I have heard that in the US you have a 10% limit, eg if someone steals your card to buy $100 worth of goods you get $90 back from the retailer via the card issuer.
In the US, federal law limits a cardholder's total liability for fraudulent charges to $50. If someone steals your card info and goes on a shopping spree, by law the credit card company cannot ask you to pay any more than $50, no matter how high the total of fraudulent charges. In practice, liability for fraudulent charges is normally zero here too. Almost all of the major issuing banks will immediately credit you for the amount of a disputed charge, and then debit the merchant for the same amount. Unless the dispute turns out to be false (i.e. the retailer has a receipt with your actual signature on it) you never pay a cent.
Speaking as someone who's been on the merchant side of things in both online and brick-and-mortar situations, I can say that this policy is a double-edged sword. Proving cardholder fraud (where the customer buys something, then decides they don't want to pay for it) and winning a chargeback is dead easy when you're using a point of sale terminal. Proving cardholder fraud with internet based transactions, especially when you're selling a service instead of a tangible (shipped) product, is next to impossible and the merchant will almost always lose.
OTOH, when someone used my credit card to order $600 worth of Victoria's Secret merchandise online a few years ago, it was nice that all I had to do was fill out a form on my bank's website to dispute the charge and get my money back. I still have that card, with the same number, and it's never been abused since. I always wondered where they got it from, and why they only used it once.
..have you ever heard of refrigerators autonomously calling the service centre (calling home), and this feature being turned ON by default, without the owner even noticing?
As the previous responder mentioned, it's possible in commercial installations, but the owner should always be aware that the capability is there. In fact, it's a selling point. Certainly this isn't taking place in a residential environment, there's no need for panic if you're buying a new Kegerator.
In either case, "without the owner noticing" tends to imply an ignorant or inattentive owner. I imagine I'd notice PDQ if I was having a new fridge installed and they went to hook into a phone jack. As cheap as wireless commo may be these days, they aren't going to build something like that into your refrigerator for free, and they certainly aren't going to pick up the cellular bill to have your fridge call the factory without your knowledge.
Delving even into the topic of autonomous devices, I would love to know why the new phone I recently bought apparently autodialed 911 when I first hooked it up. They called me several seconds after I plugged the phone in, asking what my emergency was. When I said there was no emergency and told them that under no circumstances had anyone in my home called 911, they read my phone number and address back, insisting they'd just received a call. Weird.
If the spammers are paying to send the messages then they are at worst in breach of their contract with Verizon? If they aren't paying to send the messages then thats a whole different ball game and surely there must be some form of criminal activity going on.
While the article doesn't actually seem to involve cellphone spamming, it is fairly widespread. I don't know about Verizon, but many carriers allow you to receive SMS messages via email. The problem is that the email addresses are predictable, usually yourphonenumber@yourwirelesscarrier.com. Spammers take advantage of this by correlating carriers' exchanges with area codes and carpetbombing all possibilities. It's like a dictionary attack on phone numbers.
Incoming SMS is free for me, so I really don't care much unless the spam gets to be frequent. I've only received a couple, I get more wrong numbers and misdirected SMS's than I get spams.
Uhm, no. He's *redirecting* to the sites. Fuddruckers's were embedding one file from his site. There's a big difference.
Fuddrucker's wasn't embedding anything, the guy's blog entry makes it clear that this was a case of them linking to his Flash game; he's even posted a screenshot of it. The game isn't embedded into any page at fuddruckers.com. There was a link on fuddruckers.com that pointed to the Flash file, and if you clicked the link, it loaded the game from this guy's website.
Tacky, yes. "Stealing" bandwidth, no. "Hotlinking," even by its newspeak definition, definitely not. If you object to a commercial operation linking to a Flash game on somebody else's website, I can't possibly understand your rationale for hanging out here. Slashdot melts more servers and generates more hosting bandwidth overage bills in an hour than Fuddrucker's will do before they go bankrupt.
I'm not trying to defend Fuddrucker's, I'd never heard of them prior to tonight (I've heard of Fudpucker's but I'm not going to waste the time looking up who ripped off whom). However, there are much more tactful ways of dealing with this sort of transgression. The "victim" should have uploaded one of the slaughterhouse photos to his own webspace, and used a rewrite directive to send requests for the Flash game with a fuddruckers.com referer to the gory photo.
