To be honest, I'd be surprised if WiFi would help you very much - it'd have to be a VoIP network, which isn't an obvious use of WiFi (the range is too short - most people would simply shout!)
Actually, I want VOIP on my zaurus handheld.
Let me explain why: cordless phones (not cell phones, the kind that connect a base station to the wall phone jack) are easily intercepted with consumer equipment. Tin-foil hat aside, there have been several cases of weirdos tapping their neighbors' conversations just for kicks.
And in an apartment, it's pretty easy to have several neighbors innocently using the same cordless channel.
What I'd like is to have a VoIP-to-modem bridge. I'd talk and listen on my Zaurus, which would connect to my PC via WiFi. The bridge would turn the IP back into audio and connect to the modem via the sound card.
Second, I don't think this will have any effect on public access to law.
Court decisions and statute law are public domain, by long established precedent reaching back to the US Supreme Court's findings in Wheaton v. Peters, 33 U.S. (8 Pet.) 591, 668 (1834) and Banks v. Manchester, 128 U.S. 244, 9 S.Ct. 36 (1888). Banks relied upon a decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, Nash v. Lathrop, 142 Mass. 29, 6 N.E. 559 (1886), which held that "justice requires that all should have free access to" both court decisions and statute law.
Furthermore, the 1976 Copyright Act (at 17 U.S.C. 105) specifically denies copyright protection to federal statutes and regulation; the state basis of Banks implies that state and local laws are also not copyrightable, and this is upheld in Veeck v. Southern Building Code Congress International Inc., No. 99-40632.
Indeed, as the Veeck decision reminds, "Justice Harlan, writing for the Sixth Circuit [in Howell v. Miller, 91 F. 129, 137 (6th Cir. 1898)]: 'any person desiring to publish the statutes of a state may use any copy of such statutes to be found in any printed book . ..'" (emphasis mine).
The US Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal (warning: pdf) (denied a petition for a writ of certiorari) of the US 5th Circuit's en banc ruling in SOUTHERN BUILDING CODE V. VEECK, PETER that re-decided the 5th Circuit's previous panel decision that affirmed the District Courts's summary judgment in favor of defendant Southern Building Code Congress International Inc, reversing the District Court and remanding the case to it for dismissal of SBCCI's claims.
Or to be less concise:
A three-judge panel, with one judge dissenting, of the 5th Circuit initially found that Souther Building Code Congress International Inc. retained copyright to its codes even though those codes were incorporated by reference in the law of, among other places, two Texas towns, Anna and Savoy. The majority's decison laregly rested on findings of other Circuit Courts, and explcitly said that "We decline to create a circuit split by reaching the opposite conclusion today." The majority's opinion held that the Supreme Court's finding in Banks v. Manchester didn't apply to the controversy at hand.
Then one of the judges of the 5th Circuit asked that the all the judges in the 5th Circuit decide the case -- this is called the circuit sitting en banc -- and a majority of the 5th Circuits judges agreed to hear the case en banc.
The decision of the majority (9-6, with the Chief Judge dissenting) of the entire 5th Cirucit took a diferent view of Banks v. Manchester, and so reversed the Distruct's Court's summary judgment in favor of SBCCI's claim that Veeck had violated SBCCI"s copyright to the building codes at issue, by posting them on his web site.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Children's Show Host/Actor Bob "Captain Kangaroo" Keeshan was found dead in his Vermont home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
The big thing here is, you have to stop worrying about the student and users rights.
The big thing here is, you have to stop worrying about users' rights. Some users are terrorists, some are Communists, some are dissidents, some are Revanchists, some are Homosexuals, some are Jews.
These people are Enemies of State, and their activities must be tracked -- minutely tracked -- so that we can learn what other Anti-Social Counter-Revolutionaries these traitors to the Motherland are collaborating with.
Then we can remove all these Dissident Intellectual Cosmopolitan Terrorists to the Gulag, or KZ Dachau, or to Guantanamo -- or Manzanar -- because it has happened here.
I'm sure there were some honorable men working at I.G. Farben who never dreamed that Zyklon-B would be used as anything other than an insecticide.
