I have no idea how many is "many", but it worked for me. Not India, but I flew to a third world country for surgery a few years ago and was very satisfied with the results (the surgeon was definitely more qualified than the one who would have done it here in the US; the hospital staff not so much). Including airfare, the total cost of the trip was less than a third of what I would have had to pay here.
I'm a 46 year-old American citizen. My ancestors came over from Europe 400 years ago. I have been actively interested/involved in politics since I watched Bobby Kennedy get shot on TV when I was 6. I can honestly tell you that there is very little difference between the two candidates other than the color of their skin and their age. The Democratic and Republican parties have become one and the same. If our media, which dominates your airwaves would cover the "other" parties' candidates you would see the lack of difference between the two leading candidates.
Do you honestly believe that the world would be exactly the same as it is now, if Al Gore had won in 2000?
I like to see what other people are going to be making fun of, and that sometimes gets lost in transcription. For example, McCain shuffling aimlessly around the stage toward the end of debate #2.
For your solution, provided you can identify the names in the sentence (which should be pretty trivial), a program that guesses a random pair of names from the list of 6 you provide will be correct 1 time in 30, or a bit over 3% of the time (1 in 6 guess for the first, 1 in 5 for the second name).
That's not a great success rate, but it's enough that a spammer could still successfully complete your registration process hundreds of times a day.</quote>
Exactly. In fact, if you put together a database of which names are male and which are female, you can parse the questions looking for "Which woman is...?" and greatly increase your chances of success.
With a lot more work, I could devise questions that take something other than a name for an answer, but when you get away from multiple choice it starts becoming difficult for humans to figure out what answer you're looking for. A traditional CAPTCHA is multiple choice in a sense - if it's alphanumeric, there are 36 choices for each character.
The pain in the ass here was figuring out questions that weren't ambiguous. Something I ran into during development was "Tim is a fireman, Bob plays football. Which man is a couch potato?" The answer was Bob because Bob's hobby precludes being a couch potato, while Tim's occupation is irrelevant data to be ignored... except that to a human, Tim's occupation happens to look just as relevant as Bob's hobby. If Tim's random irrelevant occupation had been bus driver or librarian, it might have worked.
why would a company pay spammers to send out emails if it doesn't make them money?
You're forgetting Rule #1: spammers lie.
The company believes that the spammer has been very successful in the past with their double-opt-in targeted marketing campaigns and the spammer's other clients have been very satisfied, because that's what the spammer tells them. They don't find out the truth until after the spammer has been paid.
I tried something like this. Here was my attempt. It was a pain in the ass to write, and it didn't take me long to realize that it would be trivial for a botnet to break it.
You could ask things that require human thought, not just parsing. Something like object A is larger than B and C is smaller than A, then put some options like C is the smallest, B is the largest, etc. Then bots would need a new level of thinking and we'll be safe for a few more (tens of?) years.
Here was my attempt. It was a pain in the ass to write, and I quickly realized that it would be trivial to break it if you had access to a botnet.
To detect humans, wouldn't it be easier and less costly, and perhaps even more effective, to hold a large database of questions that are readable and solvable only by humans?
You can't create a database big enough to make this practical.
Let's say you come up with a thousand questions. If I sit there answering just ten of them by hand, I now have 1% of your database. Now if I get a botnet of 10,000 bots to hit your CAPTCHA, they'll know the correct answers 1% of the time, which means I can create 100 new accounts on your server (or whatever) with each attempt, and of course I can try again as often as you'll let me.
How long will it take you to come up with a database of 1,000 questions?
In my day to day job I deal with having to develop for both IE and Firefox. I haven't even so much as downloaded Chrome. Why should I?
So you can see whether the sites you developed for IE and Firefox work in other browsers too, and if not, find out why. It might be an easy thing to fix.
And it's great if Firefox users keep on using Firefox. The people we want to switch to Chrome are current IE users. What can Google do to attract them, where Mozilla/Apple/Opera have failed?
I had Yahoo! email crap out on me once and delete all of my messages. I had like over 900, so it's not like I clicked that check mark in the top and hit delete. I emailed customer support 3 days later because I figured it might have been a mail server error, but they're like "Oh no, they're lost. We're not sorry, but if you like to tell us a time within the last *24 hours* we can restore it to then." Seeing as how it was 3 days prior, I didn't get my email back.
