Any spam I receive that seems to have a non-free address (there's not a huge amount you can do about hotmail et al.) gets placed in a text file, which is used as the seed for a web-page, so that the bots that go around mining addresses get to pick up lots of spammers' addresses.
I doubt it's useful, but it makes me feel better. After all, it's not costing me money, really - just time, and not much of that in the scheme of things.
Although as soon as you veer away from glenlivet, glenmorangie and cragganmore, on to the ones with original Gaelic spellings the chances of incorrect connection attempts because people can't remember the inscrutible letter order.
Of course, to you kiddies who have never had a real job
Yawn.
AC is as AC posts, my email's there if you want to continue displaying your stupidity and closed-mindedness in private rather than hiding behind a mask.
The majority of users use the systems that's put in front of them and if it's comfortable to use, then great. Most people's desktops will have a few "Office" applications, an email client, a web browser and any proprietory systems that they specifically need to perform their job.
There are word processors out there for Linux that are as "easy" to use as Word. There are spreadsheets out there that are "easy" to use as XL. There are plenty of different databases available. The integration is a key feature of Office and Smart Suite - but that's achievable too.
The availability for Linux of email clients and web browsers is not an issue.
The question of proprietory systems is the thorny one, though. If your transaction processing system or whatever is based around a Windows app then porting to Linux may be viable but it's a chicken and egg situation that's not really so dependent on Linux standards but on a corporate IT strategy that has a project manager with teams of workers weaned on Gatesware and with business critical apps that would cost a fortune to port.
That's the crunch. You can't port the apps if people haven't got Linux machines to run them on or the time to support the learning curve and you can't give them Linux machines if they haven't the apps to use on them.
There are niches developing, there has always been a place for *ix in many corporations, it might be able to extend but it does need a focussed strategy. MS has that focussed strategy and its worked wonderfully albeit with a flawed product. No-one's saying that Linux doesn't have it's flaws and at the moment, one of those flaws is no realistic champion.
Fluffy, albeit with a hard centre 8/10
on
The Code Book
·
· Score: 3
Simon Singh has a proven track record of writing about hard maths and science so that you don't need to be a hard mathematician or scientist in order to understand it all. His book on Fermat's Last Theorem is one of my favourites, I'm not a mathmo by training, I'm a CompSci so while I could follow it, it could easily have been way beyond my ken. It was more than that though, Singh caught hold of Wiles' drive and passion - something that most of us can empathise with, but sometimes you can lose because the project going badly or your boss is being a little too PHed. He reminded me why I'm doing what I'm doing.
The Code Book isn't *that* good - but then I doubt it ever could be. He gets a little muddled himself in places and there are better descriptions out there on the work of Bletchley Park (although he gives the Poles more of their due credit than most), but there are some gems in there too. His background writing, the side-tracking on Linear B, the revelations about how Diffie-Hellman-Merkle (and even RSA, to an extent) were beaten to their marks by us Brits but because that information was classified until very recently no-one knows it.... I certainly didn't appreciate it until now. Which is the key to some of the gems - that much of what he writes couldn't have been known even eighteen months ago.
He finishes with a look at the future and quantum machines - very topical and, a physicist by training, he seems more certain of his ground here - or maybe that's just because I know less about that than I did about the rest of the book.
He does a great job putting codes, ciphers and cryptography into context - both more the modern world and way back whenever.
If you're a cryptographer, this book will probably annoy more than inform, but I'm a sucker for pop science books and my knowledge of cryptography isn't so strong. I enjoyed it.
I refuse to support a world in which major access providers are capable of not routing my page because it has some objectionable stuff on it.
Fair enough, but I want to go to a search engine and not have objectionable stuff returned when I used non-objectionable search terms because my boss, my mother or my elderly next door neighbour is looking over my shoulder at the results. If your page has objectionable stuff, then I don't want it caught in a search term that was looking for something completely different.
Routing is an issue, yes. Censorship is not a clearly defined black-white issue, there is a morass of blurred greyness in the middle. Your page not being routed by a major provider is my search engine use being more productive for me. We need to find a system which satisfies both these things (and all the other gripes besides.)
I, for one, refuse to label my web pages. and I suspect that a huge number of people will make the same choice that I will if this passes, and there will be waaay too many of us to arrest.
What possible objection could you have to labelling your pages?
