There is no surer predictor of bad weather in my home town than a cosmic event. With the exception of Halley's comet (not even this place could sustain cloud cover that long) and the occasional lunar eclipse, I've never managed to catch any event (including the Leonids and Perseids *every* *single* *year*).
We had lovely clear skies until I read this posting.
They can, of course, move out of the country, but that's more work for them. The reason spam exists is because it's easy and inexpensive to do.
Every roadblock you put in the way increases the cost of doing business a bit. Converting money between countries, dealing with people that you don't meet, being unable to get a physical handle on things, etc. makes it harder and more expensive.
Of course it will happen anyway, and those who don't get shaken out will find ways to reduce those problems. And then we'll see how existing laws work (and how they fail) and extend them to cover the new situations. We're always playing catchup, but that's generally the case with criminals.
This seems to me like a potentially serious problem; I could have been fooled by such a thing and I consider myself fairly proficient with computers (I am a programmer, after all). The best place to fix it is probably the browser. I can think of two ways for the browser to fix this potential problem:
1. Remove the username/password field when you display the URL in the tool bar, so that it cannot display misleading URLs.
2. Warn the user when a username/password was provided but not required, which would be a clue that soemthing is wrong with the URL.
Educating the users is a very slow process, especially when it's tricky to do. Amazon has long, complicated URLs and if you pass me an Amazon URL I'm not likely to go scanning it for an @ (except now I'm going to).
Upgrading the browser happens very slowly. Supposedly Microsoft has ceased to work on it entirely, and I'm sure they wouldn't consider this their problem. But I'd love to see one of these two suggestions incorporated into Firebird/Mozilla in a future release, to protect me from myself.
Oh, yeah, I've seen it used for HTTP connections too, when you're using HTTP authentication. (Most sites use cookies for authentication now, I think.) I should have realized that. Thanks.
So I suspect you weren't going directly to the FTP server, but that your friend was running an HTTP server on the same files. Netscape with the ftp: protocol should use the same ports as any other ftp client, so it would have been blocked.
it thinks you're passing www.slashdot.org as a user name. I knew that (I even use it) but got fooled by the fact that I know that www.slashdot.org is a web site, even though the browser can't know that.
I was baffled to discover that my browser (Firebird) supports the @ redirection at all. I've been unable to uncover any W3C or RFC standard that covers it, though presumably one exists. Can somebody point me to it?
Perhaps that would explain why such a silly feature exists at all. It seems to have no other purpose than for spoofing.
After the last scam article I've been trying to figure out what the @ is good for, besides fooling people.
I figure it must be part of some standard, since Firebird supports it, but I've been unable to find that standard. As far as I can tell the best solution to this problem is to eliminate support for @ in a URL as a redirector. Is this going to break anything useful?
To get the $99 TiVo you have to get DirecTV service, which is pretty pricey. By itself it costs $300 MSRP, though Amazon wants only $220 and Circuit City $250.
That's still comparable to the system described, though I'm not sure how many gigabytes 40 hours is, so I can't compare the storage. The 80 hour one is around $350.
I can't imagine why you want exactly one thing spoiled, but according to the article (which must be taken with a grain of salt the size of Ohio), the answer to your question is "The article says that the movie will give an answer to the question".
Unfortunaltely, peer-to-peer networks don't work as an underground. They need a large base of people to be using it and sharing their stuff.
If only hackers can get KazaaLite, and the norms are smart enough to avoid using Kazaa+spyware, then you won't boot up your KazaaLite because there won't be anything to find. And if you don't boot up KazaaLite to share your stuff, then the network contracts, and eventually there's nothing at all.
Napster was quite aboveboard about things; everybody had heard of it (and therefore RIAA's target). Kazaa lasts a bit longer because it's less visible, but there's less stuff on it. Everybody says "Kazaa has less stuff than Napster did", and they're right, but that's not because of the software. It's because between Kazaa's lower profile and the obnoxious spyware giving it a "don't touch" feeling, fewer people use it, so there's less stuff to share.
Sadly, I'm afraid you're right. I think the problem is one of a Prisoner's Dilemma gone bad. Each individual assumes the he must take all that he can get, because the others have already proven that they will do the same. Who started it? Who cares. It's self-perpetuating now.
Perhaps with Canadian elections commissions, the stakes are lower; they don't ultimately end up deciding the Fate of the Free World. Or perhaps it's just a flaw in American culture that leads us to believe that we should have any influence over the Fate of the Free World.
(Sorry for the mostly off-topic rant. You just seemed to be making some sense and failing any ability to do so myself [and having spent my last mod point this afternoon] I figured I'd just second yours.)
