> but just once I'd like to have a chain of evidence stretch taut, seize, and throttle a spammer, who will then hang for all to see over a pit fuming with fire and brimstone.
Chain of evidence, chain of forged iron, I'm not picky;-)
Anyways, feel free to cut-and-paste. As for chains of evidence and spammer suffering, the/. crowd pretty much missed the point of the article, which is that the honeypot being discussed is very probably going to be the downfall of a certain spammer who's been going non-stop since 1999.
All his base are belong to us (There Is No Us), he has no chance to survive; he should make his time.
> > The only people getting the ads would be the people who asked for it. The rest of us would be spam-free. > > That's not a problem, that's the ideal situation.
Oh, I agree.
Unfortunately, it is a problem if you're the DMA or some other bunch of marketing goonz.
Historically, the DMA's "problems" seem to get fixed by Congress with greater frequency than our "problems".
This may be changing - the FTC has asked for a national do-not-call list. Although it's opt-out, it's enforced by law, not "voluntary compliance on the part of the DMA". See, for instance, the FTC's press release on the
FTC proposed national "Do Not Call" registry.
In typical fashion, DMA lobbyists are out in force to try and shut this one down. With overwhelming grasroots support for such a proposal, Congress might not bow to them this time. Perhaps a letter to your Congresscritter might be in order?
> If you don't mind, I'd like to condense most of what you said here and use it in my stock spam-reporting boilerplate. Well-said, and righteous.
Feel free - though I'd point out that enforce ment at sec dot gov doesn't care whether a stock spam is promoted via spam or other means.
They do, however, give a major hoot about stock fraud, and when they choose to act, come down hard.
/me whacks self over head. You know you've been reporting spammers too long when you parse that as "boilerplate for reporting spams that promote stocks";-)
If you meant your "generic, boilerplate" spam-reporting template, feel free - but most ISPs already realize that Spam Is Bad, and you're not going to convince the others -- they also know Spam Is Bad, but they just don't care:(
> When you are negotiating for the process, at least one sales person and probably a pre-sales consultant goes to your site and goes through the registration process multiple times.
But what's the registration process? That's where the rubber hits the road.
If it's confirmed opt-in (what marketroids like to call "double opt-in"), fair enough.
If it's anything less, you're (er, DCLK is) running the risk of being considered a spammer-for-hire.
What DCLK could do is provide a confirmed opt-in process - set up a CGI on their server (or the client's server) to collect addresses, send out confirmations to collected addresses, archive the confirmations of those who confirmed that "yes, I entered that email address into the form, and here's my token to prove it" (so that you can turn around to an accusation of spam and say "We got this email confirming you."), and maintains the mailing list on behalf of the client.
That'd be a valuable service; if "double opt-in" is too confusing or hard for some marketroid at iwannasellmycrap.com to understand, you could do it for them (for a price).
But this sounds suspiciously like opt-out -- client comes to you with a list of addresses, and you take the risk that the addresses weren't legitimately required by spamming on their behalf.
That you do due diligence to minimize this risk is laudable. But anything less than confirmed opt-in ("double opt-in") is of questionable efficacy at best.
> It would be good if their software could connect to a central opt-out server and check each e-mail address before sending out spam. If the address is found in the opt-out server, it's removed from the recipients list.
How about an opt-in clearinghouse?
Users could register with the Doubleclick, the DMA, or the marketing agency of their choice with three flags set:
I wish to receive exciting offers via snail mail
I wish to receive exciting offers via telephone during dinner
I wish to receive exciting offers via email.
Any request to be placed on the list would be validated, by either a request received in writing (with signature), a telephone call (with recording archived), or an email with a randomly-generated token ("Someone entered this email address on the opt-in website. They were using IP address xx.xx.xx.xx. To confirm your opting-in, please reply to this email with '54771989981' in the Subject: line").
Any snail/phone/email list would be filtered through the opt-in list. If the address is not found on the opt-in server, no mail is sent.
Oh, right. The only people getting the ads would be the people who asked for it. The rest of us would be spam-free.
> Now, this isn't so say that all people are nice. That's not to say that people don't troll web pages and people don't fake mail-from headers. It happens. But there's also a lot of promotional mail that YOU OPTED INTO whether you realize it or not.
Bullshit.
If I opted into it, and didn't realize I'd done so (perhaps I'm the dr00ling AOLer you seem to think I am), then show me the opt-in.
