He was told his site was being delisted for violating Google's rules. He wasn't told which rule, or which page, of the 5000 page site, was in violation. No, Google isn't obliged to be helpful. but it wouldn't hurt them or cost them anything. It'd help the integity of their index and quality of results in the long run.
"This theory gained temporary popular attention due to press reporting following a better understanding of ice age cycles and a temporary downward trend of temperatures from the 1940s to the early 1970s. The theory never had strong scientific support..... It is occasionally asserted that "in the 1970's, the scientific establishment believed in global cooling" [4] and therefore we should not believe in global warming now. However, the scientific literature does not support this (see below); there is limited support from the popular press [5]."
If OS X is insecure and is only free from spyware because relatively few people use it then OS X is not secure.
We're talking past each other... So again, I DID NOT SAY THAT. I said the risk remains theoretical. Not impossible. And when and if it the vulnerabilities are weaponised, we'll know about it pretty quickly.
, headlines were throbbing with claims of a disastrous hurricane season back in January that would wipe out the nation. It ended up being the least active season in 10 years, but nobody reported the discrepancy in what scientists claimed
Climatologists don't write headlines, journmalists do. Climatologists know the difference between weather and climate. One good, or bad, year doesn't make much difference to climate.
That is really interesting. In which field did you work? In my field (theoretical condensed matter physics) claims that something is not so important are very hard to judge. It tends to be either testable
If his weblink really is his site, he's a historian. So not really as teastable as physics.
As I said the cost of development makes developing spyware for Macs prohibitively expensive for the profits that such a relatively small market share could yield. I don't see how I could make it any clearer.
Yes, but you miss the implication of your own argument: whether it's too hard or too expensive, no one has actually done this yet.
Though $10,000 should buy you a lot of ingenuity in Mosocow, I would have thought. Maybe it's just that the actual Mac hardware is thin on the ground in poorer countries. So cracked editions of OSX/Intel may change that.
Hey, sorry, I'm not American. A "dime" is just a movie cliche for me. The point was of course to use a public phone and cash. Or mooch a free call from a shop when you buy something; I'm a Luddiyte when it comes to mobile phones and depend on public phones and "the kindness of strangers" for calls on those rare occasions I'm away from my desk.
Let's say the chance of a piece of spyware being ran into and executed is X, and N is the number of Macs out there, and Z is the average profit per spyware installation. If the cost of developing the spyware is greater than X*N*Z there's no point in developing the spyware.
But once developed, the cost of additional copies is zero, and they proliferate in no time. So it seems no one has invested the time or money to develop that.
Basically if you feel secure then fine. But you're not.:) I just hope no-one actually specifically targets you, because if anyone has a mind to getting access to your Mac you're screwed.
I take precautions. I'm paranoid about my own security. And I don't have anything worth money to anyone else on my computer in any case.
Perhaps you are confused with Creationism and Intelligent Design
ID was coined by creationists as a means of trying to evade the constitutional separation of church and state. All the ID proponents are fundamentalist Christians.
Go search for any article talking about Christians/Creationists and you'll be met with hundreds of anti-Christian posts flaming about what idiots Christians are and how stupid they are for believing that an all powerful, self sufficient being created the world, instead of a "cause-and-effect law" breaching big-bang theory. There's no pretending about the existence of such hate, its right there in plain sight.
Just because I think you're a moron for believing in creationism doesn't mean I hate you. And Creationism/= Christianity. If you insist otherwise, well you just confirmed yourself a moron.
Should Google put the effort into finding out who the webmaster really is?
They don't need to. They already have a feature where webmasters can identify themselves and check the status of their site, submit new pages for indexing, etc. That's where he got the confirmation that he'd been delisted, but was unable to find out more.
I think the whole problem here is the way the guy is carrying out his campaign. He has a legitimate issue, but he is taking things out of turn. He could have started with a very apologetic pleading like "I'm very sorry this happened, and I know it usually takes two weeks, but I believe this site is important for public education, particularly at this time of year, could you please re-index my site?" You know, try and ply them with a little sugar.
He mentions that it's impossible to get any human response, phone or email. Unless you're buddies with Sergei, forget making personal appeals. Most big companies are like that, I once sent about 10 emails to Yahoo trying to work out a problem with my email account (which I pay then for, not a free account). I never got any response except links to irrelevant FAQ pages. Never one human being would give me their name to follow up.