Nah, I don't think it's really a troll. (One of the hazards of meta-moderating is that you get to see the real trolls.)
I'm just surprised to hear that there were 3-letter domains available at all in 1998. (I've sometimes wondered if there are any available post the dotcom crash.)
I was asked to meta-moderate a moderation as "troll", and I've been trying to decide. I guess I have to moderate it "fair", given that by the time jennicam was established, I would have imagined that all three-letter dot-com domain names were long since taken.
Then again, I knew a complete fool who had a 3 letter domain name. And you don't say that you got them at the same time. You could well be the guy who squatted npr.com.
The rest of the story rings true, but I'm going to call shennanigans anyway. I'll probably never know if I'm right or not.
I just can't find myself too bothered about the Saruman scenes. They'd already cut the original ending of Saruman's storyline, so why should I care whether or not they've kept Jackson's version of it?
And on a slow news day, that's news. I guess. But since none of the commenters thus far seem to have much of a grasp of either the problem or its solution, I'd say the primary reason is to be able to post a picture of an attractive woman pointing at a math problem.
In general, you'll note that important advances in mathematics aren't usually first reported in Aftenposten.
Sadly, most of us have time to see only a few movies. Reviews, at their best, help you guess which movies would make the most of the limited time you have. The only way to know if a movie is "good", to your particular definition of that term, is to see it yourself, but reviews still have a place in the world.
Obviously this won't get rid of any spam, but it will do two useful things:
1. For "legitimate" spammers, it will be easy to filter them out, preferably at the server level. (I wonder if we could convince, say, AOL to bounce all email self-designated as spam.)
2. For illegitimate spammers, we will now have some sort of legal recourse. I know that this won't be easy, since illegitimate spammers don't include valid return addresses, but it's a start. We can also use it to punish legitimate companies who use illegitimate means to acquire email lists, since they _do_ have well-known addresses.
Immediately, we've gained very little, and it's the least-offensive spam that is most easily filtered out. But if this is just the first step, maybe we can get to the real bad guys eventually.
The article points out that it only _sounds_ like a foreign accent, because some feature is changed (e.g. vowel length). It's not actually a particular foreign accent.
The two samples, to an untrained American ear, both sound quite similar; they're both "British" accents. (I'm not sure which accent it is; the original sounds a lot like Received pronunciation but I'm not an expert.)
The syndrome I'd like to combat is the one associated with going to Renaissance festivals which induces the unshakeable delusion that one has developed an accurate British accent.
They could have published a binary file format rather than XML. If you write the spec and stick to it there's no real advantage to XML.
I do like XML anyway. It provides a standard language in which to publish those specifications, and it makes writing parsers and writers easier.
But many of its purported advantages are illusory. Even though it's text, you can't really write XML by hand most of the time; it's just too complex, for the same reason that truly complex layouts in HTML require machine assistance.
XML's semantics are nil, and despite this standard being published there will still be substantial disagreements between MS and other implementers on the meanings of various tags, especially in combination with other tags.
That's even when MS is complying with the letter of its own spec. If MS fails to comply with the spec, the spec will be useless. The real definition of this spec is the MS "reference" implementation, AKA Word, Excel, etc. That's because XML doesn't contain enough semantics to yell at MS for failing to comply with its own specification.
Actually, I find it rather scary to have my CC# stored in my browser. First, I'm never sure when it's going to fill it out without my noticing. Is it possible to trick my browser into auto-filling it into a hidden form?
Second, how well protected is by browser's forms cache? Is my CC# stored, unencrypted, on my disk somewhere? The info is available to anybody who sits down an borrows my browser.
There are a host of problems with single-sign-on, but auto-fill is at least as dangerous, IMO.
Seconded. I spent forever explaining how my work was different from the references that I provided, which he understood incompletly. (But I give him huge props for reading them at all, since they're highly technical and involved.)
That was rather frustrating, since he'd likely never have found those references if we didn't include them, when compared to some of the patent silliness I read on Slashdot.
I actually get a variety of calls that I want that do not transmit numbers. Some are friends calling from business phones; others are somewhat-unsavory-but-still-useful human resources departments offering me a job.
Perhaps I wasn't quite clear: my group does no telemarketing, and won't ever. I was merely trying to point out that the original poster's point (that putting out a web page and waiting for the world to come) is not entirely effective.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no surer predictor of bad weather in my home town than a cosmic event. With the exception of Halley's comet (not even this place could sustain cloud cover that long) and the occasional lunar eclipse, I've never managed to catch any event (including the Leonids and Perseids *every* *single* *year*).
We had lovely clear skies until I read this posting.
