"Apple Laptops run Linux with full hardware support VERY nicely and have over a broad generation of laptops."
Got any more information on this? When I asked YellowDog about their iBook pre-loaded with linux, there were a number of things not supported, including critical things like support for an external monitor.
"Is anybody else unhappy with some of the changes in GIMP2?"
Well, the constant crashes on the Windows version aren't an ideal advertisement for free software...
The interface seems about the same though... not particularly easier to use, not particularly harder to use... It's the same tools and panels that were always available, so I wouldn't really expect any great productivity gains from rearranging them.
"What right does this person have to dictate what his boss should do?"
What right? Well, companies have been harping on for years about how it's okay and perfectly legal to monitor employees' use of work computers. Why should it be any less legal if it's a manager that gets caught?
"This idiot overstepped his boundaries."
A sysadmin knowing what's going on on company computers is "overstepping his boundaries"?
"Perhaps his boss can do his job and play Solitaire at the same time. Maybe that's why he ended up as Boss."
lol. very good.
"What makes it worse is that he was a government employee and demonstrated an intent to use his position as system administrator to spy on other government employees"
Government employee saving government money, and improving the efficiency of government departments is, I believe, the phrase you're looking for. Taxpayers are having x% taken out of their salaries to finance this guy doing nothing and getting paid for it.
"This is completely unacceptable, and it was entirely appropriate to fire his dipshit ass."
We look forward to your company firing sysadmins who do their job instead of ignoring problems then?
"when you start it the first time a dialog comes up and says "do you want the stripped down "easy" interface, or the full version for "advanced" users"
Why separate the options into "newbie", "idiot", and "developer" though? Surely it would make more sense to reveal options depending on what you're likely to use?
[*] Organising mode. Suddenly, all the context menus have the gzip options, cut/copy/paste, erase/wipe, while the file-manager gets a tree-view and history display
[*] Multimedia mode. Now, the context menus have "open in GIMP", "send to iPod", "print with gimp-print" options, a preview pane appears on the left of your file-manager, and directories have their big thumbnails.
[*] Development mode. Start displaying a shell at the bottom of the file-manager, while "execute program" takes its proper place on the context menu alongside "edit with...", "upload by FTP", and "open a command prompt here"
[*] Learning mode. You get your graphics-intense display modes, the "dangerous things" are turned off ("execute this file in WINE"), and popup help everywhere.
It would be rather better to have modes according to what you want to do, rather than making someone label themselves "non-expert" because they've turned off the customisation features. They may well be different types of experts, all of whom have different requirements for their interface.
It's also more likely to be elegant or efficient... "the things which happen most often need to be easiest". How do you know what the user wants to do most often, unless you let them tell you, either by customising things, or directly in bugzilla.
"He doesn't ONCE mention what his "problems" with gnome are, besides the fact that apparently the devs are "arrogant twits."
Is that not enough of a problem for you?
As to technical problems with GNOME, I think the writer mentions that he filed several bug reports in GNOME's bugzilla. These bugs were never fixed. There would seem to be little point in re-hashing what he wrote in bugzilla, when the problem is of users' opinions being belittled (to quote your comment, for example: "Ugh, this dude comes off as being an Iiiiddeeeeottt.") and that the problem of a hostile environment for those trying to help needs to be fixed before discussions about technical issues become relevant again.
In short, I think he's probably standing on the right side of the fork. Isn't that what open-source people are supposed to do when discussions stop being technical and start being shouting matches? You try out your way of working, and see if it attracts more users than the other way of working. "other" in this sense, consisting of insulting anyone who disagrees with you.
"Um, am I missing the point, or does the last author completely forget KDE and others ? You already have the freedom, silly."
The freedom to let GNOME stagnate as people migrate to other desktops instead of trying to improve it?
It would seem somewhat unfair to GNOME to take-up this freedom... When people offer bug reports, they are trying to help GNOME. Of course, while "use Windows instead" or "use KDE instead" is a valid response, it doesn't help GNOME get any better.
So are we supposed to give them different names, or is it not possible to uniquely identify each moon in 2018? January Blue Moon and March Blue Moon or something?
And can you change when blue moons occur by selecting an appropriate timezone, or by changing to daylight-savings-time just before a full moon?
"What kind of blind OSS zealotry is this? If somebody said something similar of IE there would be a unanimous uproar of upbraids from the slashdot community against whoever said it."
