It's even cheaper to use the library. Read it in the hardcover, which usually has bigger print and wider margins and so is often more comfortable, albeit heavier. Then return it, get something else, and not have a book you'll likely never read again cluttering up your house.
I found eight of the first ten sci-fi novels from this year's list on my local library's web site. Ask, and they might even buy the other two.
I don't know about the overhead, but I'm sure it's bigger than zero. Fifteen million emails at (say) 1K apiece (probably an overestimate, but it's a rough order of magnitude) is fifteen gigabytes.
If you want to get that out in any sort of reasonable order, you're going to require a T1, at $1K per month. It's probably more than that; he probably requires a T3, for more money. Plus a bunch of servers and a small team of MSCEs to maintain them.
Plus his own marketing department to find people willing to hire him to spam, and a sales department to actually fulfill all of those 40,000 transactions. And an office to put them in, and so on.
Rough guess, it takes him $10K per month to stay in business. Now, that's still trivial compared to a $200K profit, but it's not "virtually nil". And I'd bet I'm low by as much as an order of magnitude; businesses have a way of being more expensive than you expect.
The next trick is to raise his rents, as it were. Hit him with a fine when he sends illegal spam (as opposed to the legal stuff under the MAY SPAM law). Make service providers drop him for fear of being sued. And if he steps a toe out of line (like being behind MyDoom), send him to jail for a trillion years.
There is something to be said for raising the quality of spam.
I receive an awful lot of spam which hopes I'm a complete moron, attempting to defraud me or sell me a product (or web site) I'm clearly not interested in. The amount of spam that I get from "respectable" senders is extremely small. They turn a profit on spam only because their costs are extremely low.
By raising the costs even slightly, the equation shifts. If I got only as much spam as I got in my postal mailbox, I could filter it by hand with no noticeable effort. It's only when it gets to hundreds a day, as many people get, that it drags down servers and costs real time.
Besides, "respectable" spam is legally required to be marked as such, making it easy to filter. The new American law is considered a joke because most spammers aren't respectable, and so it's ineffective. But if some solution, such as this, is able to effectively raise the quality of the spam, we'll have an easier time dealing with that which is left.
How does this get fixed?
on
SCO Offline
·
· Score: 1
So there are hundreds of thousands of computers infected with this virus. I believe that the attack is designed to expire in a couple of weeks, but what if it didn't?
I suspect that many of these users don't even know they're infected. They're not running AV software (or it's not updated). All they see is that their internet connection is kinda slow.
These computers will likely remain infected forever, and apparently with a back door installed to use them for future attacks.
Do the major ISPs have any programs in place for limiting this effect? I'd really love for hundreds of thousands of users to be getting phone calls right now saying, "Hi, you appear to be DDOSing SCO. We're turning off your account and it won't be turned on again until you're virus free."
I also read somewhere that the backdoor is listening on some particular port. Perhaps ISPs should start scanning connections to see who's listening on that port and threaten to cut off service unless you can demonstrate you're not infected. I'm sure there would be unfortunate incidents, since I don't know who else is using that port, but it seems like an important first step towards preventing a potentially serious internet meltdown in upcoming months.
I don't think this thing is exploiting WinZip, is it? I know it's using WinZip to get through firewalls, but I hadn't heard that it exploted WinZip directly. I thought you still had to run the enclosed.scr or.exe yourself.
Cuz if so I'd better get cracking. I'd unzipped one of these earlier. I don't seem to be infected but one never knows.
One, it doesn't take federal enforcement for a patent to be effective. If these guys come up to, say, a big ISP, which has better things to do than fight patents, they'll often pay rather than fight.
Two, every single patent thread on Slashdot includes somebody saying, "Hey, we'll finally get the feds to realize the system is broken." It hasn't happened yet, and I doubt this is the straw that breaks the camel's back.
There was only going to be one accident after Challenger. It was just a question of how long it was going to take.
From here until the end of the lifespan, there will be only a few trips. The odds of a problem are low enough that we'll probably get through those with no more accidents.
At this point it's like software: it's too complex to fix, so you start from scratch. I feel bad about that, just like I do throwing away mostly-functioning software, but it's got to go.
