Phishing attempts would be using plain text and referencing URLs that mimick and look MUCH like the URLs coming from citibank and ebay scams.
No, they would use plain text including URLs which might look like--but are obviously NOT--URLs coming from the target company. Think about it--if you send a message asking citibank customers to come to www.citybank.com, you have not only given yourself away, but you have given a huge target for citibank to nail. You don't really think people will *click* on a numeric address when they only deal with their bank as citi.com? (And you do realize we could click on links way before HTML infected messaging, right? URLs are pretty obvious bits of text.)
It's not even just that the HTML makes hiding and redirection too easy. The explicit and concrete nature of the plain text raises awareness. Of course there would still be phishing, but without the "CLICK HERE," it would be trapped at the comical Nigerian-scam level.
Re:If You Want a Serious Answer... Don't Get Cute
on
Rob Pike Responds
·
· Score: 1
You missed the all important third option: his life is secure, he can do what he wants, and he has no reason to care about the rest of us, especially in a mere business concern.
Also the fourth option: some people simply can't erase the imprint of the fear of imminent nukes in their lives. It's still rude to focus on such a side concern of the analogy, but it happens.
I would go with the third, personally. If he cared about the issue he would have been exposed to that analogy enough already to deal with the question asked. It's not "getting cute" when it's simply the common-use analysis of the situation (and lawyers have been likened to nukes, tanks, guns, and probably every other weapon invented since laws were written down and could be argued about).
Does anyone else think that the only real problem here is HTML email? It's good for nothing, wastes resources, and enables pretty much every kind of annoying spam, hidden redirect, tracking bug--it just keeps coming. Why do we have to build all these widgets to help users see that URLs aren't what they say they are, and such? Do we really want to wait for the spammers to start building javascript messages that alter the url after/when clicking, or whatever next becomes really annoying to people?
Isn't this enough of a problem yet to get the asinine companies that forced HTML down our throats (I'm looking at you AOL, MS, etc) to reconsider? Make the common clients block/ignore the HTML by default and *never* send HTML messages, instead of the current tactic of trying to trick or force users to send as HTML (maybe with an additional text version, if we're lucky), to just drown out the people asking for plain text.
Maybe I'm just bitter. It's always so difficult to watch stupid obvious mistakes blossom so thoroughly predictably. At least I can filter most all the spam by dumping HTML messages.
Speaking of which, could you fit and run an entire OS from cache? is it even possible?
I think L4 claims that as a feature, although it's only a microkernel, not an "entire OS"--but it is even a modern system... Of course, you don't actually want the whole OS in the cache, just the frequently used code paths.
You miss the point. It is not "mythologising" the designers or their process. The fact is, they made some remarkably good decisions and *WE* have weakened or even unmade a number of them over the long period of time since. The rationale for many things is as valid today as it was then--some things even moreso. There were just as good of reasons not to choose senators by popular vote as there were to use popular vote for representatives. There were good reasons the electors chose the president. There were good reasons the people were part of the judicial branch and could themselves overturn laws, rather than being treated as drone like on-off switches for whether, regardless of situation, the written law was broken. The horrible irony is that these reasons have become far more important as the country grew, yet we ignored them and made many obvious (certainly to me, now) wrong changes that undermined the commendable work done by our founders.
They were far from mythological, but that doesn't change the fact that an unusually large number of unusually bright people got together and forced themselves to work some really difficult problems to an unusually high degree. That work is a legacy that we should make as much use of as possible, rather than making the very mistakes they suffered in that hot, miserable room to avoid.
I hold up their work because our errors have made their foresight so plain.
This is an artifact of fools who were so fixated with the now and contained by fashion that they failed to come up with any remotely descriptive label. I see no reason why we should continue to humor them, and it is certainly wrong to interject this kind of drivel just because someone used the word "modern" in a correct, natural, and perfectly clear way.
using the word "modern" to refer to the past can be confusing, I know
No, it's stupid. There's a difference. Confusing would be if it were hard to understand. It's not. Stupid would be like using the word modern to refer to the past.
