but in today's world, it's fairly unknown to I would safely say 99% of computer users.
Don't underestimate the power of ordinary people. It never ceases to amaze me how much technical knowledge and sophistication is to be found in unlikely people. I first noticed this in the BBS days and have seen it continue on into the Internet days. All around us are postal workers, secretaries, truck drivers, dental assistants, warehouse workers, etc., who do extraordinary things with their computers, often with no prior experience whatsoever. I think that to presume that 99% of Winblows users don't know how to prevent boot-time program loads is to seriously underestimate the actual knowledge levels that are out there in the user community. Maybe Aunt Betty doesn't know, but OTOH maybe Aunt Betty would surprise you if you knew what she's really up to with her PC.
I'd like to suggest that the growing horde of clueless, shameless litigation companies is a threat to the well-being and future of our world, and needs to be addressed in a way that punishes the actors.
No policies are put in place nor actions taken by corporations or government without specific people being responsible. Every bad policy or action has one or more individuals behind it.
Most bad policies and actions have suprisingly few individuals behind them.
News and attention that focus solely on the corporation or government and not on the individuals allow the bad actors responsible to escape most or all of the consequences and to repeat their offenses after changing companies, jobs, positions.
For end users, often the most effective and satisfying recourse is to withhold one's purchasing power from bad actors and their employers.
We should have a mechanism to identify and track the individuals responsible for the most egregious offenses against sensibility and rights.
We should use that mechanism to follow the bad actors from place to place, company to company, position to position.
We should impose a "moving boycott" on all the entities that employ the bad actors. We should make the bad actors permanently unemployable.
A polling mechanism reinforced by email confirmation might suffice to elect candidates to the list of bad actors.
Most of what I see in their page reads so nauseautingly smarmy that it appears Suncomm may be writing both the questions and the answers. At the least it seems they may be filtering what they allow onto the page to keep it all positive. Are there really as many stupid people in the world as the alleged bouquet-throwing, kudos-flinging bearers of unabashed praise represented on that page?
So, ah, just because you own your computer and, according to SunnComm, "Those who own property, whether physical or digital, have the ultimate authority over how their property is used," doesn't mean you can press the Ctrl key whenever you want to?
I for one am rooting for Steve Irwin to be eaten by one of his "beeeOOOOtiful" crocs. I just hope it's captured on video and that the video escapes to the Internet.
I don't actually disklike him, but he lays it on so thick that it's painful.
And who are these "researchers," anyway, who get to run around and disturb wild animals for whatever whims strike them, while the rest of us would be imprisoned for interfereing with the poor creatures?
Its a bit unfair to compare him to some Japanese chick he probably doesn't even know.
Good one! I liked that!
In any case it's just a sig, not directed at any particular poster. It's a shame I can't make the word into a link. It doesn't seem to be allowed in sigs.
Yes. It lets me know that the other person hasn't died. Jeez, I really hate it when that happens, especially after typing for minutes only to learn that it will never be read.
It is obvious that the patent office is ignoring the prior art clause.
No shit, Sherlock!
Why not just file a criminal charge against the staff of the patent office and use the law to stop this kind of behavior.
Ordinary citizens can't file criminal charges. You'd have to speak with the office of the U.S. Attorney for that. Or the Justice Dept.
If the office is failing to perform it's job why not confront it in a court of law?
I'm all for it, but it's not that easily done.
Hell you could push as far as treason if need be (only takes two witnesses last I checked) as a conscious act to undermine the Constitution, federal law, and confront it as an act of economic sabotage.
I'd favor the "enemy combatant" approach, myself. Ship the damned patent examiners off to Guantanamo Bay for dentention and interrogation.
There are plenty of ways to confront the problem.
There are? Name a few that have a legal basis, a chance of working, and are affordable.
I find it odd that the EFF and ACLU have not touched the Patent Office in earnest.
The EFF has its hands full. The ACLU isn't about defending the Constitution -- it's about tearing American culture and society apart using the Constitution and willing courts as tools.
What is protecting the Patent Office such that even basic avenues are not used?
Obscurity? Someone else posted (in another topic) enlightening comments about the mentality that is bred and perpetuated within the Patent Office. It's very ugly. It's one of the few good justifications for capital punishment I've ever heard.
