Sure, it's possible that the answer was "you'll advance your career if you save mankind with this bill", but that almost never happens.
Spam doesn't just affect geeks. Don't you think that being able to claim truthfully that you were the sponsor of a bill that substantially reduced spam and saw many spammers fined/jailed would win a few votes?
The speed with which this system applies hundreds of tests to a message is also quite stunning, and a major boost to Perl's tacit reputation as a "slow" language.
I think not. lists.indymedia.org was using it, and it induced an almost complete system meltdown with emails taking over 5 days to deliver in some cases. They had to uninstall it and get some new hardware.
Then again, perhaps it was misconfigured or mis-installed so that it was invoked in an inefficient way - that's a possibility I suppose.
Re:RFC-821 Re-Write Will Make It Manageable
on
Spam Meeting Wrap-up
·
· Score: 1
You shouldn't force people to use it, because many people want to receive email from strangers. E.g. businesses, email helplines, etc. For that reason it's totally unworkable. Duh.
Re:Why do you need to do a rewrite?
on
Spam Meeting Wrap-up
·
· Score: 2, Informative
In a way, I guess you are correct, but it's a black hole that's configured by the receiving system.
Who the fuck do you think configures existing blackholes? The US government? Aliens? No, it's individual site administrators. They may choose to run with an unaltered public blacklist, but that's not inherent in the blacklist paradigm.
Right, but they don't all have to be preinstalled as part of the distro.
They don't have to be - just let your users choose whether to install all packages in the distro, or just the "recommended" ones. If they choose "Custom -> Everything", even after warnings that this will involve lots of bloat, because they think they know best... and then they complain that there are too many options - what can you do?
There's only so much you can do to save people from their own stupidity.
Basically, you need to know the difference if you ever want to write really good, efficient code,
No, that's misleading. In many, many cases you don't need to know that at all. There are situations where even the most academically frowned-upon inefficiencies, such as bubble sort algorithms, can be perfectly adequate for the task at hand. (However, people definitely should know of the existence of prewritten, pretested sort routines so that they don't waste time writing and [inadequately] debugging what thousands of other programmers have already done!)
Consider GUI-bound or disk-bound applications, where CPU speed for internal computations hardly matters. Premature optimisation can be a waste of time.
Opening the source code CAN increase the risk because it ALWAYS increases the exposure of the software to hackers and does not always have a substantial amount of peer review to counter-act that increased threat (I would submit that this is the case with most open source software). You can reiterate your open source articles of faith till you turn blue in the face, but I simply disagree.
Well, for the benefit of onlookers who are undecided, I'll put this counterargument: Exposing the source to "hackers" is not the only factor to take into consideration. Developers are more likely to be careful, to take pride in their work, and to produce secure code, when they know that their code can be viewed by all their users, and when they work in an open source style rather than as an only-in-it-for-the-money corporate code monkey. Many eyes make a lot of bugs shallow. When was the last time you heard of a typical piece of closed-source software touting its "security audit by a third party"? And, even if a closed source product is security audited, NDAs can be used to "sit on" bugs if the developer cannot be bothered to fix them. (Highly unethical, but it can happen.)
Especially with projects with diverse public participation, NDAs during a security audit of an open source product which allowed developers to ignore security holes would be unthinkable, and would result in huge media storms! At Microsoft, allowing developers to ignore security holes was (but hopefully is no longer) an implicit policy.
Lastly, security through obscurity is a very lousy way of fighting "hackers". Closed source is not invulnerable, as we've seen - and if your IIS installation gets hit and MS's "remedy" proves to be nonexistent or less than suitable, who do you turn to? You have no choice, short of scrapping your investment in IIS (which is probably advisable!): by and large, closed source == monopoly aftermarkets.
Using safer programming languages (recommended for many projects), or attracting some programming gurus who can prevent the most common security bugs getting into production code, are better strategies.
Say we do find that modification in the fictional intelligence gene, what's to say that modification doesn't also cause sever mental illness. You end up with a highly-intelligent, non-functional "human".
It's ironic - I would say that in a sense that person would not be very intelligent at all. Yet we have many historical examples of people like that - Kurt Godel, the guy in "A Beautiful Mind", etc. I think it just goes to show that intelligence cannot reasonably be considered a single-dimensional quantity. Someone can be highly intelligent at solving mathematical problems, but very dumb when it comes to dealing with the real world. (I also fall into this category, although not in such an extreme way as Godel.)
