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 ( ) 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 (X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists (X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it (X) 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 ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) 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:
(X) 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 ( ) 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 (X) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually (X) Sending email should be free ( ) 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!
Do you mean that wireless providers in Europe are explicitly required to unlock your phone (if you ask, for some fee)? Or that they're explicitly required to provide software updates for unlocked phones? Otherwise, I don't see how the situation is any different in the US than it is in Europe.
In the US, you're perfectly free to unlock your phone. In fact, there's a specific exemption to the DMCA [PDF] allowing cell phone handset unlocking. You certainly can unlock GSM phones here, or buy unlocked phones (I've done both).
So, are wireless providers required to explicitly offer an unlocking service, or just to not arrest you if you do unlock your phone? The latter is essentially the case in the US.
Sorry, I was a bit obtuse. Cheny's "One Percent Doctrine" comes from this quote of his:
If there's a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It's not about our analysis... It's about our response.
That is, if you think there's a 1% chance that [really bad thing] will happen, you should take it as a given when deciding what to do about it. I just find it really interesting that the group who want to over-react to the threat of terrorism and the group who want to over-react to the threat of global warming tend to violently disagree on the other's issues, while using the same logic.
I agree that, all other things being equal, reduced emissions are a good thing. And things are already moving in that direction, thanks in no small part to economic pressure from rising energy costs. But the costs from the government reduced emissions would be enormous -- both from an economic standpoint, and a philosophical cost in reduced freedom. Ironically, not unlike the cost in freedom coming from the war on terror.
I realize the parallel isn't exact, and, like I said, I'm not trying to troll. Just thinking out loud.
Given that the consequences range from beneficial to dire, the right approach is caution: We should act as though the most likely of dire consequences will transpire, and change our behaviour accordingly. To ignore a *potential* threat that we don't or can't understand ('can't' because of the politics involved).
So, not to be (too much of) a troll, but what are your thoughts on Cheney's "One Percent Doctrine" (as described in Ron Suskind's book)? Does the same reasoning apply - we should assume the worst case, and act accordingly? If not, why not?
Personally, I'm more of a fan of Calvin Coolidge's philosophy: "When you see ten problems rolling down the road, if you don't do anything, nine of them will roll into a ditch before they get to you."
Actually, as someone who works with a bunch of chatty people, I've found that earplugs do a pretty lousy job at blocking out conversations.
The problem is that the best earplugs you can buy at your local drug store only attenuate noise by ~32 decibels. But a typical conversation, at close range, is ~60 decibels. You wind up just blocking out all the low-level background noise (computer fans, air conditioning,...), leaving the voices even more distinct.
I've found the best solution for me is a pair of headphones that seal pretty well, combined with music. The sealed headphones drop everything, so the music can be much quieter and still drown them out.
I'm actually thinking of picking up a pair of Shure E2C earbuds for just this purpose. Has anyone got any experience with them? Will they do what I want?
Do a search in Thomas for HR 6, which is the bill in question. The section changing the daylight saving time date is Sec. 111. But... as far as I can tell, that section isn't in the final version passed by the senate (referred to as "H.R.6.EAS"). It also isn't in the "Public Print" of the bill (which you can find here.
I'm not an expert of legislative technicalities, but it could very well be that we're all getting worked up about nothing. I guess we'll have to wait until Thomas posts the final version of the bill.
I used a "free" wireless hotspot at Panera today, and I enjoyed it immensely. That Texas wants to outlaw such things is stupid and interferes with the functioning of the market -- I *do*, as a result of today's experience, prefer going to Panera now over other coffee shops and similarly-environed businesses. Why Texan regulators think they need to get their greedy mitts around the neck of this wonderful emerging technology is beyond me, although I have plenty of suspicions and could develop some conspiracy theories...
They don't! They just want to block government provided free wireless, not all free wireless. From the rest of your post, I have to assume you think that's a good thing.
Read the article. They don't want to ban "broadband collectives," or whatever term you'd like to use, where a group of people decide to pool their money and provide broadband to themselves (or to whomever they like). What they do want to ban is governments collecting taxes, and using that to fund broadband.