Software is knowledge--it is not a product. It should be developed as
we develop much of our knowledge: by people whose primary goal is to
create, and who then share that with others in the field to build on.
I wish there weren't so many people desperately trying to squeeze
every cent of out everything they touch. We should be glad that you
can actually also make money by selling support services for people
using software you are expert with (and who is more of an expert that
the people developing it?). Science isn't developed by people
fretting about the business models for their papers. They don't
publish because it rakes in the cash (in fact, it often costs to
publish--imagine having to pay just to distribute your code to those
who want it!).
I understand where people like this letter writer are coming from, and
I've heard similar "Free software is short-sighted: I want to get
paid" sentiments from people I hold in high esteem. I believe this is
the correct answer for their concern. Right now we struggle with a transitional phase
(undoing the damage done by people like Gates--the kind of people who
would wall off a forest just to charge entrance fees), but the
available code only grows larger (thanks to Disney, today's GPL'd code
will stay GPL'd past our lifetimes). Eventually the sheer weight of
freed code will overwhelm those who haven't realized (or refuse) this,
and the right choice will be the only viable choice.
The coolest thing about software is that once it's built, it can
instantly do what you told it to do for anyone, anywhere, with no
additional investment. No other field is so deeply self-automating.
It's an exciting prospect, once we are again free to focus on progress.
(For those who ask who will do the tedious bits and make things
pretty/easy: most fields use graduate students, interns, and such
support staff for work that doesn't require expert attention (and
can't be automated), and there are already fields devoted to user
interfacing and such--putting a great interface on some obtuse tool
could be a nice thesis project.)
Unfortunately XFree86 isn't a compiler or kernel, which means that determining whether it's a "major component" would probably involve lawyers.
You are honestly suggesting that the video subsystem is not a "major component of the operating system"? Even to the extent that a compiler is? You can run/distribute a system without a compiler too. XFree86 IS the operating system/kernel for my video card--it has the drivers and provides the hardware interface. It comes with the distribution, and most any gui program assumes that (and rightly so). It's not even "normally distributed with"--it IS part of the OS. How much clearer could it get for the OS exception?
Since the last story on Slashdot about this, I've been wondering why no one seems to bring up that GPL programs are allowed to link to non-GPL (even closed/proprietary) libraries. Not in general, of course, but the GPL does actually allow this in the case of OS libraries. I don't think anyone realistically could contest that XFree86 is a system library in pretty much any distribution (MacOS X and cygwin come to mind as the likely exceptions).
The point here is that XFree86 could go closed source and it would still have no effect on GPL programs in the common cases. So, the GPL angle is basically a red herring.
(That said, I do think the license change qualifies as a pretty seriously dumb idea.)
Well, without weighing in on the Narnia issue, I can answer your question. His Dark Materials is not atheist propaganda simply because of its fictional nature. I know that sounds silly, but if you think about it, HDM has a complete, cohesive metaphysics and multiverse. The fictional Christianity that Pullman overlays on his setting is intrinsically tied into that, so it can't be seen as having bearing on our world. In fact, it is so different that you can't draw religious conclusions from it at all. While you might take a moment to look at Christianity a little differently, you'd have to be dense or paranoid to take it as pro or anti Christian propaganda.
(Yes, I know HDM has a character from "our" world who lost faith, but this still happened within his setting, which as I said is utterly different from the actual "our" world. Is every work that contains a character that lost faith in religion then anti-religious propaganda, or was it just a character that fit the story?)
Pullman used Christianity's myth in telling his story. He made some (quite clever, actually) changes to it. It doesn't tell you any more about our world than LoTR--the only conclusions you can draw are what you learn about people (and what you learn about people from fiction is of questionable value anyway... Really, you can only learn about yourself). So he used Christianity in an unapproved way. Big deal. Think about it: if he'd used Norse mythology you wouldn't be calling it atheist propaganda.
