... is a single point of failure, one that can be bribed, could not be objective, could follow the pressures of RIAA/MPAA/etc instead of what is fair/freedom of speech/logic/etc, and will validate whatever atrocity is done in that matter ("the czar said so, bow and agree, or else.."). Even worse, will enforce the madness involved in IP/patents? where i can patent i.e. "thinking"?
In the other hand, "international copyright infringements"... what about US infringements about international copyrights? US laws/view of the problem always seems to be "i am the right one, the other countries just copy what is done here" even when its not, same with the "fair trade" US definition (accept our products, lets see if I accept yours)
This is the second election in a row, where could be at least uncertain if what the people voted is not what was "decided". Is voting what makes a difference between other methods of government, to distinguish it from i.e. monarchy or dictatorship, but if that don't matters anymore could be actual government regime be called "democracy"?
he could try to forward his daily mail to a gmail account to really test spam/virus protection, label classification and how much space is 1gb for that kind of traffic. Even if it works, a good promotion of whatever future service of hotmail is "it performed better than gmail with my mail".
Tikiwiki tries to be all of this, and much more. And if the current feature list is not enough, just wait a few days/weeks for the 1.9 version (the site runs a recent cvs so most can be tried there).
About language detection, probably a bayesian algorithm should learn that pretty well (i.e. with POPFile would not be so hard to try to classify mails for language.
But there should be easier ways. As far i remember most languages have its own letter distribution (i.e. around 20% 'e', 10% 'a', etc), i.e. counting frequency of letters from texts in different languages should be enough to differentiate and aggrupate them... at least, if there enough text in it.
His "instinct" seems to have been trained by the security blackholes that Microsoft produced, joined by being them the only applications that he runs because the others are "not intuitive". I would change "instinct" with "according with my experience" so let other people think in its own "intuitive" way. My experience with OS/2, BeOS, Mac OS X, and Linux is that they are pretty secure, and have environment/applications pretty intuitive, so if i never had used any microsoft OS my instinct would say me that safety and usability are usually paired.
Mixing generalities with bad examples are very common there. He put the entire idea of P2P as "unsafe" because some P2P applications have security holes, and the same with web serving as a lot of windows password files could be found out there. Maybe there are activities that are unsafe by default (i.e. jumping from airplanes, specially when without parachutes), but that is not something that can be generalized so easily.
There are gadgets to store "safely" passwords, and fits well in a keychain. If for your company is so critical the security of the passwords, well can buy for everyone there one of such things, or just magnetic cards instead of having to write passwords (of course, both gives some phisical security concerns, but are safer than some other alternatives). Is not exactly the same, but one of the uses for my palm is just storing there hard to remember passwords protected by a master password with strip.
Also, there are also several strategies to implement one time passwords, why not change password every time you use it?
3 points: - knowing how it technically works dont disable the social engineering component, very trivial worms were very sucessful just for that. - there are a lot of worms that have the source available in a way or another, from the first ILoveYou worm (well, most.vbs ones are that way) to latests Bagle or Netsky variants, that even have the source attached. - Some worms also are maybe simple exploits of software vulnerabilities or weakeness (mostly MS.*, but there are some for other developers and operating systems). What must be understood there is not the worm source, but what it exploit and why that software is used.
Im in and out with Opera since 97, and since Firefox 1.0 was released im using it again.
Yes, have adds, yes, have some compatibility problems, dont have the extensions that Firefox/Mozilla have, yes, is not open source (to differenciate with "free", as you can get it without spending money).
In the other hand, is pretty stable (well, using 7.6 beta 2, i can leave some room for problems), it displays slashdot pretty well (with firefox, sometimes the content move to the black area on the right, a problem that had also Tikiwiki as explained here), it loads FAST and is pretty compact, the ads are text based (bit dependant on content like gmail ones, and i could re-register if want them off), have a good mail client, it have even a good rss reader integrated, and surely have some other nice features that i dont explored yet. Uh, and of course, gmail works with it pretty well.