That's what "double opt-in" (or more accurately, "confirmed opt-in", the "double" is your industry's language, trying to make it sound unreasonable) is for. Until you can demonstrate to my satisfaction that I opted in, it's spam.
>What I'm saying is, before labeling every piece of mail that you get as spam, try unsubscribing. And yes, I know that some unsubscribe links are fake. What are you going to do? There are also fake breasts and fake watches.
So, because some tits are fake and some Rolexes are fake, and since I wouldn't give up feeling tits, or wearing a Rolex, just because I can't trust the owner of the tits or the seller of the Rolex, I should trust you? Holy non-sequitur, Batman!
The overwhelming majority of the claims of "click here to be removed" are lies. The overwhelming majority of the "You opted in" claims are lies.
So what I'm not gonna do is this: I sure as fsck ain't gonna trust your unsubscribe link, that's what.
And what I am gonna do is this: Find your upstream, and report you to them as a spammer. Don't want the 2000 TOS violation reports? Don't spam.
And if your upstream ignores those reports, what am I gonna do? Well, I'm probably gonna add your netblocks to my private blocklist. Don't want to be blocked? Don't spam.
> And lots of other companies (like mine) that send lots of LEGAL, NON-SPAM, promotional email.
How come (and I don't mean you specifically, I mean the general case over the past few years) every spammer always tries to re-define "spam" in such a way as "Well, whatever we do isn't spam."
If it's in my mailbox, it's unsolicited, and it was generated in bulk, it's spam, and I'll choose to either block the server that sent it, or report it to the sender's provider. What are you going to do?
> It's not spam; it's opt-in targetted email list product. Companies pay $100K+ for this hosted solution. The company gives DC a
honkin' huge email list; DC sends out Acme branded email and handles things like bounces and unsubscriptions.
It's not spam, I paid good money for this list!
(Hint: If you bought my email address and emailed it, I didn't opt in. Whether you bought it from a guy in a trailer park or a guy in a suit makes no difference. It's spam.)
> > They said they wanted people only 18 and older, but that did not stop them from sending the e-mail to a [someone whose Hotmail profile said she was a] 14-year-old girl. > > Because spammers obviously check out your personal profile before mailing you.
Of course they don't. The journalist writing the story probably even knows this.
But if the law says Thou Shalt Not Email Minors when spamming pr0n, and a spammer doesn't take reasonable steps not to email minors, such as checking profiles where they exist, then the spammer's broken the law.
The spammer is likely to whine "Well, I can't check all my hotmail.com addresses against the profiles!". If he does so, I hope a judge bitchslaps him into next week.
Because, you see, the spammer can check. At a rate of perhaps 100 or so hotmail.com profiles per hour.
What he can't do is spam all 10 million hotmail.com addresses if he checks. But that should be the spammer's problem, not the recipient's.
When a spammer says he "can't" check, he's really saying he won't check, because it would cut down on the rate at which he could spam. It'd make him have to work. And spammers don't like that.
To which the only response is "Fuck what the spammers want. It's not their network." And we're back to the trespass-to-chattels argument.
> For trespass, probably the stocks: that is, the miscreant is locked into a wooden frame out in the village square, and
the victims and other villagers get to throw rotten veggies, etc., at him
"Hey spammer! You're receiving this rotten tomato 'cuz you're on our list of people interested in rotten tomatoes! *zingggg-splat*"
"If you don't want your daily hot teen tomato, just type 'i no longer wish to receive my free tomatoes'! *zingggg-splat"
"Pity he's in the stocks and can't reach the keyboard, huh? But if he's too lazy to opt out of the tomato list, it's not my problem! He must have subscribed from somewhere and forgotten about it! *zingggg-splat*"
> Often I see it encoded, such as/image.png?5f7a97d66d9aec0e1582c15578ac5815. I think they know otherwise I can do this, by
hand: >GET/image.png?uselessaddr1@hotmail.com
That's when you reverse-engineer the URL. If it's for beastiality or incest pr0n (yeah, we all know what Dallas-Ft. Worth spammer I'm talking about), you then punch in some URLs that "validate" some addresses at fbi.gov;-)
>It was an anime/manga in which a whole society lived on a planet that was a dump for another society's high tech trash. Enough of the junk worked or partially worked that they were able to make a fairly high tech society themselves; although it was a fairly lawless one. Living off of the trash of others has a psychological impact..
I can't vouch for an entire culture, but I can speak to this personally.
