Except his employer isn't "corporate", they're a U.S. state, funded by taxpayers. As a taxpayer, I demand to know if there are security (or "configuration") holes that have been actively exploited at the institutions my taxes fund, unless the dissemination of such knowledge would hurt an ongoing police investigation. There is no mention in the story of such a request from the police, just a general indication that the police are investigating.
Apparently just a specific subset, though it would probably be easy to find other websites with vulnerabilities similar to Twitter's. Basically, although he couldn't directly read the encrypted user name and password passed between Twitter servers and clients, he was able to exploit functionality in Twitter's public API to log the data from the request to a location he could access, including the stuff that had been encrypted in transit.
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks (x) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it (x) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once (x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( ) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email (x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes (x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( ) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck (x) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free (x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
In the long run, a government monopoly is usually worse than a similar private monopoly, because politicians can directly use it to reward loyalty and punish disloyalty. Contributed to the last campaign? Here's a job for your nephew. Town didn't vote the way you wanted on that annexation issue? No internet for you!
The town seemed to have no problem laying out the infrastructure for this Greenlight project. Did they give themselves zoning clearances they would not have given private companies?
Why does the city have to provide it? I hate hate hate the cable and telco companies, but the long-run result of allowing the feds/state/local govt to "compete" is usually the destruction of the private sector, resulting in the worst kind of monopoly, a government monopoly.
If there are laws that make it difficult for private sector companies to effectively compete with the cable and telcos, then those laws need to change. I completely understand the enthusiasm for these muni networks, because right now, they are providing a better deal than the entrenched oligarchs, but I really worry about the long-run effects of allowing the government to compete with private sector companies.
[the fact that most people don't exceed the caps] indicates that low cap levels aren't needed to keep traffic "reasonable" since it's actually quite low to begin with.
If the few who are exceeding the caps are putting out five times as much traffic as the rest of the crowd, then no, traffic is not low to begin with.
I believe as strongly as anybody that the telcos and cable companies are out to screw the little guy at every opportunity (see the nonsense fees and charges added to every bill, instead of them being honest and including those in the advertised price), but paying for what you use is not a bad concept. In the long run, it will make internet access cheaper as they put more bandwidth in the high traffic areas (the same areas that will make them the most money under this plan), as long as there is viable competition encouraging them to keep the prices in check. I know competition isn't where it should be in ISP-land right now, but the wireless companies are starting to make some significant moves that should shake the scene up.
I'm afraid you misunderstand my dilemma. I do want my kid to get scraped knees and learn how to fail, I just don't want them dealing with the really heavy issues like death and sex until they're old enough to understand what I'm talking about. To me, those issues are the mental equivalent of "things where they might get their arms chopped off"
I really do hope my kid can spend a lot of time unsupervised growing up. My parents retired to the family farm, where I spent a lot of my youth exploring with my cousin without adult guidance, and I survived, and I'm excited about my kid being able to do the same when we go down to visit them.
What's so innocence-shattering about plowing the fields, or even working in the factory, provided it's not a sweatshop? Just because children were put to work earlier and harder in "the old days" doesn't mean they were exposed to life's horrors, it just means they grew up with a better work ethic.
Your other example about getting married young, is/was definitely a problem, but outside of the more primitive tribal cultures, even "olden times folk" wouldn't marry off a nine year old, they'd at least wait until she hit puberty. Not great, but a fourteen year old is at least theoretically capable of handling that kind of pressure.
As far as the freedoms we give them to act on their own, you're right, it's the other way around. I'm talking about what we put in their heads while we have them locked up in their gilded cages, though - a lot of the media we expose them to is highly sexualized and violent, and I feel like I'm just supposed to talk to my daughter until she accepts this as normal, instead of letting her go play in the flowers and be innocent for a while longer.
Breathed's new child's book, Pete & Pickles, features Pete, a lonely pig who vacuums his wife's grave.
Yeah, I'm gonna run right out and buy that for my toddler. Granted, he says it's not directly mentioned in the text, it's just there in the pictures in case you want to point it out to your kids, but still.
I guess I shouldn't be too hard on him, since it's not like he's forcing me to buy the book. I just feel like there's a societal obsession with getting our kids to "mature" as fast as possible, rather than just letting them be kids.
From an email I received this morning from the SpaceX news mailing list:
The static fire took place on Saturday [20 Sep 2008, CA time], as expected, and no major issues came up. However, after a detailed analysis of data, we decided to replace a component in the 2nd stage engine LOX supply line. There is a good chance we would be ok flying as is, but we are being extremely cautious.
This adds a few extra days to the schedule, so the updated launch window estimate is now Sept 28th through Oct 1st [CA time].
