridge simulators. That way, teens would arrive at the recruiting office having already devoted thousands of hours developing the skills the military needs.
More subtle would be developing games that aren't obviously military in theme, yet develop skills wanted by the military. Wait! That's what these games do, isn't it? Focusing on obedience, dedication, hard work at priorities set by others...
It's a great idea, and I can imagine people setting up IR beams between their various campuses to get fast networks.
The only problem is, what control do you have over the airspace rights over your line-of-sight? How do you prevent someone building an office tower that blocks 10,000 IR beams? After all, you have purchased no rights to that space, you're simply relying on the fact there is currently no obstacle. if you eventaully complain, the owners and former owners might ask for twenty years back rent on the air space!
Slashdot Mirror
Go to the music store and buy a CD which has copy protection. Take it home, open it, attempt to play it on your stereo. If it works, try it in the car, in the bathroom CD, at your parents place. Once you find a machine which won't play it, return the CD to the store as defective. They'll give you another copy. A few days later, you can take that back, as defective.
Eventually they'll refuse to give you another CD. If they don't refund your purchase pricee, you can charge the store with theft. If you've been dealing with a national chain, make it a class action suit.
would anyone notice?
So if I succeed in stealing an FBI laptop, it'll have cached all the DRMs I need to read the documents. Oh goodie!
If a nation publishes a law in a format which I cannot legally read except by purchasing a specific product, and I refuse to make that purchase, how can I be expected to obey the law?
But they HAVE to piss away stockholder cash on SOMETHING .... MS has so much cash stashed away, the government will go broke printing more bills unless SM buys stuff.
You don't have IE download the web page. The page is downloaded by a program/script in C, C++, java, Perl, Python, Ruby which does not attempt to interpret the page, but simply scans it for includes and images from the same web site. The program is presented to the user as a rough text/image thumbnail. If it is spam, no need to view it through IE; if it is not spam, no need to view it through IE.
The spam email is an invitation to visit their web site
Very true, but it's trivial to have your defense program trim down the URL.
If the URL is http://www.f*%&-me.com/ident?id=Peekaboo, just visit the root. If that takes you to geocities.com, the account will be wiped out soon enough. Very soon, hosted web pages will included a clause making the users liable for bandwidth. It wouldn't take a host long to dedermine which page is responsible for the sudden 10000000% increase in traffic, and their legal budget will be bigger than that of most people they host.
The other factor I intended to mention is the cost to ISPs.
Every time you make a spammer serve a gigabyte of web page, ISPs and Internet BackBone servers have to transport that bandwidth.
Earthlink, Rogers, etc. would love to eliminate the 50% of email which is spam ( last year 15%, next year 87% ). But are they willing to increase their http bandwidth by 25% as part of the solution?
This is something I've been considering since Graham's Bayesian Filter article appeared last autumn.
.... you need to fetch the large images, maybe even the same-site linked pages. On the other hand, few people pay much for banners which do not provide click-through. It won't take many days of a million clicks an hour to convince the remainder to change their policy.
Whether it's Spam Assassin or Bayesian filters, conventional defense mechanisms attempt to prevent spam from getting through. If IBM or AOL succeed, the savings are significant, both in terms of employees'/subscribers' time, network bandwidth, hard drive storage, etc. But for individuals, the effect is purely local. One person stops receiving spam, after the first few.
Unfortunately, there is no effect on the spammers. The majority of people are unprotected, so visit the web site, buuy the product, etc. What do they care whether Paul Graham visits their site or not?
What is needed is to inflict a penalty on the spammer for sending the spam. One ideda which has been passed about is intrroducing a low fee for email. Your first 10,000 messages each month are free, but after that each one costs a penny, nickel, dime. Ordinary users won't be affected, only those attempting to send millions of emails. But what about corporations? Obviously, IBM, GM, AT&T send many emails. So this method stops those who try to send 5000000 messages through a user account, but what about someone who has their own corporation? For that matter, what about AOL? AOL users send more than 10000 messages, between them. Yes,I know, none of us care about AOL, but still.
Now a spam message is an invitation to visit a web site. They WANT you to go to their website. They're not going to make a sale over email, but if you see their pr0n for yourself, you might sign up. So the solution is for everyone to visit their web site. Since you are so interested in their product, you want your software to fetch their website every hour, so you will know quickly when any changes occur. Suddenly, sending spam has a cost: web site bandwidth.
Some people might object to the spammer being paid for 'pay-per-view' banners, but there is a simple defense against that. Just set your software to only fetch same-site images and includes. Of course you want to fetch more than the tiny frameset
The big risk, in my opinion, is people spamming out a URL to mount a DDoS attack, slashdotting someone they don't like. My solution is a combination of Google and Gnutella. Check your peers for copies of the web site. If it is not available, or if your peers cannot agree on the size or checksum of the page, or if a random number returns a wrong value, go check on what Google, Yahoo, Altavista or the Way Back machine have to say about the site. Of course, these sites may not be totally delighted to offer a portion of their bandwidth to protecting the internet, but life is hard. If a couple of these sites disagree on what the page looks like, or the random nunmber is still rolling snake-eyes, visit the page itself. This way, the load on Joe's Shoe Repair is limited to a forgivable level.
Once a page, or a few alternate pages are obtained, the user needs to examine them, to determine whether to co-operate with the email by visiting the web site, every day, every hour, every ten minutes.
