And how do you expecto t "anonymize" yourself in a P2P? You can anonymize the searchs (the README says something about proxys) but for downloading the data, how could you be "anonymous"
Someone came up with one way to get around this. Basically, you setup a P2P network where everyone is only allowed to download from peers.
Let's take a simple, single-path example. Computer A connects to computer B and requests TinyLinux.iso. A doesn't know if B *owns* the file or not, or is getting it from computer C.
B doesn't know if the file is destined for computer A or not... A may be requesting the file for some other user connected to A.
In this way, one could track who is connected to each peer, but cannot establish with certainty if the B is the source of the file that is being sent or is merely a link. Meanwhile, one cannot establish with certainty that A is the destination of the file or merely a link.
While it doesn't ensure true privacy (your peers know your IP address), it does make the culpability harder to pin on particular users... if I never store any part of a file transfering through my system, did I ever fully "steal" it?
The downside to this is, of course, you may not get optimal path downloads for a sourcefile AND you're limited to the bandwidth of the weakest link in the chain.
But, like an extension of the "Kevin Bacon" game, if you tell everyone you know to tell Kevin, "Love the movies," and they tell everyone they know to pass the message along... eventually, it *will* get to Kevin, but the source won't be known anymore. Kevin just has to tell the person that told him, "Thanks," and so on back to the original source for the communication to happen effectively. This is also how this P2P would work with multi-path (to aid in download speeds).
Ummm... what about the (growing ever ubiquitous) cell phone?
You might make the argument that they suck in areas where there's poor reception... but then, you expect these same areas to have kick-ass broadband that you can readily access for cheap?
And with a cell phone, you're getting data services that are getting faster and faster all the time.
UMTS is around the corner with Docomo offerings soon after.
Soon the question might be "why have a wired connection at all?" instead of "which broadband/VoIP combination gives me the best price?"
From the article, it would seem this guy's argument _could_ be read like this:
"Apple is infringing on my rights because the format I purchased my music is tied tightly to iPod. Since I purchased the rights to the music, I should be able to play it on other devices that are similar (to an iPod)."
This sounds to me like a similar argument one who purchased a bunch of cassette tapes of music is all pissed-off because he can't put those tapes into boombox with a CD player in it.
"Cassette-producing company is infringing on my rights because the format I purchased my music is tied tightly to a boombox with a casette player. Since I purchased the rights to the music, I should be able to play it on other boomboxes that are similar (except have a CD player instead of a tape player)."
Anybody else read it that way, or do you not see the similarity between encoding standards and physical media?
I mean, it seems like he wants iTMS to provide alternative copies of the music he purchased (with the encoding/DRM Apple uses) for play on other "similar" players (ie, ones that don't support the Apple DRM, but have similar physical features in that they are compact and have harddrives).
That means learn how to express yourself in a way that others will understand; tailor the message for your audience so they'll "get it."
And learn how to listen to what's being said; others may not be adept at expressing themselves, so if you can learn how to get to "what they mean" instead of just "what they said," you'll be much better off.
And the cool thing is, these skills will carry you through your career, no matter which field you study.
If I recall correctly, the #1 way to prevent something from getting stolen is to simply keep it out of sight. That means, if you have your laptop in the backseat of your car (instead of more intelligently in the trunk), throwing a towel over it will work just as effectively as this pizza box. Yet ANOTHER use for your towel from HHGG. 8)
Nah... this thing has gimmick written all over it.
One would think that if you were the RIAA or MPAA and had employed a company to polute P2P networks with trojans, you'd have the trojaned files pop-up windows with anti-piracy statements instead of "punishing" people with advertising.
Since I use long-disatnce service so infrequently, it makes the most financial sense.
Just make sure your phone card isn't one of those that expires or slowly loses value either over time or with infrequent use; I got bit by that "expires on such-n-such date" one once.
Out of curiosity... what would stop Microsoft from developing the "next" IE as an extension of Firefox made with proprietary MS extensions (ie, add ActiveX and such into it)?
I would imagine the design challenge would be less to do it that way than to implement new features in the current IE codebase.
Or, is it because IE is so heavily integrated into the Microsoft OS that it would make doing this unrealistic? Or is it a matter of pride that doesn't allow them to see Firefox/Mozilla as a real threat?
In any case, I don't believe they think that Mozilla isn't a threat; they didn't get to the position they're in by being stupid with competitors.