At the point that the Patent Office has ignored it's purpose I would most likely pursue legal action first based on ignoring the law and establishment of the "Prior Art" rules and if there is still no change after that, move to the treason avenue.
I'm sure I speak for everyone when I say that we are in full agreement and urge you to proceed. Please post progress reports here on slashdot.
Sad to say that treason is becoming more and more reasonable when looking at the larger picture of the Patent Office problems.
Indeed. Veritably gnawing away at the foundations of the Republic, they are. Not to mention aggravated cluelessness, which also seems to abound.
But Tom Galvin, VeriSign's VP of public affairs, said this is just one big misunderstanding.
Yeah. Maybe Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Batista, Somoza, Pol Pot, Baby Doc Duvalier, Millajovovich, Saddam Hussein, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, Henry Lee Lucas, et al could have saved themselves a lot of trouble if they had thought of this excuse. "It's just one big misunderstanding!"
The coverage has been largely technical, expressing the fears of the technical community.
Yeah, as in the technical community that built and that operates the Internet. Fuckwit!
The media is not focusing on the end user. We think they're the most important audience.
Great! Let's just shitcan the Internet Engineering Task Force and put all the technical issues up for public polling. Slimey shit-for-brains!
We're putting it in the context of the benefits to the end user.
Now there's a great idea! How about putting narcotics in the context of the benefits to the end user, hmmm? How about putting robbery and theft in the context of the benefits to the end user? How about rape? Let's not stop there... there's invasion,looting and pillage and genocide, not to mention forgery, fraud, etc.
VeriSlime joins SCO in putting faces to the long-alleged "corporate greed" some of us used to laugh at. "Corporate greed" used to be a pejorative of the far left, but now it has taken shape and lives in the form of VeriSlime and SCO. In real life it's far worse than anything the lefties used to complain about.
Once upon a time there were no CFOs, COOs or CIOs, the President of a company was the CEO without being called "CEO," because everyone knew that the President was, by definition, the chief executive officer, and no one in their right mind would have put an MBA into a position as a "professional manager" while the MBA was completely clueless about the business or the industry. "Human Resources" didn't exist -- we had a Personnel Department that kept records, added people to payroll and removed them, kept tabs on benefits, and had no voice in anything. The top financial officer was the Treasurer or the Comptroller, also without much of a voice, since the primary financial function in a corporation, after collecting receivables, paying payables and not misplacing the remainder, is accounting -- that is, keeping track of where we have been -- essentially the view out the back window of the corporate car. A friend of mine once observed that if you drive looking out the back window, you'll end up in a ditch.
Internet Explorer has had that feature for years, as well as many other browsers. What they tried to do is knock all other site finders out of service, regardless of user preference.
Right, in a very crude sense. But once again, this time with feeling:
Internet Explorer is an application
DNS is a system of protocol, servers, and clients -- the infrastructure for translating between host names and IP addresses for the Internet. DNS knows nothing about Internet Explorer.
Internet Explorer is only one of many, many applications and lower-level processes that make use of DNS. Many of those applications and processes have nothing to do with the Web and many have no direct user interface. They depend on accurate replies from the DNS subsystem to queries about host and domain names.
VeriSlime broke DNS in the.COM and.NET domains for all applications and processes other than Web browsers.
When a browser such as MS Internet Explorer interprets a DNS no-find reply to kick off its own redirect to an MS search site, that has no effect on anything outside the PC where it happens
When VeriSlime returned false IP address information for all nonexistent hosts or domains, they caused numerous things other than Web browsers to break -- things you may not normally see but without which you might become quite unhappy.
Think of it like an oil company suddenly changing to a new gasoline additive without consulting anyone, not even the engine manufacturers. It has only a minor effect on consumers, who put low mileage on their cars, but immediately causes engine failure in taxicabs, police cars, delivery vehicles, ambulances, and a whole host of vehicles that you, the dimwitted consumer, don't think about much, if at all. So things start to break all around you while you say, "Hey! What's the big deal?"
Exactly how is the sitefinder service any different than some domain name squatter using a commonly misspelled version of a domain name for commercial gain?