It is a big, bad world out there, but that shouldn't mean that you can't start making your corner a little cleaner - if we all did a bit, the whole would be slightly less big and bad. Simplistic, trite and as shallow a soundbite as our esteemed PM could hope for, but there's a point in there, too! Look at car design, there are still accidents, but you use seat-belts, air-bags and what-have-you.
I don't have a problem with porn, but if I'm using a search engine to look for some non-porn information, I don't want 7 of the top ten hits to contain page-jacked URLs which have bugger all (sic) to do with the search term I entered.
Some search engines are better than others and if the search engines tend toward the sites that are correctly rated and are monitored for their content then I will tend toward using them because I'll have confidence in the results they return. If that means that I'm less likely to find your page, then sure, it might be my problem - but who are you producing your web pages for? Your own gratification or because other people might find your output interesting end/or useful? If it's the latter, then reducing the chance that users will find your page isn't productive, is it?
This kind of technology has practical benefits for some too. The sides of Britain's roads are increasingly populated by cameras which aren't there for speed, they recognise number-plates and then, when another camera sees that same plate at some other place it can use that information to help formulate a picture of traffic flows. That's cool. So long as the do as they say and drop the data after 20-30 minutes and only encode the middle few characters and not the whole plate.
If the camera makes the high street safer and the criminal more scared, is it a totally bad thing?
The concept is admirable, but as with so many worthy concepts when the parliamentarians get a hold of things, the end result isn't normally worth a jot.
The phrase quoted in the article, "Causing danger to data processing systems" - is that too vague to be meaningful or too ill-defined to be useful?
The trouble with clauses like that is that they have to be very loosely defined otherwise loopholes will appear all over the shop, but by defining things loosely you'll make charges tough to stick. QED.
When is a virus not a virus? As has been pointed out, anti-virus software might be a little tricky to write. More though, obviously there's an element of intent to this, but we've all written silly mistakes which have had unfortunate repercussions - do they count?
I'm on (like many other/.ers I imagine) the BUGTRAQ mailing list, while it doesn't distribute virii it does tell you how to replicate potentially damaging security flaws, does having those mails on my system count?
Nice idea, though, we shouldn't necessarily chastise them too much for trying!
Copyright is hard to enforce but that shouldn't be taken as a green light to just go ahead and flaunt it.
I presume, from the tone, that you don't have anything out there from which you make money? What would your feelings be toward someone who uses your products/services without paying for them? That's your livelihood, that is. Sure, only a small ripple on the human ocean, but a large wave in your local pond!
Actually, I think parking violations can be fairly serious, too. In the same way that someone parking for 90 seconds outside a shop to pay a newspaper is less serious than someone parking so as to block the ambulance entrance to a hospital, so there are degrees of copyright abuse.
Incarceration is harsh, I agree, a fine might be enough - but let's see some fines start to get meted out, then.
Just because the massive potential for movement of information has been unleashed, it doesn't mean that we should let certain facts get lost along the way.
Copyright is not theft, copyright is an assertion that you have created something original and that you want at least recognition of this fact and possibly monetary reward. If you want to use copyleft or something similar to allow free use, go for it, that's great, you're an altruist.
Rippers, encoders, warez sites, k3wl kids and CDs full of MP3s don't cover the fact that there are rules, internationally agreed rules, that dictate what you are and are not allowed to do with copyrighted material in your posession.
Linking to MP3 files that you know to be illegal must be viewed poorly, by linking to that site you are allowing people to exploit their presence and that should be considered abuse.
There's no difference between that and broadcasting the URL on a radio show or publishing it in a newspaper.
Fair use is allowed and copying for yourself is not going to get you into trouble, buy the CD once and listen to it on your laptop, on your MD walkman or on the tape player in your car - go right ahead, the music industry will not touch you. But publishing an MP3 on the web should be jumped on and linking to that MP3 is not dramatically different.
You might not agree with the rules, so try to change them - remember, direct action is a viable means of protest, but there's a good chance that it might also be illegal.
It seems to me that they're being very sensible. Some might call it FUD, but one person's FUD is another's reasonable, pragmatic reaction to an unclear future. Unless your crystal ball is functioning 100% error-free, there's no way you can tell me that Y2K will not be a problem in some way to someone somewhere.
The chances are that most large organisations will escape scot-free, but it only takes a small cog to fail for the whole system to come down. "But for a nail, the shoe was lost...."
FUD is not always a bad thing, but you have to receive it with an open mind.