The difference is, at least to my mind, pretty clear. In the first situation, if I don't want to participate (I might have my own arrangements through a different group, or through a commercial company, or I might just not want broadband), I don't have to. In the second situation, the government is going to take my money to pay for broadband whether I want it or not. This is clearly anti-competitive. After all, the cable company (or a private co-op) has to convince people that they should pay them money for broadband service. The government doesn't have to convince anyone that they should give them money. They'll take it, in the form of taxes, whether I want their service or not.
If you think that a collective arrangement is a good way to do broadband (and, incidentally, I'd agree with you), set it up and convince people to pay for it. But don't force people who don't want it to pay for it for you.
IANAL, but, historically there has always been a significant legal distinction between reverse-enginnering in a "clean" setting for the purpose of interoperatbility and copyright infringement. See, for example, Phoenix Technology's revese engineering of IBM's BIOS. This principle has been upheld recently; the DMCA even has a specific exemption for reverse engineering for interoperability.
I'm not familiar with the specifics of what mldonkey is doing, but I suspect that the answer to your question lies in this concept. Certainly it holds for gaim and trillian.
To the anti-p2p crowd:
You people make me sick. You know in your heart-of-hearts that there's plenty of legitimate uses for this technology, and yet you still try to paint p2p users with the broad brush of illegality. Go bust the kids trading Brittney tracks! Leave us the tools to easily distribute legitimate large files (Linux distros, Project Gutenberg archives, etc), you dark-minded fucks.
I'm sympathetic to your point, but this seems to be the wrong discussion to be making it in. Check out clause 7.b. of the eXeem license agreement. Users of the software agree not to redistribute or modify it. What are the people who made eXeem lite doing? Redistributing a modified version. Even if you use the software only to distribute 100% legitimate, public domain or freely redistributable stuff, you're still commiting copyright infringement by using eXeem Lite!
Sorry - it's Information Theory. There are 4.7 bits of entropy (in an information theory sense) in a natural number chosen with equal probablilities between 1 and 26. Hence, the statement that there's a key size of 4.7 bits.
To see what that means, suppose we were had an alphabet of 1000 different letters. It'd take much longer to brute-force reverse the cipher and discover the key. And, even more time if we had an alphabet of 1 million letters. (The key sizes in these cases would be 9.97 bits and 19.93 bits.)
Of course, there are much better ways to break this sort of simple cipher than brute force. But, I hope that gives you some idea what the key size means.
Firstly, I think you have misunderstood what "adding extra bits" (enlarging the key) means --- at least in this context. In my (silly) example, the key had the length of 1 (number). Notice there is no bits, since the atomic unit in this encryption unit is letters.
Not really. The key size is a measure of the number of different ways a given algorithm can encrypt an input. In the case of a simple caesar cipher (shifting each letter by a fixed amount), there are 26 different possible keys. Therefore, the keysize in bits is log_2(26) = 4.7 bits.
Sorry for nitpicking, but I am a bit of a (strictly amatuer) crypto guy.
I don't know if you've seen this yet, but its another essay that's similar in feeling. Stephenson follows the story of building a trans-oceanic fiber link (with many interesting digressions). It first appeared in Wired in December 1996:
Microsoft does run a site called "The Spoke," at http://www.thespoke.com. I'll admit that I don't know anyone who uses it (and it's badly broken in Firefox), but it's got Blogs and "Copyright Microsoft 2004" at the bottom. So it's not quite fair to say this is their first entry into the world of blogging.
They're not dumbing it down - it's not a full fledged pedometer. A real pedometer allows you to calibrate it, and will estimate the distance that you've walked, calories that you've burned, and other useful information. The 'stepometer' they're giving out only counts steps, and doesn't give you any other information.
I'm not arguing against the necessity of good nutrition (far from it). Indeed, my routine tended to be:
Breakfast - cereal with milk and a banana
Lunch - Big salad from the cafeteria at work
Dinner - Lean Cuisine / Healthy Choice frozen dinner
It's certainly not easy, especially when you're first getting used to it. But, check out The Hacker's Diet. His thesis (which makes a lot of sense to me) is that weight gain or loss is directly proportional to calories burned - calories eaten. I suspect that if you look at it, by cutting out wheat and sugar you're cutting calories by proxy.
