Email only gets through if you have a valid address, you're sending from the corresponding valid address, and you decode the CAPTCHA. See the case studies toward the end of the article.
And it's not just CPU cycles needed to test your 7,893,600 permutations, each test requires an email. Is that worth it, from a spammer's perspective, to reach one recipient? Wouldn't he instead discard that address (or ignore the bounce) in favor of an unprotected one?
I think many people are misunderstanding something fundamental about the economy of fooling porn-hungry users into cracking CAPTCHA systems.
Currently they are cracking the systems of free email sites, no? So each CAPTCHA image they decode yields an entirely free email account, free to spam from for a while until its abuse is detected and it is shut down. That makes good sense... rig up a complicated system, keep on top of Yahoo's dodges and modifications, integrate it with a porn site, and at tne end of the day you've got a stack of email accounts, each one good for sending out a few dozen spams (or 50, or 100, whatever the limit is.)
With Kaplan's CAPTCHA system, each decode gets you one destination email address. Just one. And it can be suspended without too much hassle on the target's part -- it won't even interrupt incoming mail from his friends. This doesn't make good sense -- it throws the cost/benefit ratio out of whack.
That's the/. headline, not the article's. The author's numbers are a bit more realistic. In any case, nobody is predicting that all lost jobs will be lost overnight. It will be gradual, of course. A McDonalds employs thirty people, but you can replace three of the six cleaning staff with simple roving robots, four of the ten order takers/preparers with kiosks, and all of the sudden you've cut McDonalds labor force by 10% or 20%. McDonalds alone employs over a million people. 200,000 of them are replacable with technology that is not hard to imagine.
People don't like interacting with robots-- that's why automated call answering systems piss people off so much
It doesn't seem to matter how aggravated it makes consumers... companies use them anyway. That's a whole set of jobs that has essentially been eliminated. Call any large company and you will get an automated system. There are some exceptions, of course, but they are few and far between, and usually on the back end. That is, NBC's phone number for the general public is an automated system, but their phone number for industry people gets you a live switchboard operator.
The point is that robots are taking over service jobs anyway. As discussed, you can use robots to do your banking, buy gas, buy movie tickets, and now, order food. Hell, forget about answering calls; they use robots to *make* calls.
I agree. Furthermore, imposing some US-based legislation on the global internet is futile, anyway.
I seem to recall an idea that was bouncing around a while ago for a technical solution. Instead of SMTP servers rejecting connections from RBL-listed servers, hanging those connections by 5 seconds or so. The effect on the SMTP server would be negligible, but the cumulative effect on the spammer's box would be huge. Even if there was some kind of "Spammer Special" custom sendmail hack that closed connections after a 1 second timeout, the overall effect would be crippling.
What's wrong with this solution? Am I missing something? I realize that it would make it easier for RBL-listed hackers to DoS a protected box, but there has got to be a way to handle that case. At the very least it's a sizable hurdle for your average spammer to overcome.
I hate to be so simplistic as to say RTFA, but it seems pretty clear from the description that this is not a surveillance tool nor a data mining tool.
LifeLog can be used as a stand-alone system to serve as a powerful automated multimedia diary and scrapbook. ...
"Anywhere/anytime" capture of physical data might be provided by hardware worn by the LifeLog user. Visual, aural, and possibly even haptic sensors capture what the user sees, hears, and feels.
It hardly seems likely that the Pentagon's plan to spy on the population includes mounting cameras, microphones, tactile sensors, etc. on our bodies. Instead of a 1984-like intrusion, I think a better description of LifeLog might be as an intelligence augmentation device:
...recall an experience from a few seconds ago or from many years earlier in as much detail as is desired, including imagery, audio, or video replay of the event.
Imagine being able to recall the name of the little restaurant you went to three years ago -- and to have a ten second video of the place pop up on your HUD. You can argue about what it is that makes us human -- forgetting things, making our own memories, etc. -- but I think it's safe to say that LifeLog is not an inherant or direct threat to our privacy.
I particularly like the idea of collective/collaborative applications. How would, say, a group of five construction workers benefit from such high-level connectivity while on the job? How about five surgeons? Five poets? Five cops?
