Having just read it, I can assure you it wouldn't. Well, it might replace Indiana Jones with Mission Impossible, but it still reads more like a film script than anything else.
My immediate reaction was that it must be fake, but it does seem to be reasonably well corroborated. I guess the way the 'facts' were put forward certainly helps set the ambiance, but nonetheless it's a cool story.
If you're living somewhere with high enough population density to make decent public transport practical (London or New York spring to mind) then you're also living somewhere with a population density that is too high to have everyone driving in to the city every morning without causing gridlock (again, see London/New York).
Now that I think of it, the other extreme can be true too: on a long, empty motorway you're still constrained by the speed limit (and general safety/sanity, if you do choose to exceed it) whereas high-speed rail links can average 170+ mph. Even the (not nearly as fast) rail service we have up and down the UK can take more than an hour off what would be a 3.5 hour drive.
On the other hand, poor reliability, infrequent services and unpleasant conditions can easily ruin these advantages. It just depends on what you've got to work with and how it's run, really.
How could you possibly think that the grades a teacher assigns are more based on the students than the teacher?
I didn't say anything about the grades that are assigned by the teacher, I said the grades they achieve on the exam. Unless there's something I'm missing about the US system, that's purely based on how many questions they answer correctly - the teacher has no say.
The teacher designs the class, or at least the exams, and teaches the students the material.
Again, perhaps I'm lacking important knowledge of the American education system, but aren't major examinations standardised and provided by an outside organisation? The teacher has to teach to the given exam syllabus, something they have no control over. They do 'design the class', but only within those limits.
Sure a particular student may be more or less prepared to learn the material, may even have different aptitudes for the type of material. But overall the grades in the class are due to how well the teacher teaches and how well s/he judges their students.
Some students will start the class already knowing how to do everything that'll be on the end of year exam. Some students could be left in the library with a textbook and easily achieve 100% on the test. Some could be taught 1-to-1 by an excellent teacher and struggle to achieve 50%. Some students are much harder to control than others - get too many of them and the teacher will be forced to spend so much time trying to maintain order that the rest of the class will suffer. Some students have done so little work in previous years that they don't have the time to get to the level they're supposed to. And so on.
Just FIRE him, stop making EXCUSES and hurting your kids.
Was that aimed at me or was it the general 'you'? If it's the former, your implied assumptions are way off...
I don't debate that there are many good teachers out there but (as a relatively recent product of the UK education system) I think you present a somewhat rose-tinted view. There were some superb teachers that I came across throughout my education, and there were some terrible ones too.
Maybe as a pupil rather than a colleague the impact of the few 'dictators' sits more strongly in the memory - not to mention the fact that they are much more likely to treat you, a fellow teacher, as an equal. Nonetheless, they were there, as were some who were so lacking in understanding of their subject that they had no hope of teaching it. They didn't make up a vast contingent by any means, but there were enough of them to add to the general unpleasantness of schooling - the school system itself and the social problems of being a teenager effectively took care of the rest.
I'd imagine the American system is much the same, and it's simply that nobody mentions the legions of perfectly good teachers out there when the extremes are the first who spring to mind. Add the misery caused for many people (especially those in the Slashdot demographic) by the administrative and social aspects that the teachers have no control over and all you're going to hear about is how terrible it all is.
What's wrong with a teacher who admits they're not sure and looks it up later, or asks for the pupil to provide logical backing for their statement and considers whether it may be the pupil's version which is correct, or whatever?
A teacher's factual knowledge has no need to be perfect, but they should be prepared to accept some brief debate. Hell, if they're any good they should encourage it even when they know they are right - it gets the kids thinking, after all.
I appreciate that it must be hard to strike a fair balance of evidence when it comes to firing people, but just how would one make a specific record of incidents of misconduct when a teacher is simply crap at their job?
Not only is any direct measurement very subjective, an objective measurement (exam grades achieved by children) is skewed by so many factors it's not even funny and even brings in its own set of problems - it's more dependent on the children who happen to be in the class than the teacher to begin with, and since it is often used despite that it means that most teachers (even the good ones) are forced to teach to an exam syllabus rather than actually providing a rounded understanding of a subject.
