The Department of Unspecified Threat Assessment has recently raised the Unfocused Anxiety Index to THREE, and I don't have to tell you what that means.
Of course! Failure to take appropriate measures at level THREE is treason! I wish I knew what those measures were, but my clearance is surely too low, and requesting information beyond your clearance level is treason:-)
Given that the cold war seems to have passed us by, who is the computer's main nemesis? Is the computer now going to be a Total Information Awareness project gone bad?
Spammers already sort addresses by site in order to take advantage of this effect. They forge the from address as someone else from your site on the theory that you know them and would whitelist them.
In fact, this has provided me with a kind of "honeypot", since I now check for the addresses of several people who are long gone from my site. If I see their address its gotta be spam!
Yes, this is just one of many forms of this roblem
>I once made the mistake of working with these files under Windoze. After I was done, >all the EXIF information had been removed. You can imagine how mad I was.
The reason is that Microsoft, Adobe and others are all pushing their own methods of handling image metadata. And in classic vendor lock form, they support their own way, but not their competitors.
Microsoft want you to use a method locked to their filesystem, Adobe wants you to embed XMP data (which is well suited for newsrooms but not individuals). Other "photo managers" out there keep annotations in a proprietary database.
I got tired of waiting and, in a fit of anger, wrote up the manifesto below. I've been using this for my own pictures six months.
Digital photos are wonderful, but for all of their megapixels they lack the simple feature of prints -- you can't write on the back of them.
On the surface, it seems simple enough. When I take a picture of Uncle Harvey, the JPEG file is one million bytes in size. You would think that it wouldn't be difficult to add in the twelve extra bytes for the string "Uncle Harvey".
The problem is that everyone wants to do it differently. In what has become computing industry standard practice, each vendor wants to lock you into their private database for notes, and when the technology or business environment changes, you lose everything.
In the past year, I have shot many photos, and since I can't jot notes on the back, have forgotten many details about the subjects. I can't wait another few years for a winner to emerge before recording this information. I need to capture it now!
I keep my physical photos for 30-40 years, and want to keep my digital photos for just as long. If you believe that your current solution is going to survive that long, good for you. I don't, and PIXTAG is my open way of saving the information in a way that will survive for many years and hopefully outlast the stupid vendor contests.
That data belongs to you! Don't let someone else lock it up!
PIXTAG was written to scratch this particular itch. The following are my design goals:
- Let me capture BASIC information about the photos
- Store the master copy of the information in a separate file, so that we never lose it if some vendor decides to strip things from the picture file.
- Store the master copy in an open format so that I can write tools against it or even just edit it with a text editor and never be held hostage to a particular tool.
- Copy the info into the file multiple times in all the competing protocols, so that it will be visible in whatever system you happen to be using.
In order to make this happen, I have defined two specs that will govern the tools I write. If it other people and projects want to adopt them too, so much the better.
The first is the pixtag file format for picture descriptions. This is simple enough to write by hand with notepad.exe or emacs (I am doing a lot of this while building my tools), but structured enough for tools to easily read and manage.
The second is a naming convention for files. You can use pixtag regardless of what you name your image files, but if you plan on keeping your pictures for decades, you better use something better than the IMG_1234 that comes out of your camera. Plus, you better plan on mixing those files with ones from other people, scans of traditional prints, and so on.
PIXTAG DESCRIPTION FILE
There is some flexibility in how the master file is handled. In most cases, I expect that there will be one file with all of the pictures a person has. However, I can also see people partitioning the files by year, and perhaps super-aggressive users might e
There are dozens, if not hundreds, of anonymizing proxies.
Yes, but how do you trust them? I always assume
that an anonymizing proxy is sniffing everything that passes through.
The original point about anonymizer being a single point of failure is legitimate. After all, even if you don't go in with a court order and seize logs, you can still learn a fair bit from the traffic analysis, and the "something to hide" crowd have given you a nice convenient place to focus your efforts. And then you are always free to select some bits of the traffic for more intensive analysis.
I expect that the main overseas links are likewise subjected to such regular scruitiny.
Now, I'm not wearing the tinfoil chapeau, but I would hope that the intelligence agencies would spend my tax money going after the most cost effective places first.
If you happen to be using SpamBouncer, the settings to disable Osirusoft and SPEWS checks are as follows:
OSDIALCHECK=no OSHAVENCHECK=no OSOOLCHECK=no OS OPSCHECK=no OSORCHECK=no OSSHRCHECK=no OSSPAMCH ECK=no SPEWSCHECK=no
Note that the SpamBouncer homepage declares these to be the default values, but looking through the latest sb.rc file, it appeared to me that OSDIALCHECK was actually defaulting to "yes"
Yea, I had to do a little googling too for the publication date. That was really a golden time for science fiction short stories with neat ideas.
I grew up devouring the various Del Rey collections of short stories from that era (including those of Lester Del Rey:-) and they hold a special place in my heart. There are still authors doing short stories, but it's a much tougher way to pay the bills, so you don't see the same range of ideas. Mostly today you get one big idea == one novel.
Actually, flexing a device as input was mentioned in CM Kornbluth's "The Little Black Bag", which was first published in July 1950.
