It's cheap, yes, but $20 is about 20 boxes of Mac & Cheese. For some students, this could probably feed them for 3/4 of the month.
Realistically though, profit depends on volume. Some few people probably masterminded the idea, and are taking part-profits somehow. If they skimmed $5 from 20 students with relays - that's $100/month. Still not a lot, but cheap for no work.
Canadian actually... and I often wonder the same thing. Why is it that N. America has to suck hind teet when it comes to cellphones... and the fact that a standard flipphone w/o plan still costs around or over $500 (CAD)
The problem is:
An ISP can charge or terminate a customer for sucking overly large amounts of bandwidth through game servers or P2P. Most actual server packages do have a "gig limit" per month, and a surcharge after - though I myself have never reached mine (a fact I attribute in part to never having a successful article submission to slashdot).
You can charge you customers for using more than their "fair share." You can't charge the spammers, and it's just as unwanted by your customer as it is by you.
The problem is: catching spammers is tricky. They use tons of tricks - most notably nailing other people's servers to transmit spam - in order to make it appear as if spam comes from another source.
If we could catch some of the spammers now, I think more actions would already be in place against them (whether legal or vigilante).
A workaround is what I do with my hotmail account. All subscriptions go to hotmail, since I don't have to download emails before filtering, and I can whitelist by my address book. When I first sign up on a new site though, I disable the spam blocker for up to 30 minutes - usually enough to let confirmation emails come in.
A neat trick would be to build a function into the whitelister, where you can "allow all for XX minutes" and automatically resume whitelisting after. It still doesn't solve the bandwidth issue though....
A few questions:
How would you grade the effectiveness of current filter techniques, and blacklists etc.
What filters/blacklists do you use, and how could they evolve so that you would feel comfortable using them? When choosing blacklists or filters, how do you measure the gains of blocking x% of spam against not-blocking y% of legitimate emails.
How do you regard the threat of spam in opposition to some of the major viruses. That is, viruses like "sapphire" that generate huge disabling traffic netwide, or like "code red" that - to this day - is still making attempts to access "cmd.exe" on my own linux box.
And lastly, as we all want to know, what do you think can be done to spammers to strongly discourage them from continueing their immoral practices.
Except that after the initial novelty wears off, and most people using cellphones get tired of the hitting "2" thrice just to get a letter "C"... it will become somewhat less frequent, and used only in special occasion or when the blogger is extremely bored.
This one got me as odd... with the way the "Prius" electric+gas motors work, you actually tend to get much better milage in the city (50-75mpg) than on the highway (45mpg).
This is probably due the power required for highway speeds, but maybe also due to the charging effect start/stop traffic would have.
Guess this one would be a good vehicle for those who drive to work in bad city traffic - 75mpg would be quite nice under current gas prices.
For those that have always dreamed about making a good (and popular) game, it's not always about salary. I think that the fame and pursuant job offers for making a free game would more than make up for the lack of salary during development. If every 15-year-old was picking your title up off the shelf/net and saying "coool" - reading your name in the credits - don't you think that would be a fairly rewarding experience in itself?
As is very, very often the case with human nature, people lash out against the unknown. In the case of computers, hackers are very much a mystery to normal people. How many techs out there have seen a person's computer malfunctioning for various reasons (usually windows, or bad RAM, or the fact that they've install kazaa and a million other crapware loaded programs) - and they automatically assume it's been haxored and/or infected with a virus?
When it comes to computers, most people are hypocrondriacs (sp?). And what do people do when they fear something unknown, they lash out against it.
Many people on computers today are affected by spam, viruses, and other issues. Their solution, nail the bastards, put them somewhere - it doesn't matter where, so long as they can't cause me trouble - and jail is a seemingly optimal location for this.
On the flipside, for kiddies who build idiotic viruses that knock down routers worldwide and cause general chaos, I think that many of the users here on slashdot would be very happy to see them lynched. We have to seperate major disruptions and white-collar criminals from the kids who write "H4XOR3D BY 133TM4N" on a website.
