Let's just say that when I first found out about this trick, I didn't realize how it was done. I don't know if my grandmother would think to look for the at-sign for the real name. The username/password part of the URL is not used very often and I think many people expect it to mean something from what it really means.
I don't think it's at all clear that http://slashdot.org@www.whitehouse.gov comes from whitehouse.gov. Users are used to looking at lengthy URLs (e.g. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000 05RKOE/ref=pd_qpt_gw_2/102-5119174-9172131) and ignoring anything after what appears to be the web site name.
Especially if one obfuscates further: http://slashdot.org:dfkjkasfznc=dfjkkerj -dfjed=fjk dndjfserncs@www.whitehouse.gov/dfkdf/dfkjdf/dfsf, when the whitehouse.gov part has scrolled off the screen and buried in the text. You have to watch for the @ sign in every long URL.
So you think you're looking at slashdot, but you're really looking at the White House. Or you think you're looking at your bank, maybe even with SSL on (and verified, too) but you're really looking at the scammer's site.
And I don't think micropayments will stop spam - wouldn't the spammers just use servers that didn't require that?
It's your server at mailinator.that counts. It can refuse to accept email except from people (or other mail servers) who pay.
And would email be as useful if you could only get mail from someone who bought into a particular micropayment system?
The payments Microsoft is proposing aren't necessarily monetary. Sometimes it can be a hard computational problem, which takes you a few seconds to compute. Spam depends on the very low cost of email. If you have to buy 10 computers to send your spam, instead of just one, it's suddenly far less profitable. Whereas you yourself can easily afford a few seconds added to each of the few dozen emails you send each day, since almost every personal computer has free cycles.
Of course, that depends on spammers to use their own computers. If they're using yours, a problem which plagues Microsoft-based computers, you're still stuck.
The problem with the Bright Tunes decision isn't just that subconscious copying is a crime. It's also the fact that three notes were considered a copyrightable element.
I guess that's not entirely untrue. The NBC tune is only three notes long, and it would certainly be theft if ABC were to used them. But in that case it's the entire piece. It's also the context there: I can't imagine you'd be sued if you weren't thematically invoking NBC in your song.
In Bright Tunes, the judge felt that three notes used as only part of a song, and not deliberately invoking the other piece, were sufficient for Harrison to be riding on the back of Ronnie Mack's success.
Does it solve the problem? (I'm genuinely asking; I don't have a Mac around to test it.)
The problem is that IE (and Firebird, and Mozilla) all display the URL as typed, including user name and password information. So if you type http://www.slashdot.org:foo@www.whitehouse.gov/ you get directed to a nasty site, even though the URL appears to say www.slashdot.org.
(I don't seem to be able to reproduce the link exactly here; I think Slashdot may be removing the user name and password info.)
The solution seems fairly simple; remove user name and password information from the displayed URL. But that's not necessarily the Right Thing, displaying a different URL than you clicked. I don't consider the problem a "bug" in the same sense that buffer overflows are a bug.
Clearly it's a problem; I am a professional programmer and wasn't aware of this until it was pointed out to me.
If Safari has a solution, I'd like to know it. Mac developers are pretty good about doing The Right Thing.
It's proactive in the sense that when they discovered the problem, injured customers didn't have to sue or even threaten them to get compensation. That's more than I expect out of most businesses.
They also offered more than simply replacement. They offered a very good deal. Customers unhappy with the deal offered will have a hard time complaining that they didn't try, at least once the problem was pointed out to them.
Oh, man, I've got brain cells working now that have six inches of dust on them. I played with mine until it just failed. I can't imagine when I would even have found tic-tac-toe interesting, but I was just fascinated at the time.
So maybe you can clue me in on how it works. (I've already RTFA and a bunch of links as well.)
Theoretically, heat is always transferring from hot regions (e.g. your torso) to cold regions (like your fingers) without anything fancy going on. Except that your fingers get colder, faster, because they're further away from the heat source, and have more surface area.
But if this is passive, how does it move heat from your torso to your hands more quickly than the air can sap it away? A plain-old wire would presumably transfer heat faster than flesh can. How does the fancy passive fluid system do it faster?
You are correct: nobody was really screaming for a new television standard. This is being imposed by the government much more as a matter of managing over-the-air bandwidth than because somebody thought that Survivor 3 just didn't look sharp enough. The higher resolution is just the carrot.