Copyright is a serious issue and there are many people who make their lives from producing copyrightable material, be it software, music, prose or whatever.
Linking to other sites is the lifeblood of the web, without it the usefulness of the things disappears, but you while you cannot always control what's on the other end of the link, you can decide whether to link to it.
As a webmaster, linking to another's site is endorsing that site, whether you provide a disclaimer or not. By linking to another site you are promoting it and, implicitly or otherwise, telling your readers that that site is worthwhile.
Therefore, by linking to a site which you know to be illegal you are opening yourself up to charges (criminal or moral) of aiding and abetting.
The contract/permanent debate is very similar over this side of the pond, but the government, in their own sweet way, are about to dive in.
They are planning a change in the law to say that if someone turns up for regular hours, does a specific job, answering to a specific person then that person should be employed not contracted. What criteria they plan to us is unclear, but the bottom line is that they're a bit miffed at the various tax loopholes that contractors exploit (most noticeably the practice of operating a single-person company and being paid via dividends, not directly). They are having to be careful because, when they initially drew up the guidelines a fair number of other professions were included, barristers and members of parliament being the most noticeable. They tinkered with some of the rules, but nobody mention the fact that most MPs came in via the law because that's irrelevant, OK?:)
In the main, while contractors are probably the best means of getting something specialised done quickly, there are an awful lot of bad contractors out there who are only there because of the ridiculous rates that you can get.
Quite apart from the privacy issues and the amount of time it will take you to do the job (presumably your boss won't mind the systems going belly up in the meantime), there's an easier way.
Just tell the users that their mail is being scanned for porn and that the web logs are open to scrutiny. I would suggest that there are two types of users out there anyway: those that assume it's happening and those that had no clue it was possible.
We all know how easy it is to write a Perl script to sift through web histories or a network filestore or whatever and pick out potentially "interesting" items - but whether this happens is another matter. I know that our sys guys have far more important things to worry about, but I also know that if it's becomes an issue then it's simplicity itself to set something up.
In this situation it sounds like a few words to the latter type, the ones who have no idea that emails and web accesses can be traced and scanned and probed, a few words would work wonders.
Of course, if you were really sneaky, take a snapshot of current usage, make a few announcements and then take another snapshot... you'd only need to check the ones with a large enough delta:)
Slashdot Mirror
Any spam I receive that seems to have a non-free address (there's not a huge amount you can do about hotmail et al.) gets placed in a text file, which is used as the seed for a web-page, so that the bots that go around mining addresses get to pick up lots of spammers' addresses.
I doubt it's useful, but it makes me feel better. After all, it's not costing me money, really - just time, and not much of that in the scheme of things.
Although as soon as you veer away from glenlivet, glenmorangie and cragganmore, on to the ones with original Gaelic spellings the chances of incorrect connection attempts because people can't remember the inscrutible letter order.
Still, one of way of keeping things secure.
Yawn.
AC is as AC posts, my email's there if you want to continue displaying your stupidity and closed-mindedness in private rather than hiding behind a mask.
The majority of users use the systems that's put in front of them and if it's comfortable to use, then great. Most people's desktops will have a few "Office" applications, an email client, a web browser and any proprietory systems that they specifically need to perform their job.
There are word processors out there for Linux that are as "easy" to use as Word. There are spreadsheets out there that are "easy" to use as XL. There are plenty of different databases available. The integration is a key feature of Office and Smart Suite - but that's achievable too.
The availability for Linux of email clients and web browsers is not an issue.
The question of proprietory systems is the thorny one, though. If your transaction processing system or whatever is based around a Windows app then porting to Linux may be viable but it's a chicken and egg situation that's not really so dependent on Linux standards but on a corporate IT strategy that has a project manager with teams of workers weaned on Gatesware and with business critical apps that would cost a fortune to port.
That's the crunch. You can't port the apps if people haven't got Linux machines to run them on or the time to support the learning curve and you can't give them Linux machines if they haven't the apps to use on them.
There are niches developing, there has always been a place for *ix in many corporations, it might be able to extend but it does need a focussed strategy. MS has that focussed strategy and its worked wonderfully albeit with a flawed product. No-one's saying that Linux doesn't have it's flaws and at the moment, one of those flaws is no realistic champion.