Cockerham got this right years ago when some idiot snarfed his Burning Man photo to use for eBay, and certainly while his case was high-profile, even he wasn't the first to figure it out. You (perhaps temporarily) alter the file that you believe is being abused, either to zero it out, or to humiliate the perceived abuser. Hosting it should remain your responsibility; don't complicate the problem by generating popups to load websites that have nothing to do with the situation.
So someone is punishing another person for using a hotlink on the web?
I imagine you, like me, recall the day when "hotlink" was just another term for "link." Back then, having as many "hotlinks" to you as possible was a great thing.
People have gradually redefined the word, though, and now it no longer carries positive connotations. The current definition of "hotlink" is something like "to embed content in your web site which references an absolute URI on another web site." This practice used to be called image stealing or bandwidth stealing, but I guess those weren't buzzword-worthy enough.
I guess even with that definition, what Fuddrucker's did doesn't really qualify. What they're really guilty of is just plain asshattery, and it's possible that the "victim" is just perpetrating more of the same. His LiveJournal post includes this edit:
EDIT: Apparently the slaughterhouse sites are getting hammered... they might take a while to load.
So, presumably, he's not hosting the slaughterhouse images himself, but he's redirecting Fuddrucker's traffic to innocent third parties... The very thing he's pissed off at Fuddrucker's for doing.
(BTW, the spam worked. It was for a particular penny stock that doubled in price over the last few days. Someone just doubled their money.)
That someone needs to get into hot water, as pump-and-dump schemes are illegal. If you happen to have a copy of the spam, forward it to the Securities and Exchange Commission; they can track down who sold off a big chunk of the hyped company around the date of the spam. Whether or not they'll punish him is another matter, but at least you did your part.
The address to report the spam is enforcement(@)sec.gov. Same goes for any "stock tip" spam you get.
The case against the "Kutztown 13"--a group of Pennsylvania high school students charged with felonies for tinkering with their school-issued laptop computers--seems to be ending mostly with a whimper.
In meetings with students over the last several days, the Berks County, Pa., juvenile probation office has quietly offered the students a deal in which all charges would be dropped in exchange for 15 hours of community service, a letter of apology, a class on personal responsibility, and a few months of probation.
"The probation department realizes this is small potatoes," said William Bispels, an attorney representing nearly half the accused students.
The 13 initially were charged with computer trespass and computer theft, both felonies, and could have faced a wide range of sanctions, including juvenile detention.
The Kutztown Area School District said it reported the students to police only after detentions, suspensions, and other punishments failed to deter them from breaking school rules governing computer usage. (See "Felony charges for computer-abusing kids.")
But the students, their families, and outraged supporters around the nation said that authorities overreacted, punishing the kids not for any horrible behavior but because they outsmarted the district's technology workers.
The trouble began last fall after the school district issued some 600 Apple iBook laptops to every student at the high school, about 50 miles northwest of Philadelphia.
Students easily breached security and began downloading forbidden internet programs, such as the popular iChat instant-messaging tool. Some students also turned off a remote monitoring function that let administrators see what students were viewing on their screens--or used the monitoring function to view administrators' own computer screens.
School district officials and prosecutors did not return phone messages left Aug. 25 and had not been heard from by press time.
In legal terms, the students have been offered an "informal adjustment"--the least severe form of punishment.
Bispels said a few students are thinking about refusing the deal because they don't feel they have broken any laws. "A lot of these parents would like to fight this on principle, but it's hard to put the kids at risk on principle," he said.
Mike Boland, who represents one student, said his client likely will accept the offer. "It doesn't require my client to acknowledge he is guilty of anything," he said.
"It's about as mild as you can go," agreed James Shrawder, whose 15-year-old nephew was among those offered the deal. "It's more of a face-saving measure."
One student who has had prior dealings with the juvenile probation office was not offered a deal. That case is expected to proceed.
Thank you very much for seeding this video. It's more than worth the time that it takes to watch. Several clips from this footage were co-opted by the national media, in particular the images of the Hyatt with its OKC-Murrah-esque looking window blowouts. It's painful but also enlightening to see the more in depth video.