Do you know how many things young kids do that are probably again the law, but the don't realize? Honestly, I can think of any number of kids up to gr12 that wouldn't even come close to thinking of criminal offence by changing some grades.
While ignorance is not the defence for a grown, knowledgable adult, for an 11-yr-old kid it should be. In cases where kids beat the crap out of somebody, or pull guns, whatever - it's clearly wrong and illegal - society has made that obvious.
Even *I*, as a computer administrator in schools, wouldn't expect an 11-yr-old to get slapped with a criminal offence for changing some grades on an unprotected computer. In fact, if that happened, I would take it to mean that I wasn't doing my own job properly (or the teacher) in protecting said information.
What you are stating is fine for a grown adult, but nailing a kid with a criminal charge for messing with grades on an open computer system is like charging kids with vandalism for writing pictures in ink on the corner of desks. The legal system has better uses for its time than prosecuting 11-yr-olds.
You have to realize that both companies, and others, occasionally make shite drives. I've seen crappy lines of Maxtors (some of the slimlined 20GB's were quite ill-fated), and some ugly Western Digitals.
With the cost of high-capacity drives now, and the built-in RAID on motherboards (for those with RAID1 anyhow), it may be worth it to by two drives just for safety's sake. However, if these new drives would just get a little bigger, I'd be very willing to buy them for the increased reliability that the warrantee indicates.
When both WD and Maxtor dump their OEM warrantees down to 1 year (and shortly after, I start having drives fail within a year) - you come to realize that both brands are following the bigger, faster trend - and both moving toward the additional trend of having bigger, faster crashes.
With current filesharing, when you look up a movie it finds.mpg,.mpeg.avi etc etc, and music.wav,.mp3, etc
It helps you filter your search. Now if somebody zips it up... there goes the filter, unless maybe you name it.mp3.zip or.zip.mp3? Even then you'll have to break out the cluebat for most amature leeches to figure out that the file is zipped, and others might suspect it is a virus.
Doesn't Kazza search files based on a common fingerprint though? How am I going to find 5 people to download "cowboyneil uncut.mpg" from when they all have a different fingerprint.
It's not in giving the file different fingerprints, it's in giving the traffic in general good encryption. Searching, downloads, etc... it should all be encrypted.
My only other concern with this... how much processor gets sucked down while encrypting/unencrypting 5-10 different files, at several segments per file, at 128bit+ encryption?
I'd be more worried when somebody's prof finds of a homemade copy of "Me and my dormroom buddies get it on.mpg" starring one of the students. That or just when the computer admin gets it... not sure who is scarier.
Yes, but unfortunately most of this collection would probably be targetted at American consumers anyways, not EU.
However, if an American was in a transaction with a European, it would apply.
How about Canada?
Anybody want me to bid on something cheap in Europe?
But in all cases... they should require a warrant before delving into your personal information, calling people, raiding you house, etc. That's what this is about.
Seizure of information is perfectly acceptable under law... with a warrant. Making it available to anybody with a fax machine and a police-like logo is not good...
Why would they use glass instead of something like "lexan." Lexan is somewhat of a clear plastic-type material, often used as "bulletproof glass." I've heard that local lumber yards also use them as shields, since a 2-3" piece can stop a speeding log from caving in one's head. Should be able to survive water pressure,etc as well?
Everyone knows what this is really about: Control, and the easy way.
Finding bad sites, tracking down some underage porn dealing scumbag, successfull prosecuting him/her in a local venue - that's all a lot of work. In the case of offshore sites, it's difficult if not impossible to nail the foreign owners - and rightfully so since they don't fall under US law (we all know where this ends up).
