The location of Socorro (Help Me, in Spanish) New Mexico, as well as the scarcity of, well, students of the female persuasion, makes for a bad combination. They're building a trebouche at the moment, I believe.
Re:The Yes Men could be at fault
on
Dow vs. Parody
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· Score: 2
The government should go after the people who put up a kiddie porn site, of course. As long as they can do it without stepping on my rights. On the other hand, the government would do more damage than good attempting to regulate misrepresentation. Who gets to decide what crosses the line and what doesn't? In most cases, the government is not competant to decide it. Outright fraud is slightly different, but that violates other laws.
A lot of people don't understand the concept, so I'll explain. Everyone in America can think of at least 10 good laws about speech that would improve society. I know I can. Ban hate speech, ban those psychic ball-gazing frauds, ban tobacco advertisements, and so on. And those would be good laws. In my opinion.
Unfortunately, everyone else has a different set of good laws for restricting speech. And I probably don't agree with most of them. The only way to come to agreement on how we restrict speech will therefore be through our elected officials.
The founders understood that. And they also understood that the government bodies they were setting up simply wouldn't be perfect enough to be trusted with making these kind of laws. For that reason they put up a fence around that area of the law. The First Ammendment establishes that the government can't make laws regarding speech, and that it can't make laws regarding religion. Sure, some good might be accomplished if the fence wasn't there, but eventually the damage would outweigh the good.
So everytime you see some piece of speech that you think shouldn't be allowed, restrain yourself. Don't call for it to be banned. The government isn't smart enough to be messing around in there. Protecting that speech protects your speech.
Re:This is interesting...
on
Dow vs. Parody
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· Score: 2
Ah, but what about frivilous law suits and spurious DMCA ceast and desist letters. You don't see how that might have a chilling effect on speech?
Re:Do not pass go, do not collect $200
on
Dow vs. Parody
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· Score: 2
Have you ever seen "just kidding" notices on the Onion? Goddamn, but a lot of people get fooled by the Onion. I've seen articles about how the mainstream press picks up on it every now and then. So, since the Onion goes out of its way to make its articles look real (hint: that's why they're funny), the Onion should be sued?
If you want the courts to step in here based on the "some people will be fooled" line, that is a very slippery slope.
Re:The Yes Men could be at fault
on
Dow vs. Parody
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· Score: 2
You, sir, have just found the root password to the first ammendment. I commend you. Let's outlaw parody just in case someone uses it for misrepresentation. In fact, hell, outlaw the internet too--I mean people use that for kiddie porn.
Re:This is interesting...
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Dow vs. Parody
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· Score: 2
Should the government (or corporations maliciously using the legal system-->therefore government) be able to pressure ISP's about content?
Re:The Yes Men could be at fault
on
Dow vs. Parody
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· Score: 2, Flamebait
Oh, God. Copying a website and changing it in small ways for humorous result. That wouldn't be something called parody would it? I've heard of parody. It sounds awful. I hope it's banned. I'm going to write my Congressman asking for a new division of the police force especially designed to break into people's houses looking for this thing called parody. I mean, a company could actually lose PROFIT over a thing like this!
User education? Let me burst your bubble. The general public will never be intimately familiar with how their computers work. Short of forced re-education camps, it's simply not going to happen.
And the only other option to reasonable computer security for the general public happens to be: "an application automatically downloading software and installing it without the user knowing about it." People will always be idiots. You can't change society. But you can engineer around it.
Everyone seems to be aghast that someone like Schlafly is joining them in the fight against the RIAA.
Well, get used to it. The only political pressure that I've seen being brought to bear against the RIAA has been from conservative politicians. Funny, but "let's go back to how things used to be when this country was just starting out," has a great deal of resonance with conservatives. Interesting how that works.
Moreover the Senators from Disney and Hollywood are all, well, Democrats. You aren't going to get any help from there, friends.
