And, Altavista never did email, maps, personal webpages, or advertising.
I beg to differ. Altavista had much of what Google has today, and they had it in the 90s. They offered email accounts @altavista.com, the offered some customization, and if anything they had too much advertising, to the point they started watering the results. They had image search IIRC, and newsgroups search. They may have had some partnership with an online mailing list website, I don't recall clearly.
Except they didn't put everything together the way Google did. Their mindset was that of the dreadful "portal" of the bubble, a website where you throw everything together, but without actually integrating everything smoothly. Remember their homepage back then, at one point it was something like Yahoo's.
They lacked the insight to do what Google did, but it's not fair holding it against them. Not many did, I dare say that Google is a spectacularly singular example. And certainly not in the 90s. I dare say that there's no way that something like Google could have appeared during the bubble. The mindset of both web users and companies was too different.
That's not exactly fair. OK, "google" has become an incredible trademark, but it has some things going for it that Altavista never got to have. For one thing, it can be used as a verb, which doesn't work for "go altavista it".
Altavista was a nice project, I always liked that about their beginnings. Their "about" section at one point said "we started this because we wanted to see if we can index the entire Web". You gotta love that, and I think they succeeded there.
Except that at some point they sold out or went commercial and sacrificed the simple looks of the result pages for banner ads and payed results and whatnot, something that Google is very careful about. To this day, Google's result pages are very simple and clean, the ads are unobtrusive text ads, and there is no injection of payed results because the ads themselves are that and are clearly delimited.
Altavista could've still been big today but they messed up at the critical moment.
Would be to have seperated the class into two teams with two networks and then have them secure their networks. Then launch attacks angainst one another.
I dunno, some security experts seem to think that "penetrate and patch" is not such a brilliant idea after all.
[..]like the SOB that attempted 2147 login attempts on my openssh server in a 10 minute time span.
Dude, that's just asking for it. Why would you allow so many attempts in the first place? Should've used time limits and sensible timeouts. A real human should not need more than 3 attempts before he realizes he's forgotten his password, or need to try more than once ever 10 seconds or so.
The first one they decoded was already available in plain text, they just didn't know which it was. Chances are that the others will be similar. Decades after the war, it's easier to just go the former enemy nation and ask to see their records.
Besides, what is left to prove for this M4 project?
The original breakthrough was the deed of one brilliant mind, the Polish matematician Marian Rejewski, and he was helped (however little) by the fact that Hans-Thilo Schmidt sold the Enigma plans to the French secret services.
The English project was a joint effort of many more minds and succeeded because the Germans did all kinds of mistakes which reduced the scope of the searches. Even so, the encryptions used by the German Navy back then (which didn't make those mistakes) could not be broken after all, and the English had to resort to capturing the code-change schedules.
So what's the purpose of this modern reenacting of the breaking process? Just to prove that, given enough raw computing power, you can break any code? Gee, what a novel concept. It doesn't contribute anything new. It's just a brute force attack, no elegance to it, no particularly new approach, no subtlety. So I ask again, what's the point?
I'm thinking that there are a few distributed computing projects out there which could actually produce something useful instead of a telegram text which was already available anyway.
Wikipedia is not propaganda, it is basic information. We expect that the block will be lifted.
Huh? Doesn't he understand the nature of Chinese censorship?
Exactly. The Chinese government policy is very simple: they either control information, or they censor it.
It's frightening to see how the Chinese market is making governments, companies and organizations all over the world give in an inch at a time, for some small favor, thinking that things will change. The Chinese never change. They absorb whoever attempts to conquer them and they change them. It's like that old saying: if you dance with the devil, the devil doesn't change, the devil changes you.
Giving in to the Chinese gov demands and arranging compromises with it is not the answer. Offering the Chinese citizens complete access through alternate means is the answer.
Well I'm pretty sure someone is making a profit out of it. It costs next to nothing to send a million emails, and there are a lot of dumbasses out there.
While this is certainly true (money drives spam), I don't see why this is being attributed to dumb people who click on links due to cluelessness. I'd venture to say it's more likely that spam messages sell something that people want. They send out a million messages a day for whatever merchendise: viagra, bogus kits for enlargement of various body parts, fake diplomas, "original" software kits at half the price, lists of lonely housewives in your neighbourhood and so on. If one person a day makes a payment for any of these, that's already profit.
