Our phones were protected against that - they just wouldn't accept the forwarding command. However, a friend once forwarded one phone line to another and that line to the first phone (maybe in the same exchange, I can't recall).
His whole phone exchange went off-line for half an hour... I guess they didn't see that one coming.
That was the same in my case. I still get about the same number of bounces from spammers after adding SPF. The only thing that did solve it was killing all addresses I don't use and adding filters for the most common bounces.
I had a fun problem with a version of Word (for Windows 2.0, I think) many years back. Some friends came by to print a paper for a CS class, and the files they brought were made with the Brazilian Portuguese version of Word.
I had the English version of Word. When I tried to print, I discovered (after a lot of pages, of course) that I had to fix the formatting because some of the formatting was translated... And not even logical stuff like accents - page breaks, footnotes, etc.
He probably did read the details. Some people automatically think that because something is GPL you can't have commercial use, just because then who'd pay you when they could get it for free?
In many situations (you sell a product that uses MySql, for example) it just makes more sense to buy a license instead of abiding by the GPL.
However, there are a few (obvious) situations where you can use GPL software for profit: 1) Server-side use - no need to provide source code. 2) Contractors who are required to give away the source to their client anyway. 3) Companies that sell support to the code. 4) You sell the hardware, not the software.
This is still an image. Instead of sending a JPG or GIF, you are sending an actual bitmap in HTML. In my three-second preview, it just looks like a table with one-pixel cells. Then, you set the color of each cell (pixel) in HTML.
So, this still requires OCR, but there is just an extra obfuscation step in getting the image from HTML to a standard graphics format. The down side is that it is incredibly inefficient. Each pixel takes probably a dozen bytes or more (too lazy for an exact count right now).
Yes, I realize the spammer still have to do an OCR step. But the obfuscation step seems way too simple compared to OCR, which was my point.
BTW - dozen bytes per pixel? You wish! It's 64 bytes per pixel in the current sample!
The HEC is heavy - although you can change the size of the HEC and make it smaller.
Wouldn't pretty much anything larger than a single letter in HEC be larger than a full CAPTCHA?
The HEC should only be on the form page (registration, forum submission etc) so it won't harm the user's experience too much.
My problem with the idea is that if it got popular, it'd probably be in a well-know script, at which point it'd be fairly easy to crack (even with random HTML spread around, it's a whole lot easier to analyze the text into a visible captch than doing OCR). So we'd keep the problem of the spammers, and add a new problem of large HECs.
I created the HEC because I used to get about 20 spam posts a day on my phpBB forums and other forms on my sites. I also read on many boards that this is a real problem. Since I started using HECs the spam amount went to 0.
Were you using well known phpBB CAPTCHAs? Comparing a brand new system to a popular system where serious time was spent on developing bots is unfair.
Unless your forums are particularly targeted in a huge scale (i.e.: 20 spam posts per day would be nothing) - ANYTHING at all you added that wasn't know to the bots would cut the amount of spams to 0.
It's a clever concept... But I'm afraid it won't scale all that well.
While I have to agree with your "everything is crackable", doesn't HECs use a whole lot more of bandwidth (moving the HEC, even compressed) and/or processing on both sides to decompress a gzipped stream than regular CAPTCHAs?
How poorly are the CAPTCHAs doing these days against bots, anyway? I see a few that are probably easy to OCR, but there are quite a few where I have to make a effort to read them myself...
Seems unfair that the parent has been modded down - the comment is very relevant in that case. While the page recommends using other methods, most other methods are going to be a lot easier to crack than doing good OCR on complex CAPTCHAs.
Does that surprise anyone? I love Delphi, I've used it since the beta of version 1 (without upgrading from Delphi 5 till Delphi 2006 though) - but the moment they announced Kylix it seemed obvious to me that it was a bad idea and doomed to fail...
The high price (for the "usable" version) when they released didn't help. A pricy tool for developers used to free tools, with its greatest strength being the GUI system and components on a system most used server-side...
I understand it was a bit buggy, too, though that is hearsay - I never used it.
