My final opinion is, the article did not give proper references, but instead expected the reader to take them on their word and trust in their analysis, but since so many people DID read the thread and back up their claims, I believe the article is probably accurate.
Nevertheless, good references would have saved people some headaches. I didn't feel this particular headache so much, because at no time did I feel compelled to read the entire thread after I read the article. I read the article. I gave people headaches because I think it's juvenile to post articles which make summary judgements without any reference at all except for a big arrow saying "it's all in here...somewhere" and especially unhelpful for everyone who DID read or follow the thread to expect everyone else to as well.
I have better things to do. Like rant at poorly written articles.
Well, how many fucking times do I have to point out how there was tons of information missing from the article, with no reference to back up any claims made except a link to this one giant thread, only to be told time and again that all that information is "somewhere in the thread?" If the author can't post references, they may as well not write the article at all, because while I can accept some simple facts on a stranger's word, I can't just accept their analysis when it appears 100% contrived. The article was crap. It might have been interesting to follow the thread as it was happening, but it's severely boring to wade through so much brainless drivel.
What's scary is how many people DIDN'T read the thread, and just took the article at its word.
That's about as useful as writing a how-to that says "to configure, search Google."
...because the word "Googol" has been an inspirational breakthrough in the world of math, and the Google search engine has been little more than a coat-tail rider.
You expect reference to the supporting detail. It's standard fucking practice when writing. Whether it's a bibliography in a fucking book, or a fucking link to the fucking source of the information, something to corroborate it would be nice. The fucking PDF lacked any fucking thing except a link to the ENTIRE FUCKING THREAD.
Like I said, jackfuckingass, the PDF was useless. It may as well have said "this PDF is fucking useless, read the whole thread."
This is yet another example of the mindset I love so dearly on Slashdot. No, I didn't assume...I said the PDF gave no evidence, merely assumptions. If you HAVE to read the entire thread, why bother with the article at all? Just point to the thread and say "here, read all this."
Sure. And when we negotiate the details, I will determine for myself whether or not the offer is legitimate, rather than let other people make brief, summary statements about it and then swallow it hook-line-and-sinker. Shoot me an offer.
Ah...I see. I thought the buyer a professor here in the U.S. Someone should condense the thread to just the important points. It seems like the real meat of the story is in the thread, not the PDF. The PDF jumped a lot from assumption to assumption. They should ditch the PDF and just bullet-point a story with links to the relevant thread posts, in order.
I guess I just don't accept someone telling me that the escrow site is a fake. Is it? I tried to go there right now and there is no web site at that address. Like I said, something resembling evidence of anything would be nice. All I see are people saying "well, obviously" and "so clearly" and so on. Is there ANYTHING at all that goes beyond an eyebrow raise?
I saw where they said the popup LOOKED like a fake, but I didn't see or read anything else about it.
If there are VALID points to be made about the guilt of the alleged scammer, they ought to be highlighted. I read the article once, scanned it a second time and browsed a lot of the "thread" where they were discussing the revenge, but I saw very, very little of anything that looked suspicious, and I saw nothing that went beyond suspicious. If there was more information in there making it clear, I didn't see it. I don't see many people talking about it either. Wherever the proof is, apparently everyone got it, everyone is 100% convinced, but it's somehow hidden from my view.
I have bought MANY things which came with manuals written in very poor English. That didn't mean the company that made them was scamming me, it just meant they didn't have the resources to write a proper manual in English.
An unprofessional web site should make a person say "hmm, I think I need something more professional for this transaction" but NOT instantly judge themselves the victim of an attempted scam.
I sort of hope the seller(s) end up getting charged with fraud. Even if just to teach them a lesson to not break the law when taking the law into their own hands using little more than unfounded paranoia as evidence.
You know what I find MORE suspicious? People who "just know" when someone else is guilty of something.
I read the whole thing, and I saw where they *thought* the verisign popup looked funny, but it seemed to me they weren't even sure. They were merely suspicious and then went on as if they had hard evidence.
Are you saying that one verisign popup that they weren't sure about was their only evidence?
How was the buyer a scammer? I missed that part. All I read was a vague "this is obviously a scam" and the entire article was about his revenge after that.
How do we know this all wasn't perpetrated on a perfectly legitimate buyer?
Seems to me like they prematurely judged an innocent buyer as a scammer, and then broke a bunch of laws to scam him as "revenge."
Help me see what I missed. Where is any evidence at all that the original buyer was a scammer at all?
