Maybe this is where to start -- not necessarily with PayPal, but the idea of distributed "identifying entities." Rather than spending your time on a site for registration, design an infrastructure that allows entities who do know with some certainty who I am ( say, the Instituto Nacional de Migracion, who handle my residence visa, or my banker who handles my money ) to allow me to issue these same identifying tickets to other parties.
Be like BASF "We don't make the identity database. We make the identity database better."
In many ways we do have that with, at least in the US, credit cards -- A web site can do a $1 auth and then never deposit the frank, and they can be reasonably certain that that user is John Q. Bankcustomer. This of course falls apart as soon as you leave the US.
I have a friend (no really!) who is a major porn addict, and every month he gives me a pile of cash to go put on one of a prepaid debit card that I got for him in his name (itself an interesting exercise). The last stastitic I heard: About 30% of the population of Mexico has a bank account.
While the OP clearly has "a" site now with his test code, there is absolutely no reason the system could not be expanded to dozens or hundreds of autonomous entities each offering verification of identity.
Well, first and foremost: Get a fire extinguisher handy for the
slashdotting you're about to receive. Hmmmm... I have a
compute-intensive application I'm playing with... I think I'll talk
about it on slashdot. What's that crashing sound I hear?
As to the premise: I actually think it is a moderately valuable idea,
but you are going to find yourself heading into a strong wind of
distrust. "Who is this guy that I want to give him information that
has extemely high identity-theft value?" - Your first major obstacle
is not technological at all, it is going to be image: How do you
present your bona-fides. Can you afford a seven figure surety bond?
Finally, the ultimate question, when you decide how to make the
business model work: Who wants the product? If you can get
pr0n sites to accept your say-so as an adult-verification entity, then
you will have people beating down your door to sign up with your
service.
Once Upon A Time, a friend of mine had a domain that spelled a major ISPs name backwards (he registered it on purpose, and joked that he was the "anti-big vendor" and gave shell accounts to friends, friends of friends, etc.
Then, someone started posting to usenet a lot, who was a customer of Big Vendor , and he 'spam-proofed' his address by ever so cleverly spelling it backwards.
Suddenly dozens if not hundreds of undeliverable messages started landing on Mike's server for some clown over at ReallyBigISP.
So, like any good sysadmin, he corrected this oversight, adding a sendmail rule to deliver mail for jrluser@psigib.com to jrluser@bigisp.com.
The moral of the story: Do not create harm for some innocent third party with your spam evasion techniques. It may come back to haunt you.
You order it for under US$25, shipping included, and you get a flat envelope with the cardboard.
I can forgive not reading the farking article, the site is slagged. But please try to at least read the summary. UKP 10 and post and packing for under USD 25. No error.
Another origin of things like the $500 hammer, is almost always lineitem allocation of overhead.
Suppose NASA contracts to Missile And Rocket Systems to provide some enormous system, including among other things: A rocket engine, and a hammer. MARS subcontracts out the rocket engine and a hammer to Engines and Hammers, Inc. E&H bills MARS $1,000,005 for one rocket engine ($1,000,000) and one hammer ($5).
MARS adds their 10% overhead for managing the E&H contract, and bills NASA at $1,100,006. Now, because of a policy called Line-item allocation, the overhead has to be prorated, not over the COST of the contract lineitems, but the COUNT... So, the $100,001 in overhead gets divided in two... the rocket engine cost NASA $1,050,000.. and the hammer a staggering $50,006!
I am sure if there WERE an accountant out there, they would explain to you that any scheme that involves spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, just so you can diminish your tax liability by tens of thousands of dollars is mindless folly.
Businessman 1: "Yeah -- I spent three million dollars last year to send my software engineers to a planning session in orbit. We were able to save nearly $800,000 on our corporate tax filings."
Buesinessman 2: "Was it worth $2.2 million to do that?"
I am not a graphics person either, but when I tried to get a designer I work with to use The Gimp, he balked. While it appeared to have all the featureset we needed for the project, he would have lost all of the muscle-memory he had developed using PhotoShop.
The training costs to get him to change would exceed the costs of using pirated software for the application he needed.