I've also heard quite a few complaints from Delphi component developers, such as Developer Express. Some of them spent quite a bit making components for Kylix and felt that Borland let them down when they lost interest.
No offense but you clearly didn't finish it if you are trying to make this argument and thus you should not comment at all.
Actually, I did finish it. I just didn't want to see any more of the story (or the game) after finishing it...
That is just like saying that the many TV pilots or episodes that ended on an abrupt point are going to make people reject the concept of TV series.
Well, they didn't. And I really doubt that will be the case here.
If the gamers don't WANT to see the next episode, well, clearly it's a good thing that they didn't spend the price of a whole game on it in the first place.
Of course, anyone who actually liked it is not going to be happy about it, but I think it's much better if more money isn't spent on poorly done flops, both by developers and gamers.
That's silly. If you didn't get your money's worth in the first episode, that is the game's problem.
How many movies were clearly made to be continued, but didn't? How many books? If the authors can't make a satisfying conclusion for an episode alone, that is their problem.
I played Sin Episode 1 and had no intention of getting the next episode - because it was pretty weak and had a lot of problems that should have been fixed before release.
At the same time, I got Half-Life Episode 1. Not only I'm going to buy the next one, but I'm waiting eagerly for it...
"Episodic" gaming doesn't really mean a lot - just that they want to try to make cheaper, smaller games and sell more of them instead of fitting the same price mold as everyone. There will be good games and bad games, just like the regular type.
I played the whole thing, and while I don't think it was *that* bad, it certainly wasn't good.
That has nothing to do with being episodic though, I got Half-life 2 Episode 1 too and it was great, I can hardly wait for the next episode of it. It was perfectly good value for my money.
I don't really use SmarterStats, although it is included on one of my sites, so I can't really say if it's any good or not.
I do use SmarterMail, and while the regular mail filters are neat, their spam filters are horrible! At least 10x more spam gets through than the default CPanel SpamAssassin (which is not so great compared to a nicely tuned one).
I didn't try this in the current version, but in a previous version, if I tried to erase a hundred messages through their web interface, the server would stop responding for several minutes...
Backlight: Sure, it shortens the battery life, but being able to read in bed without the light on is great. Or in any other environment where the light levels are low enough to cause your mother to worry about you going blind!
I also read mostly on a Palm (E2), about two books a week or more. I was somewhat disappointed at the fact that you could not turn the backlight off. The minimum setting is still too bright. I'd rather have the extra battery time.
Size - I'd like a much larger display. I wouldn't mind an A5 form size.
Palmtop vs Ebook reader- I'd much rather prefer it if Sony did their e-reader as a Palm. They did a ton of them, why not one more? I imagine it'd cut into their profits since Palm Reader and Mobipocket users could just buy at their regular places. Of course, the e-ink display would be awful for most Palm apps.
Good PDF support - I don't know about you, but so far I think PDF support on the Palm is awful. I tried a couple of apps, including Acrobat, and the conversion isn't great and the delay on new pages (or specially when going back a page) is terrible, sometimes several seconds. Good PDF support would be great.
On my first day on my first real job as a programmer, I was handed an important CD-R with customer data, and was supposed to put the data in a database. I was actually warned to be careful with the disc, as it was the only copy (shipped from the US to Brazil, when CD-Rs were still fairly expensive).
Ok. So I insert the disc, but the drive is struggling to read it. I eject the disc... and the disc is still spinning in the tray as it opens, and then ENTERS THE DRIVE THROUGH THE TRAY OPENING... while the tray is still open.
So 15 minutes into my first day at the job, I had to call my boss because the computer had just eaten the CD.
My boss actually got the disc out of the drive by taking the drive off the computer and carefuly closing the tray of the upside-down drive, and the disc was fine. The drive failed completely after a couple of months.
The drive never did anything similar before failing, probably because I was *very* careful to only eject discs after they stopped spinning:-)
Learn the difference between "Gpay is useless" and "Gpay is useless to me". I would pay for your English lessons, if I could use Gpay to transfer funds from Greece.