I am fairly ignorant about a lot of physics, but could it be that the wave frequency of the light is modified slightly where the photons the edges of the holes, refracting and slowing as it passes through the top layer of atoms around the hole edge?
Or perhaps since so many photons are streaming at the around the same wave frequency in the same direction, that photons actually DO interact with each other, but under such circumstances they resonate and create an unusual wave pattern?/shrug
Was American intelligence the best in the world when it came to the Bay of Pigs? Name one other agency that was gathering more and more accurate intelligence at that time.
Intel gathering isn't a precise science, so finding chinks in the armor doesn't mean someone else out there MUST be better. The U.S. intel is the best, bar none. Not being perfect is not the same as not being the best. U.S. intel is the best, but it's not perfect. It's the least imperfect of all intelligence agencies out there. We know more about more people and things in the world with more accuracy than any other agency in the world.
I don't say that because I blindly believe in U.S. intel. That's not my purpose with that. I say that because when I ponder the video game character threat, I need to make assumptions, and I want to make the most appropriate assumptions; the ones that make the most sense, not the ones that support a pre-conceived notion I have to believe that U.S. intel are a bunch of clowns.
We have to make assumptions, but we should make the most SENSIBLE assumptions. It does not make sense to assume that the U.S. investigated a video game character in-depth and found him to be a real person, then google came along and corrected them. More likely, U.S. intel got a report somewhere about a video game character which was false, but very alarming, so they made it a priority to investigate, and early in the investigation the truth was discovered.
The character reached the top of the matrix because he was reported and the report was scary, not investigated.
It doesn't have to be XML-RPC or SOAP, per se. I just meant to say that a middle-tier is very helpful. Especially if you write the middle tier to use semaphores through the SQL server instead of using the local file system. You can place your middle tier on many different servers to spread the load out, so the SQL server is only servicing queries (some SQL servers can scale as well). It's not too hard to implement; you can pass through SQL queries from the client to prototype, and place it into the middle tier when you want to make it more efficient. When you do that, stick in semaphores to keep procedures that have to perform multiple database queries from running over themselves.
A trick to overcoming the latency issue is to write very high-level procedures in the middle, that perform sophisticated tasks atomically. If you bundle tasks up so the clients are only making one call per major user-interface action, the latency is less of a problem.
Letting them die has other beneficial side-effects such as allowing the earth's population to reduce at a normal rate as well as improving the overall gene pool.
Not to be cruel or anything, but we spend so much time trying to keep everyone alive, one day the earth is simply not going to be able to sustain us. I think mother nature has had a wonderful system for a long time, and I don't see why we should sacrifice privacy just for the joy of fooling with mother nature.
Let's not be evil bastards and just let people die left and right without lifting a finger, but draw a line at a sensible place. Installing sensors to track hikers is going too far.
Reports and other visual output generated at the client using simple data structures spit out by a procedure (middle-tier) layer.
Java/Ruby/Perl/Python/C++ (gasp! adjust for efficiency) through XML-RPC or SOAP works well as a middle-tier layer. Export the grunt work of searching and sorting as SQL statements to your database. Give the layer an SQL-pass-through command so you can prototype code in your client easily, then port/move the code into the middle layer.
Do it over HTTP or pipe it through SSH.
The database can be anything, MySQL/Oracle/MS SQL. Don't write any procedures or anything to them. They are not very portable; it's very easy to get blocked in, at least in my experience. I'm sure lots of people are good at not getting blocked in, but it's not automatic.
Regardless of what it might be fun to think, American intelligence is still the best in the world. Whatever the cause was, you have to assume the most obvious, if you assume anything. Don't assume U.S. intel made a blunder; assume you don't understand how the threat matrix is operated. I am 99.9% certain most people here have only the most rudimentary understanding of the threat matrix. So I don't buy the knee-jerk snickering that U.S. intel did something stupid. My first assumption is: we don't know something about how the threat matrix is operated.
People seem to assume that investigations are done BEFORE a person reaches the top of the threat matrix. What I believe, and I think it's logical, is that little or no investigation is done beforehand. A person is elevated to the top of the threat matrix based on some primitive criteria: the reported threat, the person's resources, placement within their organization and whether or not we know anything about them. A person who threatens the U.S., who is rich and is reported to head a terrorist organization would shoot to the top, especially if we had no information on them.
