For some nice stories about teleportation (somebody invented a matter transmitter, and the stories go from there), check out One Step From Earth, by Harry Harrison. The first story, IIRC, involves the first manned mission to Mars, carried by an unmanned probe. Fun stuff.
It may have hooked you after a single use, but there are some of us who don't have a krispy kreme addiction even after multiple uses. There's nothing addictive about doughnuts, they just give us a sensory whammie that we could get in other ways.
You're right, of course---but if you want examples of (in most cases fairly minor) transgressions, there's a list of recent ones. Looking at that list makes me glad that things aren't nearly as bad as they could be. Still, having to try not to look odd sitting through a teacher-led prayer at a public high school graduation (personal experience, two years ago) is not pleasant. And niether is hearing the president talk about the "bridge between church and state".
It's funny how there are state-run lotteries, and yet people get up in arms whenever there's talk about letting anyone else run gambling operations. The arguments against private gambling operations would apply just as well (or as poorly, however you want to look at it) to the state lottery.
A long time ago, there was a story on slashdot about this---from the so-immoral-the-government-has-to-run-it department.
I am curious - if the media is so liberal, and I am considered a liberal, why is it that I am always annoyed by the news? You would figure, being liberal and all, that I would love the media and agree with more than 10% of what is showed.
I know why I'm generally annoyed by the news: they take something that might be interesting the first time you hear about it, and talk about it for a very long time, not really adding anything. With slashdot you can scroll down the page. With the newspaper you can go for the comics section. But with the TV news, they just sit there, talk, and pipe commercials at you.
As for US liberalism---have you noticed that even the "liberals" try to be as conservative as possible? They act like there's a big difference, when really they're just a toned-down version of the same thing. But there's more to, say, George Bush II than just God and tax cuts---there's also war and patriotism.:~{
Anyway, see you spacecowboy.
Re:Soon he will be dead too...
on
The Diamond Age
·
· Score: 1
Perhaps that's why the article emphasizes that the leader of this company used to be a brigadier general, as if to say, "This guy will be staying alive!"
Yeah, school is already too tight as it is. But one idea---make sure you have webcams in the administrative offices, too. If you're going to have invasion of privacy, it should never be a one-way thing.
Or who could forget the thermodynamics discussion in Physics that started as a discussion of why thermometers don't significantly alter what they're measuring, then someone pointing out that an 800 pound thermometer would affect things significantly, and eventually spiraling into a five minute laughing fit of speculations about 800 lb. rectal thermometers.
I agree. Do you remember the article on slashdot a while back about an incremental bayesian spam classifier that would throttle SMTP connections that were transmitting spam? That would, if widely deployed, make things rather painful for spammers. You would use the same amount of bandwidth if the spam software didn't just give up on you, but it would make it impractical for spammers to send spam in bulk. AND THAT WOULD BE THAT! TAKE THAT, YOU SPAMMING SCUMBAGS! HAHA! DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE!!!!!
Ho ho, sorry about that. I'm talking about TarProxy, which I think should work as an SMTP proxy sitting in front of an existing mail server. Share and enjoy!
Maybe. But I don't see where they get a disincentive to also add that email to a list of addresses not to sell to other nasty clueless spamming scum.
I still like the idea of some spamming sucm getting the dirty end of the stick, and polluting GURANTEED!!! address pools should make living in their own collective filth a little more squalid for spammers. I think that's a worthy goal.
As an aside, the thing that most scares me lately is some mortgage spam I've been getting which has all my personal information embedded in the URLs. Name, address, zip code, personal code numbers... how they got all this I don't know. But I really wouldn't want an automated system to click on one of those links and confirm that I'm receiving all their s*it. I get like 5 a day just from this one group. How many times could I possibly refinance?
Wow. That's pretty amazing. Methinks something incredibly crooked is going on, assuming that you weren't gullable enough to give that info away to some unscrupulous web site. Any web site that asks for that stuff when they don't need it deserves a pack of lies. And if asking you to refinance once doesn't work, well, just try again! Patience is cheap with computers; surely those uncooperati) will come around.
As for the mortgage on your P.O. box---maybe that particular spammer is getting so many loads of bricks delivered by business reply mail that he/she needs to get a mortgage, and wants help paying it off.:-)
First off, I'd like to apologize for being in flame mode in my original post. Oops. But now to the points:
Sorry, but I'm not censoring myself to compensate for the failure of someone else's software. I don't go on about mortages or viagra, but it's HTML, it does have one ad (which pays for my site's hosting bill), and it tends to be fairly long. Spam filters regularly misidentify it as spam.
Bummer. But surely your newsletter has some topic(s) that would be able to identify it through word frequency? In a statistical filter, I haven't had any problems with newsletters or mailing list postings getting filtered. But yes, it would be irresponsible to use this with a filter that regularly blocks innocent newsletters and such.
