Wikipedia articles are supposed to cite their references - many do - many don't.
If you are doing research into something that matters - rather than just wondering if this episode of 'Monk' is one you've seen already - then by all means read Wikipedia. Then look up the books and papers that it references - then cite those.
The way the rabbids and the dungeon guard gradually go from booing you to respecting you to cheering you - then gradually to making you their idol is rather neat. Little touches like that really helped an otherwise disjoint series of Mini games 'hang together'.
I was disappointed with multiplayer though. Once my son and I had played all the way through 'story' mode, the game lost it's appeal very quickly - when we finally managed to track down a second controller, we were devastated to discover that there was no split-screen versions of the racing games and that many of the other Mini-games didn't let you both play together.
One criticism I have with the "plunger-shooting" levels in Rayman is that the game controls not just the camera - but also your motion through the level so all you get to do is aim and shoot. I'd appreciate a mode where you can use the joystick on the nunchuck to move yourself around in the world.
That's an even bigger problem with Wii Sports "Tennis". It would be a trivial software addition to allow you to use the nunchuck joystick or the '+' pad to move your player around the court - and it would have made it much more challenging. I can understand them trying to 'dumb it down' so that people could pick up the game and immediately enjoy it - but it should have been made a selectable option - (maybe something you can 'unlock' once you've reached the 'pro' level).
Another good 'party' game - with great multi-player stuff is "Rampage" - it was half the price of all of the other games ($26 in WalMart) - they've added some 3D-ness to the original - much nicer graphics than the N64 version - but it's GREAT fun with the Wii controller. Two player is just hilarious. Mindless destruction! Yeaah! It's not as good as Rayman - but once you've played Rayman all the way through, it loses it's appeal pretty quickly. At almost half the price, Rampage has given us more hours of fun.
From TFA:...a formula he's dubbed Temporal Motivational Theory, which takes into account factors such as the expectancy a person has of succeeding with a given task (E), the value of completing the task (V), the desirability of the task (Utility), its immediacy or availability (L) and the person's sensitivity to delay (D). It looks like this and uses the Greek letter L (capital gamma): Utility = E x V / LD
Hmmmm - so precisely what units are these variables given in? Because if you don't know - the equation has no predictive value whatever. All you can say is that utility gets bigger if expectancy or value goes up or if immediacy/availability or sensitivity to delay goes dowm.
In other words, when it's important and valuable and you can't delay and it's "available immediately" - then the task is more likely to get done. Wow! Who'da guessed! But how does he know it's not E+V/LD or E+V-L-D....if you don't know what units you are using or even how these things are to be measuresd - it's just bullshit.
This kind of pseudo scientific claptrap really needs to go away.
nVidia have been very open about the reasons why they can't OpenSource their code - I think we have to take that as a true statement. It's not going to happen - period.
Can we clone their drivers? Maybe - but it could take years to do that - and no sooner we succeed then we'll discover that there have been four generations of new hardware since we started - and the hardware we can support will be so far behind that very few people will want to use it.
You *might* be able to do this for a relatively simple peripheral like a WiFi card - but graphics chips are probably the most complex (and least standardized) single chip device in existance. The driver has to contain a full-up compiler for the OpenGL shader language for chrissakes! (And no, you can't use an existing compiler or translate to some other language because this is a language that supports 4-way parallel arithmetic and has the bizarrest optimisation requirements imaginable!)
This is a massive undertaking. $10,000 doesn't even scratch the surface of the work involved. I seriously doubt that a cash injection of a million dollars would get you a working, useful driver within a couple of years...let alone maintaining it and continually reverse-engineering the next generation of hardware.
Your driver would probably (by necessity) infringe on a bunch of patents too.
Whilst I'd REALLY like the peace of mind of knowing that there is a working, efficient and up-to-date-with-modern-hardware OpenSourced driver out there - it's *so* not going to happen. We need to find clean ways to wall off the nVidia driver so that it can function without being a security loophole and so it can survive kernel changes and such.
In the particular example given, a spammer trying to sell Vitamins using the word 'B12' would have a strong incentive to scan Wikipedia and remove all instances of the word 'B12' wherever it was found - and perhaps even to insert it spuriously in a few places where the end user might be white-listing words too.