My guess is, and I see no other logical conclusion, is that reaching the top of the threat matrix is not the RESULT of investigation, it is trigger that STARTS an investigation.
Do you see my point? People are assuming that reaching the top of the threat matrix as the result of investigation. Perhaps none is done at all. Perhaps the threat matrix is the mechanism by which we convert reports into investigations. Perhaps the threat matrix is filled through simple anonymous phone calls, and the items with the least information get priority until they can be placed into a more appropriate position in the matrix.
Either way, since we don't really know, why make the assumption that a mistake was made? Because it's humorous? Perhaps...but you can't overlook the obvious just to allow an assumption to seem true for the sake of humor.
What are the criteria for being at the top on the threat matrix for one day? What does it take? What puts something at the top?
I would guess: being the most serious threat for which there is little or no intelligence. (AKA, something dark and spooky)
Once intelligence starts to come in on an item, I would guess then that the threat goes down in the hierarchy. The more is known, the less of a threat it is. Also, intelligence might show it's not a threat at all.
So, all I see is something got reported (perhaps by one or more pranksters). It sounded really bad. No one had any information on it. It became a priority. Once it became a priority, work started. First task: quick look around, google, phone books, etc. Google comes up: just a video game character. Item drops off the matrix.
I don't see "top of the threat matrix" to mean "the most serious threat that all of our intelligence corroborates." I don't think it takes ANY corroboration at all to get on the matrix or reach the top. Actually, I am pretty damn sure this is the case. Why else would a video game character go to the top of the threat matrix? Because fields agents reported his activities? No. LACK of information is probably what put the character at the top of the matrix.
I don't see how so many of you conclude that the government doesn't know a real threat from a video game character. A threat can crop up in any one of a gazillion ways. Once made, they have to verify threats before they take them seriously. They did. They determined it was a video game character.
How else does it work? Magic? When a threat comes in, they use telepathic powers to determine that any given name is a real one and not a video game character? A quick google isn't to everyone's liking?
Slashdot Mirror
My final opinion is, the article did not give proper references, but instead expected the reader to take them on their word and trust in their analysis, but since so many people DID read the thread and back up their claims, I believe the article is probably accurate.
Nevertheless, good references would have saved people some headaches. I didn't feel this particular headache so much, because at no time did I feel compelled to read the entire thread after I read the article. I read the article. I gave people headaches because I think it's juvenile to post articles which make summary judgements without any reference at all except for a big arrow saying "it's all in here...somewhere" and especially unhelpful for everyone who DID read or follow the thread to expect everyone else to as well.
I have better things to do. Like rant at poorly written articles.
Well, how many fucking times do I have to point out how there was tons of information missing from the article, with no reference to back up any claims made except a link to this one giant thread, only to be told time and again that all that information is "somewhere in the thread?" If the author can't post references, they may as well not write the article at all, because while I can accept some simple facts on a stranger's word, I can't just accept their analysis when it appears 100% contrived. The article was crap. It might have been interesting to follow the thread as it was happening, but it's severely boring to wade through so much brainless drivel.
What's scary is how many people DIDN'T read the thread, and just took the article at its word.
That's about as useful as writing a how-to that says "to configure, search Google."
Fucking useless.
...because the word "Googol" has been an inspirational breakthrough in the world of math, and the Google search engine has been little more than a coat-tail rider.
You expect reference to the supporting detail. It's standard fucking practice when writing. Whether it's a bibliography in a fucking book, or a fucking link to the fucking source of the information, something to corroborate it would be nice. The fucking PDF lacked any fucking thing except a link to the ENTIRE FUCKING THREAD.
Like I said, jackfuckingass, the PDF was useless. It may as well have said "this PDF is fucking useless, read the whole thread."
You fucking dimwit.
This is yet another example of the mindset I love so dearly on Slashdot. No, I didn't assume...I said the PDF gave no evidence, merely assumptions. If you HAVE to read the entire thread, why bother with the article at all? Just point to the thread and say "here, read all this."
Sure. And when we negotiate the details, I will determine for myself whether or not the offer is legitimate, rather than let other people make brief, summary statements about it and then swallow it hook-line-and-sinker. Shoot me an offer.
Ah...I see. I thought the buyer a professor here in the U.S. Someone should condense the thread to just the important points. It seems like the real meat of the story is in the thread, not the PDF. The PDF jumped a lot from assumption to assumption. They should ditch the PDF and just bullet-point a story with links to the relevant thread posts, in order.
