Fines are problematic as a punishment, because not everybody can pay them. Some of the money has already been spent by the time you get to them, and some has been hidden. You can take everything they have, which is usually less than they made off the crime. There are usually ways to legally hide money even from fines; they're reluctant to take your house, for example (though I gather that the US government has ways around that.)
Jail time is something that people can't miss.
I agree that two years should be a terrifying thing to take from somebody; it's scary that so many people are willing to risk jail time nonetheless.
Punishment is always a problem. Nothing really works universally. Deterrence obviously fails to deter. Rehabilitation also fails more often than it helps. Vengeance comes with its own problems.
Jail terms are always quantifications based on all three factors and more, which will always lead to absurdities of proportion, where some minor crimes get larger sentences than major ones. The laws are always compromises, and the numbers end up as the result of splitting differences and argumentation rather than an understanding of what works.
Because nobody had done it before. A gazillion cell phone models exist, and none had done this.
There are a gazillion cell phone models because they're all looking for some sort of differentiator. Why should you buy this one rather than that other one? They put a lot of time and effort into thinking of new models.
Either this is the first time somebody came up with it, and the patent is a way of rewarding that ingenuity, or it's been tried before and rejected as useless, in which case the patent is pointless.
We can debate whether the amount of time the patent is issued for is appropriate. We can debate whether it's worth the effort of rewarding this novel design with anything other than an industry award. We can certainly debate why the patent office issues a patent to anybody with a sheet of paper and letting the courts sort it out.
But this strikes me as a classic patentable idea: novel, presumably useful, and (given that we didn't have any before despite a gazillion other models) non-obvious.
It depends on how you define the commodity. They have a monopoly on Weird Al's song, but they don't have a monopoly on music. If they raise the price of the Weird Al song to $99.95, you'll buy something else. If they raise the price of CDs to $34, you'll shift to other forms of music, or other forms of entertainment.
The same thing can happen to sugar: if an organic sugar producer decides to charge $15 per pound, he can get it if the cost of substituting conventional sugar is too high for people in non-economic terms (i.e. they really want organics). Or they'll switch to honey, or Nutrasweet, or whatever price point holds their fancy relative to what they want.
In other words, the law of supply and demand still holds in setting prices. Demand curves are always about substitutions: at which point will you decide to get something different? Comparing music to sugar is a bit of a red herring because sugar is an amorphous white blob with ready substitutions. The substitutions for the Weird Al music exist as well: they're other songs and other forms of entertainment.
What's breaking that curve from this point of view is the ease of file trading, because the supply is essentially infinite, which drives the price down to zero. This worries them, because the price is lower than the cost of production (which is larger than zero).
The curves haven't settled out yet: people still don't get all of their music through file trading, even though the economic models predict that they eventually will.
I mean, when you buy a song off of iTunes, you're buying a bunch of bits. You're perfectly free to move those bits around. Email 'em to a buddy, put them on BitTorrent, whatever.
It just won't do anybody any good, because they've worked very hard to restrict the utility of those bits to just the one computer you bought them for. You've bought the bits, but you haven't bought the music. It just so happens that under certain limited conditions, you can turn the bits into music.
With a standard MP3, the bits are identical to the music. They're trying to change that equation back to the way it used to be.
With CDs, before the Internet, or with vinyl, you didn't really get bits at all. You got a physical artifact, and that was equivalent to buying the music. They could sell you the music at small but non-zero price, and they knew they could sell the same music to somebody else at the same price.
They liked it that way, and they're going to have a hard time getting back to it. It takes only one hacker to make the bits equivalent to the music again, even if that's only via the analog hole.
So their business model is totally shot. The DMCA allows them to try to hang on to it, because nobody's come up with an alternative that allows them to keep doing what they do: make musicians famous. That's what they're good at.
The alternatives all seem to revolve around making music free or nearly free. You can sell live performances, but that's hard to do: you can't tour nationally if you're not famous, and the people near you will pay to hear you only so many times. If your music is nearly free, and you're not famous, you can't make up the difference in volume.
Destroy the major labels and there are still a few ways to get famous: win on American Idol, develop a cult following on the internet, etc. You can do that now, too, and it just doesn't happen terribly often. That's because the labels are GOOD at making you famous. It's a very, very compelling thing to a band who's spent a few thousand dollars in studio and engineering time and made 23 bucks selling CDs at the local club.
