Well, sometimes typos develop into real words. That can't be considered trying to dupe people unless the sole purpose of your site is to trap people who wanted to go to another site (yaho.com, yahoooo.com, pokomon.com, atlavista.com).
One time at work I made the mistake of typing "buy.com" as "boy.com." Was I ever thankful that the only thing the proxy retrieved was a text page that said "Please wait 5 seconds to be redirected to youngnastysluts.com." I didn't even need one second to SLAM on the close button in my browser.
Typo sites just prey on newbies, people who have a hard time spelling, and people who just make honest mistakes. I can just imagine the horrified look on parents' faces when their child gets an educational web site's domain name off by one character and is redirected to a porn site. This type of thing has even been used by competitors: for example, for some time "amazom.com" pointed to a direct competitor to Amazon. And let's not forget all the ways children (and adults) can misspell names like "Pokémon."
Don't penalize people for their inability to spell by giving them a flood of banners, porn, and malicious Javascript. Try misspelling some popular sites' names. You'd be surprised.
The term script kiddies creates a negative image of young people using Unix/Linux as being only vandals.
The fears about kids using Unix/Linux usually come from the administration being totally clueless about technology. The vast majority of script kiddies won't touch Linux, because
It's free, but "free as in speech/beer," not "free as in WaReZ d00d."
Most of the hacking is done from their home (family's) or school computers, which only run Windows.
Open source software doesn't mean anything when all the software they use is written in Visual Basic.
Say what you will about Ralph Nader, but I think he's just a little bit above the equivalent functional level of a script kiddy. Ralph Nader exposed the fallacies of the auto industry, like these "grey hats" -- that is, he actually did the research and fact-finding himself.
The equivalent of a "script kiddy" as applied to the auto industry of days past would be a driver who deliberately caused fatal auto accidents to expl0it the safety problems. Script kiddies don't actually find security problems; they just use crax0rz provided by grey hat sources (or by more knowledgeable black hats) to exploit the weaknesses. No thinking required.
It's not so much the color of the text as the font they use. Serif fonts (like Times, which/. and other sites use) are easy to read for large quantities of text. Only for smaller lengths of text (i.e./. headlines) should sans serif fonts like Helvetica be used. Filling a page with Helvetica text is almost as bad as the "Tahoma fetish" that has taken over many web sites of late.
When you think about it, there weren't all THAT many people using Napster at the same time. Users were redirected to one of many load-balanced servers, with a pre-set capacity. The servers were not networked at all, so your search results were limited to whoever was on the same server as yourself.
A service like Gnutella (not GNUtella, as it's not made by any free software people) is decentralized so that you can become a node in a network of potentially infinite size. Of course, the fact that so many packets are going around makes latency a horrible burden to bear, so it's easy to get downloads that run at miserably slow speeds. (And don't even think about getting more than 1 KB/sec if you're running it on a dial-up connection.)
I am sick and tired of people comparing the VCR (a playback and recording device) with Napster (a sharing device). They are two completely different things.
The MP3 format itself is not illegal. The RIAA is not going after companies like RealNetworks, MusicMatch, and Xing that create software to encode MP3's. The fact that MP3's exist is not the issue here. The fact that Napster exists to facilitate the trade of MP3's is the issue.
Let's try this: I set up a little flea market where everyone sits at a table with piles of videotapes, an infinite supply of blank tapes, and a tape copier. I sit in the center, with no tapes or copier of my own. When you arrive, you don't have to pay anything, but you just give me a list of the tapes that you're bringing. Then, when I open it up to the public, someone comes up to me and asks who has a copy of, say, "Terminator 2." I give that person a list of several tables where they can get a copy of "Terminator 2," he goes to one of them, and he gets his copy of the movie.
Well, then the MPAA steps in once my flea market gets to be the size of Giants Stadium, and 99.99% of the copies made are of copyrighted films. "But wait!" I say. "I'm not encouraging the people to break the law, in fact some people here are copying independent films that the directors WANT to be copied!" The MPAA will not care about that statistically insignificant amount of people, and will dutifully shut me down.
In fact, we have a few places where this analogy works out for computer software. They're called MarketPro computer shows.:)
IRC is still centralized to a point. Let's say I started up an IRC network specifically devoted to music swapping. Sure, people could chat and such, but 99% of the traffic would just be requests and file transfers. If I got 20 million users and the public mindshare of Napster, you bet your ass I would be shut down.