This would be very bad indeed for Wikipedia because it gives a motive to vandals - and not just to the stupid vandals we have right now - but to the annoyingly inventive ones too.
The problem is that tens to hundreds of millions of individual contributions were predecated on the fact that there is no advertising on the site. It's deeply unfair to all of those people to change the rules only after it has reached maturity. I would never have written a word for them if they supported advertising. Disallowing advertising is one of the Wikipedia core policies.
It's not that Wiki is short of money - they always meet their free donation targets - the present drive has reached $850k in just couple of weeks - the average donation is $47. It doesn't need advertising.
What's going on here is that some people want to use the 'sponsorship' to start new projects - but there is a real ethical question here. Unfair though it would be to use people's free contributions to pay for the upkeep of the encyclopedia when those contributions were given on the basis of an advert-free site - to use that money for something entirely different is downright unethical.
The problem is that anything you can put up on the screen can be rendered using the code inside an open-sourced browser and saved as an image file. Hence there is no possible means to encode or encrypt or otherwise mangle the image that can't be read by a sufficiently good font recognition algorithm.
The trick has to be to make life harder for the image recognition step - not to make it harder to feed the image into that stage.
So - more noise in the background - more crazy font choices - more 'meta' stuff like "Please type this in backwards" that the AI program will find hard to understand. If they get too good at AI image extraction you can use cultural knowledge that the program won't have "Who lives at the north pole and brings presents to children at Christmas?"
In the limit, this is like a Turing test - can the bad guy's program answer questions sufficiently like a human?
If the bad guys can solve this AI problem then they are doing better than the great artificial intelligence minds of our time!
You can achieve random positioning just by putting the captcha into a larger image - that costs more bandwidth - but so does this approach. I don't see the benefit.
I think a better approach is to use some natural language: "Please type the following word in backwards: WIBBLE" - "Please type in every alternate letter of this word XPQUNTF" - "Please tell me the name of a baby dog". "What is the first word in this paragraph?"
Just think up a few dozen of these and you're done. Providing no two websites use the same list of questions, the bad guy can't break into a large number of sites automatically without a truly industrial strength AI package! Remember we don't need a defense against one-off attacks because those guys can just type in the captcha anyway.
The irony of that was that the format that eventually won (VHS) was technologically the worst of the three. The format that lost out the fastest (V2000) was technologically the best of the three (by far actually). If there is something to be learned from this it is that technological superiority doesn't count for much in setting global de-facto standards.
The thing got up to 300 kph - 186mph - and it climbed several thousand feet. He was zipping alongside the plane in formation, you could see he was turning under full control around those jagged mountain peaks. That's definitely flying!
The problem with takeoff from the ground is that if his engines crap out on him at a couple of hundred feet, he has no time left to open his parachute and he'll be dead for sure. It makes much more sense to iron out any technical glitches with a drop from a plane so he always has time to open his chute in the event of problems. He's doing this very carefully - one baby step at a time.
The other problem with takeoff is that unless he has wheels or ski's or something, there is no way to build up enough speed for the wings to generate any lift. So he's going to have to have enough thrust to take off vertically - and according to TFA, that's something that'll have to wait for the next generation of machine.
He handed over his college account userId and password - and his Social Security number - if it were a frame-up, how would the people doing the framing find those out?
Hey - don't knock it. If you are using rot-26 encryption you're going to need something a little harder to trace than "your next door neighbours wireless" - and IP_over_Avian_Carriers is VERY hard to trace!
The real mystery is how somebody this sharp, informed and educated managed to do so badly in college. I mean, the guy's obviously got street smarts and book smarts.
You are forgetting that he's a communications director - you couldn't possibly expect him to understand how email and public forums work.
It's just hilarious - this guy is supposed to be a Republican Communications Director?! A Communications Director didn't realise he was posting to a public site using his real name?! Yikes!
When they tell him that the Feds may have busted the operation by cracking their rot-26 encryption I nearly choked on my breakfast (cold pizza of course)! This is a classic.
On one of the linked sites, the guy is claiming that he was 'under the influence' for the whole exchange and is 'seeking treatment'. So he's claiming he was blind drunk for the entire two weeks? Wow - the Republicans either have better parties than I ever suspected - or they truly are drowning their sorrows after recent election defeats!
Since we believe that spammers are targetting a very small section of society who actually reply to this crap, we could try to identify who those people are.
