&WEll lets bloodwell hope the software DOES put them out of commission for good - the world would be a better place for it.&
Seriously - in cases of consumer hardware(and this is what we are talking about), a simple end packet or probe should not kill it. If you are changing the firmware - it should be down to the software to make this a very obvious process(do you really want to do this? Are you really, really sure you want to do this...).
If indeed it is the former, then LG are at fault. If it is the latter- then Mandrake are at fault. There is the thing that "If it aint broke then dont fix it." - so maybe mandrake should have left it out- after all I think if you configure your own kernel - packet writing is still flagged as dangerous(dont do it kids).
The problem is (and it is still the manufacturers fault) that the IO routines for upploading firmware may be in the firmware - and bad firmware will render it useless as you can no longer flash the thing...
When would you EVER flash both bios's at the same time. Fine- if you have a good update, test it for stability(I mean really test- 36 hours or so), then flash the other bios with this known good copy - but never both at the same time. Thats like downloading and burning a new dist and chucking out all the old dist cd's without testing the new dist is gonna install...
Umm - if the project was useful, and popular, it would have been maintained by the open source community. There are some obscure open source packages whos code is very hard to find, and whose developers are even harder to find. If a company is developing against something like this(an pen source projects),then undoubtedly with many years usage they will have bug fixes - and give those back to the community.
The voyager problem is simple - document, and log what you did. If I install an OS then select a bunch of packages, tune some config files to create say an intranet app - then I log every step of the way - for me - I can retrace/backtrack my steps if it goes tits up, and other people can recreate it when its gone. That includes hardware if it is relevant as well.
Although power plants may not all be more efficient than cars, they can be retrofitted/upgraded. Improvements in efficiency, and large scale pollution scrubbers are the kind of things that have been done on these power plants for a long time. Many car users are still yet to switch to unleaded, or fit catalytic converters.
Besides - if truly computerised electronic cars were available(using FPGA's for some systems instead of CPU's) - then you would also have the idea of rolling out firmware to make them more power efficient. Stuff like better PWM techniques and turn handling come to mind. I would make the leap that any half-decent electric/hybrid car would use brushless motors.
I suppose it makes sense. Although I have a wife(so the whole getting laid thing is well sorted), I would like to make money - so I can stake a bigger teratorial claim I expect - or is that just so I can buy more geek things..
I always wanted a big black room, with a black leather chair, TV wall, multi-keyboard console, and a white fluffy cat.
No seriously- I build robots for learning - just for the pure tech factor of it. I have plans to build robots that will save money/lives etc - like my track bot designs, but at the end of the day - I just want to see how much cool stuff I can build.(Maybe that is a whole better-than-the-jones's thing).
As much as I hate to say it - being a firm Linux user and not running any microsoft apps at home, but my favourite has to be my microsoft optical trackball. If trackballs count - they dont make my fingers hurt so much. Logitech do make good trackballs, but they just dont have the finish. Besides - I have had no problems ever connecting this device with my linux desktop or server.
I was one of the few people I ever new to own a mouse for a commodore 64 - not that there was a great deal that could be done with it. It simply registered movements on the joy port as if it were a normal atari joystick. Somewhere I may even be able to dig out the code I wrote for a graphical file manager - which was fine as long as you had no more than 7 files - I used 1 hardware sprite for the mouse.
I remember a few years ago when I used to do CAD stuff- there was a controller device referred to lovingly as the "Pigs Tits". It was simply a board of 6 or eight rotary controls and optionally two switches - used to trim things for mathematical precision. I couldn't help thinking how great it would be to write a midi driver for the thing, or use it for robot control. I have not seen one for a while.
Bu the sooner one of the big boys SWATS them out of existence with a countersuit the better.. Go on IBM - take em to peices...
I would even recommend our secretaries use VIA Voice on a Model 55SX as a token of my gratitude..
Unless the evolve windows in an open fashion, giving wine developers time to roll with the changes. This would benefit WINE, and the consumer. MS would be force to evolve faster, and start thinking about other ways to proove it really has a better product than FUD and pure monopoly.
He doesnt, he works for MS.
But seriously - it may be just as well to develop something similar, using the techniques uyou used to code the original - if you were one of the original coders, you can probably write code that does a similar function without looking the same(obfuscation, refactoring(probably better)).
Write the system in a different language, or using alternative choices of APIs.
