Re:The last quote interests me...
on
Hacking Web Services
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Re: AntiSpam lawmaking
Let's count them: 1 spam from the US, 9 spams from taiwan, 1 real email. 1 spam from the US, 9 spams from china, 1 real email. 1 spam from the US, 9 spams from korea, 2 real emails.
Read the link from the link -- when an unauthorised copy of something is distributed, the copyright holder is competing against a modified version of their own material.
This is exactly what the GPL was set up to prevent: having to compete with someone selling a version of something you wrote.
"Yes, it is published by Microsoft Abruptly stops the finger from clicking the link"
Age of Empires is published by Microsoft, but I still play it. Tron is published by Disney, so unfortunately I can't play it. The slashdot boycott effect is such a random thing...
"I want the ability to link up to my bank, credit card companies, morgage companies, retirement fund, etc. and download the latest data like I can with Quicken"
Some things to think about
* Eggs and baskets. Theft of your main PC. People on Kazza searching for *.gnuCash files (or whatever)
* Can you say proprietry? What are the chances that your bank will let you authenticate with anything other than a MS Internet Explorer certificate?
* Liability. For remote access, bank passwords and PIN numbers may be stored on your PC (either intentionally, or by paging memory, or by keylogging viruses) -- if any of the above apply, you've broken the bank's T&C regarding keeping your password safe, and hence gained liability for anything that fails.
* Security, again. I assume that accounting software doesn't have the level of security you expect for financial data? (I may be wrong, I'd be pleased to see *.xml.gz.gpg files used)
Use just a text file like everyone else. That also makes it easier to encrypt if you don't have PGPDisk (it's all in the one file).
Use Gnumeric to do your calculations (and always have a worksheet open when you're on the phone to your bank to write notes in) but it's a lot easier to find things if you put the results back into the text file when you're finished.
The alternative (one spreadsheet for each thing) looks pretty for a while, until the next time you change software and find that copies of OpenOffice or Excel at university or on your windows partition can't read them.
This sort of data is what the "platform independance" argument is all about (c.f. Peru). It's stuff you'll still need to access long after your current software, computer, and operating system no longer exist. Need I even say that proprietry accounting software is out of the question.
"AND because you live in the UK, the land of civilized business-customer relationships, you get to foot the bill for your SMS spams as well!"
In a word... NO. Phone calls are paid for by the sender, as are text messages. You pay only in time and annoyance.
A little research wouldn't go amiss before labelling the UK as backward in the area of mobile phones. Unless you're from scandanavia or japan, we probably have a higher density of mobile phones per person than your country.
"Gradually escalate the interruptions by making beating sounds or having your girlfriend start crying or scream."
Ignoring for a moment that torturing your girlfriend is far more fun without the distraction of a telemarketer...
Don't forget that one fun response of the marketing droid might be an anonymous tip-off which leads clueless policemen to your house searching for "reports of abuse"
If your state has no harrasement laws, I guess you're legally in the clear when you set your voice-modem to dial that #800 number every 30 minutes, play music, and hang-up
Since this system would keep your modem out-of-action while you're using it, I suggest leaving it running next time you go away on holiday
If lawyers/phone company threaten you, simply play-back your conversation with the policeman about phone-harassement.
Ditch the land line and use cellular exclusively."
Two words: SMS SPAM
Once you have a mobile phone, you get the same computer-generated broadcast spam as your regular email account, except with no filters, not as much space to store it, and it beeps at you each time you get something.
Vodafone used to send broadcast emails all the time. Kind'a backfired on them when I stopped using a mobile phone at all because of it.
"I'm guessing they are probably the helium filled version? Otherwise someone need to be strapped to a chair and watch the documentary on the Hindenburg for a week or so.."
Oh F.F.S. Sit down and watch the documentary yourself. The one about inflammable paint and lack of electrical earthing.
Ironically, both times I tried to reply to this post my browser (Galeon) crashed whilst trying to access argos.co.uk's vehemently anti-non-IE internet shopping site.