Yep: if it's "too much", in an efficient system somebody will come in and produce it at a cheaper price. The system isn't terribly efficient, what with marketing and R&D costs and all, but the theory roughly holds.
Unless, of course, there's collusion, but that's illegal and I doubt you're ever going to get Apple and Rio in a room together.
I'd tend to doubt 2G at $149. The price to produce the parts is a fairly small difference, so I bet they'd try to upsell it at $175. Apple would almost always rather sell a few expensive things than many cheap things with lower margin.
Besides, by the time the price drop rolls around, they'll probably upgrade the 4 to an 8 and keep it at $250. In which case maybe they'd keep the 4G and price it at $200, like you said, but not make a 2G at all.
The question for me is whether they're going to produce an ultra-mini with a flash card, 512M for $150 (or, more likely, $175). That's getting perilously close to my price point, especially if they include a radio. My main use would be running, and I like to listen to recorded books or the news. I could dump 30 hours or so at medium fidelity; I don't require high fidelity when I'm outside with light headphones.
True, but it means you're depending on the judge. It's a gamble not everybody wishes to make. It may well be better than the American system which permits SLAPP and frivolous suits, but it's not necessarily a perfect win either.
Loser-pays is common in Europe, and there are groups pushing it in the US.
There is an obvious downside to it: it tends to discourage access to the courts by people who can't afford to lose. Mike Rowe would never have been able to afford Microsoft's court costs, and if he's not 100% convinced he'll win (not just right: win) he'd be in debt forever.
It's not infeasible; it's so common in England that it's sometimes called the English rule. But it would involve a substantial change to American jurisprudence.
Why do the virus writers even bother writing code? If people are willing to do all that, it sounds like the next virus will consist solely of the text:
"Pick a friend at random. Go over to his house and bash his computer with a sledge hammer."
I'd really like for AOL to filter out any.exe attachment. Why would anybody ever send an executable attachment?
I answer my own question: a friend of mine recently sent me a self-extracting archive, with no other text in the message. The man has a PhD in physics. I never even saw it; SpamAssassin gave it about a zillion stars. I found it only when he asked me why I didn't reply.
I think I'm going to give up and become cynical. Ah, wait, too late.
There's a difference between what the government must provide in order to deprive you of life, liberty, or property, and the decisions that you make every day. The original poster is suggesting that it would be immoral ("bad policy") for you to provide advice to a group you knew to support terror. The standards of proof are entirely different.
Yeah, that's kind of pissing me off. I read the catchall in my domain. It's making up names (most of the emails are address to common-first-name@mydomain.)
I usually read about attacks before I receive one. Most people likely to have me in their address book are too smart to run attachments.
1 : proceeding from the will or from one's own choice or consent 2 : unconstrained by interference : SELF-DETERMINING 3 : done by design or intention : INTENTIONAL 4 : of, relating to, subject to, or regulated by the will 5 : having power of free choice 6 : provided or supported by voluntary action 7 : acting or done of one's own free will without valuable consideration or legal obligation
Only the final definition requires that no monetary payment is involved. They're volunteers as opposed to being contractually obligated to produce. And they're not guaranteed to be paid, even if they do produce.
I'm not a fan of loser-pays systems, because the tend to discourage poor people from filing. They also encourage poor people to settle quickly.
But I do like your idea for in-house appeals. If somebody sues me for patent infringement on a patent which is obvious or ridden with prior art, it would be nice to be able to file a document with USPTO to have the patent invalidated.
Unfortunately, the time periods are a problem. The USPTO's wheels grind slowly: a patent often takes years to grant, and I don't expect them to evaluate newly-submitted prior art any more quickly.
An open-source-esque system would be amusing, where any individual could submit prior art in the examination process. Sadly, it can't work: you can't publish the patented material until the patent is granted.
All these systems would be subject to abuses. There are those who will fight against any patent, which is not necessarily an invalid position, but fighting every patent would bog down an imperfect but still somewhat useful system without providing a clear alternative.
The USPTO does consider its job to include dealing with prior art. It just doesn't do a very good job of it.