My TV is a 28" set that was thrown away for a $3.20 vertical deflection IC. The AC cord (because the owner cut the old cord) cost more than the fix. I picked it up because (a) I didn't have a TV, and (b) I figured I'd have more fun, and learn more, by fixing an old one than buying a new one, (c) If I could fix it, it's 100 pounds less landfill. If I couldn't fix it, I'd put it back on the curb where I found it, and (d) I'm a cheap bastard.
My DVD player was born as a P166MMX with an ancient ATI card that had TV-out, but no MPEG2 decoder support. I got lucky and found a BIOS upgrade for the motherboard that would let me run lower voltages required for a K6-III. So now it runs (FSB overclock) at 500 MHz and decodes the stream with brute force. (The only time I got glitches in the video stream was when I forgot to enable DMA mode on the DVD-ROM).
My current computer is 3 years old. It began as a C366. It's now at 1GHz. The only component I've upgraded was the CPU for $50. Won't play Wolfenstein at ultra-high-res, but it's good enough for my computing and gaming needs.
My monitor was a 19" Sony flat-screen CRT. $125 at a surplus store. (And I was able to hand my 17" to a friend.)
Just last weekend, I recovered some data off a 15-year-old 40M Seagate ST-251 and an old '286. (Moral of the story, make two CDs for backing up data, in case one of your CDs gets zorched.) A couple of twists with the wrist to loosen the bearings and get the stiction-killed drive to spin up, and a couple of BIOS-based cylinder seek tests to spread the lube along the rails. (First run, it'd seek OK for a while, then pause for 1-2 seconds on some problematic cylinders. Second run, it got a little "better" at moving the head. 10 minutes later, it was fine. I was amazed.)
Getting more life out of "junk" hardware by fscking around with it can also be fun.
> > I keep having this picture of archeologists in thousands of years in the future going through all of this stuff, and trying to piece together an old PC. no tech manuals, etc. > > (A.P. News 25,237 CE)
> > Archeologists have made a great advance towards understanding the contents of fossilised "hard disks" with the discovery of what they are calling the "Pornsetta Stone"...
(A.P. News 25,238 CE)
Jack Valenti DCLXVI, head of MPAGC (Motion Picture Association of the Galactic Confederacy), applauds the Confederacy for passing the SSSCA (Scieno Schutz-Staffel Copyright Act) and declaring archaeology a banned science for its crimes in supporting the actions of "Copyright Terrorists".
On advice of the chief demographer, all archaeologists are to be shipped back to Teegeeack, buried near Hawaii, and thereby blown to smithereens...
> FYI: HTML also has tags, you know, and they will add a lot to the story, so your numbers are bogus.
A lot? Try four bytes (<P> and a linefeed) per paragraph. And another 100 bytes or so for an HTML, BODY, TITLE, and BGCOLOR stuff. What about the other 22,356 bytes?
The AC with the XML/XSL idea might be onto something. A locally-cached XSL stylesheet that filters out the crap, and a browser that says "Send me the article, I'll render the rest".
The only problem would be that while a browser vendor might want to provide such a thing, no commercial web site operator will ever use it. "What? You mean a user might click on an 2-kilobyte article about space exploration and not have today's 12K horoscopes rendered in three nested TABLEs in the sidebar? We spent thousands on web designers to make that sidebar work!"
> Instability of the Gulf Stream: $10,000. > > 10 million gallons of water melting from the North Pole Ice Shelf: $500,000 > >60 deg. F February average temperature in Boston: priceless.
Actually, judging from housing prices in Silicon Valley, people are willing to pay about $800,000 for 60F February temperatures;-)
No shit. For good laughs, cut-and-paste the text of a news article into a text editor, then save the HTML and compare the difference.
I believe the current record for lowest S/N ratio (ignoring tomshardware.com's practice of putting one sentence per page;-) for a mainstream news site is http://www.theglobeandmail.com.
Ad-laden CNN serves 22,700 bytes of HTML for a 1400-byte story.
The Globe and Mail delivers a staggering 90,587 bytes of HTML for a 3082-byte story.
Those numbers are for surfers who surf with images off, by the way. The bloat is Javashit, banners, towers, stock quotes, polls, and navigation to every section of the newspaper. I don't even want to think about what it'd be like with graphics on.
And these jerkwads wonder why their bandwidth bills are so high.