And the grandparent poster I'm sure never built his network tools to suppress political dissent or to accumulate evidence of users' sexual proclivities. Bit I'll bet these uses have occurred to Admiral Poindexter.
Any other cynics out there thinking some Haliburton exec read some popular science mag and talk Cheney/Bush to annex the Moon for them quick?
In other news, President Bush declared the Moon-men "part of the axis of evil" and has announced the start of "Operation Loony Freedom", to liberate Earth's satelite from "Moon-men tear-or-wrists with nooky-leer Weapons of Mass Moon Destruction (WMMDs)".
Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld was quoted as saying that, for reasons of national security, all energy concessions on the Moon have already been assigned to Halliburton in no-bid contracts.
Under the auspices of the "Stopping Lunarian Aggression Patriot Act", Reichsminister Ashcroft has announced the suspension of habeas corpus "for the duration". All non-Christians are required to report for "special licensing".
...Key provisions of the Patriot Act are set to expire next year. (Applause.) The terrorist threat will not expire on that schedule. (Applause.)....
The AC, of course, is quoting President Bush's State of the Union Speech given last night.
The applause for "Key provisions of the Patriot Act are set to expire next year" was predominantly by the Democrats, and was apparently unexpected by the Republicans.
To repudiate the Democrats, the Republicans rose to their feet and even more loudly applauded "The terrorist threat will not expire on that schedule."
Yes, that's right. The Republican majority clapped loudly and enthusiastically for the proposition that the terrorist threat won't end.
But besides being black humor at its best, it just makes sense: the continuing "War on Terrorism" gives the Republicans an excuse to grab more power, further limit our liberties, and direct more no-bid contracts to Halliburton. Our fear of terrorism is their ticket to the good life.
So it was telling that later in the speech, President Bush characterized the "War on Terrorism" as "a task that does not end."
Like the "War on Drugs", Bush knows he'll never win the "War on Terrorism", and so he'll always have it around to justify more and more intrusive government. So long as there's a "War on Terrorism", Bush and his Republican cronies get to keep their cushy jobs, old men like Admiral Poindexter get to stare into your bedrooms, and young men from poor families get to join the army and die for Halliburton's oil.
Blocking integrated into the browser is great, but an independent blocking proxy is better.
Not only can MS IE "(l)users" use it too, but it means that you can write one set of rules that apply no matter what browser you're using -- including browsers built-in to software, and software that does http downloads.
I use Proxomitron, so that all* my http connections -- whether from Firebird, my main browser, or IE, a backup for sites that don't play well with Mozilla, or from within Winamp -- block the same way.
And since Proxomitron can accept connections outside of localhost, it even provides blocking for the browsing I do on my Zaurus handheld -- without any additional overhead on the slower, more memory limited handheld.
And Proxomitron allows the conversion of any arbitrary html to any other arbitrary html, using regular expressions. So if it doesn't already do what I want, I can (usually -- as we all know, regexp's aren't Turing machines) write a rule that will do it.
* All connections, that is, that read IE's proxy settings, which is most.
"Games have bigger viewership numbers than The Sopranos."
Let me correct this statement: games have a larger number of players than "The Sopranos" has viewers.
In case you're an ad-man, or have an MBA, let me clearly state: gamers are not viewers.
Anyone remember the whole premise of cable-tv channels? That you'd pay for the channel upfront, and so avoid commercials?
Now this is only true for the so-called "premium" channels, so called because to view them you must pay an additional premium over and above what you pay for the basic cable service. Indeed it seems like most cable channels not only feature ads, but sell their entire late night time to infomercials. (Of course, I may be wrong; I only watch cable on vacation, because I won't buy lots of channels with lots of ads.)
So beware this discovery of games by Madison Avenue: prepare to find the games you've paid for to interrupt your play for commercials, or to sacrifice playability to product placements.
I could, in principle. I've lost the script that used the google API to do this
Oh suuure, you lost it.