The courts are a crummy way to deal with prior art: its expensive, and judges aren't trained in technology. Patent examiners are. A patent examiner generally has a college degree in the field to which he (or she) is assigned.
I don't see an easy solution. Properly investigating prior art takes a really long time. Dealing with the vast mass of paperwork applicants file takes a really long time. I can just see the lawyer for this applicant badgering the bejeezus out of this patent examiner. Or maybe he just rubber-stamped the top of the pile and went home.
Patent examiners are like teachers: we expect them to do what should be incredibly valuable work, then pay them badly and overwork them. That's never an excuse for doing a bad job, but what doesn't excuse an individual should come as no surprise for the group.
I've read the article and I can't figure out what the test is. Does this mean that AOL is publishing SPF records (in which case it's old news) or does it mean that AOL is going to start rejecting incoming mail which fails the SPF tests?
why would you want to use a P2P client that has DRM, when you can use something like eMule, Kazaa, GNUNet or any other P2P client that doesn't?
Well, for starters I'd pick a P2P client that doesn't include spyware, which lets out Kazaa, at least the original. Not that DRM doesn't contain its own nasty potential for privacy violations, but I'd pick it over Gator.
Then I'd look for the biggest network, because the more people use it, the more stuff you can actually get your hands on. If this guy can make a lot of stuff available, many people might go for it, because dealing with DRM may well be less bad than 200-hour failed downloads from an illegal system. That's why people pay a buck to Apple: "free" but unavailable isn't free.
Still, in the end I dunno what this guy thinks he's going to get. P2P works only because it's free. When you pay for music, you get the privilege of a dedicated fast server with a support staff. Pay music on P2P would be trying to get other people to do the storage and network space. I'm not participating in that.
Slashdot Mirror
It's even cheaper to use the library. Read it in the hardcover, which usually has bigger print and wider margins and so is often more comfortable, albeit heavier. Then return it, get something else, and not have a book you'll likely never read again cluttering up your house.
I found eight of the first ten sci-fi novels from this year's list on my local library's web site. Ask, and they might even buy the other two.
I don't know about the overhead, but I'm sure it's bigger than zero. Fifteen million emails at (say) 1K apiece (probably an overestimate, but it's a rough order of magnitude) is fifteen gigabytes.
If you want to get that out in any sort of reasonable order, you're going to require a T1, at $1K per month. It's probably more than that; he probably requires a T3, for more money. Plus a bunch of servers and a small team of MSCEs to maintain them.
Plus his own marketing department to find people willing to hire him to spam, and a sales department to actually fulfill all of those 40,000 transactions. And an office to put them in, and so on.
Rough guess, it takes him $10K per month to stay in business. Now, that's still trivial compared to a $200K profit, but it's not "virtually nil". And I'd bet I'm low by as much as an order of magnitude; businesses have a way of being more expensive than you expect.
The next trick is to raise his rents, as it were. Hit him with a fine when he sends illegal spam (as opposed to the legal stuff under the MAY SPAM law). Make service providers drop him for fear of being sued. And if he steps a toe out of line (like being behind MyDoom), send him to jail for a trillion years.
Believe it or not, Western Union.com. Mind you, it costs fifteen bucks. But it definitely makes an impact.
There is something to be said for raising the quality of spam.
I receive an awful lot of spam which hopes I'm a complete moron, attempting to defraud me or sell me a product (or web site) I'm clearly not interested in. The amount of spam that I get from "respectable" senders is extremely small. They turn a profit on spam only because their costs are extremely low.
By raising the costs even slightly, the equation shifts. If I got only as much spam as I got in my postal mailbox, I could filter it by hand with no noticeable effort. It's only when it gets to hundreds a day, as many people get, that it drags down servers and costs real time.
Besides, "respectable" spam is legally required to be marked as such, making it easy to filter. The new American law is considered a joke because most spammers aren't respectable, and so it's ineffective. But if some solution, such as this, is able to effectively raise the quality of the spam, we'll have an easier time dealing with that which is left.
So there are hundreds of thousands of computers infected with this virus. I believe that the attack is designed to expire in a couple of weeks, but what if it didn't?