Why that last switch? Installed firefox 1.0 RPM from SuSE and started to have problems (well, the right col bug problem was there from some time), firefox sometimes dont load (have to kill the task to retry), sometimes load, but don't display anything on browser's window (seems to work, just not show) and sometimes works. Of course, had to reinstall most themes/extensions, and somewhat between 1.0rc and 1.0 decided to disable the open of new windows from web pages.
I could had try to install another/newer rpm or from other format, clean configurations and try without extensions/themes, and so on... but too i can play a bit more with Opera and leave that test for later.
About opera's "market share", well, that seem to run well in the embedded market. Being small, with low requirements, fast and multiplataform enough are good advantages there and where hardware is not at the top. And for normal desktops still is a good alternative.
Digital content could be "refreshed", just copying it to newer, bigger, cheaper and with more far on time expiration date each time (i.e. when i bought my cd burner, made a backup of my old diskette-based info there).
But the main problem is not the "end of life" of media used for storage, is the format in which the information is. In 50 years, will be an application that opens/process that information? One of the advantage of having information in open formats is that in the worst case, you can have all the information to be able to process them. But if you stored your information using an applicaiton with its own propietary/closed format, and the company just decided to not support that format anymore, or just closed, you could have lost your information, even if the media where it is stored still retains it well.
Computer programs must fail, have errors, anomalies, buffer overflows, etc, even for something as simple (?) as increasing counters in something as critical as deciding the country's future.
And there is no really big fuzz about this fact, no cancelled contracts with the companies making that faulty machines. It is just accepted as normal things related to computers as blue screens. People had to vote in computers, was sold the idea that their vote is more accurate because "they are counted by computers" only to find that the malice or idiocy around those computers had make irrelevant the main thing that makes what is a democracy.
Could the final result of the election have been different? Who knows, the detected anomalies could be the tip of the iceberg or things could have been the same even if all things were perfect. But for getting unnacurate or "according to polls" results why not stop at the poll level and give the same weight as real votes? after all maybe the percent of error in poll estimates is lower than the one counting the votes with that technology.
Logic? In politic? is a 3-way hole. Politics are unlogic, logic is against most what is done by politics, and the last one is you wanting to mix both and getting surprised because they dont mix at all.
Not followed the Kuro5hin discussion, but, for someone profane to statistics, that analisis had the assumption that people in 2004 would vote approx the same way as in 2000, even with all what happened in Bush administration?
Because a way of cheating the results could be follow the approx distribution of previous election + a random value adjusted to the levels of actual, registered voters.
Ok, this objection could not have statistical meaning, nor means that because after existed a "proof" that things were fair, before the cheat was done specifically with that proof as target. But as I said, have very little knowledge on this topics.
Worrying about a very short-sighted "now" vs what future disaster could come after Bush administration is very responsible, yes.
Also worrying even now about people that could lose his job and vote is better than worry about dead people (by hurricanes and similars enhanced by climate changes) that dont matter because they dont vote anymore.
Hopely Bush is still alive (and whoever he cares about) the day of the end of the world as we know it, would hate that he fuck the world and don't lives to suffer for what he helped to cause.
in a mailing list I administer, and in my own personal address (time to test the new "report phishing" gmail feature) I received today what could be the same message, but the IP it pointed to resolved as ipvpn101156.netvigator.com (don't look like to be in zimbabwe) port 38, that looked like a Windows 2000/XP with too many open ports.
Probably that message is sent from hacked/owned/not patched windows machines that send the entered info to the real criminal. I suppose that for really knowimg who is him that "infected" machines should be hacked back or that the provider of that internet connection contacts/gives the address of the owner, and check the programs there.
If not was about price, availability, and probably linux compatibility having a cell phone with a good pda, web browser, GPS (and maybe even ebook reader and ssh client) is like a dream. It even have good mp3 player, radio and not so bad camera included. But if it marks a trend, the future looks promising.