Rubbish. Vista doesn't change anything having to do with the Internet Protocol. You move bits around. You move them around freely.
The question now is, what sort of bits do they want to sell you? It won't work to sell the same bits to two different people any more, because the freedom of the Internet is still just the same as it always was.
What's changing is the kind of bits they sell, and the software that they use to interpret those bits. That's an attempt to make money of the effort that they put into creating those bits.
Maybe it'll work. More likely not; somebody will always find a way to get something resembling the original form of the bits, and then people won't want the highly individualized version. I just haven't seen a good alternative yet. (And if you want to talk about live performances, reply only if you've ever tried to make a living booking venues for a band. I have. Start with an anecdote about how badly you were treated so I know you're not BSing me)
But if you want to say, "Hey, remember the good old days when I got all my music for free, and only suckers actually paid for it?", well, whatever. More power to you. Just don't expect the guys who make bits for a living to reminisce along with you.
Slashdot isn't a commons, at least not in its news articles. They're picked by editors. Those editors fail in a lot of ways (dups, slashvertisements, crappy grammar), but as you observe they keep up a reasonably interesting stream of articles.
The comments are a commons, it's interesting that it's not too bad. One still sees occasional trolls, but several mechanisms weed them out: moderation, ignoring ACs, and Slashdot's filters. Eliminating graphical content helps, too.
I'm still surprised that you don't find groups of trolls banding together to subvert that. It wouldn't be hard for several to make a few intelligent comments, acquire karma, and then burn it all to moderate an ascii-art goatse image to +5. Presumably this doesn't happen because there are too many real moderators pushing such idiocies down; the wealth of mod points is on their side.
Wikipedia, too, is a commons where a combination of benign dictatorship (locking down controversial articles, banning troll users and unregistered users from some articles) and the general good-will to hide the trolls works to make the commons quite liveable.
That doesn't work for most physical commons. Modding down a troll is cheap; cleaning up a polluted river or the air is expensive, and not amenable to many people putting in a little work.
That may have been true with respect to Mutually Assured Destruction, but I think that this is aimed more at modern asymmetrical warfare. These days the US doesn't really fear massive barrages from the Soviet Union or China as much as it fears a single missile from North Korea or Iran with a nuclear warhead. Something which can inflict tens of thousands of casualties.
Response to such an event would be difficult. To prevent it from happening again we'd have to inflict massive, disproportionate damage on the enemy, thus incurring truly epic international hatred. We wouldn't even be 100% certain of being able to identify the enemy.
This throws the balances of MAD out of whack. I can actually believe North Korea would try such a thing and believe they could get away with it. It knows that the first thing China would do is insist that the US take no retaliation, and back it up with real MAD. Shooting down that one missile (or at least making North Korea believe we could) dramatically reduces the risk.
(Note: I'm not an expert in international relations. There are plenty of people who would say that the US is busily making the world a more dangerous place, and has been since before our latest Iraq debacle. I'm just trying to explain the actions in terms of our own perceptions. "Truth", if there is such a thing, may well differ.)
For common items, you don't actually have to snipe. You just bid on the next auction to come due. I suspect that a lot of things that appear to be sniping are really just people bidding on the thing at the top of the list.
The things lower on the list may appear to have lower prices, but they'll be bid up, too, when they hit the top of the list, plus you have to wait if you find out if you won. Just do what everybody else does, and it'll have most of the same effects as concerted sniping.
In general I agree with you, though I'm aware of one instance in which it wasn't just a fun prank. For some time the search "Jews" came up with an anti-Semitic web page as its first hit, as a result of googlebombing by anti-Semitic groups.
Since there are more Jews than rabid anti-Semites in the world (I hope) I'd be tempted to just tell 'em to reverse-googlebomb, making sure you've got plenty of links to more valid pages, but a concerted (if distributed) effort to target one page is still going to put it higher up in the rankings than it really deserves to be.
It has to do with funding. If you're publishing in a journal which doesn't pay you to publish in it, then you're getting your money from elsewhere, which often means government grants. That means that the government has the ability to clamp down on research that it doesn't like.
If the government mandates that you have to publish in something like PubMed, and the paid journals end up going out of business (because they can't compete with "free"), then the government ends up with a lot more power of the purse over what research gets done.
