That's a broad generalization based on your personal experiences.
You're seem very proud of your accomplishments, but that doesn't mean you can look down on your peers who haven't accomplished the same.
Count yourself lucky that you were able to find the jobs to suit your education, lucky that you're in strong enough health to work those hours and study.
And don't forget... it may or may not be your case, but I've heard your argument before... even if you had no money coming from your family, there's a huge difference between that and not having a family to fall back on.
Most irritating is when I hear your argument from people who were raised in large, relatively affluent families where the whole family has a university education. Typically, the person making the argument is not eligable for student loans or grants because their family is too affluent on paper to qualify for loans, however the family's money has been tied up in various investments, such as their primary home or the cottage. They then discount the advantage that their parent's contacts had in putting them into a position where they could get three jobs, when their friends couldn't get one, having the nerve to tell their peers "I could do it, why can't you?"
Receive an Internet postcard from somebody who genuinely likes you.
Have somebody send you a link to an article using a "click here to send this to a friend" button.
Post to a private mailing list only to have somebody conveniently set up a web-archive.
Have an easily guessed email address.
Have somebody cc' you on a usenet post.
Be unlucky.
If none of these things had happened to me since 1998, my current address would probably be spam free.
Explaining the problem to people beforehand is only so effective. Telling off your friends after the fact is not a solution. Eventually you just have to give up. My work address has been quite safe, I generally don't use it to correspond with the outside world, especially non-technical people and it is reasonably cryptic, but my personal address is ceaselessly bombarded.
What does it take to get a 1?
on
Online! The Book
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I mean really, there should be a competition to find a book which sets new lows.
What's the point of having a scale of 1 to 10 if nobody has a 1?
If Dvorak put out a book with so little value that it's not worth reading, will mislead anyone who doesn't know any better, would corrupt young minds if given to a library, would shame you to admit to have read it, much less purchased it, invokes sadness to look upon -- knowing that trees died to print it, leads you to question the sanity of the publisher or the motives of the author, then by all means, give it a 1!
Email is next. How many IDs have you discarded because of SPAM?
Instant messaging has for the mostpart replaced email for informal conversation. I can't have a decent email discussion with anyone anymore because of the sheer volume of SPAM. IM hasn't been swamped yet. But when email is dead, IM will be next.
I've lost contact with friends and I've missed real "urgent notifications" for payments because of SPAM.
It's idiocy. Legislation and vengence are not the answer though. I think the problem can be solved via a technical solution, everyone just needs to adopt it.
There's a niche here for somebody to make a killing wiht some slick spamproof email solution.
The usual consequence is a panicked phonecall at 2:00am, "My wordprocessor isn't working, I can't print! I thought you were an expert? What did you do?"
Yeah it is a stretch, but KDE wouldn't have started if it were not for QT. And there's nothing you can link to to make the environment work except QT... to the extent that you must[1] distribute QT with your GUI... which set Debian against the world until QT went GPL while back.
QT of course profits from KDE because commercial apps either must go open source or pay for licenses... (before they start development, but the terms can change of course).
I'm not saying that open software can't have commercial roots, only that it is interesting that the nice shiny desktop apps all do.
"Interesting", not "bad" or "good" or anything of the sort... just "interesting".
[1] "must" is subject to the following pedantic caveats: you want to ship the binaries and you want the binaries to run when they get to their destination.
But the parent's description holds, Mozilla and KDE are/were "adjuncts to commercial ventures"
Almost all the good shiny GUI apps have some commerical tie-in. KDE certainly wasn't written "open source from the ground up", it was built on a commercial toolkit.
Gimp -> GTK -> Gnome was probably the only untainted chain, but eventually Gnome was helped along by commercial interests... but the origins were 'pure'.
The Mozilla project had paid employees and clear commercial goals --- commercial goals for an open source browser, but commercial goals.
Apache, gcc etc, are fantastic programs, but not for "end users". They're as shiny as monochrome ASCII gets:-)
IMHO, the problem is that the media is hyping Linux as a commercial and home user's desktop OS, whereas nobody outside of commerce cares about that... short of ensuring that one's pet OS skills are transferrable to employment skills... which is in essence a commercial interest anyways... but not powerful enough to have anyone troubleshoot the grandma's soundcard... not as fast as a commercial venture that is.