And it's just a coincidence that I found a word-for-reserved-word very similar script -- by searching Google. (It's on the site "Napkin Scribblings of Don Knuth, as submitted by janitors, waiters, and graduate students". )
Looks like you "forgot" to cite "your" work. This will go on your permanent record, young man.
Thank you for making me marginally on-topic; here's a quote from Thuggott's WinSuperSite, about the task-centered approach being touted for Longhorn. Again, this is mostly off-topic, but pause for a second and consider the almost inevitable consequences:
There is a special shell folder/collection/Library (whatever they decide to call it) in Longhorn that aggregates all of the photos on your system automatically, and instantly.
What a great idea: "Daddy, what happenned to this man's bottom? In the pictures, next to the girl showing her hoo-haa, Daddy!"
(Incidently, this mis-feature isn't even unique to Microsoft: I'm typing this on a Sharp Zaurus, which also dynamically searches for documents. It becomes clear what a bad idea this is when you mount a remote 32GB partition, and the OS blithely decides that needs to be searched too, every time you want to open a document.And don't even think about multiple files with the same name in different directories, when "task centric" means "forget distracting canonical names".)
The last and most confused kind of questions are those that seem completely fucking pointless. A case in point is today's Shoe Issue.
No, no, no. This "Ask Slashdot" isn't pointless.
You missed the point: Milo_Mindbender wants us -- all of us who read Slashdot -- to know that he gets to go to lots and lots of conferences. So many, in fact, that he needs to get special shoes to wear to all those conferences.
And Milo goes in style too: lots of plane flights, lots of frequent flyer miles, and -- oh dear me footsies! -- lots of trips through Mr. Metal Detector.
Milo wants us to know just how much fun he's having while we're sitting in the office grinding out more cookie-cutter java code. Milo wants us to know just how valuable he is, to be sent hither and yon to conferences on six continents. Milo Mindbender wants to bend your mind around his 1337 coolness!
Milo wants us to know, because otherwise it's just not as much fun for Milo if he can't brag about it a bit. And that's the point of this "ask Slashdot."
I'd love to see someone try to argue this point of view to a judge with a straight face...
<voice ='Darl McBride'>Let me be the first to recommend David Boies; it's amazing the things he can argue with a straight face. For instance, did you know the GPL is unconstitutional?
Oh, and that'll be $699.00 for the advice....</voice>
That spamgourmet is cool, are there any opensource solutions that will let you do the same thing with your own domain?
Just get a domain and host it somewhere that will forward all mail to @your-domain-tld to your pop account.
Then download it all, and filter on the client side.
This is cheaper and easier than running your own mailserver (I'm paying $12/year for hosting at hostica.com), and doesn't require a host that allows you to run your own mailserver, or a pc that's always on and always connected to the net.
For any commercial entity, or any mailing list, the address I give them is generally their-domain-name@my-domain.tld. If that address starts getting spam, SpamBayes will start associating that address with spam, and soon will be automatically filtering those messages. I can also use the address in maunally wrutten mail filters, to sort my mail.
Somehow, this power accumulation and surveilance (sic) reminds me of Senator Palpatine. I just hope I'm wrong.
Huh. It reminded me of Stalin and Beria and the NKVD, but you're right, better we should take our lessons from space opera than from history.
George Lucas's fertile imagination is so much more convincing than those ponderous, dusty history books. And you can't eat popcorn and jujubes while reading books, it gets the pages too sticky.
Methinks that would be marketing speak for an HTML mail with a web bug
That's my guess too. If so, had the extortionist had his mail client set up like mine, he wouldn't have had his IP "verified".
My client, actually, is the (rightfully) much maligned Microsoft Outlook, but I don't have a problem with web bugs, because my firewall only allows Outlook to connect to one address -- my domain's mail server -- and only to two ports at that address, ports 110 and 25.
This means no web bugs or any referenced (as opposed to inlined) images are ever displayed. In the few cases where I actually want to see referenced images, this is a minor inconvenience, but it's more than offset by knowing that no spammer -- or corporation -- ever gets verification of my email address.