After all, taking the Example of MS Word, there is common features that are important - having the same or similar features, implemented in a different way(different gui etc) should not be a crime. - IANAL
Now thats the most sensible job all day. a handful of geeks discuss commuting - when telecommuting is the answer. That means you could ride your bike around a local park for exercise in the morning, avoiding the traffic, and get to work in reasonable time.
Being a full-time game developer - I sometimes find the fact that I have to work in an office away from home a pointless excercise. The occasional meeting is worth going for though...
I think that was one concept that is taken for granted in the William Gibson (and others) cyberpunk universe. Anonymous electronic money - without the need for cash.
You could just pop round an offy and buy a credit disk for a few grand and then use it to pay off a deal. Then as long as money could be transfered from one disk to another (think dreamcast VMU's) - you could pay off who ever you liked.
Of course - preventing such items being hacked would be a nightmare. It would have to be encrypted - like an encryption code for each dollar, that the reading of which - and transfer of will destroy it. have it in two seperate systems much like the PS2 IOP and EE memory - which make it harder- so if one number falls out of sync with another the whole card is rendered useless.
Of course the best hackers would still find a way around it if they really wanted to. But then people also forge notes too..
As a serious robot developer(check my url/sig) I commonly use different formats of storage. Smartcards are small and sometimes convenient - and as such i own a number of readers.
They are not in any way pirate devices. By that same argument any DCE/DTE combination is a pirate device - which ir rubbish.
Now I do not subscribe to Cable/Satellite TV of any kind, and seriously resent the implication that my activities are that of pirating. Okay - living in the UK I am not affected by this attack directly, apart from my ability to purchase smart card readers and products. Which would impede my research and usage of a particular technology.
To be honest, someone who tries to imply a standard used for many things (like many recent banking cards, identity cards etc) is only useful for pirating cable is a very small minded person indeed. Maybe they are trying to make their dying buck in the face of business swiped by net exchanging of programs. After all - who would want to subscribe when movies can be bought/hired on DVDs - without the crap and cheaper than cable subs, or downloaded with some software.
If someone is goin to pirate - why go to the trouble of getting cable and hacking that, when a broadband connection and bittorrent is probably going to get more of the movies they want- and less of the high volume ads they dont.
Heres to hoping there efforts will see them countersued by many legitamate smart card users - robot builders and engineers and such.
If the person wants the speach, they would look for it. If I want to buy something I look on ebay. If I am looking for a robot component, I look at robot related pages.
AS for usenet posts, I subscribe only to certain groups, that is computing, electronic and robotics related ones. If there was a porn submission to comp.robotics.misc, then I would certainly not like reading it. After all, there are plenty of porn ones to subscribe to instead if I really wanted porn.
My email is owned by me. So is my mail server. It is not ownewd by someone else, and is not public land. In fact it has very aggresive spam filters, a decent firewall and nat. And will reject most would be spammer attempts with a message telling them in no uncertain terms where to get off. I would say that is quite clearly a do not trespass sign. People who email me are people to whom I have given my email address, giving them express permision to use it.
I have already suggested a system using digital signing to get into an allowed mailbox, so mail not containing the signing attachment would be filtered out.
I would probably find spam less annoying if the senders would leave a proper email address and place of business, then I could bill them for the damage they have done(ever seen it?).
My mail server is not an open relay, and has some pretty aggresive filters on it, at the moment, the spam that seems to make it through the most is chinese stuff.
I agree - it is not up to the FBI to police it, but there should be laws to protect the privacy of our mail boxes, and the FTC should be regulating companies wishing to use email marketing techniques so that they can be filtered.
At least if they all had ADV: in the line my server could easily reject them all before they got there.
Free speach would mean putting up a website, then anyone can see it. But theres a diffrence between that, and forcing their speach upon you. To me, an unsolicited email from anyone would be the equivalent of someone breaking into your home, and disturbing your relaxing bath with a speach about something totally irrelavent to you.
Dont get me wrong, I dont want to trample on free speach, but there is a difference between just announcing it(like a website), and being intrusive even aggresive about it - forcing your opinion, however inane upon someone.
Its not what they say I always dispute, its the fact that my mail box is a private mailbox for use of me and my associates(friends or business), and the web is used for public broadcasts. Imagine if somebody cut into your mobile phone conversation, and charged you to tell you something completely irrelevant (like double glazing, herbal viagra or such). I dislike telemarketing just as much. I mean there is always the radio, which means if you do not wish to listen, you turn it off.