Firstly, yes, "Mozilla 5", which I believe is used in Mozilla 1, Galeon, and Netscape 6.x seems pretty standards-compliant. (Netscape 4 of course, was the de-facto standard, because it's been the only real browser available since the start of the intternet (i.e. before W3C, and long before IE)
That wouldn't be my reason to suggest upgrading though: I'd always cite stability, security, popup-blocking, advert-blocking, cookie management, open-source, and a disinclination to run arbitary code on your system as a reason to upgrade from IE to something else.
Secondly, to the wit who quipped: "Yeah, make it so 95% of the world can't get to your website. Genius", please read the message before replying to it.
I am not suggesting that anyone stoop to the level of microsoft, or of argos in making their sites inaccessible. My website passes W3C tests, links to anybrowser, and displays correctly on Links.
The proposal was to make specific sections unavailable, specifically the privacy policy (which is pretty irrelevant for IE users anyway) and other sections which are not vital to the site, but which are useful enough to interest people in the opposing site of the "IE5 or higher only" debate.
I really don't know where you got the 95% figure from. All I can guess is that you're either running a corporate internet, or the MSDN server to get that many IE5 hits.
My website gets around 70% IE, and: 6% Mozilla 5 5% Galeon 2% GoogleBot 1% Netscape 3 ... and the rest are mostly from the Netscape 4 series
(before anyone levels the "foaming-mouthed-linux-advocate" accusation at my website and their browser stats, 90% of the visitors to that site come from download.com looking for MsWindows software.
Given that NyTimes only lets one person on at once using the same user/password combo, is it not a little pointless for everyone to post their passwords on slashdot?
Most of us will make up a random username anyhow, and let it set the cookie. I can't remember if it needs a valid email address or just "an email address" but most of us have spamtrap email accounts for that purpose *
Now what would be -really- useful is for someone to write a PHP script that goes to the signup page, enters random information. signs you up, then logs in and goes to the page you originally wanted. Then we could just point all the links to mydomain.net/ReferToNyTimes?StoryID=x
And no, I can't be bothered to get into that arms-race with their signup mechanism. You can if you want!
* sooner or later, all the free email places will go and those which remain will want your national ID card number, so some of us will have to stump up domains that everyone can use for this stuff. Like, anything sent to temp_*@mydomain.net gets posted on the web for example, and you direct all your crappy passwords there.
"By this definition, the Pentagon was a Terrorist attack, since most of the people who work there are noncombatants"
What?!? To quote this very discussion: "civilian deaths aren't even a war crime (much less terrorism) as long as the force was proportional to the value of the military value of the target"
Would anyone care to estimate the military value of a command centre responsible for coordinating many tens of wars all around the world?
The loops you have to jump though to make it appear like a terrorist attack: "most of the people who work there are noncombatants" are farsical. They're not combatants because they just guide the long-distance weapons, right. In the same way that leaders of the IRA are non-combatants if they only give orders???
About the only decent explanation I've heard is that using a civilian plane to attack makes it terrorism. So I guess all we now need to do is compare the numbers of civillians either in an airliner or in a few dozen afghan villages, right? (Assuming here that every human life is of equal worth, correct that if you will but I hope nobody does)
"Might is right" -- who needs rules and laws when you're the most powerful?
"No, I'm not equating the star wars empire to any particular country on earth, just making the observation that what differentiates a rebel hero from a terrorist is your perspective."
And since when is this new? "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" has been a truism for so long now that the label "terrorist" no longer even holds meaning for many people. (or makes them wonder about the motivations of whoever is doing the labelling?
Unfortunately, if you're on the wrong side, it's becomes very difficult to grasp that there may be two sides to the argument. That's exactly the reason why Star Wars wouldn't make sense to us if Luke and Solo had gained their victory by destroying the Pentagon instead of the Death Star.
"Oh, and one last thing - never give anyone your social security number. Or your mother's maiden name "
Are they not necessary to open a bank account in america? or to get a credit card? or a hotel room or a train ticket? or to file a tax return on the internet?