Correct me if I've misunderstood the article, but I thought the whole point (well maybe half the point) in fetching the page was to examine the contents of the page to see if it looked like spam? If it's not checking the page, then how will it know the difference?
You've got three categories of email based on just word frequency in the email itself: normal, spam, and unsure. If you just wanted to increase accuracy, you'd only follow links in the unsure emails, which would catch the "stealth spams" that Paul Graham talks about. If you're angry abd out to hurt spammers, you'd follow links in the emails definitely classified as spam already. The impact should be minimal on nonspam emails. Still, it's probably safer to use this only on unsure emails. Unsure is a difficult category to get into with regularity, so that should make it harder to do the sort of intentional DDoS you talked about.
Sorry, that is unacceptable. My site is fairly well-known on the internet and receives a lot of attention. I shouldn't be forced to fend off a DDoS attack because someone links me.
You have a point there. Only following links in spams and unsures should help, and limiting it to unsures should help more, but I suppose that if someone really tries hard, they could DDoS your site. I've never really liked the idea of whitelisting, but I suppose that it would be useful in your case, especially if your web site could be automatically scanned by a number of statistical website classifiers automatically. Still, the more I think about it, the more I think it would be best to limit link visiting to unsures.
As for the IFRAME and image thing, such emails could be deleted by a filter before you even see them, but there are still a lot of people without filters who will inadvertantly view emails before deleting them (i.e. clicking on a message to select it for deletion views it also). I'm just surprised that with all the worry about this being used to evil ends, I haven't heard of people exploiting existing problems with HTML email implementations.
By the way, what newsletter are we talking about here? I tried to get to your website, but I failed.
When my newsletter (confirmed Opt-in for the NANAE people who may be reading) goes out every Tuesday and 8,000 people open it, how am I supposed to deal with these filters DDoSing my site?
Presumably, you would make your newsletter less spammish, so that 8000 email filters don't classify it as spam or unsure and DDoS/check your site.
For that matter, how do I deal with these filters attacking my site when some other newsletter links to it?
Again, this will only be applied to messages that have been classified as spam by the fairly accurate filters that Paul Graham talks about. Just hope you don't get linked to by any non opt-in "newsletters".
What do I do when I piss off Ronnie Scelson and he links to every individual page on my site and spams 100,000,000 people with them?
In the meantime, what do you do if you piss off someone who sends out 100000000 emails containing every individual page on your site in an HTML IFRAME element? Or repeatedly includes pictures on your server in the email?
For the ISP sysadmins reading, you think it's bad when 20,000 spams land on your mail server? How are you going to like it when each of those 20,000 spams produce 3 or 4 (or 30 or 40) HTTP requests?
You'll mutter about those crazy users and bill them for the bandwidth they use. Or I suppose you could flip out and kill people.
I can't see how the idea of "attack filters" does anything but discredit the whole idea
And replace them with what? "Get via gra somewhere, but were not going to tell you where. Our name is bob.com! Un5ub scribe by going to... umm... forget it. Call 1-800-EAT-SHIT for more inf0mationses"
Or would they obscure the URLs like some people obscure their email addresses? The more hoops you have to go through to get your FR33 H0T BANDAGE PIKZZE, the less likely you are to actually be suckered by the spam. This cuts most deeply into the ranks of stupid people, who are the main target demographic for spam.
I'm guessing, based on the fact that he wrote A Plan for Spam, that he's happy. After all, when (I'm an optimist, and happy!) we solve the spam problem for all but a few suckers, he'll get the advantage of being able to say that he helped. Plus, having something you wrote cited over and over again and called "seminal" has got to be one big ego boost.
Neither can I. Come on people---the Super Nintendo was, and still is, great! Plus, the architecture is IIRC extremely tractable to emulation with software like ZSNES or (my favorite) SNES9X. The CPU was slow, but it had hardware acceleration for layers, transparency, etc. So your emulator can handle the really processor intensive graphics parts natively and leave the emulation to the game logic.
Besides, who can resist the wonders of Tetris Attack or Chrono Trigger?
This also provides incentives for spammers to provide a link to an unsubscribe page that works, preferably (for everyone, including the spammer) to a page that unsubscribes you for just visiting it. That way, only the users clueless or stupid enough to be unprotected will get repeat spam, and the bit bandwidth problem will go away. Hooray!
Ah, but this isn't a deliberate DoS attack! This is just visiting links in emails to get some information about the email itself. And if the site goes down due to bandwidth spikes? Just a convenient side effect, like the slashdot effect going into "righteous wrath" mode.
How aboout this: tech support people get "mod points" that they can use if a know-it-all acts like an asshole. If your user karma gets too low, your licence is no good anymore.