A 'good guy' at the ISP could set up a deliberate fake-Spam-sending operation to his own customers intentionally bypassing the ISP's spam filters - and in a form that uses techniques similar to the ones the real spammers are using. The general community would be somewhat inconvenienced by this - but we don't intend to do it often - each customer would only get a handful of extra spams per month - they'd never notice. The plan is to use these 'white hat' spams as a honey pot for Spam-respondants. They want to take up these fake offers - so they reply to the email - or visit a fake web site set up by the ISP. Either way, the ISP now knows who the idiots are.
Because our 'White hat' spams bypass the ISP's spam filters - but they test the client's filters realistically, they reach a wider number of respondants than a real spammer could - but they don't reach people who are effectively filtering current spam techiques. The honeypot will therefore capture a wider number of gullible idiots than the real spammer ever could - the offers the white hat spam makes can be even more tempting than real spammers can afford to be.
Now the ISP has a list of his customers that are gullible idiots who are likely to respond to spam. He could just cancel those people's service - or send them notices pointing out that they are the cause of all the problems. There aren't many of them - so the ISP isn't going to make a big dent in his bottom-line. If all of the ISP's did this, it would have a long-term effect on Spammer's profit margins. The idiots would be kicked out and blacklisted by ISP after ISP getting more and more inconvenienced and spending less and less time online until they either find they can't get an email account anymore or they learn that what they are doing is antisocial - so they stop. Company email providers can use training and actual punishment of employees who abuse company email systems for these purposes.
Perhaps an even better solution is to offer to give this list of idiots to known spammers and offer not to filter email to those people - ON THE CONDITION THAT THE SPAMMER NOT SEND EMAIL TO ANY OTHER OF THE ISP's CUSTOMERS! The spammer would have a ready-made list of high-grade customers. That's gotta be more profitable than going through the hassle of blasting out millions of emails. By letting him do what he actually wants to do - we can avoid the anti-social consequences of the lengths he is normally forced to go.
The spammer gains because he can "go legit" and talk only to people who are very likely to respond. The ISP gains because they lose that big spam burden. People who don't respond to spam win because they don't get anywhere near so much spam anymore and the idiots who respond to spam are (presumably) happy because they are getting more "valuable stock tips" offers to buy "fake Rolexes" and more opportunities to deal with Nigerians with unlikely amounts of cash to transfer.
The ISP could actually deliver encrypted addresses to the spammer for the gullible idiots and decrypt them in the ISP's mail server. If the spammer is found to continue to spam addresses not on the list then the decryptor for those primo addresses could be turned off as punishment.
Ultimately, if this worked, we'd evolve into an opt-in advertising infrastructure that would allow ultra-cheap advertising rates with "no questions asked" - with ISP's, "busnessmen" and customers working together....well, we could hope.
The nasty thing about the image-based spam is that it capitalises on the fact that our eyes and brains are very very good indeed at spotting patterns in noise. This allows them to obfuscate their text message to the point where image recognition approaches to rejecting it are doomed.
They are doing what we planned to do - we wanted to somehow make sending each message computationally expensive so they couldn't send as many. In fact what's happened is that the computational cost of filtering has now become so extreme that we can't really consider doing it.
Worse still, if we put in the effort to make really good text recognition that can detect the spam and discard it - the bad guys can use that exact same software to break capcha's.
It's really depressing.
Stopping the morons who reply to these adverts has to be our best line of attack. I'm not sure how we should do that - but getting some publicity out there would help. We need government-funded TV ads telling people that THERE ARE NO PILLS THAT'LL MAKE YOU DICK BIGGER. NOBODY EVER, EVER WANTS YOU TO TRANSFER 5 MILLION DOLLARS FOR THEM. ABSOLUTELY NO GOOD STOCK TIPS ARE EVER GIVEN AWAY FOR FREE VIA EMAIL.
In the NPR interview with the guys who ran the study, they said that it seemed that the only limit on the speed that practiced humans could track the scent was the speed they could crawl with their noses that close to the ground. That makes sense - I mean you can't crawl along with your nose literally in the grass at any kind of speed at all. A dog is able to run at full speed with it's nose just inches from the ground - and it's eyes are placed so it can still be looking forward as it does it.
