Let's just give the people behind atomic bombs a little bit of credit for what they've done for world history...
The use of the weapon was the knockout blow that ended the first World War. There's know way of telling how many lives were saved as a result of the war ending then compared to going on for however longer it would have went without it.
The fact that both the US and the USSR had nuclear weapons during the cold war scared both sides into being unable to use them. Mutually Assured Destruction was a valid theory because USSR fell not by military attack but simple political failure.
In fact, the biggest threat the USA faces today is not from any organized state but from stateless terrorists who would love to get ahold of nuclear weapons, but don't have a government worth of resources to develop what history has proven is quite a hard thing to come accross and control.
I hate to put information about a topic so serious into the half-credible bin, but what sense are we supposed to make out of black and white map that doesn't have any sort of key? I can't tell if the white or the black is what indicates an area was affected... I think it's the white but I'm just guessing.
With either a Mac or Windows laptop, the iPod can be mounted as a drive and then shared... which is all that's really going on here anyway. That's just functionality of the OS, no extra software needed.
Of course, this is Slashdot where we like to do things the hard way...
Re:already being built, it's called the liberty .
on
An Online ID Registry
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Nope. Liberty is a free project for centralized user IDs... but has no component for the killer app this person is looking for, preventing the same person from using two or different accounts to get treated as a new signup two or more times...
Oh, sure... there's a lot of things that could be done to the domain name system to be faster and more secure and all we'd have to trade away is legacy compatiblity.:)
Then again, it cuts both ways. If somebody were to get an injunction awarding the domain back to them, it'd be back up right away as well.
Censorship concerns usually go at the ISP to pull down the content altogheter, as afterall it most likely would still be available by IP address anyway.
It's in a trademark case that the owner of the trademark might seek to overtake a domain from somebody they don't like. In that case, the publisher can simply repost their content under another domain, or direct people to the IP address and forget about DNS.
Just because a TTL is marked 48 hours doesn't mean all ISP DNS servers keep the cached information for 48 hours. Besides, those plainning a change could now lower their TTLs and actually have it mean something...
Verisign's Spin... Will rapid DNS updates impact SPAM? Verisign anticipates negligible increases in SPAM as a result of more frequent updates to the.com/.net zone files. Rapid updates to.com/.net are consistent with processes in place at other large domain registries today.
Translation: When a spamvertized site is unpluged by hosting company X, the spammers can quickly redirect their domain to point at their new server at hosting company Y...
In the cat and mouse game that is spamming, the mice have just gotten an ability to flee faster.
However, doesn't that mean they will have to adjust the TTL value of the domains all the way down to 5 minutes, which will raise the number of queries skyhigh compared to what they are at now? (Thanks to caching)
You can keep the TTL high if you don't intend on changing your nameservers any time soon. It's just if you want to make a change, the new information will start being spread immediately rather than having an extra day's delay in there for Verisign to do whatever was taking them so long.
It really just means that a short TTL now actually has meaning... that the new info will be appearing shortly, rather than have needless checking for the new info to be out while waiting for it to spread.
What this means on a business level is that it'll be much easier to move websites and mail servers from one provider to another because it'll take minutes rather than days to update the DNS pointers on the root servers. The only people who will be pointed to the old server after a few minutes will be those relying on old cached info.
So... the main barrier for switching web hosting providers has just fallen away.
Come on.... Let's hope that SNL releases this software as open source.
Wouldn't the work of a government-funded national lab be public domain if it ever were to be released?
As great as OSS is, the only truely free license with absoultely no restrictions is public domain, and that's what works of the government usually become.
Spam is in the eye of the beholder. Some people welcome discount offers from Amazon.com in their e-mail, others consider that to be Spam. Your right to have the messages you don't want blocked ends where it starts to interfere with somebody getting messages that they actually want.
Opt-in consent is the best system we have... if you really want to opt-out you should have the blocks set up on the systems you control because clearly an opt-out-by-law system is never going to function.
What'd be better is for the provider to allow users to set up a white list of requirements an SMS must have in order for it to be delivered. Therefore, random guessing Spam usually won't make it past the checks.
T-Mobile has such an interface on their website so that the only SMSs I get are the ones I asked for in advance.
T-Mobile has a rather simple web-based application via which a customer can establish rule-based settings for which SMS messages they would like to get or world like trapped out. Therefore, the configuration doesn't have to be done at the phone itself, it's done via a web browser at a full-featured PC.