I can't wait to see the governments' look of surprise when people start using cash again for serious things. "Airline ticket by cash? Right, bodily-search for you, boy. We'll not have anyone who doesn't trust the Credit Corporation"
Too true! I blocked access to my account from hotmail (or forged hotmail) addresses for a long time. I was absolutely shocked to find some of my friends in the "deleted_spam" folder, not because I'd deleted their emails, but that they were actually using hotmail!
I presume most people here run websites. Many people have privacy policies (or other such useful but non-vital information) and PHP/Perl is pretty standard.
Put the following code on your privacy policy page:
<?php
if (index(getenv("USER_AGENT"),"MSIE")>0)
{
echo "<p>We have detected you are using a non-standard browser
which may not display this page properly. Please upgrade to Galeon 0.2 or later, Mozilla 0.9 or later,
or any version of Netscape Navigator</p>";
}
else
{
/* Put your website's privacy policy here */
}
?>
Are there ANY decent webmail sites left out there anymore that don't charge for basic services like automatic forwarding?
...and how easy is it to set one up for those of us who own our own domain?
I've given out a couple of email addresses on my domain to family, but there's still no way they can configure passwords on their own. I saw a package which lets you run a yahoo-like web email service (skinnable interface, optional POP collection, etc) but that's £500 (and obviously I can't run it on a size-limited hosted webserver)
Plenty of us have got domains we can use, the question is whether it's possible (or easy) to use them for limited web-based email accounts.
Slashdot Mirror
Re: AntiSpam lawmaking
Let's count them:
1 spam from the US, 9 spams from taiwan, 1 real email. 1 spam from the US, 9 spams from china, 1 real email. 1 spam from the US, 9 spams from korea, 2 real emails.
Banning US spam is not going to help much
while(true) { can be especially useful in an program you're hoping to secure the maintenance contract on...
... right after you've redefined true.
The copies of this film almost make the name "attack of the clones" seem appropriate! ;-)
Read the link from the link -- when an unauthorised copy of something is distributed, the copyright holder is competing against a modified version of their own material.
This is exactly what the GPL was set up to prevent: having to compete with someone selling a version of something you wrote.
"Yes, it is published by Microsoft
Abruptly stops the finger from clicking the link"
Age of Empires is published by Microsoft, but I still play it. Tron is published by Disney, so unfortunately I can't play it. The slashdot boycott effect is such a random thing...
$StringPlusOne = $DollarDivideBy * $HashSemicolon + 8;
print "$EndQuote Semicolon new line";
getURL "http$Colon$Slash$SlashSlashDot${dot} org$slash";
...
"I want the ability to link up to my bank, credit card companies, morgage companies, retirement fund, etc. and download the latest data like I can with Quicken"
Some things to think about
* Eggs and baskets. Theft of your main PC. People on Kazza searching for *.gnuCash files (or whatever)
* Can you say proprietry? What are the chances that your bank will let you authenticate with anything other than a MS Internet Explorer certificate?
* Liability. For remote access, bank passwords and PIN numbers may be stored on your PC (either intentionally, or by paging memory, or by keylogging viruses) -- if any of the above apply, you've broken the bank's T&C regarding keeping your password safe, and hence gained liability for anything that fails.
* Security, again. I assume that accounting software doesn't have the level of security you expect for financial data? (I may be wrong, I'd be pleased to see *.xml.gz.gpg files used)
Use just a text file like everyone else. That also makes it easier to encrypt if you don't have PGPDisk (it's all in the one file).
Use Gnumeric to do your calculations (and always have a worksheet open when you're on the phone to your bank to write notes in) but it's a lot easier to find things if you put the results back into the text file when you're finished.
The alternative (one spreadsheet for each thing) looks pretty for a while, until the next time you change software and find that copies of OpenOffice or Excel at university or on your windows partition can't read them.
This sort of data is what the "platform independance" argument is all about (c.f. Peru). It's stuff you'll still need to access long after your current software, computer, and operating system no longer exist. Need I even say that proprietry accounting software is out of the question.
"AND because you live in the UK, the land of civilized business-customer relationships, you get to foot the bill for your SMS spams as well!"