So this may have nothing whatever to do with the sensitivity of our sense of smell and more to do with the shape of our head, neck and the length of our fore-limbs.
We mostly evolved to use our sense of smell for detecting whether food has gone bad or not - and for that, having nostrils right above our mouths is plenty good enough.
Dogs are evolved to track prey and find carrion - they need to be able to sniff and run at the same time.
Dog's noses are very impressive...it's incredible to see the kinds of tricks they can manage. But I wonder where that statement of "a million times more sensitive than humans" comes from - I bet it's something some journalist guessed at 100 years ago that we are all passing on as if it were the definitive answer. This study suggests to me that some simple practicing could narrow that gap considerably.
It's not evident from the slash summary - but one interesting discovery is that we actually smell in stereo - hence two nostrils.
That comes as a surprise to me - our other stereo sense organs (eyes and ears) are placed just about as far apart on our heads as is structurally possible - but our nostrils are really close together. OK - we don't have a really great sense of smell and we don't rely on it at all - but dogs clearly do - and their nostrils are also very close together.
You'd think we (or at least dogs) would have nostrils mounted just below our ears.
I'm not sure I understand all of the details here - but I presume (please correct me if I'm wrong) that shuffling code around will tend to randomise the nature of memory corruption bugs in software.
For example, an array off-by-one overflow error might benignly overwrite an unused RAM location during debug - but one time in a hundred the random shuffle could cause it to screw up something important. This would make software stability generally worse - and unreproducable bugs would be much, much harder to find than reproducible ones.
Of course ideally we want software that has no bugs - but for software of any size, that just ain't gonna happen. It'll be interesting to see whether the benfits of helping insecure software avoid letting the bad guys in outweigh the penalty of making somewhat buggy software less reliable.
Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia articles are supposed to cite their references - many do - many don't.
If you are doing research into something that matters - rather than just wondering
if this episode of 'Monk' is one you've seen already - then by all means read
Wikipedia. Then look up the books and papers that it references - then cite those.
The way the rabbids and the dungeon guard gradually go from booing you to respecting you to cheering you - then gradually to making you their idol is rather neat. Little touches like that really helped an otherwise disjoint series of Mini games 'hang together'.
I was disappointed with multiplayer though. Once my son and I had played all the way through 'story' mode, the game lost it's appeal very quickly - when we finally managed to track down a second controller, we were devastated to discover that there was no split-screen versions of the racing games and that many of the other Mini-games didn't let you both play together.
One criticism I have with the "plunger-shooting" levels in Rayman is that the game controls not just the camera - but also your motion through the level so all you get to do is aim and shoot. I'd appreciate a mode where you can use the joystick on the nunchuck to move yourself around in the world.
That's an even bigger problem with Wii Sports "Tennis". It would be a trivial software addition to allow you to use the nunchuck joystick or the '+' pad to move your player around the court - and it would have made it much more challenging. I can understand them trying to 'dumb it down' so that people could pick up the game and immediately enjoy it - but it should have been made a selectable option - (maybe something you can 'unlock' once you've reached the 'pro' level).
Another good 'party' game - with great multi-player stuff is "Rampage" - it was half the price of all of the other games ($26 in WalMart) - they've added some 3D-ness to the original - much nicer graphics than the N64 version - but it's GREAT fun with the Wii controller. Two player is just hilarious. Mindless destruction! Yeaah! It's not as good as Rayman - but once you've played Rayman all the way through, it loses it's appeal pretty quickly. At almost half the price, Rampage has given us more hours of fun.
So what units are they in?
From TFA: ...a formula he's dubbed Temporal Motivational Theory, which takes into account factors such as the expectancy a person has of succeeding with a given task (E), the value of completing the task (V), the desirability of the task (Utility), its immediacy or availability (L) and the person's sensitivity to delay (D). It looks like this and uses the Greek letter L (capital gamma): Utility = E x V / LD
Hmmmm - so precisely what units are these variables given in? Because if you don't know - the equation has no predictive value whatever. All you can say is that utility gets bigger if expectancy or value goes up or if immediacy/availability or sensitivity to delay goes dowm.
In other words, when it's important and valuable and you can't delay and it's "available immediately" - then the task is more likely to get done. Wow! Who'da guessed! But how does he know it's not E+V/LD or E+V-L-D....if you don't know what units you are using or even how these things are to be measuresd - it's just bullshit.
