Terrorists, sex offenders, and liberals as "big predators"... Interesting way to look at it. The masses certainly do react to them like sheep (ie. prey animals).
Tho it never occurred to me to count liberals as "predators"; in my biology text, they're covered in the chapter on "parasites";)
Actually, it's not entirely apples and oranges. Watch an unusually-fearful kid on the playground -- ALL the other kids pick on him. A dog pack will torment and eventually kill an abnormally-fearful member. Same with chickens (one that panics when pecked will eventually get ganged up on, killed, and eaten by the other chickens. Contrary to popular belief, chickens are more predatory than not; their natural diet includes mice, snakes, and anything else they can catch.)
As to evolutionary survival value -- if you're a monkey living in a panther-infested jungle, then the whole troupe fleeing in panic may save the majority, but one monkey still gets caught and eaten by the hungry cat (likely the one that was most panicked and therefore thought the least about its escape route). If the troupe holds its ground (staying rationally out of reach; that is, in control of their fear) and throws rocks at the cat's head, chances are it'll look for an easier meal elsewhere.
As someone once pointed out, intelligence gets selected for by the dumb (here defined as panic-prone) individuals being eaten out of the gene pool.
Maybe we need a new big predator:)
Re:Jail The Examiner - Howard Britton
on
JPEG Patent Challenged
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Or better yet, make the patent examiner financially liable for wrongfully issued patents. If it's overturned, the restitution costs and penalties come out of his paycheck. That would likely be a stronger threat than jailtime, and would also help reimburse those injured by bad patents.
This awareness, thus ability to react instantly yet rationally, is the diametric opposite of the unreasoning fear that mice and other prey animals live with all the time. See above where I talk about this as predator behaviour vs prey behaviour.
Ask yourself which type gets eaten more often, and therefore whether fear or rationality has better survival value:)
I have to wonder if in fact it normalized his fear reaction, rather than removing it... or if maybe it was just a turning point in the kid's development that was attributed to a "vaccine reaction" but in fact was no such thing. ("Vaccine reaction" has become blamed for every sort of problem, but in my observation is at most a trigger for an existing problem, but not itself the cause.)
See my post above where I mutter about how normal predators (that's us humans) have rational caution based on experience, rather than the unreasoning "panic over every little thing" of prey animals.
Once upon a time when I was a kid, I caught a garter snake, and kept it in an egg carton under the bed. Eventually it got loose, and slithered down the hall... my mom saw it and literally JUMPED onto a chair, screaming fit to raise the dead. It was exactly the same atavistic-fear reaction that monkeys do when they see a snake.
If you search for the original M$ antispyware article here on/., your requested links are in the comments somewhere. Sorry, I didn't save the info (at least not anywhere I can find it again:)
Indeed -- it sounds to me like what they've really discovered is the fundamental difference between predators and prey.
Predators don't panic at every little oddity in their environment. They are much more inclined to explore new stuff than run from it, and to stop and think rather than run away screaming. They learn fear of bad things from experience, rather than just being generally afraid of everything. They can relax, because they learn that not everything in their environment is a threat.
Conversely, prey animals can't cope with change or oddness, and tend to flee in a panic and hide in the shadows even when the "threat" is imaginary. They have difficulty learning what *really* is or isn't a threat, because they're unable to stop and examine the situation; indeed, they tend to react more strongly on repeat exposure to a fear stimulus, because now it's a fear-trigger point rather than becoming familiar. They can't relax, because omighod the bogeyman might get us at any moment. Generally not a fun existence.
Occurs to me that panic disorder in humans is fundamentally prey-animal behaviour. Inherited panic disorder also commonly occurs in other carnivorous and omnivorous species (cats and dogs). "Abnormal" boldness in prey species is much more rare, tho has been to some degree selected for in domestic livestock, to make them steady enough for humans to deal with. (Who wants to ride a horse that takes off bucking every time it thinks it hears an odd noise??)
You have to wonder about a "free keylogger" that claims to be the best in the business... what is *it* bundled with??? [reads linked page] Sounds like it's actually a specialized rootkit.
Well, if Sony did nothing else for the world, they did get the AV companies in an uproar about detecting rootkits, which hadn't previously been in their purview.
Actually, when some independent outfit (I forget who, but it was reported here on/.) tested the various anti-spyware/adware apps, M$'s product came out #1, with the highest percentage of finds and kills. This isn't really so surprising when you remember that it is just the old Giant antispyware, an enterprise-class product, which M$ bought and apparently changed very little prior to releasing under their own name. Not that relying on a single solution is wise, but if you've got to pick just one (as may well be the case with an average user, who needs one that -- like M$'s -- will run in the background and not make them have to deal with it) M$'s antispyware is probably the best choice at the moment.