I'll be leaving my copy of Burst up until my next reboot (several days to a week) with this file available, and I'm putting it on Gnutella as "Hurricane Katrina Damage Video - WGNO TV New Orleans Aerial Footage.wmv" if anyone wants to download it there. Please don't take down the seed.
AOL back in the mid 90's allowed you to cancel your account right online?
Yes, AOL used to have a form at Keyword: CANCEL where you could choose to close the account either immediately or at the end of the current billing period. The only confirmation needed was re-entering the password, similar to changing the billing method. The last I checked, Keyword: CANCEL went to a form that gave an 888 number for the Saves department.
You can still cancel online, though. Just send an incredibly vulgar, anti-AOL email to, say, "Operators":)
Oh it's a whole metric-fuckton worse than that. The problem the FCC, FBI (insert your favourite alphabet agency here) is that they make the assumption that the criminals that will be using VOIP will COMPLY with FCC.
And it gets worse yet. Essentially, all "anti-terrorism," "anti-drug," etc. laws are useless for the purpose for which they're supposedly enacted. Terrorists, drug dealers, and other criminals are, by their very nature, breaking the law. Making their tangential activities (like communicating, meeting, transferring funds...) illegal isn't going to stop them!
In short, attempts to legislate terrorism out of existance are doomed from the start and should be suspect. You can damned well bet that lawmakers are smart enough to know that these laws aren't going to do anything to stop the Bogeyman of the day. They're being passed as "feel good" measures at best, and as attempts to control the law-abiding population at worse.
Making it illegal to carry cigarette lighters onto airplanes doesn't stop a terrorist; a terrorist would find a way to bring an incendiary onboard anyway. Making it illegal to have an untappable VoIP connection doesn't stop a terrorist, either; a terrorist would just setup stunnel or pgpFone end-to-end and chat away.
Sigh. Someday, the United States Congress will be comprised of people who grew up understanding technology...
What is wrong with admitting you were speeding because you wanted to and face the music???
Nothing at all (and for the record I've never had a speeding ticket). If you're speeding for the sake of speeding, and you get caught, tough shit.
On the other hand, the OP said "don't speed and you won't get caught," as if it were actually that simple. My response was to provide several example cases in which speeding is perfectly reasonable - if not the safest possible reaction - yet the cameras would nab you anyway. Guilty until proven innocent, and good luck proving it.
My point isn't that speeding should be okay, it's that cameras (and other automatons) shouldn't be doing law enforcement.
Yeah, that advice really helps when I'm trying to pass an 18-wheeler whose driver is nodding off. Or when I'm in heavy traffic, and an ambulance comes up behind me and there's no clearance to pull to a different lane. Or when I'm minding my business on a one-lane highway, doing somewhere around the speed limit, and some drunk moron comes flying up behind me leaving me nowhere to go but forward in order to avoid being hit.
These and a hundred other mostly excusable situations will result in someone going over the speed limit, sometimes by a substantial amount. The problem with these cameras is that they don't capture context, and they don't have discretion. It becomes an issue of black or white, and "you were speeding," so you get a ticket regardless of the circumstances. That's inappropriate IMO.
Thanks to everyone who responded! I've been using heavens-above to forecast Iridium flares for some time now, so I'm aware of their ISS tracking. What I didn't know is how close satellites such as ISS had to be in order to pick up their transmissions.
I presume that since the shuttle is currently docked to the ISS, its passes overhead are concurrent with ISS. There is no pass listed over my area until 8 August, so I imagine that I should keep my scanner tuned to the local po-po trunk until then...;)
Thanks again to all who replied, in particular, juggle and grumling. Very informative, and I appreciate it greatly.
How is this any better than Bitzi and its Bitprints, which are already built into popular Gnutella servents like BearShare?
"Our client provides a peer-based judgement that a given object will possess the properties with which it is labeled and enables users to evaluate search results for authenticity before downloading."
Sounds exactly like Bitzi to me...
"Many peer-to-peer reputation schemes have been proposed in academia. Credence is the first practical implementation of a peer-to-peer reputation scheme."
If you're worried that you're missing emails of any sort (politics is a red herring as far as I'm concerned), go with an email provider that tags messages instead of deleting them. This is a simple configuration in SpamAssassin, and any competent mailhost will set it up on a user-configurable basis. I'm not saying that ISPs will be so kind as to offer this option, but if you can afford it, you've probably already got your own domain at a webhost somewhere.