In terms of how the Internet works, the two are vastly different. A domain squatter or parker actually pays for and registers a domain. What the domain owner puts up there is nobody else's business, and it affects nothing else on the Internet. What Verisign did was to return false DNS responses for nonexistent domains as if all those domains existed and were located at the IP address of their SiteFinder Web server. That action introduced a massive falsehood into the domain name space of.COM and.NET.
Morons sitting at Web browsers are not the only things on the Internet that make use of DNS. Lots of non-Web processes also use DNS, and most of them depend partially or completely on accurate replies to DNS queries. That's what the talk of things being "broken" by Verisign's action is all about.
Uh, where do you think the "keen little page" came from, thin air, hmmm? That is the Web site. Sitefinder is still there, but ineffectual without DNS wildcarding sending traffic to it.
"We requested an extension from ICANN
to give more notice to the community but were denied."
Really. That's like Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War asking for an extension to the extinguishing of the Kuwaiti oil field fires to give more notice to the region and the world that the emission of noxious black smoke was going to cease.
The idea is to raise the costs of spam to the spammers, if not at the spam sending side, then at the spamwebsite side. Most spam solicits visits to a website. If a relatively small percentage of Net users were to employ Bayesian filters and/or other techniques to identify and segregate spam, then to accept the explicit invitation in each spam to visit one or more URLs provided, and maybe even download the entire sites a few times, the cost of running a spamwebsite server for the tiny numbers of orders they get would rise sharply.
I don't have it completely automated yet. I'm still using filters in my email client, but they are good enough that no spam gets through to my New Mail folder, and a whitelist ensures that there are no false positives in any mail from anyone I already know I wish to hear from. What goes to my spam folder contains a few false positives of people who have never written to me before, but mostly those whose email contains garbage like HTML.
Once a day or so I simply save the cleaned spam folder to a file and ftp it to one of my servers. There, scripts take over and faithfully accept the explicit invitations in the spam to visit their websites.
As more people do this, the traffic will dramatically increase at the spamwebsites, but orders will not increase. At some level or other, either in their server farm or to their upstream provider, those sites pay for bandwidth. As they get bumped up into higher bandwidth pricing tiers, their margins on the small numbers of orders they get from complete nitwits will drop.
Think of it as a servo system: If the level of spam annoys you, set your filter to fighting back. As more people do that, spam will level off and drop. As it drops to a level at which fewer people bother to set their filters to fighting back, an equilibrium will be achieved. There will still be spam, but a whole lot less than there is now. Think mosquitos and birds. Birds control mosquito populations. There are still mosquitos, but a lot less than there would be if there were no birds. Be a bird -- eat spamwebsites.
The weak point in Graham's proposal is that it really needs a universal whitelist to prevent spammers or other malicious third parties from causing massive traffic to innocent websites by sending out spam that provides URLs that are not the spammer's. It's not clear how such a whitelist would work, who would run it, how sites would get onto it (or off, if they turn bad), or whether someone will come up with a neat P2P solution.
It is clear, though, that anyone receiving 20-100 spams a day can easily review the filtered spams or the extracted URLs and simply delete those that appear innocent. Then scripts do the rest.
Nonsense! States don't presently collect sales tax on interstate transactions because they don't have the power to do so.
Congress has to step in because they have the power to regluate interstate commerce.
Wong, Glasshoppa! To "regulate" does not extend to unilaterally granting new powers to the States to levy and collect taxes they presently have no power to levy or collect.
The states are depending on software to come to the rescue.
No Glasshoppa! They have some very fundamental obstacles to overcome before software even enters the picture. Why do you think we don't already have a national sales tax, hmmm? Why do you think the many surfacings of a proposed national Value Added Tax (VAT) went nowhere, hmmm? It's because there are serious Constitutional problems that Congress has so far not been able to figure out how to overcome (or flim-flam, as they did to impose the 55 MPH speed limit in the 1970s).
The "group of States" may be just that -- a flim-flam to bypass the utter absence of any federal authority to "authorize" the States to collect taxes for which neither the States nor the federal government has any legitimate constitutional power. If it flies at all, you can bet that underneath it will be a network of treaties between the participating States, and that any real power will drive from those treaties, not from the federal government. But there will be plenty of smoke and mirrors and misdirection, because sales taxes are no business of the federal government, but that fact is only one of many that the politicians don't wish the average person to understand.