> The TV networks should be flattered that anyone would want to "pirate" their crap. It seems that as I get more channels on my cable system, the less quality I get. I can honestly say I do not watch one network show during PrimeTime outside of Enterprise and the Simpsons.
And that is the fundamental problem with the TV networks.
In the 50s and 60s, you watched networks. Just as there were Ford people and there were Chevy people, there were people who watched "NBC" or "CBS" or "ABC".
Today, I don't know anyone who gives a rat's fried patoot what network, nor even what channel, their programming is on. We watch shows, not networks.
And that's why the woman in the article won't pay for HBO. She doesn't want "HBO". She only wants to watch "Sex in the City", and if she could pay $1/month to watch 1 hour of HBO's programming (that is, the new episode of "Sex in the City") a week, she would.
But she can't. Because HBO doesn't work like that. Because the cable system doesn't work like that. The whole notion of "broadcasting" (and this includes "niche channels") is that you fill the pipe 24/7 with content, charge your viewers for all that content, even though they only want one or two shows you offer.
It's not quite the same as the RIAA model of "put one good song on the album, the rest can be filler", because your idea of filler might be my idea of content. (That is, some folks watch highbrow channels for the Shakespeare, others for the war documentaries, still others for the Red Dwarf reruns;-)
But the practical effect is the same -- an end user buys a subscription to a channel in order to get the hour or two of "good stuff" per week that they care about.
Cable makes it worse, of course, in that underlying technical restrictions have created buyers used to buying "packages" of 10-20 channels at a time in order to get the 2-3 channels that carry the 4-5 shows you watch. It's not like buying a whole CD to get the one song you want, it's like buying a whole box set!
Now comes the 'net - we bypass the high-level middlemen (cable/satellite operators) and the low-level middlemen ("channels") to allow an individual to get the product ("shows") they actually want. In effect, the 'net makes the traditional distribution system ("shows" aggregated onto "channels" and sold in "packages of channels") obsolete.
The woman who says "Fuck that!" and downloads her Sex in the City isn't saying "Fuck copyright".
> > What kind of marketing data are they going to get from "user 3453845 watches the hell out of 'tina3.wmv'"? > > You laugh now but soon, all your popups will be for Jergens, Vasoline and inflatable girlfriends.
And your copy of XP will stop working every time you view "ballmer_monkeyboy.mpg" or "developers.mpg"
> My wife works in a special needs school and she has a dozen kids with severe mental handicaps every day. She has days where they literally fling turds around the room [...]
She sat on the board of directors at my last employer? Wow, small world, dude!
> That's one of the really ugly things about secret evidence. If AOL held the messages indefinitely, and they were
used in a public trial, the people would all be on notice. But in the scenario you describe, the people get the worst of
both worlds: a false sense of security and the spectre of having ten year old IMs come back to haunt them if they do
something to irritate someone powerful.
To play Devil's Advocate - or the best of both worlds. The knowledge that your ten-year-old messages can't be used against you unless you really piss off someone very powerful, because to present them into evidence (even secret evidence) is still a very big security risk.
You can get away with pissing off a lot of people before you cross that line;)
> The prompt dose from a solar flare could exceed 100 rem total, which would kill a crew in a cycler such as Aldrin seems to advocate.
Leaving aside the issue of shielding the crew, it's a cycler. It'll come back.
What were the odds of a sailing ship making it from Spain to the New World in 1492 BC?
(Better yet, what were the odds of a grass boat making it halfway across the Pacific in 10,000 BC?)
But people did it. People took the risk back then. Sure, some came for the gold and furs and population of pagans to convert, but they also wanted a chance to expand/explore stuff. Whatever their reasons, they took risks that by modern standards would be madness.
If there were a 10% chance of being fried to a crisp, and a 90% chance of setting foot on Mars and helping set up or grow a colony, (if the crew gets fried en route, no need to waste a pricy lander, just send the cycler, with lander, back to Earth and pick up a new crew!) you'd still have thousands of volunteers.
It's better odds than the New World's settlers had. It's incredibly better odds than those faced by the Polynesians. I'd fly tomorrow.
Who's with me?
> Maybe it's because the 33rd anniversary of the first Moon landing is coming up?
Yeah, and we could have had this meme hit public consciousness on the 30th anniversary of the moon landings, but some doofus decided to Darwin himself out of the gene pool by flying his plane in conditions he wasn't trained for, and the media completely forgot about anything else for the rest of the month.
