There isn't a lot of colour in the night sky even through a good telescope. I know this from theory and observation, but even so I goggle along with everyone else at the false colour, saturated colour images that they come out with.
Must be our monkey brains hardwired for picking out speckles of colour that mean ripe bananas in that tree over there!
Now if they offered some kind of sanction against the spammer. Say a few cents for every physical letter that was delivered when it should have gone as e-mail.
THAT might give some encouragement to register.
As it stands registration just gives the spammer another chance to find you.
There are lots of satellites up there, and lots of reports of unauthorized usage, but no-one seems too upset by it all.
Could it be that the value of the data to be hacked is not worth the effort, so the actual amount of hacking activity is low?
There was some TV news reporting recently that the US reconnaissance planes over Kosovo were uplinking their camera shots to a satellite that rebroadcast without scrambling.
The US military type that was interviewed said that they were aware, and that the data was unclassified so no need for encryption.
Those with the right dish on the roof can pick up quite a few unscrambled transmissions from news gathering teams uplinking to satellite. Again noone worries too much because the info is seldom much use.
Denial of service attacks like the one in China were quickly rectified, and I'm sure the Chinese government embarrassment will quickly pass.
If there was a security problem with satellites, military or otherwise, we would have seen many more high profile attacks before now.
True rewards have been around since the dawn of maths, but these have mostly been from rich sponsors paying what amounted to the living expenses of the successful mathematician.
My days were in the 70s and I think the richest prizes were like the Booker prize, £20,000 ($30,000)Hardly the same league as a million green 'uns.
That's not counting salaried positions which are sometimes awarded as prizes
Things have changed since my day. It used to be that anyone who was capable of a serious attempt on the Riemann hypothesis would get to work because the problem needed solving and the kudos would be immense. Any monetary reward would be incidental.
I suppose a million dollars will attract mathematicians who are today working on other topics. Presumably the Clay Institute feels that Riemann has to compete hard against other avenues of research.
Or maybe they are targetting all the rich quants who were just laid off On Wall Street.
If you want to make sense of most things in the commercial world, the answer is to follow the money trail.
It seems to me the trail starts with the advertiser (or scam merchant). They pay Mr Big to send out a spamshot and forward back the results.
Mr Big needs to
* buy some expertise in spam techniques, * buy some mail generation kit (I don't know how much H/W or S/W these guys need) * pay the ISPs, * buy / get hold of some spamlists * pay someone to keep track of the mail replies * If they are unlucky pay for some legal advice * Oh and the last step in the chain is a punter actually paying hard cash to the advertiser/scammer They put the money into the chain that drives all the other players.
The point is that every step in the chain there is a skilled person who is being paid to do a task. Such a person could legitimately argue that they are satisfying market demand for a product or service that has many perfectly honest uses and that it is no business of theirs to be making moral judgements that the law doesn't require.
"Hell if I didn't carry the spammers traffic then someone else would"
At a guess I would say that there must be sufficient money flowing in from punters to keep the wheels turning for a while yet.
Long term answer? Fewer mug punters. Maybe that's where the effort should be placed.
Short term answer? Flood the spammers back with fake replies that they can't easily discard.
If one Mr Big gets blacklisted or put out of business then there are plenty more to step up and buy in all the things they need to pick up the threads.
MS launching probing attacks into a new sector
on
Microsoft Freon
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The Xbox offers benefits to many parts of MS, and the investment necessary to establish a beachhead is small compared what they could win.
It seems clear that there is a huge marketplace in the home entertainment / home management space. The traditional PC / laptop and Office type apps aren't going to take this area by storm so some new thinking is needed.
First off it isn't clear what will turn out to be the paradigm shifter. New ways to run e-mail? Video interaction with chat groups over broadband? New games? Management of CD music centre? TiVo style access to TV content? Automating household security and energy management?
Any or all of these could be the key, but maybe something not on this list at all. The big thing for MS is to leverage current strengths to absolutely dominate the space they target.
From this point of view they need to establish a new common platform for H/W, S/W and comms under MS control.
Xbox offers
* A foothold in the livingroom via a games console, with a cashflow attached
* Testing out of the control technologies that will be needed to enforce a monopoly:
* Xbox architecture for coupling the OS and hardware so that only controlled, approved apps can run
* The chance to test out DRM and distribution apps (at least in the next Xbox release)
* MS mediation of interactive services, e-mail home shopping etc that are currently set top box based
* A viable platform for whatever does turn out to be the killer app/service in the home
A lot of people would love to see these kind of services up and running, but lack the muscle to do it on their own. If MS can ship enough Xbox class machines they should be able to attract third parties to deliver whats necessary (within MS rules of course)
Whatever happens I'm sure that Xbox and derivatives will not be money down the drain for MS
So much software gets shifted because someone is actively pushing it. Not because its good, useful or well supported but because someone is out there at trade shows, advertising in trade mags, shipping out trial licenses etc, actively recruiting early adopters.