For most mail, of course, it's not an issue. Important email rarely if ever contains referenced images; indeed I discourage anyone from sending me HTML-encoded email at all.
And if I want to view a url included in an email, I just click on it, and Firebird (which is allowed to connect to any address, so long as it's to port 80) displays the url. If I really want to see an email in its full glory (and I never do), I can always save it and then open it in Firebird.
Specifically, the (default) Proxomitron filter replaces window.open with a javascript that only allows opens if they were immediately preceded by a mouse-up (indicating that the user actually clicked on something), and disallows pop-ups immediately after a window load (another filter unilaterally edits out onUnload scripts).
So it's much like the heuristics other posters have noted are used by Konqueror or Safari.
It'll securely interupt your parent's networking once every eight hours to show them an ad, ironically for "parental controls".
Three times a day, your parents will know someone cares about them. What more could they ask for from their son?
Re:Screw weird, this is the *COOL* present thread!
on
Weird Presents Anyone?
·
· Score: 1
I find it funny that your mother in law is advocating piracy.
I wonder if his Mother-In-Law knows what kind of "movies" predominate on the net:
"It'll all work out, honey. I'm getting your hubby a big hard drive for Christmas. Once he can store a few of those "donkey, monkey, and lesbian" movies, everything will be all right again!"
Slashdot Mirror
It's like as soon as GWB came into office, the folks at NASA have really come into their own as space farers.
Yeah, it's all thanks to the great GW Bush! Maybe we'll even find WMDs on the Moon!
Why, even Slashdot submitters are learning to talk like our Smirker-In-Chief:
The lander's parachute even casted a shadow nearby this target....
Or as Dubya might say, "Is our children learning?"
There really aren't any spoilers in the clip.
I have a spoiler for you: you will die alone!
(With apologies to Triumph the Insult Comic Dog and Robert Smigel.)
To be honest, I'd be surprised if WiFi would help you very much - it'd have to be a VoIP network, which isn't an obvious use of WiFi (the range is too short - most people would simply shout!)
Actually, I want VOIP on my zaurus handheld.
Let me explain why: cordless phones (not cell phones, the kind that connect a base station to the wall phone jack) are easily intercepted with consumer equipment. Tin-foil hat aside, there have been several cases of weirdos tapping their neighbors' conversations just for kicks.
And in an apartment, it's pretty easy to have several neighbors innocently using the same cordless channel.
What I'd like is to have a VoIP-to-modem bridge. I'd talk and listen on my Zaurus, which would connect to my PC via WiFi. The bridge would turn the IP back into audio and connect to the modem via the sound card.
Second, I don't think this will have any effect on public access to law.
.'" (emphasis mine).
Court decisions and statute law are public domain, by long established precedent reaching back to the US Supreme Court's findings in Wheaton v.
Peters, 33 U.S. (8 Pet.) 591, 668 (1834) and Banks v. Manchester, 128 U.S. 244, 9 S.Ct. 36 (1888). Banks relied upon a decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, Nash v. Lathrop, 142 Mass. 29, 6 N.E. 559 (1886), which held that "justice requires that all should have free access to" both court decisions and statute law.
Furthermore, the 1976 Copyright Act (at 17 U.S.C. 105) specifically denies copyright protection to federal statutes and regulation; the state basis of Banks implies that state and local laws are also not copyrightable, and this is upheld in Veeck v. Southern Building Code Congress International Inc., No. 99-40632.
Indeed, as the Veeck decision reminds, "Justice Harlan, writing for the Sixth Circuit [in Howell v. Miller, 91 F. 129, 137 (6th Cir. 1898)]: 'any person desiring to publish the statutes of a state may use any copy of such statutes to be found in any printed book . .
Not anymore.
The US Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal (warning: pdf) (denied a petition for a writ of certiorari) of the US 5th Circuit's en banc ruling in SOUTHERN BUILDING CODE V. VEECK, PETER that re-decided the 5th Circuit's previous panel decision that affirmed the District Courts's summary judgment in favor of defendant Southern Building Code Congress International Inc, reversing the District Court and remanding the case to it for dismissal of SBCCI's claims.
