I assume web bug images aren't filtered out if they are, for example:
http://host.com/images/1F59C6EA.jpg
A spammer could setup their server (mod_url I think?) so that this gets translated to:
http://host.com/serve_image.php?email_id=1F59C6E A
This would still verify the email address and would generally be transparent to the user. The filter could get smarter and search for numbers, but this is also easily overcome by dictionary words. If you used 5 letter words, you'd have about 10,000 of them to use. You could then represent 100,000,000 (10,000 ^ 2) email addresses using only two five letter words in succession in a URL, such as:
http://host.com/img/abash/zymin/logo.jpg
and rewriting it as before. Each user gets a unique combination of two words that uniquely identifies them. If abash is the 9th word and zymin is the 9914th word, then this is user id (9 * 10,000 + 9914) = 99,914.
Really, the only solution to web bugs is to not load images from unknown senders. Make the user manually load images (mail.app has this feature as do many other clients) if they are not attached as files with the message.
Did you consider compressing the helium? Compressed gasses take up less space, so you would have needed a much smaller envelope.
Even more efficient than helium, a really light particle, is a total vacuum which has no particles. To make an efficient lifting device, you can figure out the amount of total vacuum you would need to lift 250kg. Essentially, you would need the equivalent amount as the displacement of 250kg of air. For sake of argument, let's say this is 250 cubic meters. The beauty of this is that a vacuum, having no particles, compresses down to nothing. In fact, you could compress 250 cubic meters of vacuum down to nothing and store it inside the object you are trying to lift!
This amazing technology was used by the Egyptians in building the pyramids and by whomever built Stonehenge. The object itself thus becomes its own lifting mechanism. Ever wonder why modern man has been unable to reproduce such engineering feats? They've been unable to harvest the power of compressible vacuums to move great masses. However, I have shared this new secret technology with you in the hopes that you too will build marvels of the Earth.
The trick, of course, is not to store too much compressed vacuum inside an object or it'll just float away forever. King Tut was really pissed when the engineers first made that mistake!
If both companies you're buying the product from are in Froogle, this might not be all that difficult. Figure out the format Froogle uses to grab product and pricing information, and do the rest. Hm... you may be on to something interesting here. At the very least, I could see this as a useful option to have built into the Google toolbar, though much to the displeasure of the higher-priced merchants!
I think a better comparison is if you request an L.L.Bean catalogue in the mail and the postal carrier has been hired by Claria/Gator to tape an advertisement for J. Crew onto the catalogue's cover. Are you saying that because you asked for the mail carrier to deliver stuff to you that this practice would happen with your full permission?
The spyware angle is a different issue altogether because that's similar to hiring an advertising firm to recommend competing products to you. Even if you were ignorant that you hired them (EULA agreement) it's still something that you agreed to.
I like analagies, so here is another; picture in picture for televisions. Advertisement for McDonald's on your primary channel, so you flip through to another channel in the secondary picture, where there is an advertisement for Wendy's.
And how would you feel about a device which somehow exploited a flaw in your set-top box and noticed when you were watching a McDonald's ad and opened up a picture-in-picture window to display a Wendy's ad?
You've turned a tongue-in-cheek response into something quite informative. Except, that is, for this part:
This would increase the amount of ice in the northern hemisphere, which would cause more sunlight to be reflected (due to the relatively high libido of ice).
I assume you mean "albedo", unless there's some funky property of ice of which I'm unaware.:)
That movie is expected to draw furhter focus on the environment and specifically global warming.
And what we learn from the movie is that this global warming you speak of causes a 10,000 year winter. Or, the warmer it gets, the more snow falls on New York... or something like that.
There's a difference between closing down the PayPal account and closing down the bank account you have associated with your PayPal account. PayPal can close your PayPal account at any time, but it can't close your actual bank-provided bank account.
That's why everyone should open up a separate bank account for use with PayPal. There is always a slight risk that you could be a victim of fraud -- either someone scams PayPal and you end up paying, or someone steals your account login. With a separate bank account, your risk is minimized as they can't take out money if you don't keep anything in it. Credit cards are always an issue, but fortunately you can easily dispute any charges there.