This kind of pseudo scientific claptrap really needs to go away.
nVidia have been very open about the reasons why they can't OpenSource their code - I think we have to take that as a true statement. It's not going to happen - period.
Can we clone their drivers? Maybe - but it could take years to do that - and no sooner we succeed then we'll discover that there have been four generations of new hardware since we started - and the hardware we can support will be so far behind that very few people will want to use it.
You *might* be able to do this for a relatively simple peripheral like a WiFi card - but graphics chips are probably the most complex (and least standardized) single chip device in existance. The driver has to contain a full-up compiler for the OpenGL shader language for chrissakes! (And no, you can't use an existing compiler or translate to some other language because this is a language that supports 4-way parallel arithmetic and has the bizarrest optimisation requirements imaginable!)
This is a massive undertaking. $10,000 doesn't even scratch the surface of the work involved. I seriously doubt that a cash injection of a million dollars would get you a working, useful driver within a couple of years...let alone maintaining it and continually reverse-engineering the next generation of hardware.
Your driver would probably (by necessity) infringe on a bunch of patents too.
Whilst I'd REALLY like the peace of mind of knowing that there is a working, efficient and up-to-date-with-modern-hardware OpenSourced driver out there - it's *so* not going to happen. We need to find clean ways to wall off the nVidia driver so that it can function without being a security loophole and so it can survive kernel changes and such.
In the particular example given, a spammer trying to sell Vitamins using the word 'B12' would have a strong incentive to scan Wikipedia and remove all instances of the word 'B12' wherever it was found - and perhaps even to insert it spuriously in a few places where the end user might be white-listing words too.
This would be very bad indeed for Wikipedia because it gives a motive to vandals - and not just to the stupid vandals we have right now - but to the annoyingly inventive ones too.
Urgh!
You could probably rig up a bicycle pump to do the same thing.
These things are either so obviously and trivially easy to cheat or so spectacularly inconvenient for the sober motorist, it's a ridiculous idea.
The problem is that tens to hundreds of millions of individual contributions were predecated on the fact that there is no advertising on the site. It's deeply unfair to all of those people to change the rules only after it has reached maturity. I would never have written a word for them if they supported advertising. Disallowing advertising is one of the Wikipedia core policies.
It's not that Wiki is short of money - they always meet their free donation targets - the present drive has reached $850k in just couple of weeks - the average donation is $47. It doesn't need advertising.
What's going on here is that some people want to use the 'sponsorship' to start new projects - but there is a real ethical question here. Unfair though it would be to use people's free contributions to pay for the upkeep of the encyclopedia when those contributions were given on the basis of an advert-free site - to use that money for something entirely different is downright unethical.
The problem is that anything you can put up on the screen can be rendered using the code inside an open-sourced browser and saved as an image file. Hence there is no possible means to encode or encrypt or otherwise mangle the image that can't be read by a sufficiently good font recognition algorithm.
The trick has to be to make life harder for the image recognition step - not to make it harder to feed the image into that stage.
So - more noise in the background - more crazy font choices - more 'meta' stuff like "Please type this in backwards" that the AI program will find hard to understand. If they get too good at AI image extraction you can use cultural knowledge that the program won't have "Who lives at the north pole and brings presents to children at Christmas?"
In the limit, this is like a Turing test - can the bad guy's program answer questions sufficiently like a human?
If the bad guys can solve this AI problem then they are doing better than the great artificial intelligence minds of our time!
You can achieve random positioning just by putting the captcha into a larger image - that costs more bandwidth - but so does this approach. I don't see the benefit.
I think a better approach is to use some natural language: "Please type the following word in backwards: WIBBLE" - "Please type in every alternate letter of this word XPQUNTF" - "Please tell me the name of a baby dog". "What is the first word in this paragraph?"
Just think up a few dozen of these and you're done. Providing no two websites use the same list of questions, the bad guy can't break into a large number of sites automatically without a truly industrial strength AI package! Remember we don't need a defense against one-off attacks because those guys can just type in the captcha anyway.
The irony of that was that the format that eventually won (VHS) was technologically the worst of the three. The format that lost out the fastest (V2000) was technologically the best of the three (by far actually). If there is something to be learned from this it is that technological superiority doesn't count for much in setting global de-facto standards.