Actually, the funny dialogue never implied you said that. It just tried to say through hyperbole that Google isn't likely to care if minor merchants in other countries can't use their service because they can't pay for stuff directly.
And if you look carefully at their site (VERY carefully - it's not that easy to find), you might note that don't even accept merchants from outside the US now.
Anyway, I doubt they will go the Paypal way - behaving like a bank - any time soon. It's just a Google CC service, which happens to keep the user CC numbers.
The current cost of the iraq war [nationalpriorities.org] is sitting around $270 x 10^9. That is around a $1000 bill for each citizen or about $22,500 per tax payer! I think before the start of any war it should be a law that the cost should be projected and be paid by the current generation in a reasonable time span.
While I agree with you on principle, what will happen is just what the other reply said - all wars will just be presumed to be trivial, fast and cheap, both on purpose to gain popular support and through the cluelessness of the country's leaders.
I've only used mine (Trendnet) with a Palm Tungsten E2, but in Windows XP SP2 I just plugged the dongle in and everything worked fine.
True, the manual that came with it had a pretty complex procedure, but I just ignored it - one of the sites I checked it out in before buying mentioned that it worked fine after just plugging it in.
That may be, but theres nothing stopping a would-be identity thief from raiding your mailbox in the morning before you can get to it.
Just wondering, I saw this mentioned in several posts - doesn't anyone lock their mailbox?
That is quite common in Brazil... In most houses around here, either the mailbox has a flap that opens inside the gate (and sometimes is also locked), or it's an outside model, which is nailed/fixed to the sidewalk, has a flap in front (not large enough for hands to fit, and usually pretty deep) and has a locked door in the back.
Of course, that still can be beat with a little effort, but is fairly different from just going through the mail.
I've bought a lot of books on Fictionwise (a couple of hundred), and just wanted to note that if you get books in (Palm's) eReader format, you can use it on any device that support it - PCs, Macs, PocketPC and Palms. You just need to enter your name and the credit card you used to buy it.
Adobe's and MS's DRM is much worse, and have real activation schemes with device limits.
So if it's comparing if hashes of keywords match to hash sets, you can't know what it'd match to until it does, even if you have the code (unless you run all possible keyword sets through it, which could be quite a large search space).
Slashdot Mirror
I think http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/accessories/911 6/ would be much more impressive, if it could be set as a reset button.
I'd be a bit worried about being arrested as a terrorist, if I had one of those in a office, though...
Our phones were protected against that - they just wouldn't accept the forwarding command. However, a friend once forwarded one phone line to another and that line to the first phone (maybe in the same exchange, I can't recall).
His whole phone exchange went off-line for half an hour... I guess they didn't see that one coming.
Yeah, me too. I don't recall ever spending anything on Apple gear, yet I feel that I'm as entitled to criticize them as anyone...
Seriously, when I saw the first news release I was almost drooling. I mentioned the specs to a couple of friends, with the same results.
Then I saw every single annoying limitation... (specially no third-party software) Now I'm basically not interested at all.
Maybe by the second or third generation...
That was the same in my case. I still get about the same number of bounces from spammers after adding SPF.
The only thing that did solve it was killing all addresses I don't use and adding filters for the most common bounces.
I had a fun problem with a version of Word (for Windows 2.0, I think) many years back. Some friends came by to print a paper for a CS class, and the files they brought were made with the Brazilian Portuguese version of Word.
I had the English version of Word. When I tried to print, I discovered (after a lot of pages, of course) that I had to fix the formatting because some of the formatting was translated... And not even logical stuff like accents - page breaks, footnotes, etc.
He probably did read the details. Some people automatically think that because something is GPL you can't have commercial use, just because then who'd pay you when they could get it for free?
In many situations (you sell a product that uses MySql, for example) it just makes more sense to buy a license instead of abiding by the GPL.
However, there are a few (obvious) situations where you can use GPL software for profit:
1) Server-side use - no need to provide source code.
2) Contractors who are required to give away the source to their client anyway.
