Offshore affairs certainly put a different spin on the problem, and moves to internationalise control of the Internet through the UN may present an opportunity to control wayward countries and ensure that they enforce internationally binding internet laws* in accordance with the declaration of human rights.
* laws that don't exist yet, hence the unsolicited commercial email problem.
Mea culpa. No offence taken at Henry's comment. That line was the last thing I wrote, and it should probably have read:
I have no mod points, so I must just respond since I cannot also appropriately mod the article as interesting, reflecting that a wider awareness of the authors comments is an important factor in the airing of the concerns I wish to highlight.
Hi SpyDerMan, I appreciate that you're trying to make a positive difference, and I'm concerned that the project may be trying to solve the problem by entirely the wrong means...
We've received HUNDREDS of volunteers to help us. And with more than 700 diggs, i doubt it's "unrepresentative".
The number of volunteers is certainly promising, and although 700 is a good start its definitely not a representative sample of the 1 billion people who now use the internet.
I note that there are as yet no volunteers in the "Legal Advice" section. Hopefully this will change and you'll have some specialists in international law willing to help out (perhaps a call to the EFF - see if they know anyone?).
It should be obvious by now that you haven't RTFA.
Only "the FAQ", "Security Concerns", "Project Description", several diagrams and some of the google groups discussion - and I enjoyed your peer review idea.
You're forgetting something, currently there's *NO* mechanism to enforce ALREADY EXISTING laws regarding SPAM. Spammers' servers are across the globe, where there are no laws.
So if there are no opt-out laws, how will clicking an opt-out link help? Is Okopipi entirely helpless against international spammers?
Note: "Yarr! We'll DDoS those scurvey ridden pirates" is not the correct answer here, obviously. So is Okopipi impotent?
I already said that, the "attacks" will be controlled but significant enough to disrupt the spammers' business. As if that wasn't enough, people who have voted to punish an innocent website will receive bad karma, this eliminates corruption from the network.
Whilst that might deter people from being petty and spiteful; its not perfect:
it cannot stop mistakes from being made
genuinely honest people can be corrupted, hoodwinked or can have their machines compromised.
Perhaps a short example will explain my concern. Imagine a web company that has an email list for their customers (a company that never spams, because they have to pay for the limited inbound and outbound bandwidth).
That company has an opt-out web page for their customer-email list. If someone were to "spam in their name" (i.e. without their knowing) how would they be able to stop their entire month of bandwidth being wasted by Okopipi clients automatically trying to unsubscribe?
Who is responsible if Okopipi "accidentally" attacks such a company? What recourse does the company have against the members of the Okopipi network? Will individual members be liable to court action, or will Okopipi?
It seems that you are really disagreeing with who holds the fire and not with the idea of fighting fire with fire
Yes; although if there were appropriate legislation in place, the authorities wouldn't need to fight fire with fire.
I also agree that "the system" can never be perfect (because we keep inventing new things that require new legislation) so there is at best, a lag.
Perhaps the Okopipi volunteers will spend some time lobbying their government representatives - in the long run that may do more good.
I'd like to hope Okopipi could make a positive difference, but it cannot, because it is open to exploitation by the very people it's trying to stop.
Okopipi's greatest asset: people who are desparate to stop spam; is also it's greatest weakness, because their frustration sometimes leads them to take ill considered actions without first understanding the facts. Choosing to publish the statement below is a fairly pertinent example:
If you disagree with fighting fire with fire, I suggest you also criticize any and all law enforcement activities. They're simply state-sponsored vigilantes.
It's difficult to see any way this statement could be more wrong.
When a state sponsored law enforcement official does their work they are enacting the will of a democratically elected governement. It is a careful and methodical process designed to protect the innocent.
Their job works like this:
A law is defined (there are many ways for this to happen).
A transgression of that law is identified.
Evidence is gathered.
The transgressor is prosecuted and can defend their actions.
If the transgression is proven a sentence is handed down.
The problem with Okopipi is that it amounts to an unelected and unrepresentative group that is appointing itself as police force, judge, jury and executioner.
The result is that members of the Okopipi network and innocent bystanders with websites will become the target of the organised crime that is funding the spammers.
At which point your friendly "state sponsored vigilante" is only a phone call away.
Establish regular peer reviews: regular, as in daily; and not just when the library is finished and ready for delivery.
Peer reviews encourage developers to describe what they're doing and why they're doing it (not just conceptually, but at the code level) so deeper awareness of whole systems is fostered.
This can lead to projects with less redundancy, and greater integration. It also helps ensure that code will pass any human driven acceptance tests that the commisioning agent may stipulate.
