I recommend trying to find a way to get your net access disconnected for part of the day at work. helps me a lot. of course, it means admitting to someone that you surf the web instead of working - they might know that anyway but you can't usually tell them that.
i get far more 'in the zone' coding sprees now I have attempted to kill off all my interruptions... now if only I could block out my co-workers too...
I don't understand why these hyper-cheap hardware soloutions are only planned for the developing world. There are still huge price-limited markets in the developed world for hardware, which could potentially create still lower costs for the developing world.
£47 is still a lot of money in China, but in the US and Europe people routinely spend more than that on keyboards and mice. There are untold applications for $100 laptops here still.
Launch the $100 laptop here too, and then by 2010, you can be launching the $50 laptop too.
The key is always to ensure you have every level covered.
A post-it on your monitor may sound dumb, but if you want a truly random 18 character password to SSH to your home computer, writing 10 generated passwords on a post-it, sticking it on your monitor at work and using the 3rd from the bottom will keep your machine a lot safer than memorising 'h4ckmeple4se'.
Obviously, this is not a truely tinfoil hat approach but it's enough for most situations.
The key with evil TLAs is invisibilty, deniability, then security. If they ever see you, you've lost 1 line, so you better be very sure of the second line, because on that 3rd line you are playing a David vs Goliath game.
To keep yourself invisible is easy. Keep your nose clean, and don't do anything to attract attention.
If you must make yourself visible, make sure everything is deniable. Cover your tracks, and put out bait to cover you. For example, encode your sensitive data within borderline pornography pictures, then encrypt those pictures with a massive key. Then hide your server in a hollow tree on public land, powered by solar panels, with Wi-fi access protected by WEP, and lose the key. Of course, none of that will really help you when the TLA comes, because these days, they don't need real evidence.
As for physical security: Buy 5 second hand machines from 5 different locations, and only use one. Pick an absurd key size, double it, then double it again. Encrypt everything, hide the machine inside a metal cage, and never ever connect it to anything. Never store a bit of data you don't have to, and never store anything complete. Fill the disks with plausible fake data, or better still, real data of a less serious nature. Your passwords should be machine generated, one time, and never less than 32 chars. Write your own software, and use your own formats. They'll still get in, but at least you'll have made them work.
I'll write a follow up post after I find out who's banging on my door.
Not only that, but many places work on a large scale subscription model, so you deposit you CC details with BT or T-Mobile, and then log on at any one of dozens of places.
So the phisher has a an account to wireless network and internet access, and you're paying for it. The phisher then has lots of bandwidth and information to do various other illegal things, with your money and your liability carrying the can for them.
I don't see how using a terribly stripped down version of windows is going to foster their "microsoft habit". If anything, I think it's going to drive them away from MS into the arms of something else. (most probably pirated copies of windows).
I don't agree. It will take a long time for new XPSE users to discover that there are better operating systems out there, and by then, they will be used to Windows, and be looking for a Windows upgrade, not a free OS.
Even if they turn to 'pirated' upgrades, they're still on the habit, and MS will have another set of future customers.
We see this as a 'stripped down' OS. They don't see it that way. A bicycle may not be as good as a car, but if you're walking to work in the mornings, you won't reject it. And then your upgrade will be to a car - because if someone offers you a fighter jet for free, you won't want to risk something new.
Don't forget, most computer users only use email, the web and basic word processing
I know this is a joke, but it's a serious point. From reading slashdot it seems people don't understand why Microsoft have done this. Security, Piracy, etc, none of these things have anything to do with it.
It's all about getting new users into the Microsoft habit. They're like drug dealers, who offer the first hit free. In the west, the market is already sewn up, and your schools are educating your children that Microsoft is the only way. But out in India, Thailand, China, and so on, there are many millions of people who will get their first computer in the next 5 years. XPSE means these people will be getting their first hit free.
Microsoft don't want to sell Windows on shelves, they want to bundle Windows. Bundled Windows, taken for granted Windows, gives them Power. Power they can use to sell the things that really matter: big bucks corperate licenses, OEM deals, and so on.
With XPSE they will extend their awesome power over the 'long tail' of non-'power' users.
Americans will never tolerate the terrorism that Isreal has In addition to the above replies, a huge %age of the Isreali population has military training. Their weapons are typically much more dangerous - assault rifles in trained hands rather than pistols in untrained hands.
I couldn't agree more. However, if you need a break from your ranting, you could consider one positive (probably unintended) side-effect of the 'Evil Empire': Their development of a hugely successful, industry standard OS, based entirely on cheap commodity hardware, has given us powerful personal computers for as little as $350 dollars.