Now as for IRC channels, there's little the RIAA could do. They could get an injunction to stop #mp3z on IRC network X, but there's nothing to stop the displaced traders from moving to #!!!!!!!riaasucks-downloadmp3z on network X or #mp3z on network Y.
Frankly, they just didn't care. The "here, sign this" request was made with all the gusto and enthusiasm of a cashier in McDonald's who has just said "Would you like to super-size that?" for the 10,000th time today.
They didn't even keep a record of what it was that I copied, or even my name and address (I paid cash, of course). Office Depot was just doing a classic Cover Your Ass tactic.
When I went to Office Depot to photocopy some pages of books for a school project (note educational "fair use" and all that jazz) I was actually required to sign a document affirming that I was permitted to copy the materials. The document was brightly colored, had a lot of legal jargon on it, and was marked "Exhibit A" on the bottom. How nice -- when the publishers want to sue me, they already have one piece of signed, pre-labeled evidence.
I signed it, of course, because I wanted to pay the 40 cents for my copies and go home.
XMMS is not available on Windows without the use of an X server. Those who use Windows not only get to use Winamp, they get to use:
High-quality visualization plugins not available for other operating systems
New media formats, like the high-quality MPEG-4 codecs that Microsoft is innovating to make Internet video more accessible
Internet Explorer, the world's fastest and most integrated full-featured web browser
High-quality software from third parties you'd never see for other operating systems
Remember, just because an operating system is free doesn't make it a better value. With new, innovative technologies, Microsoft is leading the way towards a more high-performance standard of computing. Don't miss out! You don't want to be stuck recompiling some beta build of an ASF decoder that works at 5 fps when you can have streaming, high-quality, full-screen video on your screen, today!
Or do an article about the two sides of ZDNet News, which ran the story this morning. However, both sites picked it up from the Wall Street Journal, which isn't as outwardly biased in the minds of many Slashdot readers.
Windows Millennium Edition (aka Windows 98 Third Edition) will ship with MSN Messenger -- and Windows Media Player 7 -- pre-installed. Why bother downloading AOL's instant messaging clients and MP3 playback software when you get functional equivalents* included with your OS?
* This assumes that MSN gets AOL/ICQ support yet again, which wouldn't be too hard. Also WMP 7 supports its own skins and plugins, not to mention playlists. Who needs Winamp?
No, the fact that their software is preinstalled doesn't make you a _user_. You have to actually establish an account and give them a credit card to gain that designation. What does inflate their numbers is the product of two facts:
Every AOL account includes seven screen names, which you can use even if there are fewer than seven people in your household.
You can amass as many AIM screen names as you want, and they never expire. I presently use two, but am credited with having five when I search their member directory with all three of my (past and present) e-mail addresses. The three that I don't use have never been logged into for over a year. I have known friends who have gone through 10 or 15 screen names, informing only their friends of their newest name so as not to be bothered by the idiots they left behind. (And let's not forget the spammers who register hundreds of thousands of ICQ accounts to send out porn site URL's.)
Eventually, AOL/AIM will claim more active members than the total userbase of the Internet.
You forgot the fundamental point of Slashdot-style advocacy. Anything that Microsoft produces (except perhaps Internet Explorer) sucks, and is just an attempt to gain more of a stranglehold over the world as a whole. When a device using Linux starts to imitate what Microsoft does, it's hailed as an incredible breakthrough, something that's almost as good as... using Microsoft products!
On a more serious note, sometimes Microsoft _does_ make something decent on the desktop. The use of keyboard accelerators far and away beats out other desktop OS's, so I can do things like rapid data entry without reaching for the mouse. Additionally, applications tend to use common dialogs, icons, and widgets much more often. Microsoft's own Office products tend to be among the exceptions, ironically enough.
Of course, Microsoft has practically nothing on *nix on the command line, but who in their right mind gets anything done THERE?;)
According to yopy.org, it runs W, not X. The W window environment takes up much less space than X, thus making it more useful for small devices with less resources than your average desktop.
Freewwweb went bankrupt in late June, and Juno bought out their existing customer base. The DOJ doesn't have anything against that.