The webhosting company I use for my personal stuff does this (not going to mention names, because I don't want this to sound like a plug). I can set up unlimited POPs and forwarders, and adjust the SpamAssassin settings on each one; not only the scoring gestalts, but also whether messages that are considered spam get deleted, or simply have a [SPAM] tag added in the subject line.
I opt for the tagging. This means that I get all of the email, but with a single filter rule on my mail client (i.e. matching "[SPAM]" in the subject header), I can sort all the questionable stuff to a "Junk" folder and go through it later.
If your ISP drops or deletes spam mail, set your mail up elsewhere, or bitch heavily to your ISP requesting that your spam be tagged instead of nuked. I hate spam as much as the next guy, but there's no reason that any ISP should be risking false positives and having their customers lose legit email.
OK, I'm not a ham but I have a couple of scanners. My question is, how can I eavesdrop on the ISS and/or STS shuttle missions? Some web searching has led to 145.8000 and 146.6550 as the ISS and STS audio downlinks, respectively; however, monitoring them even when ISS is over North America doesn't get me anything.
Are there other interesting frequencies, or does the ISS/STS have to be "exactly overhead" in order to pick up on their transmissions? I presume that if Houston is able to pick them up, I should be able to, also; but I'm not a radio engineer. I'm in west Tennessee and haven't been able to locate any repeaters of the ISS/STS frequencies anywhere nearby.
With IT workers so commonly producing some of our best work 'after hours'...
Please don't read this as a flame, but what the hell is meant by this? Maybe its because I don't buy into this work-till-you-drop mentality that so many people in capitalist economies seem to have, but why on earth is this being used as a rationalisation for maintaining outside-office freedom of assembly?
I think you're reading way too much into the original quote. Seems to me the comment was referring to the laid-back atmosphere that employees can share at the bar, or over a group dinner somewhere. Many office environments are "stuffy" and don't allow for much in the way of conversation. If you meet up with coworkers for a drink, or a night at the bowling alley, this stuffiness goes away and there are a lot of opportunities for interaction. Often, you can accomplish more in less time in this relaxed atmosphere, even if you're not trying to.
You might have a coworker who sits six cubes away, who you'd never have a chance to talk to during the course of a business day. Let's call him Bob. Maybe Bob's in your department, maybe not, but you barely know him and don't realize he shares your skillset. Then one night you and some others meet at the bar for a few beers. You get to talking to Bob, and realize you share competencies. You make a remark about a problem you've been working on, and after a few seconds of thought, Bob shoots back a solution you'd never thought of.
Whether you like it (or care about it) or not, you've just done "work" after hours, and you've just solved a problem that you'd have probably spent the next couple of days working on at the office. Over the next few months, you and Bob make great friends, sharing tips and tricks, and helping each other unofficially with coding problems, both work-related and personal.
In other words, after-hours socializing can benefit all parties. You and Bob and your other coworkers get some friendly face time in a relaxed environment. You get to know your coworkers better and develop productive relationships with them. Bob saves you a couple of hours worth of work now and then by offering a solution to something you're stuck on, and you do the same for him. And the company is better off for it - unless, of course, their policies made this entire scenario impossible to begin with.
Probably for "test" clicking your own ads. It's happened before. That $0.07 really hurts Google's bottom line.
Nah. I'd been signed up since February, and had specifically avoided clicking any of my own ads due to others' horror stories.
In 5 months of showing ads, I'd received one check for a whopping $120. I was averaging about 2,000 impressions per day, I think around $1 daily (can't check, because they won't even let me login to view my old stats); hardly breaking the bank. I was just coming due for another check, barely over $100, when they sent an email saying I'd been kicked out for "invalid clicks." They wouldn't give any further information.
All I can imagine is that maybe someone visited my site and clicked multiple ads, but it's not like I can prevent that, especially when I'm on vacation. Left a bad taste in my mouth, one day everything was great, the next day I'd been unilaterally booted out with no recourse and no apology.
Considering that Google booted me out of AdSense a month ago (while I was on vacation, no less), and won't give any reasonable explanation as to why, at least Yahoo's service gives me another option.
