Where's the Asian spammers?
on
Mapping the Spam
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
It's a fascinating site, a really cool map.
But where are all the Asian spammers? I'd
guesstimate that I get 30 or 40 foreign-language
spams apparently from Taiwan, Malaysia, and India every day. It's more than half of all the spam
I get now.
serialize the data to plain ascii. I assume no software can
restrict taking stuff out of binary documents, and then sending that flat data to a friend
The Fritz chip will prevent any non-[MS|RIAA|MPAA]-approved
software from accessing a protected document. And
in the Palladium/Fritz scheme, to get [MS|RIAA|MPAA] approval the application will not be allowed to have a useful "save" option.
Of course, maybe all you need is a single "buggy" but approved application to get around all this.
Another way would be to digitize the video or
audio coming out of your PC, but after the
MPAA makes owning or building unrestricted
A/D converters illegal this won't be an option. (Except to those of us who know how to
build A/D converters out of stone knives and
bearskins and live in the underground economy).
But I can think of one way Microsoft's plan might become relevant: if so many people adopt the secure
platforms that network effects cause open platforms to wither (because the secure platforms will be
crippled so they can't interoperate with the open platforms).
Microsoft has been doing this for years. Look
at, for example, the Microsoft Telnet terminal
emulation that ships with windows. It does
such a crappy job that anyone who uses it
to connect to remote (implicitly non-MS)
machines will decide that it's such a pain that
they give up out of frustration.
which will
come solely from Microsoft and have hardware DRM, will run only Microsoft-approved code, will
allow access to Microsoft-approved web sites, and will allow corporate and law enforcement access to
your data
I see the Microsoft-approved world of the future
the same way as you. What I'm hoping is that it will take
so incredibly long for MS to line up all its
ducks, that by the time it's ready it will be
completely irrelevant.
The "information world" is a rapidly changing
place, and so far Microsoft has always been
playing catch-up. I think this trend will
continue into the future, and if we're lucky
they'll be lagging so far behind that they become
irrelevant to what I'm interested in doing. They
may never get so far behind that the "mass media"
world they are trying to control becomes uninterested, though.
A fearsome future, but beauracracy will save us
on
The Ideas Behind Longhorn
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The "Longhorn/Palladium" future - where
the hardware contains Digital
Rights Management hardware to stop us from
seeing what Microsoft hasn't allowed us to see -
is indeed a totalitarian one.
But with at least 5 years until Longhorn's
release, I think we can count on the world
changing so radically in the meantime that
Longhorn and Palladium become completely
irrelevant. Look at Microsoft Bob, their last "big-bang" approach
to engineering a network computer architecture,
and how the WWW made it completely irrelevant.
The SecurityFocus article takes a very
interesting look at the PUC hearing and is,
I think, very newsworthy and a significant
legal development.
What is most vital is that in this case,
unlike other previous Mitnick cases, the
telco is arguing that Mitnick
didn't break in while Mitnick is
insisting that he did. Mitnick is offering
proof in the form of documents and passwords
and the Sprint of Nevada lawyer is saying
that the information Mitnick is bogus or
publicly available. This is such an exact
turnaround from the last legal tangle that
Mitnick was in that I gotta wonder if it's
even the same universe.
Does this have any relevance to legal cases
outside the Munoz "Vegas escort" case? I
don't know, but I could see it happening:
Hollywood lawyers calling on DeCSS authors
and users, arguing that the software they have
doesn't actually promote piracy. Could be
interesting!
back then, it was an elite group of youngsters that really got into the maintenance of
and differences between various machines. now mechanics are a dime a dozen, and near the bottom rung of the social ladder, in most
places.
That's a little unfair. A certified auto
mechanic can pull down $70K to $90K without much
problem in most markets. Now while that isn't
as much as incompetent Java programmers were
making last year, it's not a bad living and there's
good job security.
To get a good mechanics certification requires
a lot of dedication and hard work. Not
necessarily a lot of brains, but it doesn't hurt
to have 'em.
Another company bought the network for pennies on
the dollar. Only way we can tell anything changes is we havn't gotten a bill for two months because the new company doesn't have their act
together in that regard yet.
That would worry me if I was in the same situation. If the company that was succesfully
issuing invoices went broke, then the replacement
company which cannot issue invoices is going to
soon be (if it isn't already) in even worse financial shape.
I've heard the same phrase applied to
capabilitiy-based architectures,
but these are systems built around hardware
enforcement, and I get the impression that SCC's
scheme is software-based.
Oh really? There were school shootings like Columbine in the "bad old days?"
Gee, I dunno, maybe the public lynchings let
the public release their rage in different ways:-O
Have you ever thought what the illegitimate birth rate
would have been before birth control if people were as innately animalistic as you would like to think?