Really, you could easily argue that the book promotes faith, because there was so much more to the universe than the people in our world could detect.
Slashdot Mirror
Phishing attempts would be using plain text and referencing URLs that mimick and look MUCH like the URLs coming from citibank and ebay scams.
No, they would use plain text including URLs which might look like--but are obviously NOT--URLs coming from the target company. Think about it--if you send a message asking citibank customers to come to www.citybank.com, you have not only given yourself away, but you have given a huge target for citibank to nail. You don't really think people will *click* on a numeric address when they only deal with their bank as citi.com? (And you do realize we could click on links way before HTML infected messaging, right? URLs are pretty obvious bits of text.)
It's not even just that the HTML makes hiding and redirection too easy. The explicit and concrete nature of the plain text raises awareness. Of course there would still be phishing, but without the "CLICK HERE," it would be trapped at the comical Nigerian-scam level.
You missed the all important third option: his life is secure, he can do what he wants, and he has no reason to care about the rest of us, especially in a mere business concern.
Also the fourth option: some people simply can't erase the imprint of the fear of imminent nukes in their lives. It's still rude to focus on such a side concern of the analogy, but it happens.
I would go with the third, personally. If he cared about the issue he would have been exposed to that analogy enough already to deal with the question asked. It's not "getting cute" when it's simply the common-use analysis of the situation (and lawyers have been likened to nukes, tanks, guns, and probably every other weapon invented since laws were written down and could be argued about).
Does anyone else think that the only real problem here is HTML email? It's good for nothing, wastes resources, and enables pretty much every kind of annoying spam, hidden redirect, tracking bug--it just keeps coming. Why do we have to build all these widgets to help users see that URLs aren't what they say they are, and such? Do we really want to wait for the spammers to start building javascript messages that alter the url after/when clicking, or whatever next becomes really annoying to people?
Isn't this enough of a problem yet to get the asinine companies that forced HTML down our throats (I'm looking at you AOL, MS, etc) to reconsider? Make the common clients block/ignore the HTML by default and *never* send HTML messages, instead of the current tactic of trying to trick or force users to send as HTML (maybe with an additional text version, if we're lucky), to just drown out the people asking for plain text.
Maybe I'm just bitter. It's always so difficult to watch stupid obvious mistakes blossom so thoroughly predictably. At least I can filter most all the spam by dumping HTML messages.
Speaking of which, could you fit and run an entire OS from cache? is it even possible?
I think L4 claims that as a feature, although it's only a microkernel, not an "entire OS"--but it is even a modern system... Of course, you don't actually want the whole OS in the cache, just the frequently used code paths.
You miss the point. It is not "mythologising" the designers or their process. The fact is, they made some remarkably good decisions and *WE* have weakened or even unmade a number of them over the long period of time since. The rationale for many things is as valid today as it was then--some things even moreso. There were just as good of reasons not to choose senators by popular vote as there were to use popular vote for representatives. There were good reasons the electors chose the president. There were good reasons the people were part of the judicial branch and could themselves overturn laws, rather than being treated as drone like on-off switches for whether, regardless of situation, the written law was broken. The horrible irony is that these reasons have become far more important as the country grew, yet we ignored them and made many obvious (certainly to me, now) wrong changes that undermined the commendable work done by our founders.
They were far from mythological, but that doesn't change the fact that an unusually large number of unusually bright people got together and forced themselves to work some really difficult problems to an unusually high degree. That work is a legacy that we should make as much use of as possible, rather than making the very mistakes they suffered in that hot, miserable room to avoid.
I hold up their work because our errors have made their foresight so plain.
This is an artifact of fools who were so fixated with the now and contained by fashion that they failed to come up with any remotely descriptive label. I see no reason why we should continue to humor them, and it is certainly wrong to interject this kind of drivel just because someone used the word "modern" in a correct, natural, and perfectly clear way.
using the word "modern" to refer to the past can be confusing, I know
No, it's stupid. There's a difference. Confusing would be if it were hard to understand. It's not. Stupid would be like using the word modern to refer to the past.