Um, right. I find it incredibly suspect that an alleged ex-manager would consistently misspell PayPal as Pay-Pal. All they claim is a job position as a "middle management type". But perhaps PayPal never educated their "middle management types" on how to properly spell the corporation's name that is written on every company document and that provided their paychecks. HINT: There is no hyphen!
Could be fake (that'd be my guess). Could be legit. Who can tell?
Interesting. I think we've discovered the missing step!
1. Visit porn site using anonymous proxy and "Pay by check" using government account. 2. Watch the many people who apparently have had their underpants stolen. 3. Profit!
If they freeze your account, and it's your only bank account, guess what? You are absolutely fucked! There is no way for you to get money out of your bank account until paypal unfreezes it.
YOU: [ringing bank]
BANK: Good afternoon, Whatever Bank.
YOU: Yes, I just tried accessing my money and it says my account is frozen.
BANK: Okay, can I have your account number please and verification?
YOU: [give info]
BANK: Ah, yes. It seems we received a call from a company in a different state this morning.
YOU: Okaaayyy...?
BANK: And they asked us to freeze your account for no particular reason. So we did.
YOU: Wait a second. You're saying that an unrelated third party is able to just call you up out of the blue and freeze my account in violation of my banking agreement?
BANK: Absolutely, sir. You see, we freeze all bank accounts at the request of any unknown third party.
YOU: So if I asked you to freeze your own personal account...?
BANK: You bastard. Now *my* money is frozen and I can't do anything until you authorize me to unfreeze it.
YOU: Hah, now you know what it's like.
BANK: Actually, we're just joking with you. You see, according to banking regulations, you are our customer. The only time we would ever freeze an account is if the bank is going to be out some money and we need to put a reserve on the money you already have with us.
YOU: But I read on Slashdot...
BANK: Yes, we've been getting calls about that all day. It seems that somebody on Slashdot has been spreading FUD.
YOU: Well, maybe I shouldn't be surprised.
BANK: Hey, it's Slashdot, isn't it? I'll fancy a guess and say that the person who said that didn't present any evidence to back it up?
YOU: Yeah, that's exactly right.
BANK: We have to deal with people like that all day. They make unsubstantiated claims about what PayPal can or can't do. Why, just the other day, a customer said that PayPal sold their home without them knowing it just so that PayPal could recover a chargeback!
YOU: Oh come on!
BANK: No, I'm serious. You'd be surprised what other people can come up with when the burden of proof is absent.
YOU: Actually, I probably wouldn't be. From time to time, I read Slashdot at -1.
BANK: [laughs] On Friday, someone said that the GNAA acquired this bank.
YOU: [laughing hysterically] Oh, that's a good one. Well, I guess my account can't be frozen then?
BANK: Of course not. At least not by PayPal. They would need a court order to do something like that.
Just goes to show that technological leadership is never any guarantee of marketplace leadership - x86 hardware is only now getting some of the features that Data General and Motorola were peddling [without much success] about fifteen years ago.
Completely unrelated to this is the fact that patents last only seventeen years. I'm sure it's a coincidence though.
Depends on how you define the words. Strictly speaking, an atheist is really an a-theist. The "a-" prefix is [Greek? Latin?] for "non-", so atheist in this context means non-theist.
Thus, if someone asks "Are you a theist?" And you answer, "No, I am not a theist." Then you're really saying you're not a theist, non-theist, atheist. Saying that you're not a theist doesn't automatically mean that you actively believe in the complete opposite of whatever theists believe.
Someone who is Gnostic believes a whole lot of other stuff. Thus, to be a non-Gnostic (agnostic) is much different than to be a non-Theist (atheist). Anyway, check out Wiki on theist/gnostic/atheist/agnostic for more info.
Since it was not theft at all, the problem is those who are mis-using the word "theft", such as the RIAA, to make something seem worse than it is.
Oh here we go, I could see this coming a mile away. SCO, the RIAA, and now Valve must be in bed together in a mass scheme to misappropriate the word theft! Damn you scoundrels! You've convinced people on the street, you've convinced the media... there's only several Anonymous Cowards left to convince that illegally copying something is considered theft these days.