I can't find a "submit your site" entry in the random mishmash that is Baidu via Babelfish. Is there any way to submit a site to them for inclusion/spidering? There a whole lot of chinese eyeballs in the world...
If they haven't found your site yet, just wait, they'll get to it as long as people are linking to you. Be careful what you ask for, though; the "BaiDu Spider" tends to hit sites hard and fast when it does come knocking.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking as someone who's been on the merchant side of things in both online and brick-and-mortar situations, I can say that this policy is a double-edged sword. Proving cardholder fraud (where the customer buys something, then decides they don't want to pay for it) and winning a chargeback is dead easy when you're using a point of sale terminal. Proving cardholder fraud with internet based transactions, especially when you're selling a service instead of a tangible (shipped) product, is next to impossible and the merchant will almost always lose.
OTOH, when someone used my credit card to order $600 worth of Victoria's Secret merchandise online a few years ago, it was nice that all I had to do was fill out a form on my bank's website to dispute the charge and get my money back. I still have that card, with the same number, and it's never been abused since. I always wondered where they got it from, and why they only used it once.
In either case, "without the owner noticing" tends to imply an ignorant or inattentive owner. I imagine I'd notice PDQ if I was having a new fridge installed and they went to hook into a phone jack. As cheap as wireless commo may be these days, they aren't going to build something like that into your refrigerator for free, and they certainly aren't going to pick up the cellular bill to have your fridge call the factory without your knowledge.
Delving even into the topic of autonomous devices, I would love to know why the new phone I recently bought apparently autodialed 911 when I first hooked it up. They called me several seconds after I plugged the phone in, asking what my emergency was. When I said there was no emergency and told them that under no circumstances had anyone in my home called 911, they read my phone number and address back, insisting they'd just received a call. Weird.
Watch the language for heaven's sake, there might be some kids reading.
Incoming SMS is free for me, so I really don't care much unless the spam gets to be frequent. I've only received a couple, I get more wrong numbers and misdirected SMS's than I get spams.
Tacky, yes. "Stealing" bandwidth, no. "Hotlinking," even by its newspeak definition, definitely not. If you object to a commercial operation linking to a Flash game on somebody else's website, I can't possibly understand your rationale for hanging out here. Slashdot melts more servers and generates more hosting bandwidth overage bills in an hour than Fuddrucker's will do before they go bankrupt.
I'm not trying to defend Fuddrucker's, I'd never heard of them prior to tonight (I've heard of Fudpucker's but I'm not going to waste the time looking up who ripped off whom). However, there are much more tactful ways of dealing with this sort of transgression. The "victim" should have uploaded one of the slaughterhouse photos to his own webspace, and used a rewrite directive to send requests for the Flash game with a fuddruckers.com referer to the gory photo.
Cockerham got this right years ago when some idiot snarfed his Burning Man photo to use for eBay, and certainly while his case was high-profile, even he wasn't the first to figure it out. You (perhaps temporarily) alter the file that you believe is being abused, either to zero it out, or to humiliate the perceived abuser. Hosting it should remain your responsibility; don't complicate the problem by generating popups to load websites that have nothing to do with the situation.
People have gradually redefined the word, though, and now it no longer carries positive connotations. The current definition of "hotlink" is something like "to embed content in your web site which references an absolute URI on another web site." This practice used to be called image stealing or bandwidth stealing, but I guess those weren't buzzword-worthy enough.
I guess even with that definition, what Fuddrucker's did doesn't really qualify. What they're really guilty of is just plain asshattery, and it's possible that the "victim" is just perpetrating more of the same. His LiveJournal post includes this edit:
So, presumably, he's not hosting the slaughterhouse images himself, but he's redirecting Fuddrucker's traffic to innocent third parties... The very thing he's pissed off at Fuddrucker's for doing.
The address to report the spam is enforcement(@)sec.gov. Same goes for any "stock tip" spam you get.
In meetings with students over the last several days, the Berks County, Pa., juvenile probation office has quietly offered the students a deal in which all charges would be dropped in exchange for 15 hours of community service, a letter of apology, a class on personal responsibility, and a few months of probation.
"The probation department realizes this is small potatoes," said William Bispels, an attorney representing nearly half the accused students.