Simon Singh has a proven track record of writing about hard maths and science so that you don't need to be a hard mathematician or scientist in order to understand it all. His book on Fermat's Last Theorem is one of my favourites, I'm not a mathmo by training, I'm a CompSci so while I could follow it, it could easily have been way beyond my ken. It was more than that though, Singh caught hold of Wiles' drive and passion - something that most of us can empathise with, but sometimes you can lose because the project going badly or your boss is being a little too PHed. He reminded me why I'm doing what I'm doing.
.... I certainly didn't appreciate it until now. Which is the key to some of the gems - that much of what he writes couldn't have been known even eighteen months ago.
The Code Book isn't *that* good - but then I doubt it ever could be. He gets a little muddled himself in places and there are better descriptions out there on the work of Bletchley Park (although he gives the Poles more of their due credit than most), but there are some gems in there too. His background writing, the side-tracking on Linear B, the revelations about how Diffie-Hellman-Merkle (and even RSA, to an extent) were beaten to their marks by us Brits but because that information was classified until very recently no-one knows it
He finishes with a look at the future and quantum machines - very topical and, a physicist by training, he seems more certain of his ground here - or maybe that's just because I know less about that than I did about the rest of the book.
He does a great job putting codes, ciphers and cryptography into context - both more the modern world and way back whenever.
If you're a cryptographer, this book will probably annoy more than inform, but I'm a sucker for pop science books and my knowledge of cryptography isn't so strong. I enjoyed it.
£14.10 + P&P. Just about the first time I've seen things cheaper on this side of the pond!
Fair enough, but I want to go to a search engine and not have objectionable stuff returned when I used non-objectionable search terms because my boss, my mother or my elderly next door neighbour is looking over my shoulder at the results. If your page has objectionable stuff, then I don't want it caught in a search term that was looking for something completely different.
Routing is an issue, yes. Censorship is not a clearly defined black-white issue, there is a morass of blurred greyness in the middle. Your page not being routed by a major provider is my search engine use being more productive for me. We need to find a system which satisfies both these things (and all the other gripes besides.)
What possible objection could you have to labelling your pages?
It is a big, bad world out there, but that shouldn't mean that you can't start making your corner a little cleaner - if we all did a bit, the whole would be slightly less big and bad. Simplistic, trite and as shallow a soundbite as our esteemed PM could hope for, but there's a point in there, too! Look at car design, there are still accidents, but you use seat-belts, air-bags and what-have-you.
I don't have a problem with porn, but if I'm using a search engine to look for some non-porn information, I don't want 7 of the top ten hits to contain page-jacked URLs which have bugger all (sic) to do with the search term I entered.
Some search engines are better than others and if the search engines tend toward the sites that are correctly rated and are monitored for their content then I will tend toward using them because I'll have confidence in the results they return. If that means that I'm less likely to find your page, then sure, it might be my problem - but who are you producing your web pages for? Your own gratification or because other people might find your output interesting end/or useful? If it's the latter, then reducing the chance that users will find your page isn't productive, is it?
The New Scientist is carrying it too.
This kind of technology has practical benefits for some too. The sides of Britain's roads are increasingly populated by cameras which aren't there for speed, they recognise number-plates and then, when another camera sees that same plate at some other place it can use that information to help formulate a picture of traffic flows. That's cool. So long as the do as they say and drop the data after 20-30 minutes and only encode the middle few characters and not the whole plate.
If the camera makes the high street safer and the criminal more scared, is it a totally bad thing?
The concept is admirable, but as with so many worthy concepts when the parliamentarians get a hold of things, the end result isn't normally worth a jot.
/.ers I imagine) the BUGTRAQ mailing list, while it doesn't distribute virii it does tell you how to replicate potentially damaging security flaws, does having those mails on my system count?
The phrase quoted in the article, "Causing danger to data processing systems" - is that too vague to be meaningful or too ill-defined to be useful?
The trouble with clauses like that is that they have to be very loosely defined otherwise loopholes will appear all over the shop, but by defining things loosely you'll make charges tough to stick. QED.
When is a virus not a virus? As has been pointed out, anti-virus software might be a little tricky to write. More though, obviously there's an element of intent to this, but we've all written silly mistakes which have had unfortunate repercussions - do they count?
I'm on (like many other
Nice idea, though, we shouldn't necessarily chastise them too much for trying!
AC is as AC posts ;)
Copyright is hard to enforce but that shouldn't be taken as a green light to just go ahead and flaunt it.
