...otherwise they'll have all your personal data and your phone # for future direct marketing, and they'll know their spam had reached you so they'll have your interests more narrowly classified, making you a more valuable direct marketing target!
The problem with NANAS is that it has different format for sightings. I think that when the article talks about a spam repository he's talking about reliable email-folder-like one to digest for the "bad" dictionary, without polluting it with the custom wrappings of the submitters' headers and privacy suppressions.
Well, any spam fighting must start with spam
recognition, which has to involve some filtering. So this probabilistic technique is as good as any other for yet another approach to single out spam messages.
Now when you are 100% sure that something you've received is spam, it's time to complain to the sender's providers to have his account closed ASAP (and the upstream providers, and spamcop etc.)
The best approach is hand-written complaints. Being lazy, I use SpamBouncer to do the job for me
(and I have actually received a couple of manual followups to these autocomplaints leading to reported spammers' account closures).
(It's alpha version yet, and it's presently working on a very small subset of environments - requiring MS Outlook/CDO/.NET; but the author seems to solicit invitations to have this rewritten for a normal platform/language:
"Depending on the interest, the future versions can be re-written to support more platforms and features."
Before that, its being free is questionable as it's basing on non-free tech...)
Well, the article is happy with the fact that so far, the "good guys" seemingly prevail (in the author's opinion). I.e., Orwell failed.
There are two caveats here. One is measuring the existing balance and judging whether the "good guys" indeed benefit from the technology more than suffering the personal freedom loss to some extent. Different views exist on that. For a good dose of more cautious opinions read some Chomsky thoughts. It definitely is a subjective thing - while a lot of the people in the US and around the world are now giving their govts more and more surveillance and censorship power (or
just have fallen prey to unfortunately elected officials who make things look as if their people give them this power), others would never sacrifice their own personal freedoms even if everybody around shouts that this would bring "better security". Depending on what is more important to you, you may or may not think the world is 1984-like today. Unfortunately for me, I am on the pessimistic side here - feeling that the mass media technology does suppress >99% of thinking out of the mainstream political lines dictated by the ruling powers and the capital behind them. The perpetual war going on right now as a series of "isolated conflicts" and hypocritic switch of countries like the US from being at war with "Ostasia/Eastasia" is so much like what was described by Orwell...
The other thing is that the battle is not over. The technologies involved are in fact moved by concrete people - so some classified techs leak out of sole govt possession for everyone's use (for good and for bad - crypto and nukes come to mind). And, of course, there is a lot of public-domain tech which first serves those trying to restrain abusive power representatives forgetting what they are supposed to be there for, even in some democratic states... The balance can shift either way - and who knows what would the article author say in 2084?
The "spam filters on your work and home accounts" are there working just because you have all the anti-spam fighters working to protect you. Do you think that mail filtering programs like SpamBouncer (see my journal) are just heaven-sent?
Sure, people engaged in the anti-spam fight
seriously waste much more effort that they could have if they were "just hitting delete". Yet, it is them who give us the common mortals the powerful filtering tools to never have that "You have new mail" message again on the screen generated by some junk instead of a real letter you want to read!
And you really should give something in return. If a spam gets through your filter, please report it to SpamCop or similar! Because your filters (Hotmail's for sure!) are constantly improving themselves via this feedback - they use the blocklists out there, which are generated from these complaints. To report, you need just 1) one forward operation on the spam to a pre-stored (in your address book) address of your spamcop report box 2) opening the autoresponse from spamcop in your email later on and click
through it 3) 15 seconds reviewing what's in there on the dynamic report page 4) submit!
If everybody using a filter were doing this at least occasionally, the Net would have been a better place.
Agreed. I think it is definitely not a "typical Lem" book. I would recommend
"Solaris", "Eden", "Cyberiad" or "Pirx..."
for a more typical Lem start.
Back in 1980s in Russia I was stunned by "Eden"
- how did the authorities let this book out
when it so obviously denounces the Soviet-style
total information control? Great book indeed...
On John Lennon's 50th birthday (in 1990), I remember some signs on the Lenin prospect (actually, some house numbers) in St.Petersburg (the original one in Russia, you copycats...) were repainted in the same font to read "Lennon prospect" (which, unfortunately, was replaced by the authorities back to original in just 2 days or so:-( ).
The bio you link does acknowledge that the ministry of truth idea was based on his experiences with BBC, but they don't acknowledge the news was frequently changed:-)
The ministry of truth did just that - changing yesterday newspapers based on what the today's party official line was.