So, that leaves us with a few solutions:
a) We can tag and nail users who go to these sites. Can anyone who hasn't gotten disturbing mislabeled pictures from kazaa, or shipped to a rauncy site (maybe not one of the ones in question, but bad enough) when surfing warez.
b) We can block the sites. This will almost assuredly end up blocking legitimate sites, being used as a weapon to control internet traffic (oh, that anti-gov't site is unavailable because it shares IP's with an illegal porn site).
c) They can be smarter. I mean, disgusting sites aside, what about freakin' newsgroups? To my knowledge ISP's actually locally cache these things, and on my ISP I've seen some newgroups that blatantly indicate illegal porn (whether they actually contain it, I dunno, but likely they do).
Really, we should be nailing owners as many US-born sites as possible, and then try and find a way to deal with the rest. Simply blocking won't give the same deep-seated satisfaction as slamming some underage pornsite owner is a federal PMITA prison. My-kid-in-bathtub pictures not applying, I'm talking about sites with intent to promote this type of material.
The last question of course is... that do people who view this stuff do? Do they go out and target possible victims? Are they actively damaging young children themselves.
Or, are such sites sufficient to provide their fix of sick fantasy? Or do these sites string them on to sicker, more dangerous activities? I've heard these questions asked by psych-types for a long time, and as of yet I haven't seen anybody who really knows the answer.
Yeah. But there's not much else we could do about it, except maybe put it in geosynchronous orbit with Earth, and that would be an entirely new ballgame.
Major resellers in Canada often have the following listed in their auctions
Final price will add 7% tax to all residents of Canada, with an additional x% to residents of the province of yyy (where the company resides).
For things like garage sales and personal sales, double-dipping should be considered. The tax was already paid when the item was first bought, the government really isn't entitled to a second round for the same item. Of course, that doesn't stop them when it comes to used dealership cars, houses, etc - so they'll probably try anyways.
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It's cheap, yes, but $20 is about 20 boxes of Mac & Cheese. For some students, this could probably feed them for 3/4 of the month.
Realistically though, profit depends on volume. Some few people probably masterminded the idea, and are taking part-profits somehow. If they skimmed $5 from 20 students with relays - that's $100/month. Still not a lot, but cheap for no work.
Canadian actually... and I often wonder the same thing. Why is it that N. America has to suck hind teet when it comes to cellphones... and the fact that a standard flipphone w/o plan still costs around or over $500 (CAD)
The problem is:
An ISP can charge or terminate a customer for sucking overly large amounts of bandwidth through game servers or P2P. Most actual server packages do have a "gig limit" per month, and a surcharge after - though I myself have never reached mine (a fact I attribute in part to never having a successful article submission to slashdot).
You can charge you customers for using more than their "fair share." You can't charge the spammers, and it's just as unwanted by your customer as it is by you.
The problem is: catching spammers is tricky. They use tons of tricks - most notably nailing other people's servers to transmit spam - in order to make it appear as if spam comes from another source.
If we could catch some of the spammers now, I think more actions would already be in place against them (whether legal or vigilante).
A workaround is what I do with my hotmail account. All subscriptions go to hotmail, since I don't have to download emails before filtering, and I can whitelist by my address book. When I first sign up on a new site though, I disable the spam blocker for up to 30 minutes - usually enough to let confirmation emails come in.
A neat trick would be to build a function into the whitelister, where you can "allow all for XX minutes" and automatically resume whitelisting after. It still doesn't solve the bandwidth issue though....
A few questions:
How would you grade the effectiveness of current filter techniques, and blacklists etc.
What filters/blacklists do you use, and how could they evolve so that you would feel comfortable using them? When choosing blacklists or filters, how do you measure the gains of blocking x% of spam against not-blocking y% of legitimate emails.
How do you regard the threat of spam in opposition to some of the major viruses. That is, viruses like "sapphire" that generate huge disabling traffic netwide, or like "code red" that - to this day - is still making attempts to access "cmd.exe" on my own linux box.
And lastly, as we all want to know, what do you think can be done to spammers to strongly discourage them from continueing their immoral practices.