Again, I reiterate -- if DRM existed, and he could NOT run a pirated version of PhotoShop, I bet he'd be much more interested in learning Gimp on his own nickel.
I actually agree, that bullet-proof anti-piracy techniques would greatly improve the Open/Free Software Community.
If Joe User (well, I live in Mexico, so Jose Usuario) could not go down to the flea market and buy a pirated Win2K for $10, or download it for free from some Russian w4r3z site, he would be more likely to find and use gratis software.
Software manufacturers lost $29 billion to piracy in
2003, more than double the previous year's losses, according to an
industry survey released Wednesday.
Translation:
Software manufacturers CLAIM $29bn in losses due to piracy.
About 36 percent of software installations worldwide
are pirated copies, the study by trade group Business Software
Alliance and market researcher IDC showed. In dollar terms, the losses
were greatest in Western Europe, where piracy cut revenue by $9.6
billion in 2003, followed by Asia and North America.
Translation: We assume that 100% of all people running pirated
software would have paid full retail had they not found it for less in
some other venue.
The Business Software Alliance blamed the rapid
spread of piracy on so-called peer-to-peer networks, where Internet
users illegally swap software and other files such as music for free
or at discounted prices. Translation: We also assume
that 100% of all piracy is via peer-to-peer networks.
"Peer-to-peer file-sharing services are becoming a
huge problem for us," said Jeffrey Hardee, the Business Software
Alliance's Asia-Pacific director. Translation: Sure
sucks to be us.
Vietnam and China had the world's highest rates,
with pirated versions accounting for 92 percent of all computer
software installed in each country, followed by the Ukraine with 91
percent, Indonesia at 88 percent, and Zimbabwe and Russia with 87
percent each. Translation: Places with excruciatingly
low per-capita incomes, for some reason don't want to spend the
equivalent of a years salary for a substantially defective product.
Hardee identified Vietnam, China, India and Thailand
as Asian countries that need to step up their fight against
piracy. Translation: I bet governments in these places
are cheap.
"We need to see more (government) enforcement from
these countries," he said. Translation: So we will buy
them.
By region, about 53 percent of software applications
on computers in Asia was pirated in 2003, compared with 70 percent in
Eastern Europe, 63 percent in Latin America, 55 percent in the Middle
East, 36 percent in Western Europe and 23 percent in North
America. Translation: Poor people don't buy software.
But the dollar losses were largest in Western
Europe, North America and Asia because of the sheer size of those
markets and the growing use of expensive, sophisticated software in
developed countries, said Hardee. Translation: Even
though the first world has the lowest per-capita RATES of piracy, they
still have the most people who use software.
"In the Asia-Pacific (region), the governments
really do want to develop strong IT sectors. And to do that, there's
no question they have to bring down the levels of piracy. This will in
turn benefit the Asian economies," he said.
Translation: The best way for Asian governments to improve their IT
sector is to ship major amounts of capital to Poughkeepsie, Redmond
and Cupertino.
Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia and South Korea are
making progress in the battle against piracy, Hardee
said. Translation: We are pleased with our
rent-to-own program with these governments.
As little as five years ago, getting connected to The Network (in the sense of telephone network, not internet) was difficult. It required substantial technical know-how, some regulatory hoops to jump through, and newcomers were carefully scrutinized for behavior consistent with Community Standards.
Sound like the internet we knew and loved pre-1995?
I fear The Network will become just as much a stinking sewer as The Internet has become, unless we do something Serious, and Now.
If the call doesn't enter the PSTN at an end office, there will BE no ANI spill, other than whatever SE the VoIP gateway adds, which is under THEIR control. As far as The Network is concerned, identification and rating are end-office functions. Sure, logs are kept at the tandem level for billing access minutes, or inter-carrier settlement, but getting from that to "who was at the other end" can be a tremendous challenge requiring the cooperation of every carrier whose network the call passed through.
I concur. I gave recently as a gift to my boss a copy of Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and reccomended that he read SiaSL as well.
In fact, my highschool and just post-highschool reading consisted of a lot of RAH, and it definitely helped me form a lot of my personality and politics. In that sense, it truly did Change My Life.