If we want to stop spam we need to stop people buying the stuff that spam advertises. Will that happen? I hardly doubt it.
Of course they do. But where's the profit in that?
Ask Hotmail. Last I heard, they were getting payed by advertisers to let stuff pass through their antispam filters.
Yahoo has (recently?) added captcha's for every message you send out and they're moving towards a heavy JavaScript interface too.
Google are still relatively protected by theirs being a full AJAX interface. But I'm willing to bet there are JavaScript-enabled bots out there used for spam purposes (collecting addresses and operating such interfaces). And if there aren't now, there will be soon enough.
And I'm willing to bet that the big one will come through a communication app, most likely a messenger, because those can pass firewalls and don't have the bitter history of email and browsers to learn from.
Since educating the users doesn't work, and playing catch-up with malware also doesn't work, the solution should be obvious: preemptive technologies and practices.
A few examples.
* Whitelisting executables that are allowed to run on the system. It seems to work well for firewalls such as Zone Alarm, which starts from a deny-all policy and prompts the user for things it wants to allow. Substitute "user" with "admin" for executables, though.
* Any app used for communication should follow some common-sense rules. In particular, it should never ever be allowed to trick the user into thinking one type of file is another. This means email and instant messengers at the very least. Browsers seem to have gotten the point, although some are slower to fix things than others (cough*IE*cough). But take that Mac OS X worm of last week; what business has a chat program to allow an executable file pose as an image? This is asking for it!
* Better security in the applications. I'm not talking about buffer overflows which let's say are legitimate slip-ups to some extent, I'm talking about stupid stuff like directory traversal or masquarading a file type as another and so on. Much of the malware (and much of the most successful) exploits such stupid mistakes, not buffer overflows. There are stupid applications, not stupid users. You can't expect users to learn everything about security on the Internet. They are just as accountable as someone who wipes out because the steering in their car was badly designed. Except big software makers are careful to put disclaimers in their EULA. Would Ford get away with the kind of responsability wavers Microsoft uses?
* Stop idolizing the kind of "hacker" that's been popular in the media as a cool character, the "bad guy". Those types are burglars, they commit breaking and entering. Enough of Holywood movies with cool geeks and spies using leet hacks as the cool main characters. The public at large still doesn't understand anything, but leaves the theater with the wrong impression.
Inventing something once is Genius. Inventing something twice is stupidity.
If somebody comes up with a solution on his own, unaware there was already one ready-made, does that make him stupid? I'd say he's just as much of an inventor as the first one.
There's a distinction to be made here.
If we want productivity (and money) then of course one should always look for ready-made solutions first, look into modifying an existing one second, and only third should they attempt to make their own from scratch.
But if we want learning, then there's no substitute to coming up with good solutions on your own. That's solid programming education, that will teach you to gather relevant information, analyse it, make decisions and come up with a solution. This is the kind of stuff that will allow him to become a project leader later on.
Perhaps we should allow porn of all types to be available in public libraries, because clearly most parents do the "right thing" and educate their kids... what a joke, what world do you live in? Certainly not this world - many parents are fools and are poor role models - good thing the government steps in and trys to regulates things.
How is it alright to limit the freedoms of everybody to make up for idiots who aren't willing to make the effort and take responsability?
No government is going to come out openly and say "let's help the oppressed masses in China evade government censorship." It's too bad for business. It's sickening to see how every value fades away once confronted with the prospect of an incredibly rich potential market.
Hi, I'm going to create a service similar to yours in the same industry, but I'm not going to directly compete with you.
What if Google ads a "buy this" link to its advertising banners? With a cut of the transaction going to either Google itself, or to the owner of the page (for some targeted stuff) (or to both).
If they restrict the payment service to their own ad network, you can't really say they are directly competing with PayPal.
I keep hearing OSS people breezily dismiss criticisms of software such as GIMP or just insist that it IS good enough for professionals. The very fact that some people are arogant enough to try to shove tools onto people that WILL NOT DO THE JOB shows why it's hard to adopt Linux on the desktop. Linux has done well in areas where geeks have written software for other people like themselves.