Can you imagine how different the world would be if they had gone the route of Apple and many other manufacturers, of locking their software to expensive, proprietry hardware? Maybe now, our only choice would be 'Microsoft PCs', at $5000 a pop with $1 charges every time you booted the thing. Microsoft have certainly expressed a desire to turn their software into 'services' instead. If it wasn't for business users, I have little doubt that MS Office would be a subscription based 'service' by now, costing $15-20 dollars per month to use.
I already replied, or I would give you an insightful for that.
You can chalk up more victims to Sept 11th - thousands killed in the WTC, tens of thousands killed in Afganistan and Iraq, and millions accross the world living in fear and oppression.
This sort of thing should be a wakeup call to the masses.
Despite my best attempts, my girlfriend still worries when I get a on train every morning for London. She doesn't worry I'll be run over by a black cab, or raise my blood pressure in a stressful job. Instead, she worries that terrorist will blow up my train, my office, or even 'the whole of London'. The Culture of Fear has her trapped.
I did know that, and I've used it. It's good, but a bit slow at times.
Where the webmail interface really strikes (in addition to normal webamil advantages) is with things like conversation grouping and the search feature. I have to use Outlook 2k at work - and gmail is vastly superior, despite it's web-based nature.
I actually forwarded my domain catch-all address to gmail because of the amount of spam bouce messages I was recieving - something in the order of 1500 per day. My Mozilla Thunderbird behind a Brightmail-filtered ISP just wasn't coping with the load so I dropped it all on gmail. It did a fantasitic job, with a few tweaks set up, and now that my spam load has died down again a bit, I'm hooked on gmail despite my love for Thunderbird.
Likewise, here in the UK, it would destroy the second-hand laptop market.
look on ebay.co.uk for laptop auctions finishing in the next day for less the 265GBP, which is 500USD.
You will not find anything close to the specs of the Walmart $500, let alone the $550 machine. And that is for second-hand machines, from non-reputable dealers with little or no warrenty.
It has P3 750Mhz, same RAM, less HD space, smaller screen, probably non-legit OS and so on. Typical price for UK ebay - as you can see it has attracted a fair number of bids. And that's 2nd-hand!!
Come on ASDA. Get these in stock asap.
Re:My favorite [read: most annoying] bad science:
on
Bad Science Awards
·
· Score: 1
Remember: if a state is conducting it, it's not terrorism. It's simply tyranny (or a 'reign of terror').
Or, 'War on Terror', 'Patriotism' or 'Electioneering'.
Whichever way, you want to pray you don't experience it first hand.
I had exactly the same problem. The way I got around it was to redirect my catchall inbox to my gmail account and set a few filters there to catch the worst of it.
Then just weather the storm. It did appear to slacken off for me after a month.
You can't do it on your own bandwith, not if you get hit like me. I was getting over 1000 bounce messages per day. At one point I had over 40,000 emails in my spam box, despite gmail clearing them on a 30 day cycle.
The only thing you can do about your school is to explain the situation. It may help to google for extra info you can refer them to.
Here's the messy details:
Gmail picks up around 95% of the bounces as spam, because they include the original spam content. The bulk of the remainder can be caught with filters on sender name 'postmaster' or 'MAILER-DEAMON', and subject 'Considered UNSOLICITED BULK EMAIL from you', '**Message you sent blocked by our bulk email filter**', 'Delivery Status Notification', 'Undeliverable Mail', 'Returned Mail', and so on.
Make sure you search your spam folder once a month to weed out false positives. don't browse it, just search for your name, and common keywords people use when emailing you. Adding addresses to your contact list appears to whitelist them. clicking 'this is not spam' whitelists them in a less permanent fashion.
One thing I would like to see is a way of retroactively applying filters after you create them.
These days I get less than a dozen spams/bounces a day that make it through the filters.
That article's layout is so horrible. The entire text is in One small column to the left. Lynx renders it so much better!
Tip of the Day: Click 'Print version' or whatever it's called, and it will lay the article out in a normal fashion.
Works on a great many sites which stupid layouts in fact. Having the text taking up a large %age of the screen allows you to resize it as you fit, one of the wonders provided by most windowing systems.
(x) Check here to recieve a new tip with every post.
Even if you got like 50 spams a day at 40kb each (after you gave out your email adress to all those gay porn sites) it would take 450 days for that much spam to accumulate
Some of us get a lot more than that; without distributing our address in any fashion. At one stage I had a spammer spoofing mail from my domain. That was generating over 1000 emails per day, mostly spam bounce messages. Without gmail, I would have given up my catch-all approach a long time ago; gmail makes it possible. Certainly gmail is a great webmail service, and my email of choice, but anyone can improve!