They can, of course, move out of the country, but that's more work for them. The reason spam exists is because it's easy and inexpensive to do.
Every roadblock you put in the way increases the cost of doing business a bit. Converting money between countries, dealing with people that you don't meet, being unable to get a physical handle on things, etc. makes it harder and more expensive.
Of course it will happen anyway, and those who don't get shaken out will find ways to reduce those problems. And then we'll see how existing laws work (and how they fail) and extend them to cover the new situations. We're always playing catchup, but that's generally the case with criminals.
This seems to me like a potentially serious problem; I could have been fooled by such a thing and I consider myself fairly proficient with computers (I am a programmer, after all). The best place to fix it is probably the browser. I can think of two ways for the browser to fix this potential problem:
1. Remove the username/password field when you display the URL in the tool bar, so that it cannot display misleading URLs.
2. Warn the user when a username/password was provided but not required, which would be a clue that soemthing is wrong with the URL.
Educating the users is a very slow process, especially when it's tricky to do. Amazon has long, complicated URLs and if you pass me an Amazon URL I'm not likely to go scanning it for an @ (except now I'm going to).
Upgrading the browser happens very slowly. Supposedly Microsoft has ceased to work on it entirely, and I'm sure they wouldn't consider this their problem. But I'd love to see one of these two suggestions incorporated into Firebird/Mozilla in a future release, to protect me from myself.
Oh, yeah, I've seen it used for HTTP connections too, when you're using HTTP authentication. (Most sites use cookies for authentication now, I think.) I should have realized that. Thanks.
So I suspect you weren't going directly to the FTP server, but that your friend was running an HTTP server on the same files. Netscape with the ftp: protocol should use the same ports as any other ftp client, so it would have been blocked.
Oh. Duh. So when you say:
http://www.slashdot.org@spoof.com
it thinks you're passing www.slashdot.org as a user name. I knew that (I even use it) but got fooled by the fact that I know that www.slashdot.org is a web site, even though the browser can't know that.
Thanks. Ain't my face red.
I was baffled to discover that my browser (Firebird) supports the @ redirection at all. I've been unable to uncover any W3C or RFC standard that covers it, though presumably one exists. Can somebody point me to it?
Perhaps that would explain why such a silly feature exists at all. It seems to have no other purpose than for spoofing.
After the last scam article I've been trying to figure out what the @ is good for, besides fooling people.
I figure it must be part of some standard, since Firebird supports it, but I've been unable to find that standard. As far as I can tell the best solution to this problem is to eliminate support for @ in a URL as a redirector. Is this going to break anything useful?
To get the $99 TiVo you have to get DirecTV service, which is pretty pricey. By itself it costs $300 MSRP, though Amazon wants only $220 and Circuit City $250.
That's still comparable to the system described, though I'm not sure how many gigabytes 40 hours is, so I can't compare the storage. The 80 hour one is around $350.
I can't imagine why you want exactly one thing spoiled, but according to the article (which must be taken with a grain of salt the size of Ohio), the answer to your question is "The article says that the movie will give an answer to the question".
Happy?
Unfortunaltely, peer-to-peer networks don't work as an underground. They need a large base of people to be using it and sharing their stuff.
If only hackers can get KazaaLite, and the norms are smart enough to avoid using Kazaa+spyware, then you won't boot up your KazaaLite because there won't be anything to find. And if you don't boot up KazaaLite to share your stuff, then the network contracts, and eventually there's nothing at all.
Napster was quite aboveboard about things; everybody had heard of it (and therefore RIAA's target). Kazaa lasts a bit longer because it's less visible, but there's less stuff on it. Everybody says "Kazaa has less stuff than Napster did", and they're right, but that's not because of the software. It's because between Kazaa's lower profile and the obnoxious spyware giving it a "don't touch" feeling, fewer people use it, so there's less stuff to share.
Not a sermon, just an economic rant.
Sadly, I'm afraid you're right. I think the problem is one of a Prisoner's Dilemma gone bad. Each individual assumes the he must take all that he can get, because the others have already proven that they will do the same. Who started it? Who cares. It's self-perpetuating now.
Perhaps with Canadian elections commissions, the stakes are lower; they don't ultimately end up deciding the Fate of the Free World. Or perhaps it's just a flaw in American culture that leads us to believe that we should have any influence over the Fate of the Free World.
(Sorry for the mostly off-topic rant. You just seemed to be making some sense and failing any ability to do so myself [and having spent my last mod point this afternoon] I figured I'd just second yours.)
Nah, I don't think it's really a troll. (One of the hazards of meta-moderating is that you get to see the real trolls.)
