It seems like the attack is just taking user names and other publicly-known data trying to determine an email address from them. Spammers don't need microid to confirm that their guess is correct; they'll just send to all 50 or 100 top email domains, hoping to get a hit.
The whole point of MicroID is that if someone knows your email address, they can tell that you are the author of the page. If your email address is easy to guess, then your email address will be revealed, _whether_or_not_ there's a microid here, there, or anywhere.
If an email address is easy to guess, then the email address is easy to guess. Not clear what new ground we're covering here.
The vast majority of businesses will never trigger _any_ of the provisions of the licenses for their Open Source software because they will not publicly re-distribute the software in verbatim or modified form.
For those businesses that do, it is highly unlikely that they'll deal with more than the GPL or BSD licenses. Other licenses are important only for a single package or cluster of packages (e.g. the MPL, the Artistic License, or the Apache license), and companies that deal with these packages tend to be specialists in that area.
This just really isn't a practical problem for most businesses. It's an issue that software aggregators like distros or SourceForge need to deal with, but not your normal everyday business.
So, I'm really dubious about one of the myths about Google and metadata: that Google doesn't use metadata because it's unreliable.
Google does, in fact, use metadata -- tons of it. Google uses explicit metadata built into headers (like the description, robot control); it uses the rel-license microformat; and it uses titles and h1 headers. It also uses some crucial metadata that's not self-reported by the Web site -- namely, the number and text of links inbound towards a page. It also uses metadata in HTTP headers.
Google also uses lots of data that is unreliable or could be dishonest. After all, there's a huge dark business of blackhat SEO that has its sole intention to trick Google's bots into thinking pages are more important (or are on a different subject) than they actually are. There is no particular part of an HTML page or any other Web resource that cannot be a lie. Web spiders have to deal with this all the time, and they have to balance the information they get from different data sources to determine what's true and what's not.
It's true that Google's search results don't depend as heavily on the specific meta keywords the way many first-generation search engines did. But I think that's more a consideration of the remarkable naivete of early search engines than anything else.
Corporations are bound by law to make money for their stockholders and to have no other priorities whatsoever.
That's not anti-corporatism; it's just the law. There is an occasional veneer of PR when it seems like a corporation is doing something for purely altruistic reasons ("Do people really shave baby bunnies' bottoms for free for no good reason?... People do."); if it could be proved in court that that was actually the case, the officers of the corporation could be personally liable for millions and even up for jail time.
Google is not doing this because they want to give back to the community; they're doing it because they think they might make money from the process in the near (or distant!) future. They might be _wrong_ on that count, but that's the motivation.
It's important to keep an air of perspective here. Open Source advocates -- myself included -- applaud donations and support by commercial entities to FLOSS software projects. When one of our favourite hackers gets a paying gig to keep doing what he loves, we get a little envious but mostly congratulatory.
My point is that any and all support for Wikipedia is a very good thing. It's an excellent project and a great reference, and creative methods of underwriting its huge resource requirements are really worth seeking out.
I hope that this new structure works out well and that those of us Wikiholics who curse bitterly when we get a.75-second delay loading a page get the infrastructure we need to keep making a really great piece of Open Content.
What if the word was a really, really long word, and actually performed some useful function running on some strange virtual machine platform?
I'd think that was a patentable invention.
Or maybe a magic word. Like a really good word for spells and stuff. If the word was actually a sufficiently good device for making frogs fall from the sky, wouldn't that be patentable?
Or possibly a really long string of letters, like GATTACATACGA..., which made a patentable gene? Is a gene a word?
I like that quote -- it makes it sound like having women's participation in the field is the worst possible outcome. "We must find some alternative to having women in the IT workforce!"
> The drugs protected by patents wouldn't even exist > to save anyone if the pharmaceutical companies > didn't think they could profit from developing them.
That's a crock. Thousands of important drugs were created in universities in America, with government funding, before the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 made it possible to patent taxpayer-funded research.
Even today, drug companies leave the majority of the tab for basic R&D up to the taxpayer.
Patents don't ensure R&D for lifesaving drugs -- your tax dollars do.
Of course it makes a lot of sense. There's a ripe market for a public wiki a la friendster, tribe.net, or linkedin.
There's a ton of wiki engines out there, not least MediaWiki, the software that runs Wikipedia. Almost any one would be sufficient to make a good social networking site.
All that's needed is some effort to make it happen.
This despite the fact the work-in-progress wasn't an actual release, but a testing copy.
This seems to be the basis of the problem: the idea that the source code availability requirements of the GPL only apply to official "releases". They do not: any time binaries are distributed, source code must be made available.
The FSF recommends against using the term "digital rights management". They suggest other terms, such as "digital restrictions management" or "handcuffware".
2) doesn't follow from 1), nor does 3) follow from 2). There may be an infinite number of primes, but that doesn't mean for any subset of the primes, there's an infinite number of members of that subset.
There's not an infinite number of primes under 10, nor an infinite number of even primes, nor an infinite number of primes equal to 113.
Slashdot Mirror
"Privacy is a top concern" is exactly the kind of thing that people unconcerned with privacy say.
This is an evil product.
It seems like the attack is just taking user names and other publicly-known data trying to determine an email address from them. Spammers don't need microid to confirm that their guess is correct; they'll just send to all 50 or 100 top email domains, hoping to get a hit.