I think that the first thing they'll notice is with widescreen movies. On a standard television you're looking at perhaps 250 scan lines. They actually look pretty terrible, even on a 27" TV screen; there just aren't enough pixels. I often watch movies in pan & scan (blasphemy!) not because I'm dumb enough to worry that they're wasting my glass, but because I'd rather see details in the center of the image than the frequently unimportant stuff off at the side.
For that reason, and for the widescreen format, I've been looking forward to being able afford (and justify the expense) of an HDTV. For the most part people do not care, but I think that once they've seen the new formats, they won't want to go back.
Unfortunately, it's not preserved by most coding processes. The frame rate is often changed when you down-sample something low enough to put on the Internet.
That doesn't totally invalidate the idea, but it does lower the granularity: you'd have to count seconds rather than frames. Still plenty of oppotunities in a 7,200 second movie.
who gives an advance screening of a movie to a B-movie actor?
The studios do. This guy is a voting member of the Academy. They wanted to make damn sure he'd seen Something's Gotta Give so that he could vote for it come voting time. (You're not allowed to vote unless you've seen all of the movies in the category.)
BTW: he's not a B-movie actor. He's an A-movie actor: Godfather II is a major motion picture. He's just a B-list actor, or actually, more of a D-list actor. Bruce Campbell is a B-movie actor.
Does this mean I can assert copyrights over/etc/X11/rgb.txt?
Did you write it? I didn't think so.
SCO is claiming that they own errno.h as part of the Unix code that they bought. It's not just the association of the number and the string; it's the overall content of the file.
They didn't write this file, either, but they did buy a bunch of rights, which is legally equivalent. Copyrights in general originate with the author, but since the author is usually not capable of turning a profit directly from the work (since they don't own printing presses or a distribution system), they usually profit by selling that right.
It is, in fact, somewhat telling: the file uses the exact same words as the Unix standard and the exact same numbers. This suggests that it's clearly a derivative work. There were other solutions to the problem (different names, use global variables instead of #defines, etc.)
The question then becomes, does SCO in fact own the contents of errno.h? Was it one of the things that they bought, or could it be considered to have gone into the public domain with the myriad releases of Unix source code, as well as the POSIX standard?
Errno.h can hardly be considered all that valuable. The file is clearly trivial, and the only reason we don't just rename all the numbers and tell SCO where to stick itself is that it's a tremendous hassle. I suspect a judge will feel the same way, but he could well ultimately decide that the copyright on the file belongs to SCO and that Linux must make a different work.
Number 4 on the "most popular news searches" is "bertrand cantat". Perhaps my worldview is too limited, but I'm surprised to discover that #4 is somebody I've never heard of.
Apparently he's a French guy who murdered a French actress. The French must have been searching like crazy for him to bid him up above Korea.
I've started my own startup company, and so I can tell you from experience: give up now. Screw the brass ring; it's only an illusion. Don't live your dreams, because the odds aren't just against you: it's certain you will lose.
"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." -- Thoreau. Those are the smart ones: the rest of them lead lives of noisy, soul-crushing misery. "Quiet desperation" is the best you can hope for. That's why the mass of men do it.
It's certainly got the potential to suck, and he's got the potential to suck in it.
He's a very bankable star. He's likeable on screen, something that many talented actors lack and that's incredibly hard to learn or fake. (I'm an actor myself, so I get to see this effect up close. No, you wouldn't have seen me in anything.)
Like many bankable stars he seems to want to alternate between opening crummy but well-paying movies and being in fun, small movies. I'd love to see him on stage some day.
Will Smith has done some terrible movies, and he's done mediocre work in some of them, but I think he's a very talented actor nonetheless. See him in Six Degrees of Separation. I can't say if you'll like the movie (it suffers from being a play first and a movie second), but Will Smith does some extraordinary work.
It's filling me with a hankering for an iPod, sure. But since it's not filling me with cash as well, it'll have to wait.
I'd buy an iPod over its competitors at any price point, but since my price point is well below any of its competitors as well as the iPod there is literally no contest. So I guess I'm the wrong guy to talk to.
I've been using iTunes on windows, and it's not filling me with a hankering to run out to get a Mac.
It's fine, certainly. The problems I've had have been trivial ones. But I find them to be about as aggravating as the ones I have to deal with on Windows on a daily basis.
I didn't find it any easier to use than RealOne. No harder, just not significantly easier. I use iTunes because I do like what Apple does, in general (and I own a tiny piece of stock), and conversely Real pisses me off as a company. But in this case I found the software roughly equivalent.