An additional benefit is that utilisation estimates are improved because as developers get better at describing what they're doing, they become better at describing what they plan/need to do.
The canny manager will schedule the peer-review session 30 mins before lunch, recognizing that it gives developers something to discuss as a group whilst eating.
... one every quarter of a mile on motorways quite clearly means they'll be used to enforce speed limits as well...
The regularity of the cameras is irrelevant, you only have to know the distance between them, and ensure their clocks are in sync to be able to issue a speeding ticket.
So thinking around the subject:
If you want to monitor road usage to check up on tax discs you only need one set of ANPR cameras between each junction.
If you want to monitor speed over distance you need two or more APNR camera sets.
Having multiple regular cameras makes it easier to passively monitor the progress of vehicles. What this will give the government/police is the ability to track certain people, and more importantly, to gain an understanding of road usage patterns.
The UK Government has estimated that an outbreak on British soil would result in 50,000 (minimum) deaths[PDF]. So it's big, but, not that big: approximately 0.1% of the population. This is equivalent to just under 50% of the UK's annual smoking-attributed deaths.
During testing, wouldn't you want the application to fail if it at all can, to find bugs ?
In most cases, yes; 'though testing usually just proves compliance to an agreed set of interfaces and service levels, the fact that the testing process finds bugs is an agreeable side effect.
Also the JVM and it's contents may not be under test, they may be part of the test harness.
Wouldn't adding random latency help the testing process ?
When testing, we minimise the unknown and then measure one thing at a time. The random latency caused by class loading and the aforementioned garbage collection are unknowns, so controlling them is a benefit. That's not to say that testing with the "real" latency is not a good thing if it's likely to exist in the real environment, it's just that being able to control exactly when it is allowed into the mix makes the overall test process more robust.
There are benefits outside of gaming, for example, when testing applications, especially distributed ones, a random bit of latency can be the difference between a pass and a fail, and can also be a total bastard to debug, so being able to minimise the unexpected is a welcome tool.
Regardless of this, the garbage collector can always throw a spanner in somewhere, so it's a moot point.
I'm sorry, that should have said they were "indicted in the anti-trust suit", easy mistake to make.
All humans have stereotypes and scripted responses that we use to help manage all the information we receive, so it's attractive to dismiss MS, and their products, because it makes for what appears to be an easier decision making process.
The fact is MS have been collaborating with others, and for example, through the W3C they do a lot of useful work, it's just that this is easy to lose sight of because they have become a pantomime ghoul that is fun to ridicule.
Netscape the company is long gone. There are a few people left, but 99% of the "original" 4000 or so employees who had an @netscape.com email address moved on. Look at people.netscape.com and compare it to this archived version from 2000.
The brand has already been repeatedly scuttled by (among other things):
the squandering of the server assets by AOL (to the benefit of Sun)
the missed opportunity for AOL to run on Netscape products.
the "Netscape Online" ISP that failed to ignite much interest.
Just be thankful that the Mozilla Foundation is independent of AOL.
Google's blogsearch is, fundamentally, a metadata search that has the benefit of being integrated with the rest of the Google empire.
i.e. it "just" adds metadata to the list of things that can be searched effectively.
The killer feature of blogsearch is the fact that search results can be output using RSS and Atom formats (in addition to the familiar web page).
i.e. it does something that the main search can't do yet.
Blogsearch is a very good indicator of future improvements to Google's main search service, and provides some useful functions today.
i.e. there's no reason why the main search shouldn't do it in the future.
So overall, expect to see the capabilities that are today branded "blogsearch" rolled into the main Google search next year sometime.
Does this mean that at some point since the invasion of Iraq, George W. Bush has (somehow) learned that it is necessary to obtain proper legal authority before committing the US military?
This is news; though I'm not sure I like to have to read real news about stuff that actually matters on slashdot.
Can we just get back to the gadgets and overzealous MS bashing, and leave the politics 2 teh grow3d up ppl?
Drive bays: besides another CD or DVD ROM drive,
what else can you put there? Anything else?
In the mid 90's, the small British computer manufacturer Acorn (the company whose engineers originally invented the ARM Architecture) wanted to demonstrate the adaptability of their case design.
The stackable, expandable case, meant that a supposedly unlimited number of drive bays could be added - effectively a stand-alone rack for the home.
Naturally, just adding a few extra drives is a bit deja vu, so instead, domestic appliances were installed including a Pizza Oven and a Sink, with running water.
It's still a personal favourite nearly 10 years on.
The problem faced by Canada and/or the USA is indicative of a more general (and therefore more difficult to solve) problem.