I'm not saying I like his logic. By that logic, the government already has too much to say in most research. But that's what he's talking about.
How typical: you pick what criteria you think are important, define them as "intelligence", and then determine that everybody else is less intelligent than you are.
When it happens at a conference, it's just back-slapping. Scale it up and its racism and then genocide.
Whatever, guys. As long as you stop short of the genocide I really don't care what you think.
Successes can be useful, too, though less useful than failures. In succeeding, it refutes the notion that string theory is untestable, which is a major reason to go work on something else instead.
As you point out, that's aesthetic rather than factual, but the aesthetics of science aren't arbitrary. They've proven themselves to be a pretty good way of finding out more truth, without getting sidetracked. Simplicity is the ultimate dogma of science, the thing that it believes without proof and without the possibility of proof, but it has nonetheless shown itself to be useful.
(Utility, of course, is yet another aesthetic judgment, and a while separate branch of philosophy, namely the "What are we as humans supposed to DO?" branch. I'm a lot less comfortable in working out that branch, and will content myself with the notion that I do science because it amuses me.)
The point is that there aren't any truly novel, effective spam solutions waiting out there. Whatever it is they're suggesting, it's been thought of before, or something like it, and it's already been found wanting.
We don't need to rewrite the objections from scratch, and can just re-tread the old ones by filling out the form. Somebody will fill out that form for EVERY anti-spam solution posted on Slashdot.
I'm curious to know more about this. Having spent some time on Slashdot, I've seen that there are an awful lot of people with an awful lot of time on their hands, looking for nothing more than to spew filth at somebody whose reaction they'll never see. I just bumped into one in a different thread a few minutes ago. It was anonymous and therefore left at 0, but I still ran into it drilling down into a question I found interesting.
Wiki removes things a bit more thoroughly, but I know that the trolls are out there. I imagine that the anti-vandalbots are reluctant to disclose details, but I was not actually aware of their existence.
Clearly it's working. Despite my initial misgivings I now use Wikipedia more than I use google. But I don't really know how it works, and therefore I'm afraid that it's just because of a temporary flagging of interest.
the answer would be nuking all your sheep from orbit and posting a lock and a sign on the commons stating "you must be at least THIS------> Respectable before you can graze your sheep on these commons."
Are you saying that the equivalent happens on wikipedia already? I was under the impression that it still supported anonymous editing.
What's the difference between "communally-managed" and "unmanaged"? That is, what's the difference between Wikipedia being communally-managed and the classic field-of-sheep commons? The latter also has community opprobrium to try to keep your usage fair.
On Wiki you can actually go so far as to remove resource usages you don't find appropriate, but its success so far seems to be insufficient value to the trolls and spammers. If somebody were really intent on "overgrazing" wikipedia, automated troll-bots would have no difficulty spewing crap all over it faster than the community could work to revert it.
I'll be honest, I'm surprised I haven't seen more if it already.
Is the hack really all that ugly? It actually strikes me as rather elegant: rather than looking at something tangential to the page itself, like a META tag, its looking at something fundamental about the nature of the web. The notion that a page donates some of its importance to other pages seems quite elegant to me, and the NOFOLLOW tag is a simple extension of that notion: "Even though I'm linking to this page, for whatever reason I don't consider it important."
Open user-editable web sites like Wiki should probably have a blanket NOFOLLOW, because the page owner isn't really willing to vouch for any of the pages that it links to.
If a bounce refers to a Message-ID that you haven't sent, the bounce can be rejected.
That's clever. I like that.
(Kudos on the polite rejection message. My example was a joke, of course, but I'm glad to hear you're applying some civility. Spam tends to make people very, very upset; you've seen the sort of things people on Slashdot propose as punishments and they really don't seem to be joking.)
What I mean is, I'd like to change the protocol from:
Spammer: Here's some email Server: Thanks!.. time passes... Server: Hey, this is spam! Let's send it to jfengel!
to
Spammer: Here's some email Server: Screw you. It's spam. (or "There's no such person here. I reject it now rather than having to call you back using the forged header.")
I suspect that the SMTP protocol already supports that. But in general, SMTP is heavily oriented towards store-and-forward in an intermittently connected, unreliable network, passing mail at midnight when the rates were cheap. Maybe that's still a good mode to support, since not everybody has high-speed lines and the network is still unreliable, but TCP and the backbone have solved the problem without some of the problems that come from store-and-forward.
