Considering the low resolution television images that came back, it would have been very easy to fake it.
I hope this was meant as a joke. It was not even possible to do digital music synthesis in real time back then. The moon landing would NOT have been easy to fake, and for quite a few reasons:
An estimated 6 million people watched that rocket lift off live from the Cape. The damn thing was visible with the naked eye for miles around. Something big sure got launched.
We're talking HISTORY here. This was during the height of the Cold War, and nobody was going to let the US take credit for something it didn't do. That mission was tracked by every country that could afford an optical or radio telescope. The spacecraft was tracked both optically and electronically by friend and foe from the time it left the launch pad until the capsule splashed down. SOMETHING went to the moon, landed, and returned.
Some of you might not be aware of this, but the earth is round. The moon can only be seen from one side of the earth at a time. NASA had tracking stations in several countries around the world that received the data and relayed it back to the States. You've got to either fake an incoming signal from the moon, or thousands of people would have to be in on it. Thousands of other current and future NASA employees (including me) would have had to be in on it as well, and NO secret can be kept by that many people for such a long time.
In 1969, we used punched cards and paper tape for computer input, and "mainframe" computers had memory measured in KB and not MB. You got typical memory cycle times of one or two microseconds. The IBM mainframe I worked with at the time had three memory partitions, a 100K partition, a 200K partition, and a 300K partition. This was the Triangle Universities Computation Center (TUCC) in Research Triangle Park, N.C., and was shared by three universities. This was typical cream of the crop high tech for the day. NASA didn't have much better. You couldn't fake a moon landing using hardware like that. It would be easier to do it than to fake it.
Finally, a retroreflector was left on the moon by the Apollo 11 crew, and it is being used to this day. It is possible, using a telescope and laser that most major university physics departments can afford, to get very precise measurements of the distance from the earth to the moon by bouncing a laser beam off of this reflector. Some of this work has been used to help verify some of Einstein's theories. You can find out about this by spending a bit of time with Google.
I can't, for the life of me, understand why this "controversy" is still going strong. I suspect that the type of person who believes that the landing was a fake is the type who learned his physics from Star Trek, "Put us into a synchronous orbit over the pole, Mr. Data..."
It's not easy if you're J. Random Enduser, but any qualified system administrator should be able to take the steps needed to win back control of his servers. You can choose to do this - with today's software - if you're willing to exert a modest amount of effort.
So, you reckon Blue Security didn't have a qualified system administrator?
The lesson to be learned from this is that the Internet is the wild west and there ain't no marshal to be found. You piss off the spammers, and freesoftwaremagazine.com will very quickly end up on virtual Boot Hill right beside Blue Security. Blue Security pissed them off by automating the "opt out" requests that we are entitled to under CAN-SPAM. Now that Blue Security is out of the way, perhaps SpamCop will be next. Why stop there? Why not take out the anti-virus vendors? Why not take out anyone who posts instructions for blocking spam?
But secondly, I'm fascinated by the logic of spammers. I can see why you'd want to get your spam in front of potential marks, and people too stupid to filter are likely to be just the ticket. But why all the effort to get through filters, when you're only going to be sending mail to people who aren't stupid enough to respond anyway?
I agree with you. This is the same logic that TV networks use to try to force us to watch commercials. For example, I'll never buy a "feminine hygene" product, no matter how many ads I see, because I'm not a woman. I'd never recommend one to a female friend (and if a female friend was obviously in need of one consistently, she probably wouldn't remain a friend anyhow...). Such ads are a waste of time for me, and if I'm forced to watch them the result will be a lasting dislike for the company and its products. I'd wipe my ass with with razor wire before I'd buy a roll of Charmin toilet paper because I detested "Mr. Whipple" and the "do not squeeze the Charmin" commercials of my youth.
The spammers wouldn't lose a single penny of revenue by complying with the Blue Security list. In fact, they'd save time and probably make more money. They would weed out the troublemakers. Those of us who installed BlueFrog are probably among the more militant spam haters. Even though my ISP's spam filter properly flags 99.9% of the spam I get, I still report every single message to SpamCop. I also report every message to my ISP to help them improve their spam filter. I suspect that other BlueFrog subscribers did the same (or worse). I'm a retired geek with plenty of time on my hands. I can afford to be ornery just for the hell of it. Without people like me on their mailing lists, more spam would get through to potential customers, and spammers wouldn't have to find new homes for their web sites as quickly. Blue Security would be good for the spammers' business (at the expense of the naive, but hasn't this always been the case?). Most of the spammers seem to've been too dumb to figure this out.
The more serious implications of this defeat don't seem to have sunk in (as far as I've seen so far). These people now hold most of the Internet hostage. What happens if one of them get pissed at "/.", for example? "First they came for the BlueFrog subscribers, and I did not speak out because I was not a BlueFrog subscriber..."
I'm a BlueFrog user, and I received 30 or 40 spam messages a day during the attack on Blue Security. I reported each of them to SpamCop, and SpamCop gave Tucows as the "abuse" address for a large percentage of the web sites listed in the spam messages. I've been seeing Tucows sites in my spam for months. If the SpamCop analysis is correct, then it would appear that Tucows is profiting from the spam.
Outlook 2003 now won't even load graphics unless you tell it to. It also blocks any executable attachments. Both are useful features.
