I sure hope that isn't possible with any browser. -- One word. JavaScript. Pity really.
JavaScript can't find the e-mail address unless you type it in or the site server already has it. There isn't any browser variable that makes the e-mail address automatically available to JavaScript.
*This* is why it annoys me: even filtering means the damage is done.
Mail clients should fetch only the header and then, if the sender is blocked, delete the message from the server without fetching it. Why don't they do it this way?
Give a man a fish and he eats for one day. Teach him how to fish, and though he'll eat for a lifetime, he'll call you a miser for not giving him your fish.
Oh, now I see. I was imagining something much worse. I thought you just visited some page somewhere on the Web and your browser revealed your mail address to the site's server. I sure hope that isn't possible with any browser.
Yes, what you describe is simple enough to do. It's surprising then that spammers don't do it often. Perhaps many of them don't know how. Probably many of them use ready-made programs to produce the spam, and these programs simply haven't caught up yet.
Sooner or later it'll hit us. Ugghh!
Give a man a fish and he eats for one day. Teach him how to fish, and though he'll eat for a lifetime, he'll call you a miser for not giving him your fish.
Oh yeah.. and then there are HTML tags that 'phone home,'
Is that true? I always thought this was some sort of urban legend. I find it somewhat hard to believe.
Give a man a fish and he eats for one day. Teach him how to fish, and though he'll eat for a lifetime, he'll call you a miser for not giving him your fish.
A bit? How dare you! That's disgusting! It's far too indecent!
You're saying it yourself. A bit has to be a 1 or a 0.
Look at a 1! See what it resembles! Look at a 0! See what it resembles!
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for one day. Teach him how to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime, all the while calling you a miser for not giving him your fish.
...only that content which is deemed acceptable, world-wide.
That doesn't exist. For instance, to a Taliban, a woman is indecent unless hidden under a burqa. To the rest of us, forcing women to live under burqas is indecent. So there couldn't be any women on the Internet. But discriminating against women is indecent too.
There is no common ground. Humanity will have to learn how to live with diversity.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for one day. Teach him how to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime, all the while calling you a miser for not giving him your fish.
...the anti-virus update they mail round every month.
Er... would that be an attachment? Hey, I know a script kiddie who'd love to work at your company!
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for one day. Teach him how to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime. And he'll call you a miser for not giving him your fish.
Indeed, Vipul's Razor sounds really interesting. I just wish that at the client end we had communication standards and a simple button, so that every office worker and every housewife and every grandfather could react to spam, and lots of different filtering systems -- Vipul's Razor and many others -- could receive the resulting votes and act on them. This way I think we could really stem the flood.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for one day. Teach him how to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime. Unfortunately, he'll call you a miser for not giving him your fish.
Mail clients should have a spam-vote button, a button that lets you vote for blacklisting the sender of the message you are just viewing.
If you press the button you get a warning, explaining what you're about to do. If you accept, a message including all the headers of the spam mail is created automatically and sent to a spam-vote server at your e-mail service provider. This vote server verifies that the vote comes from you, and then, possibly after some processing, sends your vote to one or more blacklisting services chosen by your e-mail service provider.
If there are just a few votes to blacklist a particular sender it's considered a mistake and no blacklisting occurs. The sender is blacklisted only if the number of votes is large. If a provider has a very large number of blacklisted senders, that provider may be blacklisted.
This would give technically clueless users a say in the matter. It would let clueless users send proper spam complaints, complete with all the headers. And it would allow people to stem the flood without revealing their e-mail address to fake opt-out lists that just increase the spamming.
When you press the spam-vote button, the mail client not only sends the spam vote. It also puts the sender in the client's own list of blocked senders, and removes all the messages that came from that sender. You can change your mind and remove the blocking, so you can receive messages from that sender again. Then the mail client creates another automatic message revoking the blacklist vote.
This way even the clueless will see what happens. A clueless user can't just keep sending a lot of blacklisting votes by mistake. Mistakes have consequences that have to be rectified.