And using Firefox and Thunderbird helps stop popups and some of the more obvious vulnerability routes (like that invention of the devil, ActiveX) but they won't save you if a keylogger does find its way aboard via some other route. Nor will a firewall stop a keylogger from phoning home, since to get around firewalls, they send their data via ordinary email in the background... and who makes their firewall stop and query their email client each and every time it sends or receives anything??**
And imagine a keylogger that uses, say, the Sony rootkit to stealth itself... people who believe themselves safe because they did all the recommended updates and run all the "safe" apps may still encounter something this devious (Sony doubtless isn't alone, they just got caught!) and this easily exploited, that even current protection measures don't yet stop.
** Occurs to me that a good feature for an email client is a "check destination" function where if the recipient wasn't entered by some essentially manual route (address book, hit reply, type into TO field) it stops and asks if you really want to send mail to Unknown Recipient X.
Modernizing... ever see Shakespeare in the Parks? They do things like turn... um, I think it was The Merchant of Venice, into a 1930s Chicago ganster epic. It was both accessable and absolutely hilarious, without sacrificing the soul of the play (layers of meanings, etc.)
Re chat clients -- actually, that's a good idea. Don't include a user-visible spellchecker (that makes it too easy to duck out of doing the real work), but do make it refuse to send the message until all words are spelled correctly (could be done using a hidden spellchecker with some grammar checking). This would be a good teaching tool for computer-addicted kids -- if the message won't go, they'd have to scrutinize it until they found the error, correct it, then try again, rinse and repeat until it's all correct.
Damn, that's a great idea. Any programmers in the audience?
Exactly. You can't learn to think analytically without practice; reading Shakespeare involves practice on complex arrays of words, where the results can be explained by more than one equation.:)
Exactly so... Remember when some group tried to institute a requirement that schools teach "ebonics"?? Right, let's teach all kids to sound like ignorant street punks. That'll serve 'em well when they reach the job market. Fortunately, this effort wasn't adopted by the schools at large.
But when something like this does get into the educational mainstream, the result is disastrous. I was in one of the first classes experimented upon by the "whole word recognition" method of reading, and even in the 5th grade, we kids could tell we were being shortchanged. The other classes were learning words like psychedelic and kaleidoscope; we were being shown flashcards with words we'd known since the first grade, like dog and cat. (No, I'm not kidding. We really were.) Fortunately we'd already learned to read, with a good grounding in phonics, and it did us no real harm, but what about kids who'd never had that advantage?
Fast-forward a generation, and suddenly everyone reads by that method.... which is to say, poorly.
I have several clients who are severely dyslexic, and while watching them struggle to read and write, it occurred to me that "whole word recognition" is exactly how these people read: Recognise a few letters and make a wild-assed guess at the balance.
Clearly, "whole word recognition" is not good educational technique; it's trying to teach normal kids to read the same way dyslexics do. Yep, instead of educating everyone to the best of their ability, let's educate to the lowest common denominator. Some kid has a learning disability? let's disable all the kids the same way!
Hear freakin' hear! Education is supposed to be, well, educational. Not fun, nor 1337, nor a sop to your ego^H^H^H self-esteem. A good education stuffs your brain full of the needful tools (readin', writin, 'rithmetic), shows you how to use them (spelling, grammar, algebra), then presents new problems that you must solve using these tools (Kafka, Plato, how many apples does it take to fill the bath?)
In my observation, the problem is educators who are coming from the "make learning fun and easy" generation, where whole-word recognition and other atrocities were taught (rather than the phonics that teaches a kid how to demystify ANY word). They haven't a clue how to get kids to learn, so they are essentially *begging* for the kids' attention; this 1337-lit is yet another downgrade.
And it obviously doesn't work; if it did, today's kids wouldn't be so poorly-educated compared to that elder generation from back when by damn you learned like it or not, and you came out of school equipped to deal with further study in Shakespeare and Kant and quantum mechanics, and a far better understanding of life and the world at large.
I know the telecoms used to be able to distinguish modem traffic from voice traffic, as some required that you have a second line if you wished to use a modem at all (modem traffic wasn't allowed on your voice line). This went away in the early 1990s, probably due to expanding modem use and a plethora of consumer complaints (plus the problem of enforcement). Now that everyone and their brother uses a modem, the telecoms would have have hell's own time enforcing such a policy, unless backed by a gov't mandate.
