No, it looks like he worked out the code letter by letter, moving his hand away from the page each time, possibly to use the pencil as a pointer in his code pad or to do intermediate calculations, instead of writing the letters straight through. The inference I'd make is that he made a cleartext version of this before encoding it, but didn't copy this encrypted version from a scratchpad.
No. It totally wouldn't. They're taking his clothes away and giving him a tearaway blanket to sleep in because he's talked of suicide. His lawyer says he said it "sarcastically" but the regulations don't give a damn, if they didn't do this they'd be accused of encouraging him to kill himself.
They have him in solitary confinement, which you'd expect for a young kid who'd just sold out his entire country for a little egoboo. Put him in the rest of the population (he'd be in a military prison, remember) and he'd probably end up beaten and raped and the people doing it would sing the national anthem while they were wiping off. Others in the general population would encourage him not to cooperate regardless of whether it's in his best legal interest. He gets fed and exercised as much as anyone there, and he talks to his jailers and his lawyers as much--maybe more than--anyone there. The argument that what he's undergoing is torture is not much different from arguing that being arrested and jailed is torture. The answer to that is "tough shit, it's jail, not a fucking country club."
I think a large portion (not a majority) have the time, will do it, do it, and do it zealously. 150 million humans is a small fraction of the world's population, and the number of those that have to have a dozen or more avatars to rule in a game is even smaller. Don't forget there are also people sending Zynga several hundred dollars a day to buy credits in some of these games. The point being that online gaming is not a monolithically reasonable society. Expect the unexpected.
The fb app on my phone remains logged in and retrieves the latest news in the background. But that's beside the point.
The point is, someone who has 25 avatars in a game will log in 25 times to perform the tasks that a game player has to do to improve enough to be significant in the game. Usually there is the player's primary character, who is the focus of all the avatars' attention, being a collection point for gifts and the primary initiator of quest activities (to get the loot and other benefits of being the one initiating it) that the avatars converge on to complete.
This is not a reasonable thing to do in a game with a realtime component (like WoW) since it would involve in some cases needing two pairs of hands to operate in concert to complete tasks. But all the games I know of on fb don't require real-time action (other than completing certain tasks in under a certain number of hours or days). Well, except the poker game. Though if you have two computers you can put up two avatars and join a table and spoof the games, trade chips, give gifts, etc; so it's not impossible or useless.
So there's nothing inconsistent between my estimate of the numbers and your observation that they are "active" numbers.
Presuming the 600 million is actual, breathing, unique personages, then by my factorization there are likely to be 2.4-7.2 Billion accounts open on facebook.
See, here's the thing. The idea behind the fake accounts is to send little game tchotchkes to each other in order to build lists of items that represent game value, and to level-up the fake friends so as to give the aggregate team greater power. Just having the fake friends in a big list is rarely a significant boost in game value. So these people are logging into all of their fake accounts on a regular or semi-regular basis, because that's the game within the game. Thus, they're active if the main account is playing. I have no doubt that facebook has no way of knowing whether an account has a unique person behind it. And I have no doubt that Zynga et al have no compunction about ignoring the situation when pricing ad space. Their advertisers are likely less clued than the average/. reader, and I'm getting a skein of wide eyes and doubting responses here, so you can imagine how little they know.
No, I'm clearly not assuming everyone creates fake accounts. If I were, then the 50-150 million real users could equate to a couple of billion accounts.
I said I know of several real humans who have at least 10^1 accounts. I suspect I've encountered people in the games who have 10^100 or more.
Frankly, I think the people who are giving Zuckerberg money that "values the company at N Billion dollars" are being had, because they are likely looking at the account numbers and multiplying by a profit factor, but not considering that many of their potential audience are actually nonexistent.
I've recently discussed with my ISP the sort of thing they could do to identify packets trying to get into my network (lots of extra blinkenlights on the cable modem, occasional access attempts at the router), and their response was basically that it's illegal for them even to tell me the IP addresses in the incoming or outgoing packet headers.
Yup. They may be routing them, but they're not allowed to log them or even to see them on a screen, and they're certainly not allowed to tell me what they are.
I'm not sure they have a basis for saying that it would be illegal, but they certainly don't want to do the simplest of things to tell me what's going on.
My router logs most access attempts (about 90% of which are IPs allocated to a certain semi-communist meganation in the Far East), but I suspect it's not logging everything and the ones it doesn't log are of course the ones I'm most curious about. So I'm still considering escalating the issue until they prove they're forbidden to do enough inspection to block the offending interlopers entirely.
But it suggests to me that if I asked them to watch my link to see if it ever starts botting, that they'd tell me they aren't allowed to, but not why.
So I guess it's time to front a more sophisticated standalone firewall, maybe get a cable-modem (DOCSIS) analyzer, though that is unlikely to be cheap, unless I can hack up a modem... hmm...
No, and now that there's less traffic your operation will be more visible, hence more vulnerable. Hence the PECs will be negotiating to pay you less since the risk of losing your services to interdiction just went up.