Not just your normal, run of the mill bureaucrats either, by the sound of it. If even Jacqui Smith can be convinced that a project is in violation of civil liberties, after all the crap she's done in the past, then I'm fucking worried about anyone who tries to go ahead with it anyway.
There is a logical, non-evil argument for transfer capping.
Bandwidth is oversold, and there's not an inherent problem with that: for the couple of hours per day (at most) that a connection is actually saturated, there are many more when it is idle or nearly so. Obviously we want to be able to use a lot of bandwidth in short bursts (waiting for an iPlayer video to download, for example) but for most usage patterns it would be wasteful to have that amount of backbone bandwidth sitting 'reserved' with my name on it all day. By overselling, the costs for high-bandwidth connections are kept sensible and bandwidth capacity 'waste' is minimised.
Marketing an oversold connection as unlimited, however, is rather dishonest and becomes more so as the extent of the overselling increases. If a connection is marked as unlimited then it should not be oversold, it should be bandwidth limited such that there will be enough backbone capacity to support 100% usage 24/7.
As mentioned above, however, that true unlimited connection is overkill for many people. Provision of that level of service would have us all being lied to and sold 'unlimited' connections that are anything but unlimited (sound familiar?) or paying through the nose for a few Mbps.
The imposition of a cap on data transfer allows the oversold bandwidth to be allocated more sensibly: take a hypothetical 100Mbps connection, oversold by a ratio of 50:1. If my calculations are accurate, 100Mbps is equivalent to approximately 30.9TB (note the capital B) per month. This means that for the same infrastructure cost as giving one person a truly unlimited 100Mbps connection, you can give 50 people a connection that can deliver burst speeds of up to 100Mbps and allow each one of them about 600GB/month of data transfer. Assuming you want the cheaper, oversold connection rather than the truly unlimited one, I don't see why being upfront about that overselling and giving everyone a 'portion' of the total capacity is problematic. It's the same as having an unlimited 2Mbps connection, except it can deliver burst rates of 50 times that when you need them.
As I said in another post, the problems come because caps are made for reasons of profiteering not network management, and that leads to all kinds of consumer-unfriendly behaviour.
You're not thinking like a business owner - all they need to do is take the exact same package they sell now and stick a 10-20GB allowance on it. The majority of users would probably see no change, the heaviest 20% or so would get stung with excessive per-GB charges. Net result: increased revenue for the ISPs. There would only be a revenue drop if they allowed it, and I don't see that happening.
The worst of it is, I actually think bandwidth caps can be a reasonable measure to take (certainly preferable to traffic shaping and other crap like that); the problem is that they're usually set far too low for the cost, sometimes even combined with other traffic control measures, and (most importantly) are inflexible and set to screw you on 'excess use' charges at the drop of a hat.
In an ideal world (although one not quite so ideal that there's enough capacity to dish out unlimited connections): the cap should be set based on actual available capacity rather than with the intent of hitting users with extra charges, there would be no alteration or interference with any traffic or network ports, they should take a three month rolling average of data transfer to allow for short periods of unusually heavy use, and the contract should allow the user to specify what is done if their average usage does go over the limit.
I believe you're misinterpreting the request - the translation is done by humans (the volunteers mentioned in the summary); what is needed is software to manage and coordinate the different files (text and audio), different languages and different users doing the translation.
I have to agree with you - too much money and not enough capability.
I'd be surprised to hear that a PS2 actually costs $250 in Brazil. You can pick them up used here in the UK for the equivalent of $100 or so, and the GamingIndians article linked in the summary places them at $125 (presumably new); the Zeebo isn't undercutting them at all, it's half the price again!
Add to that the fact that Zeebo's DRM prevents illegal copying (thus cutting off a prime source of cheap games in those markets) and places restrictions on the use of legally purchased content (no lending, for example) and I can see no reason that anyone would buy one if it actually were cheaper, let alone pay the premium for one.
I'm sure there will be a rush of Slashdotters going to Blackwell use this thing on Monday, so you'll probably be told soon enough. I quite like the idea of having a copy of I, Robot printed on demand by an automated machine, come to think of it.