That's a pretty weak argument. You're waving around strong statements involving the word 'security', but you only expand upon 'security' in the context of verifying one's identity.
Email systems which verify identity have existed since PGP. The only reason you're not using it is because your friends aren't. Of course your friends aren't because your not... but why?
You and your friends likely talk about nothing worth hiding.
Personally, I think that the real battle is between anonymity and privacy. Anonymity on the Internet provides an uncontrolled avenue for crimes such as cracking, trading in illegal materials, fraud, stalking etc.
Law enforcement would be happy to abolish anonymity.
Commerce doesn't like true anonymity because it discards valuable mareting data. They for the most part seem to be happy not knowing that Bob visited the Honda website, but simply that those who visit the Honda website also have shown interest in the following car stereos, bicycle racks, autorepair places, insurance companies... etc. So pseudonymity through random identifiers is generally o.k., but not anonymity.
However... on the Internet, anonymity is critical for privacy. With crappy security practices by Microsoft etc, it is usually not too hard to link random identifiers to real-world identity, and then before you know it, your insurance company raises your rates because you express interest in fast cars, racing games and car mod sites.
Total anonymity would protect this.
And what about pseudonymity? Adopting a pseudonym to hide your true identity and using it to express your views?
What if your employer obtained your Slashdot ID? and started exploring your posts? What if they didn't like what they saw?
Without complete anonmity to manipulate the pseudonym, your real-world identity can be determined. How could they do that? Right now, it is tricky. But any action against anonymity makes it easier for them.
Far worse would be government examples. What if... the government decided that people who have something to hide are criminals and need to be investigated? And the government found out that you were using PGP?
But I don't have time to fully express this idea... that's the gist of it though.
People say that, but it doesn't make any sense. North American outlets are generally rated and have breakers/fuses for 15A. Breakers on power bars are generally rated for 10A. Plugging a power bar into a power bar into a power bar, and sucking a few watts here and a few watts there with silly fat transformers driving wimpy low-power devices shouldn't cause any problems at all.
As soon as you hit 10A, your first breaker goes. As soon as you hit 15, the branch circuit breaker goes.
How is this dangerous?
Now if you're one of those nuts who's response to blowing a breaker is to put in a bigger breaker, then you'll heat up your wiring in the walls, make the insulation brittle and weak, until some day the insulation cracks, a short appears and that over-rated wire surrounded by dry, warm building materials bursts into flames.
Naw, phone numbers only set up the connection, they don't exist once the connection is established. Modems are only capable of a point-to-point connection so the MAC is meaningless.
I assume Microsoft assigns a bogus MAC just because it is easier (== less bug prone) than dealing with special cases in their protocol stacks.
I've always been a bit curious about how they generate the bogus MAC though. Can it be an identifier?
IMHO, if the thief didn't wipe the HDD on the notebook, then they were probably nailed by a cookie as soon as they fired up their browser.
The cookie would give an IP, an IP would give a rack of modems, a rack of modems would give the caller's phone #, and pow.
Or... the cookie would give an IP, the IP would give a provider, the provider and IP would give an account, the account would give a physical address and pow.
BTW, one ISP I was with would create a dynamically generated reverse-lookup DNS entry which contained my MAC address. Pretty clever since my MAC and IP, thus provider and account would be splottered all over ISP logs everywhere. It's not so much a privacy invasion, since the IP and the date/time would give the same info.
is like saying, "look, we've got a few managers that like to gang-rape their secretaries, but most of them are allright".
Do you actually need to include the word "like"?
Replace the word "gang rape" with "anally rape" and "secretaries" with "children" and it would still be true.
IMHO Catholics need to distance themsleves from the organization. Catholocism won't die if the Catholic church is sued into oblivion for condoning, commiting and hiding sodomy. The irony would be the secular courts finding their moral inspiration guilty of immorality.