First up - WinCE is bloated. WinCE devices do not talk with other devices very easily. In fact, they do not completely support IrDA properly(that is the actual record formats - they cannot handle multiple records). In terms of desktop connectivity, WinCE only supports connectivity with Windows.
Palm is nice and compact, but has a very wierd file system - or database system. Its not a bad thing, but it makes writing software for it a bit of a paradigm shift. It does support many different methods of connectivity - older palms with serial support can be connected to almost anything else with a serial port.
The thing is, you could never write one source apckage, and easily develop multiplatform between those two platforms alone. Let alone all the other ones. So the interconnectivity, and intercompatibility are an issue.
The problem is far from solved - and the way I see it, the problems like these are only just beginning.
I do like having a variety of systems - and not the one ring, but equally sometimes I may just want that intercompatibility no matter what.
Remember the old speccy vs Commodore 64 wars... at least they could still talk to each other with a serial cable(admittedly it needed funky adaptors)...
Being an amateur robotics engineer- i can tell you that a large number of cheap microcontrollers and embedded controllers come with I2C as standard. The probelm with USB is that it requires proprietory drivers for each device.
I cannot stand the fact that USB Activesync is a windows only thing - and annoyingly my PDA (an IPAQ 1910) does not have a serial cable available to it.
I may try some IrDA based connection to install familiar. I know familiar is not fully ported, but I am only too happy to try fixing some of the bugs myself.
But thats what the spammers would like you to think... Thats "Opt Out". I would rather they never included me in the first place unless I gave them my express permission. I think the laws need to seriously regulate commercial mail, and ban "Opt-Out" mailings. If I didnt ask for it, I really do not want it. There are certain select companies from whom I would be happy to receive their newsletters,and opt-in for, but at the moment I have no idea who they will share the information with, so I subscribe to nothing with my main account, and only use my dummy alias for that stuff...
Okay how can I make this clear - Unless I have a big flashing website, with red borders saying "Please send me fraudulent cr*p" - I do not want spam.
Those who spam me anyway are now forcing their rubbish on to me. I do not take kindly to that kind of cajouling, and will therefore send bits over wires to destroy the spammers computers (DoS, targeted virii or some nasty trick) where possible(if I can get and verify a "real" IP address).
After all- its only bits over a wire....
I really beleive the big difference is commercial and personal. On a personal level, someone is only going to send email to people they know, or groups they are interested in. On a commercial level- its spam. I consider advertising and con-merchant quips a different type of communication from an email to a number of (ex)-colleagues. The big problem here is that old nutshell - the corporate person. When the US constitution gave personal rights to corporations, who also had more money and power through their commercial leverage, they screwed up the US law system irrepairably. This is the one reason copyright law, commercial email law and most rights vs freedoms problems arose. Rememebr a person can be prosecuted and jailed - it is not possible to do the same to a company - which may just shut up shop, and its employees go elsewhere and continue the same bad practices unhindered.
You could simply piggy back a stamp as as encrypted/encoded tag attached to a mail. Mail without valid stamps can be simply rejected by the mail server, and you and your friends/colleagues would send mails with the stamps. The stamp having been used for the email, and confirmed received by you is available for the originator to reclaim and send again. If you do not confirm it, it is now invalid, and the originator must get a new one. If for every new stamp, instead of paying money, you must just type in a numeric code printed in a gif image on the registration page - they are free, considering that each recipient will need a valid stamp - unless spammers have very sophisticated OCR programs(fuzzify the text to make that difficult) then they will have to hand type something for each and every mail they send. For people subscribed to mailing list, they would each send you a stamp which would be encoded together with the senders stamp into an attachment on the group mailing. The subscribers clients or servers would then reject mail without a stamp which was encoded with their stamp.
As for who would own it/run it, if the open source community build software which will use shared resources and one tracker page. So that a batch of stamps are handled by some machine on the net in a fashion not to dissimilar to the distributed model of bittorrent.
Of course a furthar refinement would be that if you have your own user stamp(or key) you would give that to the stamp issuing web page, which along with asking you to type numbers, would email you with the final key. Therefore requiring you to provide a valid email address which would also be encoded and verifyable against the stamp.
I like this notion- as long as it is done free - which it very much could be.. and like I say, by having users use distributed clients(with redundancy) then we dont end up with huge loads on single key-verification and registration servers.
