Here is an interesting article published in The Advance-Titan, the weekly newspaper at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh. It's written by an exchange student spending a semester at the Moscow State University. (For reasons apparent from the content, Swen Gwolkquist is a pen name.)
Did Saddam get Russian GPS jammers? The answer is at a Moscow strip club.
If Saddam did get Russian GPS jammers it was rusty rubbish. For the modern stuff, look at Moscow casinos, strip clubs and brothels.
By Swen Gwolkquist
"Honey, I never knew you were that fond of classical music," the voice of my girlfriend woke me up in my hotel room in Moscow, "I wouldn't expect you to go listen to Shostakovich Sixth Symphony on Friday night. Did you enjoy it?"
"uh-hu... err... How did you know where I was last night?"
"Easy, darling. Remember, when you arrived in Moscow and rented your mobile phone you subscribed for a people finder service. If something happens to you, well, kidnapped or in trouble, I would know where you are and would direct police or security guys to your rescue. Well, yesterday I felt uneasy and decided to check the web site of the mobile operator. It showed that you were at Bolshaya Nikitskaya 13, and that was Bolshoi Conservatory Hall."
"Oh, well, it really works... amazing... now I really feel protected. And you would no longer worry about me. Great."
What the hell is going on, I asked myself. Conservatory Hall? Shostakovich Sixth Symphony? Damn, I was at Hungry Duck, the dirtiest hole in Moscow! Drunk Russian girls dancing on the table, completely naked. Hookers and stuff... vodka by the glasses...
I rushed to the mobile operator's web site. Yes, indeed, the log showed that on Friday night I was at Bolshoi Conservatory Hall! It was worth an investigation.
Calls to the Conservatory Hall and BeeLine, the mobile operator, lead to nowhere. Folks at Hungry Duck also refused to tell me anything over the phone but hinted that I may find out something if I'd drop by in person and talk to their security.
"You should thank us, fellow. We probably saved your marriage. Or was it your girlfriend? You don't care? Whatever," the security guy laughed loudly, after he drank, in one gulp, a double shot of Stoli I bought him. "You, studs, tell your wives that you are at Bolshoi and come here to screw around. It takes them only one visit to BeeLine's web site to find out that you're cheating on them. Patrons do not like it. It's bad for business."
"Well, luckily, we found a solution. One Russian company, formerly a top-secret defense contractor, makes great boxes. You hang one by the ceiling, and it jams the GPS satellite receiver in your mobile phone. You know, the old stuff like that would just make the GPS receiver inoperable. The stuff we got is smarter. It fools the receiver. The signal is so strong that it completely overwrites the faint signal from the satellite. I would enter any longitude / latitude in the box and your GPS receiver would obligingly report it back to the mobile operator."
"Wait a minute," a dark thought crossed my mind, "A GPS jammer? A Russian defense contractor? One that was accused of selling GPS jammers to Saddam Hussein? What did they call it? Aviaconversia?"
"Err..., no, buddy, I didn't tell you that," the security dude replied, quickly glancing around. "But I tell you one thing. If Saddam gets the box that hangs by my ceiling, you Americans are in deep trouble. Your Cruise missiles would fly back home. Funny, isn't that?" - he chuckled. "Or they would hit unexpected targets, whatever Saddam enters into the jammer. And, you know, the guy is wicked, he gassed his own people with Sarin. He could direct your missile on his folks again, to rally your greenie and leftie fools against the war, and Bush government."
"But, you now, friend," the security guy continued. Three empty glasses were now lined up in front of him on the counter. "The old comrades, from the organization, you know, those comrades who build these smart boxes, I don't think they sold any of this stuff to Saddam lately
With some users complaining about receiving up to 1,000 unsolicited e-mails a day there is no shortage of innovative solutions to stop the spam. Blacklists of known spammers and keyword filtering have been tried with mixed results.
Another promising approach, pioneered by companies like MailFrontier, MailBlocks and others is called challenge-response. It works as follows. When a customer receives a new message from an unknown correspondent, the system will intercept the message and automatically return to the sender a form to fill out. The typical form contains graphics images, simple pictures, geometric shapes, colored check-boxes or other objects that are easily recognizable by humans but hard for computers to make sense of. Once a human being views those images and types the response into the form - demonstrating that she is a person and not an automated mass-mailing machine - the system will forward the e-mail to the intended recipient.
DyedBlond, a secretive Silicon Valley artificial intelligence startup, is rumored to have been working on an advanced version of a challenge-response spam blocker. Whereas existing challenge-response spam blockers discriminate between mass-mailing machines and humans, DyedBlond discriminates between intelligent and not so intelligent humans.
"Counting daisies and bunnies is too simple," says Alex Brodenschmuck, a renowned AI expert, "Sooner or later the machines would learn how to do it. You need more sophisticated tests for human intelligence. An ability to maintain a conversation has always been considered a test for true intelligence (so-called Turing test)."
But DyedBlond goes beyond small talk. Want to send an e-mail to a physics professor? Be ready to take an integral or solve a differential equation. Sending your resume to Wall Street? Prepare to price an exotic option.
Not only does DyedBlond solution eliminate spam, it prioritizes mail by sorting the correspondents by their intelligence.
"If the guy cannot solve Schroedinger equation for hydrogen atom you probably don't want to hear from him," says Tiev Resle, a Cornell physics professor. "I am looking forward to the day when American Physical Society makes DyedBlond mandatory filter for all e-mail sent to its members. This will kill spam once and for all, and improve students' performance."