What if the site had hundreds of pages of non-topical links? What if Google spiders just stopped at the first one they indexed (as they should)
If the site was blacklisted because of spam links on a specific page, they can just say that. They don't need to list every single violation. Once the webmaster checks out that page, he can fix that and fairly easily search his whole site for similar problems. If you have a big site you have no idea what to look for or where to start otherwise. As it happens, the guy was reasonably lucky in that the links were on the home page...
As I said in my previous post, spyware hasn't been written for Macs because there's not a large enough market share. Saying that this makes OS X secure is like saying it's safe to never lock your home when you leave because you live in a good neighborhood. Your home isn't secure, there's just a lack of criminals.
It's not the same at all. Wherever you are, if you're online you can and will be attacked by some sleazeball in Russia, Florida, Lagos, wherever. And there are millions of Macs online, and many owned by juicy, rich, unsophisticated targets. So I still this make a good empirical case that the ease of attack is not high, in an absolute sense, not just security by obscurity.
Now suppose I write spyware, but I use the Safari vulnerability coupled with the local admin escalation vulnerability....
I still wonder: if it's so easy, why hasn't it been done? I know lots of media compnaies, especially, who are heavily into Macs. If they were such easy pickings, why haven't they been taken down? Sure, industrial espionage would try to remain unobtrusive, but plenty of others would just add them to their spam botnets if they could.
This is not an anecdote like: "My grandfather smoked till and lived to be 90, so smoking is safe"; this is statistically significant: "10 million users have been smoking and are still on their feet".
Bill. He lives in relative modesty for his income and has always maintained that his kids would only inherit a small portion of his wealth with the bulk to be used for charitable causes.
Bill Gates home is worth in excess of $125 million. Modest by Saudi Royal standards, perhaps. As for what he leaves his children, that's just talk and yu can believe it if you want. At a minimum they'll still be richer than 99.999% of humanity.
The vast majority of funds and foundations that have long survived their founders have gone in ideological directions that would outrage said founders
Exactly. And the Gates foundation will be no different. If anyone believes in 50 years or whenever the the Gates foundation, with of the order of $100 billion dollars, will just quietly dissolve, they're insane. Those in charge of it will find a way to perpetuate it, probably just changing the name and shuffling people around.
As a matter of fact, I paid my higher education while making small programs and fixing PCs. I doubt I would have this chance in a world of VAXen or UNIX microcomputers that were way too expensive for small business. So, while Microsoft has done a lot of damage for his competitors, it's not true that they hadn't done some good also.
Without Bill Gates, there would have been just as many PCs and work for you. They wouldn't have been running MSDOS and Windows, maybe something similar like CP/M , GEM; or possibly Apple would have gone more mainstream. In any case, thank Intel, IBM, AMD and Motorola, not Microsoft, for your job.
It's not that MS software is completly crap, but that it has smothered any competition.
this vulnerability, coupled with one of the Safari vulnerabilities, is potentially much, much worse
Why is it still "potential"? It's been at least 8 months since this has been public knowledge. So I think this hole cannot be as easy to exploit as you think.
I don't understand rm-my-mac-mini's most common refutation of "In the real world people aren't given the opportunity to execute code on your system, so why does it matter
Who says it doesn't matter? But it does mean that the common state of home or SOHO users with one Mac connected to the Internet aren't vulnerable to this.
On an Australian TV show long ago the host would have a regular feature trying to open a milk carton tetra-pak without tearing it apart or spilling it. He succeeded about 10% of the time. (Before the pour slots and screw tops they often have now.)
Slashdot Mirror
Did you RTFA?
He was told his site was being delisted for violating Google's rules. He wasn't told which rule, or which page, of the 5000 page site, was in violation. No, Google isn't obliged to be helpful. but it wouldn't hurt them or cost them anything. It'd help the integity of their index and quality of results in the long run.
"This theory gained temporary popular attention due to press reporting following a better understanding of ice age cycles and a temporary downward trend of temperatures from the 1940s to the early 1970s. The theory never had strong scientific support..... It is occasionally asserted that "in the 1970's, the scientific establishment believed in global cooling" [4] and therefore we should not believe in global warming now. However, the scientific literature does not support this (see below); there is limited support from the popular press [5]."
And no, I didn't change it....
We're talking past each other... So again, I DID NOT SAY THAT. I said the risk remains theoretical. Not impossible. And when and if it the vulnerabilities are weaponised, we'll know about it pretty quickly.
Climatologists don't write headlines, journmalists do. Climatologists know the difference between weather and climate. One good, or bad, year doesn't make much difference to climate.
global cooling alarmism of the 1970s.