Another book that changed my life was actually an error. I told my father to buy a book I needed for work (on CBASIC for CPM) and he erroneously bought this new-release, The C Programming Language by some guys named Kernighan and Ritchie. I went to visit for Christmas, and found that same volume sitting on the shelf in my fathers den. I hope one of my nephews picks it up and has his brain poisoned the same plesant way mine was. while ( *s++ = *t++ ) ;
I would also keep in mind that write times for CF devices can be...g...l...a...c...i...a...l compared to disk.
Re:Nitrogen as a lifting gas?
on
Broadband Blimps
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Well, you partially answered it. People hear the word "hydrogen" and lose control of their bowels.
Second, and more seriously an envelope capable of containing hydrogen for long mission profiles has yet to be invented. Keeping He is difficult, but doable.
The difference in pathloss between the SSP (21km slantrange) and the edge of a 75 mile coverage circle (122km slant range) is only 15.3 dB. Not an insurmountable design figure. You might need to use a directional antenna at the edge of coverage, where a more omni antenna would suffice at the center.
They are NOT Blimps!
on
Broadband Blimps
·
· Score: 5, Informative
It is not a balloon or a blimp. It is a high-altitude
airship." Looks like a blimp to me...
The sarcastic wicked side of me wants to ask, "Do you also have
trouble distinguishing cows from automobiles?". The designation
of various categories of lighter-than-air craft is not just random -
there are specific design features. OPs glib statement comes across
like the PHB who says, "Looks like a television set to me... " when
confronted with a computer monitor.
The things that make the stratellite airship not a balloon or a blimp,
based on reading the fine FAQ are:
Rigid airframe: Blimps get their envelope shape from internal pressure acting against the envelope. These craft get their shape from a rigid airframe.
Airfoil shape: Blimps have a streamlined shape, but it is symettrical with reference to the flight motion. These craft have an airfoil shape that can provide lift.
A communication platform that sits at 65000 feet and stays relatively
still sounds like a dream come true. None of the cost of keeping a
constellation of LEO satellites moving, none of the latency of
geosync. This would also seem a great technology for providing ad hoc
coverage to a remote area for a special event. Put a couple of
moderately directional (say +23 dBi) antennas, one pointed at Black
Rock City, and the other at Civilization, and you have low-cost
temporary ludicrous bandwidth at Burning Man. (Feel free to
substitute YOUR favorite boondock~based
used-to-be-cool-'til-they-sold-out art festival if you are offended by
BM)
I for one, welcome our helium filled stationary communication
overlords.
It already takes forever for DNS changes to propagate through every network, which can be extremely frustrating when you have a high bandwidth domain. There definitely needs some optimization on the DNS front.
If your zones are taking too long to propogate, maybe you need to Read The Fine Manual... especially the parts around Refresh and Time to Live
The starting population of algorithms was tested on the simulator
using randomly generated requests.
I would think this would breed out of the caching system any affinity
to locality-of-reference.
One of the things I did each morning when I was running a
cybercafé was "prime" the Squid cache by running a little
script that did a wget -p on all of the URLs in the portal
page, and a few sites that were not. And it definitely did
improve performance for most users.
One of my unrealized dreams would be some sort of speculative-fetch
algorithm for Squid that would basically do a breadth-first fetch on a
page while the user was busy reading it.
Of course in my not-so-humble opinion, the biggest problem with
any caching system is the population of websites that,
through either malice or incompetence develop content that is
cache-hostile, and call it "experience enhanced".
Slashdot Mirror
let me trump myself. 5. Profit.
The slippery slope my homeland is heading down ...
- Boobs are bad, because we must protect children from sexual
images. (Despite no scientific proof that such images are
actually harmful.)
- Swearwords are bad, because we must protect children from
scatological talk, lest they grow up to be Howard Stern.
- Pointing out flaws in national security is bad, because we must
protect children from terrorist attack.