Along those lines, allow me to draft an open letter/rant to celebrities in showbiz and politics:
I hereby request that for the 33rd anniversary of the lunar landings, that all celebrities and politicians kindly take one day off from slashing your wives' throats, letting your drunk chauffeurs drive you home, running into trees while playing football, skiing into trees, flying in dense fog, playing golf in thunderstorms, or standing on tops of hills in copper bathtubs raising lightning rods to the skies screaming "ALL GODS ARE BASTARDS!", or whatever else it is that celebrities do to attract attention.
Just one fscking day.
Thanks to a society that preferred celebrities like you, I'll never see ultra-mega-huge-baseline interferometric data from the worlds around other stars. Thanks to you, I'll never see pictures of what's under the ice of Europa. Thanks to you, I know I'll never see anyone, let alone me, set foot on Mars. Thanks to you, I know I'll never see goddamn low earth orbit, let alone explore another world.
The dinosaurs went extinct because their walnut-sized brains weren't enough to permit them to develop a space program. From where I sit, I see the odds of being wiped out by asteroid impact as far greater than the odds of seeing any significant manned space exploration in my lifetime. Maybe it'll serve us right.
The saddest thing is that I'm part of that transitional generation that did have hope of exploring the solar system in our lifetime. I grew up believing that happiness was looking at Earth in my rear-view mirror, and the realization that we traded it for a world of "punch the monkey" banner ads is a hell of a comedown.
Slashdot Mirror
> So when you ask "Are our keys secure" the logical follow-up question is, "From who?"
Well-put. Use the amount of security you need for the threat you face.
> God is real unless declared integer
Chain of evidence, chain of forged iron, I'm not picky ;-)
Anyways, feel free to cut-and-paste. As for chains of evidence and spammer suffering, the /. crowd pretty much missed the point of the article, which is that the honeypot being discussed is very probably going to be the downfall of a certain spammer who's been going non-stop since 1999.
All his base are belong to us (There Is No Us), he has no chance to survive; he should make his time.
>
> That's not a problem, that's the ideal situation.
Oh, I agree. Unfortunately, it is a problem if you're the DMA or some other bunch of marketing goonz.
Historically, the DMA's "problems" seem to get fixed by Congress with greater frequency than our "problems".
This may be changing - the FTC has asked for a national do-not-call list. Although it's opt-out, it's enforced by law, not "voluntary compliance on the part of the DMA". See, for instance, the FTC's press release on the FTC proposed national "Do Not Call" registry.
In typical fashion, DMA lobbyists are out in force to try and shut this one down. With overwhelming grasroots support for such a proposal, Congress might not bow to them this time. Perhaps a letter to your Congresscritter might be in order?
Feel free - though I'd point out that enforce ment at sec dot gov doesn't care whether a stock spam is promoted via spam or other means. They do, however, give a major hoot about stock fraud, and when they choose to act, come down hard.
If you meant your "generic, boilerplate" spam-reporting template, feel free - but most ISPs already realize that Spam Is Bad, and you're not going to convince the others -- they also know Spam Is Bad, but they just don't care :(
But what's the registration process? That's where the rubber hits the road.
If it's confirmed opt-in (what marketroids like to call "double opt-in"), fair enough.
If it's anything less, you're (er, DCLK is) running the risk of being considered a spammer-for-hire.
What DCLK could do is provide a confirmed opt-in process - set up a CGI on their server (or the client's server) to collect addresses, send out confirmations to collected addresses, archive the confirmations of those who confirmed that "yes, I entered that email address into the form, and here's my token to prove it" (so that you can turn around to an accusation of spam and say "We got this email confirming you."), and maintains the mailing list on behalf of the client.
That'd be a valuable service; if "double opt-in" is too confusing or hard for some marketroid at iwannasellmycrap.com to understand, you could do it for them (for a price).
But this sounds suspiciously like opt-out -- client comes to you with a list of addresses, and you take the risk that the addresses weren't legitimately required by spamming on their behalf.
That you do due diligence to minimize this risk is laudable. But anything less than confirmed opt-in ("double opt-in") is of questionable efficacy at best.
How about an opt-in clearinghouse?
Users could register with the Doubleclick, the DMA, or the marketing agency of their choice with three flags set:
Any request to be placed on the list would be validated, by either a request received in writing (with signature), a telephone call (with recording archived), or an email with a randomly-generated token ("Someone entered this email address on the opt-in website. They were using IP address xx.xx.xx.xx. To confirm your opting-in, please reply to this email with '54771989981' in the Subject: line").