Now that the Venezuelan technology powerhouse has jumped on this bandwagon, I think the rest of the world will stand up and finally take notice of this Open Source thing!
Yes, but users don't always want to learn. The old saying "ignorance is bliss" is true.
More to the point, once you put a "trusted and automatic" mechanism in place, it won't take long before that gets exploited such that scammers will have people falsely believing they are safe. I think that situation is infinitely worse.
As my ju-jutsu sensei used to say, the fundamental problem is that people want to live in a constant state of "condition green" (everything is reasonably safe, except for the odd natural disaster) instead of the more realistic "condition yellow" (one must be on alert because there may be danger around).
The media promotes "condition red" (we're under constant attack).
Some people might think that by hitting both extremes you wind up somewhere in the middle. For computer safety and safe internet usage, that doesn't appear to be the case. Instead, you have those who are either overly paranoid or underly paranoid.
I fear that the media push towards "you should be overly paranoid" has Joe Average User swinging back the other way: "I want to have an experience that is always safe that I don't have to think or worry about 'bad people'."
And despite the fact that that situation can never exist, people are still trying to satiate that desire by coming up with these "automatic protections."
While at first blush this toolbar looks like a good idea, I fear it will ultimately do more harm than good.
I checked out the page and the concept seems pretty neat -- kinda like painting on your own faraday cage.
Which is to say, this isn't much more difficult to do than stapling up wire mesh. Heck, if one puts up wall-paper, then putting wire-mesh behind it shouldn't be too much more difficult and would be much cheaper than this "paint."
Or, go the extra step: what happens when one tires of the faraday cage and wants to allow signals in from the outside/let signal out? What would one do THEN?!?
But as others have pointed out: if one is so paranoid about having their wireless getting broken into/"stolen" and they're willing to put this uber-expensive paint on all their walls, maybe they'd be better off putting the same money into running physical wiring instead.
Only problem with in-line scanning is the time/resource it takes to do it.
While great for low-volume mail servers, you really need a beefy box to enable you to have enough MTA threads for handling the initial SMTP communication, threads for doing the virus scanning/spam filtering, and CPU to do it in the time allowed by the SMTP standard (I *think* it is 180 seconds... probably enough time).
I don't know if there's an advantage to not accepting virus-laden mail as one can biff it "off line" without inviting more infection attempts (ie, after the message is accepted by the transport).
But, there's plenty of good reason to do spam filtering at that point: reject the message before you even store it, so your server doesn't even have to bother with trying to deliver to forged bounce addresses.
Last problem with that, however, is attack through backup MX host, but... I'm starting to digress.
(That's not for the author, but for others who might want to learn more about plugging his suggestion into their mail server, or upgrading to an MTA that supports it).
Well, this isn't necessarily the case in your scenario because one could always argue that you wouldn't have done it had you not authenticated your boss in the first place.
What it really protects you from is the case where, later, your boss forges messages and says he sent them TO you... or forges messages he says came FROM you; in either case you can claim that the conversation had already ended and it was indeed a forgery by someone else because the key was then openly available.
It is a subtle, but important, difference.
Ultimately, all that you both can say is that while you were having your conversation, you both knew you were talking to the correct person and nobody else was listening in. After you agree the conversation is over, then all records of that conversation become an easily taintable source... nobody can make claim about who said what and when. It basically assigns a discrete time element to the verifiability of the conversation.
It seems to ensure that any service that can be started is started as soon as is possible, and that any dependent services don't start until requisite services have completed starting. That was written in September of 2003.
You can immediately sort possible-spam by whether it offers an unsubscribe option. If it doesn't have it, it's definitely spam.
Strike that... reverse it.
Mail that has an unsubscribe link is more likely to be commercial solicitation than it is to be, say, a message from a bud. Most of the heuristics I've seen use "Unsubscribe link" as a positive indicator of spamness.
We have a similar policy at work... and it is applied (with random expire times) on over 40 different server boxes.
Since our dev environment is on a Windows platform, I use Password Safe and have it generate/store new passwords for me for all of the production machines.
Sure, it is a pain because I have to fire it up and put in my one secure password to get to the other passwords. But, at least it limits my security exposure to one bastion host (the shared drive on the LAN, so my encrypted password database is backed-up).
You're not getting the basic principle: it's less costly to "save" everything (by not deleting it) than to spend time deciding what will be valuable in the unknown future.