- Speaking ill of the Current Power Structure is ba, because we must
protect children from policies we do not agree with.
sigh... it was a nice democratic republic we had once.In a related story, an iPod can carry 490 passengers from New York to Sydney, Australia. The catch? You have to put it inside a Boeing 747 ....
Maybe this is where to start -- not necessarily with PayPal, but the idea of distributed "identifying entities." Rather than spending your time on a site for registration, design an infrastructure that allows entities who do know with some certainty who I am ( say, the Instituto Nacional de Migracion, who handle my residence visa, or my banker who handles my money ) to allow me to issue these same identifying tickets to other parties.
Be like BASF "We don't make the identity database. We make the identity database better."
In many ways we do have that with, at least in the US, credit cards -- A web site can do a $1 auth and then never deposit the frank, and they can be reasonably certain that that user is John Q. Bankcustomer. This of course falls apart as soon as you leave the US.
I have a friend (no really!) who is a major porn addict, and every month he gives me a pile of cash to go put on one of a prepaid debit card that I got for him in his name (itself an interesting exercise). The last stastitic I heard: About 30% of the population of Mexico has a bank account.
Another thought: How do you solve this problem?
While the OP clearly has "a" site now with his test code, there is absolutely no reason the system could not be expanded to dozens or hundreds of autonomous entities each offering verification of identity.
Well, first and foremost: Get a fire extinguisher handy for the slashdotting you're about to receive. Hmmmm ... I have a
compute-intensive application I'm playing with ... I think I'll talk
about it on slashdot. What's that crashing sound I hear?
As to the premise: I actually think it is a moderately valuable idea, but you are going to find yourself heading into a strong wind of distrust. "Who is this guy that I want to give him information that has extemely high identity-theft value?" - Your first major obstacle is not technological at all, it is going to be image: How do you present your bona-fides. Can you afford a seven figure surety bond?
Finally, the ultimate question, when you decide how to make the business model work: Who wants the product? If you can get pr0n sites to accept your say-so as an adult-verification entity, then you will have people beating down your door to sign up with your service.
Once Upon A Time, a friend of mine had a domain that spelled a major ISPs name backwards (he registered it on purpose, and joked that he was the "anti-big vendor" and gave shell accounts to friends, friends of friends, etc.
Then, someone started posting to usenet a lot, who was a customer of Big Vendor , and he 'spam-proofed' his address by ever so cleverly spelling it backwards.
Suddenly dozens if not hundreds of undeliverable messages started landing on Mike's server for some clown over at ReallyBigISP.
So, like any good sysadmin, he corrected this oversight, adding a sendmail rule to deliver mail for jrluser@psigib.com to jrluser@bigisp.com.
The moral of the story: Do not create harm for some innocent third party with your spam evasion techniques. It may come back to haunt you.
Another origin of things like the $500 hammer, is almost always lineitem allocation of overhead.
Suppose NASA contracts to Missile And Rocket Systems to provide some enormous system, including among other things: A rocket engine, and a hammer. MARS subcontracts out the rocket engine and a hammer to Engines and Hammers, Inc. E&H bills MARS $1,000,005 for one rocket engine ($1,000,000) and one hammer ($5).
MARS adds their 10% overhead for managing the E&H contract, and bills NASA at $1,100,006. Now, because of a policy called Line-item allocation, the overhead has to be prorated, not over the COST of the contract lineitems, but the COUNT ... So, the $100,001 in overhead gets divided in two ... the rocket engine cost NASA $1,050,000 .. and the hammer a staggering $50,006!
I am sure if there WERE an accountant out there, they would explain to you that any scheme that involves spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, just so you can diminish your tax liability by tens of thousands of dollars is mindless folly.
Businessman 1: "Yeah -- I spent three million dollars last year to send my software engineers to a planning session in orbit. We were able to save nearly $800,000 on our corporate tax filings."
Buesinessman 2: "Was it worth $2.2 million to do that?"
Busniessman 1: "D'oh!"
I am not a graphics person either, but when I tried to get a designer I work with to use The Gimp, he balked. While it appeared to have all the featureset we needed for the project, he would have lost all of the muscle-memory he had developed using PhotoShop.
The training costs to get him to change would exceed the costs of using pirated software for the application he needed.