Well since most of us can't run Internet Explorer (it's not available for the operating system we use) that can be quite a moot point. Besides, you've got to pick one, and it may as well be the one which didn't run all those viruses we saw over the last two years.
"Black Moon is even more rare: When no full moons occur in a month (usually February)"
That would make it 2018 then?
Blue moon: 31/Jan/2008, 9am Worm moon: 01/Mar/2008, 10pm
b.t.w. I don't think it's "usually february", I think it is always february. Every month other than february is guaranteed to be longer than the synodic period (about 29.5 days), so is guaranteed to contain a full moon. (apart from the month in which you change from julian to gregorian calendars...)
On Mozilla 1.5, that link causes Mozilla to disappear completely (as in, shuts down all your open windows the same as a kill command would) -- this may be dependant on settings.
"The nurses don't take your pulse while you wait for a doctor in our hospitals - after 4 hours of pulse taking, they would probably not have learnt a great deal more. And that's the emergancy patients."
Well at least they don't greet you with "could I have your bank details and insurance certificate please"
"XP has been ROCK SOLID for me. No weird bugs, no hiccups, no problems. Runs moy software for work as well as games pretty without a single problem."
Actually I should explain better. I wasn't talking about instability problems. (at least, I hope I wasn't). We were discussing whether having WindowsXP on a computer is good or bad, in terms of getting work done. My reply was that it wasn't, for reasons in several categories:
(a) Setup time - By default, XP is awful. (Default for me typically means "as supplied by Dell") Awful as in, the stupid start menu layout, the stupid control panel layout, the stupid default settings, having everything set to "most animated", having everything set up with stupid defaults, that sort of thing. I usually budget about 2 hours per machine, to get a pre-loaded WindowsXP machine into a usable state (where "usable" is pretty similar to Windows 2000 with a few tweaks)
(b) Annoyances - probably in the same class of problems really, but I'm thinking of things like animated dogs when you search for files, or "helpfully" clearing away the icons on your desktop after 30 days, or all the other things like that. You always get flamed by "power-users" saying oh, but you can turn that all off. You can, but it's all time that you're not doing real work.
(c) Annoyances - networking - WindowsXP networking is so awful, it's in a class of it's own. I'm trying to blank it from my mind, but the two examples that stick are (a) deleting all my settings when I changed "workgroup" to "domain" or something, and (b) when we (6 software engineers) spent about a day trying to figure out why WindowsXP wouldn't let us use it in a network (turns out it baulked at the blank admin password [on a lab network] and silently refused fileshare connections)
(d) Updates - It's standard policy amongst slashdotters that a WindowsXP machine needs to be updated at least weekly, to get the latest patches. And I'm not talking about minor patches that make your email download faster. I'm talking about the ones which if you don't download them, your computer gets used by a criminal gang to send spam and everyone laughs at you for not running Windows Update daily instead of weekly.
(e) Security, day-to-day - Same group as the problems above? Securing a WindowsXP machine can be time-consuming in the extreme, probably because you're never really sure whether you're finished, or if there's something running that you don't know about. Ask all the people who didn't disable LSASS or Windows Messaging... The standard answer is a hardware firewall and virus-checker which really needs to be included in estimates of the cost of Windows.
(f) Security, distasters - and of course, the major one. If all you want to do is "get work done" as the original discussion was about, how would you feel if you lost 3 days to clean-up a virus in your office? Howabout if that happened every few weeks? For some people, you can get away with running Windows and not get viruses (for those of you with firewalls, clued-up users, and no laptops) but there are plenty of people losing a lot of their working hours to Windows viruses.
So... that's 6 ideas why Windows might not be ideal for a computer to assist you in your work. And I don't think I've mentioned instability amongst any of those... they all assume that Windows is working as intended.
"Firefox is not an acceptable replacement for IE for 90% of the users out there so I really think we could have done without the snide comment."
Huh?
Microsoft Internet Explorer isn't an acceptable browser for 90% of the users out there.
Nevermind your "snide" assertions about the websites that don't work, people are getting owned here. It's a serious problem. It's the spam problem and the virus problem and all the tech support problems, all stemming from this one application that's so insecure that everyone, from DHS to MSN themselves recommend getting rid of it immediately.
If your favorite website doesn't work in a generic web-browser, get them to fix it, or get a new supplier. Even the banks have got HTML websites now.