The private companies haven't done anything to deserve the extra passengers. The government has legislated people off the roads, and onto the trains. As a commuter into London both before and after the congestion charge, I can point the finger at the largest rail incentive in the last 30 years. Behind that is the under-funding of roads and ever rising fuel and insurance prices. If you think people use trains because they have a choice or the service is getting better, then you haven't seen the where the bulk of the rail passengers travel. The hundreds of thousands of downtrodden commuters forced into trains to reach our major cities, mainly London, are the largest share of money and stats for the rail companies - and the rail companies certainly don't deserve the credit for that.
Privitisation does fail, regularly, but since it's a often a desperation move, the business in question was headed for failure already.
I don't disagree that BT were lucky and the rail network unlucky. BT were handed really useful monopoly powers at the perfect moment. The rail companies were handed badly abused cash cows, and no power to do anything about the crumbling network, which has just prompted them to play election-style political games to hang onto that cash flow as long as possible before they get their licenses taken away again.
The big question about privitisation is: Are we, the taxpayer, up or down on the deal? I say we are up on the deal with BT. I don't believe that a government controlled BT would have done as well. BR is a bit more questionable. The trains were a failure with no future, and the government had to force people to use them by breaking the alternatives. They're still a failure, they still have no future, and the goverment is still trying to force people to use them (road under-investment, congestion charge, fuel duty).
Slashdot Mirror
I recommend trying to find a way to get your net access disconnected for part of the day at work. helps me a lot. of course, it means admitting to someone that you surf the web instead of working - they might know that anyway but you can't usually tell them that.
i get far more 'in the zone' coding sprees now I have attempted to kill off all my interruptions... now if only I could block out my co-workers too...
hang-gliding + harness failue = blood, superficial resemblance to: ketchup, SUE SUE SUE!!!!!!!
You want to thank your lucky stars you're not French with that kind of marketing strategy.
I don't understand why these hyper-cheap hardware soloutions are only planned for the developing world. There are still huge price-limited markets in the developed world for hardware, which could potentially create still lower costs for the developing world.
£47 is still a lot of money in China, but in the US and Europe people routinely spend more than that on keyboards and mice. There are untold applications for $100 laptops here still.
Launch the $100 laptop here too, and then by 2010, you can be launching the $50 laptop too.
The key is always to ensure you have every level covered.
A post-it on your monitor may sound dumb, but if you want a truly random 18 character password to SSH to your home computer, writing 10 generated passwords on a post-it, sticking it on your monitor at work and using the 3rd from the bottom will keep your machine a lot safer than memorising 'h4ckmeple4se'.
Obviously, this is not a truely tinfoil hat approach but it's enough for most situations.
The key with evil TLAs is invisibilty, deniability, then security. If they ever see you, you've lost 1 line, so you better be very sure of the second line, because on that 3rd line you are playing a David vs Goliath game.
To keep yourself invisible is easy. Keep your nose clean, and don't do anything to attract attention.
If you must make yourself visible, make sure everything is deniable. Cover your tracks, and put out bait to cover you. For example, encode your sensitive data within borderline pornography pictures, then encrypt those pictures with a massive key. Then hide your server in a hollow tree on public land, powered by solar panels, with Wi-fi access protected by WEP, and lose the key. Of course, none of that will really help you when the TLA comes, because these days, they don't need real evidence.
As for physical security: Buy 5 second hand machines from 5 different locations, and only use one. Pick an absurd key size, double it, then double it again. Encrypt everything, hide the machine inside a metal cage, and never ever connect it to anything. Never store a bit of data you don't have to, and never store anything complete. Fill the disks with plausible fake data, or better still, real data of a less serious nature. Your passwords should be machine generated, one time, and never less than 32 chars. Write your own software, and use your own formats. They'll still get in, but at least you'll have made them work.
I'll write a follow up post after I find out who's banging on my door.
Not only that, but many places work on a large scale subscription model, so you deposit you CC details with BT or T-Mobile, and then log on at any one of dozens of places.
So the phisher has a an account to wireless network and internet access, and you're paying for it. The phisher then has lots of bandwidth and information to do various other illegal things, with your money and your liability carrying the can for them.
Tried for hacking your own printer catridge? C'mon! What judge would not feel fundamentaly insulted for having a case like that in his courtroom?
