Main Entry: scatology
Pronunciation: ska-'ta-l&-jE, sk&-
Function: noun
Etymology: Greek skat-, skOr excrement; akin to Old English scearn dung, Latin muscerdae mouse droppings
Date: 1876
1 : interest in or treatment of obscene matters especially in literature
2 : the biologically oriented study of excrement (as for taxonomic purposes or for the determination of diet)
Simple. Warn parents that they'll be held responsible if anything happens to them and hand out fliers about SafeWare. You could insure a $900 iBook for $75/year with a $100 deductible against theft, dropping, etc. Almost all parents would go for it.
A good idea. Although I'd worry about spammers using a dictionary attack on such a server. Actually, it would be more accurately called a "phone book attack" since it would try, not English words, but rather, permutations of names from the phone book.
I think the likelihood of that would be related to the size of the organization represented. For example, one for AOL.com would be harvested daily. Ditto for comcast.net, verizon.net, sbcglobal.net. But such an attack on my friend's company, alexrthomas.com, would be far less likely. Actually, ironically enough, any addresses created on that domain, even if never given out, attract copious spam, so it seems it's dictionaried on a regular basis.
> Why run Squirrel Mail over any of the other free/free webmail applications out there (sqWebMail, IMP, etc)?
One reason might be because SquirrelMail doesn't require any databases, but IMP does.
My friend chose SquirrelMail for his company, after also looking at IMP and others, because he didn't have MySQL set up. He says SquirrelMail is great.
I use IMP, but that's because my web host provides it (and configures it) for all their clients. And I have database access anyway if I need it.
I'd recommend my host except they're not super reliable, and they seem to have disappeared on the sales end (in other words, it looks like they're not selling hosting anymore, but only servicing their existing clients. If you want to try to track them down, they seem to have several names: webdisks.com, hostinglink.org, netmar).
> if site finder is associated with a neutral web directory like dmoz.org, it might be a different story
Assuming by "Site Finder" you mean forging DNS responses as if a nonexistent domain exists in order to pander to clueless WWW users who don't know what DNS is, then no, it will never be a different story.
The right way to do this is to let it be implemented on the client side. While I personally would never install a piece of malware from VeriSign, I think they should create such a program, an MSIE-for-Windows add-on, and advertise it just like those "Taskbar Update" hawkers with the "clock synchronizer" the likes of Gator, SaveNow, or WeatherBug, since that's the type of program it is. Plenty of idiots would install Site Finder if enticed to in that way, and thus VeriSign could provide this *cough cough* "service" to those who want it. An even more effective option would be to get it into the next release of Kazaa. Meanwhile, all kinds of non-WWW services wouldn't break, and I wouldn't hate VeriSign on such a personal level. (I'd just hate them as sleazy ad companies like WhenU and Gator.)
As for a similar, non-profiteering version, if someone needed this, I would have thought someone would have coded it by now. It wouldn't be that hard.
I've considered an autoresponder. The idea being that you give out, freely, an address like mailbot1@domain.com, and set up an autoresponder on that address that says "Thank you for requesting my address: real@domain.com"
That has the disadvantage that in the unlikely chance any spam with a valid return address hits this address, someone will unexpectedly get your autoresponder. Probably not a spammer, though. What spammer gives a correct return address? I'd add a line saying, "If you did not request John Doe's e-mail address, please disregard this message. It was likely generated by a spam message which had your address forged as the sender."
> a general purpose info viewer that would use... custom... viewer[s]... to deal with different types of content.
I am reminded of Sherlock on the Mac. It has "channels" which turn it into different purposes (Movie Showtimes/Trailers, Search, eBay Browser, etc.) Uses XML, I'm pretty sure. Since maps came up repeatedly, it's funny that the screenshot located on the page to which I linked above has a map (from the "Yellow Pages" channel).