At the server side, the system can be refined and improved over time. For instance, the voting services should count percentages rather than absolute numbers. They might also keep karma points and reputation scores. They might use collaborative filtering. Lots of different refinements are possible. Hopefully there would be several different services trying different strategies so the system evolves.
Users can then try different e-mail service providers with different spam-vote and spam-block policies. Probably many providers would let users choose among several alternatives. Tastes differ very much in this matter. You try different alternatives and see what works best for you.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for one day. Teach him how to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime. Unfortunately, he'll call you a miser for not giving him your fish.
Mod up the parent! Some clueless moderator gave it "-1 offtopic"! It's right on topic and it's a worthwhile contribution. I can't judge if counduit without the extra lines will save money, but the idea is worth considering and definitely on topic.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for one day. Teach him how to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime, all the while calling you a miser for not giving him your fish.
What's the difference? Ordered offline or slashdotted, it's the same thing.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for one day. Teach him how to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime, all the while calling you a miser for not giving him your fish.
You might arrange a voting system. Among the Reporters at each Catalogue Server, calculate the percentage who report a message as spam. Consider it spam if more than X percent report it as spam.
I think some sort of threshold will be necessary, because even Reporters with very high reputation scores will make occasional mistakes. Also, sometimes pranksters will subscribe people to legitimate list, making it look like spam.
With the right threshold value, this should give very reliable results.
You mention a reputation system. Voting can be combined with reputation scores. Each vote might get a higher or lower weight depending on a reputation score.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for one day. Teach him how to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime, all the while calling you a miser for not giving him your fish.
Oops, I expressed myself very poorly. Very poorly indeed.
FreeUser said "places like Afghanistan and Somalia [...] will be taken down"
The US actions in Afghanistan have not "taken down" the place. Rather the contrary! They have removed that extremely opressive and incredibly murderous Taliban regime, while doing as little damage as possible. Undoubtedly they have saved the lives of thousands of Afghans who would have been killed by the Taliban for religious "crimes".
Judging by available information, the US military has been very careful. It seems to a very great extent they have managed to do the right thing in an extremely difficult situation.
FreeUser seems to be talking about attacking the people of Afghanistan, attacking the people of Somalia, "taking them down", without caring about the innocent people. That's something else.
Give a man a fish, and you have fed him for a single day. Teach him how to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime, all the while calling you a miser for not giving him your fish.
Interesting link, thanks. Of course something must be done. But before shutting down the entire network they should at least make serious attempts to get at the criminals. Obviously not every office and employer and money sender and receiver cooperates with the terrorists.
As an example, if they should find that top staff at Western Union were funneling funds to terrorists, they wouldn't shut down the entire world-wide network of Western Union. They would arrest the criminals.
I haven't seen any hint that they have requested the government of Somalia to arrest the criminals.
Give a man a fish, and you have fed him for a single day. Teach him how to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime, all the while calling you a miser for not giving him your fish.
As for the people of Somalia being punished. Your statement is like saying that because someone commited murder that he should not go to jail because he happens to be the father of two children.
Not at all. As for the people of Somalia being punished, my post is like saying that the people of Florida and Somalia should not be punished because terrorists chose their flight schools and banks.
Give a man a fish, and you have fed him for a single day. Teach him how to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime, all the while calling you a miser for not giving him your fish.
Wow, I didn't know the Florida flight school knew their students were going to crash into the WTC!
That's exactly my point! Those schools couldn't know that, and mustn't be punished for what they couldn't know. And the Somalian money senders and money receivers couldn't know it and shouldn't be punished for it.
The people of Florida must not be punished, nor the people of Somalia.
That's exactly my point!
Give a man a fish, and you have fed him for a single day. Teach him how to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime, all the while calling you a miser for not giving him your fish.
The WTC pilots learned piloting in flight academies in Florida, IIRC. Florida harboured them and taught them. By your logic Florida should be bombed.
Should Florida be bombed? Of course not. Try better logic.