-----
Do you feel stupid yet? Look at the bright side: There's always seppuku.
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Not to mention "conceivably" and "therefore."
c0dedude wrote:
Don't underestimate the power of ordinary people. It never ceases to amaze me how much technical knowledge and sophistication is to be found in unlikely people. I first noticed this in the BBS days and have seen it continue on into the Internet days. All around us are postal workers, secretaries, truck drivers, dental assistants, warehouse workers, etc., who do extraordinary things with their computers, often with no prior experience whatsoever. I think that to presume that 99% of Winblows users don't know how to prevent boot-time program loads is to seriously underestimate the actual knowledge levels that are out there in the user community. Maybe Aunt Betty doesn't know, but OTOH maybe Aunt Betty would surprise you if you knew what she's really up to with her PC.
Nightbrood wrote:
Anyone claiming to be a scientist should know the difference between "lose" and "loose."
I lose my patience when seeing such loose use of English.
I'd like to suggest that the growing horde of clueless, shameless litigation companies is a threat to the well-being and future of our world, and needs to be addressed in a way that punishes the actors.
Most of what I see in their page reads so nauseautingly smarmy that it appears Suncomm may be writing both the questions and the answers. At the least it seems they may be filtering what they allow onto the page to keep it all positive. Are there really as many stupid people in the world as the alleged bouquet-throwing, kudos-flinging bearers of unabashed praise represented on that page?
Sunncomm announced today their intention to investigate prosecuting the following circumventions recently brought to their attention:
The last is being hailed by IP attorneys as an innovative "wildcarding" of the DCMA.
So, ah, just because you own your computer and, according to SunnComm, "Those who own property, whether physical or digital, have the ultimate authority over how their property is used," doesn't mean you can press the Ctrl key whenever you want to?
gd23ka wrote:
Hey! Our U.S. legal system deeply resembles your remark!
I for one am rooting for Steve Irwin to be eaten by one of his "beeeOOOOtiful" crocs. I just hope it's captured on video and that the video escapes to the Internet.
I don't actually disklike him, but he lays it on so thick that it's painful.
And who are these "researchers," anyway, who get to run around and disturb wild animals for whatever whims strike them, while the rest of us would be imprisoned for interfereing with the poor creatures?
cyril3 wrote:
Good one! I liked that!
In any case it's just a sig, not directed at any particular poster. It's a shame I can't make the word into a link. It doesn't seem to be allowed in sigs.Sir Haxalot wrote:
Yes. It lets me know that the other person hasn't died. Jeez, I really hate it when that happens, especially after typing for minutes only to learn that it will never be read.
kenp2002 wrote:
No shit, Sherlock!
Ordinary citizens can't file criminal charges. You'd have to speak with the office of the U.S. Attorney for that. Or the Justice Dept.
I'm all for it, but it's not that easily done.
I'd favor the "enemy combatant" approach, myself. Ship the damned patent examiners off to Guantanamo Bay for dentention and interrogation.
There are? Name a few that have a legal basis, a chance of working, and are affordable.
The EFF has its hands full. The ACLU isn't about defending the Constitution -- it's about tearing American culture and society apart using the Constitution and willing courts as tools.
Obscurity? Someone else posted (in another topic) enlightening comments about the mentality that is bred and perpetuated within the Patent Office. It's very ugly. It's one of the few good justifications for capital punishment I've ever heard.
I'm sure I speak for everyone when I say that we are in full agreement and urge you to proceed. Please post progress reports here on slashdot.
Indeed. Veritably gnawing away at the foundations of the Republic, they are. Not to mention aggravated cluelessness, which also seems to abound.
abertoll wrote
Yes. It's an intrinsic part of the concept of patent.
You must be from latin America. That's the way property registration works there when the same piece of property is sold to more than one buyer.
I thought it was just a turn of phrase to ask if someone had lived in a cave all his life. I had no idea...
Godeke wrote:
Not any Yahoo Instant Messenger I've ever used. The indicator goes on and off periodically depending on whether the other person is typing or not.
Yeah. Maybe Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Batista, Somoza, Pol Pot, Baby Doc Duvalier, Millajovovich, Saddam Hussein, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, Henry Lee Lucas, et al could have saved themselves a lot of trouble if they had thought of this excuse. "It's just one big misunderstanding!"