Slashdot Mirror
Here is an interesting article published in The Advance-Titan, the weekly newspaper at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh. It's written by an exchange student spending a semester at the Moscow State University. (For reasons apparent from the content, Swen Gwolkquist is a pen name.) Did Saddam get Russian GPS jammers? The answer is at a Moscow strip club. If Saddam did get Russian GPS jammers it was rusty rubbish. For the modern stuff, look at Moscow casinos, strip clubs and brothels. By Swen Gwolkquist "Honey, I never knew you were that fond of classical music," the voice of my girlfriend woke me up in my hotel room in Moscow, "I wouldn't expect you to go listen to Shostakovich Sixth Symphony on Friday night. Did you enjoy it?" "uh-hu... err... How did you know where I was last night?" "Easy, darling. Remember, when you arrived in Moscow and rented your mobile phone you subscribed for a people finder service. If something happens to you, well, kidnapped or in trouble, I would know where you are and would direct police or security guys to your rescue. Well, yesterday I felt uneasy and decided to check the web site of the mobile operator. It showed that you were at Bolshaya Nikitskaya 13, and that was Bolshoi Conservatory Hall." "Oh, well, it really works ... amazing... now I really feel protected. And you would no longer worry about me. Great."
What the hell is going on, I asked myself. Conservatory Hall? Shostakovich Sixth Symphony? Damn, I was at Hungry Duck, the dirtiest hole in Moscow! Drunk Russian girls dancing on the table, completely naked. Hookers and stuff... vodka by the glasses...
I rushed to the mobile operator's web site. Yes, indeed, the log showed that on Friday night I was at Bolshoi Conservatory Hall! It was worth an investigation.
Calls to the Conservatory Hall and BeeLine, the mobile operator, lead to nowhere. Folks at Hungry Duck also refused to tell me anything over the phone but hinted that I may find out something if I'd drop by in person and talk to their security.
"You should thank us, fellow. We probably saved your marriage. Or was it your girlfriend? You don't care? Whatever," the security guy laughed loudly, after he drank, in one gulp, a double shot of Stoli I bought him. "You, studs, tell your wives that you are at Bolshoi and come here to screw around. It takes them only one visit to BeeLine's web site to find out that you're cheating on them. Patrons do not like it. It's bad for business."
"Well, luckily, we found a solution. One Russian company, formerly a top-secret defense contractor, makes great boxes. You hang one by the ceiling, and it jams the GPS satellite receiver in your mobile phone. You know, the old stuff like that would just make the GPS receiver inoperable. The stuff we got is smarter. It fools the receiver. The signal is so strong that it completely overwrites the faint signal from the satellite. I would enter any longitude / latitude in the box and your GPS receiver would obligingly report it back to the mobile operator."
"Wait a minute," a dark thought crossed my mind, "A GPS jammer? A Russian defense contractor? One that was accused of selling GPS jammers to Saddam Hussein? What did they call it? Aviaconversia?"
"Err..., no, buddy, I didn't tell you that," the security dude replied, quickly glancing around. "But I tell you one thing. If Saddam gets the box that hangs by my ceiling, you Americans are in deep trouble. Your Cruise missiles would fly back home. Funny, isn't that?" - he chuckled. "Or they would hit unexpected targets, whatever Saddam enters into the jammer. And, you know, the guy is wicked, he gassed his own people with Sarin. He could direct your missile on his folks again, to rally your greenie and leftie fools against the war, and Bush government."
"But, you now, friend," the security guy continued. Three empty glasses were now lined up in front of him on the counter. "The old comrades, from the organization, you know, those comrades who build these smart boxes, I don't think they sold any of this stuff to Saddam lately
With some users complaining about receiving up to 1,000 unsolicited e-mails a day there is no shortage of innovative solutions to stop the spam. Blacklists of known spammers and keyword filtering have been tried with mixed results. Another promising approach, pioneered by companies like MailFrontier, MailBlocks and others is called challenge-response. It works as follows. When a customer receives a new message from an unknown correspondent, the system will intercept the message and automatically return to the sender a form to fill out. The typical form contains graphics images, simple pictures, geometric shapes, colored check-boxes or other objects that are easily recognizable by humans but hard for computers to make sense of. Once a human being views those images and types the response into the form - demonstrating that she is a person and not an automated mass-mailing machine - the system will forward the e-mail to the intended recipient. DyedBlond, a secretive Silicon Valley artificial intelligence startup, is rumored to have been working on an advanced version of a challenge-response spam blocker. Whereas existing challenge-response spam blockers discriminate between mass-mailing machines and humans, DyedBlond discriminates between intelligent and not so intelligent humans. "Counting daisies and bunnies is too simple," says Alex Brodenschmuck, a renowned AI expert, "Sooner or later the machines would learn how to do it. You need more sophisticated tests for human intelligence. An ability to maintain a conversation has always been considered a test for true intelligence (so-called Turing test)." But DyedBlond goes beyond small talk. Want to send an e-mail to a physics professor? Be ready to take an integral or solve a differential equation. Sending your resume to Wall Street? Prepare to price an exotic option. Not only does DyedBlond solution eliminate spam, it prioritizes mail by sorting the correspondents by their intelligence. "If the guy cannot solve Schroedinger equation for hydrogen atom you probably don't want to hear from him," says Tiev Resle, a Cornell physics professor. "I am looking forward to the day when American Physical Society makes DyedBlond mandatory filter for all e-mail sent to its members. This will kill spam once and for all, and improve students' performance."