I felt that RotK was much closer to its book than TTT was to its. Although RotK left out vast swaths of story, they didn't spend time making up their own story. Even the dialogue seemed to me more straight from the book.
Closest is still FotR, which I think I still have to call my favorite of the movies, though I'll have to see RotK again to be sure. FotR (the book) has more "wish I could see that" moments than the other two books.
You think you're kidding. I was at Tuesday's all-day LOTR fest. The view from the back of the room between movies was awesome: every third seat was glowing with a laptop, gameboy, PDA, or phone. It was like Christmas. Two guys had a micro LAN party in the theater.
Unfortunately, America has a car culture which is tricky to replace with public transport.
Americans clump their houses pretty closely together, but not so closely that you can put a train system within walking distance of each house. So you have to take a car to various places (say, the grocery store). One you've paid the overhead of having a car at all (buying it, paying the insurance, etc.) it's more cost-efficient (and time efficient) to take it to work, on medium-size trips, and everywhere else.
Changing that would involve changing substantial American physical infrastructure. I'm all in favor of that, but it's not easy.
Funny from the country that parlayed its excellent rail system to open up much of a continent 150 years ago.
It is very unfortunate that the train isn't the less expensive choice, but it may be the most time-efficient one.
To fly from NY to Boston you have to get to La Guardia or JFK, a major undertaking. Plus you have to get there an hour early. (I know daredevil business travellers know the airports well enough to allocate less time, but I'm paranoid.) And when you get to Logan you have to go through the Big Dig to reach your destination.
You can take the train from Penn Station and if you miss the train you intended, there's another in 15 minutes.
Yeah, it takes longer, but it's more comfortable than those puddle-jumpers, and by the time you take all the time into account, I find it just as fast.
That said, you're right about driving. When I go from Washington to NYC, I take the train if it's just me, but if there are two or more I drive.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh. Thanks. I didn't realize that's how the %00 works, and that is a bug. Very clever.
Let's just say that when I first found out about this trick, I didn't realize how it was done. I don't know if my grandmother would think to look for the at-sign for the real name. The username/password part of the URL is not used very often and I think many people expect it to mean something from what it really means.
I don't think it's at all clear that http://slashdot.org@www.whitehouse.gov comes from whitehouse.gov. Users are used to looking at lengthy URLs (e.g. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000 05RKOE/ref=pd_qpt_gw_2/102-5119174-9172131) and ignoring anything after what appears to be the web site name.
j -dfjed=fjk dndjfserncs@www.whitehouse.gov/dfkdf/dfkjdf/dfsf, when the whitehouse.gov part has scrolled off the screen and buried in the text. You have to watch for the @ sign in every long URL.
Especially if one obfuscates further:
http://slashdot.org:dfkjkasfznc=dfjkker
So you think you're looking at slashdot, but you're really looking at the White House. Or you think you're looking at your bank, maybe even with SSL on (and verified, too) but you're really looking at the scammer's site.
And I don't think micropayments will stop spam - wouldn't the spammers just use servers that didn't require that?
It's your server at mailinator.that counts. It can refuse to accept email except from people (or other mail servers) who pay.
And would email be as useful if you could only get mail from someone who bought into a particular micropayment system?
The payments Microsoft is proposing aren't necessarily monetary. Sometimes it can be a hard computational problem, which takes you a few seconds to compute. Spam depends on the very low cost of email. If you have to buy 10 computers to send your spam, instead of just one, it's suddenly far less profitable. Whereas you yourself can easily afford a few seconds added to each of the few dozen emails you send each day, since almost every personal computer has free cycles.
Of course, that depends on spammers to use their own computers. If they're using yours, a problem which plagues Microsoft-based computers, you're still stuck.
The problem with the Bright Tunes decision isn't just that subconscious copying is a crime. It's also the fact that three notes were considered a copyrightable element.
I guess that's not entirely untrue. The NBC tune is only three notes long, and it would certainly be theft if ABC were to used them. But in that case it's the entire piece. It's also the context there: I can't imagine you'd be sued if you weren't thematically invoking NBC in your song.
In Bright Tunes, the judge felt that three notes used as only part of a song, and not deliberately invoking the other piece, were sufficient for Harrison to be riding on the back of Ronnie Mack's success.
Does it solve the problem? (I'm genuinely asking; I don't have a Mac around to test it.)