Make no changes to the English language! It shall not budge. Thou Anonymous Cowards henceforth shalt use the glorious language afforded by the King of Britain inasmuch as you commune with one another. Pray tell you oppose all such grievances as such besmirch our culture! Rollback the book of words, Webster, for it doth displease the simple minded!
If you're talking about encrypted text, then your point is very valid. However, for English words you can get a much better result by using a dictionary to limit the number of words that fit the pattern.
How many 5 letter words are there in the English language? According to/usr/share/dict/words, there's 9987 words, from aalii to zymin. Compare that to how many combinations of letters add up to 60 pixels? If the letter "i" is 4 pixels -- 3 pixels for the letter, one pixel space after it -- then you *could* guess that the word is "iiiiiiiiiiiiiii". In fact, there's a hell of a lot more possibilities doing it the pixel way, but you can reduce this down by using a dictionary. "iiiiiiiiiiiiiii" isn't in the dictionary. You can also reject outright words that have impossible letter combinations. Three of any letter in a row can be rejected, Q followed by X can be rejected, etc. The rest you do a dictionary lookup to see if they exist.
It'd be an interesting exercise to perform. Luckily for the researcher, the word preceding the blacked out word was "an", which implies that the next word starts with a vowel. So that narrowed it down to only 7 potential words based on pixel length and dictionary lookup, and the one that seemed to work best was Egyptian. However, if all you knew was that it was an 8 letter word beginning with a vowel... you'd be looking at 6089 possibilities (again, according to/usr/share/dict/words and grep).
There are currently non-RIAA member labels around. Check out Magnatune.com as one example. Your monopoly argument doesn't even hold up. They're a really dominant force, yes, but they're not a monopoly.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the clarification. Upon re-reading your original post, I misunderstood what you said about images.
I assume web bug images aren't filtered out if they are, for example:
E A
http://host.com/images/1F59C6EA.jpg
A spammer could setup their server (mod_url I think?) so that this gets translated to:
http://host.com/serve_image.php?email_id=1F59C6
This would still verify the email address and would generally be transparent to the user. The filter could get smarter and search for numbers, but this is also easily overcome by dictionary words. If you used 5 letter words, you'd have about 10,000 of them to use. You could then represent 100,000,000 (10,000 ^ 2) email addresses using only two five letter words in succession in a URL, such as:
http://host.com/img/abash/zymin/logo.jpg
and rewriting it as before. Each user gets a unique combination of two words that uniquely identifies them. If abash is the 9th word and zymin is the 9914th word, then this is user id (9 * 10,000 + 9914) = 99,914.
Really, the only solution to web bugs is to not load images from unknown senders. Make the user manually load images (mail.app has this feature as do many other clients) if they are not attached as files with the message.
Did you consider compressing the helium? Compressed gasses take up less space, so you would have needed a much smaller envelope.
Even more efficient than helium, a really light particle, is a total vacuum which has no particles. To make an efficient lifting device, you can figure out the amount of total vacuum you would need to lift 250kg. Essentially, you would need the equivalent amount as the displacement of 250kg of air. For sake of argument, let's say this is 250 cubic meters. The beauty of this is that a vacuum, having no particles, compresses down to nothing. In fact, you could compress 250 cubic meters of vacuum down to nothing and store it inside the object you are trying to lift!
This amazing technology was used by the Egyptians in building the pyramids and by whomever built Stonehenge. The object itself thus becomes its own lifting mechanism. Ever wonder why modern man has been unable to reproduce such engineering feats? They've been unable to harvest the power of compressible vacuums to move great masses. However, I have shared this new secret technology with you in the hopes that you too will build marvels of the Earth.
The trick, of course, is not to store too much compressed vacuum inside an object or it'll just float away forever. King Tut was really pissed when the engineers first made that mistake!
If both companies you're buying the product from are in Froogle, this might not be all that difficult. Figure out the format Froogle uses to grab product and pricing information, and do the rest. Hm... you may be on to something interesting here. At the very least, I could see this as a useful option to have built into the Google toolbar, though much to the displeasure of the higher-priced merchants!
I think a better comparison is if you request an L.L.Bean catalogue in the mail and the postal carrier has been hired by Claria/Gator to tape an advertisement for J. Crew onto the catalogue's cover. Are you saying that because you asked for the mail carrier to deliver stuff to you that this practice would happen with your full permission?