If they mix random victims addresses in with their own send-me-money addresses, they'll get lots of citizens screaming to vote down this law as harrassment.
Uh, who's doing the harrassing here?
The spammers are, not the law - and that is harrassment (I say "is" not "would" because they already do it) irrespective of whether any anti-spam laws exist.
At best, they'll be calling for the spammers head's for framing them - not calling for repealing in the law.
Besides, it should still be possible to track down the real culprit, if a lot of his/her "customers" send in complaints to some central processing center - such as SpamCop.net.
Developing America's skillset is the aim of DARPA grants; promoting science in other countries is the job of those countries!
But it's called "Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency" for good reason.
You're right that a lot of defense-related government spending is disguised subsidies. But equally, if some foreign researcher has developed some "innovative" technique for killing people more efficiently or more horribly - or something which would increase US military superiority on the battlefield - they're not necessarily going to turn up their noses at it...
There is one radical shift in play for anti-spam measures, we are going to move all the mailing list traffic onto a protocol like RSS that is a pull mode protocol rather than push. This removes all the horrid problems you get from the push model, like I can't unsubscribe and jane is sending spam and so on.
Great! What is this protocol going to be called, and where can we read about it?
Telling them they could have some gene therapy done on their fetus to have a "perfect" baby would probably strike most people in the world as playing God, and not something to be done.
Great! That would be an evolutionary advantage for atheists and broadminded religious people then! Excellent!!
If you actually manage to raise the bottom 10% it just means who makes up that bottom % will be smarter than the bottom 10% in the past. It will not change the fact that there will still be a bottom 10%.
Thus you display your own stupidity.;-)
Actually, no, I agree, but it's only conjecture. It could be that cybernetic enhancements could give us all effectively the same level of intelligence, far off into the future. Can you prove that that will never happen?
Oops. Apparently the Green Party doesn't support the Euro. Apart from that, my point still stands.
Re:visionaries vs reactionaries
on
DMCA, Auf Deutsch
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
As a historian once told me - history is a story of visionaries and reactionaries. The visionaries create the new future, and the reactionaries try to block those changes and keep the status quo. Here one might say, the USA is the visionary and old-Europe is the reactionary.
I disagree.
The US is constantly changing, and growing, where Europe is trying to maintain the world super power status they once had.
The US is trying to increase the reach of its world hegemony. The EU is effectively becoming (over the long term) an increasingly needed counterbalance to the US.
Another example, visionary currency traders figured out how to call a nations "bluff" (eg when when HK artifically peged their currency to the dollar) reactioaries grouped their currences together into a single large one (the Euro, but notice how the two strongest Euopean economies passed).
I don't see how the Euro is reactionary. In the UK, which has not joined the Euro, the Euro is a totally cross party issue. Left-wingers like Tony Benn and right-wing reactionaries like the current Conservative leader oppose it. But visionary left-wingers like the Green Party, centrists like the Liberal Democrats, and so-called "moderate" right-wingers like Kenneth Clarke support it.
When visionary leadership in the US went to route out a ruthless dictator who terrorists could possibly get deadly weapons from, reactionaries desperately tried to block it every step of the way.
Yes they do. Ideally, they produce one heavily bankrupt spammer, who vows to never, ever spam again.
I'm hoping that that rich bastard Alan Ralsky will meet that fate someday. It's not right that Ralsky can not only get away with theft of services, but also profit immensely from it. Those are ill-gotten gains and they should be taken away from him.
Leave the system alone and it will correct itself. Intelligent filters will evolve to "pre-read" the incoming mail and categorize it appropriately
Maybe in about 10-20 years time (give the developing world enough time to catch up and start using these intelligent filters in a major way) spam will become uneconomical and discredited thanks to filters. Maybe. That's great. But right now the wrongdoers need to be punished. They can't get away with this theft of bandwidth and time just because they're going to stopped years and years later (according to you; I'm not convinced). The whole point of law is to enforce morality and social order.
Anyway, I now realise we may have been talking at cross-purposes. In Computer Science, "concatenate" is a general term for adding one string to the end of another, whichever way it is implemented. Therefore, I thought you meant "a+b". I didn't realise that you might have meant "a.concat(b)". You could have been more clear.
I'd like to point out that this yet again confirm's greenrd's law:
Any post correcting someone else's grammar or spelling (or about spelling or grammar) will
inevitably contain a grammatical or spelling mistake itself.