Either they're making a big loss on in-print books, or the £0.10/page charge for out-of-print ones is pretty steep. The summary says that they charge cover price for books that are currently available in normal, ready printed format on the shelves - I pointed out in a post below that that works out to about £0.02/page for books that are currently available on the shelves (admittedly calculated using one data point because it was within arm's reach). I understand charging a small premium for content that would otherwise be unavailable - even though the actual cost is no different, the market conditions are different and they react accordingly - but I think they've priced themselves out of the market for all but the cases of absolute necessity.
I thought the whole point of the machine is that everything is effectively a one off - the cost per page of printing any book in the database is the same.
The summary says the price of books that are currently in-print is the same as taking one off the shelf - less than £10 for a lot of titles (for example the closest book to hand on my desk, Dune, is 604 pages and has a cover price of £7.99). I couldn't see what paper size the machine uses, so even giving them the benefit of the doubt and calling that 400 pages on slightly larger paper that brings it in at about £0.02 per page - a fifth of what they're charging for out of print books.
I can see that by running off copies of otherwise unobtainable books they are providing a useful service, but an "out of print premium" £0.08/page is pretty steep if it's just something you'd quite like rather than something you really need - on a 400 page book which would cost around £8 if it were in-print, for example, that's a £32 premium! If I can go into Blackwell's and have this thing print any popular book for £0.02/page or so, I would expect to be able to buy an out of print book for maybe £0.04 or £0.05/page - I'd call that a fair premium for a useful product.
One thing I will say, though, is that they've just gained at least one sale from pure technical curiosity. Since the pricing for in-print books is the same as the cover price, I'll be going to Blackwell's for my next book purchase purely to see this thing in action and to see the quality of the finished product.
The judge is a member of copyright organizations. So? Isn't copyright the law? Knowing copyright law is probably why he's on the case.
I'm not 'pro-piracy', although to say I'm 'anti-big media' would probably be fair. That said, copyright is not a single ideal and there are plenty of opinions on it's implementation. The groups that the judge is a member of take a view that the law should be changed to make copyright stricter - surely that presents a conflict of interests when dealing with a case that tests the limits of copyright law in the opposite direction?
I do agree with some of what you say, although as I've said before I can't really bring myself to show too much concern for the music and film industries. I don't download infringing content myself, and I would agree that all but a very small minority who do are in it simply for free stuff, but that doesn't stop me remembering all the greedy, harmful, anti-competitive and sometimes plain illegal activities of large media companies.
Having the judge be a member of copyright protection organizations isn't bias. Copyright is the law, and he's a judge...how is this a story?
Copyright is not, however, a single universally agreed upon subject. Personally I think a standard 15 to 20 year term from creation of a work is reasonable. Some people want to see it abolished completely. Others want to see it extended in perpetuity. If the judge openly takes a view in any one of those directions I would question his ability to remain impartial when considering the opinions of those diametrically opposed to him.
It was one thing to defend Napster, but now it's just bleedingly obvious that Slashdot is visited by a ton of selfish leeches who want to spend all day and night running Bittorrent apps, never even dreaming of paying somebody for their work.
Why do you consider Napster any different to Bit Torrent?
So how does it compare to Avian Flu, or SARS, or whatever the health scare before that was?
I'm sure it's a good thing for them to be cautious, but honestly I have to admit to seeing the whole thing as a bit of a 'boy who cried wolf' scenario. I certainly don't know how I'd tell if this were something that really caused any more threat than the non-events that have preceded it.
I wonder if there isn't some way they could just take a snapshot of the domain as it is right now, and then keep that online.
Archive.org maybe? I can't imagine Geocities can have created more than a few TB of data, and I'd not be surprised to hear that the figure is lower than that. Considering that the Wayback Machine is apparently indexing 100TB/month of new data, having Yahoo send them a dump of Geocities would surely be a drop in the bucket.
I have, however, found a few messages recently that are getting past that somehow. Haven't got around to looking into how they're doing it, but of the few spam messages that actually make it to my inbox I've seen three that are displaying an image - the standard text, presented as a graphic to avoid filtering - despite the fact that the Google message stating 'Images are blocked, do you want to allow them?' is still displayed.