Except that after the initial novelty wears off, and most people using cellphones get tired of the hitting "2" thrice just to get a letter "C"... it will become somewhat less frequent, and used only in special occasion or when the blogger is extremely bored.
If it's a free game, why would anyone crack it though?
This one got me as odd... with the way the "Prius" electric+gas motors work, you actually tend to get much better milage in the city (50-75mpg) than on the highway (45mpg).
This is probably due the power required for highway speeds, but maybe also due to the charging effect start/stop traffic would have.
Guess this one would be a good vehicle for those who drive to work in bad city traffic - 75mpg would be quite nice under current gas prices.
The former assume access to the file already, so why not just cut+paste it into a different file format without DRM?
For those that have always dreamed about making a good (and popular) game, it's not always about salary. I think that the fame and pursuant job offers for making a free game would more than make up for the lack of salary during development. If every 15-year-old was picking your title up off the shelf/net and saying "coool" - reading your name in the credits - don't you think that would be a fairly rewarding experience in itself?
As is very, very often the case with human nature, people lash out against the unknown. In the case of computers, hackers are very much a mystery to normal people. How many techs out there have seen a person's computer malfunctioning for various reasons (usually windows, or bad RAM, or the fact that they've install kazaa and a million other crapware loaded programs) - and they automatically assume it's been haxored and/or infected with a virus?
When it comes to computers, most people are hypocrondriacs (sp?). And what do people do when they fear something unknown, they lash out against it.
Many people on computers today are affected by spam, viruses, and other issues. Their solution, nail the bastards, put them somewhere - it doesn't matter where, so long as they can't cause me trouble - and jail is a seemingly optimal location for this.
On the flipside, for kiddies who build idiotic viruses that knock down routers worldwide and cause general chaos, I think that many of the users here on slashdot would be very happy to see them lynched. We have to seperate major disruptions and white-collar criminals from the kids who write "H4XOR3D BY 133TM4N" on a website.
Do you know how many things young kids do that are probably again the law, but the don't realize? Honestly, I can think of any number of kids up to gr12 that wouldn't even come close to thinking of criminal offence by changing some grades.
While ignorance is not the defence for a grown, knowledgable adult, for an 11-yr-old kid it should be. In cases where kids beat the crap out of somebody, or pull guns, whatever - it's clearly wrong and illegal - society has made that obvious.
Even *I*, as a computer administrator in schools, wouldn't expect an 11-yr-old to get slapped with a criminal offence for changing some grades on an unprotected computer. In fact, if that happened, I would take it to mean that I wasn't doing my own job properly (or the teacher) in protecting said information.
What you are stating is fine for a grown adult, but nailing a kid with a criminal charge for messing with grades on an open computer system is like charging kids with vandalism for writing pictures in ink on the corner of desks. The legal system has better uses for its time than prosecuting 11-yr-olds.
You have to realize that both companies, and others, occasionally make shite drives. I've seen crappy lines of Maxtors (some of the slimlined 20GB's were quite ill-fated), and some ugly Western Digitals.
With the cost of high-capacity drives now, and the built-in RAID on motherboards (for those with RAID1 anyhow), it may be worth it to by two drives just for safety's sake. However, if these new drives would just get a little bigger, I'd be very willing to buy them for the increased reliability that the warrantee indicates.
When both WD and Maxtor dump their OEM warrantees down to 1 year (and shortly after, I start having drives fail within a year) - you come to realize that both brands are following the bigger, faster trend - and both moving toward the additional trend of having bigger, faster crashes.
Yes, but each person you connect to on the P2P network is a peer. So you'd have a lot of encrypting/decrypting going on
With current filesharing, when you look up a movie it finds .mpg, .mpeg .avi etc etc, and music .wav, .mp3, etc
.mp3.zip or .zip.mp3? Even then you'll have to break out the cluebat for most amature leeches to figure out that the file is zipped, and others might suspect it is a virus.