Oh, yes, illegitimate births were very high.
Young unmarried pregnant women were either:
Married off to whoever could be found
Sent off for 9 months to an asylum where
they gave birth, were forcibly
separated from their child, and then they
were "mainstreamed" back into society as if it
never happened.
It was socially unthinkable in my parents and grandparents childhood environments for
men to stalk and harass teenage girls, for children to kill their fellow-classmates with guns at school, and the like. (Insert your own typical
news headline here.)
If you believe that the US of 30 years ago
was "pure", or that Victorian England was
"chaste", you're severely limiting your scope of
view. Just because it wasn't on TV or in the
movies, or just because it didn't make the
newspapers, doesn't mean that it wasn't happening.
Every variety of human deviance (for whatever
you think is deviant) has been around since the
beginning of time.
So it is quite possible that copy protection is the explanation for the consumer equipment
failure, while the machines that lacked it succeeded.
That's possible. It's also possible that we'd
all be flying around in private helicopters
instead of driving cars if only the FAA would
open up helo pilot licensing to the public.
I personally believe that consumer DAT was a
flop for the same reason that Elcassetes and
quadrophonic vinyl (remember those? all the
rave for a couple months each in the 1970's
as the "new consumer audio standard")
didn't succeed, and that was because none of them
offered sufficient perceived value to the
average consumer to justify
their costs.
DAT isn't dead. It's not being used for
consumer audio, but is still somewhat common
in pro studios as an interchange format. It's
in decline in pro use as other technologies
displace it, but five years or so ago all pro
audio techs used it and even many amateurs
with a few hundred extra $.
It was doomed for mass consumer use anyway.
Yes it was vastly better than regular audio
cassettes - but it was also much much more
expensive (both for the recorder and for the
media.) For the last several years, of course,
CD-R is the vastly more affordable and usually
more convenient consumer equivalent.
Were those days really so bad? For a buck or
two a month you got a good-quality, heavy-duty,
engineered to withstand a nuclear attack phone.
If it broke, they came and fixed it, no charge,
no questions asked.
Most of today's phones are cheap plastic and
don't even have a real bell inside.
definatly 20% using some
version of nestcape 4.x or earlier
You aren't interpreting your website logs
appropriately if you come to this conclusion.
Many of the web crawlers advertise themselves
as being early Netscape/Mozilla clients in the
HTTP request; if you are including these in
your figures as "real people using a browser"
you're going to come up with horribly skewed
figures like your own. Most decent server
log analysis tools (such as the ever-present
Analog) do
a pretty good job of removing bots from the
"real browsers" totals. See the Analog ROBOTINCLUDE option documentation for starters.
The problem with this is, exams arent the best way to test someone's knowledge. By definition, they only test a limited
subset of knowledge and skills, and they are usually timed, which imposes a different set of demands on the student.
But on a typical undergraduate-level exam there
will be no questions that involve truly original
thinking. There *will* be questions that
require the student to put together previously
learned algorithm A with previously used
data structure B to produce a little tool that
does C. Being able to quickly identify the
algorithms and data structures which solve a
particular problem is the bread-and-butter of
programming, and is pretty easy to test quickly.
If a student is floundering at test time under
such a simple load, they didn't do their homework:-)
arg...there is no bad guy/good guy in this becasue THEY DO NOT KNOW ABOUT THE BAD GUY YET.
You mean that by Hollywood's design we've
got to sit through six hours of pointless
crap before the real stuff can start? Maybe
that's inherit to doing a prequel, but I'd
hope that someone in la-la land would stand
up and point this out...
there were a few things that seemed a little too familiar...
You're forgetting that the original Star Wars
was almost entirely a direct descendant of the
sci-fi serials of the 30's and 40's, and that
this time-worn format was executed with perfection
in the original 3 Star Wars movies. IMHO the
deviation from the simplistic good-guy/bad-guy/
cliffhanger mentality and more into "big screen
blockbuster" mentality marks the decline of
the Star Wars movies.
The comic-book atmosphere is a big part of
Spider-Man's success, IMHO, and the New Yorkers
are very very much a part of it.
My favorite part was where Spiderman (in his
"ordinary" persona) sits down with his
arch-nemesis (also in his "ordinary" persona)
for Thanksgiving Dinner. Big plot device because
that's where the bad guy figures out who the good
guy is.
I think Star Wars would be better if it got
back more towards its roots in sci-fi serials.
It's moderately amusing that others are
accusing the "Yay for the military" poster
of being a recruiter. Come on, guys - the
military careers he's talking about are fine
options if you're just out of high school and
new to the world, but the pay is abysmal, the
working conditions are admittedly potentially
fatal, and you do not have a lot of ability to
quit should you decide you don't like it.