Occurs to me that faxes are just a glorified specialized modem, and it might be possible to encode messages in the fax data -- crap, doesn't fax actually send stuff as a scan converted to a TIFF? so we're back to stenography, one way or another. And that's another point of suspicion: no non-busines entity needs to send that many faxes!
As to how to make it secure if outside access is allowed -- the only way stenography wouldn't stand out like a sore thumb is if the BBS accepted NO data except picture files... but the Bad Guys aren't stupid, and they'd soon regard that as a redflag.
So we're back to dialup, with a trusted sysop and only trusted users allowed access (or if a user is untrusted, kept isolated as can be done with Wildcat).
My brain hurts. I think my tinfoil hat is too tight.:)
Urchin *itself* doesn't require javascript, nor any specific code on your pages; Earthlink uses it to generate stats on users' "personal webspace", but in that case it presumably has access to the webserver's logs.
But how to run stats on a remote host? Obviously, it has to have some way for the remote host to speak to the counter, without needing to rely on webserver-specific features; hence the javascript, to make the browser do that job. (Of course, this won't tell you anything about visitors who have js disabled, like myself.)
But it did occur to me that this also gives Google a whopping load of data that can be used toward developing a better pagerank system, that would favour real sites, and denigrate link farms and other useless crap. If this serves to elevate my sites in Google results, it's worthwhile.
And if there's any page you don't want thusly indexed -- just don't add the js snippet, and they'll be invisible to Urchin.
And my domain is actually a godaddy redirect to a non-root page on my Earthlink webspace. There's nothing in the FAQ that covers this situation. I did make a support request via google's form, we'll see if they have a useful answer or not:)
Slashdot Mirror
Terrorists, sex offenders, and liberals as "big predators"... Interesting way to look at it. The masses certainly do react to them like sheep (ie. prey animals).
;)
Tho it never occurred to me to count liberals as "predators"; in my biology text, they're covered in the chapter on "parasites"
Actually, it's not entirely apples and oranges. Watch an unusually-fearful kid on the playground -- ALL the other kids pick on him. A dog pack will torment and eventually kill an abnormally-fearful member. Same with chickens (one that panics when pecked will eventually get ganged up on, killed, and eaten by the other chickens. Contrary to popular belief, chickens are more predatory than not; their natural diet includes mice, snakes, and anything else they can catch.)
:)
As to evolutionary survival value -- if you're a monkey living in a panther-infested jungle, then the whole troupe fleeing in panic may save the majority, but one monkey still gets caught and eaten by the hungry cat (likely the one that was most panicked and therefore thought the least about its escape route). If the troupe holds its ground (staying rationally out of reach; that is, in control of their fear) and throws rocks at the cat's head, chances are it'll look for an easier meal elsewhere.
As someone once pointed out, intelligence gets selected for by the dumb (here defined as panic-prone) individuals being eaten out of the gene pool.
Maybe we need a new big predator
Or better yet, make the patent examiner financially liable for wrongfully issued patents. If it's overturned, the restitution costs and penalties come out of his paycheck. That would likely be a stronger threat than jailtime, and would also help reimburse those injured by bad patents.
This awareness, thus ability to react instantly yet rationally, is the diametric opposite of the unreasoning fear that mice and other prey animals live with all the time. See above where I talk about this as predator behaviour vs prey behaviour.
:)
Ask yourself which type gets eaten more often, and therefore whether fear or rationality has better survival value
I have to wonder if in fact it normalized his fear reaction, rather than removing it... or if maybe it was just a turning point in the kid's development that was attributed to a "vaccine reaction" but in fact was no such thing. ("Vaccine reaction" has become blamed for every sort of problem, but in my observation is at most a trigger for an existing problem, but not itself the cause.)
See my post above where I mutter about how normal predators (that's us humans) have rational caution based on experience, rather than the unreasoning "panic over every little thing" of prey animals.
Once upon a time when I was a kid, I caught a garter snake, and kept it in an egg carton under the bed. Eventually it got loose, and slithered down the hall... my mom saw it and literally JUMPED onto a chair, screaming fit to raise the dead. It was exactly the same atavistic-fear reaction that monkeys do when they see a snake.
:)
And here you thought you'd posted a joke
If you search for the original M$ antispyware article here on /., your requested links are in the comments somewhere. Sorry, I didn't save the info (at least not anywhere I can find it again :)
Good points. Yeah, you'd think a well-designed keylogger would account for obvious checks by the host OS, including ps, mem, etc.