And Orwell didn't invent this himself - this is precisely what the Soviet system did back in the days of Stalin. Whenever yet another party big shot "turned out to be the Soviet people enemy", i.e. convicted in yet another truth-mocking trial, he was carefully removed from all the old newspapers, books and especially school textbooks. It's amazing to think just how much images with Trotsky were edited in that manner...
The article never elaborates on the aspect of the QA fighting the trolls - important to deal with for any knowledge base compiled from various level expertise sources (like comments to a/. article - some are right on the nail, some are incompetent, some are intentional trolls). Unfortunately, even robust technologies which were designed with such attacks in mind sometimes fall in the face of the clever poisoning attacks (see the/. article Google bombing).
You need a lot of "mod" and "metamod"-like activities to work; it looks to me that the peer review system shouldn't be too "democratic" to succeed (i.e., there is always a need for some top-level superusers, who are trusted automatically because they are essentially the system builders).
Anyone has an example of such a system with its founders going berserk (say, think of CmdrTaco starting daily trolling:-) )?
About a month ago I got a virus (blocked by spambouncer,
and then verified as a virus by text-only
mail user agent) very similar in its idea to what you describe. Unfortunately, I don't
remember the exact subject line, but the social
engineering line was along what you propose.
The subject and the main body part were telling that I am violating software license agreement for the senders' software, according to the license excerpts attached. An attachment, disguised as "license.txt", but actually an executable file, was there, too. Deleted it...
Why or.orbl.org is listed twice??
on
ORBZ Shuts Down
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Thanks for the.mc snippet, but can you please explain why do you have the open relay blockage listed twice? Won't this result in extra query per each incoming email?!
FEATURE(dnsbl,`or.orbl.org', `Mail from $&{client_addr} refused: See http://or.orbl.org/ (ORBL)') FEATURE(dnsbl,`or.orbl.org', `Mail from $&{client_addr} refused: or.orbl.org. See http://www.orbl.org/')
Simpler way to disable autosearch in IE5+
on
Netscape 6 is Spyware?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Whenever I am forced to use an IE on yet another corporate PC I get, I always go to the Tools/Internet Options/Advanced, and change some things to suit my taste on presentation and security (to the extent you can get the latter with IE...)
security/more anonymous browsing DISABLE Install On Demand DISABLE Page Hit Counting DISABLE Page Transitions
presentation DON'T Show Friendly HTTP messages (I want the plain servers response back, unedited, dammit!) DON'T Show Friendly URLs DON'T Use Smooth Scrolling (smooth scrolling makes my eyes SORE!!!)
Search From Address Toolbar: DON'T Search From Address Toolbar
(This is the one that completely toggles the autosearch off.)
Security: turn all the certificate checks and alerts on
also I use the "High" security zone settings for casual browsing
You scared me for a while... But if you actually go to
zdnet.com and type "Microsoft's lobbying efforts eclipse" in the searchbox, you'll get a link to the article (to the zdnet.com.com location). So it's O.K...
was it .jp company - w/TV RC in mind? precision??
on
Think And Click
·
· Score: 1
Me too, although I had this off some Russian media at that time. I vaguely remember it, but IIRC, it was a Japanese company that was doing the research at that time, and they had a working prototype FOR HUMANS (not monkeys) that allowed channel flipping up or down. And they were saying they're looking into things like 2D movements + selection (equivalent of a 1-button mouse). I won't be surprised if someone can dig up an existing Japanese patent on this all from that time!
They also said then (in that article) that they started with electrodes hooked up to pretty random places on one's scull (maybe still within certain areas), then feeding it up to an oscillograph, and then, after a 15-minute training session, a human was always able (via the visual feedback) to do things with that waveform on the screen as instructed. Next step was their RC prototype. They said it required 15 minutes of training before it was usable.
OTOH, I don't think they seriously talked about applying this tech to people with disabilities then. Actually, they mentioned that they don't think any serious machinery hookup was possible at that stage because they feared glitches (like, someone frightens you, and your telepathic wheelchair uncontrollably rushes from the sidewalk and into the traffic...)
I don't see any of these addressed in this recent (/.-posted) article at all, BTW.
You're in it from the older days than I am - I started in the days of the kernel 2.0.0 release and gcc was the compiler to do it. I take my hat (not red) off before you.:-)
I generally agree with your rule of the thumb. This is the way that one person does his kernel configs. But I think you still are missing my point about various optimization inclinations with the same hardware. Even if you disregard things like hardcoded defaults (indeed, most of these are configured with/proc-based tools today), have a closer look at the "M or Y" question. What is rarely used for you can be used on a regular basis for someone else. Say, for someone PPP stack should be in the modules, but not if you compile a dial-in box. For someone with a WinModem on board the driver is completely unnecessary because he has an external serial modem. For another one compiling a secure router box disabling modules completely (unfortunately impossible when things like FW protocol plugin modules required if you're building a FW box) is an additional performance and security feature.