It's not a great problem, but it is somewhat irritating to think they could have confirmed that my address is active in the time that it took me to click 'Report spam'.
It's something I often wonder about, actually: what's their excuse for anything beyond utilitarian buildings and equipment?
I'm sure it's fun having huge chunks of gold around the place, but when their religious text contains categorical denunciation of wealth it strikes me as odd.
Even though I don't download infringing content, I still cheer every time TPB wins something.
The reason is simple: the music and movie industries have proven themselves time and again to be absolutely colossal asshats. They do everything they can to screw the consumer, the lie, they cheat, they push through substandard technology - all in aid of artificially protecting their profits. Sure, freely available downloads are bad news for them, but I'd be more likely to feel sorry if they'd ever demonstrated any consideration for their customers.
I'm not naive enough to expect better from large corporations, but (and it's a major one) if they are going to behave with total self-interest and little regard for the greater good (or often even the law) then they have no right to expect that I pay them any coutesy when my peers (no pun intended) are screwing them over.
Absolutely, which is why it would make an interesting comparison. I have no idea what the actual state of malware (or unpatched permission escalation vulnerabilities) is at the moment, but I'd think that's exactly the kind of information the smart/geeky user would want to know about for their own system.
As far as I'm aware conficker relies on an issue that's long since been patched. This Mac botnet relies on users volunteering their password to any old bit of software with dubious providence. I'm reasonably confident that my systems are, therefore, safe from these issues. </tempting fate>
Maybe, just maybe, we'd find out it's not often worth the effort, or indeed even possible, for the malware authors to stealth their applications so the smart users won't see them when there are plenty of other users out there to prey on instead.
As a poster mentioned above, it requires the user to manually install the trojan.
What I'd be interested to see is how OSX/Vista/XP/Linux stack up in terms of "security when user is not a moron" tests, actually. Take an average Slashdotter's machine: patched up to date, probably using Firefox, won't feel the need to install the latest smiley pack from evilhax0rz.com/CuteSmileysLOL, more likely to be running as a limited-permission user day to day, and so on. Are any of those machines likely to be compromised at all? If so by what vector? It'd pretty much have to be a worm or stealthy malware - both of which are (I would guess) going to raise flags with the savvy user on any modern OS by forcing a permission box to pop up.
What's your ISP? I'm not an especially heavy user, but I do get very pissed off about traffic interception/monitoring (and to a lesser extent traffic shaping) - the best I've found is in the £30-35/month region.
Slashdot Mirror
Having just read it, I can assure you it wouldn't. Well, it might replace Indiana Jones with Mission Impossible, but it still reads more like a film script than anything else.
My immediate reaction was that it must be fake, but it does seem to be reasonably well corroborated. I guess the way the 'facts' were put forward certainly helps set the ambiance, but nonetheless it's a cool story.
Public transport can be fast if it's done well.
If you're living somewhere with high enough population density to make decent public transport practical (London or New York spring to mind) then you're also living somewhere with a population density that is too high to have everyone driving in to the city every morning without causing gridlock (again, see London/New York).
Now that I think of it, the other extreme can be true too: on a long, empty motorway you're still constrained by the speed limit (and general safety/sanity, if you do choose to exceed it) whereas high-speed rail links can average 170+ mph. Even the (not nearly as fast) rail service we have up and down the UK can take more than an hour off what would be a 3.5 hour drive.
On the other hand, poor reliability, infrequent services and unpleasant conditions can easily ruin these advantages. It just depends on what you've got to work with and how it's run, really.
I didn't say anything about the grades that are assigned by the teacher, I said the grades they achieve on the exam. Unless there's something I'm missing about the US system, that's purely based on how many questions they answer correctly - the teacher has no say.
Again, perhaps I'm lacking important knowledge of the American education system, but aren't major examinations standardised and provided by an outside organisation? The teacher has to teach to the given exam syllabus, something they have no control over. They do 'design the class', but only within those limits.
Some students will start the class already knowing how to do everything that'll be on the end of year exam. Some students could be left in the library with a textbook and easily achieve 100% on the test. Some could be taught 1-to-1 by an excellent teacher and struggle to achieve 50%. Some students are much harder to control than others - get too many of them and the teacher will be forced to spend so much time trying to maintain order that the rest of the class will suffer. Some students have done so little work in previous years that they don't have the time to get to the level they're supposed to. And so on.