Another media-created story. See Was an imminent Ice Age predicted in the '70's? No
If his weblink really is his site, he's a historian. So not really as teastable as physics.
Yes, but you miss the implication of your own argument: whether it's too hard or too expensive, no one has actually done this yet.
Though $10,000 should buy you a lot of ingenuity in Mosocow, I would have thought. Maybe it's just that the actual Mac hardware is thin on the ground in poorer countries. So cracked editions of OSX/Intel may change that.
Hey, sorry, I'm not American. A "dime" is just a movie cliche for me. The point was of course to use a public phone and cash. Or mooch a free call from a shop when you buy something; I'm a Luddiyte when it comes to mobile phones and depend on public phones and "the kindness of strangers" for calls on those rare occasions I'm away from my desk.
TFA isn't about hardware bugs, but software that hijacks your phone to send signals clandestinely.
Just use a pay phone. Get rolls of dimes from the bank.
But once developed, the cost of additional copies is zero, and they proliferate in no time. So it seems no one has invested the time or money to develop that.
Basically if you feel secure then fine. But you're not. :) I just hope no-one actually specifically targets you, because if anyone has a mind to getting access to your Mac you're screwed.
I take precautions. I'm paranoid about my own security. And I don't have anything worth money to anyone else on my computer in any case.
ID was coined by creationists as a means of trying to evade the constitutional separation of church and state. All the ID proponents are fundamentalist Christians.
Just because I think you're a moron for believing in creationism doesn't mean I hate you. And Creationism /= Christianity. If you insist otherwise, well you just confirmed yourself a moron.
Really? What do Muslims have against evolution? If it was actually a hot button someone would have put a fatwah on Richard Dawkins, I think.
They don't need to. They already have a feature where webmasters can identify themselves and check the status of their site, submit new pages for indexing, etc. That's where he got the confirmation that he'd been delisted, but was unable to find out more.
He mentions that it's impossible to get any human response, phone or email. Unless you're buddies with Sergei, forget making personal appeals. Most big companies are like that, I once sent about 10 emails to Yahoo trying to work out a problem with my email account (which I pay then for, not a free account). I never got any response except links to irrelevant FAQ pages. Never one human being would give me their name to follow up.
If the site was blacklisted because of spam links on a specific page, they can just say that. They don't need to list every single violation. Once the webmaster checks out that page, he can fix that and fairly easily search his whole site for similar problems. If you have a big site you have no idea what to look for or where to start otherwise. As it happens, the guy was reasonably lucky in that the links were on the home page...
It's not the same at all. Wherever you are, if you're online you can and will be attacked by some sleazeball in Russia, Florida, Lagos, wherever. And there are millions of Macs online, and many owned by juicy, rich, unsophisticated targets. So I still this make a good empirical case that the ease of attack is not high, in an absolute sense, not just security by obscurity.
I still wonder: if it's so easy, why hasn't it been done? I know lots of media compnaies, especially, who are heavily into Macs. If they were such easy pickings, why haven't they been taken down? Sure, industrial espionage would try to remain unobtrusive, but plenty of others would just add them to their spam botnets if they could.
This is not an anecdote like: "My grandfather smoked till and lived to be 90, so smoking is safe"; this is statistically significant: "10 million users have been smoking and are still on their feet".
Bill Gates home is worth in excess of $125 million. Modest by Saudi Royal standards, perhaps. As for what he leaves his children, that's just talk and yu can believe it if you want. At a minimum they'll still be richer than 99.999% of humanity.
Exactly. And the Gates foundation will be no different. If anyone believes in 50 years or whenever the the Gates foundation, with of the order of $100 billion dollars, will just quietly dissolve, they're insane. Those in charge of it will find a way to perpetuate it, probably just changing the name and shuffling people around.
Without Bill Gates, there would have been just as many PCs and work for you. They wouldn't have been running MSDOS and Windows, maybe something similar like CP/M , GEM; or possibly Apple would have gone more mainstream. In any case, thank Intel, IBM, AMD and Motorola, not Microsoft, for your job.
It's not that MS software is completly crap, but that it has smothered any competition.
Why is it still "potential"? It's been at least 8 months since this has been public knowledge. So I think this hole cannot be as easy to exploit as you think.
Who says it doesn't matter? But it does mean that the common state of home or SOHO users with one Mac connected to the Internet aren't vulnerable to this.
On an Australian TV show long ago the host would have a regular feature trying to open a milk carton tetra-pak without tearing it apart or spilling it. He succeeded about 10% of the time. (Before the pour slots and screw tops they often have now.)
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume this is ironic.