In the other hand, if you already carry/need a "plain" cell phone, a pda, a digital camera and a mp3 player and even a gps, if you can have all that functionalities in a single device (assumming that do fairly well all of those things and are well integrated) will be better.
Of course, if you just need a portable device to just talk, then all the extras are not needed and you can choose to buy cheaper/simple phones, but that depend on each people. For me maybe is no use the camera, or ringtones, but be able to access google and other sites, launch a ssh terminal, locate myself in a map to find where i must go and be able to take notes while talking or after are between the things i felt in some moment or another that really needed.
... voted yesterday, in Uruguayan elections. But even as a foreigner, have my own opinions on what candidate should win.
What matters me (and gived me that opinion) is that you can take several points of view to decide for a candidate or another. One could be a "future" one, if we knew how history will develop if the only change in the past was what president was elected, maybe we could have a hint of which finally would be the "best" one. But that is not possible (you know, knowing the future changes it, etc etc), so other criteria must be chosen, like discurses, political promises for what they worth, history, how you like one or another, etc.
But my point of view is about the past. If you vote Kerry, you vote for the unknown future, you don't know what will happen. And the same for Bush, but there is a difference. Bush is the actual president. If you vote for him, you also are approving all he did, and encourage him to follow the same way as till now. And that will say that the recent history of US, all the good and bad that comes from there, is not just choice of a bad government, but that the american people, all US citizens (at least, in average) agrees and supports all what Bush did, That is a dangerous message for the rest of the world that don't agreed with Bush external policy.
Of course, that don't mean that Bush will or not be a better president than Kerry, nor one with less evil external policy (at least, if you think about it as "evil"), but is something that could have influence on how the rest of the world will think about US citizens, more than about their government, laws, policies, etc.
And last, that also don't mean a "you should not vote Bush", just forget about promises for future, think if you approve what US did in the last period, and have that in mind when voting.
Never was infected by a virus myself. But had a BBS whose files were checked against virus, worked in LANs where workers had not a lot of common sense sometimes, and avp is pretty good for checking for virus in mail servers (i.e. teamed up with anomy sanitizer).
To be "unprotected" from virus is ok if you have common sense, firewalls and safe software (i.e. windows is not in that category, and if well linux is pretty safe against virus, maybe is not 100% safe against worms), but when you talk about a lot of people, common sense looks not so common.
So it was written to send spam. A nice thing that could be done is to charge all the money lost by that virus to all the companies that sent spam directly or indirectly thru that program.
Also could be count as a "hard fact" for companies/governments/etc that people that send spam are in part responsible for the virus they receive and the damages they make, and start to take actions.
Well, doubt that spammers could be liable for SoBig damages, but is a nice dream.
The old myth that says that the antivirus makers are the ones that are developing virus? I use AVP/KAV since a decade ago, first in DOS and now in Linux, and is one of the best (if not THE best) available antivirus on the market.
Even know someone that programmed a test virus long time ago, and sent to antivirus publishers to see how well it could be detected, and the response from the community of that time, specially the people from Kaspersky, was very against that kind of "tests", so is very improbable what you are telling there (and that includes too most of the other biggest players 10 years ago if the same is said about i.e. F-Prot or McAfee people)
At least without hard proof (not just speculation or just urban myths) i would give that notice the same weight as that Bill Gates is sending big bucks to any that continues a chain letter.
Slashdot Mirror
In the other hand, "international copyright infringements"... what about US infringements about international copyrights? US laws/view of the problem always seems to be "i am the right one, the other countries just copy what is done here" even when its not, same with the "fair trade" US definition (accept our products, lets see if I accept yours)
This will give a whole new meaning for bad taste jokes.
This is the second election in a row, where could be at least uncertain if what the people voted is not what was "decided". Is voting what makes a difference between other methods of government, to distinguish it from i.e. monarchy or dictatorship, but if that don't matters anymore could be actual government regime be called "democracy"?
he could try to forward his daily mail to a gmail account to really test spam/virus protection, label classification and how much space is 1gb for that kind of traffic. Even if it works, a good promotion of whatever future service of hotmail is "it performed better than gmail with my mail".