The fact that someone like Schlafly is signing on with us actually happens to be great news. Before long, with any luck, conservatives will realize that a major political issue amoung young urban professionals happens to be copyright. Hell, we create more press in a day on this one political issue than most other interest groups our size do in a year. Once we get the conservatives to sign on, then we'll start getting some major traction on our issues.
Well, it's a problem if you find out. If you don't, then it's equivalent to: "Does a tree falling in the woods make a sound?" And apparently most people aren't having problems that they notice. The study would have a hard time measuring the other kind, wouldn't they?
It's not a matter of what is most secure for me. It's a matter of what is most secure for the general population. And with the general population of computer users, it's either Microsoft's automatic updates or forced education camps. Tell me which you think is more realistic.
As far as trusting Microsoft's automatic updates, well I actually trust them more than Mandrake's automatic updates. I believe it was with Mandrake 7.2 that the automatic update tried to upgrade my kernel. If I had the 8.0 version, I would have been able to see the warning telling me not to use the automatic updater for that task. (You still have to read the detail on every update to catch that, of course, if you don't even 8.0 will happily ruin your day.) No such luck with 7.2. Wrecked the system. Microsoft isn't quite that stupid, fortunately.
Now, if you mean trust as in "trust them not to screw you over on purpose," that's a bit different. I don't trust Microsoft. But how much can they actually do to me without seriously pissing off the government and/or endangering their revenue stream by ticking off customers? Not to mention lawsuits galore--wait and see how legal their EULA's are once the trial lawyers smell blood in the water. Tell me what you think they might do to me realisticly.
But it is more secure for my grandmother. And most computer users are like my grandmother. You fail to understand the difference between something that functions without the user even needing to know it's there (like Microsoft Update) compared to something like apt or RedHat's Update agent. The vast majority of users don't have a clue that they even need to update unless their machine tells them.
Microsoft Update could use a few new features to make it truly idiot proof--in fact the version that came with the original WinXP SP1 has been improved on already with the updates--but it's a lot better than the other solutions provided by Linux distributors.
If you or I want a secure machine we go with Linux. But, like I said, for my grandmother Windows is as good as it gets.
Users haven't been hard hit by Internet vandalism. Even online identity theft--while a serious problem, only affects a small minority of the population.
A security concern is a hole in your system that allows attacks.
A security problem is an attack that actually affects you in a deletorius way. And frankly, the majority of people haven't had a security problem. And the number of people who simply took minimum precautions (updates, not running strange code) and had a security problem is vanishingly small.
So, no, the hassle of Linux (as compared to the minimum precautions approach) is not worth it for most individuals.
And frankly, Microsoft is now light-years ahead of Linux on security concerns for one simple reason. Microsoft boxes update simply and automatically out of the box.
No Linux distribution matches that ease. And frankly, the majority of computer users are, and always will be, uninformed about their machines. Microsoft is manufacturing systems that are relatively harmless in the hands of an idiot. Linux is not. That is a security hole, and it will remain a hole because the Linux community has never been especially responsive to the needs of the computer-illiterates.
Shouldn't there be some corollary to Godwin's Law, but involving Dragonball instead of Nazis?
Here is my formulation: As the number of idiots posting in a thread increases, the chance of a Dragonball reference increases accordingly. In case of said event, the person who made the comment will have everything he has said or ever will say forever invalidated.
I doubt that there is any way to use these measurements to transmit information. For all the 'instantaneous communications' stuff in the media over these sort of experiments, no one has been able to show mathematically how that would work--much less practically. The wave collapse is instantaneous, but all that means is that you can pool information later and violate Bell's Inequality with it.
But we might get bigger and better EPR experiments from this!
What this is saying--I'm guessing--is that an entangled spin state for two particles wouldn't look as entangled anymore for a moving observer (relativity). A classical (relatively--ha ha, double pun) analogy would be how electric fields look like magnetic fields to moving observers.
The interesting thing is this "boosting". They're saying, I guess, that there are refrence frames from which particles look far more entangled than the rest frame.