Yeah, and those guys who use periods for elipses... horrible.
Next people will be using decimals for periods, comparison operator symbols for 'angle brackets' and single quotes as apostophes! Everybody knows there is no such thing as an apostophe! They'll start using subtraction operator symbols for hyphens and horror of horrors -- pre/postdecrement operators for en-dashes!
When see people abuse 'i.e.' and 'e.g.' in an informal discussion forum, I just shudder and interpret the person's meaning from their context.
But 'mo:'? Wow. 'i.e.' and 'e.g.' are commonly abused and the misuse is normally easy to understand.
Making up obscure acronymns could be interpreted as a way to prompt people to ask you for the meaning, providing you with an ego stroke as you 'educate' them. It could be the result of a low self-esteem.
In the future, ISPs will no longer sell "Internet connections", they will instead sell AOL'esque access to the web and email. The access will be filtered against viruses, SPAM and will include parental controls and complete usage monitoring (which will deter kids from circumventing parental controls).
People will pay money not to be SPAM'ed and not to have to worry about protecting their machine all the time. This will protect the net from most unprotected Windows machines.
For home-workers, Cisco and similar big companies will offer proprietary VPN software which will interface with their proprietary 'almost the internet' software.
However, because of the limited market in unfiltered connections, geeks will pay extra for an unfiltered connection, or will use a technology akin to SLIRP, only to have it blocked time and time again as virus/worm authors try to install such software on unsuspecting Windows machines, and ISP's try to block them.
A couple things to think about in regard to 'children' in schools and 'bullying'.
Children are
Legally required to be in school
Unable to access law enforcement for all but the most serious crimes comitted by their peers
Subject to the daily realities of theft, slander and assault
All but immune to persecution for theft, slander and assault
Legally required to face their assailants/theives the next day
Legally required to face their victims the next day
They have known nothing else
Worse, it's up to the victim's parents whether or not to act... leaving those with the worst homelives the most vulnerable... either to bullying or being bullied.
IMHO, if you can legally require the separation of the bully from the victim, you may have really helped one kid.
I also think the comment in the article that "... while these comments may seem silly to people who have matured, they are very devastating to the young people on the receiving end..." ignores the above reality.
It's tough to draw analogies to adult life, but what if you were legally required to show up for work? What if somebody spread a similarly scandalous rumour about you at work? Oh... let's see... while kids might think it cool to grab a peer's breasts, the reverse might just work for adults. So, your coworker starts telling people that you grabbed her breasts, and you're making passes at her all the time. So your coworkers begin to shun you. You can't quit... you're legally required to be there. You can't call the police, they won't do anything because this is just a little bit of workplace bullying. Now your boss... who happens to be 150% of your height, twice your strength and twice your weight, might just believe the person spreading the scandal, so it will be your word against theirs.
Your friends at work no longer want to be seen with you, because anyone can fall victim to such harassment... so you become ostracised... Some even join in to dispel rumours that they too might be perverts. Few people really believe the rumours, but they know you're not a safe person to be around because you... and anyone you're around is a target.
Seeing that you have no allies, people begin to pick on you, steal your office supplies, scratch your car, slash your tires.
So you keep going to work, despite all this, because you're legally forced to.
Now we're getting close except: kids don't get paid, have little control over their homelife and they've never known anything else.
Except that "shoulda/woulda/coulda" was preceeded by a sketchy election and an overwhelming "DON'T DON'T DON'T!!!" and the nut who's doing it is still in power in the U.S.
I could draw a WWII Germany comparision, but somebody might invoke Goodwin's law.
"I bring the courts attention to document 3,002,345 where it plainly indicates that Darl McBride had an intimate relationship with Bill Gates. Darl, could you please read the message you sent Bill Gates?"
"<ahem> I don't recall composing that message."
"Please read the message for the court"
"The message says 'I love you'"
"It is also plain that you sent many similar messages to Bill Gates, including instructions as to how he can enlarge his anatomy, is this true?"
Slashdot Mirror
FAT's even bad for disks. I have a pet theory that FAT was an idea ported directly from tape drives.