I liked Freewwweb, but I really had to question how they were making money. I didn't get any more spam, I didn't have to set their site as my home page, and I usually got very good connections, even during peak times (I'm in the New York suburbs). Oh well, at least this thread has given me some ideas so that I can unshackle myself from Windows before I go back to school.
With any window manager you can shift windows around wherever you please. With Windows, ad bars can be forced on-screen (unless you use a Visual Basic craX0r) so that you have to look at them. The fact that Linux users won't have to stare at the ads should be reason enough for NetZero et al. to abandon the plan. They just issued a press release with "Linux" in the text so that their stock would rise a bit.
From what I've heard, though, NetZero's one of those companies that _forces_ you to click on an ad every so often or be disconnected. But hey, that's nothing a little scripting (on Linux or otherwise) can handle, right?
Telemarketers never say "we'd like to sell you X." They now say "We'd like to tell you that you've been selected to receive X, with a no-risk trial for the next 30 days! All we need to do is confirm your address and billing information. Okay?"
The fact that telemarketers now _tell_ you what you want to buy, instead of asking, is another type of "guerrilla" tactics that prey on stupid people.
Even if the answering machine plan has been cancelled, people using urinals may soon hear wise-ass remarks from ABC star Norm MacDonald as they try to do their business. It's all part of ABC's new strategy: "ABC: As If 'Is That Your Final Answer?' Was Annoying Enough."
BTW, other companies have used answering machines to send advertising. It's similar to "Important Memos!" about vacation packages in Florida coming through the fax machines of office buildings. The phone system where I now work was hit three months ago with telemarketers calling at 5:00 AM and leaving voice mail commercials. Funny thing was, the quality was so bad, you couldn't hear what they were saying over the staticky background music.
Read the article. They sent out e-mails with the domain name containing a capital "I" (which looks a lot like a lowercase "l" in most fonts, especially the sans-serif fonts that companies like AOL use by default). Click the link, and you're presented with a PayPal look-alike. Log in, and your username (just your e-mail address) and password are forwarded to the phony site.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, sometimes typos develop into real words. That can't be considered trying to dupe people unless the sole purpose of your site is to trap people who wanted to go to another site (yaho.com, yahoooo.com, pokomon.com, atlavista.com).
One time at work I made the mistake of typing "buy.com" as "boy.com." Was I ever thankful that the only thing the proxy retrieved was a text page that said "Please wait 5 seconds to be redirected to youngnastysluts.com." I didn't even need one second to SLAM on the close button in my browser.
Typo sites just prey on newbies, people who have a hard time spelling, and people who just make honest mistakes. I can just imagine the horrified look on parents' faces when their child gets an educational web site's domain name off by one character and is redirected to a porn site. This type of thing has even been used by competitors: for example, for some time "amazom.com" pointed to a direct competitor to Amazon. And let's not forget all the ways children (and adults) can misspell names like "Pokémon."
Don't penalize people for their inability to spell by giving them a flood of banners, porn, and malicious Javascript. Try misspelling some popular sites' names. You'd be surprised.
The term script kiddies creates a negative image of young people using Unix/Linux as being only vandals.
The fears about kids using Unix/Linux usually come from the administration being totally clueless about technology. The vast majority of script kiddies won't touch Linux, because
Say what you will about Ralph Nader, but I think he's just a little bit above the equivalent functional level of a script kiddy. Ralph Nader exposed the fallacies of the auto industry, like these "grey hats" -- that is, he actually did the research and fact-finding himself.
The equivalent of a "script kiddy" as applied to the auto industry of days past would be a driver who deliberately caused fatal auto accidents to expl0it the safety problems. Script kiddies don't actually find security problems; they just use crax0rz provided by grey hat sources (or by more knowledgeable black hats) to exploit the weaknesses. No thinking required.
It's not so much the color of the text as the font they use. Serif fonts (like Times, which /. and other sites use) are easy to read for large quantities of text. Only for smaller lengths of text (i.e. /. headlines) should sans serif fonts like Helvetica be used. Filling a page with Helvetica text is almost as bad as the "Tahoma fetish" that has taken over many web sites of late.