Now I'm wondering... are there attacks that can install on *NIX at a point before the system reaches any login point at all?
Thank you! answered my question entirely. In fact, thanks for the link -- lots of good stuff on that site.
Indeed -- it sounds to me like what they've really discovered is the fundamental difference between predators and prey.
Predators don't panic at every little oddity in their environment. They are much more inclined to explore new stuff than run from it, and to stop and think rather than run away screaming. They learn fear of bad things from experience, rather than just being generally afraid of everything. They can relax, because they learn that not everything in their environment is a threat.
Conversely, prey animals can't cope with change or oddness, and tend to flee in a panic and hide in the shadows even when the "threat" is imaginary. They have difficulty learning what *really* is or isn't a threat, because they're unable to stop and examine the situation; indeed, they tend to react more strongly on repeat exposure to a fear stimulus, because now it's a fear-trigger point rather than becoming familiar. They can't relax, because omighod the bogeyman might get us at any moment. Generally not a fun existence.
Occurs to me that panic disorder in humans is fundamentally prey-animal behaviour. Inherited panic disorder also commonly occurs in other carnivorous and omnivorous species (cats and dogs). "Abnormal" boldness in prey species is much more rare, tho has been to some degree selected for in domestic livestock, to make them steady enough for humans to deal with. (Who wants to ride a horse that takes off bucking every time it thinks it hears an odd noise??)
For the *NIX-impaired, what's ps?
And... if you have to log in to run it, doesn't any resident keylogger already have the single most important password?
You have to wonder about a "free keylogger" that claims to be the best in the business... what is *it* bundled with??? [reads linked page] Sounds like it's actually a specialized rootkit.
Well, if Sony did nothing else for the world, they did get the AV companies in an uproar about detecting rootkits, which hadn't previously been in their purview.
Actually, when some independent outfit (I forget who, but it was reported here on /.) tested the various anti-spyware/adware apps, M$'s product came out #1, with the highest percentage of finds and kills. This isn't really so surprising when you remember that it is just the old Giant antispyware, an enterprise-class product, which M$ bought and apparently changed very little prior to releasing under their own name. Not that relying on a single solution is wise, but if you've got to pick just one (as may well be the case with an average user, who needs one that -- like M$'s -- will run in the background and not make them have to deal with it) M$'s antispyware is probably the best choice at the moment.
... and who makes their firewall stop and query their email client each and every time it sends or receives anything??**
And using Firefox and Thunderbird helps stop popups and some of the more obvious vulnerability routes (like that invention of the devil, ActiveX) but they won't save you if a keylogger does find its way aboard via some other route. Nor will a firewall stop a keylogger from phoning home, since to get around firewalls, they send their data via ordinary email in the background
And imagine a keylogger that uses, say, the Sony rootkit to stealth itself... people who believe themselves safe because they did all the recommended updates and run all the "safe" apps may still encounter something this devious (Sony doubtless isn't alone, they just got caught!) and this easily exploited, that even current protection measures don't yet stop.
** Occurs to me that a good feature for an email client is a "check destination" function where if the recipient wasn't entered by some essentially manual route (address book, hit reply, type into TO field) it stops and asks if you really want to send mail to Unknown Recipient X.
Modernizing... ever see Shakespeare in the Parks? They do things like turn ... um, I think it was The Merchant of Venice, into a 1930s Chicago ganster epic. It was both accessable and absolutely hilarious, without sacrificing the soul of the play (layers of meanings, etc.)
Neigh, verily :)
Re chat clients -- actually, that's a good idea. Don't include a user-visible spellchecker (that makes it too easy to duck out of doing the real work), but do make it refuse to send the message until all words are spelled correctly (could be done using a hidden spellchecker with some grammar checking). This would be a good teaching tool for computer-addicted kids -- if the message won't go, they'd have to scrutinize it until they found the error, correct it, then try again, rinse and repeat until it's all correct.
Damn, that's a great idea. Any programmers in the audience?
"Like video games and violence, I don't think cel-speak causes illiteracy. I think the illiterate are drawn to it."
Exactly my observation. People are drawn to what's a comfortable peer group for themselves, whatever that may be.
Because some kid who fails a test might, like, FEEL BAD if they don't pass along with their age-peers, and get, like, left behind or something.
And we can't have that, in this age of pseudo-egalitarianism!
Erm... why am I suddenly thinking of the French Revolution??