Mostly the grandparent post is guilty of something missing from the standard spam solution rebuttal checklist: insufficient details.
Yeah, a spam solution is almost certainly going to involve a modification to the SMTP protocol. The devil is in the details.
For my tastes, I'd be content to start with rejecting emails immediately rather than sending out "your email was rejected" messages. The number of valid "rejected" messages has got to be infinitesimal compared to the amount of address-guessing spam in the universe. About 1/3 of the spam I get comes from somebody's server rejecting somebody else's spam and telling me about it to no useful effect.
I know many people who use PayPal for intermittent or even frequent eBay purchases, and not one has mentioned any problems to me.
But we're talking about money here. If they hold your money, it feels like theft, because it is, and that's incredibly infuriating. So a small percentage of users (much less than 1%, I gather) are very vociferous in their objections.
As far as I can tell, go ahead and use it to buy stuff, and you're wildly unlikely to notice anything difficult. If you were to be an eBay power seller, though, it would be different.
A video just has so much room for steganography. You could encode each I-frame using slightly different parameters, and choose your P and B frames differently, yielding very, very different results. A simple bitwise compare won't do you any good.
Even there, I suppose that eventually with enough work you could undo that by decoding and re-encoding each frame to your own specifications. You'll lose some resolution, and it would take a lot of computing power, but I don't think that'll deter people: they're willing to watch stuff off at YouTube resolution (which I find intolerable) and computing power is cheap, especially when in the service of Sticking It To The Man. (If you buy multiple copies and combine them you could probably even get around the loss of resolution, eventually deriving a near-perfect original.)
Still, I'd really like to see this catch on. Given the success of iTunes, it appears that people are willing to pay to download content legally, if the price is right and the DRM restrictions tolerable. Apple's DRM is generally tolerable, but there are those for whom it grates anyway, and this would remove those limitations as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Fines are problematic as a punishment, because not everybody can pay them. Some of the money has already been spent by the time you get to them, and some has been hidden. You can take everything they have, which is usually less than they made off the crime. There are usually ways to legally hide money even from fines; they're reluctant to take your house, for example (though I gather that the US government has ways around that.)
Jail time is something that people can't miss.
I agree that two years should be a terrifying thing to take from somebody; it's scary that so many people are willing to risk jail time nonetheless.
Punishment is always a problem. Nothing really works universally. Deterrence obviously fails to deter. Rehabilitation also fails more often than it helps. Vengeance comes with its own problems.
Jail terms are always quantifications based on all three factors and more, which will always lead to absurdities of proportion, where some minor crimes get larger sentences than major ones. The laws are always compromises, and the numbers end up as the result of splitting differences and argumentation rather than an understanding of what works.
Because nobody had done it before. A gazillion cell phone models exist, and none had done this.
There are a gazillion cell phone models because they're all looking for some sort of differentiator. Why should you buy this one rather than that other one? They put a lot of time and effort into thinking of new models.
Either this is the first time somebody came up with it, and the patent is a way of rewarding that ingenuity, or it's been tried before and rejected as useless, in which case the patent is pointless.
We can debate whether the amount of time the patent is issued for is appropriate. We can debate whether it's worth the effort of rewarding this novel design with anything other than an industry award. We can certainly debate why the patent office issues a patent to anybody with a sheet of paper and letting the courts sort it out.
But this strikes me as a classic patentable idea: novel, presumably useful, and (given that we didn't have any before despite a gazillion other models) non-obvious.
It depends on how you define the commodity. They have a monopoly on Weird Al's song, but they don't have a monopoly on music. If they raise the price of the Weird Al song to $99.95, you'll buy something else. If they raise the price of CDs to $34, you'll shift to other forms of music, or other forms of entertainment.
The same thing can happen to sugar: if an organic sugar producer decides to charge $15 per pound, he can get it if the cost of substituting conventional sugar is too high for people in non-economic terms (i.e. they really want organics). Or they'll switch to honey, or Nutrasweet, or whatever price point holds their fancy relative to what they want.