It is not, by any stretch of the imagination,
the Regular Job the original
poster was asking for.
Now, working as a civilian employee of the
government or for a defense contractor, *those*
are potentially Regular Jobs.
It just shows that today, even big
companies can be victimized
No, it shows that every once in a while that
the big companies will publicize that their security
has been compromised. Of course, we all know
that for every such case that makes the New
York Times, there are thousands where they don't.
And for every one of those, there are ten where
the news of the security breach never leaves the
company. And for every one of those there are
probably a hundred where nobody at the company
knows that they have gaping security holes.
Of course, some electrons have high energy, while some electrons have low energy. The low energy electrons are cold,
while the high energy electrons are hot.
Cooling with electrons involves encouraging the high energy electrons to escape, bringing in low energy electrons to
replace them.
Isn't this exactly the same as Maxwell's Demon,
which violates the second law of thermodynamics?
You haven't tried a "custom" install have you? nineteen servers running RH7.2 and the only one that has sendmail is the
MX
Nope, you're wrong. All Redhat installations
get the sendmail software
installed. Only certain configurations get
sendmail turned on as a network service, and this is the "custom"
that you're thinking about.
Believe me, a "custom install" under Redhat
gives you little control over what software
goes on (although, thank god, it does give you
at least some control over what network services
are turned on). Until you've built your own
Linux system entirely
from sources you've never seen a custom install:-).
Mandrake comes with so many extra packages that I reckon anyone who moves over to Red Hat will wonder what the hell
they were thinking.
For me, numerous packages is not a selling point. I run Linux because I want
precise control over what's running on my machine,
whether it be a desktop or a server. I don't want
layers upon layers of crud.
Example: You cannot install recent Redhat versions
without installing sendmail, because cron needs
sendmail, and a redhat install needs cron. But
I don't want sendmail. In many
cases I don't want cron. If I want sendmail
functionality, I'll install something less
gargantuan and less cumbersome. And if I want
cron functionality, I'll install something
substantially cleaner than the heavily-heavily
patched Vixie cron that comes from redhat.
For me, the perfect "distro" (it's not even really
that) is Linux From Scratch. Complete control over everything!
Slashdot Mirror
But where are all the Asian spammers? I'd guesstimate that I get 30 or 40 foreign-language spams apparently from Taiwan, Malaysia, and India every day. It's more than half of all the spam I get now.
The Fritz chip will prevent any non-[MS|RIAA|MPAA]-approved software from accessing a protected document. And in the Palladium/Fritz scheme, to get [MS|RIAA|MPAA] approval the application will not be allowed to have a useful "save" option.
Of course, maybe all you need is a single "buggy" but approved application to get around all this.
Another way would be to digitize the video or audio coming out of your PC, but after the MPAA makes owning or building unrestricted A/D converters illegal this won't be an option. (Except to those of us who know how to build A/D converters out of stone knives and bearskins and live in the underground economy).
Microsoft has been doing this for years. Look at, for example, the Microsoft Telnet terminal emulation that ships with windows. It does such a crappy job that anyone who uses it to connect to remote (implicitly non-MS) machines will decide that it's such a pain that they give up out of frustration.
I see the Microsoft-approved world of the future the same way as you. What I'm hoping is that it will take so incredibly long for MS to line up all its ducks, that by the time it's ready it will be completely irrelevant.
The "information world" is a rapidly changing place, and so far Microsoft has always been playing catch-up. I think this trend will continue into the future, and if we're lucky they'll be lagging so far behind that they become irrelevant to what I'm interested in doing. They may never get so far behind that the "mass media" world they are trying to control becomes uninterested, though.
But with at least 5 years until Longhorn's release, I think we can count on the world changing so radically in the meantime that Longhorn and Palladium become completely irrelevant. Look at Microsoft Bob, their last "big-bang" approach to engineering a network computer architecture, and how the WWW made it completely irrelevant.
What is most vital is that in this case, unlike other previous Mitnick cases, the telco is arguing that Mitnick didn't break in while Mitnick is insisting that he did. Mitnick is offering proof in the form of documents and passwords and the Sprint of Nevada lawyer is saying that the information Mitnick is bogus or publicly available. This is such an exact turnaround from the last legal tangle that Mitnick was in that I gotta wonder if it's even the same universe.
Does this have any relevance to legal cases outside the Munoz "Vegas escort" case? I don't know, but I could see it happening: Hollywood lawyers calling on DeCSS authors and users, arguing that the software they have doesn't actually promote piracy. Could be interesting!