It even uses StringBuffers if you just have "foo"+b.
Of course if you use constants the compiler can automatically concatenate them together into a single string in the.class file... but that's a special case.
Slashdot Mirror
Spam doesn't just affect geeks. Don't you think that being able to claim truthfully that you were the sponsor of a bill that substantially reduced spam and saw many spammers fined/jailed would win a few votes?
I think not. lists.indymedia.org was using it, and it induced an almost complete system meltdown with emails taking over 5 days to deliver in some cases. They had to uninstall it and get some new hardware.
Then again, perhaps it was misconfigured or mis-installed so that it was invoked in an inefficient way - that's a possibility I suppose.
Who the fuck do you think configures existing blackholes? The US government? Aliens? No, it's individual site administrators. They may choose to run with an unaltered public blacklist, but that's not inherent in the blacklist paradigm.
They don't have to be - just let your users choose whether to install all packages in the distro, or just the "recommended" ones. If they choose "Custom -> Everything", even after warnings that this will involve lots of bloat, because they think they know best... and then they complain that there are too many options - what can you do?
There's only so much you can do to save people from their own stupidity.
And even that only generated about $20 000 USD per month per porn site.
Aha! But I thought Ralsky claimed he never sent porn spam?
*Gasp*! Are you trying to imply that.... spammers lie ? I'm shocked... shocked, I tell you!
No, that's misleading. In many, many cases you don't need to know that at all. There are situations where even the most academically frowned-upon inefficiencies, such as bubble sort algorithms, can be perfectly adequate for the task at hand. (However, people definitely should know of the existence of prewritten, pretested sort routines so that they don't waste time writing and [inadequately] debugging what thousands of other programmers have already done!)
Consider GUI-bound or disk-bound applications, where CPU speed for internal computations hardly matters. Premature optimisation can be a waste of time.
Well, for the benefit of onlookers who are undecided, I'll put this counterargument: Exposing the source to "hackers" is not the only factor to take into consideration. Developers are more likely to be careful, to take pride in their work, and to produce secure code, when they know that their code can be viewed by all their users, and when they work in an open source style rather than as an only-in-it-for-the-money corporate code monkey. Many eyes make a lot of bugs shallow. When was the last time you heard of a typical piece of closed-source software touting its "security audit by a third party"? And, even if a closed source product is security audited, NDAs can be used to "sit on" bugs if the developer cannot be bothered to fix them. (Highly unethical, but it can happen.)
Especially with projects with diverse public participation, NDAs during a security audit of an open source product which allowed developers to ignore security holes would be unthinkable, and would result in huge media storms! At Microsoft, allowing developers to ignore security holes was (but hopefully is no longer) an implicit policy.
Lastly, security through obscurity is a very lousy way of fighting "hackers". Closed source is not invulnerable, as we've seen - and if your IIS installation gets hit and MS's "remedy" proves to be nonexistent or less than suitable, who do you turn to? You have no choice, short of scrapping your investment in IIS (which is probably advisable!): by and large, closed source == monopoly aftermarkets.
Using safer programming languages (recommended for many projects), or attracting some programming gurus who can prevent the most common security bugs getting into production code, are better strategies.
It's ironic - I would say that in a sense that person would not be very intelligent at all. Yet we have many historical examples of people like that - Kurt Godel, the guy in "A Beautiful Mind", etc. I think it just goes to show that intelligence cannot reasonably be considered a single-dimensional quantity. Someone can be highly intelligent at solving mathematical problems, but very dumb when it comes to dealing with the real world. (I also fall into this category, although not in such an extreme way as Godel.)
In order to get tags to display "as is", you have to escape them.
Nonsense.
Subpoena the spammer and the suspect. One of them must have records. If the spammer has no accounts, jail them for tax evasion!
Uh, who's doing the harrassing here?
The spammers are, not the law - and that is harrassment (I say "is" not "would" because they already do it) irrespective of whether any anti-spam laws exist.
At best, they'll be calling for the spammers head's for framing them - not calling for repealing in the law.
Besides, it should still be possible to track down the real culprit, if a lot of his/her "customers" send in complaints to some central processing center - such as SpamCop.net.
But it's called "Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency" for good reason.
You're right that a lot of defense-related government spending is disguised subsidies. But equally, if some foreign researcher has developed some "innovative" technique for killing people more efficiently or more horribly - or something which would increase US military superiority on the battlefield - they're not necessarily going to turn up their noses at it...