I hear you. I suppose this is partly the reason behind gmail's "no real deletion" policy; all that information may have some data mining potential for the future.
My point was that so long as a decision can be made (even loosely) up front, before there gets to be too much volume, then it helps to cut the clutter. Your point is "there is no such thing as clutter... what might seem useless today may have a use in the future." The real difference in our POV, I suppose, is I take the risk that I won't need it again for the trade-off of having less to manage today. I guess I take the "every man" view on it: will "Mom" need all that email 5 years from now? How many people have sophisticated data mining needs? I won't deny the "packrat with a purpose" argument; I just disagree that that describes the "every man" issue. 8)
Meanwhile, how am I drowning in a short stack of CDs and a couple of DLTs?
In this case, you're not drowning in the physical media, but you must admit that (without a proper indexing system), you'll be searching through CD's and tapes "one at a time" until you find the pertinent information. You're "drowning" in a sea of useless information.
I mean, even if it was all on a live drive someplace that could easily/readily be searched (with a google-esque query), then you'd have more of an argument for keeping tons of stuff, but would still be keeping a lot of cruft around.
Perhaps it is important to clarify something in my point: I'm not against archiving "important" information... just against archiving "all" information.
Despite what we like to believe, the nature of information is that its usefulness is transient. To make a thought-experiment out of it: let's say I got a new document on the nature of atoms. And let's say that each time there's an "improvement" in the theory, I get a new document about it. Let's say that the documents follow the Atomic Structure Timeline. What I will have is a mess of information and misinformation intermingled in my knowledge base. I won't have a clear representation of what is currently considered "true."
And with all that documentation sitting around my storage units, I still have the option of re-obtaining that information elsewhere. So... why should I cloud my current "important information" collection when historical data is A) Irrelevant and B) Easily re-obtained?
Does everyone need a complete copy of the Library of Congresss?
What does it cost, in terms of management, energy, "wetware" (for tracking purposes), and equipment to maintain a redundant storage place? And you're not descriminating between useful/useless information.
You're telling me that spam from 2 years ago has some relevance to you today? Yet you'll keep saving it, migrating it, and cataloging it?
That's why I have every email I've sent/received for decades.
Ummm... then you must have a ton of crap you'll never reference again just so you can have the option later if there's a "need."
There's some value to archiving email that contains something useful. I'm regularly cleaning stuff out of my inbox and archiving things that are important. Of course, the definition of "important" is per individual. For me, that's correspondence with my wife (I'm sentimental), "how to do X" type email from experts that isn't documented someplace on the web, funny stuff (yeah, I know...), or anything else I'd have a hard time looking up again.
I don't keep ads; short notes from friends that read, "Yeah, let's get together on Sunday at 11;" or stuff I know I can find again (do you really need to keep that explanation of how to setup postfix if you can remember to look at postfix.org or search on google?).
What does the effort of cleaning out the inbox net me? When I do need to search for information, I have a limited subset of places to look before I need to expand that search to a general google query. And the "cleaning" part takes almost no time as I have an initial acid test for stuff I receive, then I review stuff I felt was important every couple of months to either file away someplace that will make it easier for me to find again or delete it.
Honestly... how much of that email from "decades ago" do you still read? How much email do you have that has important links that are now completely dead? Aren't you in danger of drowning useful information in a sea of crud?!?
Postfix now supports content filters. These allow you to run the message through a filter BEFORE it is accepted.
I've modified an excellent transparent proxy to do just that: it checks a MySQL database for the existence of a reject address and gives a 550 response if found.
The modification is listed at the bottom and seems to work pretty well for me. The script can be modified to block on any particular criteria (sender, receiver, etc).
For computer use, WHO CARES which format gets adopted? Personally, I'd go for the one that lasts longer and has better error recovery (ie, I don't have to worry about my 50G of data going bad too quickly).
But for the consumer movie market, I'm just about ready to give up on this whole thing. One has to ask: do you want to keep buying movies over and over as a new format comes out? VHS? Then DVD? Then Blu-Ray? We keep updating... jumping as a new format comes out. And part of the reason they keep coming out with a new format (outside of the obvious marketing benefits listed above... resale of the same art again and again) is to override pirating concerns.
I give up. You want control? Great. Give me video on demand so I can watch what I want when I want and pay a nominal fee to do so. Then they can upgrade the quality of the copy "behind the scenes" to their heart's content.