I love Ctrl-Shift-Esc. It's great because you can do it easily with your left hand:
1. Fold thumb over palm so tip of thumb points at or touches middle finger. 2. Turn hand over, palm facing down. 3. Place middle fingertip on Esc. 4. While pressing Esc with middle finger, exert outward (downward and away from palm) force with thumb, pressing Ctrl and Shift at the same time.
Of course, Mac OS X's Command-Option-Esc for the equivalent function is actually even nicer because you don't have to fold your thumb over (the keystroke is like Win-Alt-Esc on a Windows keyboard). Thumb in between Command and Option, index or middle on Esc.
Open-Apple to contrast with Solid-Apple, which was the precursor to the Option key on later Apple ][ and Macintosh keyboards. And of course, Reset was the precursor to the modern Power key.
There was one of those ImageWriter banners in the (Apple ][e) computer lab at my elementary school that said "Control-Open Apple-Reset." I remember wondering what that meant. I think it's kind of cool that if I feel the need to reset my PowerBook today (not that it needs it) I can still think "Control-Open Apple-Reset" as I press Control-Command-Power.
You'll be glad you did. The network is the only one I've encountered that really does work everywhere, and work well at that. Seems like GSM is just not ready for prime time in the US.
You couldn't? I've never encountered a Cingular phone with acceptable service. My T720c on Verizon works flawlessly in San Francisco, north of SF, all over New England, and 18 miles out in the Atlantic.
Maybe there's something wrong with your phone on VZW? Or maybe you're in some rural locality I haven't been to.
I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the country as poor,
RTFA:
But in a country with an average annual income of about $700, a computer is still very much a luxury.
I'm pretty sure no further explanation is needed. If I made $700 A YEAR, even a crappy old MS Mouse with a ball and no wheel might bring in 99 cents at a garage sale, which would be worth the equivalent of about $28.29 as a proportion of even a marginal $20K/year income (one seven-hundredth of annual income). Therefore, I wouldn't even think of destroying my hardware for a radio stunt, even if there was a tiny chance of "winning" new hardware.
Which is just a tiny bit different than the typical quality of service at Cingular. I would never do business with them. Judging by the way it sounds when I talk to my girlfriend on her Cingular phone, I can just imagine an emergency call:
Help, Pol...............has a gu............ill us all........... address is 3..........Street....
In a March 1999 interview with Wolf Blitzer, Gore said, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
Taken in context, the sentence, despite some initial ambiguity, means that as a congressman Gore promoted the system we enjoy today, not that he could patent the science, though that's how the quotation has been manipulated. Hence the disingenuous substitution of "inventing" for the actual language. [...]
But the real question is what, if anything, did Gore actually do to create the modern Internet? According to Vincent Cerf, a senior vice president with MCI Worldcom who's been called the Father of the Internet, "The Internet would not be where it is in the United States without the strong support given to it and related research areas by the Vice President in his current role and in his earlier role as Senator."
The inventor of the Mosaic Browser, Marc Andreesen, credits Gore with making his work possible. He received a federal grant through Gore's High Performance Computing Act. The University of Pennsylvania's Dave Ferber says that without Gore the Internet "would not be where it is today."
Joseph E. Traub, a computer science professor at Columbia University, claims that Gore "was perhaps the first political leader to grasp the importance of networking the country. Could we perhaps see an end to cheap shots from politicians and pundits about inventing the Internet?"
Unlimited* High-Speed Internet! ... ...
* "Unlimited means within reason, you jackasses with the 24/7 Kazaa. You can't hog all the bandwidth for the entire block. That's fscked up. See "What Happens When You Do Things That Are Fscked Up," section 62.4 in our Terms of Service.
It's pretty pathetic that some people don't know how not to abuse something, and now they have to put a limit on it. The hard number limits are coming next, and they will suck more, because as it stands now, you'll probably be okay if you don't make a habit of abuse. Once they limit it at 2GB/day or whatever ungodly huge amount, then those of you with high-bandwidth applications will have to worry about it constantly. I am happy to see either a discretionary cap or, to a lesser extent, a hard number cap, because it will help control chronic bandwidth hogs.