In other words, the law of supply and demand still holds in setting prices. Demand curves are always about substitutions: at which point will you decide to get something different? Comparing music to sugar is a bit of a red herring because sugar is an amorphous white blob with ready substitutions. The substitutions for the Weird Al music exist as well: they're other songs and other forms of entertainment.
What's breaking that curve from this point of view is the ease of file trading, because the supply is essentially infinite, which drives the price down to zero. This worries them, because the price is lower than the cost of production (which is larger than zero).
The curves haven't settled out yet: people still don't get all of their music through file trading, even though the economic models predict that they eventually will.
I mean, when you buy a song off of iTunes, you're buying a bunch of bits. You're perfectly free to move those bits around. Email 'em to a buddy, put them on BitTorrent, whatever.
It just won't do anybody any good, because they've worked very hard to restrict the utility of those bits to just the one computer you bought them for. You've bought the bits, but you haven't bought the music. It just so happens that under certain limited conditions, you can turn the bits into music.
With a standard MP3, the bits are identical to the music. They're trying to change that equation back to the way it used to be.
With CDs, before the Internet, or with vinyl, you didn't really get bits at all. You got a physical artifact, and that was equivalent to buying the music. They could sell you the music at small but non-zero price, and they knew they could sell the same music to somebody else at the same price.
They liked it that way, and they're going to have a hard time getting back to it. It takes only one hacker to make the bits equivalent to the music again, even if that's only via the analog hole.
So their business model is totally shot. The DMCA allows them to try to hang on to it, because nobody's come up with an alternative that allows them to keep doing what they do: make musicians famous. That's what they're good at.
The alternatives all seem to revolve around making music free or nearly free. You can sell live performances, but that's hard to do: you can't tour nationally if you're not famous, and the people near you will pay to hear you only so many times. If your music is nearly free, and you're not famous, you can't make up the difference in volume.
Destroy the major labels and there are still a few ways to get famous: win on American Idol, develop a cult following on the internet, etc. You can do that now, too, and it just doesn't happen terribly often. That's because the labels are GOOD at making you famous. It's a very, very compelling thing to a band who's spent a few thousand dollars in studio and engineering time and made 23 bucks selling CDs at the local club.
Rubbish. Vista doesn't change anything having to do with the Internet Protocol. You move bits around. You move them around freely.
The question now is, what sort of bits do they want to sell you? It won't work to sell the same bits to two different people any more, because the freedom of the Internet is still just the same as it always was.
What's changing is the kind of bits they sell, and the software that they use to interpret those bits. That's an attempt to make money of the effort that they put into creating those bits.
Maybe it'll work. More likely not; somebody will always find a way to get something resembling the original form of the bits, and then people won't want the highly individualized version. I just haven't seen a good alternative yet. (And if you want to talk about live performances, reply only if you've ever tried to make a living booking venues for a band. I have. Start with an anecdote about how badly you were treated so I know you're not BSing me)
But if you want to say, "Hey, remember the good old days when I got all my music for free, and only suckers actually paid for it?", well, whatever. More power to you. Just don't expect the guys who make bits for a living to reminisce along with you.
Can he do it by leaving kudos on their myspace page?
Slashdot isn't a commons, at least not in its news articles. They're picked by editors. Those editors fail in a lot of ways (dups, slashvertisements, crappy grammar), but as you observe they keep up a reasonably interesting stream of articles.
The comments are a commons, it's interesting that it's not too bad. One still sees occasional trolls, but several mechanisms weed them out: moderation, ignoring ACs, and Slashdot's filters. Eliminating graphical content helps, too.
I'm still surprised that you don't find groups of trolls banding together to subvert that. It wouldn't be hard for several to make a few intelligent comments, acquire karma, and then burn it all to moderate an ascii-art goatse image to +5. Presumably this doesn't happen because there are too many real moderators pushing such idiocies down; the wealth of mod points is on their side.
Wikipedia, too, is a commons where a combination of benign dictatorship (locking down controversial articles, banning troll users and unregistered users from some articles) and the general good-will to hide the trolls works to make the commons quite liveable.
That doesn't work for most physical commons. Modding down a troll is cheap; cleaning up a polluted river or the air is expensive, and not amenable to many people putting in a little work.
That may have been true with respect to Mutually Assured Destruction, but I think that this is aimed more at modern asymmetrical warfare. These days the US doesn't really fear massive barrages from the Soviet Union or China as much as it fears a single missile from North Korea or Iran with a nuclear warhead. Something which can inflict tens of thousands of casualties.