The article says they're "studying pricing plans." I wonder if they'll do a flat rate or what. I imagine they'd just put a DSL modem and a 802.11x box in each phone, and as we all know, once the cost of installing the base stations has been recovered, there's really almost no operating expense. They've got the DSLAMS in place around the city already and the could make support on the web only.
They're not likely to give it away, though. If they're smart they would tie it into their DSL service. They could provide one concurrent WiFi login per home DSL account. It could be your same login/password that you use for the crappy PPPoE service at home, and they could use the "captive firewall" as described above.
That might make me switch from Road Runner cable modem.
please, just for the heck of it, explain how in the hell windows xp is better at networking than linux, solaris, or even vms.
He's not allowed to be on a network. So what difference does it make how good XP is on a network?
Anyway, if you want to get things done, along the lines of office productivity/creativity, (for instance, write a book), and not have to worry about driver issues, whether your computer will come out of suspend or sleep, or which shell to use this week, choose WindowsXP. You've got a very good chance of having an effortless computing experience.
Since Windows98 SE (maybe vanilla 98, I'm not sure) MS has included the System File Checker. Want to replace a DLL? Run sfc.exe (put it in the "Run..." box, or find it in Explorer), specify the file you want to restore and the source (CD, cabs, another file, whatever) and presto. Of course, for most of them you'll have to reboot. But Mac OS 9.2.2 is the same way for extensions.
I've always considered anything with a keyboard, mouse, and a monitor to be a computer. What, you want to write something? Print it, email it, browse, record, edit, burn, whatever? Windows can do it, so can a Mac, so can *nix. They're all going to outpace each other in different ways. It's even possible to demonstrate why one is better than another for a specific application. Yippie.
It's fun to discuss this stuff, but the passion that is displayed for such subjects as which company charged $30 more for a subjectively less substantial upgrade amazes me. Shouldn't we be bitching about the true offensively bad implementations of technology?
- How about oversold cell networks that are often too crowded to make a call (and the telco staff that explain the problem as a "weak signal")?
- How about traffic lights (with pressure plates or other sensors) that are obviously misprogrammed? They could be cutting traffic and emissions, but instead they waste money. You *know* that 4 our of 5/.ers could fix one of those intersections up in a week.
- How about the auto raciing industry that is obsessed with squeezing.5hp more out of century-old internal combustion engine technology?
- How about that out of the hundreds of available digital camera models there is still not one simple enouh that we can recommend it to our parents?
- How about... biometrics?
Sure, it's nice to be able to add a new protocol and bind it to the NIC without restarting (or whatever), but honestly who gives a shit?
"Wow, you can afford to stream movies during a plane flight?"... "Movielink is all about ONLINE distribution of movies"
Movielink is not all about streaming. In fact, from what I can tell there is no provision for streaming. You pick the movie, cough up the $5, and an hour later (with broadband) it's on your computer. You have a month to start watching it, and after you press play you have up to 24 hours to finish watching it. This is a fine way to take movies on the plane.
No, the quality isn't great and the selection is limited, but you can't beat the convenience and we all know that the next version will look better and the library of titles will grow.
As to the implementation of DRM, of course they're going to give it a shot. To allow downloads (for a fee) of the full unencrypted movie ensures that they will cripple the revenue stream. The kind of people who will be early adopters of Movielink are the same kind of people who use KaZaA(lite). Let the studios find a happy medium between functionality and security.
So far I haven't seen a post that seems to truly understand the CDMA quality of service situation.
Here are some things as I understand them:
There is a huge difference between signal strength and capacity. Signal strength, measured in terms of the Pseudo-noise offset level of the spread spectrum signal is one part, and the Ec/Io (that's "Eee-See over Eye-Naught"), the difference between the signal strength and the noise floor, which is the available capacity. When your phone reports signal strength in bars, it's actually making an estimate using some kind of formula to simplify this pretty complicated technology. You can have a strong signal but not be able to make a call. You could be sitting under the tower but but there are already a few thousand other people using it.