Give a man a fish, and you have fed him for a single day. Teach him how to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime, all the while calling you a miser for not giving him your fish.
Re:Yeah, everyone must do it their way
on
Freedom or Power?
·
· Score: 1
I was unaware of any society where people were granted total freedom to decide how the fruits of their labour are used.
I don't want total control. I want limited control. For example I want to agree with my employer that he'll pay me for my work. In exchange my employer expects me to make my software available to him. I want to be able to make such agreements.
If I spend a month employed as a carpenter, making chairs, this does not give my employer the right to just take my chairs from me without payment. I have the right to make agreements with those who take my chairs that they pay me for my work. If instead of carpenting I decide to spend that month programming, you expect that this gives you the right to just take away everything I make.
Work is work. Work is worth compensation. A worker has the right to a salary, to decent working conditions, etc. These are rights and compensations in return for work. Employers do not have the right to just take away without any compensation the chairs or razor blades or programs or whatever their employees produce.
Neither do you.
Give a man a fish, and you have fed him for a single day. Teach him how to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime, all the while calling you a miser for not giving him your fish.
Yeah, everyone must do it their way
on
Freedom or Power?
·
· Score: 1
So we have no rights to decide over the fruits of our own labor? What are we, slaves?
One thing that horrifies me about both anarchists and communists is their penchant for power, for totalitarianism, dictatorship. They want to decide centrally what's best for everyone. No variety allowed. Everything must be uniform. Everyone must comply with their restrictive notions.
Socialism has a few great ideas and ideals. Why are they always perverted?
Give a man a fish, and you have fed him for a single day. Teach him how to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime, all the while calling you a miser for not giving him your fish.
"it could form the basis of a DNA computer in the future that could potentially operate within human cells and act as a monitoring device"
"Hey, your face is turning blue, what's the problem?"
"I don't know, my doctor recommended this Microsoft stuff, I'm feeling... I'm fee... g-g-g-aaa... GGGAAAHH... An exception 0D has occurred at 0028:C003C720000433F."
"PATH searches are more expensive than bin lookups"
If we're discussing the principles of how things work, why not improve how PATH works?
When the system starts, have the system go through the PATH collecting all the file names and making a quick-search table. To find an executable it would just look in this quick-search table, not in the PATH directories.
Then the size of the PATH makes no difference at all. PATH searches will be equally quick regardless of the number of directories.
(Implementation details: The system must rebuild the quick-search table whenever files have been added or removed in any directory in the PATH, or the PATH itself has been modified.)
I'm sure you realize that would totally break DNS.
The rules could be adapted so the last three characters form a TLD, regardless where the dots are. For example, in support.microsoft the TLD would be oft, in slashdot.org it would be org, in fastmail.fm it would be.fm. If heavily used endings such as com get too hard on the root servers, more characters could be included just for those endings -- queries for microsoft.com might go to a root server for ft.com.
Just ignore the dots. It's certainly technically feasible.
I like the suggestion in snookum's post! More freedom! More clarity! Better names! Mod it up!
Give a man a fish, and you have fed him for just one day. Teach him how to fish, and he'll call you a miser.
A mathematically rigorous examination will show that predicting development time is impossible since it's impossible to predict how interesting Slashdot will be and how much time will be spent there.
I was chatting on IRC while the installer went on about its merry way.
Gaaaah! When installing on Windows, no other applications must be running! Ever! This is the First Rule wich appears First and Foremost on all Windows installers!
Perhaps you activated the dreaded Cancel button. Another less-known rule is never to use the Cancel button during installation. It may leave the system in an unstable state that requires re-installation of the entire system, and after that all your applications. This means that you must keep your hands and any pets and toddlers away from the keyboard, since the Cancel button often has focus and gets activated if you just press the spacebar or the return key.
This instability is of course a feature introduced by Microsoft to give us some adventure in our lives.
Slashdot Mirror
I sure hope that isn't possible with any browser. -- One word. JavaScript. Pity really.