I'd like to close this post by pointing out how highly unethical it would be for some slashdot poster with an account for Physical Review to post the full text of the article as an AC. It would be entirely wrong to think of that as "liberating" some piece of research funded by U.S. taxpayer dollars. Furthermore, those of us interested in the article but lacking accounts or easy access to a college library to read it would not be at all grateful.
A solution that would allow relaying would be to store Alice's (and everybody else's) questions on some sort of centralized server. You wouldn't need to change the mail server software at all then.
Can you think of any more holes in the idea? It would help if you took enough time on your objections to avoid the ones with obvious answers.
Oh no, I really don't want to waste your precious time arguing when you're so busy thinking about all sorts of ways to stop spam that will be so much more valuable than this piss-poor excuse for an anti-spam implementation.
Now, here is where you fail to understand the system.
Say that Bob wants to send a message to Alice. In fact, Bob even uses an open relay. Alice has a list of computationally intensive questions that she has uploaded to her mail server. When Bob wants to send a message to Alice, his mail server (the open relay) queries Alice's mail server, and gives Bob one of Alice's questions. Bob can then choose to include an answer to the question with his message or not. Once Bob's message reaches Alice, her client software looks at the answer to the question. If the answer is not there, or is incorrect, the message is sent to junk mail.
Now imagine that Trent is an evil spammer. He sends out a million messages around the world every day through an open relay. Unfortunately, he doesn't have the computing power to answer a million different questions. He still sends out a bunch of spam from the open relay. And it all gets to the various Alices of the world. But none of the messages have correct answers on them, so they all get filed in Junk Mail.
I gave the solution in another post on this thread. Almost all of this is implemented client-side. A spammer would need a super-computer to get the mail out even if he had an open-relay to use.
I'd imagine you would implement most of it client-side. The mail server would simply give you a list of messages, as well as challenge questions and the responses to challenge questions. The client software then decides whether to throw a piece of mail in the junk folder. That way there is no more demand on the mail server than before.
Moreover, mailing lists would simply ignore the challenge questions, and rely on user white-lists to let them through.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure you can. But to be able to do it with something like MD5, you need to factor some very large prime numbers. Hence the security.
The location of Socorro (Help Me, in Spanish) New Mexico, as well as the scarcity of, well, students of the female persuasion, makes for a bad combination. They're building a trebouche at the moment, I believe.
The government should go after the people who put up a kiddie porn site, of course. As long as they can do it without stepping on my rights. On the other hand, the government would do more damage than good attempting to regulate misrepresentation. Who gets to decide what crosses the line and what doesn't? In most cases, the government is not competant to decide it. Outright fraud is slightly different, but that violates other laws.
A lot of people don't understand the concept, so I'll explain. Everyone in America can think of at least 10 good laws about speech that would improve society. I know I can. Ban hate speech, ban those psychic ball-gazing frauds, ban tobacco advertisements, and so on. And those would be good laws. In my opinion.
Unfortunately, everyone else has a different set of good laws for restricting speech. And I probably don't agree with most of them. The only way to come to agreement on how we restrict speech will therefore be through our elected officials.
The founders understood that. And they also understood that the government bodies they were setting up simply wouldn't be perfect enough to be trusted with making these kind of laws. For that reason they put up a fence around that area of the law. The First Ammendment establishes that the government can't make laws regarding speech, and that it can't make laws regarding religion. Sure, some good might be accomplished if the fence wasn't there, but eventually the damage would outweigh the good.
So everytime you see some piece of speech that you think shouldn't be allowed, restrain yourself. Don't call for it to be banned. The government isn't smart enough to be messing around in there. Protecting that speech protects your speech.
Ah, but what about frivilous law suits and spurious DMCA ceast and desist letters. You don't see how that might have a chilling effect on speech?