Yeah, it seems like we're screwed any way we chose. I'm just trying to slashdot fate.:-)
I think that the licence should be free, online, and not required---but it can get you bumped up beyond the unfortunate script readers. Now, does anyone want to set up something like that? Preferably some official-sounding organization should make it.
On a kinder note, you can learn something interesting from just about anyone, if you make an effort to find out what it is that really interests them. Hard to believe, but not everyone thinks that the really funny story I like to tell about the integral of secant^3 is funny. There's just no accounting for people's taste.
If you can find some intersection of your interests, you can have a pleasant conversation with just about anyone who isn't an annoying jerk (and there are lots of such good people), you're right. The thing I've discovered is that I tend to need a context for stuff like that to happen. I need to be doing something with someone else before I can have a conversation, even if it's just playing cards. Then things snowball from there; someone starts making Monty Python jokes, you discover that someone likes a certain card game that you like too, and things happen. The problem for me is just getting started.
By the way, do you have a link for the integral joke? I haven't yet seen the humor in it...:-).
Slashdot Mirror
For some nice stories about teleportation (somebody invented a matter transmitter, and the stories go from there), check out One Step From Earth, by Harry Harrison. The first story, IIRC, involves the first manned mission to Mars, carried by an unmanned probe. Fun stuff.
I think the point was that the percentage of how much money the slot machine has is fixed.
In 1998 (only year I could find) drug enforcement in the US was 15.9 billion dollars.
It may have hooked you after a single use, but there are some of us who don't have a krispy kreme addiction even after multiple uses. There's nothing addictive about doughnuts, they just give us a sensory whammie that we could get in other ways.
You're right, of course---but if you want examples of (in most cases fairly minor) transgressions, there's a list of recent ones. Looking at that list makes me glad that things aren't nearly as bad as they could be. Still, having to try not to look odd sitting through a teacher-led prayer at a public high school graduation (personal experience, two years ago) is not pleasant. And niether is hearing the president talk about the "bridge between church and state".
A long time ago, there was a story on slashdot about this---from the so-immoral-the-government-has-to-run-it department.
I know why I'm generally annoyed by the news: they take something that might be interesting the first time you hear about it, and talk about it for a very long time, not really adding anything. With slashdot you can scroll down the page. With the newspaper you can go for the comics section. But with the TV news, they just sit there, talk, and pipe commercials at you.
As for US liberalism---have you noticed that even the "liberals" try to be as conservative as possible? They act like there's a big difference, when really they're just a toned-down version of the same thing. But there's more to, say, George Bush II than just God and tax cuts---there's also war and patriotism. :~{
Anyway, see you spacecowboy.
Perhaps that's why the article emphasizes that the leader of this company used to be a brigadier general, as if to say, "This guy will be staying alive!"
Yeah, school is already too tight as it is. But one idea---make sure you have webcams in the administrative offices, too. If you're going to have invasion of privacy, it should never be a one-way thing.
Ahh dear, them were the days.. ;)
Ho ho, sorry about that. I'm talking about TarProxy, which I think should work as an SMTP proxy sitting in front of an existing mail server. Share and enjoy!
I still like the idea of some spamming sucm getting the dirty end of the stick, and polluting GURANTEED!!! address pools should make living in their own collective filth a little more squalid for spammers. I think that's a worthy goal.
As an aside, the thing that most scares me lately is some mortgage spam I've been getting which has all my personal information embedded in the URLs. Name, address, zip code, personal code numbers... how they got all this I don't know. But I really wouldn't want an automated system to click on one of those links and confirm that I'm receiving all their s*it. I get like 5 a day just from this one group. How many times could I possibly refinance?
Wow. That's pretty amazing. Methinks something incredibly crooked is going on, assuming that you weren't gullable enough to give that info away to some unscrupulous web site. Any web site that asks for that stuff when they don't need it deserves a pack of lies. And if asking you to refinance once doesn't work, well, just try again! Patience is cheap with computers; surely those uncooperati) will come around.
As for the mortgage on your P.O. box---maybe that particular spammer is getting so many loads of bricks delivered by business reply mail that he/she needs to get a mortgage, and wants help paying it off. :-)
Sorry, but I'm not censoring myself to compensate for the failure of someone else's software. I don't go on about mortages or viagra, but it's HTML, it does have one ad (which pays for my site's hosting bill), and it tends to be fairly long. Spam filters regularly misidentify it as spam.
Bummer. But surely your newsletter has some topic(s) that would be able to identify it through word frequency? In a statistical filter, I haven't had any problems with newsletters or mailing list postings getting filtered. But yes, it would be irresponsible to use this with a filter that regularly blocks innocent newsletters and such.
Correct me if I've misunderstood the article, but I thought the whole point (well maybe half the point) in fetching the page was to examine the contents of the page to see if it looked like spam? If it's not checking the page, then how will it know the difference?