Any snail/phone/email list would be filtered through the opt-in list. If the address is not found on the opt-in server, no mail is sent.
Oh, right. The only people getting the ads would be the people who asked for it. The rest of us would be spam-free.
Can't have that, can we?
Bullshit.
If I opted into it, and didn't realize I'd done so (perhaps I'm the dr00ling AOLer you seem to think I am), then show me the opt-in.
That's what "double opt-in" (or more accurately, "confirmed opt-in", the "double" is your industry's language, trying to make it sound unreasonable) is for. Until you can demonstrate to my satisfaction that I opted in, it's spam.
>What I'm saying is, before labeling every piece of mail that you get as spam, try unsubscribing. And yes, I know that some unsubscribe links are fake. What are you going to do? There are also fake breasts and fake watches.
So, because some tits are fake and some Rolexes are fake, and since I wouldn't give up feeling tits, or wearing a Rolex, just because I can't trust the owner of the tits or the seller of the Rolex, I should trust you? Holy non-sequitur, Batman!
The overwhelming majority of the claims of "click here to be removed" are lies. The overwhelming majority of the "You opted in" claims are lies.
So what I'm not gonna do is this: I sure as fsck ain't gonna trust your unsubscribe link, that's what.
And what I am gonna do is this: Find your upstream, and report you to them as a spammer. Don't want the 2000 TOS violation reports? Don't spam.
And if your upstream ignores those reports, what am I gonna do? Well, I'm probably gonna add your netblocks to my private blocklist. Don't want to be blocked? Don't spam.
> And lots of other companies (like mine) that send lots of LEGAL, NON-SPAM, promotional email.
How come (and I don't mean you specifically, I mean the general case over the past few years) every spammer always tries to re-define "spam" in such a way as "Well, whatever we do isn't spam."
If it's in my mailbox, it's unsolicited, and it was generated in bulk, it's spam, and I'll choose to either block the server that sent it, or report it to the sender's provider. What are you going to do?
It's not spam, I paid good money for this list!
(Hint: If you bought my email address and emailed it, I didn't opt in. Whether you bought it from a guy in a trailer park or a guy in a suit makes no difference. It's spam.)
>
> Because spammers obviously check out your personal profile before mailing you.
Of course they don't. The journalist writing the story probably even knows this.
But if the law says Thou Shalt Not Email Minors when spamming pr0n, and a spammer doesn't take reasonable steps not to email minors, such as checking profiles where they exist, then the spammer's broken the law.
The spammer is likely to whine "Well, I can't check all my hotmail.com addresses against the profiles!". If he does so, I hope a judge bitchslaps him into next week.
Because, you see, the spammer can check. At a rate of perhaps 100 or so hotmail.com profiles per hour.
What he can't do is spam all 10 million hotmail.com addresses if he checks. But that should be the spammer's problem, not the recipient's.
When a spammer says he "can't" check, he's really saying he won't check, because it would cut down on the rate at which he could spam. It'd make him have to work. And spammers don't like that.
To which the only response is "Fuck what the spammers want. It's not their network." And we're back to the trespass-to-chattels argument.
"Hey spammer! You're receiving this rotten tomato 'cuz you're on our list of people interested in rotten tomatoes! *zingggg-splat*"
"If you don't want your daily hot teen tomato, just type 'i no longer wish to receive my free tomatoes'! *zingggg-splat"
"Pity he's in the stocks and can't reach the keyboard, huh? But if he's too lazy to opt out of the tomato list, it's not my problem! He must have subscribed from somewhere and forgotten about it! *zingggg-splat*"
"Forsooth, I was once known as Sir Launcelot, yet after trying this mirackle programme, the fair maidens call me Sir Lotsa-Lance!"
>GET
That's when you reverse-engineer the URL. If it's for beastiality or incest pr0n (yeah, we all know what Dallas-Ft. Worth spammer I'm talking about), you then punch in some URLs that "validate" some addresses at fbi.gov ;-)
I can't vouch for an entire culture, but I can speak to this personally.
My TV is a 28" set that was thrown away for a $3.20 vertical deflection IC. The AC cord (because the owner cut the old cord) cost more than the fix. I picked it up because (a) I didn't have a TV, and (b) I figured I'd have more fun, and learn more, by fixing an old one than buying a new one, (c) If I could fix it, it's 100 pounds less landfill. If I couldn't fix it, I'd put it back on the curb where I found it, and (d) I'm a cheap bastard.