The bag in question was full of futuristic, computer controlled medical tools, one of which was a reference card that could be cycled through many pages of text simply by flexing it.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course! Failure to take appropriate measures at level THREE is treason! I wish I knew what those measures were, but my clearance is surely too low, and requesting information beyond your clearance level is treason :-)
- Dave
John Poindexter is good, Trust John Poindexter :-)
-Dave
- Dave #2
The blacklist_to must be a recent addition. When I last checked only blacklist_from was available (which annoyed me because of the lack of symmetry)
It wasn't a big deal though, since a quick procmail rule did the trick.
In fact, this has provided me with a kind of "honeypot", since I now check for the addresses of several people who are long gone from my site. If I see their address its gotta be spam!
- Dave
We know the true name of this condition ...
Dr Hibbert: You have an absolutely unique genetic condition known as "Homer
Simpson syndrome".
Homer: [moaning] Oh, why me?
Dr Hibbert: Why, I could wallop you all day with this surgical two-by-four
without ever knocking you down.
--From "The Homer They Fall"
Yes, this is just one of many forms of this roblem
>I once made the mistake of working with these files under Windoze. After I was done,
>all the EXIF information had been removed. You can imagine how mad I was.
The reason is that Microsoft, Adobe and others are all pushing their own methods of handling image metadata. And in classic vendor lock form, they support their own way, but not their competitors.
Microsoft want you to use a method locked to their filesystem, Adobe wants you to embed XMP data (which is well suited for newsrooms but not individuals). Other "photo managers" out there keep annotations in a proprietary database.
I got tired of waiting and, in a fit of anger, wrote up the manifesto below. I've been using this for my own pictures six months.
==
== PIXTAG Photo Description Manifesto
== Dave Loffredo (loffredo@steptools.com)
==
Digital photos are wonderful, but for all of their megapixels they
lack the simple feature of prints -- you can't write on the back of
them.
On the surface, it seems simple enough. When I take a picture of
Uncle Harvey, the JPEG file is one million bytes in size. You would
think that it wouldn't be difficult to add in the twelve extra bytes
for the string "Uncle Harvey".
The problem is that everyone wants to do it differently. In what has
become computing industry standard practice, each vendor wants to lock
you into their private database for notes, and when the technology or
business environment changes, you lose everything.
In the past year, I have shot many photos, and since I can't jot notes
on the back, have forgotten many details about the subjects. I can't
wait another few years for a winner to emerge before recording this
information. I need to capture it now!
I keep my physical photos for 30-40 years, and want to keep my digital
photos for just as long. If you believe that your current solution is
going to survive that long, good for you. I don't, and PIXTAG is my
open way of saving the information in a way that will survive for many
years and hopefully outlast the stupid vendor contests.
That data belongs to you! Don't let someone else lock it up!
PIXTAG was written to scratch this particular itch. The following are
my design goals:
- Let me capture BASIC information about the photos
- Store the master copy of the information in a separate file,
so that we never lose it if some vendor decides to strip
things from the picture file.
- Store the master copy in an open format so that I can write
tools against it or even just edit it with a text editor
and never be held hostage to a particular tool.
- Copy the info into the file multiple times in all the competing
protocols, so that it will be visible in whatever system
you happen to be using.
In order to make this happen, I have defined two specs that will
govern the tools I write. If it other people and projects want to
adopt them too, so much the better.
The first is the pixtag file format for picture descriptions. This is
simple enough to write by hand with notepad.exe or emacs (I am doing a
lot of this while building my tools), but structured enough for tools
to easily read and manage.
The second is a naming convention for files. You can use pixtag
regardless of what you name your image files, but if you plan on
keeping your pictures for decades, you better use something better
than the IMG_1234 that comes out of your camera. Plus, you better
plan on mixing those files with ones from other people, scans of
traditional prints, and so on.
PIXTAG DESCRIPTION FILE
There is some flexibility in how the master file is handled. In most
cases, I expect that there will be one file with all of the pictures a
person has. However, I can also see people partitioning the files by
year, and perhaps super-aggressive users might e
Yes, but how do you trust them? I always assume that an anonymizing proxy is sniffing everything that passes through.
The original point about anonymizer being a single point of failure is legitimate. After all, even if you don't go in with a court order and seize logs, you can still learn a fair bit from the traffic analysis, and the "something to hide" crowd have given you a nice convenient place to focus your efforts. And then you are always free to select some bits of the traffic for more intensive analysis.
I expect that the main overseas links are likewise subjected to such regular scruitiny. Now, I'm not wearing the tinfoil chapeau, but I would hope that the intelligence agencies would spend my tax money going after the most cost effective places first.
All right! I've been waiting for a Squant-sensitive camera for a while now. Now I can start creating my web pages using the Negativland Squant Plugin!
I grew up devouring the various Del Rey collections of short stories from that era (including those of Lester Del Rey :-) and they hold a special place in my heart. There are still authors doing short stories, but it's a much tougher way to pay the bills, so you don't see the same range of ideas. Mostly today you get one big idea == one novel.
Actually, flexing a device as input was mentioned in CM Kornbluth's "The Little Black Bag", which was first published in July 1950.
The bag in question was full of futuristic, computer controlled medical tools, one of which was a reference card that could be cycled through many pages of text simply by flexing it.
Great story ...