There is no "OSS" people in the sense you mean here. OSS is a software developing and distribution methodology. You could just as well talk about "OOP people" or "people who use exceptions" taking a stand on desktop development. Sounds silly yet?
Second, there is no "Linux". There is no central entity with an agenda. There's just loads of geeks doing things for fun and their own use, as you already acknowledged. This will never change. This open development model is a meritocracy: "contribute or shut up."
The adoption of GNU/Linux in the commercial world and on the users' desktops is mostly a lucky side-effect. The open model simply happens to produce software that is good enough both commercially and from the user POV. There isn't a master plan, there is no agenda, no roadmap, no goals to achieve, no budgets, nothing like that. Not even malice towards end users or artist types.
Developers are kings. Users come second. Commercial grade quality comes third. No amount of complaining about it will change anything. This is how this thing works. Denying it is breaking it.
When someone with enough resources is willing to invest time and money and effort into these issues, they improve. When not, they don't. Simple. Some really big open communities have started to do it (Gnome, KDE) as well as some commercial entities (IBM, Ubuntu, Red Hat, Novell, etc.) But don't expect it from the communities at large.
The key ingredient is intelligent programmers. Sadly many companies do not realize that spending 150K per person on two programmers is more efficient than spending 85k per person on 10. Companies would rather have lots of monkeys than a few geniuses.
Google seems to have gotten the point... And another thing, I hear Google loves Python, which was bashed just earlier in the thread. If a living successful example can't get the point across to others, what will?
Does anyone else see the problem with this?.Net is so platform specific that most of what you learn is non-portable.
Nothing learned while programming is non-portable. The basic concepts of programming, as well as everything built on those concpts, are the same in any language.
Ah, but perhaps the GP was referring to how the.Net medium tries to tie you to its own Visual IDE and dumb developers down to drones in the name of productivity. You know, stuff like becoming dependant on auto-completion so you always start a project a certain way, or forget the name of standard functions and their parameters because the IDE remembers them for you.
You brought up the "copying" and "blaming" issues. Nobody's to blame. I don't particularly like the whole "X copied Y" take, as you can see from my other comments to this story.
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I thought only police officers are legally allowed to retain your actual drivers license. What business had the pharmacist doing that?
And, Altavista never did email, maps, personal webpages, or advertising.
I beg to differ. Altavista had much of what Google has today, and they had it in the 90s. They offered email accounts @altavista.com, the offered some customization, and if anything they had too much advertising, to the point they started watering the results. They had image search IIRC, and newsgroups search. They may have had some partnership with an online mailing list website, I don't recall clearly.
Except they didn't put everything together the way Google did. Their mindset was that of the dreadful "portal" of the bubble, a website where you throw everything together, but without actually integrating everything smoothly. Remember their homepage back then, at one point it was something like Yahoo's.
They lacked the insight to do what Google did, but it's not fair holding it against them. Not many did, I dare say that Google is a spectacularly singular example. And certainly not in the 90s. I dare say that there's no way that something like Google could have appeared during the bubble. The mindset of both web users and companies was too different.
That's not exactly fair. OK, "google" has become an incredible trademark, but it has some things going for it that Altavista never got to have. For one thing, it can be used as a verb, which doesn't work for "go altavista it".
Altavista was a nice project, I always liked that about their beginnings. Their "about" section at one point said "we started this because we wanted to see if we can index the entire Web". You gotta love that, and I think they succeeded there.
Except that at some point they sold out or went commercial and sacrificed the simple looks of the result pages for banner ads and payed results and whatnot, something that Google is very careful about. To this day, Google's result pages are very simple and clean, the ads are unobtrusive text ads, and there is no injection of payed results because the ads themselves are that and are clearly delimited.
Altavista could've still been big today but they messed up at the critical moment.
Would be to have seperated the class into two teams with two networks and then have them secure their networks. Then launch attacks angainst one another.
I dunno, some security experts seem to think that "penetrate and patch" is not such a brilliant idea after all.
You should be selling the logs to a security company instead of throwing them away. Seriously, they can use stuff like this.
[..]like the SOB that attempted 2147 login attempts on my openssh server in a 10 minute time span.
Dude, that's just asking for it. Why would you allow so many attempts in the first place? Should've used time limits and sensible timeouts. A real human should not need more than 3 attempts before he realizes he's forgotten his password, or need to try more than once ever 10 seconds or so.