When you think about it, there weren't all THAT many people using Napster at the same time. Users were redirected to one of many load-balanced servers, with a pre-set capacity. The servers were not networked at all, so your search results were limited to whoever was on the same server as yourself.
A service like Gnutella (not GNUtella, as it's not made by any free software people) is decentralized so that you can become a node in a network of potentially infinite size. Of course, the fact that so many packets are going around makes latency a horrible burden to bear, so it's easy to get downloads that run at miserably slow speeds. (And don't even think about getting more than 1 KB/sec if you're running it on a dial-up connection.)
I am sick and tired of people comparing the VCR (a playback and recording device) with Napster (a sharing device). They are two completely different things.
:)
The MP3 format itself is not illegal. The RIAA is not going after companies like RealNetworks, MusicMatch, and Xing that create software to encode MP3's. The fact that MP3's exist is not the issue here. The fact that Napster exists to facilitate the trade of MP3's is the issue.
Let's try this: I set up a little flea market where everyone sits at a table with piles of videotapes, an infinite supply of blank tapes, and a tape copier. I sit in the center, with no tapes or copier of my own. When you arrive, you don't have to pay anything, but you just give me a list of the tapes that you're bringing. Then, when I open it up to the public, someone comes up to me and asks who has a copy of, say, "Terminator 2." I give that person a list of several tables where they can get a copy of "Terminator 2," he goes to one of them, and he gets his copy of the movie.
Well, then the MPAA steps in once my flea market gets to be the size of Giants Stadium, and 99.99% of the copies made are of copyrighted films. "But wait!" I say. "I'm not encouraging the people to break the law, in fact some people here are copying independent films that the directors WANT to be copied!" The MPAA will not care about that statistically insignificant amount of people, and will dutifully shut me down.
In fact, we have a few places where this analogy works out for computer software. They're called MarketPro computer shows.
IRC is still centralized to a point. Let's say I started up an IRC network specifically devoted to music swapping. Sure, people could chat and such, but 99% of the traffic would just be requests and file transfers. If I got 20 million users and the public mindshare of Napster, you bet your ass I would be shut down.
Now as for IRC channels, there's little the RIAA could do. They could get an injunction to stop #mp3z on IRC network X, but there's nothing to stop the displaced traders from moving to #!!!!!!!riaasucks-downloadmp3z on network X or #mp3z on network Y.
Frankly, they just didn't care. The "here, sign this" request was made with all the gusto and enthusiasm of a cashier in McDonald's who has just said "Would you like to super-size that?" for the 10,000th time today.
They didn't even keep a record of what it was that I copied, or even my name and address (I paid cash, of course). Office Depot was just doing a classic Cover Your Ass tactic.
When I went to Office Depot to photocopy some pages of books for a school project (note educational "fair use" and all that jazz) I was actually required to sign a document affirming that I was permitted to copy the materials. The document was brightly colored, had a lot of legal jargon on it, and was marked "Exhibit A" on the bottom. How nice -- when the publishers want to sue me, they already have one piece of signed, pre-labeled evidence.
I signed it, of course, because I wanted to pay the 40 cents for my copies and go home.
- High-quality visualization plugins not available for other operating systems
- New media formats, like the high-quality MPEG-4 codecs that Microsoft is innovating to make Internet video more accessible
- Internet Explorer, the world's fastest and most integrated full-featured web browser
- High-quality software from third parties you'd never see for other operating systems
Remember, just because an operating system is free doesn't make it a better value. With new, innovative technologies, Microsoft is leading the way towards a more high-performance standard of computing. Don't miss out! You don't want to be stuck recompiling some beta build of an ASF decoder that works at 5 fps when you can have streaming, high-quality, full-screen video on your screen, today!Or do an article about the two sides of ZDNet News, which ran the story this morning. However, both sites picked it up from the Wall Street Journal, which isn't as outwardly biased in the minds of many Slashdot readers.
I fail to see the significance between your link and my comment.
You replied to my link with your comment, thus associating them in a thread. The significance between them is so implied.
I hereby implore you to stop replying and just let me post links to pictures of a CS professor dressed up like a turkey. End of thread.
Can't you guys take a joke?
Um, did you look at the link I posted? It wasn't exactly in-depth social commentary. Can't you take a joke?Computer Science Germans apparently are no different. What do they feed these guys?