Well they don't, explicitly. But that's the implication I draw from the DoD statement that Theo quoted (click on the link in the article).
Great! What is this protocol going to be called, and where can we read about it?
Great! That would be an evolutionary advantage for atheists and broadminded religious people then! Excellent!!
Thus you display your own stupidity. ;-)
Actually, no, I agree, but it's only conjecture. It could be that cybernetic enhancements could give us all effectively the same level of intelligence, far off into the future. Can you prove that that will never happen?
Thank goodness we now have an effective enforcement mechanism to prevent this kind of monopolisation, thanks to the MS antitrust case. Right?
Right??
We have, right?
I disagree.
The US is constantly changing, and growing, where Europe is trying to maintain the world super power status they once had.
The US is trying to increase the reach of its world hegemony. The EU is effectively becoming (over the long term) an increasingly needed counterbalance to the US.
Another example, visionary currency traders figured out how to call a nations "bluff" (eg when when HK artifically peged their currency to the dollar) reactioaries grouped their currences together into a single large one (the Euro, but notice how the two strongest Euopean economies passed).
I don't see how the Euro is reactionary. In the UK, which has not joined the Euro, the Euro is a totally cross party issue. Left-wingers like Tony Benn and right-wing reactionaries like the current Conservative leader oppose it. But visionary left-wingers like the Green Party, centrists like the Liberal Democrats, and so-called "moderate" right-wingers like Kenneth Clarke support it.
When visionary leadership in the US went to route out a ruthless dictator who terrorists could possibly get deadly weapons from, reactionaries desperately tried to block it every step of the way.
This invasion is not about weapons of mass destruction.
Yes they do. Ideally, they produce one heavily bankrupt spammer, who vows to never, ever spam again.
I'm hoping that that rich bastard Alan Ralsky will meet that fate someday. It's not right that Ralsky can not only get away with theft of services, but also profit immensely from it. Those are ill-gotten gains and they should be taken away from him.
Leave the system alone and it will correct itself. Intelligent filters will evolve to "pre-read" the incoming mail and categorize it appropriately
Maybe in about 10-20 years time (give the developing world enough time to catch up and start using these intelligent filters in a major way) spam will become uneconomical and discredited thanks to filters. Maybe. That's great. But right now the wrongdoers need to be punished. They can't get away with this theft of bandwidth and time just because they're going to stopped years and years later (according to you; I'm not convinced). The whole point of law is to enforce morality and social order.
The latest version of mplayer can play Quicktime Sorenson files, like this one, using a free, legal Sorenson binary codec.
Anyway, I now realise we may have been talking at cross-purposes. In Computer Science, "concatenate" is a general term for adding one string to the end of another, whichever way it is implemented. Therefore, I thought you meant "a+b". I didn't realise that you might have meant "a.concat(b)". You could have been more clear.
"Um... Not to get into a pissing match, but you've clearly never tried it."
.class file... but that's a special case.
Yes, I have. And I tried again just now to check if it had changed. Sure enough, it still uses StringBuffers:
System.out.println ("Output is: " + a + ", " + b + ", " + c);
is translated to:
34 getstatic #8 <Field java.io.PrintStream out>
37 new #9 <Class java.lang.StringBuffer>
40 dup
41 invokespecial #10 <Method java.lang.StringBuffer()>
44 ldc #11 <String "Output is: ">
46 invokevirtual #12 <Method java.lang.StringBuffer append(java.lang.String)>
49 aload_2
50 invokevirtual #12 <Method java.lang.StringBuffer append(java.lang.String)>
53 ldc #13 <String ", ">
55 invokevirtual #12 <Method java.lang.StringBuffer append(java.lang.String)>
58 aload_3
59 invokevirtual #12 <Method java.lang.StringBuffer append(java.lang.String)>
62 ldc #13 <String ", ">
64 invokevirtual #12 <Method java.lang.StringBuffer append(java.lang.String)>
67 aload 4
69 invokevirtual #12 <Method java.lang.StringBuffer append(java.lang.String)>
72 invokevirtual #14 <Method java.lang.String toString()>
75 invokevirtual #15 <Method void println(java.lang.String)>
78 getstatic #8 <Field java.io.PrintStream out>
It even uses StringBuffers if you just have "foo"+b.
Of course if you use constants the compiler can automatically concatenate them together into a single string in the