The whole point of MicroID is that if someone knows your email address, they can tell that you are the author of the page. If your email address is easy to guess, then your email address will be revealed, _whether_or_not_ there's a microid here, there, or anywhere.
If an email address is easy to guess, then the email address is easy to guess. Not clear what new ground we're covering here.
The vast majority of businesses will never trigger _any_ of the provisions of the licenses for their Open Source software because they will not publicly re-distribute the software in verbatim or modified form.
For those businesses that do, it is highly unlikely that they'll deal with more than the GPL or BSD licenses. Other licenses are important only for a single package or cluster of packages (e.g. the MPL, the Artistic License, or the Apache license), and companies that deal with these packages tend to be specialists in that area.
This just really isn't a practical problem for most businesses. It's an issue that software aggregators like distros or SourceForge need to deal with, but not your normal everyday business.
That should be "abuse of its developers". Possessive form of "it" is "its"; "it's" is a contraction of "it is".
So, when will we see OpenID login on Slashdot? What about being able to use Slashdot accounts as identities on other sites?
So, I'm really dubious about one of the myths about Google and metadata: that Google doesn't use metadata because it's unreliable.
Google does, in fact, use metadata -- tons of it. Google uses explicit metadata built into headers (like the description, robot control); it uses the rel-license microformat; and it uses titles and h1 headers. It also uses some crucial metadata that's not self-reported by the Web site -- namely, the number and text of links inbound towards a page. It also uses metadata in HTTP headers.
Google also uses lots of data that is unreliable or could be dishonest. After all, there's a huge dark business of blackhat SEO that has its sole intention to trick Google's bots into thinking pages are more important (or are on a different subject) than they actually are. There is no particular part of an HTML page or any other Web resource that cannot be a lie. Web spiders have to deal with this all the time, and they have to balance the information they get from different data sources to determine what's true and what's not.
It's true that Google's search results don't depend as heavily on the specific meta keywords the way many first-generation search engines did. But I think that's more a consideration of the remarkable naivete of early search engines than anything else.
Did I really get itÉ
That's a pretty lame prank, actually.
Corporations are bound by law to make money for their stockholders and to have no other priorities whatsoever.
... People do."); if it could be proved in court that that was actually the case, the officers of the corporation could be personally liable for millions and even up for jail time.
That's not anti-corporatism; it's just the law. There is an occasional veneer of PR when it seems like a corporation is doing something for purely altruistic reasons ("Do people really shave baby bunnies' bottoms for free for no good reason?
Google is not doing this because they want to give back to the community; they're doing it because they think they might make money from the process in the near (or distant!) future. They might be _wrong_ on that count, but that's the motivation.
"faze".
...etc. etc. etc.
.75-second delay loading a page get the infrastructure we need to keep making a really great piece of Open Content.
It's important to keep an air of perspective here. Open Source advocates -- myself included -- applaud donations and support by commercial entities to FLOSS software projects. When one of our favourite hackers gets a paying gig to keep doing what he loves, we get a little envious but mostly congratulatory.
My point is that any and all support for Wikipedia is a very good thing. It's an excellent project and a great reference, and creative methods of underwriting its huge resource requirements are really worth seeking out.
I hope that this new structure works out well and that those of us Wikiholics who curse bitterly when we get a
-Mr. Bad
Like, y'know, http://www.theosfiles.com/os_linux/ospg_Linux_stro m.htm ?
Like, you know, a row of vegetables in a garden. That you make deeper and wider with a hoe.
"Roe" is crab eggs.
What if the word was a really, really long word, and actually performed some useful function running on some strange virtual machine platform?
I'd think that was a patentable invention.
Or maybe a magic word. Like a really good word for spells and stuff. If the word was actually a sufficiently good device for making frogs fall from the sky, wouldn't that be patentable?
Or possibly a really long string of letters, like GATTACATACGA..., which made a patentable gene? Is a gene a word?
That is all.
I like that quote -- it makes it sound like having women's participation in the field is the worst possible outcome. "We must find some alternative to having women in the IT workforce!"
> The drugs protected by patents wouldn't even exist > to save anyone if the pharmaceutical companies
> didn't think they could profit from developing them.
That's a crock. Thousands of important drugs were created in universities in America, with government funding, before the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 made it possible to patent taxpayer-funded research.
Even today, drug companies leave the majority of the tab for basic R&D up to the taxpayer.
Patents don't ensure R&D for lifesaving drugs -- your tax dollars do.
Of course it makes a lot of sense. There's a ripe market for a public wiki a la friendster, tribe.net, or linkedin.
There's a ton of wiki engines out there, not least MediaWiki, the software that runs Wikipedia. Almost any one would be sufficient to make a good social networking site.
All that's needed is some effort to make it happen.
This seems to be the basis of the problem: the idea that the source code availability requirements of the GPL only apply to official "releases". They do not: any time binaries are distributed, source code must be made available.
"cites".
Style points for using the word perfervid.
The FSF recommends against using the term "digital rights management". They suggest other terms, such as "digital restrictions management" or "handcuffware".
There's not an infinite number of primes under 10, nor an infinite number of even primes, nor an infinite number of primes equal to 113.
IBM had revenue to the tune of $260 million from Linux servers in Q1 2004, according to ZD net.
Why would communication between FSF and its contributors be confidential?