Like, say, if the government advertised their names and addresses, would it be impossible to bribe their nefarious cohorts to impose a little discipline on them?
SMTP is a protocol and has no behaviors. SMTP-formatted email does identify the sender. Unfortunately, such a thing is easily spoofed. So SMTP can be manipulated to hide the true sender and its location on the network. That's the flaw. But fixing that wouldn't be enough. The proximal problem is that people still get trojans on their machines that can act like normal programs, and the server accepting your connection has no way of knowing whether the client sending it data is legitimate or bogus. The way to fix that is for servers to distribute the code that sends data, and only allow that client to do so. But then the trojan would consist of a script to operate that mechanism as though it was being done by a user.
So the real solution is to track these fuckers down and throw them into a pit with hungry tigers and poisonous snakes. Make their brains part of the malware protection system. And keep doing it, because there's one born every minute.
It doesn't need it from the start. MS's inet stack can be watching for connections to SMTP ports and looking for to-addresses that only exist in spam databases. If the OS detects that, it can phone home, or kill the sending task, or pop up a "You are infected by a spam email botnet program." There's no reason anyone should be hosting one of those any more.
What is the absurdity of the fear that a model airplane that can fly thousands of miles by itself could be used to deliver something hazardous?
What's the LD50 for ricin?
The absurdity isn't for one vehicle randomly delivered or its ability to cause someone to die. The absurdity is that John Q. Public is so ego-bloated yet frightened by American marketing ploys that he thinks he could ever be the target of such a thing.
He had precisely the reaction that most of America did the day the Soviets reported that Sputnik was in the sky.
The result was 30 years of intense development of ICBMs, space programs, and MIRVs, plus all the radars and launch sites and giant bombers and their bases and the tens of thousands of documents delineating how all this stuff was supposed to be used. Probably a trillion dollars or more in 1950s dollars were justified, because of that one feeling. We're still living with the streamlining of the MIC that occurred to duct that feeling into Congress and the election process.
Slashdot Mirror
Neither of which is legally permitted to conduct domestic investigations. Not even if it's domestic espionage.
Although, since the FBI is responsible for counter-intelligence on American soil, you'd think they'd have an NSA-quality codebreaking team.
Which puts the stink on this whole deal. Either this is not a simple code, or they're testing us.
D'LLowh!
No, it looks like he worked out the code letter by letter, moving his hand away from the page each time, possibly to use the pencil as a pointer in his code pad or to do intermediate calculations, instead of writing the letters straight through. The inference I'd make is that he made a cleartext version of this before encoding it, but didn't copy this encrypted version from a scratchpad.
Oops.
I typed a Googol when I meant to type a Gogol. Vybachte mene.
No. It totally wouldn't. They're taking his clothes away and giving him a tearaway blanket to sleep in because he's talked of suicide. His lawyer says he said it "sarcastically" but the regulations don't give a damn, if they didn't do this they'd be accused of encouraging him to kill himself.
They have him in solitary confinement, which you'd expect for a young kid who'd just sold out his entire country for a little egoboo. Put him in the rest of the population (he'd be in a military prison, remember) and he'd probably end up beaten and raped and the people doing it would sing the national anthem while they were wiping off. Others in the general population would encourage him not to cooperate regardless of whether it's in his best legal interest. He gets fed and exercised as much as anyone there, and he talks to his jailers and his lawyers as much--maybe more than--anyone there. The argument that what he's undergoing is torture is not much different from arguing that being arrested and jailed is torture. The answer to that is "tough shit, it's jail, not a fucking country club."
So you lose the bet.
I think a large portion (not a majority) have the time, will do it, do it, and do it zealously. 150 million humans is a small fraction of the world's population, and the number of those that have to have a dozen or more avatars to rule in a game is even smaller. Don't forget there are also people sending Zynga several hundred dollars a day to buy credits in some of these games. The point being that online gaming is not a monolithically reasonable society. Expect the unexpected.
250 million log in at any given day.
The fb app on my phone remains logged in and retrieves the latest news in the background. But that's beside the point.
The point is, someone who has 25 avatars in a game will log in 25 times to perform the tasks that a game player has to do to improve enough to be significant in the game. Usually there is the player's primary character, who is the focus of all the avatars' attention, being a collection point for gifts and the primary initiator of quest activities (to get the loot and other benefits of being the one initiating it) that the avatars converge on to complete.
This is not a reasonable thing to do in a game with a realtime component (like WoW) since it would involve in some cases needing two pairs of hands to operate in concert to complete tasks. But all the games I know of on fb don't require real-time action (other than completing certain tasks in under a certain number of hours or days). Well, except the poker game. Though if you have two computers you can put up two avatars and join a table and spoof the games, trade chips, give gifts, etc; so it's not impossible or useless.
So there's nothing inconsistent between my estimate of the numbers and your observation that they are "active" numbers.
Well, let's do it in reverse.
Presuming the 600 million is actual, breathing, unique personages, then by my factorization there are likely to be 2.4-7.2 Billion accounts open on facebook.