That just means their customer service people have a tool that lets them do it automatically within 24 hours. It doesn't mean that their system administrators, when given a court order, can't recover from a backup taken a month ago.
Of course I don't normally keep backups for longer than a week on my own servers, so who knows?
How is it a questionable practice? Fires may not be very likely, and the servers are on the first floor (second in American terms) so we're not likely to have problems in a flood, but it's always better safe than sorry.
What would you do personally if you had ~250GB of data from various servers that needed to be regularly backed up? Would you still backup to tape but then just store them in a fireproof safe onsite? That should protect the tapes from most disasters, but you just never know, do you? We regularly have large cranes in the yard - if one of them were to topple or swing a heavy 20 foot container through the server room wall or something crazy like that, it could do some serious damage.
I think what the GP was saying was, I wouldn't want the liability associated with taking the tapes home myself. I mean, what if somebody did break into my car, or whatever? What if I got in an accident on my way home, and the tapes were destroyed? If there's any problem, I don't want to take them blame.
That's why I would pay somebody else to take care of it for me. Fortunately, it turns out that there's a company called EDS that offers just such a service! They do this kind of thing for plenty of other companies/government agencies, so I'm sure they're as reliable as anyone, and the important thing is, if there's a problem, I'm off the hook.
Please actually read the post, it's ActiveX that's the problem, and ActiveX is very much still there.
ActiveX is a security abomination, the entire concept of it is just completely bogus.
I'm not arguing with that, but you specifically mentioned Windows Update needing to be rewritten. It already has been; Windows Update in Vista doesn't use ActiveX at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that YouTube is the #2 search engine on the Web after Google (which owns YouTube), so if you want people to watch your videos...
I have no idea how many is "many", but it worked for me. Not India, but I flew to a third world country for surgery a few years ago and was very satisfied with the results (the surgeon was definitely more qualified than the one who would have done it here in the US; the hospital staff not so much). Including airfare, the total cost of the trip was less than a third of what I would have had to pay here.
The Onion
I'm a 46 year-old American citizen. My ancestors came over from Europe 400 years ago. I have been actively interested/involved in politics since I watched Bobby Kennedy get shot on TV when I was 6. I can honestly tell you that there is very little difference between the two candidates other than the color of their skin and their age. The Democratic and Republican parties have become one and the same. If our media, which dominates your airwaves would cover the "other" parties' candidates you would see the lack of difference between the two leading candidates.
Do you honestly believe that the world would be exactly the same as it is now, if Al Gore had won in 2000?
I like to see what other people are going to be making fun of, and that sometimes gets lost in transcription. For example, McCain shuffling aimlessly around the stage toward the end of debate #2.
Here in Oregon, OPB is airing the debate at 9pm. I assume other PBS stations on the west coast are doing the same.
If none of the ports are open on any of your external IPs, then why do you need to have more than one external IP?
He didn't say there are no ports open, he said there were no standard ports open.
I remember it this way: "Now I lay me down to sleep" has a direct object ("me"). If there's an object it's lay, if not it's lie.
Unless, as the AC pointed out, it happened in the past, in which case it's lay again. Bleh.
For your solution, provided you can identify the names in the sentence (which should be pretty trivial), a program that guesses a random pair of names from the list of 6 you provide will be correct 1 time in 30, or a bit over 3% of the time (1 in 6 guess for the first, 1 in 5 for the second name).
That's not a great success rate, but it's enough that a spammer could still successfully complete your registration process hundreds of times a day.</quote>
Exactly. In fact, if you put together a database of which names are male and which are female, you can parse the questions looking for "Which woman is...?" and greatly increase your chances of success.
With a lot more work, I could devise questions that take something other than a name for an answer, but when you get away from multiple choice it starts becoming difficult for humans to figure out what answer you're looking for. A traditional CAPTCHA is multiple choice in a sense - if it's alphanumeric, there are 36 choices for each character.
The pain in the ass here was figuring out questions that weren't ambiguous. Something I ran into during development was "Tim is a fireman, Bob plays football. Which man is a couch potato?" The answer was Bob because Bob's hobby precludes being a couch potato, while Tim's occupation is irrelevant data to be ignored... except that to a human, Tim's occupation happens to look just as relevant as Bob's hobby. If Tim's random irrelevant occupation had been bus driver or librarian, it might have worked.
Me too.
why would a company pay spammers to send out emails if it doesn't make them money?
You're forgetting Rule #1: spammers lie.