That's a broad generalization based on your personal experiences.
You're seem very proud of your accomplishments, but that doesn't mean you can look down on your peers who haven't accomplished the same.
Count yourself lucky that you were able to find the jobs to suit your education, lucky that you're in strong enough health to work those hours and study.
And don't forget... it may or may not be your case, but I've heard your argument before... even if you had no money coming from your family, there's a huge difference between that and not having a family to fall back on.
Most irritating is when I hear your argument from people who were raised in large, relatively affluent families where the whole family has a university education. Typically, the person making the argument is not eligable for student loans or grants because their family is too affluent on paper to qualify for loans, however the family's money has been tied up in various investments, such as their primary home or the cottage. They then discount the advantage that their parent's contacts had in putting them into a position where they could get three jobs, when their friends couldn't get one, having the nerve to tell their peers "I could do it, why can't you?"
Of course that may not be the case for you...
Methods to get spammed when you know better:
If none of these things had happened to me since 1998, my current address would probably be spam free.
Explaining the problem to people beforehand is only so effective. Telling off your friends after the fact is not a solution. Eventually you just have to give up. My work address has been quite safe, I generally don't use it to correspond with the outside world, especially non-technical people and it is reasonably cryptic, but my personal address is ceaselessly bombarded.
I mean really, there should be a competition to find a book which sets new lows.
What's the point of having a scale of 1 to 10 if nobody has a 1?
If Dvorak put out a book with so little value that it's not worth reading, will mislead anyone who doesn't know any better, would corrupt young minds if given to a library, would shame you to admit to have read it, much less purchased it, invokes sadness to look upon -- knowing that trees died to print it, leads you to question the sanity of the publisher or the motives of the author, then by all means, give it a 1!
Email is next. How many IDs have you discarded because of SPAM?
Instant messaging has for the mostpart replaced email for informal conversation. I can't have a decent email discussion with anyone anymore because of the sheer volume of SPAM. IM hasn't been swamped yet. But when email is dead, IM will be next.
I've lost contact with friends and I've missed real "urgent notifications" for payments because of SPAM.
It's idiocy. Legislation and vengence are not the answer though. I think the problem can be solved via a technical solution, everyone just needs to adopt it.
There's a niche here for somebody to make a killing wiht some slick spamproof email solution.
The usual consequence is a panicked phonecall at 2:00am, "My wordprocessor isn't working, I can't print! I thought you were an expert? What did you do?"
NTFS read-only support under Linux has been around for a LONG time.
Yeah it is a stretch, but KDE wouldn't have started if it were not for QT. And there's nothing you can link to to make the environment work except QT... to the extent that you must[1] distribute QT with your GUI... which set Debian against the world until QT went GPL while back.
QT of course profits from KDE because commercial apps either must go open source or pay for licenses... (before they start development, but the terms can change of course).
I'm not saying that open software can't have commercial roots, only that it is interesting that the nice shiny desktop apps all do.
"Interesting", not "bad" or "good" or anything of the sort... just "interesting".
[1] "must" is subject to the following pedantic caveats: you want to ship the binaries and you want the binaries to run when they get to their destination.
But the parent's description holds, Mozilla and KDE are/were "adjuncts to commercial ventures"
Almost all the good shiny GUI apps have some commerical tie-in. KDE certainly wasn't written "open source from the ground up", it was built on a commercial toolkit.
Gimp -> GTK -> Gnome was probably the only untainted chain, but eventually Gnome was helped along by commercial interests... but the origins were 'pure'.
The Mozilla project had paid employees and clear commercial goals --- commercial goals for an open source browser, but commercial goals.
Apache, gcc etc, are fantastic programs, but not for "end users". They're as shiny as monochrome ASCII gets :-)
IMHO, the problem is that the media is hyping Linux as a commercial and home user's desktop OS, whereas nobody outside of commerce cares about that... short of ensuring that one's pet OS skills are transferrable to employment skills... which is in essence a commercial interest anyways... but not powerful enough to have anyone troubleshoot the grandma's soundcard... not as fast as a commercial venture that is.