When a telemarketer calls you from your own country, both parties are governed by the same laws, however, many of those laws are ineffective when the caller and recipient are in different countries.
With cheap telecommunications international telemarketing is becoming more common, and consumer protection is beginning to suffer.
Take, for example, the recent spate of calls that have originated in Florida, and targetted North-West Europe. Each of these European countries has a national do-not-call list, yet international telemarketers are ignoring these lists, believing themselves to be untouchable.
It's become so bad that "the Consumer Ombudsmen from the Nordic Countries of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland have contacted the US Federal Trade Commission and cited concerns over some international business practices" [1][2]
The letter itself cites concerns over both telemarketing and general internet marketing, and illustrates that once national boundaries are crossed, the temptation to increase sales (possibly by misrpresenting the goods that are being sold) may be more than some telemarketers (or telemarketing company managers) can bear.
What is needed is a global agreement on Do-Not-Call lists. Without such an agreement, national lists will be entirely irrelevant as each company conscientiously respects it's own citizens whilst mercilessly telespamming the rest of the world.
Slashdot Mirror
Offshore affairs certainly put a different spin on the problem, and moves to internationalise control of the Internet through the UN may present an opportunity to control wayward countries and ensure that they enforce internationally binding internet laws* in accordance with the declaration of human rights.
* laws that don't exist yet, hence the unsolicited commercial email problem.
Hi SpyDerMan, I appreciate that you're trying to make a positive difference, and I'm concerned that the project may be trying to solve the problem by entirely the wrong means...
The number of volunteers is certainly promising, and although 700 is a good start its definitely not a representative sample of the 1 billion people who now use the internet.
I note that there are as yet no volunteers in the "Legal Advice" section. Hopefully this will change and you'll have some specialists in international law willing to help out (perhaps a call to the EFF - see if they know anyone?).
Only "the FAQ", "Security Concerns", "Project Description", several diagrams and some of the google groups discussion - and I enjoyed your peer review idea.
So if there are no opt-out laws, how will clicking an opt-out link help? Is Okopipi entirely helpless against international spammers?
Note: "Yarr! We'll DDoS those scurvey ridden pirates" is not the correct answer here, obviously. So is Okopipi impotent?
Whilst that might deter people from being petty and spiteful; its not perfect:
Perhaps a short example will explain my concern. Imagine a web company that has an email list for their customers (a company that never spams, because they have to pay for the limited inbound and outbound bandwidth).
That company has an opt-out web page for their customer-email list. If someone were to "spam in their name" (i.e. without their knowing) how would they be able to stop their entire month of bandwidth being wasted by Okopipi clients automatically trying to unsubscribe?
Who is responsible if Okopipi "accidentally" attacks such a company? What recourse does the company have against the members of the Okopipi network? Will individual members be liable to court action, or will Okopipi?
oh, I agree completely that CAN-SPAM is useless.
Step 1. Fix the law.
Step 2. Let the law fix the spammers.
I'd like to hope Okopipi could make a positive difference, but it cannot, because it is open to exploitation by the very people it's trying to stop.
Okopipi's greatest asset: people who are desparate to stop spam; is also it's greatest weakness, because their frustration sometimes leads them to take ill considered actions without first understanding the facts. Choosing to publish the statement below is a fairly pertinent example:
It's difficult to see any way this statement could be more wrong.
When a state sponsored law enforcement official does their work they are enacting the will of a democratically elected governement. It is a careful and methodical process designed to protect the innocent.
Their job works like this:
The problem with Okopipi is that it amounts to an unelected and unrepresentative group that is appointing itself as police force, judge, jury and executioner.
The result is that members of the Okopipi network and innocent bystanders with websites will become the target of the organised crime that is funding the spammers.
At which point your friendly "state sponsored vigilante" is only a phone call away.
There's no point him jumping.
He's an Apple user so unless he can actually land in a wastebasket the jump is bound to end in some other totally unpredictable outcome.
Establish regular peer reviews: regular, as in daily; and not just when the library is finished and ready for delivery.
Peer reviews encourage developers to describe what they're doing and why they're doing it (not just conceptually, but at the code level) so deeper awareness of whole systems is fostered.
This can lead to projects with less redundancy, and greater integration. It also helps ensure that code will pass any human driven acceptance tests that the commisioning agent may stipulate.
An additional benefit is that utilisation estimates are improved because as developers get better at describing what they're doing, they become better at describing what they plan/need to do.
The canny manager will schedule the peer-review session 30 mins before lunch, recognizing that it gives developers something to discuss as a group whilst eating.