Slashdot Mirror
&WEll lets bloodwell hope the software DOES put them out of commission for good - the world would be a better place for it.&
Seriously - in cases of consumer hardware(and this is what we are talking about), a simple end packet or probe should not kill it. If you are changing the firmware - it should be down to the software to make this a very obvious process(do you really want to do this? Are you really, really sure you want to do this...).
If indeed it is the former, then LG are at fault. If it is the latter- then Mandrake are at fault. There is the thing that "If it aint broke then dont fix it." - so maybe mandrake should have left it out- after all I think if you configure your own kernel - packet writing is still flagged as dangerous(dont do it kids).
The problem is (and it is still the manufacturers fault) that the IO routines for upploading firmware may be in the firmware - and bad firmware will render it useless as you can no longer flash the thing...
When would you EVER flash both bios's at the same time. Fine- if you have a good update, test it for stability(I mean really test- 36 hours or so), then flash the other bios with this known good copy - but never both at the same time. Thats like downloading and burning a new dist and chucking out all the old dist cd's without testing the new dist is gonna install...
Umm - if the project was useful, and popular, it would have been maintained by the open source community. There are some obscure open source packages whos code is very hard to find, and whose developers are even harder to find. If a company is developing against something like this(an pen source projects),then undoubtedly with many years usage they will have bug fixes - and give those back to the community.
The voyager problem is simple - document, and log what you did. If I install an OS then select a bunch of packages, tune some config files to create say an intranet app - then I log every step of the way - for me - I can retrace/backtrack my steps if it goes tits up, and other people can recreate it when its gone. That includes hardware if it is relevant as well.
Although power plants may not all be more efficient than cars, they can be retrofitted/upgraded. Improvements in efficiency, and large scale pollution scrubbers are the kind of things that have been done on these power plants for a long time. Many car users are still yet to switch to unleaded, or fit catalytic converters.
Besides - if truly computerised electronic cars were available(using FPGA's for some systems instead of CPU's) - then you would also have the idea of rolling out firmware to make them more power efficient. Stuff like better PWM techniques and turn handling come to mind. I would make the leap that any half-decent electric/hybrid car would use brushless motors.
I suppose it makes sense. Although I have a wife(so the whole getting laid thing is well sorted), I would like to make money - so I can stake a bigger teratorial claim I expect - or is that just so I can buy more geek things..
I always wanted a big black room, with a black leather chair, TV wall, multi-keyboard console, and a white fluffy cat.
No seriously- I build robots for learning - just for the pure tech factor of it. I have plans to build robots that will save money/lives etc - like my track bot designs, but at the end of the day - I just want to see how much cool stuff I can build.(Maybe that is a whole better-than-the-jones's thing).
How the hell did you confuse unix geeks with redneck gun-owners with big ass dogs.. You are SO confused.
I was one of the few people I ever new to own a mouse for a commodore 64 - not that there was a great deal that could be done with it. It simply registered movements on the joy port as if it were a normal atari joystick. Somewhere I may even be able to dig out the code I wrote for a graphical file manager - which was fine as long as you had no more than 7 files - I used 1 hardware sprite for the mouse.
I remember a few years ago when I used to do CAD stuff- there was a controller device referred to lovingly as the "Pigs Tits". It was simply a board of 6 or eight rotary controls and optionally two switches - used to trim things for mathematical precision. I couldn't help thinking how great it would be to write a midi driver for the thing, or use it for robot control. I have not seen one for a while.
Bu the sooner one of the big boys SWATS them out of existence with a countersuit the better.. Go on IBM - take em to peices...
I would even recommend our secretaries use VIA Voice on a Model 55SX as a token of my gratitude..
Philistine, real artists use an Etch-A-Sketch, with their teeth and only one eye...
Unless the evolve windows in an open fashion, giving wine developers time to roll with the changes. This would benefit WINE, and the consumer. MS would be force to evolve faster, and start thinking about other ways to proove it really has a better product than FUD and pure monopoly.
He doesnt, he works for MS.
But seriously - it may be just as well to develop something similar, using the techniques uyou used to code the original - if you were one of the original coders, you can probably write code that does a similar function without looking the same(obfuscation, refactoring(probably better)).
Write the system in a different language, or using alternative choices of APIs.
After all, taking the Example of MS Word, there is common features that are important - having the same or similar features, implemented in a different way(different gui etc) should not be a crime. - IANAL
Now thats the most sensible job all day. a handful of geeks discuss commuting - when telecommuting is the answer. That means you could ride your bike around a local park for exercise in the morning, avoiding the traffic, and get to work in reasonable time.