Analogy: Imagine if the grocery store you shop in puts out at the registers some item "For Our Customers' Convenience." Let's say it was stamps. The idea being if you needed a stamp to mail a letter outside the store, you could get a stamp or two for your letter(s) as you checked out. It's idiots like Mr. 90GB who would ruin that for everyone because he would say, "well, I am a customer, and these are for all us customers, so I'll use these to send out my circulars to 100 customers a day." Then the store would notice a few people are taking all the stamps and institute a rule. Maybe one stamp per customer per week. And that ruins it for everyone because that means, for example, if you have two letters to mail, you have to go get a stamp elsewhere.
How This Relates to Bandwidth Caps:
Just a few abusers create a PITA for everyone. Most people are well within expectations for bandwidth use. The cable company shouldn't have to monitor people. People should just be reasonable. People who need a lot of bandwidth once in a great while, which I can understand, should be allowed it (like needing 2 stamps sometimes). But those who continually, exceedingly, abuse shouldn't be allowed unlimited bandwidth.
The idea of "unlimited internet" in the ads from any ISP, does not mean "infinite bandwidth," anyway. It's meant to contrast with the ISP's of the old days who said "X hours per month, more hours are extra." Now, most ISPs don't do that anymore (I can think of NetZero Free, where you get 10 hours a month). The idea is that you aren't going to get some kind of bill for "too many hours online." Do you think the Average User would know what "bandwidth" meant, or how much data transfer 90GB is? That's why they're not more specific--to avoid confusing people.
If "infinite bandwidth" were offered on any cable or DSL connection, then every site that pays $$$$ through the nose for bandwidth in a month could just host all their bandwith-hogging items that get 100GB a week on a couple of high-end DSL lines and avoid the whole bandwidth cost problem. But they know that DSL and cable are for consumer use and don't provide enterprise-grade bandwidth (or allow servers, for that matter).
From invalid.museum:
----
[MuseDoma logo] invalid.museum is not in use
All names in.museum can be seen at http://index.museum
More information about.museum is available at http://about.museum
----
This is not really squatting because there is really no effort being made by MuseDoma (a nonprofit) to profit from invalid domains.
If VeriSign had implemented a page that just said, "invaliddomain123.com is not in use," without, of course, links to register it through VeriSign or any other advertising, it would be different. True, it would be rather pointless (which is why such a technique is not in widespread use in the mainstream domains). However, we would just be saying it's dumb because it breaks error detection, instead of declaring that Verisign is more evil than Satan himself, which in this case they are.
The difference is in the shameless profitteering.
I really doubt many spammers forge ".museum" as their "from" field anyways.
Mod ARTICLE +5 Funny!
In other news, Intel's new processor, the Pentium 5 FUD edition, only runs Windows XP. The wonders of DRM and trusted computing ensure that any rogue OS's cannot be installed on your new computer.
Seriously, enough with the conspiracy theories and crying foul. There's a difference between capping that isn't fair and usage that isn't fair.
From the article:
Cox Communications...subscribers are limited to downloading 2 gigabytes a day--the equivalent of about two compressed feature-length movies...
[Comcast's] Eder said there was no specific line crossed by these subscribers, but she added that some of those people were downloading the equivalent of 90 movies in a given month.
So since 2 movies in this article = 2GB, then 90 movies = 90GB.
So you think you should be able to download 90GB in a month, and pay $29.95? If that guy were my neighbor I'd kick his ass. (Well, not literally, that's not the kind of thing I do). I'm sorry, but your actions do affect others. I don't want my connection to be crawling at 3KB/s because the 14-year old next door is downloading 20GB of pr0n and 4 DivXs of "2 Fast 2 Furious" on Kazaa every week. If you need 3GB/day of bandwidth, you should get a frikkin' T1 or better.