I fear if successful, then we will see this a lot more. It could be a big win for the companies, the more people to try to get ipod, the less leads that they are to go around, meaning many people won't fill their quota, meaning less ipod the adverising company has to give out (but they still get the same amount or more leads, with the less cost!).
As part of my research, I did happen upon someone who had explained the math of it pretty well here. (Please note, this isn't me, and I'm not affiliated with that site at all).
But, to comment on some of your other thoughts:
...when playing online games people are asking others to help them get ipods.
You're absolutely correct that this is an abuse of the original concept of viral marketing, and moreso, part of the effect of "annonimity" on the internet. I believe the original intent of viral marketing was to get people to ask their friends and family, really people that they know, to try offers. It would be that bond that makes the sale. However, people have taken the megaphone-internet and started shouting their message to anyone/everyone that they can reach... and with the internet, that's a whole mess of people.
This is the same thing that ticks people off about SPAM. I mean, if it was just one jerk sending email, it'd be easy enough to ignore him. But once thousands and thousands start doing it, it becomes more than just a frustrating endevour; it becomes a real hinderance to the use and enjoyment of the network.
So... what's the solution to this (these) problems? I think at this stage people are still upset over having to deal with anything (basically, the whole "why should it be MY problem when it shouldn't be a problem at all?!?" view). So, they tend to just get angry about it. Once we're past that, what can we do about it? Education? Regulation?
Assuming the collective attitude is that regulation is "taking away freedom," we must turn to education. So the question then becomes: what are you doing to help educate those around you without falling into the same "spam-trap" that gets one irritated in the first place?
There's a serious problem with agile methodology and outsourcing (I didn't see any articles on Economist.com related to outsourcing, but may have missed it as I gave it only a cursory look).
Large and unwieldy projects benefiting from agile methodologies? Yeah... when you have easy communication between the "customers" (business partners) and your IT staff.
How does that happen when your developers are thousands of miles away, in a different timezone, with a totally different culture, and don't speak your native language?
Slashdot Mirror
And how do you expecto t "anonymize" yourself in a P2P? You can anonymize the searchs (the README says something about proxys) but for downloading the data, how could you be "anonymous"
Someone came up with one way to get around this. Basically, you setup a P2P network where everyone is only allowed to download from peers.
Let's take a simple, single-path example. Computer A connects to computer B and requests TinyLinux.iso.
A doesn't know if B *owns* the file or not, or is getting it from computer C.
B doesn't know if the file is destined for computer A or not... A may be requesting the file for some other user connected to A.
In this way, one could track who is connected to each peer, but cannot establish with certainty if the B is the source of the file that is being sent or is merely a link. Meanwhile, one cannot establish with certainty that A is the destination of the file or merely a link.
While it doesn't ensure true privacy (your peers know your IP address), it does make the culpability harder to pin on particular users... if I never store any part of a file transfering through my system, did I ever fully "steal" it?
The downside to this is, of course, you may not get optimal path downloads for a sourcefile AND you're limited to the bandwidth of the weakest link in the chain.
But, like an extension of the "Kevin Bacon" game, if you tell everyone you know to tell Kevin, "Love the movies," and they tell everyone they know to pass the message along... eventually, it *will* get to Kevin, but the source won't be known anymore. Kevin just has to tell the person that told him, "Thanks," and so on back to the original source for the communication to happen effectively. This is also how this P2P would work with multi-path (to aid in download speeds).
Ummm... what about the (growing ever ubiquitous) cell phone?
You might make the argument that they suck in areas where there's poor reception... but then, you expect these same areas to have kick-ass broadband that you can readily access for cheap?
And with a cell phone, you're getting data services that are getting faster and faster all the time.
UMTS is around the corner with Docomo offerings soon after.
Soon the question might be "why have a wired connection at all?" instead of "which broadband/VoIP combination gives me the best price?"
From the article, it would seem this guy's argument _could_ be read like this:
"Apple is infringing on my rights because the format I purchased my music is tied tightly to iPod. Since I purchased the rights to the music, I should be able to play it on other devices that are similar (to an iPod)."
This sounds to me like a similar argument one who purchased a bunch of cassette tapes of music is all pissed-off because he can't put those tapes into boombox with a CD player in it.
"Cassette-producing company is infringing on my rights because the format I purchased my music is tied tightly to a boombox with a casette player. Since I purchased the rights to the music, I should be able to play it on other boomboxes that are similar (except have a CD player instead of a tape player)."