Or to be less concise:
A three-judge panel, with one judge dissenting, of the 5th Circuit initially found that Souther Building Code Congress International Inc. retained copyright to its codes even though those codes were incorporated by reference in the law of, among other places, two Texas towns, Anna and Savoy. The majority's decison laregly rested on findings of other Circuit Courts, and explcitly said that "We decline to create a circuit split by reaching the opposite conclusion today." The majority's opinion held that the Supreme Court's finding in Banks v. Manchester didn't apply to the controversy at hand.
Then one of the judges of the 5th Circuit asked that the all the judges in the 5th Circuit decide the case -- this is called the circuit sitting en banc -- and a majority of the 5th Circuits judges agreed to hear the case en banc.
The decision of the majority (9-6, with the Chief Judge dissenting) of the entire 5th Cirucit took a diferent view of Banks v. Manchester, and so reversed the Distruct's Court's summary judgment in favor of SBCCI's claim that Veeck had violated SBCCI"s copyright to the building codes at issue, by posting them on his web site.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Children's Show Host/Actor Bob "Captain Kangaroo" Keeshan was found dead in his Vermont home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
The big thing here is, you have to stop worrying about the student and users rights.
The big thing here is, you have to stop worrying about users' rights. Some users are terrorists, some are Communists, some are dissidents, some are Revanchists, some are Homosexuals, some are Jews.
These people are Enemies of State, and their activities must be tracked -- minutely tracked -- so that we can learn what other Anti-Social Counter-Revolutionaries these traitors to the Motherland are collaborating with.
Then we can remove all these Dissident Intellectual Cosmopolitan Terrorists to the Gulag, or KZ Dachau, or to Guantanamo -- or Manzanar -- because it has happened here.
I'm sure there were some honorable men working at I.G. Farben who never dreamed that Zyklon-B would be used as anything other than an insecticide.
And the grandparent poster I'm sure never built his network tools to suppress political dissent or to accumulate evidence of users' sexual proclivities. Bit I'll bet these uses have occurred to Admiral Poindexter.
(Clumsy Soviet-era insults taken from here.)
Any other cynics out there thinking some Haliburton exec read some popular science mag and talk Cheney/Bush to annex the Moon for them quick?
In other news, President Bush declared the Moon-men "part of the axis of evil" and has announced the start of "Operation Loony Freedom", to liberate Earth's satelite from "Moon-men tear-or-wrists with nooky-leer Weapons of Mass Moon Destruction (WMMDs)".
Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld was quoted as saying that, for reasons of national security, all energy concessions on the Moon have already been assigned to Halliburton in no-bid contracts.
Under the auspices of the "Stopping Lunarian Aggression Patriot Act", Reichsminister Ashcroft has announced the suspension of habeas corpus "for the duration". All non-Christians are required to report for "special licensing".
In other words, you couldn't reliably pick out terrorists based on statistical analyses of passenger flight records.
Not surprising. I mean, how many terrorists list their occupation on a credit card application as "suicide bomber"?
But I bet you can pick out anti-war, anti-Bush, and anti-Republican travelers for harassment, uh, I mean, protective detention.
...Key provisions of the Patriot Act are set to expire next year. (Applause.) The terrorist threat will not expire on that schedule. (Applause.)....
The AC, of course, is quoting President Bush's State of the Union Speech given last night.
The applause for "Key provisions of the Patriot Act are set to expire next year" was predominantly by the Democrats, and was apparently unexpected by the Republicans.
To repudiate the Democrats, the Republicans rose to their feet and even more loudly applauded "The terrorist threat will not expire on that schedule."
Yes, that's right. The Republican majority clapped loudly and enthusiastically for the proposition that the terrorist threat won't end.
But besides being black humor at its best, it just makes sense: the continuing "War on Terrorism" gives the Republicans an excuse to grab more power, further limit our liberties, and direct more no-bid contracts to Halliburton. Our fear of terrorism is their ticket to the good life.
So it was telling that later in the speech, President Bush characterized the "War on Terrorism" as "a task that does not end."