3) Companies that sell support to the code.
4) You sell the hardware, not the software.
Yes, I realize the spammer still have to do an OCR step. But the obfuscation step seems way too simple compared to OCR, which was my point.
BTW - dozen bytes per pixel? You wish! It's 64 bytes per pixel in the current sample!
Wouldn't pretty much anything larger than a single letter in HEC be larger than a full CAPTCHA?
My problem with the idea is that if it got popular, it'd probably be in a well-know script, at which point it'd be fairly easy to crack (even with random HTML spread around, it's a whole lot easier to analyze the text into a visible captch than doing OCR). So we'd keep the problem of the spammers, and add a new problem of large HECs.
Were you using well known phpBB CAPTCHAs? Comparing a brand new system to a popular system where serious time was spent on developing bots is unfair.
Unless your forums are particularly targeted in a huge scale (i.e.: 20 spam posts per day would be nothing) - ANYTHING at all you added that wasn't know to the bots would cut the amount of spams to 0.
It's a clever concept... But I'm afraid it won't scale all that well.
While I have to agree with your "everything is crackable", doesn't HECs use a whole lot more of bandwidth (moving the HEC, even compressed) and/or processing on both sides to decompress a gzipped stream than regular CAPTCHAs?
How poorly are the CAPTCHAs doing these days against bots, anyway? I see a few that are probably easy to OCR, but there are quite a few where I have to make a effort to read them myself...
Seems unfair that the parent has been modded down - the comment is very relevant in that case. While the page recommends using other methods, most other methods are going to be a lot easier to crack than doing good OCR on complex CAPTCHAs.
Does that surprise anyone? I love Delphi, I've used it since the beta of version 1 (without upgrading from Delphi 5 till Delphi 2006 though) - but the moment they announced Kylix it seemed obvious to me that it was a bad idea and doomed to fail...
The high price (for the "usable" version) when they released didn't help. A pricy tool for developers used to free tools, with its greatest strength being the GUI system and components on a system most used server-side...
I understand it was a bit buggy, too, though that is hearsay - I never used it.
I've also heard quite a few complaints from Delphi component developers, such as Developer Express. Some of them spent quite a bit making components for Kylix and felt that Borland let them down when they lost interest.
Actually, I did finish it. I just didn't want to see any more of the story (or the game) after finishing it...
That is just like saying that the many TV pilots or episodes that ended on an abrupt point are going to make people reject the concept of TV series.
Well, they didn't. And I really doubt that will be the case here.
If the gamers don't WANT to see the next episode, well, clearly it's a good thing that they didn't spend the price of a whole game on it in the first place.
Of course, anyone who actually liked it is not going to be happy about it, but I think it's much better if more money isn't spent on poorly done flops, both by developers and gamers.
That's silly. If you didn't get your money's worth in the first episode, that is the game's problem.
How many movies were clearly made to be continued, but didn't? How many books? If the authors can't make a satisfying conclusion for an episode alone, that is their problem.
I played Sin Episode 1 and had no intention of getting the next episode - because it was pretty weak and had a lot of problems that should have been fixed before release.
At the same time, I got Half-Life Episode 1. Not only I'm going to buy the next one, but I'm waiting eagerly for it...
"Episodic" gaming doesn't really mean a lot - just that they want to try to make cheaper, smaller games and sell more of them instead of fitting the same price mold as everyone. There will be good games and bad games, just like the regular type.
I played the whole thing, and while I don't think it was *that* bad, it certainly wasn't good.
That has nothing to do with being episodic though, I got Half-life 2 Episode 1 too and it was great, I can hardly wait for the next episode of it. It was perfectly good value for my money.
I don't really use SmarterStats, although it is included on one of my sites, so I can't really say if it's any good or not.
I do use SmarterMail, and while the regular mail filters are neat, their spam filters are horrible! At least 10x more spam gets through than the default CPanel SpamAssassin (which is not so great compared to a nicely tuned one).
I didn't try this in the current version, but in a previous version, if I tried to erase a hundred messages through their web interface, the server would stop responding for several minutes...