Also, for those of you who have older phones who experience better service with "more powerful antennas," please know that it has little to do with the antenna. It has everything to do with SID vs. PRL. When cellphones really exploded here in the states (three years ago or so) they were still being built using something called SID. The definiton of the acronym escapes me, but essentially the phone would look around, pick the tower with strongest signal and the most available bandwidth and use it. So with my Startac 7760 on Verizon, if I was closer to a non-Verizon tower my phone would use it, and then Verizon would pay the other carrier a tiny fee for my use.
A couple of years ago (in Verizon's world, with the advent of the Startac 7868, I think) they got rid of SID and came up with PRL, a Preferred Roaming List. Phones were programmed with lists of preferred towers where Verizon didn't have to pay a fee. So if I was using my Verizon Startac7868W and I was sitting on top of a non-Verizon tower, but there was a tiny, weak signal from a Verizon tower 15 miles away, my phone would use the weaker signal to save Verizon a few tenths of a cent.
Slashdot Mirror
Email only gets through if you have a valid address, you're sending from the corresponding valid address, and you decode the CAPTCHA. See the case studies toward the end of the article.
And it's not just CPU cycles needed to test your 7,893,600 permutations, each test requires an email. Is that worth it, from a spammer's perspective, to reach one recipient? Wouldn't he instead discard that address (or ignore the bounce) in favor of an unprotected one?
I think many people are misunderstanding something fundamental about the economy of fooling porn-hungry users into cracking CAPTCHA systems.
Currently they are cracking the systems of free email sites, no? So each CAPTCHA image they decode yields an entirely free email account, free to spam from for a while until its abuse is detected and it is shut down. That makes good sense... rig up a complicated system, keep on top of Yahoo's dodges and modifications, integrate it with a porn site, and at tne end of the day you've got a stack of email accounts, each one good for sending out a few dozen spams (or 50, or 100, whatever the limit is.)
With Kaplan's CAPTCHA system, each decode gets you one destination email address. Just one. And it can be suspended without too much hassle on the target's part -- it won't even interrupt incoming mail from his friends. This doesn't make good sense -- it throws the cost/benefit ratio out of whack.
The point is that robots are taking over service jobs anyway. As discussed, you can use robots to do your banking, buy gas, buy movie tickets, and now, order food. Hell, forget about answering calls; they use robots to *make* calls.
I agree. Furthermore, imposing some US-based legislation on the global internet is futile, anyway.
I seem to recall an idea that was bouncing around a while ago for a technical solution. Instead of SMTP servers rejecting connections from RBL-listed servers, hanging those connections by 5 seconds or so. The effect on the SMTP server would be negligible, but the cumulative effect on the spammer's box would be huge. Even if there was some kind of "Spammer Special" custom sendmail hack that closed connections after a 1 second timeout, the overall effect would be crippling.
What's wrong with this solution? Am I missing something? I realize that it would make it easier for RBL-listed hackers to DoS a protected box, but there has got to be a way to handle that case. At the very least it's a sizable hurdle for your average spammer to overcome.
It hardly seems likely that the Pentagon's plan to spy on the population includes mounting cameras, microphones, tactile sensors, etc. on our bodies. Instead of a 1984-like intrusion, I think a better description of LifeLog might be as an intelligence augmentation device:
Imagine being able to recall the name of the little restaurant you went to three years ago -- and to have a ten second video of the place pop up on your HUD. You can argue about what it is that makes us human -- forgetting things, making our own memories, etc. -- but I think it's safe to say that LifeLog is not an inherant or direct threat to our privacy.
I particularly like the idea of collective/collaborative applications. How would, say, a group of five construction workers benefit from such high-level connectivity while on the job? How about five surgeons? Five poets? Five cops?
The article says they're "studying pricing plans." I wonder if they'll do a flat rate or what. I imagine they'd just put a DSL modem and a 802.11x box in each phone, and as we all know, once the cost of installing the base stations has been recovered, there's really almost no operating expense. They've got the DSLAMS in place around the city already and the could make support on the web only.
They're not likely to give it away, though. If they're smart they would tie it into their DSL service. They could provide one concurrent WiFi login per home DSL account. It could be your same login/password that you use for the crappy PPPoE service at home, and they could use the "captive firewall" as described above.
That might make me switch from Road Runner cable modem.
please, just for the heck of it, explain how in the hell windows xp is better at networking than linux, solaris, or even vms.