If the page obtained from the web site is different from the archived copy, user interaction is required. The possibility remains that we are visiting an innocent web site which has been mis-represented. On the other hand, what about web sites that strive to protect themselves by having insignificant varying components. Banner ads rotate, for example, so not fetching those improves comparability. if included components change, while a major portion remains unchanged, we are still dealing with the same web site. If minor text segments change, but the bulk is constant, we can continue downloading on a regular basis. How about if the site changes grgadually
SCO is worth less than $150 million. Lawyer fees reach that amount, how fast? Buy UNIX from SCO, make a present of Unix to Linus. End of problem.
China has a large number of people in close proximity to farm animals, and most of these people do not have good sanitation.
I suspect it's more relevant that rural Chinese live in relatively close proximity to a wide range of animals. In North America and Europe, farmers are regularly exposed to cows, sheep, goats, pigs ... a dozen animal types, perhaps. HIV/AIDS migrated from monkeys to humans, in Africa. Since China is the world's largest country with a variety of climates: southern, northern, desert, mountaineous, with a large variety of native animals, the potential for exposure to animal diseases is significant.
Pursue your interests.
If you can't get a faculty sponsor, organize a group through the local library.
Of course you can talk about aspects of computing that interest you, give presentations to others in the group on CS topics.
How about seekign out donations of old computers, configuring them with Linux, making them available to local charity & community groups, church/synagogue/mosque groups? Lots of people who could use a computer and can't afford one, let alone the MS software.
Become known as someone who understands computers CAN lead to summer jobs and part-time consulting work through the year. I've noticed on person at Perlmonks.com (Japhy) is 19, got started with perl at 15, regularly publishes articles; I doubt he has a McJob at his uuniversity.
In Redmond Washington, the programmer pays to be allowed to write software ...
C/C++ is wonderful for implmenting operating systems, programming languages, servers that need to be fast, and libraries/modules.
For a program which spends its time waiting for the user to click on a key, it doesn't matter whether it's implemented in CRAY assembler or GWBasic---it's still waiting for the user to click a key. Of course, once an action has been selected, efficiency becomes more of a criterion. Efficiency can be achieved by appropriate coding in high-level languages and by passing CPU-intensive tasks to library functions.
The links at the top of the page give away what it's all about, don't thay? I hope the Pattent Office is paying royalties for those. Do they use 'one-click'?
In the mid 80's I worked in a video duplication agency .. a place studios came to to get 20,000 copies of 'Kansas City' or Alien, 300 copis of the tape showing an interesting dental surgery to send out to subscribing dentists, etc.
.... Who would want to watch any movie more than two or three times at most, more often, ,once is enough.
.... Hmm, is this picture looking strange? Do studios figure out how to supply a craving for music, or do studios go out of business?
I those days, many people put garbage in the 'vertical sync' signal, which wouldn't affect the display of the movie, but would produce garbage if you tried to dub the movie on your boring home VCR.
I have no idea who won that war, since I could never figure out why people would want to use up a $5 cassette on a movie they could rent for that price
So the studios put garbage in the table of contents section of the disk, users come up with ways to decode it anyway. Studios demonstrate their total deddication to profits, fans display their insatiable need to listen to music
TomDLux
Take that back or we'll come burn the White House, like we did in 1812!
You're right, we consider the accused's right to an unbiased jury or greater importance than the news-reader's / news-viewer's right to titillating news frrom a preliminary hearing. And if US reporters are unwilling to abide by our laws, our judges are not required to admit them.
OSS is all about fere beer, right? All 31,415,926 of us are coming over to your place this evening.
Tom (location not disclosed)
the communications latency for a bveowolf cluster of those?
Seems to me, if there's a public API, you can read a decrypted data stream with your custom software, and do whatever you want with it....such as save it to an unencrypted disk.
If you can't do that, it only raises the complexity a little. Write a program which pretends to be the sound device, and receive the data stream from their propietary playback software.
I give it a week after release before it's cracked.
In the original focus of Perl as a Reporting Language, an important component was the format. While use of Perl has grown over recent years, that feature has just about disappeared from common use.
Have you considered modifying format to make it more representative of modern needs?
- Unix power users & sysadmins write scripts and programs; I assume that Windows users and sysadmins do the the same.
- Large corporations develop custom software to do things the way they want.
- Scientists and engineers write programs to process their data because nothing exists to do what they need.
- At universities, colleges and high schools areound the world, students write programs.
- And let's not forget all the software developers everywhere, writing the code which will eventually be assigned keys
How will all these un-keyed programs run on Palladium?I've wondered for some time why the military doesn't make available simplified versions of their flight simulators, tank simulators, navy bridge simulators. That way, teens would arrive at the recruiting office having already devoted thousands of hours developing the skills the military needs.
More subtle would be developing games that aren't obviously military in theme, yet develop skills wanted by the military. Wait! That's what these games do, isn't it? Focusing on obedience, dedication, hard work at priorities set by others...
It's a great idea, and I can imagine people setting up IR beams between their various campuses to get fast networks.
The only problem is, what control do you have over the airspace rights over your line-of-sight? How do you prevent someone building an office tower that blocks 10,000 IR beams? After all, you have purchased no rights to that space, you're simply relying on the fact there is currently no obstacle. if you eventaully complain, the owners and former owners might ask for twenty years back rent on the air space!