The regularity of the cameras is irrelevant, you only have to know the distance between them, and ensure their clocks are in sync to be able to issue a speeding ticket.
So thinking around the subject:
True, but then I never wanted to be a computer scientist anyway,
I wanted to be;
a lumberjack!
leaping from tree to tree...
etc.
You'll be singing it all day now, sorry.
The UK Government has estimated that an outbreak on British soil would result in 50,000 (minimum) deaths[PDF]. So it's big, but, not that big: approximately 0.1% of the population. This is equivalent to just under 50% of the UK's annual smoking-attributed deaths.
In most cases, yes; 'though testing usually just proves compliance to an agreed set of interfaces and service levels, the fact that the testing process finds bugs is an agreeable side effect.
Also the JVM and it's contents may not be under test, they may be part of the test harness.
When testing, we minimise the unknown and then measure one thing at a time. The random latency caused by class loading and the aforementioned garbage collection are unknowns, so controlling them is a benefit. That's not to say that testing with the "real" latency is not a good thing if it's likely to exist in the real environment, it's just that being able to control exactly when it is allowed into the mix makes the overall test process more robust.
There are benefits outside of gaming, for example, when testing applications, especially distributed ones, a random bit of latency can be the difference between a pass and a fail, and can also be a total bastard to debug, so being able to minimise the unexpected is a welcome tool.
Regardless of this, the garbage collector can always throw a spanner in somewhere, so it's a moot point.
They invented the NT Trust Suite.
I'm sorry, that should have said they were "indicted in the anti-trust suit", easy mistake to make.
All humans have stereotypes and scripted responses that we use to help manage all the information we receive, so it's attractive to dismiss MS, and their products, because it makes for what appears to be an easier decision making process.
The fact is MS have been collaborating with others, and for example, through the W3C they do a lot of useful work, it's just that this is easy to lose sight of because they have become a pantomime ghoul that is fun to ridicule.
No mention of a fanless version for those of us with water cooling.
Is that too much to ask of card manufacturers?
I broke my last ATI card trying to prize their glued-on fan from the GPU, and don't want to do the same with my next purchase.
I'm surprised, having just read through all the top rated comments, that not one of them questioned the environmental impact of this "sport".
My PhD supervisor thinks I'm great at design, so by deduction, my technical career is absolutely fucked.
Bugger.
If money is no object, and if you want the ultimate in comfort, you should seriously consider offshoring yourself.
Just be thankful that the Mozilla Foundation is independent of AOL.
It seems so obvious, anx yet Simon Bond never predicted it.. I'll bet the engine just purrs* along too. (*sorry).
Does this mean that at some point since the invasion of Iraq, George W. Bush has (somehow) learned that it is necessary to obtain proper legal authority before committing the US military?
This is news; though I'm not sure I like to have to read real news about stuff that actually matters on slashdot.
Can we just get back to the gadgets and overzealous MS bashing, and leave the politics 2 teh grow3d up ppl?
In the mid 90's, the small British computer manufacturer Acorn (the company whose engineers originally invented the ARM Architecture) wanted to demonstrate the adaptability of their case design.
The stackable, expandable case, meant that a supposedly unlimited number of drive bays could be added - effectively a stand-alone rack for the home.
Naturally, just adding a few extra drives is a bit deja vu, so instead, domestic appliances were installed including a Pizza Oven and a Sink , with running water.
It's still a personal favourite nearly 10 years on.
I couln't agree more; either way, international agreement is required or the problem remains.
The problem faced by Canada and/or the USA is indicative of a more general (and therefore more difficult to solve) problem.
When a telemarketer calls you from your own country, both parties are governed by the same laws, however, many of those laws are ineffective when the caller and recipient are in different countries.
With cheap telecommunications international telemarketing is becoming more common, and consumer protection is beginning to suffer.
Take, for example, the recent spate of calls that have originated in Florida, and targetted North-West Europe. Each of these European countries has a national do-not-call list, yet international telemarketers are ignoring these lists, believing themselves to be untouchable.
It's become so bad that "the Consumer Ombudsmen from the Nordic Countries of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland have contacted the US Federal Trade Commission and cited concerns over some international business practices" [1][2]
The letter itself cites concerns over both telemarketing and general internet marketing, and illustrates that once national boundaries are crossed, the temptation to increase sales (possibly by misrpresenting the goods that are being sold) may be more than some telemarketers (or telemarketing company managers) can bear.
What is needed is a global agreement on Do-Not-Call lists. Without such an agreement, national lists will be entirely irrelevant as each company conscientiously respects it's own citizens whilst mercilessly telespamming the rest of the world.