I guess I just don't accept someone telling me that the escrow site is a fake. Is it? I tried to go there right now and there is no web site at that address. Like I said, something resembling evidence of anything would be nice. All I see are people saying "well, obviously" and "so clearly" and so on. Is there ANYTHING at all that goes beyond an eyebrow raise?
I did read everything. What did I NOT read that I was supposed to in order to get solid evidence that the buyer was a scammer?
Explain to me what that means. The popup meant what? Are you referring to an SSL certificate warning?
I saw where they said the popup LOOKED like a fake, but I didn't see or read anything else about it.
If there are VALID points to be made about the guilt of the alleged scammer, they ought to be highlighted. I read the article once, scanned it a second time and browsed a lot of the "thread" where they were discussing the revenge, but I saw very, very little of anything that looked suspicious, and I saw nothing that went beyond suspicious. If there was more information in there making it clear, I didn't see it. I don't see many people talking about it either. Wherever the proof is, apparently everyone got it, everyone is 100% convinced, but it's somehow hidden from my view.
Which is unprofessional, as you say.
But hardly solid evidence of a scam.
I have bought MANY things which came with manuals written in very poor English. That didn't mean the company that made them was scamming me, it just meant they didn't have the resources to write a proper manual in English.
An unprofessional web site should make a person say "hmm, I think I need something more professional for this transaction" but NOT instantly judge themselves the victim of an attempted scam.
I sort of hope the seller(s) end up getting charged with fraud. Even if just to teach them a lesson to not break the law when taking the law into their own hands using little more than unfounded paranoia as evidence.
You know what I find MORE suspicious? People who "just know" when someone else is guilty of something.
I read the whole thing, and I saw where they *thought* the verisign popup looked funny, but it seemed to me they weren't even sure. They were merely suspicious and then went on as if they had hard evidence.
Are you saying that one verisign popup that they weren't sure about was their only evidence?
How was the buyer a scammer? I missed that part. All I read was a vague "this is obviously a scam" and the entire article was about his revenge after that.
How do we know this all wasn't perpetrated on a perfectly legitimate buyer?
Seems to me like they prematurely judged an innocent buyer as a scammer, and then broke a bunch of laws to scam him as "revenge."
Help me see what I missed. Where is any evidence at all that the original buyer was a scammer at all?
I heard the same thing about a huge underwater crater in the Gulf of Mexico. How is this different from that theory?
I am fairly ignorant about a lot of physics, but could it be that the wave frequency of the light is modified slightly where the photons the edges of the holes, refracting and slowing as it passes through the top layer of atoms around the hole edge?
/shrug
Or perhaps since so many photons are streaming at the around the same wave frequency in the same direction, that photons actually DO interact with each other, but under such circumstances they resonate and create an unusual wave pattern?
But, I thought open source products are far more profitable than closed-source projects in the long run. Maybe he quit too soon.
Was American intelligence the best in the world when it came to the Bay of Pigs? Name one other agency that was gathering more and more accurate intelligence at that time.
Intel gathering isn't a precise science, so finding chinks in the armor doesn't mean someone else out there MUST be better. The U.S. intel is the best, bar none. Not being perfect is not the same as not being the best. U.S. intel is the best, but it's not perfect. It's the least imperfect of all intelligence agencies out there. We know more about more people and things in the world with more accuracy than any other agency in the world.
I don't say that because I blindly believe in U.S. intel. That's not my purpose with that. I say that because when I ponder the video game character threat, I need to make assumptions, and I want to make the most appropriate assumptions; the ones that make the most sense, not the ones that support a pre-conceived notion I have to believe that U.S. intel are a bunch of clowns.
We have to make assumptions, but we should make the most SENSIBLE assumptions. It does not make sense to assume that the U.S. investigated a video game character in-depth and found him to be a real person, then google came along and corrected them. More likely, U.S. intel got a report somewhere about a video game character which was false, but very alarming, so they made it a priority to investigate, and early in the investigation the truth was discovered.
The character reached the top of the matrix because he was reported and the report was scary, not investigated.
It doesn't have to be XML-RPC or SOAP, per se. I just meant to say that a middle-tier is very helpful. Especially if you write the middle tier to use semaphores through the SQL server instead of using the local file system. You can place your middle tier on many different servers to spread the load out, so the SQL server is only servicing queries (some SQL servers can scale as well). It's not too hard to implement; you can pass through SQL queries from the client to prototype, and place it into the middle tier when you want to make it more efficient. When you do that, stick in semaphores to keep procedures that have to perform multiple database queries from running over themselves.