You've got three categories of email based on just word frequency in the email itself: normal, spam, and unsure. If you just wanted to increase accuracy, you'd only follow links in the unsure emails, which would catch the "stealth spams" that Paul Graham talks about. If you're angry abd out to hurt spammers, you'd follow links in the emails definitely classified as spam already. The impact should be minimal on nonspam emails. Still, it's probably safer to use this only on unsure emails. Unsure is a difficult category to get into with regularity, so that should make it harder to do the sort of intentional DDoS you talked about.
Sorry, that is unacceptable. My site is fairly well-known on the internet and receives a lot of attention. I shouldn't be forced to fend off a DDoS attack because someone links me.
You have a point there. Only following links in spams and unsures should help, and limiting it to unsures should help more, but I suppose that if someone really tries hard, they could DDoS your site. I've never really liked the idea of whitelisting, but I suppose that it would be useful in your case, especially if your web site could be automatically scanned by a number of statistical website classifiers automatically. Still, the more I think about it, the more I think it would be best to limit link visiting to unsures.
As for the IFRAME and image thing, such emails could be deleted by a filter before you even see them, but there are still a lot of people without filters who will inadvertantly view emails before deleting them (i.e. clicking on a message to select it for deletion views it also). I'm just surprised that with all the worry about this being used to evil ends, I haven't heard of people exploiting existing problems with HTML email implementations.
By the way, what newsletter are we talking about here? I tried to get to your website, but I failed.
Presumably, you would make your newsletter less spammish, so that 8000 email filters don't classify it as spam or unsure and DDoS/check your site.
For that matter, how do I deal with these filters attacking my site when some other newsletter links to it?
Again, this will only be applied to messages that have been classified as spam by the fairly accurate filters that Paul Graham talks about. Just hope you don't get linked to by any non opt-in "newsletters".
What do I do when I piss off Ronnie Scelson and he links to every individual page on my site and spams 100,000,000 people with them?
In the meantime, what do you do if you piss off someone who sends out 100000000 emails containing every individual page on your site in an HTML IFRAME element? Or repeatedly includes pictures on your server in the email?
For the ISP sysadmins reading, you think it's bad when 20,000 spams land on your mail server? How are you going to like it when each of those 20,000 spams produce 3 or 4 (or 30 or 40) HTTP requests?
You'll mutter about those crazy users and bill them for the bandwidth they use. Or I suppose you could flip out and kill people.
I can't see how the idea of "attack filters" does anything but discredit the whole idea
You mean the idea of "attack filters"?
Or would they obscure the URLs like some people obscure their email addresses? The more hoops you have to go through to get your FR33 H0T BANDAGE PIKZZE, the less likely you are to actually be suckered by the spam. This cuts most deeply into the ranks of stupid people, who are the main target demographic for spam.
I'm guessing, based on the fact that he wrote A Plan for Spam, that he's happy. After all, when (I'm an optimist, and happy!) we solve the spam problem for all but a few suckers, he'll get the advantage of being able to say that he helped. Plus, having something you wrote cited over and over again and called "seminal" has got to be one big ego boost.
Just mentally replace "wont" with "loath", and you'll have something stylistically identical that makes sense. Cheers.
Besides, who can resist the wonders of Tetris Attack or Chrono Trigger?
This also provides incentives for spammers to provide a link to an unsubscribe page that works, preferably (for everyone, including the spammer) to a page that unsubscribes you for just visiting it. That way, only the users clueless or stupid enough to be unprotected will get repeat spam, and the bit bandwidth problem will go away. Hooray!
Ah, but this isn't a deliberate DoS attack! This is just visiting links in emails to get some information about the email itself. And if the site goes down due to bandwidth spikes? Just a convenient side effect, like the slashdot effect going into "righteous wrath" mode.
If you want to buy something, I'd recommend Froogle, which is proveded by Google.
Well, at least the editors don't try to hide the fact that slashdot and thinkgeek are owned by the same company. Isn't integrity nice?
Yeah, it seems like we're screwed any way we chose. I'm just trying to slashdot fate. :-)
I think that the licence should be free, online, and not required---but it can get you bumped up beyond the unfortunate script readers. Now, does anyone want to set up something like that? Preferably some official-sounding organization should make it.
If you can find some intersection of your interests, you can have a pleasant conversation with just about anyone who isn't an annoying jerk (and there are lots of such good people), you're right. The thing I've discovered is that I tend to need a context for stuff like that to happen. I need to be doing something with someone else before I can have a conversation, even if it's just playing cards. Then things snowball from there; someone starts making Monty Python jokes, you discover that someone likes a certain card game that you like too, and things happen. The problem for me is just getting started.
By the way, do you have a link for the integral joke? I haven't yet seen the humor in it... :-).