Exactly. You can't learn to think analytically without practice; reading Shakespeare involves practice on complex arrays of words, where the results can be explained by more than one equation. :)
Exactly so... Remember when some group tried to institute a requirement that schools teach "ebonics"?? Right, let's teach all kids to sound like ignorant street punks. That'll serve 'em well when they reach the job market. Fortunately, this effort wasn't adopted by the schools at large.
.... which is to say, poorly.
:)
But when something like this does get into the educational mainstream, the result is disastrous. I was in one of the first classes experimented upon by the "whole word recognition" method of reading, and even in the 5th grade, we kids could tell we were being shortchanged. The other classes were learning words like psychedelic and kaleidoscope; we were being shown flashcards with words we'd known since the first grade, like dog and cat. (No, I'm not kidding. We really were.) Fortunately we'd already learned to read, with a good grounding in phonics, and it did us no real harm, but what about kids who'd never had that advantage?
Fast-forward a generation, and suddenly everyone reads by that method
I have several clients who are severely dyslexic, and while watching them struggle to read and write, it occurred to me that "whole word recognition" is exactly how these people read: Recognise a few letters and make a wild-assed guess at the balance.
Clearly, "whole word recognition" is not good educational technique; it's trying to teach normal kids to read the same way dyslexics do. Yep, instead of educating everyone to the best of their ability, let's educate to the lowest common denominator. Some kid has a learning disability? let's disable all the kids the same way!
IOW, what you said, if not nearly as succinct
Hear freakin' hear! Education is supposed to be, well, educational. Not fun, nor 1337, nor a sop to your ego^H^H^H self-esteem. A good education stuffs your brain full of the needful tools (readin', writin, 'rithmetic), shows you how to use them (spelling, grammar, algebra), then presents new problems that you must solve using these tools (Kafka, Plato, how many apples does it take to fill the bath?)
In my observation, the problem is educators who are coming from the "make learning fun and easy" generation, where whole-word recognition and other atrocities were taught (rather than the phonics that teaches a kid how to demystify ANY word). They haven't a clue how to get kids to learn, so they are essentially *begging* for the kids' attention; this 1337-lit is yet another downgrade.
And it obviously doesn't work; if it did, today's kids wouldn't be so poorly-educated compared to that elder generation from back when by damn you learned like it or not, and you came out of school equipped to deal with further study in Shakespeare and Kant and quantum mechanics, and a far better understanding of life and the world at large.
PS. I never used Cliff notes. Hated 'em!
Sounds like Tom Lehrer on bad drugs...
RIAA exec: Your list is too short. Where is the step for "Profit!" ??
I know the telecoms used to be able to distinguish modem traffic from voice traffic, as some required that you have a second line if you wished to use a modem at all (modem traffic wasn't allowed on your voice line). This went away in the early 1990s, probably due to expanding modem use and a plethora of consumer complaints (plus the problem of enforcement). Now that everyone and their brother uses a modem, the telecoms would have have hell's own time enforcing such a policy, unless backed by a gov't mandate.
... but the Bad Guys aren't stupid, and they'd soon regard that as a redflag.
:)
Occurs to me that faxes are just a glorified specialized modem, and it might be possible to encode messages in the fax data -- crap, doesn't fax actually send stuff as a scan converted to a TIFF? so we're back to stenography, one way or another. And that's another point of suspicion: no non-busines entity needs to send that many faxes!
As to how to make it secure if outside access is allowed -- the only way stenography wouldn't stand out like a sore thumb is if the BBS accepted NO data except picture files
So we're back to dialup, with a trusted sysop and only trusted users allowed access (or if a user is untrusted, kept isolated as can be done with Wildcat).
My brain hurts. I think my tinfoil hat is too tight.
Urchin *itself* doesn't require javascript, nor any specific code on your pages; Earthlink uses it to generate stats on users' "personal webspace", but in that case it presumably has access to the webserver's logs.
But how to run stats on a remote host? Obviously, it has to have some way for the remote host to speak to the counter, without needing to rely on webserver-specific features; hence the javascript, to make the browser do that job. (Of course, this won't tell you anything about visitors who have js disabled, like myself.)
But it did occur to me that this also gives Google a whopping load of data that can be used toward developing a better pagerank system, that would favour real sites, and denigrate link farms and other useless crap. If this serves to elevate my sites in Google results, it's worthwhile.
And if there's any page you don't want thusly indexed -- just don't add the js snippet, and they'll be invisible to Urchin.
And my domain is actually a godaddy redirect to a non-root page on my Earthlink webspace. There's nothing in the FAQ that covers this situation. I did make a support request via google's form, we'll see if they have a useful answer or not :)