Anybody else read it that way, or do you not see the similarity between encoding standards and physical media?
I mean, it seems like he wants iTMS to provide alternative copies of the music he purchased (with the encoding/DRM Apple uses) for play on other "similar" players (ie, ones that don't support the Apple DRM, but have similar physical features in that they are compact and have harddrives).
Learn how to communicate.
That means learn how to express yourself in a way that others will understand; tailor the message for your audience so they'll "get it."
And learn how to listen to what's being said; others may not be adept at expressing themselves, so if you can learn how to get to "what they mean" instead of just "what they said," you'll be much better off.
And the cool thing is, these skills will carry you through your career, no matter which field you study.
If I recall correctly, the #1 way to prevent something from getting stolen is to simply keep it out of sight. That means, if you have your laptop in the backseat of your car (instead of more intelligently in the trunk), throwing a towel over it will work just as effectively as this pizza box. Yet ANOTHER use for your towel from HHGG. 8)
Nah... this thing has gimmick written all over it.
My guess is you'd see NetBSD for NintendoDS before a linux variant.
then I realized they had mounted a camera on the thing, thus ensuring a level of "legitimacy" to the geekness of the project.
One would think that if you were the RIAA or MPAA and had employed a company to polute P2P networks with trojans, you'd have the trojaned files pop-up windows with anti-piracy statements instead of "punishing" people with advertising.
Since I use long-disatnce service so infrequently, it makes the most financial sense.
Just make sure your phone card isn't one of those that expires or slowly loses value either over time or with infrequent use; I got bit by that "expires on such-n-such date" one once.
Out of curiosity... what would stop Microsoft from developing the "next" IE as an extension of Firefox made with proprietary MS extensions (ie, add ActiveX and such into it)?
I would imagine the design challenge would be less to do it that way than to implement new features in the current IE codebase.
Or, is it because IE is so heavily integrated into the Microsoft OS that it would make doing this unrealistic? Or is it a matter of pride that doesn't allow them to see Firefox/Mozilla as a real threat?
In any case, I don't believe they think that Mozilla isn't a threat; they didn't get to the position they're in by being stupid with competitors.
Now that the Venezuelan technology powerhouse has jumped on this bandwagon, I think the rest of the world will stand up and finally take notice of this Open Source thing!
Yes, but users don't always want to learn. The old saying "ignorance is bliss" is true.
More to the point, once you put a "trusted and automatic" mechanism in place, it won't take long before that gets exploited such that scammers will have people falsely believing they are safe. I think that situation is infinitely worse.
As my ju-jutsu sensei used to say, the fundamental problem is that people want to live in a constant state of "condition green" (everything is reasonably safe, except for the odd natural disaster) instead of the more realistic "condition yellow" (one must be on alert because there may be danger around).
The media promotes "condition red" (we're under constant attack).
Some people might think that by hitting both extremes you wind up somewhere in the middle. For computer safety and safe internet usage, that doesn't appear to be the case. Instead, you have those who are either overly paranoid or underly paranoid.
I fear that the media push towards "you should be overly paranoid" has Joe Average User swinging back the other way: "I want to have an experience that is always safe that I don't have to think or worry about 'bad people'."
And despite the fact that that situation can never exist, people are still trying to satiate that desire by coming up with these "automatic protections."
While at first blush this toolbar looks like a good idea, I fear it will ultimately do more harm than good.
I checked out the page and the concept seems pretty neat -- kinda like painting on your own faraday cage.
Which is to say, this isn't much more difficult to do than stapling up wire mesh. Heck, if one puts up wall-paper, then putting wire-mesh behind it shouldn't be too much more difficult and would be much cheaper than this "paint."
Or, go the extra step: what happens when one tires of the faraday cage and wants to allow signals in from the outside/let signal out? What would one do THEN?!?
But as others have pointed out: if one is so paranoid about having their wireless getting broken into/"stolen" and they're willing to put this uber-expensive paint on all their walls, maybe they'd be better off putting the same money into running physical wiring instead.
Only problem with in-line scanning is the time/resource it takes to do it.
While great for low-volume mail servers, you really need a beefy box to enable you to have enough MTA threads for handling the initial SMTP communication, threads for doing the virus scanning/spam filtering, and CPU to do it in the time allowed by the SMTP standard (I *think* it is 180 seconds... probably enough time).