Tikiwiki tries to be all of this, and much more. And if the current feature list is not enough, just wait a few days/weeks for the 1.9 version (the site runs a recent cvs so most can be tried there).
But there should be easier ways. As far i remember most languages have its own letter distribution (i.e. around 20% 'e', 10% 'a', etc), i.e. counting frequency of letters from texts in different languages should be enough to differentiate and aggrupate them... at least, if there enough text in it.
Mixing generalities with bad examples are very common there. He put the entire idea of P2P as "unsafe" because some P2P applications have security holes, and the same with web serving as a lot of windows password files could be found out there. Maybe there are activities that are unsafe by default (i.e. jumping from airplanes, specially when without parachutes), but that is not something that can be generalized so easily.
Also, there are also several strategies to implement one time passwords, why not change password every time you use it?
3 points: .vbs ones are that way) to latests Bagle or Netsky variants, that even have the source attached.
- knowing how it technically works dont disable the social engineering component, very trivial worms were very sucessful just for that.
- there are a lot of worms that have the source available in a way or another, from the first ILoveYou worm (well, most
- Some worms also are maybe simple exploits of software vulnerabilities or weakeness (mostly MS.*, but there are some for other developers and operating systems). What must be understood there is not the worm source, but what it exploit and why that software is used.
Yes, have adds, yes, have some compatibility problems, dont have the extensions that Firefox/Mozilla have, yes, is not open source (to differenciate with "free", as you can get it without spending money).
In the other hand, is pretty stable (well, using 7.6 beta 2, i can leave some room for problems), it displays slashdot pretty well (with firefox, sometimes the content move to the black area on the right, a problem that had also Tikiwiki as explained here), it loads FAST and is pretty compact, the ads are text based (bit dependant on content like gmail ones, and i could re-register if want them off), have a good mail client, it have even a good rss reader integrated, and surely have some other nice features that i dont explored yet. Uh, and of course, gmail works with it pretty well.
Why that last switch? Installed firefox 1.0 RPM from SuSE and started to have problems (well, the right col bug problem was there from some time), firefox sometimes dont load (have to kill the task to retry), sometimes load, but don't display anything on browser's window (seems to work, just not show) and sometimes works. Of course, had to reinstall most themes/extensions, and somewhat between 1.0rc and 1.0 decided to disable the open of new windows from web pages.
I could had try to install another/newer rpm or from other format, clean configurations and try without extensions/themes, and so on... but too i can play a bit more with Opera and leave that test for later.
About opera's "market share", well, that seem to run well in the embedded market. Being small, with low requirements, fast and multiplataform enough are good advantages there and where hardware is not at the top. And for normal desktops still is a good alternative.
But the main problem is not the "end of life" of media used for storage, is the format in which the information is. In 50 years, will be an application that opens/process that information? One of the advantage of having information in open formats is that in the worst case, you can have all the information to be able to process them. But if you stored your information using an applicaiton with its own propietary/closed format, and the company just decided to not support that format anymore, or just closed, you could have lost your information, even if the media where it is stored still retains it well.
And there is no really big fuzz about this fact, no cancelled contracts with the companies making that faulty machines. It is just accepted as normal things related to computers as blue screens. People had to vote in computers, was sold the idea that their vote is more accurate because "they are counted by computers" only to find that the malice or idiocy around those computers had make irrelevant the main thing that makes what is a democracy.
Could the final result of the election have been different? Who knows, the detected anomalies could be the tip of the iceberg or things could have been the same even if all things were perfect. But for getting unnacurate or "according to polls" results why not stop at the poll level and give the same weight as real votes? after all maybe the percent of error in poll estimates is lower than the one counting the votes with that technology.