Being a full-time game developer - I sometimes find the fact that I have to work in an office away from home a pointless excercise. The occasional meeting is worth going for though...
I think that was one concept that is taken for granted in the William Gibson (and others) cyberpunk universe. Anonymous electronic money - without the need for cash.
You could just pop round an offy and buy a credit disk for a few grand and then use it to pay off a deal. Then as long as money could be transfered from one disk to another (think dreamcast VMU's) - you could pay off who ever you liked.
Of course - preventing such items being hacked would be a nightmare. It would have to be encrypted - like an encryption code for each dollar, that the reading of which - and transfer of will destroy it. have it in two seperate systems much like the PS2 IOP and EE memory - which make it harder- so if one number falls out of sync with another the whole card is rendered useless.
Of course the best hackers would still find a way around it if they really wanted to. But then people also forge notes too..
As a serious robot developer(check my url/sig) I commonly use different formats of storage. Smartcards are small and sometimes convenient - and as such i own a number of readers.
They are not in any way pirate devices. By that same argument any DCE/DTE combination is a pirate device - which ir rubbish.
Now I do not subscribe to Cable/Satellite TV of any kind, and seriously resent the implication that my activities are that of pirating. Okay - living in the UK I am not affected by this attack directly, apart from my ability to purchase smart card readers and products. Which would impede my research and usage of a particular technology.
To be honest, someone who tries to imply a standard used for many things (like many recent banking cards, identity cards etc) is only useful for pirating cable is a very small minded person indeed. Maybe they are trying to make their dying buck in the face of business swiped by net exchanging of programs. After all - who would want to subscribe when movies can be bought/hired on DVDs - without the crap and cheaper than cable subs, or downloaded with some software.
If someone is goin to pirate - why go to the trouble of getting cable and hacking that, when a broadband connection and bittorrent is probably going to get more of the movies they want- and less of the high volume ads they dont.
Heres to hoping there efforts will see them countersued by many legitamate smart card users - robot builders and engineers and such.
I know its a bit late - but I was hoping to mirror or at least seed that.. Unfortunalely I got a 404... Any chance of posting it again?
Ahh- Now if I knew an easy way to figure that out(or more to the point a quick way), I could be a god in cryptography.
If the person wants the speach, they would look for it. If I want to buy something I look on ebay. If I am looking for a robot component, I look at robot related pages.
AS for usenet posts, I subscribe only to certain groups, that is computing, electronic and robotics related ones. If there was a porn submission to comp.robotics.misc, then I would certainly not like reading it. After all, there are plenty of porn ones to subscribe to instead if I really wanted porn.
My email is owned by me. So is my mail server. It is not ownewd by someone else, and is not public land. In fact it has very aggresive spam filters, a decent firewall and nat. And will reject most would be spammer attempts with a message telling them in no uncertain terms where to get off. I would say that is quite clearly a do not trespass sign. People who email me are people to whom I have given my email address, giving them express permision to use it.
I have already suggested a system using digital signing to get into an allowed mailbox, so mail not containing the signing attachment would be filtered out.
I would probably find spam less annoying if the senders would leave a proper email address and place of business, then I could bill them for the damage they have done(ever seen it?).
My mail server is not an open relay, and has some pretty aggresive filters on it, at the moment, the spam that seems to make it through the most is chinese stuff.
I agree - it is not up to the FBI to police it, but there should be laws to protect the privacy of our mail boxes, and the FTC should be regulating companies wishing to use email marketing techniques so that they can be filtered.
At least if they all had ADV: in the line my server could easily reject them all before they got there.
Free speach would mean putting up a website, then anyone can see it. But theres a diffrence between that, and forcing their speach upon you. To me, an unsolicited email from anyone would be the equivalent of someone breaking into your home, and disturbing your relaxing bath with a speach about something totally irrelavent to you.
Dont get me wrong, I dont want to trample on free speach, but there is a difference between just announcing it(like a website), and being intrusive even aggresive about it - forcing your opinion, however inane upon someone.
Its not what they say I always dispute, its the fact that my mail box is a private mailbox for use of me and my associates(friends or business), and the web is used for public broadcasts. Imagine if somebody cut into your mobile phone conversation, and charged you to tell you something completely irrelevant (like double glazing, herbal viagra or such). I dislike telemarketing just as much. I mean there is always the radio, which means if you do not wish to listen, you turn it off.