In a word... NO. Phone calls are paid for by the sender, as are text messages. You pay only in time and annoyance.
A little research wouldn't go amiss before labelling the UK as backward in the area of mobile phones. Unless you're from scandanavia or japan, we probably have a higher density of mobile phones per person than your country.
"Gradually escalate the interruptions by making beating sounds or having your girlfriend start crying or scream."
Ignoring for a moment that torturing your girlfriend is far more fun without the distraction of a telemarketer...
Don't forget that one fun response of the marketing droid might be an anonymous tip-off which leads clueless policemen to your house searching for "reports of abuse"
If your state has no harrasement laws, I guess you're legally in the clear when you set your voice-modem to dial that #800 number every 30 minutes, play music, and hang-up
Since this system would keep your modem out-of-action while you're using it, I suggest leaving it running next time you go away on holiday
If lawyers/phone company threaten you, simply play-back your conversation with the policeman about phone-harassement.
Ditch the land line and use cellular exclusively."
Two words: SMS SPAM
Once you have a mobile phone, you get the same computer-generated broadcast spam as your regular email account, except with no filters, not as much space to store it, and it beeps at you each time you get something.
Vodafone used to send broadcast emails all the time. Kind'a backfired on them when I stopped using a mobile phone at all because of it.
"The settlement page indicates that you have to prove damages by producing a receipt showing that your computer was screwed up and has to be fixed"
Sounds like an ideal case to cite when we all take Sony to court for f---ing people's iMac CD drives.
"Nope, they are useful for three things: observation, communication relay and radar"
Dammit, put a Wireless ISP on these things and fly them over the city!
"I'm guessing they are probably the helium filled version? Otherwise someone need to be strapped to a chair and watch the documentary on the Hindenburg for a week or so.."
Oh F.F.S. Sit down and watch the documentary yourself. The one about inflammable paint and lack of electrical earthing.
Hydrogen doesn't burn red!
Ironically, both times I tried to reply to this post my browser (Galeon) crashed whilst trying to access argos.co.uk's vehemently anti-non-IE internet shopping site.
Firstly, yes, "Mozilla 5", which I believe is used in Mozilla 1, Galeon, and Netscape 6.x seems pretty standards-compliant. (Netscape 4 of course, was the de-facto standard, because it's been the only real browser available since the start of the intternet (i.e. before W3C, and long before IE)
That wouldn't be my reason to suggest upgrading though: I'd always cite stability, security, popup-blocking, advert-blocking, cookie management, open-source, and a disinclination to run arbitary code on your system as a reason to upgrade from IE to something else.
Secondly, to the wit who quipped: "Yeah, make it so 95% of the world can't get to your website. Genius", please read the message before replying to it.
I am not suggesting that anyone stoop to the level of microsoft, or of argos in making their sites inaccessible. My website passes W3C tests, links to anybrowser, and displays correctly on Links.
The proposal was to make specific sections unavailable, specifically the privacy policy (which is pretty irrelevant for IE users anyway) and other sections which are not vital to the site, but which are useful enough to interest people in the opposing site of the "IE5 or higher only" debate.
I really don't know where you got the 95% figure from. All I can guess is that you're either running a corporate internet, or the MSDN server to get that many IE5 hits.
My website gets around 70% IE, and:
6% Mozilla 5
5% Galeon
2% GoogleBot
1% Netscape 3
... and the rest are mostly from the Netscape 4 series
(before anyone levels the "foaming-mouthed-linux-advocate" accusation at my website and their browser stats, 90% of the visitors to that site come from download.com looking for MsWindows software.
Dammit, mod this to 5 and bookmark it. You didn't just write that, did you?
Given that NyTimes only lets one person on at once using the same user/password combo, is it not a little pointless for everyone to post their passwords on slashdot?
Most of us will make up a random username anyhow, and let it set the cookie. I can't remember if it needs a valid email address or just "an email address" but most of us have spamtrap email accounts for that purpose *
Now what would be -really- useful is for someone to write a PHP script that goes to the signup page, enters random information. signs you up, then logs in and goes to the page you originally wanted. Then we could just point all the links to mydomain.net/ReferToNyTimes?StoryID=x
And no, I can't be bothered to get into that arms-race with their signup mechanism. You can if you want!