Tried for hacking your own DVD? C'mon! What judge would not feel fundamentaly insulted for having a case like that in his courtroom?
First DVDs, then Carts, next what? Just look around you for other artificially priced consumer products. It has to happen.
I don't see how using a terribly stripped down version of windows is going to foster their "microsoft habit". If anything, I think it's going to drive them away from MS into the arms of something else. (most probably pirated copies of windows).
I don't agree. It will take a long time for new XPSE users to discover that there are better operating systems out there, and by then, they will be used to Windows, and be looking for a Windows upgrade, not a free OS.
Even if they turn to 'pirated' upgrades, they're still on the habit, and MS will have another set of future customers.
We see this as a 'stripped down' OS. They don't see it that way. A bicycle may not be as good as a car, but if you're walking to work in the mornings, you won't reject it. And then your upgrade will be to a car - because if someone offers you a fighter jet for free, you won't want to risk something new.
Don't forget, most computer users only use email, the web and basic word processing
I know this is a joke, but it's a serious point. From reading slashdot it seems people don't understand why Microsoft have done this. Security, Piracy, etc, none of these things have anything to do with it.
It's all about getting new users into the Microsoft habit. They're like drug dealers, who offer the first hit free. In the west, the market is already sewn up, and your schools are educating your children that Microsoft is the only way. But out in India, Thailand, China, and so on, there are many millions of people who will get their first computer in the next 5 years. XPSE means these people will be getting their first hit free.
Microsoft don't want to sell Windows on shelves, they want to bundle Windows. Bundled Windows, taken for granted Windows, gives them Power. Power they can use to sell the things that really matter: big bucks corperate licenses, OEM deals, and so on.
With XPSE they will extend their awesome power over the 'long tail' of non-'power' users.
TFA just says 'Is the dot-com boom back? We've published several technology stories this week, here are links to them'.
I might get into journalism, has to be easier than working for a living.
Americans will never tolerate the terrorism that Isreal has
In addition to the above replies, a huge %age of the Isreali population has military training. Their weapons are typically much more dangerous - assault rifles in trained hands rather than pistols in untrained hands.
I couldn't agree more. However, if you need a break from your ranting, you could consider one positive (probably unintended) side-effect of the 'Evil Empire': Their development of a hugely successful, industry standard OS, based entirely on cheap commodity hardware, has given us powerful personal computers for as little as $350 dollars.
Can you imagine how different the world would be if they had gone the route of Apple and many other manufacturers, of locking their software to expensive, proprietry hardware? Maybe now, our only choice would be 'Microsoft PCs', at $5000 a pop with $1 charges every time you booted the thing. Microsoft have certainly expressed a desire to turn their software into 'services' instead. If it wasn't for business users, I have little doubt that MS Office would be a subscription based 'service' by now, costing $15-20 dollars per month to use.
I already replied, or I would give you an insightful for that.
You can chalk up more victims to Sept 11th - thousands killed in the WTC, tens of thousands killed in Afganistan and Iraq, and millions accross the world living in fear and oppression.
This sort of thing should be a wakeup call to the masses.
Despite my best attempts, my girlfriend still worries when I get a on train every morning for London. She doesn't worry I'll be run over by a black cab, or raise my blood pressure in a stressful job. Instead, she worries that terrorist will blow up my train, my office, or even 'the whole of London'. The Culture of Fear has her trapped.
I did know that, and I've used it. It's good, but a bit slow at times.
Where the webmail interface really strikes (in addition to normal webamil advantages) is with things like conversation grouping and the search feature. I have to use Outlook 2k at work - and gmail is vastly superior, despite it's web-based nature.
We should foil all their plots by going back to pre-80's technology levels.
Aye, pre-1880 levels. Let them try hijacking horse-pulled buggies and drive them into buildings!
Back then, terrorists were different. They won, and then they wrote the history books.
See: History of the United States (1776-1789)
I wonder what Thomas Jefferson would have thought of the Internet?
I actually forwarded my domain catch-all address to gmail because of the amount of spam bouce messages I was recieving - something in the order of 1500 per day. My Mozilla Thunderbird behind a Brightmail-filtered ISP just wasn't coping with the load so I dropped it all on gmail. It did a fantasitic job, with a few tweaks set up, and now that my spam load has died down again a bit, I'm hooked on gmail despite my love for Thunderbird.
Here's the tweaks I used
Likewise, here in the UK, it would destroy the second-hand laptop market.
look on ebay.co.uk for laptop auctions finishing in the next day for less the 265GBP, which is 500USD.