Response to such an event would be difficult. To prevent it from happening again we'd have to inflict massive, disproportionate damage on the enemy, thus incurring truly epic international hatred. We wouldn't even be 100% certain of being able to identify the enemy.
This throws the balances of MAD out of whack. I can actually believe North Korea would try such a thing and believe they could get away with it. It knows that the first thing China would do is insist that the US take no retaliation, and back it up with real MAD. Shooting down that one missile (or at least making North Korea believe we could) dramatically reduces the risk.
(Note: I'm not an expert in international relations. There are plenty of people who would say that the US is busily making the world a more dangerous place, and has been since before our latest Iraq debacle. I'm just trying to explain the actions in terms of our own perceptions. "Truth", if there is such a thing, may well differ.)
For common items, you don't actually have to snipe. You just bid on the next auction to come due. I suspect that a lot of things that appear to be sniping are really just people bidding on the thing at the top of the list.
The things lower on the list may appear to have lower prices, but they'll be bid up, too, when they hit the top of the list, plus you have to wait if you find out if you won. Just do what everybody else does, and it'll have most of the same effects as concerted sniping.
In general I agree with you, though I'm aware of one instance in which it wasn't just a fun prank. For some time the search "Jews" came up with an anti-Semitic web page as its first hit, as a result of googlebombing by anti-Semitic groups.
Since there are more Jews than rabid anti-Semites in the world (I hope) I'd be tempted to just tell 'em to reverse-googlebomb, making sure you've got plenty of links to more valid pages, but a concerted (if distributed) effort to target one page is still going to put it higher up in the rankings than it really deserves to be.
It has to do with funding. If you're publishing in a journal which doesn't pay you to publish in it, then you're getting your money from elsewhere, which often means government grants. That means that the government has the ability to clamp down on research that it doesn't like.
If the government mandates that you have to publish in something like PubMed, and the paid journals end up going out of business (because they can't compete with "free"), then the government ends up with a lot more power of the purse over what research gets done.
I'm not saying I like his logic. By that logic, the government already has too much to say in most research. But that's what he's talking about.
Apparently they're not very good at that, either.
How typical: you pick what criteria you think are important, define them as "intelligence", and then determine that everybody else is less intelligent than you are.
When it happens at a conference, it's just back-slapping. Scale it up and its racism and then genocide.
Whatever, guys. As long as you stop short of the genocide I really don't care what you think.
Successes can be useful, too, though less useful than failures. In succeeding, it refutes the notion that string theory is untestable, which is a major reason to go work on something else instead.
As you point out, that's aesthetic rather than factual, but the aesthetics of science aren't arbitrary. They've proven themselves to be a pretty good way of finding out more truth, without getting sidetracked. Simplicity is the ultimate dogma of science, the thing that it believes without proof and without the possibility of proof, but it has nonetheless shown itself to be useful.
(Utility, of course, is yet another aesthetic judgment, and a while separate branch of philosophy, namely the "What are we as humans supposed to DO?" branch. I'm a lot less comfortable in working out that branch, and will content myself with the notion that I do science because it amuses me.)
He types that fast because he's mostly filling out a form. Here it is:
http://www.craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
The point is that there aren't any truly novel, effective spam solutions waiting out there. Whatever it is they're suggesting, it's been thought of before, or something like it, and it's already been found wanting.
We don't need to rewrite the objections from scratch, and can just re-tread the old ones by filling out the form. Somebody will fill out that form for EVERY anti-spam solution posted on Slashdot.
I'm curious to know more about this. Having spent some time on Slashdot, I've seen that there are an awful lot of people with an awful lot of time on their hands, looking for nothing more than to spew filth at somebody whose reaction they'll never see. I just bumped into one in a different thread a few minutes ago. It was anonymous and therefore left at 0, but I still ran into it drilling down into a question I found interesting.
Wiki removes things a bit more thoroughly, but I know that the trolls are out there. I imagine that the anti-vandalbots are reluctant to disclose details, but I was not actually aware of their existence.
Clearly it's working. Despite my initial misgivings I now use Wikipedia more than I use google. But I don't really know how it works, and therefore I'm afraid that it's just because of a temporary flagging of interest.
the answer would be nuking all your sheep from orbit and posting a lock and a sign on the commons stating "you must be at least THIS------> Respectable before you can graze your sheep on these commons."