Yeah, as in the technical community that built and that operates the Internet. Fuckwit!
Great! Let's just shitcan the Internet Engineering Task Force and put all the technical issues up for public polling. Slimey shit-for-brains!
Now there's a great idea! How about putting narcotics in the context of the benefits to the end user, hmmm? How about putting robbery and theft in the context of the benefits to the end user? How about rape? Let's not stop there... there's invasion, looting and pillage and genocide, not to mention forgery, fraud, etc.
VeriSlime joins SCO in putting faces to the long-alleged "corporate greed" some of us used to laugh at. "Corporate greed" used to be a pejorative of the far left, but now it has taken shape and lives in the form of VeriSlime and SCO. In real life it's far worse than anything the lefties used to complain about.
Yes. This is the New Corporatism.
Once upon a time there were no CFOs, COOs or CIOs, the President of a company was the CEO without being called "CEO," because everyone knew that the President was, by definition, the chief executive officer, and no one in their right mind would have put an MBA into a position as a "professional manager" while the MBA was completely clueless about the business or the industry. "Human Resources" didn't exist -- we had a Personnel Department that kept records, added people to payroll and removed them, kept tabs on benefits, and had no voice in anything. The top financial officer was the Treasurer or the Comptroller, also without much of a voice, since the primary financial function in a corporation, after collecting receivables, paying payables and not misplacing the remainder, is accounting -- that is, keeping track of where we have been -- essentially the view out the back window of the corporate car. A friend of mine once observed that if you drive looking out the back window, you'll end up in a ditch.
dtfinch wrote:
Right, in a very crude sense. But once again, this time with feeling:
- Internet Explorer is an application
- DNS is a system of protocol, servers, and clients -- the infrastructure for translating between host names and IP addresses for the Internet. DNS knows nothing about Internet Explorer.
- Internet Explorer is only one of many, many applications and lower-level processes that make use of DNS. Many of those applications and processes have nothing to do with the Web and many have no direct user interface. They depend on accurate replies from the DNS subsystem to queries about host and domain names.
- VeriSlime broke DNS in the
.COM and .NET domains for all applications and processes other than Web browsers.
- When a browser such as MS Internet Explorer interprets a DNS no-find reply to kick off its own redirect to an MS search site, that has no effect on anything outside the PC where it happens
- When VeriSlime returned false IP address information for all nonexistent hosts or domains, they caused numerous things other than Web browsers to break -- things you may not normally see but without which you might become quite unhappy.
Think of it like an oil company suddenly changing to a new gasoline additive without consulting anyone, not even the engine manufacturers. It has only a minor effect on consumers, who put low mileage on their cars, but immediately causes engine failure in taxicabs, police cars, delivery vehicles, ambulances, and a whole host of vehicles that you, the dimwitted consumer, don't think about much, if at all. So things start to break all around you while you say, "Hey! What's the big deal?"Jesus IS the Devil wrote:
In terms of how the Internet works, the two are vastly different. A domain squatter or parker actually pays for and registers a domain. What the domain owner puts up there is nobody else's business, and it affects nothing else on the Internet. What Verisign did was to return false DNS responses for nonexistent domains as if all those domains existed and were located at the IP address of their SiteFinder Web server. That action introduced a massive falsehood into the domain name space of .COM and .NET.
Morons sitting at Web browsers are not the only things on the Internet that make use of DNS. Lots of non-Web processes also use DNS, and most of them depend partially or completely on accurate replies to DNS queries. That's what the talk of things being "broken" by Verisign's action is all about.
SCO sucks.......21,900
"SCO bites".............13
SCO bites..........6,700
"SCO weasel"...........3
SCO weasel.......1,980
"SCO weasels"..........3
SCO weasels.........781
"SCO shit"...............31
SCO asshole......1,830
SCO assholes.....1,430
SCO unethical....3,350
"investigating SCO"....23
"Darl McBride, lowlife CEO of SCO"...0
"Darl McBride's pump-and-dump".......0
"investigating Darl McBride".....0
"Darl McBride's boyfriend"......0
"Darl McBride's indictment".....0
"Darl McBride indicted"...........0
"Darl McBride's suicide"..........0
Due to an overabundance of insight, I predict that all the above will increase in hits in the near future.