The problem is that IE (and Firebird, and Mozilla) all display the URL as typed, including user name and password information. So if you type http://www.slashdot.org:foo@www.whitehouse.gov/ you get directed to a nasty site, even though the URL appears to say www.slashdot.org.
(I don't seem to be able to reproduce the link exactly here; I think Slashdot may be removing the user name and password info.)
The solution seems fairly simple; remove user name and password information from the displayed URL. But that's not necessarily the Right Thing, displaying a different URL than you clicked. I don't consider the problem a "bug" in the same sense that buffer overflows are a bug.
Clearly it's a problem; I am a professional programmer and wasn't aware of this until it was pointed out to me.
If Safari has a solution, I'd like to know it. Mac developers are pretty good about doing The Right Thing.
It's proactive in the sense that when they discovered the problem, injured customers didn't have to sue or even threaten them to get compensation. That's more than I expect out of most businesses.
They also offered more than simply replacement. They offered a very good deal. Customers unhappy with the deal offered will have a hard time complaining that they didn't try, at least once the problem was pointed out to them.
Wow. How pro-active and reasonable of them. It sounds like they really want to keep their customers.
I'm sure I'd buy from them, if I ever bought heat-sink compound, which I don't because I'm a software guy.
(OK, I bought one tube once, and I bought whatever it was Radio Shack sold. See, I said I was a software guy.)
Oh, man, I've got brain cells working now that have six inches of dust on them. I played with mine until it just failed. I can't imagine when I would even have found tic-tac-toe interesting, but I was just fascinated at the time.
So maybe you can clue me in on how it works. (I've already RTFA and a bunch of links as well.)
Theoretically, heat is always transferring from hot regions (e.g. your torso) to cold regions (like your fingers) without anything fancy going on. Except that your fingers get colder, faster, because they're further away from the heat source, and have more surface area.
But if this is passive, how does it move heat from your torso to your hands more quickly than the air can sap it away? A plain-old wire would presumably transfer heat faster than flesh can. How does the fancy passive fluid system do it faster?
You are correct: nobody was really screaming for a new television standard. This is being imposed by the government much more as a matter of managing over-the-air bandwidth than because somebody thought that Survivor 3 just didn't look sharp enough. The higher resolution is just the carrot.
I think that the first thing they'll notice is with widescreen movies. On a standard television you're looking at perhaps 250 scan lines. They actually look pretty terrible, even on a 27" TV screen; there just aren't enough pixels. I often watch movies in pan & scan (blasphemy!) not because I'm dumb enough to worry that they're wasting my glass, but because I'd rather see details in the center of the image than the frequently unimportant stuff off at the side.
For that reason, and for the widescreen format, I've been looking forward to being able afford (and justify the expense) of an HDTV. For the most part people do not care, but I think that once they've seen the new formats, they won't want to go back.
Unfortunately, it's not preserved by most coding processes. The frame rate is often changed when you down-sample something low enough to put on the Internet.
That doesn't totally invalidate the idea, but it does lower the granularity: you'd have to count seconds rather than frames. Still plenty of oppotunities in a 7,200 second movie.
who gives an advance screening of a movie to a B-movie actor?
The studios do. This guy is a voting member of the Academy. They wanted to make damn sure he'd seen Something's Gotta Give so that he could vote for it come voting time. (You're not allowed to vote unless you've seen all of the movies in the category.)
BTW: he's not a B-movie actor. He's an A-movie actor: Godfather II is a major motion picture. He's just a B-list actor, or actually, more of a D-list actor. Bruce Campbell is a B-movie actor.
I wonder if Caridi sold it to somebody. Or gave it away because he'd already seen the movie; the film was aimed right at his generation.
I hope somebody gets the answer to this question.
Does this mean I can assert copyrights over /etc/X11/rgb.txt?
Did you write it? I didn't think so.
SCO is claiming that they own errno.h as part of the Unix code that they bought. It's not just the association of the number and the string; it's the overall content of the file.
They didn't write this file, either, but they did buy a bunch of rights, which is legally equivalent. Copyrights in general originate with the author, but since the author is usually not capable of turning a profit directly from the work (since they don't own printing presses or a distribution system), they usually profit by selling that right.
It is, in fact, somewhat telling: the file uses the exact same words as the Unix standard and the exact same numbers. This suggests that it's clearly a derivative work. There were other solutions to the problem (different names, use global variables instead of #defines, etc.)