Are you saying that the equivalent happens on wikipedia already? I was under the impression that it still supported anonymous editing.
What's the difference between "communally-managed" and "unmanaged"? That is, what's the difference between Wikipedia being communally-managed and the classic field-of-sheep commons? The latter also has community opprobrium to try to keep your usage fair.
On Wiki you can actually go so far as to remove resource usages you don't find appropriate, but its success so far seems to be insufficient value to the trolls and spammers. If somebody were really intent on "overgrazing" wikipedia, automated troll-bots would have no difficulty spewing crap all over it faster than the community could work to revert it.
I'll be honest, I'm surprised I haven't seen more if it already.
Is the hack really all that ugly? It actually strikes me as rather elegant: rather than looking at something tangential to the page itself, like a META tag, its looking at something fundamental about the nature of the web. The notion that a page donates some of its importance to other pages seems quite elegant to me, and the NOFOLLOW tag is a simple extension of that notion: "Even though I'm linking to this page, for whatever reason I don't consider it important."
Open user-editable web sites like Wiki should probably have a blanket NOFOLLOW, because the page owner isn't really willing to vouch for any of the pages that it links to.
If a bounce refers to a Message-ID that you haven't sent, the bounce can be rejected.
That's clever. I like that.
(Kudos on the polite rejection message. My example was a joke, of course, but I'm glad to hear you're applying some civility. Spam tends to make people very, very upset; you've seen the sort of things people on Slashdot propose as punishments and they really don't seem to be joking.)
What I mean is, I'd like to change the protocol from:
.. time passes ...
Spammer: Here's some email
Server: Thanks!
Server: Hey, this is spam! Let's send it to jfengel!
to
Spammer: Here's some email
Server: Screw you. It's spam. (or "There's no such person here. I reject it now rather than having to call you back using the forged header.")
I suspect that the SMTP protocol already supports that. But in general, SMTP is heavily oriented towards store-and-forward in an intermittently connected, unreliable network, passing mail at midnight when the rates were cheap. Maybe that's still a good mode to support, since not everybody has high-speed lines and the network is still unreliable, but TCP and the backbone have solved the problem without some of the problems that come from store-and-forward.
Mostly the grandparent post is guilty of something missing from the standard spam solution rebuttal checklist: insufficient details.
Yeah, a spam solution is almost certainly going to involve a modification to the SMTP protocol. The devil is in the details.
For my tastes, I'd be content to start with rejecting emails immediately rather than sending out "your email was rejected" messages. The number of valid "rejected" messages has got to be infinitesimal compared to the amount of address-guessing spam in the universe. About 1/3 of the spam I get comes from somebody's server rejecting somebody else's spam and telling me about it to no useful effect.
I know many people who use PayPal for intermittent or even frequent eBay purchases, and not one has mentioned any problems to me.
But we're talking about money here. If they hold your money, it feels like theft, because it is, and that's incredibly infuriating. So a small percentage of users (much less than 1%, I gather) are very vociferous in their objections.
As far as I can tell, go ahead and use it to buy stuff, and you're wildly unlikely to notice anything difficult. If you were to be an eBay power seller, though, it would be different.
A video just has so much room for steganography. You could encode each I-frame using slightly different parameters, and choose your P and B frames differently, yielding very, very different results. A simple bitwise compare won't do you any good.
Even there, I suppose that eventually with enough work you could undo that by decoding and re-encoding each frame to your own specifications. You'll lose some resolution, and it would take a lot of computing power, but I don't think that'll deter people: they're willing to watch stuff off at YouTube resolution (which I find intolerable) and computing power is cheap, especially when in the service of Sticking It To The Man. (If you buy multiple copies and combine them you could probably even get around the loss of resolution, eventually deriving a near-perfect original.)
Still, I'd really like to see this catch on. Given the success of iTunes, it appears that people are willing to pay to download content legally, if the price is right and the DRM restrictions tolerable. Apple's DRM is generally tolerable, but there are those for whom it grates anyway, and this would remove those limitations as well.
Yeah, but it's a fine use of the mediocre whisky, which is a hell of a lot cheaper. Keep 'em both in the house: one for neat, one for mixing.