Slashdot Mirror
This is seriously exactly what we need to solve the spam problem. Send as many of these bastards as possible to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
You can't argue with this one: There's no way they'd be hawking penis-enlargement pills after that.
Main Entry: scatology
Pronunciation: ska-'ta-l&-jE, sk&-
Function: noun
Etymology: Greek skat-, skOr excrement; akin to Old English scearn dung, Latin muscerdae mouse droppings
Date: 1876
1 : interest in or treatment of obscene matters especially in literature
2 : the biologically oriented study of excrement (as for taxonomic purposes or for the determination of diet)
Simple. Warn parents that they'll be held responsible if anything happens to them and hand out fliers about SafeWare. You could insure a $900 iBook for $75/year with a $100 deductible against theft, dropping, etc. Almost all parents would go for it.
And, not that it's relevant in this particular case, they even keep their Mac and Linux builds up to the same version as their Windows builds.
I think the likelihood of that would be related to the size of the organization represented. For example, one for AOL.com would be harvested daily. Ditto for comcast.net, verizon.net, sbcglobal.net. But such an attack on my friend's company, alexrthomas.com, would be far less likely. Actually, ironically enough, any addresses created on that domain, even if never given out, attract copious spam, so it seems it's dictionaried on a regular basis.
One reason might be because SquirrelMail doesn't require any databases, but IMP does.
My friend chose SquirrelMail for his company, after also looking at IMP and others, because he didn't have MySQL set up. He says SquirrelMail is great.
I use IMP, but that's because my web host provides it (and configures it) for all their clients. And I have database access anyway if I need it.
I'd recommend my host except they're not super reliable, and they seem to have disappeared on the sales end (in other words, it looks like they're not selling hosting anymore, but only servicing their existing clients. If you want to try to track them down, they seem to have several names: webdisks.com, hostinglink.org, netmar).
Assuming by "Site Finder" you mean forging DNS responses as if a nonexistent domain exists in order to pander to clueless WWW users who don't know what DNS is, then no, it will never be a different story.
The right way to do this is to let it be implemented on the client side. While I personally would never install a piece of malware from VeriSign, I think they should create such a program, an MSIE-for-Windows add-on, and advertise it just like those "Taskbar Update" hawkers with the "clock synchronizer" the likes of Gator, SaveNow, or WeatherBug, since that's the type of program it is. Plenty of idiots would install Site Finder if enticed to in that way, and thus VeriSign could provide this *cough cough* "service" to those who want it. An even more effective option would be to get it into the next release of Kazaa. Meanwhile, all kinds of non-WWW services wouldn't break, and I wouldn't hate VeriSign on such a personal level. (I'd just hate them as sleazy ad companies like WhenU and Gator.)
As for a similar, non-profiteering version, if someone needed this, I would have thought someone would have coded it by now. It wouldn't be that hard.
Well, not yet.
That has the disadvantage that in the unlikely chance any spam with a valid return address hits this address, someone will unexpectedly get your autoresponder. Probably not a spammer, though. What spammer gives a correct return address? I'd add a line saying, "If you did not request John Doe's e-mail address, please disregard this message. It was likely generated by a spam message which had your address forged as the sender."
I am reminded of Sherlock on the Mac. It has "channels" which turn it into different purposes (Movie Showtimes/Trailers, Search, eBay Browser, etc.) Uses XML, I'm pretty sure. Since maps came up repeatedly, it's funny that the screenshot located on the page to which I linked above has a map (from the "Yellow Pages" channel).
Nope. But you're actually a humorless twit. It was funny.
I love Ctrl-Shift-Esc. It's great because you can do it easily with your left hand:
1. Fold thumb over palm so tip of thumb points at or touches middle finger.
2. Turn hand over, palm facing down.
3. Place middle fingertip on Esc.
4. While pressing Esc with middle finger, exert outward (downward and away from palm) force with thumb, pressing Ctrl and Shift at the same time.