My DVD player was born as a P166MMX with an ancient ATI card that had TV-out, but no MPEG2 decoder support. I got lucky and found a BIOS upgrade for the motherboard that would let me run lower voltages required for a K6-III. So now it runs (FSB overclock) at 500 MHz and decodes the stream with brute force. (The only time I got glitches in the video stream was when I forgot to enable DMA mode on the DVD-ROM).
My current computer is 3 years old. It began as a C366. It's now at 1GHz. The only component I've upgraded was the CPU for $50. Won't play Wolfenstein at ultra-high-res, but it's good enough for my computing and gaming needs.
My monitor was a 19" Sony flat-screen CRT. $125 at a surplus store. (And I was able to hand my 17" to a friend.)
Just last weekend, I recovered some data off a 15-year-old 40M Seagate ST-251 and an old '286. (Moral of the story, make two CDs for backing up data, in case one of your CDs gets zorched.) A couple of twists with the wrist to loosen the bearings and get the stiction-killed drive to spin up, and a couple of BIOS-based cylinder seek tests to spread the lube along the rails. (First run, it'd seek OK for a while, then pause for 1-2 seconds on some problematic cylinders. Second run, it got a little "better" at moving the head. 10 minutes later, it was fine. I was amazed.)
Getting more life out of "junk" hardware by fscking around with it can also be fun.
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> (A.P. News 25,237 CE)
>
> Archeologists have made a great advance towards understanding the contents of fossilised "hard disks" with the discovery of what they are calling the "Pornsetta Stone"...
(A.P. News 25,238 CE)
Jack Valenti DCLXVI, head of MPAGC (Motion Picture Association of the Galactic Confederacy), applauds the Confederacy for passing the SSSCA (Scieno Schutz-Staffel Copyright Act) and declaring archaeology a banned science for its crimes in supporting the actions of "Copyright Terrorists".
On advice of the chief demographer, all archaeologists are to be shipped back to Teegeeack, buried near Hawaii, and thereby blown to smithereens...
A lot? Try four bytes (<P> and a linefeed) per paragraph. And another 100 bytes or so for an HTML, BODY, TITLE, and BGCOLOR stuff. What about the other 22,356 bytes?
The AC with the XML/XSL idea might be onto something. A locally-cached XSL stylesheet that filters out the crap, and a browser that says "Send me the article, I'll render the rest".
The only problem would be that while a browser vendor might want to provide such a thing, no commercial web site operator will ever use it. "What? You mean a user might click on an 2-kilobyte article about space exploration and not have today's 12K horoscopes rendered in three nested TABLEs in the sidebar? We spent thousands on web designers to make that sidebar work!"
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> 10 million gallons of water melting from the North Pole Ice Shelf: $500,000
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>60 deg. F February average temperature in Boston: priceless.
Actually, judging from housing prices in Silicon Valley, people are willing to pay about $800,000 for 60F February temperatures ;-)
No shit. For good laughs, cut-and-paste the text of a news article into a text editor, then save the HTML and compare the difference.
I believe the current record for lowest S/N ratio (ignoring tomshardware.com's practice of putting one sentence per page ;-) for a mainstream news site is http://www.theglobeandmail.com.
Ad-laden CNN serves 22,700 bytes of HTML for a 1400-byte story.
The Globe and Mail delivers a staggering 90,587 bytes of HTML for a 3082-byte story.
Those numbers are for surfers who surf with images off, by the way. The bloat is Javashit, banners, towers, stock quotes, polls, and navigation to every section of the newspaper. I don't even want to think about what it'd be like with graphics on.
And these jerkwads wonder why their bandwidth bills are so high.
And that is the fundamental problem with the TV networks.
In the 50s and 60s, you watched networks. Just as there were Ford people and there were Chevy people, there were people who watched "NBC" or "CBS" or "ABC".
Today, I don't know anyone who gives a rat's fried patoot what network, nor even what channel, their programming is on. We watch shows, not networks.
And that's why the woman in the article won't pay for HBO. She doesn't want "HBO". She only wants to watch "Sex in the City", and if she could pay $1/month to watch 1 hour of HBO's programming (that is, the new episode of "Sex in the City") a week, she would.
But she can't. Because HBO doesn't work like that. Because the cable system doesn't work like that. The whole notion of "broadcasting" (and this includes "niche channels") is that you fill the pipe 24/7 with content, charge your viewers for all that content, even though they only want one or two shows you offer.