You're talking now about the "VITAL for the user to tweak to producing a working kernel". But Sourcerer and alikes set the accent on maximum efficiency, not taking compromises. If you, say, don't compile ISA support into a kernel at all, it's more efficient than if it's not, and sometimes you want to do this even if you have an obsolete ISA card stuck in (e.g. which you use in a dual-boot config from another OS - go detect this situation automagically!). So your approach is not very far from the "generic" binary kernels supplied by the vendors like RH.
Overall I think that the effort to build this "hashing" distro-server and the framework is not needed as much - the gap from a generic kernel+modules to a custom-compiled well-tuned one is not that wide to erect such a sophisticated bridge. That's all IMHO, of course - if someone is eager to waste his time on this project but won't do anything else - why not, maybe others will think that it is indeed very useful and leap at it.
Answer to your question: yes; buest-guess. And you can
also preserve your machine's older config if you upgrade
to a newer kernel (with make oldconfig).
Redhat kernel sources, e.g., usually come with the same config
as the distribution kernel. So if you just want to recompile
the kernel for a different CPU, you can use it, and still have the generic "safe bet" answers for the other stuff.
Automatic choices will not be as perfect - they
sacrifice efficiency for a more generic solution.
But if you are looking at Sourcerer, maybe you're just
becoming brave enough to leave the generic pre-compiled
kernel aside.
Go look at http://www.digitalhermit.com/linux/kernel.html
for a start, and look at the kernel config. howto as well.
Consider #kernelnewbies (See http://www.kernelnewbies.org/) if you want advice on kernel hacking beginning. It's not
as scary as it might seem...
The server site can then take the source, recompile it for that configuration, and generate a set of ISO images containing the optimized setup for that machine.
One advantage of this approach is that if you're installing on multiple identical machines, you would only go through the process once. Once it's done, you'd have a set of "instant" install CDs. No menus, no further tweaking, just a direct blast onto the hard drive(s).
When was the last time that you actually compiled the Linux
kernel? Did you ever look at the # of options you have
in the kernel config dialogs? There are about 2^(# of
the config choice options) possible variants of kernel. The # is not exact - because, on one hand, sometimes the choices are not independent; on the other hand, some values are not binary.
Also keep in mind that even on multiple identical machines randomly picked among various Linux users it is absolutely not guaranteed that the requirements for the box stability and performance are the same, hence no same config!!!
One of the beauties of the Linux IMHO is that despite all this vast #s of different kernel configurations compiled out there, running on different hardware platforms, it evolves the way it does...
(Now just imagine the language Al Viro would have spit out if he bothered flaming you...;-) ).
Slashdot Mirror
...otherwise they'll have all your personal data and your phone # for future direct marketing, and they'll know their spam had reached you so they'll have your interests more narrowly classified, making you a more valuable direct marketing target!
The problem with NANAS is that it has different format for sightings. I think that when the article talks about a spam repository he's talking about reliable email-folder-like one to digest for the "bad" dictionary, without polluting it with the custom wrappings of the submitters' headers and privacy suppressions.
Well, any spam fighting must start with spam recognition, which has to involve some filtering. So this probabilistic technique is as good as any other for yet another approach to single out spam messages.
Now when you are 100% sure that something you've received is spam, it's time to complain to the sender's providers to have his account closed ASAP (and the upstream providers, and spamcop etc.)
The best approach is hand-written complaints. Being lazy, I use SpamBouncer to do the job for me (and I have actually received a couple of manual followups to these autocomplaints leading to reported spammers' account closures).
(It's alpha version yet, and it's presently working on a very small subset of environments - requiring MS Outlook/CDO/.NET; but the author seems to solicit invitations to have this rewritten for a normal platform/language:
Before that, its being free is questionable as it's basing on non-free tech...)
World Without War
Well, the article is happy with the fact that so far, the "good guys" seemingly prevail (in the author's opinion). I.e., Orwell failed.
There are two caveats here. One is measuring the existing balance and judging whether the "good guys" indeed benefit from the technology more than suffering the personal freedom loss to some extent. Different views exist on that. For a good dose of more cautious opinions read some Chomsky thoughts. It definitely is a subjective thing - while a lot of the people in the US and around the world are now giving their govts more and more surveillance and censorship power (or just have fallen prey to unfortunately elected officials who make things look as if their people give them this power), others would never sacrifice their own personal freedoms even if everybody around shouts that this would bring "better security". Depending on what is more important to you, you may or may not think the world is 1984-like today. Unfortunately for me, I am on the pessimistic side here - feeling that the mass media technology does suppress >99% of thinking out of the mainstream political lines dictated by the ruling powers and the capital behind them. The perpetual war going on right now as a series of "isolated conflicts" and hypocritic switch of countries like the US from being at war with "Ostasia/Eastasia" is so much like what was described by Orwell...