Each of the major cell phone providers have an e-mail to SMS gateway relaying all messages to [10-digit-number]@[provider's domain] to the appropriate cell phone of it exists on their network.
Not only does that mean that there's only 10 billion possible combinations that can go in that 10-digit-number slot, since all those numbers come in the form [area code]-[exchange]-[4 digits] they can start focusing on the exchanges that have been allocated to wireless providers to get a very high success rate. If you know that 508-335-xxxx belongs to Cingular, you can take a pretty good shot at aiming 10,000 messages at all the combinations of that number on Cingular's SMS domain, and a majority of them will most likely hit devices.
Of course, number portablity now introduces the possiblity that a number is now no longer with the original provider who owned the exchange allocation, but that'd be only a dent in a pretty high success rate to begin with. Remember that spammers need only a.001ish% response rate to justify their operations... so any tool this strong is dangerous in the hands of "guess and check" operations.
I remember the old Prodigy service had the limited domain of addresses in the form of [four letters][two digits][letter from a-f]@prodigy.com and spammers had a field day of being able to discover such addresses from them being posted on the service and just deducing others.
I'd suggest sailing your ship a little closer to the coastline first... there aren't very many places that deliver pizza to ships in international waters 285 miles away from the nearest land mass.:)
I don't think the grandparent poster would actually want a refund...
The much more interesting case is where somebody informs the publisher that they do not accept the agreement, but are unable to return the software despite speaking to the manager of the store at which the software was aquired. Therefore, he is in possession of the software without having agreed to the license... now what?
Of course, copyright law would still apply and that'd shut down any copying of the software. Still, reverse enginering could be done, but then again the DMCA would stand in the way of publishing anything relating to CSS.
Hey, wait a second... just what is the point of an EULA anywhere?
Slashdot Mirror
That's exactly what we needed that the other map was missing. Numbers and units...
America fights dirty.
And if you haven't noticed, Al Queda has a tendancy to strike low blows too.
It'd be nice if everybody followed the Geneva Convention, but it's starting too look like that's too much to ask.
One of the fun parts about Slashdot is when you make a factual error, there's no shortage of people to fix your mistake...
Let's just give the people behind atomic bombs a little bit of credit for what they've done for world history...
The use of the weapon was the knockout blow that ended the first World War. There's know way of telling how many lives were saved as a result of the war ending then compared to going on for however longer it would have went without it.
The fact that both the US and the USSR had nuclear weapons during the cold war scared both sides into being unable to use them. Mutually Assured Destruction was a valid theory because USSR fell not by military attack but simple political failure.
In fact, the biggest threat the USA faces today is not from any organized state but from stateless terrorists who would love to get ahold of nuclear weapons, but don't have a government worth of resources to develop what history has proven is quite a hard thing to come accross and control.
I hate to put information about a topic so serious into the half-credible bin, but what sense are we supposed to make out of black and white map that doesn't have any sort of key? I can't tell if the white or the black is what indicates an area was affected... I think it's the white but I'm just guessing.
Communication helps sometimes.
But it brings up the question... who owns both an iPod and a Pocket PC?
With either a Mac or Windows laptop, the iPod can be mounted as a drive and then shared... which is all that's really going on here anyway. That's just functionality of the OS, no extra software needed.
Of course, this is Slashdot where we like to do things the hard way...
Nope. Liberty is a free project for centralized user IDs... but has no component for the killer app this person is looking for, preventing the same person from using two or different accounts to get treated as a new signup two or more times...
But that doesn't solve the problem because there's nothing preventing the same real person from having two or more MS Passports or AOL ScreenNames.
That's what this person is trying to do. Limit free trial offers to one to a customer. Something tells me that's just not possible.
Oh, sure... there's a lot of things that could be done to the domain name system to be faster and more secure and all we'd have to trade away is legacy compatiblity. :)
Then again, it cuts both ways. If somebody were to get an injunction awarding the domain back to them, it'd be back up right away as well.
Censorship concerns usually go at the ISP to pull down the content altogheter, as afterall it most likely would still be available by IP address anyway.
It's in a trademark case that the owner of the trademark might seek to overtake a domain from somebody they don't like. In that case, the publisher can simply repost their content under another domain, or direct people to the IP address and forget about DNS.
Just because a TTL is marked 48 hours doesn't mean all ISP DNS servers keep the cached information for 48 hours. Besides, those plainning a change could now lower their TTLs and actually have it mean something...