Again, I reiterate -- if DRM existed, and he could NOT run a pirated version of PhotoShop, I bet he'd be much more interested in learning Gimp on his own nickel.
I actually agree, that bullet-proof anti-piracy techniques would greatly improve the Open/Free Software Community.
If Joe User (well, I live in Mexico, so Jose Usuario) could not go down to the flea market and buy a pirated Win2K for $10, or download it for free from some Russian w4r3z site, he would be more likely to find and use gratis software.
d'oh ... I hit "return" accidentally while previewing a page and it posted despite the layout errors. Forgive me, my finger slipped.
As little as five years ago, getting connected to The Network (in the sense of telephone network, not internet) was difficult. It required substantial technical know-how, some regulatory hoops to jump through, and newcomers were carefully scrutinized for behavior consistent with Community Standards.
Sound like the internet we knew and loved pre-1995?
I fear The Network will become just as much a stinking sewer as The Internet has become, unless we do something Serious, and Now.
If the call doesn't enter the PSTN at an end office, there will BE no ANI spill, other than whatever SE the VoIP gateway adds, which is under THEIR control. As far as The Network is concerned, identification and rating are end-office functions. Sure, logs are kept at the tandem level for billing access minutes, or inter-carrier settlement, but getting from that to "who was at the other end" can be a tremendous challenge requiring the cooperation of every carrier whose network the call passed through.
I concur. I gave recently as a gift to my boss a copy of Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and reccomended that he read SiaSL as well.
In fact, my highschool and just post-highschool reading consisted of a lot of RAH, and it definitely helped me form a lot of my personality and politics. In that sense, it truly did Change My Life.
Another book that changed my life was actually an error. I told my father to buy a book I needed for work (on CBASIC for CPM) and he erroneously bought this new-release, The C Programming Language by some guys named Kernighan and Ritchie. I went to visit for Christmas, and found that same volume sitting on the shelf in my fathers den. I hope one of my nephews picks it up and has his brain poisoned the same plesant way mine was. while ( *s++ = *t++ ) ;
I would use a CF card and ATA adapter.
I would also keep in mind that write times for CF devices can be ...g...l...a...c...i...a...l compared to disk.
Well, you partially answered it. People hear the word "hydrogen" and lose control of their bowels.
Second, and more seriously an envelope capable of containing hydrogen for long mission profiles has yet to be invented. Keeping He is difficult, but doable.
The difference in pathloss between the SSP (21km slantrange) and the edge of a 75 mile coverage circle (122km slant range) is only 15.3 dB. Not an insurmountable design figure. You might need to use a directional antenna at the edge of coverage, where a more omni antenna would suffice at the center.
The things that make the stratellite airship not a balloon or a blimp, based on reading the fine FAQ are:
A communication platform that sits at 65000 feet and stays relatively still sounds like a dream come true. None of the cost of keeping a constellation of LEO satellites moving, none of the latency of geosync. This would also seem a great technology for providing ad hoc coverage to a remote area for a special event. Put a couple of moderately directional (say +23 dBi) antennas, one pointed at Black Rock City, and the other at Civilization, and you have low-cost temporary ludicrous bandwidth at Burning Man. (Feel free to substitute YOUR favorite boondock~based used-to-be-cool-'til-they-sold-out art festival if you are offended by BM)
I for one, welcome our helium filled stationary communication overlords.
So, do you posit that the purpose of the GA is just to give human programmers insight into avenues they might not have otherwise considered?
Well, I have found one flaw in the methodology:
I would think this would breed out of the caching system any affinity to locality-of-reference.One of the things I did each morning when I was running a cybercafé was "prime" the Squid cache by running a little script that did a wget -p on all of the URLs in the portal page, and a few sites that were not. And it definitely did improve performance for most users.
One of my unrealized dreams would be some sort of speculative-fetch algorithm for Squid that would basically do a breadth-first fetch on a page while the user was busy reading it.
Of course in my not-so-humble opinion, the biggest problem with any caching system is the population of websites that, through either malice or incompetence develop content that is cache-hostile, and call it "experience enhanced".