Was that aimed at me or was it the general 'you'? If it's the former, your implied assumptions are way off...
I don't debate that there are many good teachers out there but (as a relatively recent product of the UK education system) I think you present a somewhat rose-tinted view. There were some superb teachers that I came across throughout my education, and there were some terrible ones too.
Maybe as a pupil rather than a colleague the impact of the few 'dictators' sits more strongly in the memory - not to mention the fact that they are much more likely to treat you, a fellow teacher, as an equal. Nonetheless, they were there, as were some who were so lacking in understanding of their subject that they had no hope of teaching it. They didn't make up a vast contingent by any means, but there were enough of them to add to the general unpleasantness of schooling - the school system itself and the social problems of being a teenager effectively took care of the rest.
I'd imagine the American system is much the same, and it's simply that nobody mentions the legions of perfectly good teachers out there when the extremes are the first who spring to mind. Add the misery caused for many people (especially those in the Slashdot demographic) by the administrative and social aspects that the teachers have no control over and all you're going to hear about is how terrible it all is.
What's wrong with a teacher who admits they're not sure and looks it up later, or asks for the pupil to provide logical backing for their statement and considers whether it may be the pupil's version which is correct, or whatever?
A teacher's factual knowledge has no need to be perfect, but they should be prepared to accept some brief debate. Hell, if they're any good they should encourage it even when they know they are right - it gets the kids thinking, after all.
I appreciate that it must be hard to strike a fair balance of evidence when it comes to firing people, but just how would one make a specific record of incidents of misconduct when a teacher is simply crap at their job?
Not only is any direct measurement very subjective, an objective measurement (exam grades achieved by children) is skewed by so many factors it's not even funny and even brings in its own set of problems - it's more dependent on the children who happen to be in the class than the teacher to begin with, and since it is often used despite that it means that most teachers (even the good ones) are forced to teach to an exam syllabus rather than actually providing a rounded understanding of a subject.
Not just your normal, run of the mill bureaucrats either, by the sound of it. If even Jacqui Smith can be convinced that a project is in violation of civil liberties, after all the crap she's done in the past, then I'm fucking worried about anyone who tries to go ahead with it anyway.
There is a logical, non-evil argument for transfer capping.
Bandwidth is oversold, and there's not an inherent problem with that: for the couple of hours per day (at most) that a connection is actually saturated, there are many more when it is idle or nearly so. Obviously we want to be able to use a lot of bandwidth in short bursts (waiting for an iPlayer video to download, for example) but for most usage patterns it would be wasteful to have that amount of backbone bandwidth sitting 'reserved' with my name on it all day. By overselling, the costs for high-bandwidth connections are kept sensible and bandwidth capacity 'waste' is minimised.
Marketing an oversold connection as unlimited, however, is rather dishonest and becomes more so as the extent of the overselling increases. If a connection is marked as unlimited then it should not be oversold, it should be bandwidth limited such that there will be enough backbone capacity to support 100% usage 24/7.
As mentioned above, however, that true unlimited connection is overkill for many people. Provision of that level of service would have us all being lied to and sold 'unlimited' connections that are anything but unlimited (sound familiar?) or paying through the nose for a few Mbps.
The imposition of a cap on data transfer allows the oversold bandwidth to be allocated more sensibly: take a hypothetical 100Mbps connection, oversold by a ratio of 50:1. If my calculations are accurate, 100Mbps is equivalent to approximately 30.9TB (note the capital B) per month. This means that for the same infrastructure cost as giving one person a truly unlimited 100Mbps connection, you can give 50 people a connection that can deliver burst speeds of up to 100Mbps and allow each one of them about 600GB/month of data transfer. Assuming you want the cheaper, oversold connection rather than the truly unlimited one, I don't see why being upfront about that overselling and giving everyone a 'portion' of the total capacity is problematic. It's the same as having an unlimited 2Mbps connection, except it can deliver burst rates of 50 times that when you need them.