First up - WinCE is bloated. WinCE devices do not talk with other devices very easily. In fact, they do not completely support IrDA properly(that is the actual record formats - they cannot handle multiple records). In terms of desktop connectivity, WinCE only supports connectivity with Windows.
Palm is nice and compact, but has a very wierd file system - or database system. Its not a bad thing, but it makes writing software for it a bit of a paradigm shift. It does support many different methods of connectivity - older palms with serial support can be connected to almost anything else with a serial port.
The thing is, you could never write one source apckage, and easily develop multiplatform between those two platforms alone. Let alone all the other ones. So the interconnectivity, and intercompatibility are an issue.
The problem is far from solved - and the way I see it, the problems like these are only just beginning.
I do like having a variety of systems - and not the one ring, but equally sometimes I may just want that intercompatibility no matter what.
Remember the old speccy vs Commodore 64 wars... at least they could still talk to each other with a serial cable(admittedly it needed funky adaptors)...
Being an amateur robotics engineer- i can tell you that a large number of cheap microcontrollers and embedded controllers come with I2C as standard. The probelm with USB is that it requires proprietory drivers for each device.
I cannot stand the fact that USB Activesync is a windows only thing - and annoyingly my PDA (an IPAQ 1910) does not have a serial cable available to it.
I may try some IrDA based connection to install familiar. I know familiar is not fully ported, but I am only too happy to try fixing some of the bugs myself.
But thats what the spammers would like you to think... Thats "Opt Out". I would rather they never included me in the first place unless I gave them my express permission. I think the laws need to seriously regulate commercial mail, and ban "Opt-Out" mailings. If I didnt ask for it, I really do not want it. There are certain select companies from whom I would be happy to receive their newsletters,and opt-in for, but at the moment I have no idea who they will share the information with, so I subscribe to nothing with my main account, and only use my dummy alias for that stuff...
Okay how can I make this clear - Unless I have a big flashing website, with red borders saying "Please send me fraudulent cr*p" - I do not want spam.
Those who spam me anyway are now forcing their rubbish on to me. I do not take kindly to that kind of cajouling, and will therefore send bits over wires to destroy the spammers computers (DoS, targeted virii or some nasty trick) where possible(if I can get and verify a "real" IP address).
After all- its only bits over a wire....
I really beleive the big difference is commercial and personal. On a personal level, someone is only going to send email to people they know, or groups they are interested in. On a commercial level- its spam. I consider advertising and con-merchant quips a different type of communication from an email to a number of (ex)-colleagues. The big problem here is that old nutshell - the corporate person. When the US constitution gave personal rights to corporations, who also had more money and power through their commercial leverage, they screwed up the US law system irrepairably. This is the one reason copyright law, commercial email law and most rights vs freedoms problems arose. Rememebr a person can be prosecuted and jailed - it is not possible to do the same to a company - which may just shut up shop, and its employees go elsewhere and continue the same bad practices unhindered.
You could simply piggy back a stamp as as encrypted/encoded tag attached to a mail. Mail without valid stamps can be simply rejected by the mail server, and you and your friends/colleagues would send mails with the stamps. The stamp having been used for the email, and confirmed received by you is available for the originator to reclaim and send again. If you do not confirm it, it is now invalid, and the originator must get a new one. If for every new stamp, instead of paying money, you must just type in a numeric code printed in a gif image on the registration page - they are free, considering that each recipient will need a valid stamp - unless spammers have very sophisticated OCR programs(fuzzify the text to make that difficult) then they will have to hand type something for each and every mail they send. For people subscribed to mailing list, they would each send you a stamp which would be encoded together with the senders stamp into an attachment on the group mailing. The subscribers clients or servers would then reject mail without a stamp which was encoded with their stamp.
As for who would own it/run it, if the open source community build software which will use shared resources and one tracker page. So that a batch of stamps are handled by some machine on the net in a fashion not to dissimilar to the distributed model of bittorrent.
Of course a furthar refinement would be that if you have your own user stamp(or key) you would give that to the stamp issuing web page, which along with asking you to type numbers, would email you with the final key. Therefore requiring you to provide a valid email address which would also be encoded and verifyable against the stamp.
I like this notion- as long as it is done free - which it very much could be.. and like I say, by having users use distributed clients(with redundancy) then we dont end up with huge loads on single key-verification and registration servers.