Logic? In politic? is a 3-way hole. Politics are unlogic, logic is against most what is done by politics, and the last one is you wanting to mix both and getting surprised because they dont mix at all.
Because a way of cheating the results could be follow the approx distribution of previous election + a random value adjusted to the levels of actual, registered voters.
Ok, this objection could not have statistical meaning, nor means that because after existed a "proof" that things were fair, before the cheat was done specifically with that proof as target. But as I said, have very little knowledge on this topics.
Also worrying even now about people that could lose his job and vote is better than worry about dead people (by hurricanes and similars enhanced by climate changes) that dont matter because they dont vote anymore.
Hopely Bush is still alive (and whoever he cares about) the day of the end of the world as we know it, would hate that he fuck the world and don't lives to suffer for what he helped to cause.
Probably that message is sent from hacked/owned/not patched windows machines that send the entered info to the real criminal. I suppose that for really knowimg who is him that "infected" machines should be hacked back or that the provider of that internet connection contacts/gives the address of the owner, and check the programs there.
If not was about price, availability, and probably linux compatibility having a cell phone with a good pda, web browser, GPS (and maybe even ebook reader and ssh client) is like a dream. It even have good mp3 player, radio and not so bad camera included. But if it marks a trend, the future looks promising.
Maybe more like Karamba, but probably with a more comfortable/easy way of doing/skinning "applets".
Wonder what linux they run, probably they need the RAM for something, so Damn Small Linux would be the right distro for them.
Of course, if you just need a portable device to just talk, then all the extras are not needed and you can choose to buy cheaper/simple phones, but that depend on each people. For me maybe is no use the camera, or ringtones, but be able to access google and other sites, launch a ssh terminal, locate myself in a map to find where i must go and be able to take notes while talking or after are between the things i felt in some moment or another that really needed.
... until SpamSat is launched, and then all will agree that is a good thing.
What matters me (and gived me that opinion) is that you can take several points of view to decide for a candidate or another. One could be a "future" one, if we knew how history will develop if the only change in the past was what president was elected, maybe we could have a hint of which finally would be the "best" one. But that is not possible (you know, knowing the future changes it, etc etc), so other criteria must be chosen, like discurses, political promises for what they worth, history, how you like one or another, etc.
But my point of view is about the past. If you vote Kerry, you vote for the unknown future, you don't know what will happen. And the same for Bush, but there is a difference. Bush is the actual president. If you vote for him, you also are approving all he did, and encourage him to follow the same way as till now. And that will say that the recent history of US, all the good and bad that comes from there, is not just choice of a bad government, but that the american people, all US citizens (at least, in average) agrees and supports all what Bush did, That is a dangerous message for the rest of the world that don't agreed with Bush external policy. Of course, that don't mean that Bush will or not be a better president than Kerry, nor one with less evil external policy (at least, if you think about it as "evil"), but is something that could have influence on how the rest of the world will think about US citizens, more than about their government, laws, policies, etc.
And last, that also don't mean a "you should not vote Bush", just forget about promises for future, think if you approve what US did in the last period, and have that in mind when voting.
To be "unprotected" from virus is ok if you have common sense, firewalls and safe software (i.e. windows is not in that category, and if well linux is pretty safe against virus, maybe is not 100% safe against worms), but when you talk about a lot of people, common sense looks not so common.
Also could be count as a "hard fact" for companies/governments/etc that people that send spam are in part responsible for the virus they receive and the damages they make, and start to take actions.
Well, doubt that spammers could be liable for SoBig damages, but is a nice dream.
Even know someone that programmed a test virus long time ago, and sent to antivirus publishers to see how well it could be detected, and the response from the community of that time, specially the people from Kaspersky, was very against that kind of "tests", so is very improbable what you are telling there (and that includes too most of the other biggest players 10 years ago if the same is said about i.e. F-Prot or McAfee people)
At least without hard proof (not just speculation or just urban myths) i would give that notice the same weight as that Bill Gates is sending big bucks to any that continues a chain letter.