The spyware angle is a different issue altogether because that's similar to hiring an advertising firm to recommend competing products to you. Even if you were ignorant that you hired them (EULA agreement) it's still something that you agreed to.
I like analagies, so here is another; picture in picture for televisions. Advertisement for McDonald's on your primary channel, so you flip through to another channel in the secondary picture, where there is an advertisement for Wendy's.
And how would you feel about a device which somehow exploited a flaw in your set-top box and noticed when you were watching a McDonald's ad and opened up a picture-in-picture window to display a Wendy's ad?
Your sig is retarded.
Yeah? Well you are retarded. The difference between us is that at least I can change my sig.
ps: I don't give a rat's ass about karma. I have too much already.
Sounds like a threat to our precious bodily fluids!
Actually, it sounds more like this guy.
Whatever you do, just don't pipe the results to finger or dig.
You've turned a tongue-in-cheek response into something quite informative. Except, that is, for this part:
:)
This would increase the amount of ice in the northern hemisphere, which would cause more sunlight to be reflected (due to the relatively high libido of ice).
I assume you mean "albedo", unless there's some funky property of ice of which I'm unaware.
In Soviet Kiev, legacy sues you!
That movie is expected to draw furhter focus on the environment and specifically global warming.
... or something like that.
And what we learn from the movie is that this global warming you speak of causes a 10,000 year winter. Or, the warmer it gets, the more snow falls on New York
The post I initially replied to stated (original emphasis unchanged):
"When they say the account is frozen, they are talking about your bank account (as well as your paypal account)."
There's a difference between closing down the PayPal account and closing down the bank account you have associated with your PayPal account. PayPal can close your PayPal account at any time, but it can't close your actual bank-provided bank account.
That's why everyone should open up a separate bank account for use with PayPal. There is always a slight risk that you could be a victim of fraud -- either someone scams PayPal and you end up paying, or someone steals your account login. With a separate bank account, your risk is minimized as they can't take out money if you don't keep anything in it. Credit cards are always an issue, but fortunately you can easily dispute any charges there.
Um, right. I find it incredibly suspect that an alleged ex-manager would consistently misspell PayPal as Pay-Pal. All they claim is a job position as a "middle management type". But perhaps PayPal never educated their "middle management types" on how to properly spell the corporation's name that is written on every company document and that provided their paychecks. HINT: There is no hyphen!
Could be fake (that'd be my guess). Could be legit. Who can tell?
Interesting. I think we've discovered the missing step!
1. Visit porn site using anonymous proxy and "Pay by check" using government account.
2. Watch the many people who apparently have had their underpants stolen.
3. Profit!
If they freeze your account, and it's your only bank account, guess what? You are absolutely fucked! There is no way for you to get money out of your bank account until paypal unfreezes it.
YOU: [ringing bank]
BANK: Good afternoon, Whatever Bank.
YOU: Yes, I just tried accessing my money and it says my account is frozen.
BANK: Okay, can I have your account number please and verification?
YOU: [give info]
BANK: Ah, yes. It seems we received a call from a company in a different state this morning.
YOU: Okaaayyy...?
BANK: And they asked us to freeze your account for no particular reason. So we did.
YOU: Wait a second. You're saying that an unrelated third party is able to just call you up out of the blue and freeze my account in violation of my banking agreement?
BANK: Absolutely, sir. You see, we freeze all bank accounts at the request of any unknown third party.
YOU: So if I asked you to freeze your own personal account...?
BANK: You bastard. Now *my* money is frozen and I can't do anything until you authorize me to unfreeze it.
YOU: Hah, now you know what it's like.
BANK: Actually, we're just joking with you. You see, according to banking regulations, you are our customer. The only time we would ever freeze an account is if the bank is going to be out some money and we need to put a reserve on the money you already have with us.
YOU: But I read on Slashdot...
BANK: Yes, we've been getting calls about that all day. It seems that somebody on Slashdot has been spreading FUD.
YOU: Well, maybe I shouldn't be surprised.
BANK: Hey, it's Slashdot, isn't it? I'll fancy a guess and say that the person who said that didn't present any evidence to back it up?