As I said in another post, the problems come because caps are made for reasons of profiteering not network management, and that leads to all kinds of consumer-unfriendly behaviour.
You're not thinking like a business owner - all they need to do is take the exact same package they sell now and stick a 10-20GB allowance on it. The majority of users would probably see no change, the heaviest 20% or so would get stung with excessive per-GB charges. Net result: increased revenue for the ISPs. There would only be a revenue drop if they allowed it, and I don't see that happening.
The worst of it is, I actually think bandwidth caps can be a reasonable measure to take (certainly preferable to traffic shaping and other crap like that); the problem is that they're usually set far too low for the cost, sometimes even combined with other traffic control measures, and (most importantly) are inflexible and set to screw you on 'excess use' charges at the drop of a hat.
In an ideal world (although one not quite so ideal that there's enough capacity to dish out unlimited connections): the cap should be set based on actual available capacity rather than with the intent of hitting users with extra charges, there would be no alteration or interference with any traffic or network ports, they should take a three month rolling average of data transfer to allow for short periods of unusually heavy use, and the contract should allow the user to specify what is done if their average usage does go over the limit.
I believe you're misinterpreting the request - the translation is done by humans (the volunteers mentioned in the summary); what is needed is software to manage and coordinate the different files (text and audio), different languages and different users doing the translation.
I have to agree with you - too much money and not enough capability.
I'd be surprised to hear that a PS2 actually costs $250 in Brazil. You can pick them up used here in the UK for the equivalent of $100 or so, and the GamingIndians article linked in the summary places them at $125 (presumably new); the Zeebo isn't undercutting them at all, it's half the price again!
Add to that the fact that Zeebo's DRM prevents illegal copying (thus cutting off a prime source of cheap games in those markets) and places restrictions on the use of legally purchased content (no lending, for example) and I can see no reason that anyone would buy one if it actually were cheaper, let alone pay the premium for one.
I'm sure there will be a rush of Slashdotters going to Blackwell use this thing on Monday, so you'll probably be told soon enough. I quite like the idea of having a copy of I, Robot printed on demand by an automated machine, come to think of it.
Either they're making a big loss on in-print books, or the £0.10/page charge for out-of-print ones is pretty steep. The summary says that they charge cover price for books that are currently available in normal, ready printed format on the shelves - I pointed out in a post below that that works out to about £0.02/page for books that are currently available on the shelves (admittedly calculated using one data point because it was within arm's reach). I understand charging a small premium for content that would otherwise be unavailable - even though the actual cost is no different, the market conditions are different and they react accordingly - but I think they've priced themselves out of the market for all but the cases of absolute necessity.
I thought the whole point of the machine is that everything is effectively a one off - the cost per page of printing any book in the database is the same.
The summary says the price of books that are currently in-print is the same as taking one off the shelf - less than £10 for a lot of titles (for example the closest book to hand on my desk, Dune, is 604 pages and has a cover price of £7.99). I couldn't see what paper size the machine uses, so even giving them the benefit of the doubt and calling that 400 pages on slightly larger paper that brings it in at about £0.02 per page - a fifth of what they're charging for out of print books.
I can see that by running off copies of otherwise unobtainable books they are providing a useful service, but an "out of print premium" £0.08/page is pretty steep if it's just something you'd quite like rather than something you really need - on a 400 page book which would cost around £8 if it were in-print, for example, that's a £32 premium! If I can go into Blackwell's and have this thing print any popular book for £0.02/page or so, I would expect to be able to buy an out of print book for maybe £0.04 or £0.05/page - I'd call that a fair premium for a useful product.
One thing I will say, though, is that they've just gained at least one sale from pure technical curiosity. Since the pricing for in-print books is the same as the cover price, I'll be going to Blackwell's for my next book purchase purely to see this thing in action and to see the quality of the finished product.
I'm not 'pro-piracy', although to say I'm 'anti-big media' would probably be fair. That said, copyright is not a single ideal and there are plenty of opinions on it's implementation. The groups that the judge is a member of take a view that the law should be changed to make copyright stricter - surely that presents a conflict of interests when dealing with a case that tests the limits of copyright law in the opposite direction?