It's not quite the same as the RIAA model of "put one good song on the album, the rest can be filler", because your idea of filler might be my idea of content. (That is, some folks watch highbrow channels for the Shakespeare, others for the war documentaries, still others for the Red Dwarf reruns ;-)
But the practical effect is the same -- an end user buys a subscription to a channel in order to get the hour or two of "good stuff" per week that they care about.
Cable makes it worse, of course, in that underlying technical restrictions have created buyers used to buying "packages" of 10-20 channels at a time in order to get the 2-3 channels that carry the 4-5 shows you watch. It's not like buying a whole CD to get the one song you want, it's like buying a whole box set!
Now comes the 'net - we bypass the high-level middlemen (cable/satellite operators) and the low-level middlemen ("channels") to allow an individual to get the product ("shows") they actually want. In effect, the 'net makes the traditional distribution system ("shows" aggregated onto "channels" and sold in "packages of channels") obsolete.
The woman who says "Fuck that!" and downloads her Sex in the City isn't saying "Fuck copyright".
She's saying "Fuck the dumb distribution system".
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> You laugh now but soon, all your popups will be for Jergens, Vasoline and inflatable girlfriends.
And your copy of XP will stop working every time you view "ballmer_monkeyboy.mpg" or "developers.mpg"
She sat on the board of directors at my last employer? Wow, small world, dude!
To play Devil's Advocate - or the best of both worlds. The knowledge that your ten-year-old messages can't be used against you unless you really piss off someone very powerful, because to present them into evidence (even secret evidence) is still a very big security risk.
You can get away with pissing off a lot of people before you cross that line ;)
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> Netname: AOL-DTC
> Netblock: 0.0.0.0 - 255.255.255.255
Well, if we're using IPv6, that's not so bad ;)
Leaving aside the issue of shielding the crew, it's a cycler. It'll come back.
What were the odds of a sailing ship making it from Spain to the New World in 1492 BC?
(Better yet, what were the odds of a grass boat making it halfway across the Pacific in 10,000 BC?)
But people did it. People took the risk back then. Sure, some came for the gold and furs and population of pagans to convert, but they also wanted a chance to expand/explore stuff. Whatever their reasons, they took risks that by modern standards would be madness.
If there were a 10% chance of being fried to a crisp, and a 90% chance of setting foot on Mars and helping set up or grow a colony, (if the crew gets fried en route, no need to waste a pricy lander, just send the cycler, with lander, back to Earth and pick up a new crew!) you'd still have thousands of volunteers.
It's better odds than the New World's settlers had. It's incredibly better odds than those faced by the Polynesians. I'd fly tomorrow. Who's with me?
Yeah, and we could have had this meme hit public consciousness on the 30th anniversary of the moon landings, but some doofus decided to Darwin himself out of the gene pool by flying his plane in conditions he wasn't trained for, and the media completely forgot about anything else for the rest of the month.
Along those lines, allow me to draft an open letter/rant to celebrities in showbiz and politics:
I hereby request that for the 33rd anniversary of the lunar landings, that all celebrities and politicians kindly take one day off from slashing your wives' throats, letting your drunk chauffeurs drive you home, running into trees while playing football, skiing into trees, flying in dense fog, playing golf in thunderstorms, or standing on tops of hills in copper bathtubs raising lightning rods to the skies screaming "ALL GODS ARE BASTARDS!", or whatever else it is that celebrities do to attract attention.
Just one fscking day.
Thanks to a society that preferred celebrities like you, I'll never see ultra-mega-huge-baseline interferometric data from the worlds around other stars. Thanks to you, I'll never see pictures of what's under the ice of Europa. Thanks to you, I know I'll never see anyone, let alone me, set foot on Mars. Thanks to you, I know I'll never see goddamn low earth orbit, let alone explore another world.
The dinosaurs went extinct because their walnut-sized brains weren't enough to permit them to develop a space program. From where I sit, I see the odds of being wiped out by asteroid impact as far greater than the odds of seeing any significant manned space exploration in my lifetime. Maybe it'll serve us right.
The saddest thing is that I'm part of that transitional generation that did have hope of exploring the solar system in our lifetime. I grew up believing that happiness was looking at Earth in my rear-view mirror, and the realization that we traded it for a world of "punch the monkey" banner ads is a hell of a comedown.
Rant mode off. Thanks for reading.