See, here's the thing. The idea behind the fake accounts is to send little game tchotchkes to each other in order to build lists of items that represent game value, and to level-up the fake friends so as to give the aggregate team greater power. Just having the fake friends in a big list is rarely a significant boost in game value. So these people are logging into all of their fake accounts on a regular or semi-regular basis, because that's the game within the game. Thus, they're active if the main account is playing. I have no doubt that facebook has no way of knowing whether an account has a unique person behind it. And I have no doubt that Zynga et al have no compunction about ignoring the situation when pricing ad space. Their advertisers are likely less clued than the average /. reader, and I'm getting a skein of wide eyes and doubting responses here, so you can imagine how little they know.
I'm going to assume your math teachers gave up on you after 4th grade.
No, I'm clearly not assuming everyone creates fake accounts. If I were, then the 50-150 million real users could equate to a couple of billion accounts.
I said I know of several real humans who have at least 10^1 accounts. I suspect I've encountered people in the games who have 10^100 or more.
Frankly, I think the people who are giving Zuckerberg money that "values the company at N Billion dollars" are being had, because they are likely looking at the account numbers and multiplying by a profit factor, but not considering that many of their potential audience are actually nonexistent.
A sucker is born every minute
Said the man selling a get-rich-quick-off-suckers scheme...
Maybe we should start a fund to help MS defray the cost of the effort. In case they have trouble paying...for fixing...the problem they...caused...
I've recently discussed with my ISP the sort of thing they could do to identify packets trying to get into my network (lots of extra blinkenlights on the cable modem, occasional access attempts at the router), and their response was basically that it's illegal for them even to tell me the IP addresses in the incoming or outgoing packet headers.
Yup. They may be routing them, but they're not allowed to log them or even to see them on a screen, and they're certainly not allowed to tell me what they are.
I'm not sure they have a basis for saying that it would be illegal, but they certainly don't want to do the simplest of things to tell me what's going on.
My router logs most access attempts (about 90% of which are IPs allocated to a certain semi-communist meganation in the Far East), but I suspect it's not logging everything and the ones it doesn't log are of course the ones I'm most curious about. So I'm still considering escalating the issue until they prove they're forbidden to do enough inspection to block the offending interlopers entirely.
But it suggests to me that if I asked them to watch my link to see if it ever starts botting, that they'd tell me they aren't allowed to, but not why.
So I guess it's time to front a more sophisticated standalone firewall, maybe get a cable-modem (DOCSIS) analyzer, though that is unlikely to be cheap, unless I can hack up a modem... hmm...
Prosecution is the prime demotivator behind reducing crime, so it should be done as loudly and crudely as possible.
No, and now that there's less traffic your operation will be more visible, hence more vulnerable. Hence the PECs will be negotiating to pay you less since the risk of losing your services to interdiction just went up.
How well protected?
Like, say, if the government advertised their names and addresses, would it be impossible to bribe their nefarious cohorts to impose a little discipline on them?
SMTP is a protocol and has no behaviors. SMTP-formatted email does identify the sender. Unfortunately, such a thing is easily spoofed. So SMTP can be manipulated to hide the true sender and its location on the network. That's the flaw. But fixing that wouldn't be enough. The proximal problem is that people still get trojans on their machines that can act like normal programs, and the server accepting your connection has no way of knowing whether the client sending it data is legitimate or bogus. The way to fix that is for servers to distribute the code that sends data, and only allow that client to do so. But then the trojan would consist of a script to operate that mechanism as though it was being done by a user.
So the real solution is to track these fuckers down and throw them into a pit with hungry tigers and poisonous snakes. Make their brains part of the malware protection system. And keep doing it, because there's one born every minute.
It doesn't need it from the start. MS's inet stack can be watching for connections to SMTP ports and looking for to-addresses that only exist in spam databases. If the OS detects that, it can phone home, or kill the sending task, or pop up a "You are infected by a spam email botnet program." There's no reason anyone should be hosting one of those any more.
That's the beauty of democracy. It doesn't have to make sense, it just has to be included in something that was voted on.
What is the absurdity of the fear that a model airplane that can fly thousands of miles by itself could be used to deliver something hazardous?
What's the LD50 for ricin?
The absurdity isn't for one vehicle randomly delivered or its ability to cause someone to die. The absurdity is that John Q. Public is so ego-bloated yet frightened by American marketing ploys that he thinks he could ever be the target of such a thing.
He had precisely the reaction that most of America did the day the Soviets reported that Sputnik was in the sky.
The result was 30 years of intense development of ICBMs, space programs, and MIRVs, plus all the radars and launch sites and giant bombers and their bases and the tens of thousands of documents delineating how all this stuff was supposed to be used. Probably a trillion dollars or more in 1950s dollars were justified, because of that one feeling. We're still living with the streamlining of the MIC that occurred to duct that feeling into Congress and the election process.
So is selling your laptop on eBay to someone with an address in Iran.
Not that I disagree with ITAR, I just think it's got its ludicrous side.
While that would make the operational effort a bit less expensive, it would make the legal hassles many orders of magnitude more expensive.
Have you counted the games?