I presume, from the tone, that you don't have anything out there from which you make money? What would your feelings be toward someone who uses your products/services without paying for them? That's your livelihood, that is. Sure, only a small ripple on the human ocean, but a large wave in your local pond!
Actually, I think parking violations can be fairly serious, too. In the same way that someone parking for 90 seconds outside a shop to pay a newspaper is less serious than someone parking so as to block the ambulance entrance to a hospital, so there are degrees of copyright abuse.
Incarceration is harsh, I agree, a fine might be enough - but let's see some fines start to get meted out, then.
Just because the massive potential for movement of information has been unleashed, it doesn't mean that we should let certain facts get lost along the way.
Copyright is not theft, copyright is an assertion that you have created something original and that you want at least recognition of this fact and possibly monetary reward. If you want to use copyleft or something similar to allow free use, go for it, that's great, you're an altruist.
Rippers, encoders, warez sites, k3wl kids and CDs full of MP3s don't cover the fact that there are rules, internationally agreed rules, that dictate what you are and are not allowed to do with copyrighted material in your posession.
Linking to MP3 files that you know to be illegal must be viewed poorly, by linking to that site you are allowing people to exploit their presence and that should be considered abuse.
There's no difference between that and broadcasting the URL on a radio show or publishing it in a newspaper.
Fair use is allowed and copying for yourself is not going to get you into trouble, buy the CD once and listen to it on your laptop, on your MD walkman or on the tape player in your car - go right ahead, the music industry will not touch you. But publishing an MP3 on the web should be jumped on and linking to that MP3 is not dramatically different.
You might not agree with the rules, so try to change them - remember, direct action is a viable means of protest, but there's a good chance that it might also be illegal.
Available here
...."
It seems to me that they're being very sensible. Some might call it FUD, but one person's FUD is another's reasonable, pragmatic reaction to an unclear future. Unless your crystal ball is functioning 100% error-free, there's no way you can tell me that Y2K will not be a problem in some way to someone somewhere.
The chances are that most large organisations will escape scot-free, but it only takes a small cog to fail for the whole system to come down. "But for a nail, the shoe was lost
FUD is not always a bad thing, but you have to receive it with an open mind.
Copyright is a serious issue and there are many people who make their lives from producing copyrightable material, be it software, music, prose or whatever.
Linking to other sites is the lifeblood of the web, without it the usefulness of the things disappears, but you while you cannot always control what's on the other end of the link, you can decide whether to link to it.
As a webmaster, linking to another's site is endorsing that site, whether you provide a disclaimer or not. By linking to another site you are promoting it and, implicitly or otherwise, telling your readers that that site is worthwhile.
Therefore, by linking to a site which you know to be illegal you are opening yourself up to charges (criminal or moral) of aiding and abetting.
The contract/permanent debate is very similar over this side of the pond, but the government, in their own sweet way, are about to dive in.
They are planning a change in the law to say that if someone turns up for regular hours, does a specific job, answering to a specific person then that person should be employed not contracted. What criteria they plan to us is unclear, but the bottom line is that they're a bit miffed at the various tax loopholes that contractors exploit (most noticeably the practice of operating a single-person company and being paid via dividends, not directly). They are having to be careful because, when they initially drew up the guidelines a fair number of other professions were included, barristers and members of parliament being the most noticeable. They tinkered with some of the rules, but nobody mention the fact that most MPs came in via the law because that's irrelevant, OK? :)
In the main, while contractors are probably the best means of getting something specialised done quickly, there are an awful lot of bad contractors out there who are only there because of the ridiculous rates that you can get.
Quite apart from the privacy issues and the amount of time it will take you to do the job (presumably your boss won't mind the systems going belly up in the meantime), there's an easier way.
Just tell the users that their mail is being scanned for porn and that the web logs are open to scrutiny. I would suggest that there are two types of users out there anyway: those that assume it's happening and those that had no clue it was possible.
We all know how easy it is to write a Perl script to sift through web histories or a network filestore or whatever and pick out potentially "interesting" items - but whether this happens is another matter. I know that our sys guys have far more important things to worry about, but I also know that if it's becomes an issue then it's simplicity itself to set something up.
In this situation it sounds like a few words to the latter type, the ones who have no idea that emails and web accesses can be traced and scanned and probed, a few words would work wonders.
Of course, if you were really sneaky, take a snapshot of current usage, make a few announcements and then take another snapshot ... you'd only need to check the ones with a large enough delta :)