Uh, where do you think the "keen little page" came from, thin air, hmmm? That is the Web site. Sitefinder is still there, but ineffectual without DNS wildcarding sending traffic to it.
Really. That's like Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War asking for an extension to the extinguishing of the Kuwaiti oil field fires to give more notice to the region and the world that the emission of noxious black smoke was going to cease.
The VeriSlime people have no shame whatsoever.
It's still there. I guess VeriSlime is going to push it right up to the deadline.
VeriSlime and SCO really do belong together, as a faux news release posted here announced. Two soiled icons of greed and arrogance.
This is really bizarre. There are almost 300 comments on this item and no one has even mentioned Paul Graham's proposal for Filters That Fight Back:
The idea is to raise the costs of spam to the spammers, if not at the spam sending side, then at the spamwebsite side. Most spam solicits visits to a website. If a relatively small percentage of Net users were to employ Bayesian filters and/or other techniques to identify and segregate spam, then to accept the explicit invitation in each spam to visit one or more URLs provided, and maybe even download the entire sites a few times, the cost of running a spamwebsite server for the tiny numbers of orders they get would rise sharply.
I don't have it completely automated yet. I'm still using filters in my email client, but they are good enough that no spam gets through to my New Mail folder, and a whitelist ensures that there are no false positives in any mail from anyone I already know I wish to hear from. What goes to my spam folder contains a few false positives of people who have never written to me before, but mostly those whose email contains garbage like HTML.
Once a day or so I simply save the cleaned spam folder to a file and ftp it to one of my servers. There, scripts take over and faithfully accept the explicit invitations in the spam to visit their websites.
As more people do this, the traffic will dramatically increase at the spamwebsites, but orders will not increase. At some level or other, either in their server farm or to their upstream provider, those sites pay for bandwidth. As they get bumped up into higher bandwidth pricing tiers, their margins on the small numbers of orders they get from complete nitwits will drop.
Think of it as a servo system: If the level of spam annoys you, set your filter to fighting back. As more people do that, spam will level off and drop. As it drops to a level at which fewer people bother to set their filters to fighting back, an equilibrium will be achieved. There will still be spam, but a whole lot less than there is now. Think mosquitos and birds. Birds control mosquito populations. There are still mosquitos, but a lot less than there would be if there were no birds. Be a bird -- eat spamwebsites.
The weak point in Graham's proposal is that it really needs a universal whitelist to prevent spammers or other malicious third parties from causing massive traffic to innocent websites by sending out spam that provides URLs that are not the spammer's. It's not clear how such a whitelist would work, who would run it, how sites would get onto it (or off, if they turn bad), or whether someone will come up with a neat P2P solution.
It is clear, though, that anyone receiving 20-100 spams a day can easily review the filtered spams or the extracted URLs and simply delete those that appear innocent. Then scripts do the rest.
I think grammar and spelling Nazis should be armed and equipped with a license to kill, don't you?
Nonsense! States don't presently collect sales tax on interstate transactions because they don't have the power to do so.
Wong, Glasshoppa! To "regulate" does not extend to unilaterally granting new powers to the States to levy and collect taxes they presently have no power to levy or collect.
No Glasshoppa! They have some very fundamental obstacles to overcome before software even enters the picture. Why do you think we don't already have a national sales tax, hmmm? Why do you think the many surfacings of a proposed national Value Added Tax (VAT) went nowhere, hmmm? It's because there are serious Constitutional problems that Congress has so far not been able to figure out how to overcome (or flim-flam, as they did to impose the 55 MPH speed limit in the 1970s).
The "group of States" may be just that -- a flim-flam to bypass the utter absence of any federal authority to "authorize" the States to collect taxes for which neither the States nor the federal government has any legitimate constitutional power. If it flies at all, you can bet that underneath it will be a network of treaties between the participating States, and that any real power will drive from those treaties, not from the federal government. But there will be plenty of smoke and mirrors and misdirection, because sales taxes are no business of the federal government, but that fact is only one of many that the politicians don't wish the average person to understand.
-----
Do you feel stupid yet? Look at the bright side: There's always seppuku.