Of course, Mac OS X's Command-Option-Esc for the equivalent function is actually even nicer because you don't have to fold your thumb over (the keystroke is like Win-Alt-Esc on a Windows keyboard). Thumb in between Command and Option, index or middle on Esc.
I'm pretty sure it was Control-OpenApple-Reset.
Open-Apple to contrast with Solid-Apple, which was the precursor to the Option key on later Apple ][ and Macintosh keyboards. And of course, Reset was the precursor to the modern Power key.
There was one of those ImageWriter banners in the (Apple ][e) computer lab at my elementary school that said "Control-Open Apple-Reset." I remember wondering what that meant.
I think it's kind of cool that if I feel the need to reset my PowerBook today (not that it needs it) I can still think "Control-Open Apple-Reset" as I press Control-Command-Power.
You'll be glad you did. The network is the only one I've encountered that really does work everywhere, and work well at that. Seems like GSM is just not ready for prime time in the US.
You couldn't? I've never encountered a Cingular phone with acceptable service. My T720c on Verizon works flawlessly in San Francisco, north of SF, all over New England, and 18 miles out in the Atlantic.
Maybe there's something wrong with your phone on VZW? Or maybe you're in some rural locality I haven't been to.
RTFA:
But in a country with an average annual income of about $700, a computer is still very much a luxury.
I'm pretty sure no further explanation is needed. If I made $700 A YEAR, even a crappy old MS Mouse with a ball and no wheel might bring in 99 cents at a garage sale, which would be worth the equivalent of about $28.29 as a proportion of even a marginal $20K/year income (one seven-hundredth of annual income). Therefore, I wouldn't even think of destroying my hardware for a radio stunt, even if there was a tiny chance of "winning" new hardware.
Help, Pol...............has a gu............ill us all ........... address is 3 ..........Street....
Um, what? How does that happen? How are newspapers and eBay competitors?
Please know your facts before you spout out complete lies, especially ones as tired as the "Gore Claimed To Have Invented the Internet" lie.
Al Gore never claimed to have invented the Internet.
Here are the actual facts, from this informative site:
In a March 1999 interview with Wolf Blitzer, Gore said, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
Taken in context, the sentence, despite some initial ambiguity, means that as a congressman Gore promoted the system we enjoy today, not that he could patent the science, though that's how the quotation has been manipulated. Hence the disingenuous substitution of "inventing" for the actual language. [...]
But the real question is what, if anything, did Gore actually do to create the modern Internet? According to Vincent Cerf, a senior vice president with MCI Worldcom who's been called the Father of the Internet, "The Internet would not be where it is in the United States without the strong support given to it and related research areas by the Vice President in his current role and in his earlier role as Senator."
The inventor of the Mosaic Browser, Marc Andreesen, credits Gore with making his work possible. He received a federal grant through Gore's High Performance Computing Act. The University of Pennsylvania's Dave Ferber says that without Gore the Internet "would not be where it is today."
Joseph E. Traub, a computer science professor at Columbia University, claims that Gore "was perhaps the first political leader to grasp the importance of networking the country. Could we perhaps see an end to cheap shots from politicians and pundits about inventing the Internet?"
FTC. Not FCC.
Unlimited* High-Speed Internet!
...
...
* "Unlimited means within reason, you jackasses with the 24/7 Kazaa. You can't hog all the bandwidth for the entire block. That's fscked up. See "What Happens When You Do Things That Are Fscked Up," section 62.4 in our Terms of Service.
It's pretty pathetic that some people don't know how not to abuse something, and now they have to put a limit on it. The hard number limits are coming next, and they will suck more, because as it stands now, you'll probably be okay if you don't make a habit of abuse. Once they limit it at 2GB/day or whatever ungodly huge amount, then those of you with high-bandwidth applications will have to worry about it constantly. I am happy to see either a discretionary cap or, to a lesser extent, a hard number cap, because it will help control chronic bandwidth hogs.