The question then becomes, does SCO in fact own the contents of errno.h? Was it one of the things that they bought, or could it be considered to have gone into the public domain with the myriad releases of Unix source code, as well as the POSIX standard?
Errno.h can hardly be considered all that valuable. The file is clearly trivial, and the only reason we don't just rename all the numbers and tell SCO where to stick itself is that it's a tremendous hassle. I suspect a judge will feel the same way, but he could well ultimately decide that the copyright on the file belongs to SCO and that Linux must make a different work.
Number 4 on the "most popular news searches" is "bertrand cantat". Perhaps my worldview is too limited, but I'm surprised to discover that #4 is somebody I've never heard of.
Apparently he's a French guy who murdered a French actress. The French must have been searching like crazy for him to bid him up above Korea.
I've started my own startup company, and so I can tell you from experience: give up now. Screw the brass ring; it's only an illusion. Don't live your dreams, because the odds aren't just against you: it's certain you will lose.
"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." -- Thoreau. Those are the smart ones: the rest of them lead lives of noisy, soul-crushing misery. "Quiet desperation" is the best you can hope for. That's why the mass of men do it.
It's certainly got the potential to suck, and he's got the potential to suck in it.
He's a very bankable star. He's likeable on screen, something that many talented actors lack and that's incredibly hard to learn or fake. (I'm an actor myself, so I get to see this effect up close. No, you wouldn't have seen me in anything.)
Like many bankable stars he seems to want to alternate between opening crummy but well-paying movies and being in fun, small movies. I'd love to see him on stage some day.
Will Smith has done some terrible movies, and he's done mediocre work in some of them, but I think he's a very talented actor nonetheless. See him in Six Degrees of Separation. I can't say if you'll like the movie (it suffers from being a play first and a movie second), but Will Smith does some extraordinary work.
It's filling me with a hankering for an iPod, sure. But since it's not filling me with cash as well, it'll have to wait.
I'd buy an iPod over its competitors at any price point, but since my price point is well below any of its competitors as well as the iPod there is literally no contest. So I guess I'm the wrong guy to talk to.
I've been using iTunes on windows, and it's not filling me with a hankering to run out to get a Mac.
It's fine, certainly. The problems I've had have been trivial ones. But I find them to be about as aggravating as the ones I have to deal with on Windows on a daily basis.
I didn't find it any easier to use than RealOne. No harder, just not significantly easier. I use iTunes because I do like what Apple does, in general (and I own a tiny piece of stock), and conversely Real pisses me off as a company. But in this case I found the software roughly equivalent.
I felt that RotK was much closer to its book than TTT was to its. Although RotK left out vast swaths of story, they didn't spend time making up their own story. Even the dialogue seemed to me more straight from the book.
Closest is still FotR, which I think I still have to call my favorite of the movies, though I'll have to see RotK again to be sure. FotR (the book) has more "wish I could see that" moments than the other two books.
You think you're kidding. I was at Tuesday's all-day LOTR fest. The view from the back of the room between movies was awesome: every third seat was glowing with a laptop, gameboy, PDA, or phone. It was like Christmas. Two guys had a micro LAN party in the theater.
I assume they shut them off during the movies.
Unfortunately, America has a car culture which is tricky to replace with public transport.
Americans clump their houses pretty closely together, but not so closely that you can put a train system within walking distance of each house. So you have to take a car to various places (say, the grocery store). One you've paid the overhead of having a car at all (buying it, paying the insurance, etc.) it's more cost-efficient (and time efficient) to take it to work, on medium-size trips, and everywhere else.
Changing that would involve changing substantial American physical infrastructure. I'm all in favor of that, but it's not easy.
Funny from the country that parlayed its excellent rail system to open up much of a continent 150 years ago.
It is very unfortunate that the train isn't the less expensive choice, but it may be the most time-efficient one.
To fly from NY to Boston you have to get to La Guardia or JFK, a major undertaking. Plus you have to get there an hour early. (I know daredevil business travellers know the airports well enough to allocate less time, but I'm paranoid.) And when you get to Logan you have to go through the Big Dig to reach your destination.
You can take the train from Penn Station and if you miss the train you intended, there's another in 15 minutes.
Yeah, it takes longer, but it's more comfortable than those puddle-jumpers, and by the time you take all the time into account, I find it just as fast.
That said, you're right about driving. When I go from Washington to NYC, I take the train if it's just me, but if there are two or more I drive.