He's not allowed to be on a network. So what difference does it make how good XP is on a network?
Anyway, if you want to get things done, along the lines of office productivity/creativity, (for instance, write a book), and not have to worry about driver issues, whether your computer will come out of suspend or sleep, or which shell to use this week, choose WindowsXP. You've got a very good chance of having an effortless computing experience.
I've always considered anything with a keyboard, mouse, and a monitor to be a computer. What, you want to write something? Print it, email it, browse, record, edit, burn, whatever? Windows can do it, so can a Mac, so can *nix. They're all going to outpace each other in different ways. It's even possible to demonstrate why one is better than another for a specific application. Yippie.
It's fun to discuss this stuff, but the passion that is displayed for such subjects as which company charged $30 more for a subjectively less substantial upgrade amazes me. Shouldn't we be bitching about the true offensively bad implementations of technology? /.ers could fix one of those intersections up in a week. .5hp more out of century-old internal combustion engine technology?
- How about oversold cell networks that are often too crowded to make a call (and the telco staff that explain the problem as a "weak signal")?
- How about traffic lights (with pressure plates or other sensors) that are obviously misprogrammed? They could be cutting traffic and emissions, but instead they waste money. You *know* that 4 our of 5
- How about the auto raciing industry that is obsessed with squeezing
- How about that out of the hundreds of available digital camera models there is still not one simple enouh that we can recommend it to our parents?
- How about... biometrics?
Sure, it's nice to be able to add a new protocol and bind it to the NIC without restarting (or whatever), but honestly who gives a shit?
Rob
From The Onion, May 2000
s .html
http://www.theonion.com/onion3618/kid_rock_starve
The studios couldn't care less about geeks with Linux and video/encryption tools. You're not even on their radar.
"Wow, you can afford to stream movies during a plane flight?" ... "Movielink is all about ONLINE distribution of movies"
Movielink is not all about streaming. In fact, from what I can tell there is no provision for streaming. You pick the movie, cough up the $5, and an hour later (with broadband) it's on your computer. You have a month to start watching it, and after you press play you have up to 24 hours to finish watching it. This is a fine way to take movies on the plane.
No, the quality isn't great and the selection is limited, but you can't beat the convenience and we all know that the next version will look better and the library of titles will grow.
As to the implementation of DRM, of course they're going to give it a shot. To allow downloads (for a fee) of the full unencrypted movie ensures that they will cripple the revenue stream. The kind of people who will be early adopters of Movielink are the same kind of people who use KaZaA(lite). Let the studios find a happy medium between functionality and security.
So far I haven't seen a post that seems to truly understand the CDMA quality of service situation.
Here are some things as I understand them:
There is a huge difference between signal strength and capacity. Signal strength, measured in terms of the Pseudo-noise offset level of the spread spectrum signal is one part, and the Ec/Io (that's "Eee-See over Eye-Naught"), the difference between the signal strength and the noise floor, which is the available capacity. When your phone reports signal strength in bars, it's actually making an estimate using some kind of formula to simplify this pretty complicated technology. You can have a strong signal but not be able to make a call. You could be sitting under the tower but but there are already a few thousand other people using it.
Also, for those of you who have older phones who experience better service with "more powerful antennas," please know that it has little to do with the antenna. It has everything to do with SID vs. PRL. When cellphones really exploded here in the states (three years ago or so) they were still being built using something called SID. The definiton of the acronym escapes me, but essentially the phone would look around, pick the tower with strongest signal and the most available bandwidth and use it. So with my Startac 7760 on Verizon, if I was closer to a non-Verizon tower my phone would use it, and then Verizon would pay the other carrier a tiny fee for my use.
A couple of years ago (in Verizon's world, with the advent of the Startac 7868, I think) they got rid of SID and came up with PRL, a Preferred Roaming List. Phones were programmed with lists of preferred towers where Verizon didn't have to pay a fee. So if I was using my Verizon Startac7868W and I was sitting on top of a non-Verizon tower, but there was a tiny, weak signal from a Verizon tower 15 miles away, my phone would use the weaker signal to save Verizon a few tenths of a cent.