JavaScript can't find the e-mail address unless you type it in or the site server already has it. There isn't any browser variable that makes the e-mail address automatically available to JavaScript.
*This* is why it annoys me: even filtering means the damage is done.
Mail clients should fetch only the header and then, if the sender is blocked, delete the message from the server without fetching it. Why don't they do it this way?
Give a man a fish and he eats for one day. Teach him how to fish, and though he'll eat for a lifetime, he'll call you a miser for not giving him your fish.
Oh, now I see. I was imagining something much worse. I thought you just visited some page somewhere on the Web and your browser revealed your mail address to the site's server. I sure hope that isn't possible with any browser.
Yes, what you describe is simple enough to do. It's surprising then that spammers don't do it often. Perhaps many of them don't know how. Probably many of them use ready-made programs to produce the spam, and these programs simply haven't caught up yet.
Sooner or later it'll hit us. Ugghh!
Give a man a fish and he eats for one day. Teach him how to fish, and though he'll eat for a lifetime, he'll call you a miser for not giving him your fish.
Oh yeah.. and then there are HTML tags that 'phone home,'
Is that true? I always thought this was some sort of urban legend. I find it somewhat hard to believe.
Give a man a fish and he eats for one day. Teach him how to fish, and though he'll eat for a lifetime, he'll call you a miser for not giving him your fish.
a large reflector that encompasses half the earth [...] I'll make out an invoice for Germany tomorrow. [...] For Sale: /. acct. w/50 karma.
/. carries some clout, but you're too optimistic about what you can achieve with a /. account.
We all like to think
A bit? How dare you! That's disgusting! It's far too indecent!
You're saying it yourself. A bit has to be a 1 or a 0.
Look at a 1! See what it resembles! Look at a 0! See what it resembles!
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for one day. Teach him how to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime, all the while calling you a miser for not giving him your fish.
...only that content which is deemed acceptable, world-wide.
That doesn't exist. For instance, to a Taliban, a woman is indecent unless hidden under a burqa. To the rest of us, forcing women to live under burqas is indecent. So there couldn't be any women on the Internet. But discriminating against women is indecent too.
There is no common ground. Humanity will have to learn how to live with diversity.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for one day. Teach him how to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime, all the while calling you a miser for not giving him your fish.
...the anti-virus update they mail round every month.
Er... would that be an attachment? Hey, I know a script kiddie who'd love to work at your company!
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for one day. Teach him how to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime. And he'll call you a miser for not giving him your fish.
Indeed, Vipul's Razor sounds really interesting. I just wish that at the client end we had communication standards and a simple button, so that every office worker and every housewife and every grandfather could react to spam, and lots of different filtering systems -- Vipul's Razor and many others -- could receive the resulting votes and act on them. This way I think we could really stem the flood.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for one day. Teach him how to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime. Unfortunately, he'll call you a miser for not giving him your fish.
Mail clients should have a spam-vote button, a button that lets you vote for blacklisting the sender of the message you are just viewing.
If you press the button you get a warning, explaining what you're about to do. If you accept, a message including all the headers of the spam mail is created automatically and sent to a spam-vote server at your e-mail service provider. This vote server verifies that the vote comes from you, and then, possibly after some processing, sends your vote to one or more blacklisting services chosen by your e-mail service provider.
If there are just a few votes to blacklist a particular sender it's considered a mistake and no blacklisting occurs. The sender is blacklisted only if the number of votes is large. If a provider has a very large number of blacklisted senders, that provider may be blacklisted.
This would give technically clueless users a say in the matter. It would let clueless users send proper spam complaints, complete with all the headers. And it would allow people to stem the flood without revealing their e-mail address to fake opt-out lists that just increase the spamming.
When you press the spam-vote button, the mail client not only sends the spam vote. It also puts the sender in the client's own list of blocked senders, and removes all the messages that came from that sender. You can change your mind and remove the blocking, so you can receive messages from that sender again. Then the mail client creates another automatic message revoking the blacklist vote.