I'm just surprised to hear that there were 3-letter domains available at all in 1998. (I've sometimes wondered if there are any available post the dotcom crash.)
Glad to hear the story is true. It's funny.
I was asked to meta-moderate a moderation as "troll", and I've been trying to decide. I guess I have to moderate it "fair", given that by the time jennicam was established, I would have imagined that all three-letter dot-com domain names were long since taken.
Then again, I knew a complete fool who had a 3 letter domain name. And you don't say that you got them at the same time. You could well be the guy who squatted npr.com.
The rest of the story rings true, but I'm going to call shennanigans anyway. I'll probably never know if I'm right or not.
"Too much free time" is not killing the unkillable monster with 200 of your friends.
"Too much free time" is composing an epic poem about it.
If I could hook up a generator to Tennyson's grave I could power Manhattan, with enough left over to drive a computer to post a "Way to go" comment.
I just can't find myself too bothered about the Saruman scenes. They'd already cut the original ending of Saruman's storyline, so why should I care whether or not they've kept Jackson's version of it?
And on a slow news day, that's news. I guess. But since none of the commenters thus far seem to have much of a grasp of either the problem or its solution, I'd say the primary reason is to be able to post a picture of an attractive woman pointing at a math problem.
In general, you'll note that important advances in mathematics aren't usually first reported in Aftenposten.
I'm afraid that if you have to ask, the odds are you won't understand the answer. Or, in fact, the question. I sure don't understand either one.
Sadly, most of us have time to see only a few movies. Reviews, at their best, help you guess which movies would make the most of the limited time you have. The only way to know if a movie is "good", to your particular definition of that term, is to see it yourself, but reviews still have a place in the world.
Obviously this won't get rid of any spam, but it will do two useful things:
1. For "legitimate" spammers, it will be easy to filter them out, preferably at the server level. (I wonder if we could convince, say, AOL to bounce all email self-designated as spam.)
2. For illegitimate spammers, we will now have some sort of legal recourse. I know that this won't be easy, since illegitimate spammers don't include valid return addresses, but it's a start. We can also use it to punish legitimate companies who use illegitimate means to acquire email lists, since they _do_ have well-known addresses.
Immediately, we've gained very little, and it's the least-offensive spam that is most easily filtered out. But if this is just the first step, maybe we can get to the real bad guys eventually.
Thank you, that's much clearer.
The article points out that it only _sounds_ like a foreign accent, because some feature is changed (e.g. vowel length). It's not actually a particular foreign accent.
The two samples, to an untrained American ear, both sound quite similar; they're both "British" accents. (I'm not sure which accent it is; the original sounds a lot like Received pronunciation but I'm not an expert.)
The syndrome I'd like to combat is the one associated with going to Renaissance festivals which induces the unshakeable delusion that one has developed an accurate British accent.
They could have published a binary file format rather than XML. If you write the spec and stick to it there's no real advantage to XML.
I do like XML anyway. It provides a standard language in which to publish those specifications, and it makes writing parsers and writers easier.
But many of its purported advantages are illusory. Even though it's text, you can't really write XML by hand most of the time; it's just too complex, for the same reason that truly complex layouts in HTML require machine assistance.
XML's semantics are nil, and despite this standard being published there will still be substantial disagreements between MS and other implementers on the meanings of various tags, especially in combination with other tags.
That's even when MS is complying with the letter of its own spec. If MS fails to comply with the spec, the spec will be useless. The real definition of this spec is the MS "reference" implementation, AKA Word, Excel, etc. That's because XML doesn't contain enough semantics to yell at MS for failing to comply with its own specification.
Actually, I find it rather scary to have my CC# stored in my browser. First, I'm never sure when it's going to fill it out without my noticing. Is it possible to trick my browser into auto-filling it into a hidden form?
Second, how well protected is by browser's forms cache? Is my CC# stored, unencrypted, on my disk somewhere? The info is available to anybody who sits down an borrows my browser.
There are a host of problems with single-sign-on, but auto-fill is at least as dangerous, IMO.
Seconded. I spent forever explaining how my work was different from the references that I provided, which he understood incompletly. (But I give him huge props for reading them at all, since they're highly technical and involved.)
That was rather frustrating, since he'd likely never have found those references if we didn't include them, when compared to some of the patent silliness I read on Slashdot.
I actually get a variety of calls that I want that do not transmit numbers. Some are friends calling from business phones; others are somewhat-unsavory-but-still-useful human resources departments offering me a job.
Perhaps I wasn't quite clear: my group does no telemarketing, and won't ever. I was merely trying to point out that the original poster's point (that putting out a web page and waiting for the world to come) is not entirely effective.