The other thing is that the battle is not over. The technologies involved are in fact moved by concrete people - so some classified techs leak out of sole govt possession for everyone's use (for good and for bad - crypto and nukes come to mind). And, of course, there is a lot of public-domain tech which first serves those trying to restrain abusive power representatives forgetting what they are supposed to be there for, even in some democratic states... The balance can shift either way - and who knows what would the article author say in 2084?
SpamBouncer is the best weapon against spam!
Sure, people engaged in the anti-spam fight seriously waste much more effort that they could have if they were "just hitting delete". Yet, it is them who give us the common mortals the powerful filtering tools to never have that "You have new mail" message again on the screen generated by some junk instead of a real letter you want to read!
And you really should give something in return. If a spam gets through your filter, please report it to SpamCop or similar! Because your filters (Hotmail's for sure!) are constantly improving themselves via this feedback - they use the blocklists out there, which are generated from these complaints. To report, you need just 1) one forward operation on the spam to a pre-stored (in your address book) address of your spamcop report box 2) opening the autoresponse from spamcop in your email later on and click through it 3) 15 seconds reviewing what's in there on the dynamic report page 4) submit!
If everybody using a filter were doing this at least occasionally, the Net would have been a better place.
Hopefully this will be dismissed before the actual hearing under the pretext of no sound substance in the case...
Agreed. I think it is definitely not a "typical Lem" book. I would recommend "Solaris", "Eden", "Cyberiad" or "Pirx..." for a more typical Lem start.
Back in 1980s in Russia I was stunned by "Eden" - how did the authorities let this book out when it so obviously denounces the Soviet-style total information control? Great book indeed...
I think that small print in most typical ISP's
contracts with their customers would relieve
them from such claims.
Nice hack :-))
:-( ).
On John Lennon's 50th birthday (in 1990), I remember some signs on the Lenin prospect (actually, some house numbers) in St.Petersburg (the original one in Russia, you copycats...) were repainted in the same font to read "Lennon prospect" (which, unfortunately, was replaced by the authorities back to original in just 2 days or so
The bio you link does acknowledge that the ministry of truth idea was based on his experiences with BBC, but they don't acknowledge the news was frequently changed :-)
The ministry of truth did just that - changing yesterday newspapers based on what the today's party official line was.
And Orwell didn't invent this himself - this is precisely what the Soviet system did back in the days of Stalin. Whenever yet another party big shot "turned out to be the Soviet people enemy", i.e. convicted in yet another truth-mocking trial, he was carefully removed from all the old newspapers, books and especially school textbooks. It's amazing to think just how much images with Trotsky were edited in that manner...
You need a lot of "mod" and "metamod"-like activities to work; it looks to me that the peer review system shouldn't be too "democratic" to succeed (i.e., there is always a need for some top-level superusers, who are trusted automatically because they are essentially the system builders).
Anyone has an example of such a system with its founders going berserk (say, think of CmdrTaco starting daily trolling :-) )?
...which is at
http://www.eff.org/IP/SSSCA_CBDTPA/
The subject and the main body part were telling that I am violating software license agreement for the senders' software, according to the license excerpts attached. An attachment, disguised as "license.txt", but actually an executable file, was there, too. Deleted it...
Thanks for the .mc snippet,
but can you please explain why do you have
the open relay blockage listed twice?
Won't this result in extra query per each
incoming email?!
FEATURE(dnsbl,`or.orbl.org', `Mail from $&{client_addr} refused: See http://or.orbl.org/ (ORBL)')
FEATURE(dnsbl,`or.orbl.org', `Mail from $&{client_addr} refused: or.orbl.org. See http://www.orbl.org/')
Whenever I am forced to use an IE on yet another corporate PC I get, I always go to the Tools/Internet Options/Advanced, and change some things to suit my taste on presentation and security (to the extent you can get the latter with IE...)
security/more anonymous browsing
DISABLE Install On Demand
DISABLE Page Hit Counting
DISABLE Page Transitions
presentation
DON'T Show Friendly HTTP messages
(I want the plain servers response back, unedited, dammit!)
DON'T Show Friendly URLs
DON'T Use Smooth Scrolling (smooth scrolling makes my eyes SORE!!!)
