there is no excuse for getting e-mail messages from next year
That's not Yahoo's fault. On a few occasions I've received messages from next year. In one case the sender's kids had been messing with the system clock on the PC which had sent the mail. It wouldn't be right for Yahoo's Spam filter to have hidden those messages from me (although, I would have appreciated some way of not having them stay at the top of the list of messages for a year, other than deleting or filing them).
I haven't used mine for years, so I thought I'd have a look.
After telling me that the new interface wouldn't work with javascript and offering to show me the old interface, it then showed me this:
No Unread Messages
You are using 0% of your 1.0GB MB limit
Go to Inbox or Check Other Mail
Yahoo! Mail gives you 1.0GB MB for free!
Would you like to buy a 10MB, 25MB, 50MB or 100MB mailbox?
So not only is the storage going to be infinite, it's also 2 dimensional, currently offering me 1.0GB MB (that's 1024 megabytes squared, right?)!
I can't see why anyone would want to buy a 10MB mailbox when the 1.0GB MB mailbox is free...
They don't owe you anything. I'm sure their terms and conditions allow them to close your account without notice if they want to. Good luck suing them!
And even if you do get 100,000 emails a day, and they're 10KB each, that's still only 1GB per day. How much does disk space cost when you buy in bulk? A lot less than $1 per GB, anyway. So all your effort of signing up for thousands of spam lists would effectively end up costing Yahoo $1 per day? I think they could probably afford that.
I can't see how you could be wrong by a factor of 8. Can you? Did the 8-bits-per-byte thing trip you up? I can't see where else an 8 might have got involved here.
"Google introduced a weird, weirdly compelling system that lets you watch your Gmail allowance grow moment by moment. (At the moment, I have 2833.40496GB--waitaminnit, now it's 2833.40454GB.)"
Firstly, he's about 3 orders of magnitude out here. Gmail currently offers 2.8GB, not 2833GB.
And secondly, growing is where things get bigger, and in this example they're getting smaller.
Wouldn't you expect a journalist who writes about technical stuff to have at least basic numeracy skills?
Viruses which immediately kill their hosts don't survive very long. Modern viruses mostly want cause as little disruption to their host as possible in order to avoid detection while they carry out their owner's bidding.
News outlets completely screw up the facts all the time
They screw up details, sure, but they don't accidentally predict unforeseeable events.
Don't forget Occam's razor, since the options are "they just fucked it up again and don't want to admit it", or "its some sort of vast cospiracy that for some reason they were in on".
The options are "they just fucked it up again and also managed to lose all the multiple tapes of their entire output for the biggest news day in recent history", or "they received a press report and reported on it". There's no need to suggest that the BBC were in on it - they were just reporting the information they were given.
He's talking about how the BBC reported that building 7 of the WTC had collapsed before it actually happened, and how when asked about it they claimed to have lost all their recordings of the events of 9/11 in a 'cock up'.
as I understand it, consoles have all this security stuff on them to stop this, because they do not *want* to be used as general purpose computers
It's an interesting question, but I don't think anyone has actually asked the consoles how they feel about it yet. I suspect that deep down they really do want to be free.
The hacker didn't download any pictures as I understand it. What he did was made his trojan available for download, posing as an image. When downloaded and executed, the trojan would install itself and display one of the images already on the victim's hard disk. So he's committing a completely different set of crimes to his victims.
You argument doesn't work. You work at a PC repair shop, so of course all the machines you see will have problems. People don't bring healthy machines in for repair. I only ever saw 2 or 3 blue screens in the 2 or so years I was running Windows XP, using it every day. More of a problem for me was the gradual decay that Windows seems to suffer from. If I try booting into Windows now, it takes about 10 minutes from the desktop appearing for the disk to stop thrashing. There doesn't seem to be any malware on there, and I've stripped down the list of things that run at boot time to the bare minimum (using msconfig, hijack this, etc) but it's still doing *something* intensive each time it boots. Fortunately, that's about once a year now, since for the most part it's the Linux partition which is running.
And the reason everyone equates blue screens with Windows is that Windows is the only OS which shows a blue screen when it crashes...
A USB2 flash drive is a USB2 flash drive is a USB2 flash drive. There's no great difference there, unless something is broken.
That's what I thought, too, so I bought the cheapest 1GB USB2 flash drive I could find. Only once I started using it did I discover that just because it's USB2, you don't get USB2 speeds.
This report shows a comparison of various USB2 flash drives. You'll see that there's something like a factor of 5 between the fastest and the slowest.
> if I'm interactively trying to send data at 64kbps this > shouldn't be a problem on a 3M/768k line. If it is, then > the ISP is breaching their contract
Have you ever read your ISP contract? Most of them have a clause which effectively says "we don't actually have to provide you with any kind of service at all".
> Every Gmail user benefits from the filtering decisions made by all the other users
Not quite. I download my email from gmail.com using POP3. Using POP3 it's not possible to download anything that Gmail has marked as spam.