Analogy: Imagine if the grocery store you shop in puts out at the registers some item "For Our Customers' Convenience." Let's say it was stamps. The idea being if you needed a stamp to mail a letter outside the store, you could get a stamp or two for your letter(s) as you checked out. It's idiots like Mr. 90GB who would ruin that for everyone because he would say, "well, I am a customer, and these are for all us customers, so I'll use these to send out my circulars to 100 customers a day." Then the store would notice a few people are taking all the stamps and institute a rule. Maybe one stamp per customer per week. And that ruins it for everyone because that means, for example, if you have two letters to mail, you have to go get a stamp elsewhere.
How This Relates to Bandwidth Caps:
Just a few abusers create a PITA for everyone. Most people are well within expectations for bandwidth use. The cable company shouldn't have to monitor people. People should just be reasonable. People who need a lot of bandwidth once in a great while, which I can understand, should be allowed it (like needing 2 stamps sometimes). But those who continually, exceedingly, abuse shouldn't be allowed unlimited bandwidth.
The idea of "unlimited internet" in the ads from any ISP, does not mean "infinite bandwidth," anyway. It's meant to contrast with the ISP's of the old days who said "X hours per month, more hours are extra." Now, most ISPs don't do that anymore (I can think of NetZero Free, where you get 10 hours a month). The idea is that you aren't going to get some kind of bill for "too many hours online." Do you think the Average User would know what "bandwidth" meant, or how much data transfer 90GB is? That's why they're not more specific--to avoid confusing people.
If "infinite bandwidth" were offered on any cable or DSL connection, then every site that pays $$$$ through the nose for bandwidth in a month could just host all their bandwith-hogging items that get 100GB a week on a couple of high-end DSL lines and avoid the whole bandwidth cost problem. But they know that DSL and cable are for consumer use and don't provide enterprise-grade bandwidth (or allow servers, for that matter).
From invalid.museum:
----
[MuseDoma logo] invalid.museum is not in use
All names in .museum can be seen at http://index.museum
More information about .museum is available at http://about.museum
----
This is not really squatting because there is really no effort being made by MuseDoma (a nonprofit) to profit from invalid domains.
If VeriSign had implemented a page that just said, "invaliddomain123.com is not in use," without, of course, links to register it through VeriSign or any other advertising, it would be different. True, it would be rather pointless (which is why such a technique is not in widespread use in the mainstream domains). However, we would just be saying it's dumb because it breaks error detection, instead of declaring that Verisign is more evil than Satan himself, which in this case they are.
The difference is in the shameless profitteering.
I really doubt many spammers forge ".museum" as their "from" field anyways.
Mod ARTICLE +5 Funny! In other news, Intel's new processor, the Pentium 5 FUD edition, only runs Windows XP. The wonders of DRM and trusted computing ensure that any rogue OS's cannot be installed on your new computer.
From the article: Cox Communications...subscribers are limited to downloading 2 gigabytes a day--the equivalent of about two compressed feature-length movies...
[Comcast's] Eder said there was no specific line crossed by these subscribers, but she added that some of those people were downloading the equivalent of 90 movies in a given month.
So since 2 movies in this article = 2GB, then 90 movies = 90GB. So you think you should be able to download 90GB in a month, and pay $29.95? If that guy were my neighbor I'd kick his ass. (Well, not literally, that's not the kind of thing I do). I'm sorry, but your actions do affect others. I don't want my connection to be crawling at 3KB/s because the 14-year old next door is downloading 20GB of pr0n and 4 DivXs of "2 Fast 2 Furious" on Kazaa every week. If you need 3GB/day of bandwidth, you should get a frikkin' T1 or better.
Sounds great in theory, but in reality "fiber to the curb" isn't here, or cheap. So cable and DSL are what we have.