The 13 initially were charged with computer trespass and computer theft, both felonies, and could have faced a wide range of sanctions, including juvenile detention.
The Kutztown Area School District said it reported the students to police only after detentions, suspensions, and other punishments failed to deter them from breaking school rules governing computer usage. (See "Felony charges for computer-abusing kids.")
But the students, their families, and outraged supporters around the nation said that authorities overreacted, punishing the kids not for any horrible behavior but because they outsmarted the district's technology workers.
The trouble began last fall after the school district issued some 600 Apple iBook laptops to every student at the high school, about 50 miles northwest of Philadelphia.
Students easily breached security and began downloading forbidden internet programs, such as the popular iChat instant-messaging tool. Some students also turned off a remote monitoring function that let administrators see what students were viewing on their screens--or used the monitoring function to view administrators' own computer screens.
School district officials and prosecutors did not return phone messages left Aug. 25 and had not been heard from by press time.
In legal terms, the students have been offered an "informal adjustment"--the least severe form of punishment.
Bispels said a few students are thinking about refusing the deal because they don't feel they have broken any laws. "A lot of these parents would like to fight this on principle, but it's hard to put the kids at risk on principle," he said.
Mike Boland, who represents one student, said his client likely will accept the offer. "It doesn't require my client to acknowledge he is guilty of anything," he said.
"It's about as mild as you can go," agreed James Shrawder, whose 15-year-old nephew was among those offered the deal. "It's more of a face-saving measure."
One student who has had prior dealings with the juvenile probation office was not offered a deal. That case is expected to proceed.
Links:
Students' web site
http://www.cutusabreak.org
Kutztown Area School District's response
http://www.kasd.org/districtinfo/kasdPressrelease
Thank you very much for seeding this video. It's more than worth the time that it takes to watch. Several clips from this footage were co-opted by the national media, in particular the images of the Hyatt with its OKC-Murrah-esque looking window blowouts. It's painful but also enlightening to see the more in depth video.
I'll be leaving my copy of Burst up until my next reboot (several days to a week) with this file available, and I'm putting it on Gnutella as "Hurricane Katrina Damage Video - WGNO TV New Orleans Aerial Footage.wmv" if anyone wants to download it there. Please don't take down the seed.
You can still cancel online, though. Just send an incredibly vulgar, anti-AOL email to, say, "Operators"
In short, attempts to legislate terrorism out of existance are doomed from the start and should be suspect. You can damned well bet that lawmakers are smart enough to know that these laws aren't going to do anything to stop the Bogeyman of the day. They're being passed as "feel good" measures at best, and as attempts to control the law-abiding population at worse.
Making it illegal to carry cigarette lighters onto airplanes doesn't stop a terrorist; a terrorist would find a way to bring an incendiary onboard anyway. Making it illegal to have an untappable VoIP connection doesn't stop a terrorist, either; a terrorist would just setup stunnel or pgpFone end-to-end and chat away.
Sigh. Someday, the United States Congress will be comprised of people who grew up understanding technology...
On the other hand, the OP said "don't speed and you won't get caught," as if it were actually that simple. My response was to provide several example cases in which speeding is perfectly reasonable - if not the safest possible reaction - yet the cameras would nab you anyway. Guilty until proven innocent, and good luck proving it.
My point isn't that speeding should be okay, it's that cameras (and other automatons) shouldn't be doing law enforcement.
Yeah, that advice really helps when I'm trying to pass an 18-wheeler whose driver is nodding off. Or when I'm in heavy traffic, and an ambulance comes up behind me and there's no clearance to pull to a different lane. Or when I'm minding my business on a one-lane highway, doing somewhere around the speed limit, and some drunk moron comes flying up behind me leaving me nowhere to go but forward in order to avoid being hit.
These and a hundred other mostly excusable situations will result in someone going over the speed limit, sometimes by a substantial amount. The problem with these cameras is that they don't capture context, and they don't have discretion. It becomes an issue of black or white, and "you were speeding," so you get a ticket regardless of the circumstances. That's inappropriate IMO.
Thanks to everyone who responded! I've been using heavens-above to forecast Iridium flares for some time now, so I'm aware of their ISS tracking. What I didn't know is how close satellites such as ISS had to be in order to pick up their transmissions.