This way even the clueless will see what happens. A clueless user can't just keep sending a lot of blacklisting votes by mistake. Mistakes have consequences that have to be rectified.
At the server side, the system can be refined and improved over time. For instance, the voting services should count percentages rather than absolute numbers. They might also keep karma points and reputation scores. They might use collaborative filtering. Lots of different refinements are possible. Hopefully there would be several different services trying different strategies so the system evolves.
Users can then try different e-mail service providers with different spam-vote and spam-block policies. Probably many providers would let users choose among several alternatives. Tastes differ very much in this matter. You try different alternatives and see what works best for you.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for one day. Teach him how to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime. Unfortunately, he'll call you a miser for not giving him your fish.
Mod up the parent! Some clueless moderator gave it "-1 offtopic"! It's right on topic and it's a worthwhile contribution. I can't judge if counduit without the extra lines will save money, but the idea is worth considering and definitely on topic.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for one day. Teach him how to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime, all the while calling you a miser for not giving him your fish.
What's the difference? Ordered offline or slashdotted, it's the same thing.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for one day. Teach him how to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime, all the while calling you a miser for not giving him your fish.
You might arrange a voting system. Among the Reporters at each Catalogue Server, calculate the percentage who report a message as spam. Consider it spam if more than X percent report it as spam.
I think some sort of threshold will be necessary, because even Reporters with very high reputation scores will make occasional mistakes. Also, sometimes pranksters will subscribe people to legitimate list, making it look like spam.
With the right threshold value, this should give very reliable results.
You mention a reputation system. Voting can be combined with reputation scores. Each vote might get a higher or lower weight depending on a reputation score.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for one day. Teach him how to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime, all the while calling you a miser for not giving him your fish.
Oops, I expressed myself very poorly. Very poorly indeed.
FreeUser said "places like Afghanistan and Somalia [...] will be taken down"
The US actions in Afghanistan have not "taken down" the place. Rather the contrary! They have removed that extremely opressive and incredibly murderous Taliban regime, while doing as little damage as possible. Undoubtedly they have saved the lives of thousands of Afghans who would have been killed by the Taliban for religious "crimes".
Judging by available information, the US military has been very careful. It seems to a very great extent they have managed to do the right thing in an extremely difficult situation.
FreeUser seems to be talking about attacking the people of Afghanistan, attacking the people of Somalia, "taking them down", without caring about the innocent people. That's something else.
Give a man a fish, and you have fed him for a single day. Teach him how to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime, all the while calling you a miser for not giving him your fish.
Interesting link, thanks. Of course something must be done. But before shutting down the entire network they should at least make serious attempts to get at the criminals. Obviously not every office and employer and money sender and receiver cooperates with the terrorists.
As an example, if they should find that top staff at Western Union were funneling funds to terrorists, they wouldn't shut down the entire world-wide network of Western Union. They would arrest the criminals.
I haven't seen any hint that they have requested the government of Somalia to arrest the criminals.
Give a man a fish, and you have fed him for a single day. Teach him how to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime, all the while calling you a miser for not giving him your fish.
As for the people of Somalia being punished. Your statement is like saying that because someone commited murder that he should not go to jail because he happens to be the father of two children.
Not at all. As for the people of Somalia being punished, my post is like saying that the people of Florida and Somalia should not be punished because terrorists chose their flight schools and banks.
Give a man a fish, and you have fed him for a single day. Teach him how to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime, all the while calling you a miser for not giving him your fish.
Wow, I didn't know the Florida flight school knew their students were going to crash into the WTC!
That's exactly my point! Those schools couldn't know that, and mustn't be punished for what they couldn't know. And the Somalian money senders and money receivers couldn't know it and shouldn't be punished for it.
The people of Florida must not be punished, nor the people of Somalia.
That's exactly my point!
Give a man a fish, and you have fed him for a single day. Teach him how to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime, all the while calling you a miser for not giving him your fish.