That's a little unfair. A certified auto mechanic can pull down $70K to $90K without much problem in most markets. Now while that isn't as much as incompetent Java programmers were making last year, it's not a bad living and there's good job security.
To get a good mechanics certification requires a lot of dedication and hard work. Not necessarily a lot of brains, but it doesn't hurt to have 'em.
That would worry me if I was in the same situation. If the company that was succesfully issuing invoices went broke, then the replacement company which cannot issue invoices is going to soon be (if it isn't already) in even worse financial shape.
I've heard the same phrase applied to capabilitiy-based architectures, but these are systems built around hardware enforcement, and I get the impression that SCC's scheme is software-based.
Gee, I dunno, maybe the public lynchings let the public release their rage in different ways :-O
Have you ever thought what the illegitimate birth rate would have been before birth control if people were as innately animalistic as you would like to think? Oh, yes, illegitimate births were very high. Young unmarried pregnant women were either:
If you believe that the US of 30 years ago was "pure", or that Victorian England was "chaste", you're severely limiting your scope of view. Just because it wasn't on TV or in the movies, or just because it didn't make the newspapers, doesn't mean that it wasn't happening. Every variety of human deviance (for whatever you think is deviant) has been around since the beginning of time.
That's possible. It's also possible that we'd all be flying around in private helicopters instead of driving cars if only the FAA would open up helo pilot licensing to the public.
I personally believe that consumer DAT was a flop for the same reason that Elcassetes and quadrophonic vinyl (remember those? all the rave for a couple months each in the 1970's as the "new consumer audio standard") didn't succeed, and that was because none of them offered sufficient perceived value to the average consumer to justify their costs.
Two points:
Most of today's phones are cheap plastic and don't even have a real bell inside.
You aren't interpreting your website logs appropriately if you come to this conclusion.
Many of the web crawlers advertise themselves as being early Netscape/Mozilla clients in the HTTP request; if you are including these in your figures as "real people using a browser" you're going to come up with horribly skewed figures like your own. Most decent server log analysis tools (such as the ever-present Analog) do a pretty good job of removing bots from the "real browsers" totals. See the Analog ROBOTINCLUDE option documentation for starters.
But on a typical undergraduate-level exam there will be no questions that involve truly original thinking. There *will* be questions that require the student to put together previously learned algorithm A with previously used data structure B to produce a little tool that does C. Being able to quickly identify the algorithms and data structures which solve a particular problem is the bread-and-butter of programming, and is pretty easy to test quickly. If a student is floundering at test time under such a simple load, they didn't do their homework :-)
You mean that by Hollywood's design we've got to sit through six hours of pointless crap before the real stuff can start? Maybe that's inherit to doing a prequel, but I'd hope that someone in la-la land would stand up and point this out...
You're forgetting that the original Star Wars was almost entirely a direct descendant of the sci-fi serials of the 30's and 40's, and that this time-worn format was executed with perfection in the original 3 Star Wars movies. IMHO the deviation from the simplistic good-guy/bad-guy/ cliffhanger mentality and more into "big screen blockbuster" mentality marks the decline of the Star Wars movies.
The comic-book atmosphere is a big part of Spider-Man's success, IMHO, and the New Yorkers are very very much a part of it.
My favorite part was where Spiderman (in his "ordinary" persona) sits down with his arch-nemesis (also in his "ordinary" persona) for Thanksgiving Dinner. Big plot device because that's where the bad guy figures out who the good guy is.
I think Star Wars would be better if it got back more towards its roots in sci-fi serials.
Now, working as a civilian employee of the government or for a defense contractor, *those* are potentially Regular Jobs.
Isn't this exactly the same as Maxwell's Demon, which violates the second law of thermodynamics?
Nope, you're wrong. All Redhat installations get the sendmail software installed. Only certain configurations get sendmail turned on as a network service, and this is the "custom" that you're thinking about.
Believe me, a "custom install" under Redhat gives you little control over what software goes on (although, thank god, it does give you at least some control over what network services are turned on). Until you've built your own Linux system entirely from sources you've never seen a custom install :-).
For me, numerous packages is not a selling point. I run Linux because I want precise control over what's running on my machine, whether it be a desktop or a server. I don't want layers upon layers of crud.
Example: You cannot install recent Redhat versions without installing sendmail, because cron needs sendmail, and a redhat install needs cron. But I don't want sendmail. In many cases I don't want cron. If I want sendmail functionality, I'll install something less gargantuan and less cumbersome. And if I want cron functionality, I'll install something substantially cleaner than the heavily-heavily patched Vixie cron that comes from redhat.
For me, the perfect "distro" (it's not even really that) is Linux From Scratch. Complete control over everything!