Like the "War on Drugs", Bush knows he'll never win the "War on Terrorism", and so he'll always have it around to justify more and more intrusive government. So long as there's a "War on Terrorism", Bush and his Republican cronies get to keep their cushy jobs, old men like Admiral Poindexter get to stare into your bedrooms, and young men from poor families get to join the army and die for Halliburton's oil.
DISCLAIMER: MS IE (l)users need not apply!
Blocking integrated into the browser is great, but an independent blocking proxy is better.
Not only can MS IE "(l)users" use it too, but it means that you can write one set of rules that apply no matter what browser you're using -- including browsers built-in to software, and software that does http downloads.
I use Proxomitron, so that all* my http connections -- whether from Firebird, my main browser, or IE, a backup for sites that don't play well with Mozilla, or from within Winamp -- block the same way.
And since Proxomitron can accept connections outside of localhost, it even provides blocking for the browsing I do on my Zaurus handheld -- without any additional overhead on the slower, more memory limited handheld.
And Proxomitron allows the conversion of any arbitrary html to any other arbitrary html, using regular expressions. So if it doesn't already do what I want, I can (usually -- as we all know, regexp's aren't Turing machines) write a rule that will do it.
* All connections, that is, that read IE's proxy settings, which is most.
"Games have bigger viewership numbers than The Sopranos."
Let me correct this statement: games have a larger number of players than "The Sopranos" has viewers.
In case you're an ad-man, or have an MBA, let me clearly state: gamers are not viewers.
Anyone remember the whole premise of cable-tv channels? That you'd pay for the channel upfront, and so avoid commercials?
Now this is only true for the so-called "premium" channels, so called because to view them you must pay an additional premium over and above what you pay for the basic cable service. Indeed it seems like most cable channels not only feature ads, but sell their entire late night time to infomercials. (Of course, I may be wrong; I only watch cable on vacation, because I won't buy lots of channels with lots of ads.)
So beware this discovery of games by Madison Avenue: prepare to find the games you've paid for to interrupt your play for commercials, or to sacrifice playability to product placements.
I could, in principle. I've lost the script that used the google API to do this
Oh suuure, you lost it.
And it's just a coincidence that I found a word-for-reserved-word very similar script -- by searching Google. (It's on the site "Napkin Scribblings of Don Knuth, as submitted by janitors, waiters, and graduate students". )
Looks like you "forgot" to cite "your" work. This will go on your permanent record, young man.
Thank you for making me marginally on-topic; here's a quote from Thuggott's WinSuperSite, about the task-centered approach being touted for Longhorn. Again, this is mostly off-topic, but pause for a second and consider the almost inevitable consequences:What a great idea: "Daddy, what happenned to this man's bottom? In the pictures, next to the girl showing her hoo-haa, Daddy!"
(Incidently, this mis-feature isn't even unique to Microsoft: I'm typing this on a Sharp Zaurus, which also dynamically searches for documents. It becomes clear what a bad idea this is when you mount a remote 32GB partition, and the OS blithely decides that needs to be searched too, every time you want to open a document.And don't even think about multiple files with the same name in different directories, when "task centric" means "forget distracting canonical names".)
The last and most confused kind of questions are those that seem completely fucking pointless. A case in point is today's Shoe Issue.
No, no, no. This "Ask Slashdot" isn't pointless.
You missed the point: Milo_Mindbender wants us -- all of us who read Slashdot -- to know that he gets to go to lots and lots of conferences. So many, in fact, that he needs to get special shoes to wear to all those conferences.
And Milo goes in style too: lots of plane flights, lots of frequent flyer miles, and -- oh dear me footsies! -- lots of trips through Mr. Metal Detector.
Milo wants us to know just how much fun he's having while we're sitting in the office grinding out more cookie-cutter java code. Milo wants us to know just how valuable he is, to be sent hither and yon to conferences on six continents. Milo Mindbender wants to bend your mind around his 1337 coolness!
Milo wants us to know, because otherwise it's just not as much fun for Milo if he can't brag about it a bit. And that's the point of this "ask Slashdot."