Verisign's Spin... .com/.net zone files. Rapid updates to .com/.net are consistent with processes in place at other large domain registries today.
Will rapid DNS updates impact SPAM?
Verisign anticipates negligible increases in SPAM as a result of more frequent updates to the
Translation: When a spamvertized site is unpluged by hosting company X, the spammers can quickly redirect their domain to point at their new server at hosting company Y...
In the cat and mouse game that is spamming, the mice have just gotten an ability to flee faster.
However, doesn't that mean they will have to adjust the TTL value of the domains all the way down to 5 minutes, which will raise the number of queries skyhigh compared to what they are at now? (Thanks to caching) You can keep the TTL high if you don't intend on changing your nameservers any time soon. It's just if you want to make a change, the new information will start being spread immediately rather than having an extra day's delay in there for Verisign to do whatever was taking them so long. It really just means that a short TTL now actually has meaning... that the new info will be appearing shortly, rather than have needless checking for the new info to be out while waiting for it to spread.
What this means on a business level is that it'll be much easier to move websites and mail servers from one provider to another because it'll take minutes rather than days to update the DNS pointers on the root servers. The only people who will be pointed to the old server after a few minutes will be those relying on old cached info.
So... the main barrier for switching web hosting providers has just fallen away.
Let's just hope they don't stumble into Microsoft Access next....
Come on.... Let's hope that SNL releases this software as open source.
Wouldn't the work of a government-funded national lab be public domain if it ever were to be released?
As great as OSS is, the only truely free license with absoultely no restrictions is public domain, and that's what works of the government usually become.
Spam is in the eye of the beholder. Some people welcome discount offers from Amazon.com in their e-mail, others consider that to be Spam. Your right to have the messages you don't want blocked ends where it starts to interfere with somebody getting messages that they actually want.
Opt-in consent is the best system we have... if you really want to opt-out you should have the blocks set up on the systems you control because clearly an opt-out-by-law system is never going to function.
What'd be better is for the provider to allow users to set up a white list of requirements an SMS must have in order for it to be delivered. Therefore, random guessing Spam usually won't make it past the checks.
T-Mobile has such an interface on their website so that the only SMSs I get are the ones I asked for in advance.
T-Mobile has a rather simple web-based application via which a customer can establish rule-based settings for which SMS messages they would like to get or world like trapped out. Therefore, the configuration doesn't have to be done at the phone itself, it's done via a web browser at a full-featured PC.
Each of the major cell phone providers have an e-mail to SMS gateway relaying all messages to [10-digit-number]@[provider's domain] to the appropriate cell phone of it exists on their network.
.001ish% response rate to justify their operations... so any tool this strong is dangerous in the hands of "guess and check" operations.
Not only does that mean that there's only 10 billion possible combinations that can go in that 10-digit-number slot, since all those numbers come in the form [area code]-[exchange]-[4 digits] they can start focusing on the exchanges that have been allocated to wireless providers to get a very high success rate. If you know that 508-335-xxxx belongs to Cingular, you can take a pretty good shot at aiming 10,000 messages at all the combinations of that number on Cingular's SMS domain, and a majority of them will most likely hit devices.
Of course, number portablity now introduces the possiblity that a number is now no longer with the original provider who owned the exchange allocation, but that'd be only a dent in a pretty high success rate to begin with. Remember that spammers need only a
I remember the old Prodigy service had the limited domain of addresses in the form of [four letters][two digits][letter from a-f]@prodigy.com and spammers had a field day of being able to discover such addresses from them being posted on the service and just deducing others.
I'd suggest sailing your ship a little closer to the coastline first... there aren't very many places that deliver pizza to ships in international waters 285 miles away from the nearest land mass. :)
I'd say we'd need a map in order to figure out just what the report is trying to tell us...
I wrote that very early in this discussion thread. :)
I don't think the grandparent poster would actually want a refund...
The much more interesting case is where somebody informs the publisher that they do not accept the agreement, but are unable to return the software despite speaking to the manager of the store at which the software was aquired. Therefore, he is in possession of the software without having agreed to the license... now what?
Of course, copyright law would still apply and that'd shut down any copying of the software. Still, reverse enginering could be done, but then again the DMCA would stand in the way of publishing anything relating to CSS.
Hey, wait a second... just what is the point of an EULA anywhere?