Have you ever seen "just kidding" notices on the Onion? Goddamn, but a lot of people get fooled by the Onion. I've seen articles about how the mainstream press picks up on it every now and then. So, since the Onion goes out of its way to make its articles look real (hint: that's why they're funny), the Onion should be sued?
If you want the courts to step in here based on the "some people will be fooled" line, that is a very slippery slope.
You, sir, have just found the root password to the first ammendment. I commend you. Let's outlaw parody just in case someone uses it for misrepresentation. In fact, hell, outlaw the internet too--I mean people use that for kiddie porn.
Should the government (or corporations maliciously using the legal system-->therefore government) be able to pressure ISP's about content?
Oh, God. Copying a website and changing it in small ways for humorous result. That wouldn't be something called parody would it? I've heard of parody. It sounds awful. I hope it's banned. I'm going to write my Congressman asking for a new division of the police force especially designed to break into people's houses looking for this thing called parody. I mean, a company could actually lose PROFIT over a thing like this!
User education? Let me burst your bubble. The general public will never be intimately familiar with how their computers work. Short of forced re-education camps, it's simply not going to happen.
And the only other option to reasonable computer security for the general public happens to be: "an application automatically downloading software and installing it without the user knowing about it." People will always be idiots. You can't change society. But you can engineer around it.
Everyone seems to be aghast that someone like Schlafly is joining them in the fight against the RIAA.
Well, get used to it. The only political pressure that I've seen being brought to bear against the RIAA has been from conservative politicians. Funny, but "let's go back to how things used to be when this country was just starting out," has a great deal of resonance with conservatives. Interesting how that works.
Moreover the Senators from Disney and Hollywood are all, well, Democrats. You aren't going to get any help from there, friends.
The fact that someone like Schlafly is signing on with us actually happens to be great news. Before long, with any luck, conservatives will realize that a major political issue amoung young urban professionals happens to be copyright. Hell, we create more press in a day on this one political issue than most other interest groups our size do in a year. Once we get the conservatives to sign on, then we'll start getting some major traction on our issues.
So, welcome aboard, Schlafly.
Well, it's a problem if you find out. If you don't, then it's equivalent to: "Does a tree falling in the woods make a sound?" And apparently most people aren't having problems that they notice. The study would have a hard time measuring the other kind, wouldn't they?
It's not a matter of what is most secure for me. It's a matter of what is most secure for the general population. And with the general population of computer users, it's either Microsoft's automatic updates or forced education camps. Tell me which you think is more realistic.
As far as trusting Microsoft's automatic updates, well I actually trust them more than Mandrake's automatic updates. I believe it was with Mandrake 7.2 that the automatic update tried to upgrade my kernel. If I had the 8.0 version, I would have been able to see the warning telling me not to use the automatic updater for that task. (You still have to read the detail on every update to catch that, of course, if you don't even 8.0 will happily ruin your day.) No such luck with 7.2. Wrecked the system. Microsoft isn't quite that stupid, fortunately.
Now, if you mean trust as in "trust them not to screw you over on purpose," that's a bit different. I don't trust Microsoft. But how much can they actually do to me without seriously pissing off the government and/or endangering their revenue stream by ticking off customers? Not to mention lawsuits galore--wait and see how legal their EULA's are once the trial lawyers smell blood in the water. Tell me what you think they might do to me realisticly.
Widows is not more secure for me or you.
But it is more secure for my grandmother. And most computer users are like my grandmother. You fail to understand the difference between something that functions without the user even needing to know it's there (like Microsoft Update) compared to something like apt or RedHat's Update agent. The vast majority of users don't have a clue that they even need to update unless their machine tells them.
Microsoft Update could use a few new features to make it truly idiot proof--in fact the version that came with the original WinXP SP1 has been improved on already with the updates--but it's a lot better than the other solutions provided by Linux distributors.
If you or I want a secure machine we go with Linux. But, like I said, for my grandmother Windows is as good as it gets.
Users haven't been hard hit by Internet vandalism. Even online identity theft--while a serious problem, only affects a small minority of the population.