Oil money. A large portion of the polygamous population is in middle eastern countries such as Saudi Arabia, Dubai, etc., which are rich with oil money. That much money would tend to lead to better medical care and improved longevity, I would think.
So you're fine with the USPS opening up every package you ship and inspecting its contents to verify you're not shipping anything illegal? They are literally acting as a middle-man by carrying your package to the recipient, and they are profiting from it by charging you for the service.
Did you know that a rogue wave [wikipedia.org] can strike without warning, rapidly sinking an ocean-going vessel and killing everybody on it?
rogue wave doesn't accumulate inside the body and does permanent and irreparable damage like radiation.
FleaPlus' point was that people can die either way. Are you saying the problem isn't that people can die, but how they might die, e.g. cancer versus drowning? That seems like a choice better left to the individual who wants to be an astronaut, not to society.
But in this case, the monkey was trained to use the robotic arm not as a replacement for a missing arm, but as an entirely new arm. That is, even though the apparatus was similar to an existing limb, the brain still had to learn to control a brand new limb independently from the old ones. If nothing else, this means we can give ourselves at least a third arm, and probably more. The brain is fairly malleable, and I bet with training, we could adapt ourselves to a wide variety of "appendage upgrades".
Of course, because of the "abomination before God" factor, nobody in the medical establishment will ask this question officially for years, if ever. But I'm sure some geek amputee will start playing around with modding his new arm/leg/ear, and if he doesn't turn into a bloodthirsty cyborg, or get lynched by fundamentalists, he'll become very rich and famous by enabling us to reach way beyond what we thought our full potential was.
Fair enough, but can't this research be directly applied to my one-man-cyborg-army-of-the-apocalypse idea, even though that's not the PR angle they're going for?
Once this technology advances to the stage where we can get genuine Darth Vader(tm) brand prosthetics after our various lightsaber mishaps, I'm just hoping that some entrepreneurial young Doctor will implant the control chips in perfectly healthy people for a fee, which you could then hook to the hardware of your choice. Of course, this may have to take place in a third world country where the FDA doesn't hold back novel ideas just because they aren't "medically necessary", or because it's an "abomination before God", or some such drivel.
How about custom appendages? If the brain can be trained to independently control a new arm, why couldn't it learn to control a genuine Doctor Octopus suit?
Slashdot Mirror
In the movies, whenever a billionaire builds a nuclear reactor, James Bond usually has to save the world from his evil schemes.
...He just yapped without checking.
Which is just sloppy corporate citizenry.
Except his employer isn't "corporate", they're a U.S. state, funded by taxpayers. As a taxpayer, I demand to know if there are security (or "configuration") holes that have been actively exploited at the institutions my taxes fund, unless the dissemination of such knowledge would hurt an ongoing police investigation. There is no mention in the story of such a request from the police, just a general indication that the police are investigating.
They're probably ramping up the program in response to the Americans' plans to put missile defense batteries in Central Europe.
You're right, we should cancel that plan. Oh wait.
You must be new here.
Apparently just a specific subset, though it would probably be easy to find other websites with vulnerabilities similar to Twitter's. Basically, although he couldn't directly read the encrypted user name and password passed between Twitter servers and clients, he was able to exploit functionality in Twitter's public API to log the data from the request to a location he could access, including the stuff that had been encrypted in transit.
Your post advocates a
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
(x) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
In the long run, a government monopoly is usually worse than a similar private monopoly, because politicians can directly use it to reward loyalty and punish disloyalty. Contributed to the last campaign? Here's a job for your nephew. Town didn't vote the way you wanted on that annexation issue? No internet for you!
The town seemed to have no problem laying out the infrastructure for this Greenlight project. Did they give themselves zoning clearances they would not have given private companies?
Why does the city have to provide it? I hate hate hate the cable and telco companies, but the long-run result of allowing the feds/state/local govt to "compete" is usually the destruction of the private sector, resulting in the worst kind of monopoly, a government monopoly.
If there are laws that make it difficult for private sector companies to effectively compete with the cable and telcos, then those laws need to change. I completely understand the enthusiasm for these muni networks, because right now, they are providing a better deal than the entrenched oligarchs, but I really worry about the long-run effects of allowing the government to compete with private sector companies.
[the fact that most people don't exceed the caps] indicates that low cap levels aren't needed to keep traffic "reasonable" since it's actually quite low to begin with.
If the few who are exceeding the caps are putting out five times as much traffic as the rest of the crowd, then no, traffic is not low to begin with.
I believe as strongly as anybody that the telcos and cable companies are out to screw the little guy at every opportunity (see the nonsense fees and charges added to every bill, instead of them being honest and including those in the advertised price), but paying for what you use is not a bad concept. In the long run, it will make internet access cheaper as they put more bandwidth in the high traffic areas (the same areas that will make them the most money under this plan), as long as there is viable competition encouraging them to keep the prices in check. I know competition isn't where it should be in ISP-land right now, but the wireless companies are starting to make some significant moves that should shake the scene up.