Maybe there is a need for an idiots guide like "Crossing the Chasm"
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbn In quiry.asp?userid=18DJH2Q01P&isbn=0066620023
If I was marketing a utility like OpenSSH I would make sure it was "on the list" in every place that someone might look for secure remote connection software. This might mean
* Tie-up deals with other suppliers to get the software shipped and trialled
* Presentations at banking industry seminars
* White papers to learned security journals
* Following up downloads and trial licences in big companies
* Printing case studies and success stories
On a side note I probably wouldn't call it freeware so much as "its a commodity these days, why would anyone pay for it"
Aye, point taken, the line rentals are the problem unless you have to have the lines for other reasons.
Looking at the technology suggested, they are talking about linking 2 ADSLs. So if you have 2 lines already in the house like we do it might make some sense to go up to 1Mb down 512k up.
I can't see myself doing this though as the performance of my basic line is fine.
I'm sure there is an easy way for people to get round this censorship. Trouble is that most corporate employees won't know/care about back routes.
For most people the mere fact that a site has been flagged as "dodgy" is good enough. If you have to go and ask for permission to visit a "banned site" and probably log a reason to go there with the authorities, I bet most people opt to keep their heads down and go along with it.
I'd been wondering about load balancing a pair of ADSL lines. This confirms my hunch.
In the UK at least, the basic home service is 512k down, 256k up and a single IP address. The cost of 1mb down 256k up is much more than twice the basic cost, presumably because it is counted as a business service. Getting 2Mb down 512k up is a lot more again. It would be far cheaper to get 4 lines converted to ADSL with the added bonus of some redundancy.
As far as I know the pricing is set for market segmentation rather than for any inherent extra costs for the fatter pipe. The same home user is unlikely to hog the extra bandwidth, they will just get a better service.
Anyone know any real objections to this from the telcos perspective?
I can't believe all these comments from people who say that they absolutely must be able to get text messages and urgent calls on their mobiles. In my experience mobile phones just aren't that reliable even when noone is trying to block the signal
In the centre of London there are lots of places that have no signal and I've lost count of the number of times a crucial voicemail message only came through the next day because the provider had problems.
If you are on call in case of emergencies then you don't go places where the signal is weak, it's as simple as that!
If the signal was so reliable why would they put the little strength indicator on the display.
These stories usually crop up when someone in the space business needs a bit of publicity to support their latest funding demands.
Having said that, it does always get some newspaper headlines.
The odds of a catastrophic meteorite hit are pretty small, certainly smaller than the chances of really big earthquakes.
However, at least you know that you are living near a volcano or on top of a fault and can learn to live with it (or move). The thing that worries people about meteorites appears to be the fact that they could strike anywhere, any time, without warning.
Has anyone actually seen serious proposals to DO SOMETHING about the meteorite menace? or is it all just hot air
The trouble is Asimov's laws are too full of loopholes to be of any practical use.
Many of Asimov's stories centred on the absurdities that resulted from ill formed instructions or ambiguous situations that robots interpreted in amusing ways.
If the legal profession can't get self preservation and self defence clearly defined after centuries of trying, what hope for the software designer?
Maybe the first step should be to solve the translation problem on one machine in one direction.
As far as I know this is still a pretty tough problem and the only working systems are still on a par with the machine text translators. In other words a long way to go yet.
The challenge lies in the fact that different languages express the same thing differently and there is no one to one map between words,still less phrases or sentences.
Maybe you can get the gist of a simple paragraph from an auto translation, but if the language is tricky, colloquial or just badly written you have little chance.
It makes me wonder whether there are already army recruiters out there on Everquest looking for tech savvy youth. You can certainly tell who is a good soldier and who is not after a serious dragon raid!
In fact some of the the guild leaders on Everquest remind me of the stereotype army sergeant barking out orders to keep the troops in line. Maybe this is where they go the idea from.
Slashdot Mirror
There isn't a lot of colour in the night sky even through a good telescope. I know this from theory and observation, but even so I goggle along with everyone else at the false colour, saturated colour images that they come out with.
Must be our monkey brains hardwired for picking out speckles of colour that mean ripe bananas in that tree over there!