I don't know if there's an advantage to not accepting virus-laden mail as one can biff it "off line" without inviting more infection attempts (ie, after the message is accepted by the transport).
But, there's plenty of good reason to do spam filtering at that point: reject the message before you even store it, so your server doesn't even have to bother with trying to deliver to forged bounce addresses.
Last problem with that, however, is attack through backup MX host, but... I'm starting to digress.
Postfix has great integration for smtp proxies with their Before Queue Content Filter.
(That's not for the author, but for others who might want to learn more about plugging his suggestion into their mail server, or upgrading to an MTA that supports it).
Well, this isn't necessarily the case in your scenario because one could always argue that you wouldn't have done it had you not authenticated your boss in the first place.
What it really protects you from is the case where, later, your boss forges messages and says he sent them TO you... or forges messages he says came FROM you; in either case you can claim that the conversation had already ended and it was indeed a forgery by someone else because the key was then openly available.
It is a subtle, but important, difference.
Ultimately, all that you both can say is that while you were having your conversation, you both knew you were talking to the correct person and nobody else was listening in. After you agree the conversation is over, then all records of that conversation become an easily taintable source... nobody can make claim about who said what and when. It basically assigns a discrete time element to the verifiability of the conversation.
IBM wrote a white paper on using Make to parallelize the boot process on linux
It seems to ensure that any service that can be started is started as soon as is possible, and that any dependent services don't start until requisite services have completed starting. That was written in September of 2003.
You can immediately sort possible-spam by whether it offers an unsubscribe option. If it doesn't have it, it's definitely spam.
Strike that... reverse it.
Mail that has an unsubscribe link is more likely to be commercial solicitation than it is to be, say, a message from a bud. Most of the heuristics I've seen use "Unsubscribe link" as a positive indicator of spamness.
We have a similar policy at work... and it is applied (with random expire times) on over 40 different server boxes.
Since our dev environment is on a Windows platform, I use Password Safe and have it generate/store new passwords for me for all of the production machines.
Sure, it is a pain because I have to fire it up and put in my one secure password to get to the other passwords. But, at least it limits my security exposure to one bastion host (the shared drive on the LAN, so my encrypted password database is backed-up).
You're not getting the basic principle: it's less costly to "save" everything (by not deleting it) than to spend time deciding what will be valuable in the unknown future.
I hear you. I suppose this is partly the reason behind gmail's "no real deletion" policy; all that information may have some data mining potential for the future.
My point was that so long as a decision can be made (even loosely) up front, before there gets to be too much volume, then it helps to cut the clutter. Your point is "there is no such thing as clutter... what might seem useless today may have a use in the future." The real difference in our POV, I suppose, is I take the risk that I won't need it again for the trade-off of having less to manage today. I guess I take the "every man" view on it: will "Mom" need all that email 5 years from now? How many people have sophisticated data mining needs? I won't deny the "packrat with a purpose" argument; I just disagree that that describes the "every man" issue. 8)
Meanwhile, how am I drowning in a short stack of CDs and a couple of DLTs?
In this case, you're not drowning in the physical media, but you must admit that (without a proper indexing system), you'll be searching through CD's and tapes "one at a time" until you find the pertinent information. You're "drowning" in a sea of useless information.
I mean, even if it was all on a live drive someplace that could easily/readily be searched (with a google-esque query), then you'd have more of an argument for keeping tons of stuff, but would still be keeping a lot of cruft around.
Perhaps it is important to clarify something in my point: I'm not against archiving "important" information... just against archiving "all" information.
Despite what we like to believe, the nature of information is that its usefulness is transient. To make a thought-experiment out of it: let's say I got a new document on the nature of atoms. And let's say that each time there's an "improvement" in the theory, I get a new document about it. Let's say that the documents follow the Atomic Structure Timeline. What I will have is a mess of information and misinformation intermingled in my knowledge base. I won't have a clear representation of what is currently considered "true."
And with all that documentation sitting around my storage units, I still have the option of re-obtaining that information elsewhere. So... why should I cloud my current "important information" collection when historical data is A) Irrelevant and B) Easily re-obtained?
Does everyone need a complete copy of the Library of Congresss?
What does it cost, in terms of management, energy, "wetware" (for tracking purposes), and equipment to maintain a redundant storage place? And you're not descriminating between useful/useless information.