;)
I presume that since the shuttle is currently docked to the ISS, its passes overhead are concurrent with ISS. There is no pass listed over my area until 8 August, so I imagine that I should keep my scanner tuned to the local po-po trunk until then...
Thanks again to all who replied, in particular, juggle and grumling. Very informative, and I appreciate it greatly.
How is this any better than Bitzi and its Bitprints, which are already built into popular Gnutella servents like BearShare?
"Our client provides a peer-based judgement that a given object will possess the properties with which it is labeled and enables users to evaluate search results for authenticity before downloading."
Sounds exactly like Bitzi to me...
"Many peer-to-peer reputation schemes have been proposed in academia. Credence is the first practical implementation of a peer-to-peer reputation scheme."
I don't think so.
If you're worried that you're missing emails of any sort (politics is a red herring as far as I'm concerned), go with an email provider that tags messages instead of deleting them. This is a simple configuration in SpamAssassin, and any competent mailhost will set it up on a user-configurable basis. I'm not saying that ISPs will be so kind as to offer this option, but if you can afford it, you've probably already got your own domain at a webhost somewhere.
The webhosting company I use for my personal stuff does this (not going to mention names, because I don't want this to sound like a plug). I can set up unlimited POPs and forwarders, and adjust the SpamAssassin settings on each one; not only the scoring gestalts, but also whether messages that are considered spam get deleted, or simply have a [SPAM] tag added in the subject line.
I opt for the tagging. This means that I get all of the email, but with a single filter rule on my mail client (i.e. matching "[SPAM]" in the subject header), I can sort all the questionable stuff to a "Junk" folder and go through it later.
If your ISP drops or deletes spam mail, set your mail up elsewhere, or bitch heavily to your ISP requesting that your spam be tagged instead of nuked. I hate spam as much as the next guy, but there's no reason that any ISP should be risking false positives and having their customers lose legit email.
OK, I'm not a ham but I have a couple of scanners. My question is, how can I eavesdrop on the ISS and/or STS shuttle missions? Some web searching has led to 145.8000 and 146.6550 as the ISS and STS audio downlinks, respectively; however, monitoring them even when ISS is over North America doesn't get me anything.
Are there other interesting frequencies, or does the ISS/STS have to be "exactly overhead" in order to pick up on their transmissions? I presume that if Houston is able to pick them up, I should be able to, also; but I'm not a radio engineer. I'm in west Tennessee and haven't been able to locate any repeaters of the ISS/STS frequencies anywhere nearby.
Any help out there?
You might have a coworker who sits six cubes away, who you'd never have a chance to talk to during the course of a business day. Let's call him Bob. Maybe Bob's in your department, maybe not, but you barely know him and don't realize he shares your skillset. Then one night you and some others meet at the bar for a few beers. You get to talking to Bob, and realize you share competencies. You make a remark about a problem you've been working on, and after a few seconds of thought, Bob shoots back a solution you'd never thought of.
Whether you like it (or care about it) or not, you've just done "work" after hours, and you've just solved a problem that you'd have probably spent the next couple of days working on at the office. Over the next few months, you and Bob make great friends, sharing tips and tricks, and helping each other unofficially with coding problems, both work-related and personal.
In other words, after-hours socializing can benefit all parties. You and Bob and your other coworkers get some friendly face time in a relaxed environment. You get to know your coworkers better and develop productive relationships with them. Bob saves you a couple of hours worth of work now and then by offering a solution to something you're stuck on, and you do the same for him. And the company is better off for it - unless, of course, their policies made this entire scenario impossible to begin with.
In 5 months of showing ads, I'd received one check for a whopping $120. I was averaging about 2,000 impressions per day, I think around $1 daily (can't check, because they won't even let me login to view my old stats); hardly breaking the bank. I was just coming due for another check, barely over $100, when they sent an email saying I'd been kicked out for "invalid clicks." They wouldn't give any further information.
All I can imagine is that maybe someone visited my site and clicked multiple ads, but it's not like I can prevent that, especially when I'm on vacation. Left a bad taste in my mouth, one day everything was great, the next day I'd been unilaterally booted out with no recourse and no apology.
Considering that Google booted me out of AdSense a month ago (while I was on vacation, no less), and won't give any reasonable explanation as to why, at least Yahoo's service gives me another option.