Since gmail often misclasifies ham as spam, I periodically go into the Spam 'folder', select all and click 'not spam'. This allows me to download the messages using POP3 and filter for myself. My own filter sometimes suffers from false positives, but at least I keep a copy of the mail. Gmail on the other hand deletes false positives after 30 days.
I wish there was some way to turn off Gmail's spam detection, or to turn on POP3-ability for 'spam' messages but there doesn't seem to be. Google of course ignore any suggestions that they should offer some way to allow me to do my own filtering without harming their own filtering database.
I think you must have something wrong. Suppose there are 2 bits missing. You claim I need at most 1 record. What if only 1 bit is missing, then I need no copies at all to reconstruct the whole thing?
Use Azureus or utorrent and it doesn't matter that the tracker is down. They both use a DHT (distributed hashtable) that enables peers to find each other without the aid of a centralised tracker. It works surprisingly well, too.
I used to use the web interface. It really is a joy to use. Then one day about 6 months ago I found I couldn't log in. It's almost impossible to get any useful information from Google when you experience a problem. For over 2 weeks I couldn't access any of my old email at all. Then as if by magic it started working again.
That was when I stopped trusting 3rd parties to hold my information for me. Now I use POP3. The interface might not be so pretty, but at least I know I can access my mail when I want to.
Of course, I could use the web interface for reading and composing mail and use POP3 just for backing it up to local storage.
You can use POP3 with gmail, and then you don't see any ads at all. I don't know if Yahoo supports POP3 or not, but even if it does I guess they still tag an ad on the end of each mail you send.
Your firewall won't help you at all if you're running an unpatched IE and allowing all outgoing traffic on port 80. The unpatched IE can be exploited, and the malware can connect to its owner though port 80.
So the way you detect you're infected with your method is "use whatever tools you want"?
Seems a little vague to me. I don't see how that trumps using GhostBuster or rootkit revealer.
Also, you don't have to be rich to use images like this. There are free Linux distributions, all of which will let you use dd to make an image of an NTFS filesystem.
Slashdot Mirror
I see... if you miss one of the zeroes...
... you can get 25. Case closed. :)
Python 2.4.4 (#2, Jan 13 2007, 17:50:26)
>>> 1024 * 124 / 5 / 1000
25
>>>
there is no excuse for getting e-mail messages from next year
That's not Yahoo's fault. On a few occasions I've received messages from next year. In one case the sender's kids had been messing with the system clock on the PC which had sent the mail. It wouldn't be right for Yahoo's Spam filter to have hidden those messages from me (although, I would have appreciated some way of not having them stay at the top of the list of messages for a year, other than deleting or filing them).
I haven't used mine for years, so I thought I'd have a look.
After telling me that the new interface wouldn't work with javascript and offering to show me the old interface, it then showed me this:
No Unread Messages
You are using 0% of your 1.0GB MB limit
Go to Inbox or Check Other Mail
Yahoo! Mail gives you 1.0GB MB for free!
Would you like to buy a 10MB, 25MB, 50MB or 100MB mailbox?
So not only is the storage going to be infinite, it's also 2 dimensional, currently offering me 1.0GB MB (that's 1024 megabytes squared, right?)!
I can't see why anyone would want to buy a 10MB mailbox when the 1.0GB MB mailbox is free...
They don't owe you anything. I'm sure their terms and conditions allow them to close your account without notice if they want to. Good luck suing them!
And even if you do get 100,000 emails a day, and they're 10KB each, that's still only 1GB per day. How much does disk space cost when you buy in bulk? A lot less than $1 per GB, anyway. So all your effort of signing up for thousands of spam lists would effectively end up costing Yahoo $1 per day? I think they could probably afford that.
1 TB is around 1,000GB or 1,000,000MB.
1,000,000MB / 5MB = 200,000.
I can't see how you could be wrong by a factor of 8. Can you? Did the 8-bits-per-byte thing trip you up? I can't see where else an 8 might have got involved here.
From TFA:
"Google introduced a weird, weirdly compelling system that lets you watch your Gmail allowance grow moment by moment. (At the moment, I have 2833.40496GB--waitaminnit, now it's 2833.40454GB.)"
Firstly, he's about 3 orders of magnitude out here. Gmail currently offers 2.8GB, not 2833GB.
And secondly, growing is where things get bigger, and in this example they're getting smaller.
Wouldn't you expect a journalist who writes about technical stuff to have at least basic numeracy skills?
An airliner jet [...] were in for an interesting ride?
This are bad grammars.
Judging by the emails, they didn't want to see any proof that you had uninstalled Windows, or even that you had actually bought a Dell machine.
Is this offer of free money available to everyone? Or did they check more than you show in the emails?
Viruses which immediately kill their hosts don't survive very long. Modern viruses mostly want cause as little disruption to their host as possible in order to avoid detection while they carry out their owner's bidding.
News outlets completely screw up the facts all the time
They screw up details, sure, but they don't accidentally predict unforeseeable events.