That's a pretty weak argument. You're waving around strong statements involving the word 'security', but you only expand upon 'security' in the context of verifying one's identity.
Email systems which verify identity have existed since PGP. The only reason you're not using it is because your friends aren't. Of course your friends aren't because your not... but why?
You and your friends likely talk about nothing worth hiding.
Personally, I think that the real battle is between anonymity and privacy. Anonymity on the Internet provides an uncontrolled avenue for crimes such as cracking, trading in illegal materials, fraud, stalking etc.
Law enforcement would be happy to abolish anonymity.
Commerce doesn't like true anonymity because it discards valuable mareting data. They for the most part seem to be happy not knowing that Bob visited the Honda website, but simply that those who visit the Honda website also have shown interest in the following car stereos, bicycle racks, autorepair places, insurance companies... etc. So pseudonymity through random identifiers is generally o.k., but not anonymity.
However... on the Internet, anonymity is critical for privacy. With crappy security practices by Microsoft etc, it is usually not too hard to link random identifiers to real-world identity, and then before you know it, your insurance company raises your rates because you express interest in fast cars, racing games and car mod sites.
Total anonymity would protect this.
And what about pseudonymity? Adopting a pseudonym to hide your true identity and using it to express your views?
What if your employer obtained your Slashdot ID? and started exploring your posts? What if they didn't like what they saw?
Without complete anonmity to manipulate the pseudonym, your real-world identity can be determined. How could they do that? Right now, it is tricky. But any action against anonymity makes it easier for them.
Far worse would be government examples. What if... the government decided that people who have something to hide are criminals and need to be investigated? And the government found out that you were using PGP?
But I don't have time to fully express this idea... that's the gist of it though.
People say that, but it doesn't make any sense. North American outlets are generally rated and have breakers/fuses for 15A. Breakers on power bars are generally rated for 10A. Plugging a power bar into a power bar into a power bar, and sucking a few watts here and a few watts there with silly fat transformers driving wimpy low-power devices shouldn't cause any problems at all.
As soon as you hit 10A, your first breaker goes. As soon as you hit 15, the branch circuit breaker goes.
How is this dangerous?
Now if you're one of those nuts who's response to blowing a breaker is to put in a bigger breaker, then you'll heat up your wiring in the walls, make the insulation brittle and weak, until some day the insulation cracks, a short appears and that over-rated wire surrounded by dry, warm building materials bursts into flames.
Naw, phone numbers only set up the connection, they don't exist once the connection is established. Modems are only capable of a point-to-point connection so the MAC is meaningless.
I assume Microsoft assigns a bogus MAC just because it is easier (== less bug prone) than dealing with special cases in their protocol stacks.
I've always been a bit curious about how they generate the bogus MAC though. Can it be an identifier?
IMHO, if the thief didn't wipe the HDD on the notebook, then they were probably nailed by a cookie as soon as they fired up their browser.
The cookie would give an IP, an IP would give a rack of modems, a rack of modems would give the caller's phone #, and pow.
Or... the cookie would give an IP, the IP would give a provider, the provider and IP would give an account, the account would give a physical address and pow.
BTW, one ISP I was with would create a dynamically generated reverse-lookup DNS entry which contained my MAC address. Pretty clever since my MAC and IP, thus provider and account would be splottered all over ISP logs everywhere. It's not so much a privacy invasion, since the IP and the date/time would give the same info.
Yeah, but they get it all back. Their accountants wouldn't even blink.
If they're the same kind I buy, they're super-cheap disks. No label, thin laquer, hold them up to a light and they're translucent.
On that note, wasn't the levy much higher on rewritable media?
is like saying, "look, we've got a few managers that like to gang-rape their secretaries, but most of them are allright".
Do you actually need to include the word "like"?
Replace the word "gang rape" with "anally rape" and "secretaries" with "children" and it would still be true.
IMHO Catholics need to distance themsleves from the organization. Catholocism won't die if the Catholic church is sued into oblivion for condoning, commiting and hiding sodomy. The irony would be the secular courts finding their moral inspiration guilty of immorality.