I used Plucker for quite a while with CHMs (using HTMLHelp's decompiler first) and regular pages but I didn't know that - thanks.
However, while Plucker worked great on my Tungsten E, in my Tungsten E2 it kept locking up and requiring resets...
I will try it again to see if the problem persists.
I also read mostly on a Palm (E2), about two books a week or more. I was somewhat disappointed at the fact that you could not turn the backlight off. The minimum setting is still too bright. I'd rather have the extra battery time.
Size - I'd like a much larger display. I wouldn't mind an A5 form size.
Palmtop vs Ebook reader- I'd much rather prefer it if Sony did their e-reader as a Palm. They did a ton of them, why not one more? I imagine it'd cut into their profits since Palm Reader and Mobipocket users could just buy at their regular places. Of course, the e-ink display would be awful for most Palm apps.
Good PDF support - I don't know about you, but so far I think PDF support on the Palm is awful. I tried a couple of apps, including Acrobat, and the conversion isn't great and the delay on new pages (or specially when going back a page) is terrible, sometimes several seconds. Good PDF support would be great.
Just a slight detail - the book he mentioned isn't science fiction, it's just science. Asimov did a lot of non-fiction, too.
On my first day on my first real job as a programmer, I was handed an important CD-R with customer data, and was supposed to put the data in a database. I was actually warned to be careful with the disc, as it was the only copy (shipped from the US to Brazil, when CD-Rs were still fairly expensive).
:-)
Ok. So I insert the disc, but the drive is struggling to read it. I eject the disc... and the disc is still spinning in the tray as it opens, and then ENTERS THE DRIVE THROUGH THE TRAY OPENING... while the tray is still open.
So 15 minutes into my first day at the job, I had to call my boss because the computer had just eaten the CD.
My boss actually got the disc out of the drive by taking the drive off the computer and carefuly closing the tray of the upside-down drive, and the disc was fine. The drive failed completely after a couple of months.
The drive never did anything similar before failing, probably because I was *very* careful to only eject discs after they stopped spinning
Actually, the funny dialogue never implied you said that. It just tried to say through hyperbole that Google isn't likely to care if minor merchants in other countries can't use their service because they can't pay for stuff directly.
And if you look carefully at their site (VERY carefully - it's not that easy to find), you might note that don't even accept merchants from outside the US now.
Anyway, I doubt they will go the Paypal way - behaving like a bank - any time soon. It's just a Google CC service, which happens to keep the user CC numbers.
While I agree with you on principle, what will happen is just what the other reply said - all wars will just be presumed to be trivial, fast and cheap, both on purpose to gain popular support and through the cluelessness of the country's leaders.
I've only used mine (Trendnet) with a Palm Tungsten E2, but in Windows XP SP2 I just plugged the dongle in and everything worked fine.
True, the manual that came with it had a pretty complex procedure, but I just ignored it - one of the sites I checked it out in before buying mentioned that it worked fine after just plugging it in.
Just wondering, I saw this mentioned in several posts - doesn't anyone lock their mailbox?
That is quite common in Brazil... In most houses around here, either the mailbox has a flap that opens inside the gate (and sometimes is also locked), or it's an outside model, which is nailed/fixed to the sidewalk, has a flap in front (not large enough for hands to fit, and usually pretty deep) and has a locked door in the back.
Of course, that still can be beat with a little effort, but is fairly different from just going through the mail.
I've bought a lot of books on Fictionwise (a couple of hundred), and just wanted to note that if you get books in (Palm's) eReader format, you can use it on any device that support it - PCs, Macs, PocketPC and Palms. You just need to enter your name and the credit card you used to buy it.
Adobe's and MS's DRM is much worse, and have real activation schemes with device limits.
As I mentioned in another post http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=175056&cid= 14558431, I imagine it's something like Clueless Agents.
So if it's comparing if hashes of keywords match to hash sets, you can't know what it'd match to until it does, even if you have the code (unless you run all possible keyword sets through it, which could be quite a large search space).