But, if it's working for you, stick with it. Congrats.
Over last summer, instead of going out or cooking food for myself, I had a TV dinner almost every night, and it helped me lose a lot of weight. Why? Portion control. If you're counting calories, it's dead easy with these - just read the label. Plus, if you're like me, you always feel like you have to clean your plate. With one of the low-calorie tv dinners (Lean Cuisine is especially good tasting, compared to the others), you can - and still not overeat.
So, if you're looking to lose a few pounds, I highly reccommend them.
Slashdot Mirror
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
( ) 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
(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) 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
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) 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:
(X) 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
( ) 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
(X) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(X) Sending email should be free
( ) 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!
Do you mean that wireless providers in Europe are explicitly required to unlock your phone (if you ask, for some fee)? Or that they're explicitly required to provide software updates for unlocked phones? Otherwise, I don't see how the situation is any different in the US than it is in Europe.
In the US, you're perfectly free to unlock your phone. In fact, there's a specific exemption to the DMCA [PDF] allowing cell phone handset unlocking. You certainly can unlock GSM phones here, or buy unlocked phones (I've done both).
So, are wireless providers required to explicitly offer an unlocking service, or just to not arrest you if you do unlock your phone? The latter is essentially the case in the US.
While I'm very sympathetic to your objection, I think the grandparent meant "global warming," not "George W."
That is, if you think there's a 1% chance that [really bad thing] will happen, you should take it as a given when deciding what to do about it. I just find it really interesting that the group who want to over-react to the threat of terrorism and the group who want to over-react to the threat of global warming tend to violently disagree on the other's issues, while using the same logic.
I agree that, all other things being equal, reduced emissions are a good thing. And things are already moving in that direction, thanks in no small part to economic pressure from rising energy costs. But the costs from the government reduced emissions would be enormous -- both from an economic standpoint, and a philosophical cost in reduced freedom. Ironically, not unlike the cost in freedom coming from the war on terror.
I realize the parallel isn't exact, and, like I said, I'm not trying to troll. Just thinking out loud.
Personally, I'm more of a fan of Calvin Coolidge's philosophy: "When you see ten problems rolling down the road, if you don't do anything, nine of them will roll into a ditch before they get to you."
Actually, as someone who works with a bunch of chatty people, I've found that earplugs do a pretty lousy job at blocking out conversations. The problem is that the best earplugs you can buy at your local drug store only attenuate noise by ~32 decibels. But a typical conversation, at close range, is ~60 decibels. You wind up just blocking out all the low-level background noise (computer fans, air conditioning, ...), leaving the voices even more distinct.
I've found the best solution for me is a pair of headphones that seal pretty well, combined with music. The sealed headphones drop everything, so the music can be much quieter and still drown them out.
I'm actually thinking of picking up a pair of Shure E2C earbuds for just this purpose. Has anyone got any experience with them? Will they do what I want?
Actually, yes!
Do a search in Thomas for HR 6, which is the bill in question. The section changing the daylight saving time date is Sec. 111. But... as far as I can tell, that section isn't in the final version passed by the senate (referred to as "H.R.6.EAS"). It also isn't in the "Public Print" of the bill (which you can find here.
I'm not an expert of legislative technicalities, but it could very well be that we're all getting worked up about nothing. I guess we'll have to wait until Thomas posts the final version of the bill.
They don't! They just want to block government provided free wireless, not all free wireless. From the rest of your post, I have to assume you think that's a good thing.
You do realize that there's a Mac Version of Windows Media Player, right?
Read the article. They don't want to ban "broadband collectives," or whatever term you'd like to use, where a group of people decide to pool their money and provide broadband to themselves (or to whomever they like). What they do want to ban is governments collecting taxes, and using that to fund broadband.
The difference is, at least to my mind, pretty clear. In the first situation, if I don't want to participate (I might have my own arrangements through a different group, or through a commercial company, or I might just not want broadband), I don't have to. In the second situation, the government is going to take my money to pay for broadband whether I want it or not. This is clearly anti-competitive. After all, the cable company (or a private co-op) has to convince people that they should pay them money for broadband service. The government doesn't have to convince anyone that they should give them money. They'll take it, in the form of taxes, whether I want their service or not.