A security concern is a hole in your system that allows attacks.
A security problem is an attack that actually affects you in a deletorius way. And frankly, the majority of people haven't had a security problem. And the number of people who simply took minimum precautions (updates, not running strange code) and had a security problem is vanishingly small.
So, no, the hassle of Linux (as compared to the minimum precautions approach) is not worth it for most individuals.
And frankly, Microsoft is now light-years ahead of Linux on security concerns for one simple reason. Microsoft boxes update simply and automatically out of the box.
No Linux distribution matches that ease. And frankly, the majority of computer users are, and always will be, uninformed about their machines. Microsoft is manufacturing systems that are relatively harmless in the hands of an idiot. Linux is not. That is a security hole, and it will remain a hole because the Linux community has never been especially responsive to the needs of the computer-illiterates.
Shouldn't there be some corollary to Godwin's Law, but involving Dragonball instead of Nazis?
Here is my formulation: As the number of idiots posting in a thread increases, the chance of a Dragonball reference increases accordingly. In case of said event, the person who made the comment will have everything he has said or ever will say forever invalidated.
I doubt that there is any way to use these measurements to transmit information. For all the 'instantaneous communications' stuff in the media over these sort of experiments, no one has been able to show mathematically how that would work--much less practically. The wave collapse is instantaneous, but all that means is that you can pool information later and violate Bell's Inequality with it.
But we might get bigger and better EPR experiments from this!
The interesting thing is this "boosting". They're saying, I guess, that there are refrence frames from which particles look far more entangled than the rest frame.
I'd like to close this post by pointing out how highly unethical it would be for some slashdot poster with an account for Physical Review to post the full text of the article as an AC. It would be entirely wrong to think of that as "liberating" some piece of research funded by U.S. taxpayer dollars. Furthermore, those of us interested in the article but lacking accounts or easy access to a college library to read it would not be at all grateful.
But what is the biggest IP (that is attached to something)? Now, there is an Ask Slashdot for ya.
Slashdot has jumped the shark.
The central server is only for the challenge questions. Mail still gets relayed.
A solution that would allow relaying would be to store Alice's (and everybody else's) questions on some sort of centralized server. You wouldn't need to change the mail server software at all then.
Can you think of any more holes in the idea? It would help if you took enough time on your objections to avoid the ones with obvious answers.
Oh no, I really don't want to waste your precious time arguing when you're so busy thinking about all sorts of ways to stop spam that will be so much more valuable than this piss-poor excuse for an anti-spam implementation.
Now, here is where you fail to understand the system.
Say that Bob wants to send a message to Alice. In fact, Bob even uses an open relay. Alice has a list of computationally intensive questions that she has uploaded to her mail server. When Bob wants to send a message to Alice, his mail server (the open relay) queries Alice's mail server, and gives Bob one of Alice's questions. Bob can then choose to include an answer to the question with his message or not.
Once Bob's message reaches Alice, her client software looks at the answer to the question. If the answer is not there, or is incorrect, the message is sent to junk mail.
Now imagine that Trent is an evil spammer. He sends out a million messages around the world every day through an open relay. Unfortunately, he doesn't have the computing power to answer a million different questions. He still sends out a bunch of spam from the open relay. And it all gets to the various Alices of the world. But none of the messages have correct answers on them, so they all get filed in Junk Mail.
I gave the solution in another post on this thread. Almost all of this is implemented client-side. A spammer would need a super-computer to get the mail out even if he had an open-relay to use.
I'd imagine you would implement most of it client-side. The mail server would simply give you a list of messages, as well as challenge questions and the responses to challenge questions. The client software then decides whether to throw a piece of mail in the junk folder. That way there is no more demand on the mail server than before.
Moreover, mailing lists would simply ignore the challenge questions, and rely on user white-lists to let them through.
Hardly. The question you ask is: Factor this large number. Or any question that is significantly easier to verify than to solve.