* sooner or later, all the free email places will go and those which remain will want your national ID card number, so some of us will have to stump up domains that everyone can use for this stuff. Like, anything sent to temp_*@mydomain.net gets posted on the web for example, and you direct all your crappy passwords there.
"By this definition, the Pentagon was a Terrorist attack, since most of the people who work there are noncombatants"
What?!? To quote this very discussion:
"civilian deaths aren't even a war crime (much less terrorism) as long as the force was proportional to the value of the military value of the target"
Would anyone care to estimate the military value of a command centre responsible for coordinating many tens of wars all around the world?
The loops you have to jump though to make it appear like a terrorist attack: "most of the people who work there are noncombatants" are farsical. They're not combatants because they just guide the long-distance weapons, right. In the same way that leaders of the IRA are non-combatants if they only give orders???
About the only decent explanation I've heard is that using a civilian plane to attack makes it terrorism. So I guess all we now need to do is compare the numbers of civillians either in an airliner or in a few dozen afghan villages, right? (Assuming here that every human life is of equal worth, correct that if you will but I hope nobody does)
"Might is right" -- who needs rules and laws when you're the most powerful?
"No, I'm not equating the star wars empire to any particular country on earth, just making the observation that what differentiates a rebel hero from a terrorist is your perspective."
And since when is this new? "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" has been a truism for so long now that the label "terrorist" no longer even holds meaning for many people. (or makes them wonder about the motivations of whoever is doing the labelling?
Unfortunately, if you're on the wrong side, it's becomes very difficult to grasp that there may be two sides to the argument. That's exactly the reason why Star Wars wouldn't make sense to us if Luke and Solo had gained their victory by destroying the Pentagon instead of the Death Star.
"Oh, and one last thing - never give anyone your social security number. Or your mother's maiden name
"
Are they not necessary to open a bank account in america? or to get a credit card? or a hotel room or a train ticket? or to file a tax return on the internet?
I can't wait to see the governments' look of surprise when people start using cash again for serious things. "Airline ticket by cash? Right, bodily-search for you, boy. We'll not have anyone who doesn't trust the Credit Corporation"
"Why are people still using Hotmail?"
Too true! I blocked access to my account from hotmail (or forged hotmail) addresses for a long time. I was absolutely shocked to find some of my friends in the "deleted_spam" folder, not because I'd deleted their emails, but that they were actually using hotmail!
I presume most people here run websites. Many people have privacy policies (or other such useful but non-vital information) and PHP/Perl is pretty standard.
Put the following code on your privacy policy page:
<?php
if (index(getenv("USER_AGENT"),"MSIE")>0)
{
echo "<p>We have detected you are using a non-standard browser which may not display this page properly. Please upgrade to Galeon 0.2 or later, Mozilla 0.9 or later, or any version of Netscape Navigator</p>";
}
else
{
/* Put your website's privacy policy here */
}
?>
Are there ANY decent webmail sites left out there anymore that don't charge for basic services like automatic forwarding?
...and how easy is it to set one up for those of us who own our own domain?
I've given out a couple of email addresses on my domain to family, but there's still no way they can configure passwords on their own. I saw a package which lets you run a yahoo-like web email service (skinnable interface, optional POP collection, etc) but that's £500 (and obviously I can't run it on a size-limited hosted webserver)
Plenty of us have got domains we can use, the question is whether it's possible (or easy) to use them for limited web-based email accounts.
make the penalty a percent of income earned.
if you coded it for free, you can't be assessed
That would seem to absolve internet explorer and outlook express, both of which are "free" (free as in candy from strangers)
You're right to suppose UCITA will penalise open-source whilst exempting microsoft, but the answer isn't so simple as "percentage of earnings"
It's even simpler than that. "US Congress stay the fuck out of what doesn't concern them, and what they know nothing about"
My software is no longer available to those states which have passed UCITA