Oh well... so horribly off-topic. Bye-bye karma.
The problem is that you're making the same mistake I am.
(No, I can't expand upon that)
Yeah, and those guys who use periods for elipses... horrible.
Next people will be using decimals for periods, comparison operator symbols for 'angle brackets' and single quotes as apostophes! Everybody knows there is no such thing as an apostophe! They'll start using subtraction operator symbols for hyphens and horror of horrors -- pre/postdecrement operators for en-dashes!
http://www.hyperdictionary.com/dictionary/single+q uote
Ego Masturbation Ploy
When see people abuse 'i.e.' and 'e.g.' in an informal discussion forum, I just shudder and interpret the person's meaning from their context.
But 'mo:'? Wow. 'i.e.' and 'e.g.' are commonly abused and the misuse is normally easy to understand.
Making up obscure acronymns could be interpreted as a way to prompt people to ask you for the meaning, providing you with an ego stroke as you 'educate' them. It could be the result of a low self-esteem.
It's the epitome of E:mp's
In the future, ISPs will no longer sell "Internet connections", they will instead sell AOL'esque access to the web and email. The access will be filtered against viruses, SPAM and will include parental controls and complete usage monitoring (which will deter kids from circumventing parental controls).
People will pay money not to be SPAM'ed and not to have to worry about protecting their machine all the time. This will protect the net from most unprotected Windows machines.
For home-workers, Cisco and similar big companies will offer proprietary VPN software which will interface with their proprietary 'almost the internet' software.
However, because of the limited market in unfiltered connections, geeks will pay extra for an unfiltered connection, or will use a technology akin to SLIRP, only to have it blocked time and time again as virus/worm authors try to install such software on unsuspecting Windows machines, and ISP's try to block them.
A couple things to think about in regard to 'children' in schools and 'bullying'.
Children are
Worse, it's up to the victim's parents whether or not to act... leaving those with the worst homelives the most vulnerable... either to bullying or being bullied.
IMHO, if you can legally require the separation of the bully from the victim, you may have really helped one kid.
I also think the comment in the article that "... while these comments may seem silly to people who have matured, they are very devastating to the young people on the receiving end..." ignores the above reality.
It's tough to draw analogies to adult life, but what if you were legally required to show up for work? What if somebody spread a similarly scandalous rumour about you at work? Oh... let's see... while kids might think it cool to grab a peer's breasts, the reverse might just work for adults. So, your coworker starts telling people that you grabbed her breasts, and you're making passes at her all the time. So your coworkers begin to shun you. You can't quit... you're legally required to be there. You can't call the police, they won't do anything because this is just a little bit of workplace bullying. Now your boss... who happens to be 150% of your height, twice your strength and twice your weight, might just believe the person spreading the scandal, so it will be your word against theirs.
Your friends at work no longer want to be seen with you, because anyone can fall victim to such harassment... so you become ostracised... Some even join in to dispel rumours that they too might be perverts. Few people really believe the rumours, but they know you're not a safe person to be around because you... and anyone you're around is a target.
Seeing that you have no allies, people begin to pick on you, steal your office supplies, scratch your car, slash your tires.
So you keep going to work, despite all this, because you're legally forced to.
Now we're getting close except: kids don't get paid, have little control over their homelife and they've never known anything else.
Shhh!
You'll ruin their business model!
Except that "shoulda/woulda/coulda" was preceeded by a sketchy election and an overwhelming "DON'T DON'T DON'T!!!" and the nut who's doing it is still in power in the U.S.
I could draw a WWII Germany comparision, but somebody might invoke Goodwin's law.
It's easier to fork your own custom distro if all the packages out in the wild follow the same standards.
"I bring the courts attention to document 3,002,345 where it plainly indicates that Darl McBride had an intimate relationship with Bill Gates. Darl, could you please read the message you sent Bill Gates?"
"<ahem> I don't recall composing that message."
"Please read the message for the court"
"The message says 'I love you'"
"It is also plain that you sent many similar messages to Bill Gates, including instructions as to how he can enlarge his anatomy, is this true?"