I received a copy of NetSky P, and the virus was intended to be launched via an IFRAME SRC=... tag. I assume that any HTML browser that supports them will automatically load an IFRAME. I didn't get infected because I'm running Outlook 2003.
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Considering the low resolution television images that came back, it would have been very easy to fake it.
I hope this was meant as a joke. It was not even possible to do digital music synthesis in real time back then. The moon landing would NOT have been easy to fake, and for quite a few reasons:
- An estimated 6 million people watched that rocket lift off live from the Cape. The damn thing was visible with the naked eye for miles around. Something big sure got launched.
- We're talking HISTORY here. This was during the height of the Cold War, and nobody was going to let the US take credit for something it didn't do. That mission was tracked by every country that could afford an optical or radio telescope. The spacecraft was tracked both optically and electronically by friend and foe from the time it left the launch pad until the capsule splashed down. SOMETHING went to the moon, landed, and returned.
- Some of you might not be aware of this, but the earth is round. The moon can only be seen from one side of the earth at a time. NASA had tracking stations in several countries around the world that received the data and relayed it back to the States. You've got to either fake an incoming signal from the moon, or thousands of people would have to be in on it. Thousands of other current and future NASA employees (including me) would have had to be in on it as well, and NO secret can be kept by that many people for such a long time.
- In 1969, we used punched cards and paper tape for computer input, and "mainframe" computers had memory measured in KB and not MB. You got typical memory cycle times of one or two microseconds. The IBM mainframe I worked with at the time had three memory partitions, a 100K partition, a 200K partition, and a 300K partition. This was the Triangle Universities Computation Center (TUCC) in Research Triangle Park, N.C., and was shared by three universities. This was typical cream of the crop high tech for the day. NASA didn't have much better. You couldn't fake a moon landing using hardware like that. It would be easier to do it than to fake it.
- Finally, a retroreflector was left on the moon by the Apollo 11 crew, and it is being used to this day. It is possible, using a telescope and laser that most major university physics departments can afford, to get very precise measurements of the distance from the earth to the moon by bouncing a laser beam off of this reflector. Some of this work has been used to help verify some of Einstein's theories. You can find out about this by spending a bit of time with Google.
I can't, for the life of me, understand why this "controversy" is still going strong. I suspect that the type of person who believes that the landing was a fake is the type who learned his physics from Star Trek, "Put us into a synchronous orbit over the pole, Mr. Data..."So, you reckon Blue Security didn't have a qualified system administrator?
The lesson to be learned from this is that the Internet is the wild west and there ain't no marshal to be found. You piss off the spammers, and freesoftwaremagazine.com will very quickly end up on virtual Boot Hill right beside Blue Security. Blue Security pissed them off by automating the "opt out" requests that we are entitled to under CAN-SPAM. Now that Blue Security is out of the way, perhaps SpamCop will be next. Why stop there? Why not take out the anti-virus vendors? Why not take out anyone who posts instructions for blocking spam?
Wake up and smell the gunpowder.
I agree with you. This is the same logic that TV networks use to try to force us to watch commercials. For example, I'll never buy a "feminine hygene" product, no matter how many ads I see, because I'm not a woman. I'd never recommend one to a female friend (and if a female friend was obviously in need of one consistently, she probably wouldn't remain a friend anyhow...). Such ads are a waste of time for me, and if I'm forced to watch them the result will be a lasting dislike for the company and its products. I'd wipe my ass with with razor wire before I'd buy a roll of Charmin toilet paper because I detested "Mr. Whipple" and the "do not squeeze the Charmin" commercials of my youth.
The spammers wouldn't lose a single penny of revenue by complying with the Blue Security list. In fact, they'd save time and probably make more money. They would weed out the troublemakers. Those of us who installed BlueFrog are probably among the more militant spam haters. Even though my ISP's spam filter properly flags 99.9% of the spam I get, I still report every single message to SpamCop. I also report every message to my ISP to help them improve their spam filter. I suspect that other BlueFrog subscribers did the same (or worse). I'm a retired geek with plenty of time on my hands. I can afford to be ornery just for the hell of it. Without people like me on their mailing lists, more spam would get through to potential customers, and spammers wouldn't have to find new homes for their web sites as quickly. Blue Security would be good for the spammers' business (at the expense of the naive, but hasn't this always been the case?). Most of the spammers seem to've been too dumb to figure this out.
The more serious implications of this defeat don't seem to have sunk in (as far as I've seen so far). These people now hold most of the Internet hostage. What happens if one of them get pissed at "/.", for example? "First they came for the BlueFrog subscribers, and I did not speak out because I was not a BlueFrog subscriber..."
I'm a BlueFrog user, and I received 30 or 40 spam messages a day during the attack on Blue Security. I reported each of them to SpamCop, and SpamCop gave Tucows as the "abuse" address for a large percentage of the web sites listed in the spam messages. I've been seeing Tucows sites in my spam for months. If the SpamCop analysis is correct, then it would appear that Tucows is profiting from the spam.
Outlook 2003 now won't even load graphics unless you tell it to. It also blocks any executable attachments. Both are useful features. I received a copy of NetSky P, and the virus was intended to be launched via an IFRAME SRC=... tag. I assume that any HTML browser that supports them will automatically load an IFRAME. I didn't get infected because I'm running Outlook 2003.