The thing got up to 300 kph - 186mph - and it climbed several thousand feet. He was zipping alongside the plane in formation, you could see he was turning under full control around those jagged mountain peaks. That's definitely flying!
The problem with takeoff from the ground is that if his engines crap out on him at a couple of hundred feet, he has no time left to open his parachute and he'll be dead for sure. It makes much more sense to iron out any technical glitches with a drop from a plane so he always has time to open his chute in the event of problems. He's doing this very carefully - one baby step at a time.
The other problem with takeoff is that unless he has wheels or ski's or something, there is no way to build up enough speed for the wings to generate any lift. So he's going to have to have enough thrust to take off vertically - and according to TFA, that's something that'll have to wait for the next generation of machine.
Dear Santa,
If it's not too late, I would like to add a jetpack to my Xmas list. You can cross off the PS3 if that helps.
Thanks!
He handed over his college account userId and password - and his Social Security number - if it were a frame-up, how would the people doing the framing find those out?
Hey - don't knock it. If you are using rot-26 encryption you're going to need something a little harder to trace than "your next door neighbours wireless" - and IP_over_Avian_Carriers is VERY hard to trace!
Hmmm - so I'm taking to an evil black-hat hacker whom I've never met. I know! I'll give him my username and password (and social security and DOB)...
Smart!
Sure he broke the law - he comissioned an illegal act. Conspiracy to commit a crime is an actual crime even if the crime itself is never committed.
The real mystery is how somebody this sharp, informed and educated managed to do so badly in college. I mean, the guy's obviously got street smarts and book smarts.
You are forgetting that he's a communications director - you couldn't possibly expect him to understand how email and public forums work.
It's just hilarious - this guy is supposed to be a Republican Communications Director?! A Communications Director didn't realise he was posting to a public site using his real name?! Yikes!
When they tell him that the Feds may have busted the operation by cracking their rot-26 encryption I nearly choked on my breakfast (cold pizza of course)! This is a classic.
On one of the linked sites, the guy is claiming that he was 'under the influence' for the whole exchange and is 'seeking treatment'. So he's claiming he was blind drunk for the entire two weeks? Wow - the Republicans either have better parties than I ever suspected - or they truly are drowning their sorrows after recent election defeats!
He needs to go to jail for a few years.
Since we believe that spammers are targetting a very small section of society who actually reply to this crap, we could try to identify who those people are.
...well, we could hope.
A 'good guy' at the ISP could set up a deliberate fake-Spam-sending operation to his own customers intentionally bypassing the ISP's spam filters - and in a form that uses techniques similar to the ones the real spammers are using. The general community would be somewhat inconvenienced by this - but we don't intend to do it often - each customer would only get a handful of extra spams per month - they'd never notice. The plan is to use these 'white hat' spams as a honey pot for Spam-respondants. They want to take up these fake offers - so they reply to the email - or visit a fake web site set up by the ISP. Either way, the ISP now knows who the idiots are.
Because our 'White hat' spams bypass the ISP's spam filters - but they test the client's filters realistically, they reach a wider number of respondants than a real spammer could - but they don't reach people who are effectively filtering current spam techiques. The honeypot will therefore capture a wider number of gullible idiots than the real spammer ever could - the offers the white hat spam makes can be even more tempting than real spammers can afford to be.
Now the ISP has a list of his customers that are gullible idiots who are likely to respond to spam. He could just cancel those people's service - or send them notices pointing out that they are the cause of all the problems. There aren't many of them - so the ISP isn't going to make a big dent in his bottom-line. If all of the ISP's did this, it would have a long-term effect on Spammer's profit margins. The idiots would be kicked out and blacklisted by ISP after ISP getting more and more inconvenienced and spending less and less time online until they either find they can't get an email account anymore or they learn that what they are doing is antisocial - so they stop. Company email providers can use training and actual punishment of employees who abuse company email systems for these purposes.
Perhaps an even better solution is to offer to give this list of idiots to known spammers and offer not to filter email to those people - ON THE CONDITION THAT THE SPAMMER NOT SEND EMAIL TO ANY OTHER OF THE ISP's CUSTOMERS! The spammer would have a ready-made list of high-grade customers. That's gotta be more profitable than going through the hassle of blasting out millions of emails. By letting him do what he actually wants to do - we can avoid the anti-social consequences of the lengths he is normally forced to go.