I suspect that many of these users don't even know they're infected. They're not running AV software (or it's not updated). All they see is that their internet connection is kinda slow.
These computers will likely remain infected forever, and apparently with a back door installed to use them for future attacks.
Do the major ISPs have any programs in place for limiting this effect? I'd really love for hundreds of thousands of users to be getting phone calls right now saying, "Hi, you appear to be DDOSing SCO. We're turning off your account and it won't be turned on again until you're virus free."
I also read somewhere that the backdoor is listening on some particular port. Perhaps ISPs should start scanning connections to see who's listening on that port and threaten to cut off service unless you can demonstrate you're not infected. I'm sure there would be unfortunate incidents, since I don't know who else is using that port, but it seems like an important first step towards preventing a potentially serious internet meltdown in upcoming months.
I don't think this thing is exploiting WinZip, is it? I know it's using WinZip to get through firewalls, but I hadn't heard that it exploted WinZip directly. I thought you still had to run the enclosed .scr or .exe yourself.
Cuz if so I'd better get cracking. I'd unzipped one of these earlier. I don't seem to be infected but one never knows.
Sadly, you're wrong on two counts.
One, it doesn't take federal enforcement for a patent to be effective. If these guys come up to, say, a big ISP, which has better things to do than fight patents, they'll often pay rather than fight.
Two, every single patent thread on Slashdot includes somebody saying, "Hey, we'll finally get the feds to realize the system is broken." It hasn't happened yet, and I doubt this is the straw that breaks the camel's back.
1. No.
2. No.
3. The answer to any question starting, "Why don't they-" is almost always, "Money." -- Robert Heinlein
There was only going to be one accident after Challenger. It was just a question of how long it was going to take.
From here until the end of the lifespan, there will be only a few trips. The odds of a problem are low enough that we'll probably get through those with no more accidents.
At this point it's like software: it's too complex to fix, so you start from scratch. I feel bad about that, just like I do throwing away mostly-functioning software, but it's got to go.
Yep: if it's "too much", in an efficient system somebody will come in and produce it at a cheaper price. The system isn't terribly efficient, what with marketing and R&D costs and all, but the theory roughly holds.
Unless, of course, there's collusion, but that's illegal and I doubt you're ever going to get Apple and Rio in a room together.
I'd tend to doubt 2G at $149. The price to produce the parts is a fairly small difference, so I bet they'd try to upsell it at $175. Apple would almost always rather sell a few expensive things than many cheap things with lower margin.
Besides, by the time the price drop rolls around, they'll probably upgrade the 4 to an 8 and keep it at $250. In which case maybe they'd keep the 4G and price it at $200, like you said, but not make a 2G at all.
The question for me is whether they're going to produce an ultra-mini with a flash card, 512M for $150 (or, more likely, $175). That's getting perilously close to my price point, especially if they include a radio. My main use would be running, and I like to listen to recorded books or the news. I could dump 30 hours or so at medium fidelity; I don't require high fidelity when I'm outside with light headphones.
True, but it means you're depending on the judge. It's a gamble not everybody wishes to make. It may well be better than the American system which permits SLAPP and frivolous suits, but it's not necessarily a perfect win either.
Loser-pays is common in Europe, and there are groups pushing it in the US.
There is an obvious downside to it: it tends to discourage access to the courts by people who can't afford to lose. Mike Rowe would never have been able to afford Microsoft's court costs, and if he's not 100% convinced he'll win (not just right: win) he'd be in debt forever.
It's not infeasible; it's so common in England that it's sometimes called the English rule. But it would involve a substantial change to American jurisprudence.
I played Edward IV in Henry VI about three years ago. Stupid director, but a great play. (Well, two good plays and a sucky one.)
First you save the attachment.
Then you unzip it.
Then you execute it.
Why do the virus writers even bother writing code? If people are willing to do all that, it sounds like the next virus will consist solely of the text:
"Pick a friend at random. Go over to his house and bash his computer with a sledge hammer."
I'd really like for AOL to filter out any .exe attachment. Why would anybody ever send an executable attachment?