Miso is a goddamn turnip.
The first one they decoded was already available in plain text, they just didn't know which it was. Chances are that the others will be similar. Decades after the war, it's easier to just go the former enemy nation and ask to see their records.
Besides, what is left to prove for this M4 project?
The original breakthrough was the deed of one brilliant mind, the Polish matematician Marian Rejewski, and he was helped (however little) by the fact that Hans-Thilo Schmidt sold the Enigma plans to the French secret services.
The English project was a joint effort of many more minds and succeeded because the Germans did all kinds of mistakes which reduced the scope of the searches. Even so, the encryptions used by the German Navy back then (which didn't make those mistakes) could not be broken after all, and the English had to resort to capturing the code-change schedules.
So what's the purpose of this modern reenacting of the breaking process? Just to prove that, given enough raw computing power, you can break any code? Gee, what a novel concept. It doesn't contribute anything new. It's just a brute force attack, no elegance to it, no particularly new approach, no subtlety. So I ask again, what's the point?
I'm thinking that there are a few distributed computing projects out there which could actually produce something useful instead of a telegram text which was already available anyway.
Exactly. The Chinese government policy is very simple: they either control information, or they censor it.
It's frightening to see how the Chinese market is making governments, companies and organizations all over the world give in an inch at a time, for some small favor, thinking that things will change. The Chinese never change. They absorb whoever attempts to conquer them and they change them. It's like that old saying: if you dance with the devil, the devil doesn't change, the devil changes you.
Giving in to the Chinese gov demands and arranging compromises with it is not the answer. Offering the Chinese citizens complete access through alternate means is the answer.
Besides games, I don't know what is so compelling about the Windows platform.
It's there when you unpack your new PC or laptop.
Well I'm pretty sure someone is making a profit out of it. It costs next to nothing to send a million emails, and there are a lot of dumbasses out there.
While this is certainly true (money drives spam), I don't see why this is being attributed to dumb people who click on links due to cluelessness. I'd venture to say it's more likely that spam messages sell something that people want. They send out a million messages a day for whatever merchendise: viagra, bogus kits for enlargement of various body parts, fake diplomas, "original" software kits at half the price, lists of lonely housewives in your neighbourhood and so on. If one person a day makes a payment for any of these, that's already profit.
If we want to stop spam we need to stop people buying the stuff that spam advertises. Will that happen? I hardly doubt it.
Of course they do. But where's the profit in that?
Ask Hotmail. Last I heard, they were getting payed by advertisers to let stuff pass through their antispam filters.
Yahoo has (recently?) added captcha's for every message you send out and they're moving towards a heavy JavaScript interface too.
Google are still relatively protected by theirs being a full AJAX interface. But I'm willing to bet there are JavaScript-enabled bots out there used for spam purposes (collecting addresses and operating such interfaces). And if there aren't now, there will be soon enough.
And I'm willing to bet that the big one will come through a communication app, most likely a messenger, because those can pass firewalls and don't have the bitter history of email and browsers to learn from.
Since educating the users doesn't work, and playing catch-up with malware also doesn't work, the solution should be obvious: preemptive technologies and practices.
A few examples.
* Whitelisting executables that are allowed to run on the system. It seems to work well for firewalls such as Zone Alarm, which starts from a deny-all policy and prompts the user for things it wants to allow. Substitute "user" with "admin" for executables, though.
* Any app used for communication should follow some common-sense rules. In particular, it should never ever be allowed to trick the user into thinking one type of file is another. This means email and instant messengers at the very least. Browsers seem to have gotten the point, although some are slower to fix things than others (cough*IE*cough). But take that Mac OS X worm of last week; what business has a chat program to allow an executable file pose as an image? This is asking for it!
* Better security in the applications. I'm not talking about buffer overflows which let's say are legitimate slip-ups to some extent, I'm talking about stupid stuff like directory traversal or masquarading a file type as another and so on. Much of the malware (and much of the most successful) exploits such stupid mistakes, not buffer overflows. There are stupid applications, not stupid users. You can't expect users to learn everything about security on the Internet. They are just as accountable as someone who wipes out because the steering in their car was badly designed. Except big software makers are careful to put disclaimers in their EULA. Would Ford get away with the kind of responsability wavers Microsoft uses?