If you think that a collective arrangement is a good way to do broadband (and, incidentally, I'd agree with you), set it up and convince people to pay for it. But don't force people who don't want it to pay for it for you.
IANAL, but, historically there has always been a significant legal distinction between reverse-enginnering in a "clean" setting for the purpose of interoperatbility and copyright infringement. See, for example, Phoenix Technology's revese engineering of IBM's BIOS. This principle has been upheld recently; the DMCA even has a specific exemption for reverse engineering for interoperability.
I'm not familiar with the specifics of what mldonkey is doing, but I suspect that the answer to your question lies in this concept. Certainly it holds for gaim and trillian.
I'm sympathetic to your point, but this seems to be the wrong discussion to be making it in. Check out clause 7.b. of the eXeem license agreement. Users of the software agree not to redistribute or modify it. What are the people who made eXeem lite doing? Redistributing a modified version. Even if you use the software only to distribute 100% legitimate, public domain or freely redistributable stuff, you're still commiting copyright infringement by using eXeem Lite!
Sorry - it's Information Theory. There are 4.7 bits of entropy (in an information theory sense) in a natural number chosen with equal probablilities between 1 and 26. Hence, the statement that there's a key size of 4.7 bits.
To see what that means, suppose we were had an alphabet of 1000 different letters. It'd take much longer to brute-force reverse the cipher and discover the key. And, even more time if we had an alphabet of 1 million letters. (The key sizes in these cases would be 9.97 bits and 19.93 bits.)
Of course, there are much better ways to break this sort of simple cipher than brute force. But, I hope that gives you some idea what the key size means.
Not really. The key size is a measure of the number of different ways a given algorithm can encrypt an input. In the case of a simple caesar cipher (shifting each letter by a fixed amount), there are 26 different possible keys. Therefore, the keysize in bits is log_2(26) = 4.7 bits.
Sorry for nitpicking, but I am a bit of a (strictly amatuer) crypto guy.
I don't know if you've seen this yet, but its another essay that's similar in feeling. Stephenson follows the story of building a trans-oceanic fiber link (with many interesting digressions). It first appeared in Wired in December 1996:
Mother Earth Mother Board.
Microsoft does run a site called "The Spoke," at http://www.thespoke.com. I'll admit that I don't know anyone who uses it (and it's badly broken in Firefox), but it's got Blogs and "Copyright Microsoft 2004" at the bottom. So it's not quite fair to say this is their first entry into the world of blogging.
They're not dumbing it down - it's not a full fledged pedometer. A real pedometer allows you to calibrate it, and will estimate the distance that you've walked, calories that you've burned, and other useful information. The 'stepometer' they're giving out only counts steps, and doesn't give you any other information.
I'm not arguing against the necessity of good nutrition (far from it). Indeed, my routine tended to be:
Breakfast - cereal with milk and a banana Lunch - Big salad from the cafeteria at work Dinner - Lean Cuisine / Healthy Choice frozen dinner
It's certainly not easy, especially when you're first getting used to it. But, check out The Hacker's Diet. His thesis (which makes a lot of sense to me) is that weight gain or loss is directly proportional to calories burned - calories eaten. I suspect that if you look at it, by cutting out wheat and sugar you're cutting calories by proxy.
But, if it's working for you, stick with it. Congrats.
Over last summer, instead of going out or cooking food for myself, I had a TV dinner almost every night, and it helped me lose a lot of weight. Why? Portion control. If you're counting calories, it's dead easy with these - just read the label. Plus, if you're like me, you always feel like you have to clean your plate. With one of the low-calorie tv dinners (Lean Cuisine is especially good tasting, compared to the others), you can - and still not overeat.
So, if you're looking to lose a few pounds, I highly reccommend them.
It works fine, at least on a Mac. I'm playing right now on Safari on Jauguar.
You Bastards!
Sure, FreeBSD makes it easy to do an upgrade. You have to compile everything from source, but that only takes a few hours.
For more information, check out Chapter 21 of the FreeBSD Handbook.
Choose "Collapse Sections" from the homepage section of the preferences.
Wow... there are now funky looking tabs on the preferences page. When did that happen?