I answer my own question: a friend of mine recently sent me a self-extracting archive, with no other text in the message. The man has a PhD in physics. I never even saw it; SpamAssassin gave it about a zillion stars. I found it only when he asked me why I didn't reply.
I think I'm going to give up and become cynical. Ah, wait, too late.
There's a difference between what the government must provide in order to deprive you of life, liberty, or property, and the decisions that you make every day. The original poster is suggesting that it would be immoral ("bad policy") for you to provide advice to a group you knew to support terror. The standards of proof are entirely different.
Certainly, news.com is not my first place I go for, uh, news. Especially political news.
Yeah, that's kind of pissing me off. I read the catchall in my domain. It's making up names (most of the emails are address to common-first-name@mydomain.)
I usually read about attacks before I receive one. Most people likely to have me in their address book are too smart to run attachments.
Nope, they've just eliminated the studio singers that Britney's lip-synching to. Ya don't sell Britney's voice; ya sell Britney's booty.
Not really. From Merriam-Webster:
1 : proceeding from the will or from one's own choice or consent
2 : unconstrained by interference : SELF-DETERMINING
3 : done by design or intention : INTENTIONAL
4 : of, relating to, subject to, or regulated by the will
5 : having power of free choice
6 : provided or supported by voluntary action
7 : acting or done of one's own free will without valuable consideration or legal obligation
Only the final definition requires that no monetary payment is involved. They're volunteers as opposed to being contractually obligated to produce. And they're not guaranteed to be paid, even if they do produce.
I'm not a fan of loser-pays systems, because the tend to discourage poor people from filing. They also encourage poor people to settle quickly.
But I do like your idea for in-house appeals. If somebody sues me for patent infringement on a patent which is obvious or ridden with prior art, it would be nice to be able to file a document with USPTO to have the patent invalidated.
Unfortunately, the time periods are a problem. The USPTO's wheels grind slowly: a patent often takes years to grant, and I don't expect them to evaluate newly-submitted prior art any more quickly.
An open-source-esque system would be amusing, where any individual could submit prior art in the examination process. Sadly, it can't work: you can't publish the patented material until the patent is granted.
All these systems would be subject to abuses. There are those who will fight against any patent, which is not necessarily an invalid position, but fighting every patent would bog down an imperfect but still somewhat useful system without providing a clear alternative.
The USPTO does consider its job to include dealing with prior art. It just doesn't do a very good job of it.
The courts are a crummy way to deal with prior art: its expensive, and judges aren't trained in technology. Patent examiners are. A patent examiner generally has a college degree in the field to which he (or she) is assigned.
I don't see an easy solution. Properly investigating prior art takes a really long time. Dealing with the vast mass of paperwork applicants file takes a really long time. I can just see the lawyer for this applicant badgering the bejeezus out of this patent examiner. Or maybe he just rubber-stamped the top of the pile and went home.
Patent examiners are like teachers: we expect them to do what should be incredibly valuable work, then pay them badly and overwork them. That's never an excuse for doing a bad job, but what doesn't excuse an individual should come as no surprise for the group.
I've read the article and I can't figure out what the test is. Does this mean that AOL is publishing SPF records (in which case it's old news) or does it mean that AOL is going to start rejecting incoming mail which fails the SPF tests?
why would you want to use a P2P client that has DRM, when you can use something like eMule, Kazaa, GNUNet or any other P2P client that doesn't?
Well, for starters I'd pick a P2P client that doesn't include spyware, which lets out Kazaa, at least the original. Not that DRM doesn't contain its own nasty potential for privacy violations, but I'd pick it over Gator.
Then I'd look for the biggest network, because the more people use it, the more stuff you can actually get your hands on. If this guy can make a lot of stuff available, many people might go for it, because dealing with DRM may well be less bad than 200-hour failed downloads from an illegal system. That's why people pay a buck to Apple: "free" but unavailable isn't free.
Still, in the end I dunno what this guy thinks he's going to get. P2P works only because it's free. When you pay for music, you get the privilege of a dedicated fast server with a support staff. Pay music on P2P would be trying to get other people to do the storage and network space. I'm not participating in that.