You're telling me that spam from 2 years ago has some relevance to you today? Yet you'll keep saving it, migrating it, and cataloging it?
I don't see the purpose in that.
That's why I have every email I've sent/received for decades.
Ummm... then you must have a ton of crap you'll never reference again just so you can have the option later if there's a "need."
There's some value to archiving email that contains something useful. I'm regularly cleaning stuff out of my inbox and archiving things that are important. Of course, the definition of "important" is per individual. For me, that's correspondence with my wife (I'm sentimental), "how to do X" type email from experts that isn't documented someplace on the web, funny stuff (yeah, I know...), or anything else I'd have a hard time looking up again.
I don't keep ads; short notes from friends that read, "Yeah, let's get together on Sunday at 11;" or stuff I know I can find again (do you really need to keep that explanation of how to setup postfix if you can remember to look at postfix.org or search on google?).
What does the effort of cleaning out the inbox net me? When I do need to search for information, I have a limited subset of places to look before I need to expand that search to a general google query. And the "cleaning" part takes almost no time as I have an initial acid test for stuff I receive, then I review stuff I felt was important every couple of months to either file away someplace that will make it easier for me to find again or delete it.
Honestly... how much of that email from "decades ago" do you still read?
How much email do you have that has important links that are now completely dead?
Aren't you in danger of drowning useful information in a sea of crud?!?
Postfix now supports content filters. These allow you to run the message through a filter BEFORE it is accepted.
I've modified an excellent transparent proxy to do just that: it checks a MySQL database for the existence of a reject address and gives a 550 response if found.
You can find smtpprox here
The modification is listed at the bottom and seems to work pretty well for me. The script can be modified to block on any particular criteria (sender, receiver, etc).
For computer use, WHO CARES which format gets adopted? Personally, I'd go for the one that lasts longer and has better error recovery (ie, I don't have to worry about my 50G of data going bad too quickly).
But for the consumer movie market, I'm just about ready to give up on this whole thing. One has to ask: do you want to keep buying movies over and over as a new format comes out? VHS? Then DVD? Then Blu-Ray? We keep updating... jumping as a new format comes out. And part of the reason they keep coming out with a new format (outside of the obvious marketing benefits listed above... resale of the same art again and again) is to override pirating concerns.
I give up. You want control? Great. Give me video on demand so I can watch what I want when I want and pay a nominal fee to do so. Then they can upgrade the quality of the copy "behind the scenes" to their heart's content.
I fear if successful, then we will see this a lot more. It could be a big win for the companies, the more people to try to get ipod, the less leads that they are to go around, meaning many people won't fill their quota, meaning less ipod the adverising company has to give out (but they still get the same amount or more leads, with the less cost!).
...when playing online games people are asking others to help them get ipods.
As part of my research, I did happen upon someone who had explained the math of it pretty well here. (Please note, this isn't me, and I'm not affiliated with that site at all).
But, to comment on some of your other thoughts:
You're absolutely correct that this is an abuse of the original concept of viral marketing, and moreso, part of the effect of "annonimity" on the internet. I believe the original intent of viral marketing was to get people to ask their friends and family, really people that they know, to try offers. It would be that bond that makes the sale. However, people have taken the megaphone-internet and started shouting their message to anyone/everyone that they can reach... and with the internet, that's a whole mess of people.
This is the same thing that ticks people off about SPAM. I mean, if it was just one jerk sending email, it'd be easy enough to ignore him. But once thousands and thousands start doing it, it becomes more than just a frustrating endevour; it becomes a real hinderance to the use and enjoyment of the network.
So... what's the solution to this (these) problems? I think at this stage people are still upset over having to deal with anything (basically, the whole "why should it be MY problem when it shouldn't be a problem at all?!?" view). So, they tend to just get angry about it. Once we're past that, what can we do about it? Education? Regulation?
Assuming the collective attitude is that regulation is "taking away freedom," we must turn to education. So the question then becomes: what are you doing to help educate those around you without falling into the same "spam-trap" that gets one irritated in the first place?
There's a serious problem with agile methodology and outsourcing (I didn't see any articles on Economist.com related to outsourcing, but may have missed it as I gave it only a cursory look).
Large and unwieldy projects benefiting from agile methodologies? Yeah... when you have easy communication between the "customers" (business partners) and your IT staff.
How does that happen when your developers are thousands of miles away, in a different timezone, with a totally different culture, and don't speak your native language?