It helps you filter your search. Now if somebody zips it up... there goes the filter, unless maybe you name it
Doesn't Kazza search files based on a common fingerprint though? How am I going to find 5 people to download "cowboyneil uncut.mpg" from when they all have a different fingerprint.
It's not in giving the file different fingerprints, it's in giving the traffic in general good encryption. Searching, downloads, etc... it should all be encrypted.
My only other concern with this... how much processor gets sucked down while encrypting/unencrypting 5-10 different files, at several segments per file, at 128bit+ encryption?
I'd be more worried when somebody's prof finds of a homemade copy of "Me and my dormroom buddies get it on.mpg" starring one of the students. That or just when the computer admin gets it... not sure who is scarier.
Yes, but unfortunately most of this collection would probably be targetted at American consumers anyways, not EU.
However, if an American was in a transaction with a European, it would apply.
How about Canada?
Anybody want me to bid on something cheap in Europe?
But in all cases... they should require a warrant before delving into your personal information, calling people, raiding you house, etc. That's what this is about.
Seizure of information is perfectly acceptable under law... with a warrant. Making it available to anybody with a fax machine and a police-like logo is not good...
Why would they use glass instead of something like "lexan." Lexan is somewhat of a clear plastic-type material, often used as "bulletproof glass." I've heard that local lumber yards also use them as shields, since a 2-3" piece can stop a speeding log from caving in one's head. Should be able to survive water pressure,etc as well?
Everyone knows what this is really about: Control, and the easy way.
Finding bad sites, tracking down some underage porn dealing scumbag, successfull prosecuting him/her in a local venue - that's all a lot of work. In the case of offshore sites, it's difficult if not impossible to nail the foreign owners - and rightfully so since they don't fall under US law (we all know where this ends up).
So, that leaves us with a few solutions:
a) We can tag and nail users who go to these sites. Can anyone who hasn't gotten disturbing mislabeled pictures from kazaa, or shipped to a rauncy site (maybe not one of the ones in question, but bad enough) when surfing warez.
b) We can block the sites. This will almost assuredly end up blocking legitimate sites, being used as a weapon to control internet traffic (oh, that anti-gov't site is unavailable because it shares IP's with an illegal porn site).
c) They can be smarter. I mean, disgusting sites aside, what about freakin' newsgroups? To my knowledge ISP's actually locally cache these things, and on my ISP I've seen some newgroups that blatantly indicate illegal porn (whether they actually contain it, I dunno, but likely they do).
Really, we should be nailing owners as many US-born sites as possible, and then try and find a way to deal with the rest. Simply blocking won't give the same deep-seated satisfaction as slamming some underage pornsite owner is a federal PMITA prison. My-kid-in-bathtub pictures not applying, I'm talking about sites with intent to promote this type of material.
The last question of course is... that do people who view this stuff do? Do they go out and target possible victims? Are they actively damaging young children themselves.
Or, are such sites sufficient to provide their fix of sick fantasy? Or do these sites string them on to sicker, more dangerous activities? I've heard these questions asked by psych-types for a long time, and as of yet I haven't seen anybody who really knows the answer.
Yeah. But there's not much else we could do about it, except maybe put it in geosynchronous orbit with Earth, and that would be an entirely new ballgame.
Major resellers in Canada often have the following listed in their auctions
Final price will add 7% tax to all residents of Canada, with an additional x% to residents of the province of yyy (where the company resides).
For things like garage sales and personal sales, double-dipping should be considered. The tax was already paid when the item was first bought, the government really isn't entitled to a second round for the same item. Of course, that doesn't stop them when it comes to used dealership cars, houses, etc - so they'll probably try anyways.
In Canada, we pay tax on online purchases from major retailers.
When importing across the border, I've also often got nailed with not only tax, but duty and border charges.
Unless you can save some money on the item itself and save on tax, it would probably cost you more in the long run.
Of course, we're always happy to have you supporting our economy, so buy Canadian eh!