I opened the doom3 mainpage and that mechanical robot page. Jesus, what a coincidence.
Excuse me, I browsed at -1, and saw no previous comment noting this similtude. So who gave the parent post a redundant, and why?
Seriously, log in AC and tell me what I missed that you saw.
I'd love to see someone try to argue this point of view to a judge with a straight face...
<voice ='Darl McBride'>Let me be the first to recommend David Boies; it's amazing the things he can argue with a straight face. For instance, did you know the GPL is unconstitutional?
Oh, and that'll be $699.00 for the advice....</voice>
There's nothing dishonest or misleading about "false color".
Try convincing the University of Michigan Admissions Office of that, the next time you claim your blond dreadlocks make you one of the oppressed.
Well, it didn't work for me, anyway.
That spamgourmet is cool, are there any opensource solutions that will let you do the same thing with your own domain?
Just get a domain and host it somewhere that will forward all mail to @your-domain-tld to your pop account.
Then download it all, and filter on the client side.
This is cheaper and easier than running your own mailserver (I'm paying $12/year for hosting at hostica.com), and doesn't require a host that allows you to run your own mailserver, or a pc that's always on and always connected to the net.
For any commercial entity, or any mailing list, the address I give them is generally their-domain-name@my-domain.tld. If that address starts getting spam, SpamBayes will start associating that address with spam, and soon will be automatically filtering those messages. I can also use the address in maunally wrutten mail filters, to sort my mail.
Somehow, this power accumulation and surveilance (sic) reminds me of Senator Palpatine. I just hope I'm wrong.
Huh. It reminded me of Stalin and Beria and the NKVD, but you're right, better we should take our lessons from space opera than from history.
George Lucas's fertile imagination is so much more convincing than those ponderous, dusty history books. And you can't eat popcorn and jujubes while reading books, it gets the pages too sticky.
Methinks that would be marketing speak for an HTML mail with a web bug
That's my guess too. If so, had the extortionist had his mail client set up like mine, he wouldn't have had his IP "verified".
My client, actually, is the (rightfully) much maligned Microsoft Outlook, but I don't have a problem with web bugs, because my firewall only allows Outlook to connect to one address -- my domain's mail server -- and only to two ports at that address, ports 110 and 25.
This means no web bugs or any referenced (as opposed to inlined) images are ever displayed. In the few cases where I actually want to see referenced images, this is a minor inconvenience, but it's more than offset by knowing that no spammer -- or corporation -- ever gets verification of my email address.
For most mail, of course, it's not an issue. Important email rarely if ever contains referenced images; indeed I discourage anyone from sending me HTML-encoded email at all.
And if I want to view a url included in an email, I just click on it, and Firebird (which is allowed to connect to any address, so long as it's to port 80) displays the url. If I really want to see an email in its full glory (and I never do), I can always save it and then open it in Firebird.
The Proxomitron uses the first kind
Specifically, the (default) Proxomitron filter replaces window.open with a javascript that only allows opens if they were immediately preceded by a mouse-up (indicating that the user actually clicked on something), and disallows pop-ups immediately after a window load (another filter unilaterally edits out onUnload scripts).
So it's much like the heuristics other posters have noted are used by Konqueror or Safari.
Get a Belkin.
It'll securely interupt your parent's networking once every eight hours to show them an ad, ironically for "parental controls".
Three times a day, your parents will know someone cares about them. What more could they ask for from their son?
I find it funny that your mother in law is advocating piracy.
I wonder if his Mother-In-Law knows what kind of "movies" predominate on the net:
"It'll all work out, honey. I'm getting your hubby a big hard drive for Christmas. Once he can store a few of those "donkey, monkey, and lesbian" movies, everything will be all right again!"
Personally, I got toothpaste, tic-tacs, deodorant, and a McDonalds coupon book in the same package.
Toothpaste, breath-freshening mints, deoderant, and cheap out-of-the house food.
No pattern there.
Hmm. Unless.... Is your family trying to tell you you're spending too much time playing Everquest, and too little time playing "shower"?