* Stop idolizing the kind of "hacker" that's been popular in the media as a cool character, the "bad guy". Those types are burglars, they commit breaking and entering. Enough of Holywood movies with cool geeks and spies using leet hacks as the cool main characters. The public at large still doesn't understand anything, but leaves the theater with the wrong impression.
Inventing something once is Genius. Inventing something twice is stupidity.
If somebody comes up with a solution on his own, unaware there was already one ready-made, does that make him stupid? I'd say he's just as much of an inventor as the first one.
There's a distinction to be made here.
If we want productivity (and money) then of course one should always look for ready-made solutions first, look into modifying an existing one second, and only third should they attempt to make their own from scratch.
But if we want learning, then there's no substitute to coming up with good solutions on your own. That's solid programming education, that will teach you to gather relevant information, analyse it, make decisions and come up with a solution. This is the kind of stuff that will allow him to become a project leader later on.
Perhaps we should allow porn of all types to be available in public libraries, because clearly most parents do the "right thing" and educate their kids... what a joke, what world do you live in? Certainly not this world - many parents are fools and are poor role models - good thing the government steps in and trys to regulates things.
How is it alright to limit the freedoms of everybody to make up for idiots who aren't willing to make the effort and take responsability?
No government is going to come out openly and say "let's help the oppressed masses in China evade government censorship." It's too bad for business. It's sickening to see how every value fades away once confronted with the prospect of an incredibly rich potential market.
Hi, I'm going to create a service similar to yours in the same industry, but I'm not going to directly compete with you.
What if Google ads a "buy this" link to its advertising banners? With a cut of the transaction going to either Google itself, or to the owner of the page (for some targeted stuff) (or to both).
If they restrict the payment service to their own ad network, you can't really say they are directly competing with PayPal.
I keep hearing OSS people breezily dismiss criticisms of software such as GIMP or just insist that it IS good enough for professionals. The very fact that some people are arogant enough to try to shove tools onto people that WILL NOT DO THE JOB shows why it's hard to adopt Linux on the desktop. Linux has done well in areas where geeks have written software for other people like themselves.
There is no "OSS" people in the sense you mean here. OSS is a software developing and distribution methodology. You could just as well talk about "OOP people" or "people who use exceptions" taking a stand on desktop development. Sounds silly yet?
Second, there is no "Linux". There is no central entity with an agenda. There's just loads of geeks doing things for fun and their own use, as you already acknowledged. This will never change. This open development model is a meritocracy: "contribute or shut up."
The adoption of GNU/Linux in the commercial world and on the users' desktops is mostly a lucky side-effect. The open model simply happens to produce software that is good enough both commercially and from the user POV. There isn't a master plan, there is no agenda, no roadmap, no goals to achieve, no budgets, nothing like that. Not even malice towards end users or artist types.
Developers are kings. Users come second. Commercial grade quality comes third. No amount of complaining about it will change anything. This is how this thing works. Denying it is breaking it.
When someone with enough resources is willing to invest time and money and effort into these issues, they improve. When not, they don't. Simple. Some really big open communities have started to do it (Gnome, KDE) as well as some commercial entities (IBM, Ubuntu, Red Hat, Novell, etc.) But don't expect it from the communities at large.
It's not like the olden days where a guy could learn Cobol and have a job until he dropped dead into the card reader.
What do you mean, "old days"? I'm a Cobol programmer today, you insensitive clod!
The key ingredient is intelligent programmers. Sadly many companies do not realize that spending 150K per person on two programmers is more efficient than spending 85k per person on 10. Companies would rather have lots of monkeys than a few geniuses.
Google seems to have gotten the point... And another thing, I hear Google loves Python, which was bashed just earlier in the thread. If a living successful example can't get the point across to others, what will?
Nothing learned while programming is non-portable. The basic concepts of programming, as well as everything built on those concpts, are the same in any language.
Ah, but perhaps the GP was referring to how the
You brought up the "copying" and "blaming" issues. Nobody's to blame. I don't particularly like the whole "X copied Y" take, as you can see from my other comments to this story.
Do you check all those extensions once a month to see for any new ones?)
They update by themselves. It's like magic.