Now if they offered some kind of sanction against the spammer. Say a few cents for every physical letter that was delivered when it should have gone as e-mail.
THAT might give some encouragement to register.
As it stands registration just gives the spammer another chance to find you.
Come on Grandad, tell us what it was like in the 90s before .NET was invented.
.
I bet you know some stories about that old time JAVA they used to use.
Cut to picture of JAVA hackers face down in the dirt with arrows in their backs. . . .
There are lots of satellites up there, and lots of reports of unauthorized usage, but no-one seems too upset by it all.
Could it be that the value of the data to be hacked is not worth the effort, so the actual amount of hacking activity is low?
There was some TV news reporting recently that the US reconnaissance planes over Kosovo were uplinking their camera shots to a satellite that rebroadcast without scrambling.
The US military type that was interviewed said that they were aware, and that the data was unclassified so no need for encryption.
Those with the right dish on the roof can pick up quite a few unscrambled transmissions from news gathering teams uplinking to satellite. Again noone worries too much because the info is seldom much use.
Denial of service attacks like the one in China were quickly rectified, and I'm sure the Chinese government embarrassment will quickly pass.
If there was a security problem with satellites, military or otherwise, we would have seen many more high profile attacks before now.
True rewards have been around since the dawn of maths, but these have mostly been from rich sponsors paying what amounted to the living expenses of the successful mathematician.
My days were in the 70s and I think the richest prizes were like the Booker prize, £20,000 ($30,000)Hardly the same league as a million green 'uns.
That's not counting salaried positions which are sometimes awarded as prizes
Things have changed since my day. It used to be that anyone who was capable of a serious attempt on the Riemann hypothesis would get to work because the problem needed solving and the kudos would be immense. Any monetary reward would be incidental. I suppose a million dollars will attract mathematicians who are today working on other topics. Presumably the Clay Institute feels that Riemann has to compete hard against other avenues of research. Or maybe they are targetting all the rich quants who were just laid off On Wall Street.
If you want to make sense of most things in the commercial world, the answer is to follow the money trail.
It seems to me the trail starts with the advertiser (or scam merchant). They pay Mr Big to send out a spamshot and forward back the results.
Mr Big needs to
* buy some expertise in spam techniques,
* buy some mail generation kit (I don't know how much H/W or S/W these guys need)
* pay the ISPs,
* buy / get hold of some spamlists
* pay someone to keep track of the mail replies
* If they are unlucky pay for some legal advice
* Oh and the last step in the chain is a punter actually paying hard cash to the advertiser/scammer
They put the money into the chain that drives all the other players.
The point is that every step in the chain there is a skilled person who is being paid to do a task. Such a person could legitimately argue that they are satisfying market demand for a product or service that has many perfectly honest uses and that it is no business of theirs to be making moral judgements that the law doesn't require.
"Hell if I didn't carry the spammers traffic then someone else would"
At a guess I would say that there must be sufficient money flowing in from punters to keep the wheels turning for a while yet.
Long term answer? Fewer mug punters. Maybe that's where the effort should be placed.
Short term answer? Flood the spammers back with fake replies that they can't easily discard.
If one Mr Big gets blacklisted or put out of business then there are plenty more to step up and buy in all the things they need to pick up the threads.
The Xbox offers benefits to many parts of MS, and the investment necessary to establish a beachhead is small compared what they could win.
It seems clear that there is a huge marketplace in the home entertainment / home management space. The traditional PC / laptop and Office type apps aren't going to take this area by storm so some new thinking is needed.
First off it isn't clear what will turn out to be the paradigm shifter. New ways to run e-mail? Video interaction with chat groups over broadband? New games? Management of CD music centre? TiVo style access to TV content? Automating household security and energy management?
Any or all of these could be the key, but maybe something not on this list at all. The big thing for MS is to leverage current strengths to absolutely dominate the space they target.
From this point of view they need to establish a new common platform for H/W, S/W and comms under MS control.
Xbox offers
* A foothold in the livingroom via a games console, with a cashflow attached
* Testing out of the control technologies that will be needed to enforce a monopoly:
* Xbox architecture for coupling the OS and hardware so that only controlled, approved apps can run
* The chance to test out DRM and distribution apps (at least in the next Xbox release)
* MS mediation of interactive services, e-mail home shopping etc that are currently set top box based
* A viable platform for whatever does turn out to be the killer app/service in the home
A lot of people would love to see these kind of services up and running, but lack the muscle to do it on their own. If MS can ship enough Xbox class machines they should be able to attract third parties to deliver whats necessary (within MS rules of course)
Whatever happens I'm sure that Xbox and derivatives will not be money down the drain for MS
Sigh,
n In quiry.asp?userid=18DJH2Q01P&isbn=0066620023
So much software gets shifted because someone is actively pushing it. Not because its good, useful or well supported but because someone is out there at trade shows, advertising in trade mags, shipping out trial licenses etc, actively recruiting early adopters.