I do agree with some of what you say, although as I've said before I can't really bring myself to show too much concern for the music and film industries. I don't download infringing content myself, and I would agree that all but a very small minority who do are in it simply for free stuff, but that doesn't stop me remembering all the greedy, harmful, anti-competitive and sometimes plain illegal activities of large media companies.
Copyright is not, however, a single universally agreed upon subject. Personally I think a standard 15 to 20 year term from creation of a work is reasonable. Some people want to see it abolished completely. Others want to see it extended in perpetuity. If the judge openly takes a view in any one of those directions I would question his ability to remain impartial when considering the opinions of those diametrically opposed to him.
Why do you consider Napster any different to Bit Torrent?
A little off-topic, but what did you mean by this? I try to keep up with American politics, but the subtlety there seems to have escaped me.
So how does it compare to Avian Flu, or SARS, or whatever the health scare before that was?
I'm sure it's a good thing for them to be cautious, but honestly I have to admit to seeing the whole thing as a bit of a 'boy who cried wolf' scenario. I certainly don't know how I'd tell if this were something that really caused any more threat than the non-events that have preceded it.
Archive.org maybe? I can't imagine Geocities can have created more than a few TB of data, and I'd not be surprised to hear that the figure is lower than that. Considering that the Wayback Machine is apparently indexing 100TB/month of new data, having Yahoo send them a dump of Geocities would surely be a drop in the bucket.
I have, however, found a few messages recently that are getting past that somehow. Haven't got around to looking into how they're doing it, but of the few spam messages that actually make it to my inbox I've seen three that are displaying an image - the standard text, presented as a graphic to avoid filtering - despite the fact that the Google message stating 'Images are blocked, do you want to allow them?' is still displayed.
It's not a great problem, but it is somewhat irritating to think they could have confirmed that my address is active in the time that it took me to click 'Report spam'.
It's something I often wonder about, actually: what's their excuse for anything beyond utilitarian buildings and equipment?
I'm sure it's fun having huge chunks of gold around the place, but when their religious text contains categorical denunciation of wealth it strikes me as odd.
Even though I don't download infringing content, I still cheer every time TPB wins something.
The reason is simple: the music and movie industries have proven themselves time and again to be absolutely colossal asshats. They do everything they can to screw the consumer, the lie, they cheat, they push through substandard technology - all in aid of artificially protecting their profits. Sure, freely available downloads are bad news for them, but I'd be more likely to feel sorry if they'd ever demonstrated any consideration for their customers.
I'm not naive enough to expect better from large corporations, but (and it's a major one) if they are going to behave with total self-interest and little regard for the greater good (or often even the law) then they have no right to expect that I pay them any coutesy when my peers (no pun intended) are screwing them over.
Absolutely, which is why it would make an interesting comparison. I have no idea what the actual state of malware (or unpatched permission escalation vulnerabilities) is at the moment, but I'd think that's exactly the kind of information the smart/geeky user would want to know about for their own system.
As far as I'm aware conficker relies on an issue that's long since been patched. This Mac botnet relies on users volunteering their password to any old bit of software with dubious providence. I'm reasonably confident that my systems are, therefore, safe from these issues. </tempting fate>
Maybe, just maybe, we'd find out it's not often worth the effort, or indeed even possible, for the malware authors to stealth their applications so the smart users won't see them when there are plenty of other users out there to prey on instead.
As a poster mentioned above, it requires the user to manually install the trojan.
What I'd be interested to see is how OSX/Vista/XP/Linux stack up in terms of "security when user is not a moron" tests, actually. Take an average Slashdotter's machine: patched up to date, probably using Firefox, won't feel the need to install the latest smiley pack from evilhax0rz.com/CuteSmileysLOL, more likely to be running as a limited-permission user day to day, and so on. Are any of those machines likely to be compromised at all? If so by what vector? It'd pretty much have to be a worm or stealthy malware - both of which are (I would guess) going to raise flags with the savvy user on any modern OS by forcing a permission box to pop up.
What's your ISP? I'm not an especially heavy user, but I do get very pissed off about traffic interception/monitoring (and to a lesser extent traffic shaping) - the best I've found is in the £30-35/month region.