You will not find anything close to the specs of the Walmart $500, let alone the $550 machine. And that is for second-hand machines, from non-reputable dealers with little or no warrenty.
Check out this example:
9 hours to go, and it's at the same price as the Walmart 1.1Ghz WinXP/Wireless machine
It has P3 750Mhz, same RAM, less HD space, smaller screen, probably non-legit OS and so on. Typical price for UK ebay - as you can see it has attracted a fair number of bids. And that's 2nd-hand!!
Come on ASDA. Get these in stock asap.
Remember: if a state is conducting it, it's not terrorism. It's simply tyranny (or a 'reign of terror').
Or, 'War on Terror', 'Patriotism' or 'Electioneering'.
Whichever way, you want to pray you don't experience it first hand.
If it can be covered up then it's not a very serious bug. Why spend money fixing bugs that aren't a big deal?
See Also: Diebold
Maybe I should install Windows XP on one of my computers... Then maybe Longhorn would come out as I opened an IE window to get FireFox :-P.
/me refreshes slashdot expectantly
While you're at it, install Duke Nukem manhatten and google desktop search.
I had exactly the same problem. The way I got around it was to redirect my catchall inbox to my gmail account and set a few filters there to catch the worst of it.
Then just weather the storm. It did appear to slacken off for me after a month.
You can't do it on your own bandwith, not if you get hit like me. I was getting over 1000 bounce messages per day. At one point I had over 40,000 emails in my spam box, despite gmail clearing them on a 30 day cycle.
The only thing you can do about your school is to explain the situation. It may help to google for extra info you can refer them to.
Here's the messy details:
Gmail picks up around 95% of the bounces as spam, because they include the original spam content. The bulk of the remainder can be caught with filters on sender name 'postmaster' or 'MAILER-DEAMON', and subject 'Considered UNSOLICITED BULK EMAIL from you', '**Message you sent blocked by our bulk email filter**', 'Delivery Status Notification', 'Undeliverable Mail', 'Returned Mail', and so on.
Make sure you search your spam folder once a month to weed out false positives. don't browse it, just search for your name, and common keywords people use when emailing you. Adding addresses to your contact list appears to whitelist them. clicking 'this is not spam' whitelists them in a less permanent fashion.
One thing I would like to see is a way of retroactively applying filters after you create them.
These days I get less than a dozen spams/bounces a day that make it through the filters.
That article's layout is so horrible. The entire text is in One small column to the left. Lynx renders it so much better!
Tip of the Day: Click 'Print version' or whatever it's called, and it will lay the article out in a normal fashion.
Works on a great many sites which stupid layouts in fact. Having the text taking up a large %age of the screen allows you to resize it as you fit, one of the wonders provided by most windowing systems.
(x) Check here to recieve a new tip with every post.
Even if you got like 50 spams a day at 40kb each (after you gave out your email adress to all those gay porn sites) it would take 450 days for that much spam to accumulate
Some of us get a lot more than that; without distributing our address in any fashion. At one stage I had a spammer spoofing mail from my domain. That was generating over 1000 emails per day, mostly spam bounce messages. Without gmail, I would have given up my catch-all approach a long time ago; gmail makes it possible. Certainly gmail is a great webmail service, and my email of choice, but anyone can improve!
The private companies haven't done anything to deserve the extra passengers. The government has legislated people off the roads, and onto the trains. As a commuter into London both before and after the congestion charge, I can point the finger at the largest rail incentive in the last 30 years. Behind that is the under-funding of roads and ever rising fuel and insurance prices. If you think people use trains because they have a choice or the service is getting better, then you haven't seen the where the bulk of the rail passengers travel. The hundreds of thousands of downtrodden commuters forced into trains to reach our major cities, mainly London, are the largest share of money and stats for the rail companies - and the rail companies certainly don't deserve the credit for that.
Privitisation does fail, regularly, but since it's a often a desperation move, the business in question was headed for failure already.
I don't disagree that BT were lucky and the rail network unlucky. BT were handed really useful monopoly powers at the perfect moment. The rail companies were handed badly abused cash cows, and no power to do anything about the crumbling network, which has just prompted them to play election-style political games to hang onto that cash flow as long as possible before they get their licenses taken away again.
The big question about privitisation is: Are we, the taxpayer, up or down on the deal? I say we are up on the deal with BT. I don't believe that a government controlled BT would have done as well.
BR is a bit more questionable. The trains were a failure with no future, and the government had to force people to use them by breaking the alternatives. They're still a failure, they still have no future, and the goverment is still trying to force people to use them (road under-investment, congestion charge, fuel duty).