Don't forget Occam's razor, since the options are "they just fucked it up again and don't want to admit it", or "its some sort of vast cospiracy that for some reason they were in on".
The options are "they just fucked it up again and also managed to lose all the multiple tapes of their entire output for the biggest news day in recent history", or "they received a press report and reported on it". There's no need to suggest that the BBC were in on it - they were just reporting the information they were given.
He's talking about how the BBC reported that building 7 of the WTC had collapsed before it actually happened, and how when asked about it they claimed to have lost all their recordings of the events of 9/11 in a 'cock up'.
For some reason this isn't newsworthy.
as I understand it, consoles have all this security stuff on them to stop this, because they do not *want* to be used as general purpose computers
It's an interesting question, but I don't think anyone has actually asked the consoles how they feel about it yet. I suspect that deep down they really do want to be free.
The hacker didn't download any pictures as I understand it. What he did was made his trojan available for download, posing as an image. When downloaded and executed, the trojan would install itself and display one of the images already on the victim's hard disk. So he's committing a completely different set of crimes to his victims.
The double quotes don't make any difference there, do they?
telnet -l-fbin solaris
should do exactly the same I think.
You argument doesn't work. You work at a PC repair shop, so of course all the machines you see will have problems. People don't bring healthy machines in for repair. I only ever saw 2 or 3 blue screens in the 2 or so years I was running Windows XP, using it every day. More of a problem for me was the gradual decay that Windows seems to suffer from. If I try booting into Windows now, it takes about 10 minutes from the desktop appearing for the disk to stop thrashing. There doesn't seem to be any malware on there, and I've stripped down the list of things that run at boot time to the bare minimum (using msconfig, hijack this, etc) but it's still doing *something* intensive each time it boots. Fortunately, that's about once a year now, since for the most part it's the Linux partition which is running.
And the reason everyone equates blue screens with Windows is that Windows is the only OS which shows a blue screen when it crashes...
A USB2 flash drive is a USB2 flash drive is a USB2 flash drive. There's no great difference there, unless something is broken.
That's what I thought, too, so I bought the cheapest 1GB USB2 flash drive I could find. Only once I started using it did I discover that just because it's USB2, you don't get USB2 speeds.
This report shows a comparison of various USB2 flash drives. You'll see that there's something like a factor of 5 between the fastest and the slowest.
> if I'm interactively trying to send data at 64kbps this
> shouldn't be a problem on a 3M/768k line. If it is, then
> the ISP is breaching their contract
Have you ever read your ISP contract? Most of them have a clause which effectively says "we don't actually have to provide you with any kind of service at all".
> Every Gmail user benefits from the filtering decisions made by all the other users
Not quite. I download my email from gmail.com using POP3. Using POP3 it's not possible to download anything that Gmail has marked as spam.
Since gmail often misclasifies ham as spam, I periodically go into the Spam 'folder', select all and click 'not spam'. This allows me to download the messages using POP3 and filter for myself. My own filter sometimes suffers from false positives, but at least I keep a copy of the mail. Gmail on the other hand deletes false positives after 30 days.
I wish there was some way to turn off Gmail's spam detection, or to turn on POP3-ability for 'spam' messages but there doesn't seem to be. Google of course ignore any suggestions that they should offer some way to allow me to do my own filtering without harming their own filtering database.
I think you must have something wrong. Suppose there are 2 bits missing. You claim I need at most 1 record. What if only 1 bit is missing, then I need no copies at all to reconstruct the whole thing?
Use Azureus or utorrent and it doesn't matter that the tracker is down. They both use a DHT (distributed hashtable) that enables peers to find each other without the aid of a centralised tracker. It works surprisingly well, too.
I used to use the web interface. It really is a joy to use. Then one day about 6 months ago I found I couldn't log in. It's almost impossible to get any useful information from Google when you experience a problem. For over 2 weeks I couldn't access any of my old email at all. Then as if by magic it started working again.
That was when I stopped trusting 3rd parties to hold my information for me. Now I use POP3. The interface might not be so pretty, but at least I know I can access my mail when I want to.
Of course, I could use the web interface for reading and composing mail and use POP3 just for backing it up to local storage.
You can use POP3 with gmail, and then you don't see any ads at all. I don't know if Yahoo supports POP3 or not, but even if it does I guess they still tag an ad on the end of each mail you send.
By your logic, the 6x6 pixel font I use can only display 36 different characters, and yet I can easily recognise both upper and lower case letters.
You need to raise 2 to the power 36 to get the true number of different (monochrome) images displayable on a 6x6 grid.
Your firewall won't help you at all if you're running an unpatched IE and allowing all outgoing traffic on port 80. The unpatched IE can be exploited, and the malware can connect to its owner though port 80.
So the way you detect you're infected with your method is "use whatever tools you want"?
Seems a little vague to me. I don't see how that trumps using GhostBuster or rootkit revealer.
Also, you don't have to be rich to use images like this. There are free Linux distributions, all of which will let you use dd to make an image of an NTFS filesystem.