The WTC pilots learned piloting in flight academies in Florida, IIRC. Florida harboured them and taught them. By your logic Florida should be bombed.
Should Florida be bombed? Of course not. Try better logic.
Give a man a fish, and you have fed him for a single day. Teach him how to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime, all the while calling you a miser for not giving him your fish.
I was unaware of any society where people were granted total freedom to decide how the fruits of their labour are used.
I don't want total control. I want limited control. For example I want to agree with my employer that he'll pay me for my work. In exchange my employer expects me to make my software available to him. I want to be able to make such agreements.
If I spend a month employed as a carpenter, making chairs, this does not give my employer the right to just take my chairs from me without payment. I have the right to make agreements with those who take my chairs that they pay me for my work. If instead of carpenting I decide to spend that month programming, you expect that this gives you the right to just take away everything I make.
Work is work. Work is worth compensation. A worker has the right to a salary, to decent working conditions, etc. These are rights and compensations in return for work. Employers do not have the right to just take away without any compensation the chairs or razor blades or programs or whatever their employees produce.
Neither do you.
Give a man a fish, and you have fed him for a single day. Teach him how to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime, all the while calling you a miser for not giving him your fish.
So we have no rights to decide over the fruits of our own labor? What are we, slaves?
One thing that horrifies me about both anarchists and communists is their penchant for power, for totalitarianism, dictatorship. They want to decide centrally what's best for everyone. No variety allowed. Everything must be uniform. Everyone must comply with their restrictive notions.
Socialism has a few great ideas and ideals. Why are they always perverted?
Give a man a fish, and you have fed him for a single day. Teach him how to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime, all the while calling you a miser for not giving him your fish.
"it could form the basis of a DNA computer in the future that could potentially operate within human cells and act as a monitoring device"
... I'm fee ... g-g-g-aaa ... GGGAAAHH ... An exception 0D has occurred at 0028:C003C720000433F."
"Hey, your face is turning blue, what's the problem?"
"I don't know, my doctor recommended this Microsoft stuff, I'm feeling
"PATH searches are more expensive than bin lookups"
If we're discussing the principles of how things work, why not improve how PATH works?
When the system starts, have the system go through the PATH collecting all the file names and making a quick-search table. To find an executable it would just look in this quick-search table, not in the PATH directories.
Then the size of the PATH makes no difference at all. PATH searches will be equally quick regardless of the number of directories.
(Implementation details: The system must rebuild the quick-search table whenever files have been added or removed in any directory in the PATH, or the PATH itself has been modified.)
Besides, what I really want is a combo phone/mp3 player/PDA watch, dammit!"
You forgot TV receiver, camera, scanner, printer and coke-and-pizza dispenser.
I'm sure you realize that would totally break DNS.
.fm. If heavily used endings such as com get too hard on the root servers, more characters could be included just for those endings -- queries for microsoft.com might go to a root server for ft.com.
The rules could be adapted so the last three characters form a TLD, regardless where the dots are. For example, in support.microsoft the TLD would be oft, in slashdot.org it would be org, in fastmail.fm it would be
Just ignore the dots. It's certainly technically feasible.
I like the suggestion in snookum's post! More freedom! More clarity! Better names! Mod it up!
Give a man a fish, and you have fed him for just one day. Teach him how to fish, and he'll call you a miser.
A mathematically rigorous examination will show that predicting development time is impossible since it's impossible to predict how interesting Slashdot will be and how much time will be spent there.
I was chatting on IRC while the installer went on about its merry way.
Gaaaah! When installing on Windows, no other applications must be running! Ever! This is the First Rule wich appears First and Foremost on all Windows installers!
Perhaps you activated the dreaded Cancel button. Another less-known rule is never to use the Cancel button during installation. It may leave the system in an unstable state that requires re-installation of the entire system, and after that all your applications. This means that you must keep your hands and any pets and toddlers away from the keyboard, since the Cancel button often has focus and gets activated if you just press the spacebar or the return key.
This instability is of course a feature introduced by Microsoft to give us some adventure in our lives.