YOU: Yeah, that's exactly right.
BANK: We have to deal with people like that all day. They make unsubstantiated claims about what PayPal can or can't do. Why, just the other day, a customer said that PayPal sold their home without them knowing it just so that PayPal could recover a chargeback!
YOU: Oh come on!
BANK: No, I'm serious. You'd be surprised what other people can come up with when the burden of proof is absent.
YOU: Actually, I probably wouldn't be. From time to time, I read Slashdot at -1.
BANK: [laughs] On Friday, someone said that the GNAA acquired this bank.
YOU: [laughing hysterically] Oh, that's a good one. Well, I guess my account can't be frozen then?
BANK: Of course not. At least not by PayPal. They would need a court order to do something like that.
YOU: Thanks, that's good to know.
BANK: No problem. Have a good afternoon!
PayPalSucks.com is certainly a shady company. To find out why, go to adzoox.com/paypalsucks.html
Wonderful anecdote. Too bad there isn't a +/-1 Anecdotal Evidence mod.
Just goes to show that technological leadership is never any guarantee of marketplace leadership - x86 hardware is only now getting some of the features that Data General and Motorola were peddling [without much success] about fifteen years ago.
Completely unrelated to this is the fact that patents last only seventeen years. I'm sure it's a coincidence though.
Depends on how you define the words. Strictly speaking, an atheist is really an a-theist. The "a-" prefix is [Greek? Latin?] for "non-", so atheist in this context means non-theist.
Thus, if someone asks "Are you a theist?" And you answer, "No, I am not a theist." Then you're really saying you're not a theist, non-theist, atheist. Saying that you're not a theist doesn't automatically mean that you actively believe in the complete opposite of whatever theists believe.
Someone who is Gnostic believes a whole lot of other stuff. Thus, to be a non-Gnostic (agnostic) is much different than to be a non-Theist (atheist). Anyway, check out Wiki on theist/gnostic/atheist/agnostic for more info.
You're thinking of Navajo code. Should be enough to keep you busy reading for a while. :)
Since it was not theft at all, the problem is those who are mis-using the word "theft", such as the RIAA, to make something seem worse than it is.
Oh here we go, I could see this coming a mile away. SCO, the RIAA, and now Valve must be in bed together in a mass scheme to misappropriate the word theft! Damn you scoundrels! You've convinced people on the street, you've convinced the media... there's only several Anonymous Cowards left to convince that illegally copying something is considered theft these days.
Make no changes to the English language! It shall not budge. Thou Anonymous Cowards henceforth shalt use the glorious language afforded by the King of Britain inasmuch as you commune with one another. Pray tell you oppose all such grievances as such besmirch our culture! Rollback the book of words, Webster, for it doth displease the simple minded!
If you're talking about encrypted text, then your point is very valid. However, for English words you can get a much better result by using a dictionary to limit the number of words that fit the pattern.
/usr/share/dict/words, there's 9987 words, from aalii to zymin. Compare that to how many combinations of letters add up to 60 pixels? If the letter "i" is 4 pixels -- 3 pixels for the letter, one pixel space after it -- then you *could* guess that the word is "iiiiiiiiiiiiiii". In fact, there's a hell of a lot more possibilities doing it the pixel way, but you can reduce this down by using a dictionary. "iiiiiiiiiiiiiii" isn't in the dictionary. You can also reject outright words that have impossible letter combinations. Three of any letter in a row can be rejected, Q followed by X can be rejected, etc. The rest you do a dictionary lookup to see if they exist.
/usr/share/dict/words and grep).
How many 5 letter words are there in the English language? According to
It'd be an interesting exercise to perform. Luckily for the researcher, the word preceding the blacked out word was "an", which implies that the next word starts with a vowel. So that narrowed it down to only 7 potential words based on pixel length and dictionary lookup, and the one that seemed to work best was Egyptian. However, if all you knew was that it was an 8 letter word beginning with a vowel... you'd be looking at 6089 possibilities (again, according to
There are currently non-RIAA member labels around. Check out Magnatune.com as one example. Your monopoly argument doesn't even hold up. They're a really dominant force, yes, but they're not a monopoly.