Maybe there is a need for an idiots guide like "Crossing the Chasm"
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isb
If I was marketing a utility like OpenSSH I would make sure it was "on the list" in every place that someone might look for secure remote connection software. This might mean
* Tie-up deals with other suppliers to get the software shipped and trialled
* Presentations at banking industry seminars
* White papers to learned security journals
* Following up downloads and trial licences in big companies
* Printing case studies and success stories
On a side note I probably wouldn't call it freeware so much as "its a commodity these days, why would anyone pay for it"
Aye, point taken, the line rentals are the problem unless you have to have the lines for other reasons.
Looking at the technology suggested, they are talking about linking 2 ADSLs. So if you have 2 lines already in the house like we do it might make some sense to go up to 1Mb down 512k up.
I can't see myself doing this though as the performance of my basic line is fine.
I'm sure there is an easy way for people to get round this censorship. Trouble is that most corporate employees won't know/care about back routes.
For most people the mere fact that a site has been flagged as "dodgy" is good enough. If you have to go and ask for permission to visit a "banned site" and probably log a reason to go there with the authorities, I bet most people opt to keep their heads down and go along with it.
I'd been wondering about load balancing a pair of ADSL lines. This confirms my hunch.
In the UK at least, the basic home service is 512k down, 256k up and a single IP address. The cost of 1mb down 256k up is much more than twice the basic cost, presumably because it is counted as a business service. Getting 2Mb down 512k up is a lot more again. It would be far cheaper to get 4 lines converted to ADSL with the added bonus of some redundancy.
As far as I know the pricing is set for market segmentation rather than for any inherent extra costs for the fatter pipe. The same home user is unlikely to hog the extra bandwidth, they will just get a better service.
Anyone know any real objections to this from the telcos perspective?
I can't believe all these comments from people who say that they absolutely must be able to get text messages and urgent calls on their mobiles. In my experience mobile phones just aren't that reliable even when noone is trying to block the signal
In the centre of London there are lots of places that have no signal and I've lost count of the number of times a crucial voicemail message only came through the next day because the provider had problems.
If you are on call in case of emergencies then you don't go places where the signal is weak, it's as simple as that!
If the signal was so reliable why would they put the little strength indicator on the display.
These stories usually crop up when someone in the space business needs a bit of publicity to support their latest funding demands.
Having said that, it does always get some newspaper headlines.
The odds of a catastrophic meteorite hit are pretty small, certainly smaller than the chances of really big earthquakes.
However, at least you know that you are living near a volcano or on top of a fault and can learn to live with it (or move). The thing that worries people about meteorites appears to be the fact that they could strike anywhere, any time, without warning.
Has anyone actually seen serious proposals to DO SOMETHING about the meteorite menace? or is it all just hot air
True, Asimov wanted to write interesting stories about the interaction of people and technology.
IMHO he was exploring the absurdities that seemingly logical rules could create.
The problem doesn't lie with technology so much as the fuzziness of the definitions:
What is a human being?
What is an order?
What is harm?
Any definition you come up with can be contested by challenging the definition of the words you use.
The trouble is Asimov's laws are too full of loopholes to be of any practical use.
Many of Asimov's stories centred on the absurdities that resulted from ill formed instructions or ambiguous situations that robots interpreted in amusing ways.
If the legal profession can't get self preservation and self defence clearly defined after centuries of trying, what hope for the software designer?
Maybe the first step should be to solve the translation problem on one machine in one direction. As far as I know this is still a pretty tough problem and the only working systems are still on a par with the machine text translators. In other words a long way to go yet. The challenge lies in the fact that different languages express the same thing differently and there is no one to one map between words,still less phrases or sentences. Maybe you can get the gist of a simple paragraph from an auto translation, but if the language is tricky, colloquial or just badly written you have little chance.
It makes me wonder whether there are already army recruiters out there on Everquest looking for tech savvy youth. You can certainly tell who is a good soldier and who is not after a serious dragon raid! In fact some of the the guild leaders on Everquest remind me of the stereotype army sergeant barking out orders to keep the troops in line. Maybe this is where they go the idea from.