No need to write up a compiler. J-Intercal works fine. You run the .i file through J-Intercal first, then run the generated .class file.
I'm afraid you misunderstand my dilemma. I do want my kid to get scraped knees and learn how to fail, I just don't want them dealing with the really heavy issues like death and sex until they're old enough to understand what I'm talking about. To me, those issues are the mental equivalent of "things where they might get their arms chopped off"
I really do hope my kid can spend a lot of time unsupervised growing up. My parents retired to the family farm, where I spent a lot of my youth exploring with my cousin without adult guidance, and I survived, and I'm excited about my kid being able to do the same when we go down to visit them.
What's so innocence-shattering about plowing the fields, or even working in the factory, provided it's not a sweatshop? Just because children were put to work earlier and harder in "the old days" doesn't mean they were exposed to life's horrors, it just means they grew up with a better work ethic.
Your other example about getting married young, is/was definitely a problem, but outside of the more primitive tribal cultures, even "olden times folk" wouldn't marry off a nine year old, they'd at least wait until she hit puberty. Not great, but a fourteen year old is at least theoretically capable of handling that kind of pressure.
As far as the freedoms we give them to act on their own, you're right, it's the other way around. I'm talking about what we put in their heads while we have them locked up in their gilded cages, though - a lot of the media we expose them to is highly sexualized and violent, and I feel like I'm just supposed to talk to my daughter until she accepts this as normal, instead of letting her go play in the flowers and be innocent for a while longer.
From a photo caption in TFA:
Breathed's new child's book, Pete & Pickles, features Pete, a lonely pig who vacuums his wife's grave.
Yeah, I'm gonna run right out and buy that for my toddler. Granted, he says it's not directly mentioned in the text, it's just there in the pictures in case you want to point it out to your kids, but still.
I guess I shouldn't be too hard on him, since it's not like he's forcing me to buy the book. I just feel like there's a societal obsession with getting our kids to "mature" as fast as possible, rather than just letting them be kids.
From an email I received this morning from the SpaceX news mailing list:
The static fire took place on Saturday [20 Sep 2008, CA time], as expected, and no major issues came up. However, after a detailed analysis of data, we decided to replace a component in the 2nd stage engine LOX supply line. There is a good chance we would be ok flying as is, but we are being extremely cautious.
This adds a few extra days to the schedule, so the updated launch window estimate is now Sept 28th through Oct 1st [CA time].
Oil money. A large portion of the polygamous population is in middle eastern countries such as Saudi Arabia, Dubai, etc., which are rich with oil money. That much money would tend to lead to better medical care and improved longevity, I would think.
How many Dark Knights is that? Burn karma burn!
It is on NASA's site, though. Searching Google for some text from the press release yielded this link.
So you're fine with the USPS opening up every package you ship and inspecting its contents to verify you're not shipping anything illegal? They are literally acting as a middle-man by carrying your package to the recipient, and they are profiting from it by charging you for the service.
FleaPlus' point was that people can die either way. Are you saying the problem isn't that people can die, but how they might die, e.g. cancer versus drowning? That seems like a choice better left to the individual who wants to be an astronaut, not to society.
But in this case, the monkey was trained to use the robotic arm not as a replacement for a missing arm, but as an entirely new arm. That is, even though the apparatus was similar to an existing limb, the brain still had to learn to control a brand new limb independently from the old ones. If nothing else, this means we can give ourselves at least a third arm, and probably more. The brain is fairly malleable, and I bet with training, we could adapt ourselves to a wide variety of "appendage upgrades".
Of course, because of the "abomination before God" factor, nobody in the medical establishment will ask this question officially for years, if ever. But I'm sure some geek amputee will start playing around with modding his new arm/leg/ear, and if he doesn't turn into a bloodthirsty cyborg, or get lynched by fundamentalists, he'll become very rich and famous by enabling us to reach way beyond what we thought our full potential was.
Fair enough, but can't this research be directly applied to my one-man-cyborg-army-of-the-apocalypse idea, even though that's not the PR angle they're going for?
Once this technology advances to the stage where we can get genuine Darth Vader(tm) brand prosthetics after our various lightsaber mishaps, I'm just hoping that some entrepreneurial young Doctor will implant the control chips in perfectly healthy people for a fee, which you could then hook to the hardware of your choice. Of course, this may have to take place in a third world country where the FDA doesn't hold back novel ideas just because they aren't "medically necessary", or because it's an "abomination before God", or some such drivel.
How about custom appendages? If the brain can be trained to independently control a new arm, why couldn't it learn to control a genuine Doctor Octopus suit?