Search From Address Toolbar:
DON'T Search From Address Toolbar
(This is the one that completely toggles the autosearch off.)
Security:
turn all the certificate checks and alerts on
also I use the "High" security zone settings for casual browsing
You scared me for a while... But if you actually go to
zdnet.com and type "Microsoft's lobbying efforts eclipse" in the searchbox, you'll get a link to the article (to the zdnet.com.com location). So it's O.K...
Me too, although I had this off some Russian media at that time. I vaguely remember it, but IIRC, it was a Japanese company that was doing the research at that time, and they had a working prototype FOR HUMANS (not monkeys) that allowed channel flipping up or down. And they were saying they're looking into things like 2D movements + selection (equivalent of a 1-button mouse). I won't be surprised if someone can dig up an existing Japanese patent on this all from that time!
They also said then (in that article) that they started with electrodes hooked up to pretty random places on one's scull (maybe still within certain areas), then feeding it up to an oscillograph, and then, after a 15-minute training session, a human was always able (via the visual feedback) to do things with that waveform on the screen as instructed. Next step was their RC prototype. They said it required 15 minutes of training before it was usable.
OTOH, I don't think they seriously talked about applying this tech to people with disabilities then. Actually, they mentioned that they don't think any serious machinery hookup was possible at that stage because they feared glitches (like, someone frightens you, and your telepathic wheelchair uncontrollably rushes from the sidewalk and into the traffic...)
I don't see any of these addressed in this recent (/.-posted) article at all, BTW.
You're in it from the older days than I am - I started in the days of the kernel 2.0.0 release and gcc was the compiler to do it. I take my hat (not red) off before you. :-)
I generally agree with your rule of the thumb. This is the way that one person does his kernel configs. But I think you still are missing my point about various optimization inclinations with the same hardware. Even if you disregard things like hardcoded defaults (indeed, most of these are configured with /proc-based tools today), have a closer look at the "M or Y" question. What is rarely used for you can be used on a regular basis for someone else. Say, for someone PPP stack should be in the modules, but not if you compile a dial-in box. For someone with a WinModem on board the driver is completely unnecessary because he has an external serial modem. For another one compiling a secure router box disabling modules completely (unfortunately impossible when things like FW protocol plugin modules required if you're building a FW box) is an additional performance and security feature.
You're talking now about the "VITAL for the user to tweak to producing a working kernel". But Sourcerer and alikes set the accent on maximum efficiency, not taking compromises. If you, say, don't compile ISA support into a kernel at all, it's more efficient than if it's not, and sometimes you want to do this even if you have an obsolete ISA card stuck in (e.g. which you use in a dual-boot config from another OS - go detect this situation automagically!). So your approach is not very far from the "generic" binary kernels supplied by the vendors like RH.
Overall I think that the effort to build this "hashing" distro-server and the framework is not needed as much - the gap from a generic kernel+modules to a custom-compiled well-tuned one is not that wide to erect such a sophisticated bridge. That's all IMHO, of course - if someone is eager to waste his time on this project but won't do anything else - why not, maybe others will think that it is indeed very useful and leap at it.
Answer to your question: yes; buest-guess. And you can also preserve your machine's older config if you upgrade to a newer kernel (with make oldconfig). Redhat kernel sources, e.g., usually come with the same config as the distribution kernel. So if you just want to recompile the kernel for a different CPU, you can use it, and still have the generic "safe bet" answers for the other stuff. Automatic choices will not be as perfect - they sacrifice efficiency for a more generic solution. But if you are looking at Sourcerer, maybe you're just becoming brave enough to leave the generic pre-compiled kernel aside. Go look at http://www.digitalhermit.com/linux/kernel.html for a start, and look at the kernel config. howto as well. Consider #kernelnewbies (See http://www.kernelnewbies.org/) if you want advice on kernel hacking beginning. It's not as scary as it might seem...
When was the last time that you actually compiled the Linux kernel? Did you ever look at the # of options you have in the kernel config dialogs? There are about 2^(# of the config choice options) possible variants of kernel. The # is not exact - because, on one hand, sometimes the choices are not independent; on the other hand, some values are not binary.
Also keep in mind that even on multiple identical machines randomly picked among various Linux users it is absolutely not guaranteed that the requirements for the box stability and performance are the same, hence no same config!!!
One of the beauties of the Linux IMHO is that despite all this vast #s of different kernel configurations compiled out there, running on different hardware platforms, it evolves the way it does...
(Now just imagine the language Al Viro would have spit out if he bothered flaming you... ;-) ).
This should've been "RedHat has offered its own distribution of the GNU/Linux operating system". RedHat doesn't own Linux!!!