The spammer gains because he can "go legit" and talk only to people who are very likely to respond. The ISP gains because they lose that big spam burden. People who don't respond to spam win because they don't get anywhere near so much spam anymore and the idiots who respond to spam are (presumably) happy because they are getting more "valuable stock tips" offers to buy "fake Rolexes" and more opportunities to deal with Nigerians with unlikely amounts of cash to transfer.
The ISP could actually deliver encrypted addresses to the spammer for the gullible idiots and decrypt them in the ISP's mail server. If the spammer is found to continue to spam addresses not on the list then the decryptor for those primo addresses could be turned off as punishment.
Ultimately, if this worked, we'd evolve into an opt-in advertising infrastructure that would allow ultra-cheap advertising rates with "no questions asked" - with ISP's, "busnessmen" and customers working together.
Steve
The nasty thing about the image-based spam is that it capitalises on the fact that our eyes and brains are very very good indeed at spotting patterns in noise. This allows them to obfuscate their text message to the point where image recognition approaches to rejecting it are doomed.
They are doing what we planned to do - we wanted to somehow make sending each message computationally expensive so they couldn't send as many. In fact what's happened is that the computational cost of filtering has now become so extreme that we can't really consider doing it.
Worse still, if we put in the effort to make really good text recognition that can detect the spam and discard it - the bad guys can use that exact same software to break capcha's.
It's really depressing.
Stopping the morons who reply to these adverts has to be our best line of attack. I'm not sure how we should do that - but getting some publicity out there would help. We need government-funded TV ads telling people that THERE ARE NO PILLS THAT'LL MAKE YOU DICK BIGGER. NOBODY EVER, EVER WANTS YOU TO TRANSFER 5 MILLION DOLLARS FOR THEM. ABSOLUTELY NO GOOD STOCK TIPS ARE EVER GIVEN AWAY FOR FREE VIA EMAIL.
It's going to be tough.
Eyes and ears are placed dramatically differently in predators and prey - but nostrils are pretty much always close together in all animals.
It's definitely a thought-provoking topic.
In the NPR interview with the guys who ran the study, they said that it seemed that the only limit on the speed that practiced humans could track the scent was the speed they could crawl with their noses that close to the ground. That makes sense - I mean you can't crawl along with your nose literally in the grass at any kind of speed at all. A dog is able to run at full speed with it's nose just inches from the ground - and it's eyes are placed so it can still be looking forward as it does it.
So this may have nothing whatever to do with the sensitivity of our sense of smell and more to do with the shape of our head, neck and the length of our fore-limbs.
We mostly evolved to use our sense of smell for detecting whether food has gone bad or not - and for that, having nostrils right above our mouths is plenty good enough.
Dogs are evolved to track prey and find carrion - they need to be able to sniff and run at the same time.
Dog's noses are very impressive...it's incredible to see the kinds of tricks they can manage. But I wonder where that statement of "a million times more sensitive than humans" comes from - I bet it's something some journalist guessed at 100 years ago that we are all passing on as if it were the definitive answer. This study suggests to me that some simple practicing could narrow that gap considerably.
It's not evident from the slash summary - but one interesting discovery is that we actually smell in stereo - hence two nostrils.
That comes as a surprise to me - our other stereo sense organs (eyes and ears) are placed just about as far apart on our heads as is structurally possible - but our nostrils are really close together. OK - we don't have a really great sense of smell and we don't rely on it at all - but dogs clearly do - and their nostrils are also very close together.
You'd think we (or at least dogs) would have nostrils mounted just below our ears.
Weird.
I'm not sure I understand all of the details here - but I presume (please correct me if I'm wrong) that shuffling code around will tend to randomise the nature of memory corruption bugs in software.
For example, an array off-by-one overflow error might benignly overwrite an unused RAM location during debug - but one time in a hundred the random shuffle could cause it to screw up something important. This would make software stability generally worse - and unreproducable bugs would be much, much harder to find than reproducible ones.
Of course ideally we want software that has no bugs - but for software of any size, that just ain't gonna happen. It'll be interesting to see whether the benfits of helping insecure software avoid letting the bad guys in outweigh the penalty of making somewhat buggy software less reliable.