Software is knowledge--it is not a product. It should be developed as we develop much of our knowledge: by people whose primary goal is to create, and who then share that with others in the field to build on.
I wish there weren't so many people desperately trying to squeeze every cent of out everything they touch. We should be glad that you can actually also make money by selling support services for people using software you are expert with (and who is more of an expert that the people developing it?). Science isn't developed by people fretting about the business models for their papers. They don't publish because it rakes in the cash (in fact, it often costs to publish--imagine having to pay just to distribute your code to those who want it!).
I understand where people like this letter writer are coming from, and I've heard similar "Free software is short-sighted: I want to get paid" sentiments from people I hold in high esteem. I believe this is the correct answer for their concern. Right now we struggle with a transitional phase (undoing the damage done by people like Gates--the kind of people who would wall off a forest just to charge entrance fees), but the available code only grows larger (thanks to Disney, today's GPL'd code will stay GPL'd past our lifetimes). Eventually the sheer weight of freed code will overwhelm those who haven't realized (or refuse) this, and the right choice will be the only viable choice.
The coolest thing about software is that once it's built, it can instantly do what you told it to do for anyone, anywhere, with no additional investment. No other field is so deeply self-automating. It's an exciting prospect, once we are again free to focus on progress.
(For those who ask who will do the tedious bits and make things pretty/easy: most fields use graduate students, interns, and such support staff for work that doesn't require expert attention (and can't be automated), and there are already fields devoted to user interfacing and such--putting a great interface on some obtuse tool could be a nice thesis project.)
Unfortunately XFree86 isn't a compiler or kernel, which means that determining whether it's a "major component" would probably involve lawyers.
You are honestly suggesting that the video subsystem is not a "major component of the operating system"? Even to the extent that a compiler is? You can run/distribute a system without a compiler too. XFree86 IS the operating system/kernel for my video card--it has the drivers and provides the hardware interface. It comes with the distribution, and most any gui program assumes that (and rightly so). It's not even "normally distributed with"--it IS part of the OS. How much clearer could it get for the OS exception?
Since the last story on Slashdot about this, I've been wondering why no one seems to bring up that GPL programs are allowed to link to non-GPL (even closed/proprietary) libraries. Not in general, of course, but the GPL does actually allow this in the case of OS libraries. I don't think anyone realistically could contest that XFree86 is a system library in pretty much any distribution (MacOS X and cygwin come to mind as the likely exceptions).
The point here is that XFree86 could go closed source and it would still have no effect on GPL programs in the common cases. So, the GPL angle is basically a red herring.
(That said, I do think the license change qualifies as a pretty seriously dumb idea.)
Well, without weighing in on the Narnia issue, I can answer your question. His Dark Materials is not atheist propaganda simply because of its fictional nature. I know that sounds silly, but if you think about it, HDM has a complete, cohesive metaphysics and multiverse. The fictional Christianity that Pullman overlays on his setting is intrinsically tied into that, so it can't be seen as having bearing on our world. In fact, it is so different that you can't draw religious conclusions from it at all. While you might take a moment to look at Christianity a little differently, you'd have to be dense or paranoid to take it as pro or anti Christian propaganda.
(Yes, I know HDM has a character from "our" world who lost faith, but this still happened within his setting, which as I said is utterly different from the actual "our" world. Is every work that contains a character that lost faith in religion then anti-religious propaganda, or was it just a character that fit the story?)
Pullman used Christianity's myth in telling his story. He made some (quite clever, actually) changes to it. It doesn't tell you any more about our world than LoTR--the only conclusions you can draw are what you learn about people (and what you learn about people from fiction is of questionable value anyway... Really, you can only learn about yourself). So he used Christianity in an unapproved way. Big deal. Think about it: if he'd used Norse mythology you wouldn't be calling it atheist propaganda.
Really, you could easily argue that the book promotes faith, because there was so much more to the universe than the people in our world could detect.