Turkey. And lots of it.Windows Millennium Edition (aka Windows 98 Third Edition) will ship with MSN Messenger -- and Windows Media Player 7 -- pre-installed. Why bother downloading AOL's instant messaging clients and MP3 playback software when you get functional equivalents* included with your OS?
* This assumes that MSN gets AOL/ICQ support yet again, which wouldn't be too hard. Also WMP 7 supports its own skins and plugins, not to mention playlists. Who needs Winamp?
- Every AOL account includes seven screen names, which you can use even if there are fewer than seven people in your household.
- You can amass as many AIM screen names as you want, and they never expire. I presently use two, but am credited with having five when I search their member directory with all three of my (past and present) e-mail addresses. The three that I don't use have never been logged into for over a year. I have known friends who have gone through 10 or 15 screen names, informing only their friends of their newest name so as not to be bothered by the idiots they left behind. (And let's not forget the spammers who register hundreds of thousands of ICQ accounts to send out porn site URL's.)
Eventually, AOL/AIM will claim more active members than the total userbase of the Internet.You forgot the fundamental point of Slashdot-style advocacy. Anything that Microsoft produces (except perhaps Internet Explorer) sucks, and is just an attempt to gain more of a stranglehold over the world as a whole. When a device using Linux starts to imitate what Microsoft does, it's hailed as an incredible breakthrough, something that's almost as good as... using Microsoft products!
;)
On a more serious note, sometimes Microsoft _does_ make something decent on the desktop. The use of keyboard accelerators far and away beats out other desktop OS's, so I can do things like rapid data entry without reaching for the mouse. Additionally, applications tend to use common dialogs, icons, and widgets much more often. Microsoft's own Office products tend to be among the exceptions, ironically enough.
Of course, Microsoft has practically nothing on *nix on the command line, but who in their right mind gets anything done THERE?
According to yopy.org, it runs W, not X. The W window environment takes up much less space than X, thus making it more useful for small devices with less resources than your average desktop.
Freewwweb went bankrupt in late June, and Juno bought out their existing customer base. The DOJ doesn't have anything against that.
I liked Freewwweb, but I really had to question how they were making money. I didn't get any more spam, I didn't have to set their site as my home page, and I usually got very good connections, even during peak times (I'm in the New York suburbs). Oh well, at least this thread has given me some ideas so that I can unshackle myself from Windows before I go back to school.
With any window manager you can shift windows around wherever you please. With Windows, ad bars can be forced on-screen (unless you use a Visual Basic craX0r) so that you have to look at them. The fact that Linux users won't have to stare at the ads should be reason enough for NetZero et al. to abandon the plan. They just issued a press release with "Linux" in the text so that their stock would rise a bit.
From what I've heard, though, NetZero's one of those companies that _forces_ you to click on an ad every so often or be disconnected. But hey, that's nothing a little scripting (on Linux or otherwise) can handle, right?
What an innovative idea.
BTW, I haven't seen this for sale in the longest time... it was too expensive, most likely.
Telemarketers never say "we'd like to sell you X." They now say "We'd like to tell you that you've been selected to receive X, with a no-risk trial for the next 30 days! All we need to do is confirm your address and billing information. Okay?"
The fact that telemarketers now _tell_ you what you want to buy, instead of asking, is another type of "guerrilla" tactics that prey on stupid people.
Even if the answering machine plan has been cancelled, people using urinals may soon hear wise-ass remarks from ABC star Norm MacDonald as they try to do their business. It's all part of ABC's new strategy: "ABC: As If 'Is That Your Final Answer?' Was Annoying Enough."
BTW, other companies have used answering machines to send advertising. It's similar to "Important Memos!" about vacation packages in Florida coming through the fax machines of office buildings. The phone system where I now work was hit three months ago with telemarketers calling at 5:00 AM and leaving voice mail commercials. Funny thing was, the quality was so bad, you couldn't hear what they were saying over the staticky background music.
Read the article. They sent out e-mails with the domain name containing a capital "I" (which looks a lot like a lowercase "l" in most fonts, especially the sans-serif fonts that companies like AOL use by default). Click the link, and you're presented with a PayPal look-alike. Log in, and your username (just your e-mail address) and password are forwarded to the phony site.