The company believes that the spammer has been very successful in the past with their double-opt-in targeted marketing campaigns and the spammer's other clients have been very satisfied, because that's what the spammer tells them. They don't find out the truth until after the spammer has been paid.
Exactly.
I tried something like this. Here was my attempt. It was a pain in the ass to write, and it didn't take me long to realize that it would be trivial for a botnet to break it.
Feel free to write a better one.
You could ask things that require human thought, not just parsing. Something like object A is larger than B and C is smaller than A, then put some options like C is the smallest, B is the largest, etc. Then bots would need a new level of thinking and we'll be safe for a few more (tens of?) years.
Here was my attempt. It was a pain in the ass to write, and I quickly realized that it would be trivial to break it if you had access to a botnet.
To detect humans, wouldn't it be easier and less costly, and perhaps even more effective, to hold a large database of questions that are readable and solvable only by humans?
You can't create a database big enough to make this practical.
Let's say you come up with a thousand questions. If I sit there answering just ten of them by hand, I now have 1% of your database. Now if I get a botnet of 10,000 bots to hit your CAPTCHA, they'll know the correct answers 1% of the time, which means I can create 100 new accounts on your server (or whatever) with each attempt, and of course I can try again as often as you'll let me.
How long will it take you to come up with a database of 1,000 questions?
In my day to day job I deal with having to develop for both IE and Firefox. I haven't even so much as downloaded Chrome. Why should I?
So you can see whether the sites you developed for IE and Firefox work in other browsers too, and if not, find out why. It might be an easy thing to fix.
Hell personally I'm shocked they beat 1% of people, I'm stunned that 1% of people cared enough to download a new browser.
Google could put a "Sell all my data to China and format my hard drive" button on their home page, and thousands of people would click it.
And it's great if Firefox users keep on using Firefox. The people we want to switch to Chrome are current IE users. What can Google do to attract them, where Mozilla/Apple/Opera have failed?
People slowly realizing it's not such a good idea to have your nine most visited pages available for anyone to see.
By "anyone" of course you mean "my friends that I allow to use my computer while they're here".
My mom had complained about that too - not hairs getting stuck, but just it being uncomfortable. I'm glad to see that it's fixed.
Of course, true Mac fans will all be watching the actual announcement live on podcast tomorrow
You know Podcasts aren't live, right?
I had Yahoo! email crap out on me once and delete all of my messages. I had like over 900, so it's not like I clicked that check mark in the top and hit delete. I emailed customer support 3 days later because I figured it might have been a mail server error, but they're like "Oh no, they're lost. We're not sorry, but if you like to tell us a time within the last *24 hours* we can restore it to then." Seeing as how it was 3 days prior, I didn't get my email back.
That just means their customer service people have a tool that lets them do it automatically within 24 hours. It doesn't mean that their system administrators, when given a court order, can't recover from a backup taken a month ago.
Of course I don't normally keep backups for longer than a week on my own servers, so who knows?
How is it a questionable practice? Fires may not be very likely, and the servers are on the first floor (second in American terms) so we're not likely to have problems in a flood, but it's always better safe than sorry.
What would you do personally if you had ~250GB of data from various servers that needed to be regularly backed up? Would you still backup to tape but then just store them in a fireproof safe onsite? That should protect the tapes from most disasters, but you just never know, do you? We regularly have large cranes in the yard - if one of them were to topple or swing a heavy 20 foot container through the server room wall or something crazy like that, it could do some serious damage.
I think what the GP was saying was, I wouldn't want the liability associated with taking the tapes home myself. I mean, what if somebody did break into my car, or whatever? What if I got in an accident on my way home, and the tapes were destroyed? If there's any problem, I don't want to take them blame.
That's why I would pay somebody else to take care of it for me. Fortunately, it turns out that there's a company called EDS that offers just such a service! They do this kind of thing for plenty of other companies/government agencies, so I'm sure they're as reliable as anyone, and the important thing is, if there's a problem, I'm off the hook.
It's a control panel now. If you try to go to the web site, it will tell you to open the control panel.
screen shot
Please actually read the post, it's ActiveX that's the problem, and ActiveX is very much still there.
ActiveX is a security abomination, the entire concept of it is just completely bogus.
I'm not arguing with that, but you specifically mentioned Windows Update needing to be rewritten. It already has been; Windows Update in Vista doesn't use ActiveX at all.