A trick to overcoming the latency issue is to write very high-level procedures in the middle, that perform sophisticated tasks atomically. If you bundle tasks up so the clients are only making one call per major user-interface action, the latency is less of a problem.
Letting them die has other beneficial side-effects such as allowing the earth's population to reduce at a normal rate as well as improving the overall gene pool.
Not to be cruel or anything, but we spend so much time trying to keep everyone alive, one day the earth is simply not going to be able to sustain us. I think mother nature has had a wonderful system for a long time, and I don't see why we should sacrifice privacy just for the joy of fooling with mother nature.
Let's not be evil bastards and just let people die left and right without lifting a finger, but draw a line at a sensible place. Installing sensors to track hikers is going too far.
My experience is this works best:
Reports and other visual output generated at the client using simple data structures spit out by a procedure (middle-tier) layer.
Java/Ruby/Perl/Python/C++ (gasp! adjust for efficiency) through XML-RPC or SOAP works well as a middle-tier layer. Export the grunt work of searching and sorting as SQL statements to your database. Give the layer an SQL-pass-through command so you can prototype code in your client easily, then port/move the code into the middle layer.
Do it over HTTP or pipe it through SSH.
The database can be anything, MySQL/Oracle/MS SQL. Don't write any procedures or anything to them. They are not very portable; it's very easy to get blocked in, at least in my experience. I'm sure lots of people are good at not getting blocked in, but it's not automatic.
Regardless of what it might be fun to think, American intelligence is still the best in the world. Whatever the cause was, you have to assume the most obvious, if you assume anything. Don't assume U.S. intel made a blunder; assume you don't understand how the threat matrix is operated. I am 99.9% certain most people here have only the most rudimentary understanding of the threat matrix. So I don't buy the knee-jerk snickering that U.S. intel did something stupid. My first assumption is: we don't know something about how the threat matrix is operated.
People seem to assume that investigations are done BEFORE a person reaches the top of the threat matrix. What I believe, and I think it's logical, is that little or no investigation is done beforehand. A person is elevated to the top of the threat matrix based on some primitive criteria: the reported threat, the person's resources, placement within their organization and whether or not we know anything about them. A person who threatens the U.S., who is rich and is reported to head a terrorist organization would shoot to the top, especially if we had no information on them.
My guess is, and I see no other logical conclusion, is that reaching the top of the threat matrix is not the RESULT of investigation, it is trigger that STARTS an investigation.
Do you see my point? People are assuming that reaching the top of the threat matrix as the result of investigation. Perhaps none is done at all. Perhaps the threat matrix is the mechanism by which we convert reports into investigations. Perhaps the threat matrix is filled through simple anonymous phone calls, and the items with the least information get priority until they can be placed into a more appropriate position in the matrix.
Either way, since we don't really know, why make the assumption that a mistake was made? Because it's humorous? Perhaps...but you can't overlook the obvious just to allow an assumption to seem true for the sake of humor.
What are the criteria for being at the top on the threat matrix for one day? What does it take? What puts something at the top?
I would guess: being the most serious threat for which there is little or no intelligence. (AKA, something dark and spooky)
Once intelligence starts to come in on an item, I would guess then that the threat goes down in the hierarchy. The more is known, the less of a threat it is. Also, intelligence might show it's not a threat at all.
So, all I see is something got reported (perhaps by one or more pranksters). It sounded really bad. No one had any information on it. It became a priority. Once it became a priority, work started. First task: quick look around, google, phone books, etc. Google comes up: just a video game character. Item drops off the matrix.
I don't see "top of the threat matrix" to mean "the most serious threat that all of our intelligence corroborates." I don't think it takes ANY corroboration at all to get on the matrix or reach the top. Actually, I am pretty damn sure this is the case. Why else would a video game character go to the top of the threat matrix? Because fields agents reported his activities? No. LACK of information is probably what put the character at the top of the matrix.
This is, I think, how it's supposed to go.
I don't see how so many of you conclude that the government doesn't know a real threat from a video game character. A threat can crop up in any one of a gazillion ways. Once made, they have to verify threats before they take them seriously. They did. They determined it was a video game character.
How else does it work? Magic? When a threat comes in, they use telepathic powers to determine that any given name is a real one and not a video game character? A quick google isn't to everyone's liking?
Dumbasses.
Way, way old.