"2K/XP are for Microsoft boxen that do real work. "
XP isn't. You'll spend more time dealing with the operating system (trying to get it to work, fixing it, patching it, securing it, wondering why odd things misbehave, and stopping annoying things happening) and won't have as much time left as you hoped for real work.
"Honestly, I got through 3 examples before giving up. The real test for me is, "Is the link back to the official site? Or does it look like a link and take you to some mysterious 3rd party server?"
In this test *ALL* links pop up to a "for the purposes of this test, this link has been suspended" This makes the whole thing useless."
I trawled through the whole of the test (got a 9, dont'ya know, but didn't supply my email to get a copy of the results), and the fraud emails were mostly asking people to verify their information NOW, HERE, while the legit ones asked you to login through the normal channels and do stuff. Not that I'd believe even those unless I were expecting them, but nevertheless...
The other clues on that sample seemed to be gross unprofessionalism. Would a big comany really start their email saying how big a problem fraud is for them? Would they send short emails without an assload of notes at the bottom? Would they use crappy HTML formatting (the very thought...;)
The odd ones were "legit" emails that actually did ask people to sign-in and enter information. How do you tell with those? Probably by whether you were expecting it, whether you did business with them, whether they have your account name right, whether they sent it to the right email address, and then you can type the website you know instead of clicking on the link.
But what do I know? They're all HTML emails, which means they'd have been deleted or unread if they appeared in my inbox. And as people have mentioned, there's a lot to be seen in email headers, lack-of-SPF notwithstanding. If only companies would learn how to sign their emails, it's not hard. You'd think that for someone who spent thousands of dollars on a website, and hundreds of dollars for a verisign certificate, that they would at least have heard of PGP...
"Let me be among the first to call "Bullshit" on this supposed test." [+ note on looking up Received: headers]
Indeed. We seem lucky so far that most such scams are falling down at the most obvious hurdles. However, it does make you think about the awful lack of security amongst many comanies that you do business with.
The main thing stopping me being defrauded by email scams is the lack of people who know enough about the transactions I'm doing to imitate them. Sure it's easy to recognise a letter from a bank which isn't mine, or that doesn't even operate in my country, but what happens when someone finally tries it on with a 2-person company that I'm doing business with? It's scary the amount of trust we have in "obscurity".
[+] The buck has to start with the banks really, because they're supposed to be the gold standard for internet security. And it's worrying that Natwest (and possibly still HSBC) were denying access to customers unless they use Internet Explorer on Windows, even after all the spoofing attacks that were (are?) so trivial on that browser.
[+] Then you get the medium-sized companies. People like Maplin Electronics, who display your password on screen, and then send it to you by email.
[+] Small companies. My website provider. I get the distinct and worrying impression that they'll follow orders from anyone who sends an email with my name in the "From" field.
Do you think it's possible for a criminal to guess information about who you're buying from or selling to? Ask the people with Windows viruses -- their entire email history is available and regularly used by the virus.
How many windows users have got emails from you? If any of them opens an EXE attachment, the virus-writer can imitate everything, right down to the way you sign-off your emails, and you can't beat that if you want the people on someones' contact list to trust an email you send... Don't talk about encryption and signatures here -- I've never got a PGP message from someone who I didn't setup the keys myself.
[+] And of course, we have the one-person internet companies. "Security? Yes we have SSL" Aargh. People who you're talking to about confidential stuff, you ask for a PGP key and they respond "we're planning to get HTTPS on our website sometime". I don't care - it's how secure is the computer you're keeping my details on that counts, and it had better not be connected to the internet.
Let's finish with a quote from 2600. This is the standard that ecommerce should be aiming for, not "Citibank reveals another thousand sets of customer account details in a database fuck-up"
" We do not save your credit card information after your order is complete. We also do not share ANY of your information with anyone. If you've ordered a subscription, your name and address reside on our subscriber database which is located on a machine that is never connected to the net and which is protected by two levels of encryption that even the NSA would have trouble with. We will also NEVER send you unsolicited mail. In other words, we know a thing or two about privacy and we will do everything possible to protect yours." - 2600
Is it worthwhile to make a system wide-open to cheating, and then ask someone (you suggest the FBI) to shore-it-up by trying to catch those who cheat?
It sounds like a Microsoft maintenance plan... "No need for a secure system, we'll just keep fixing it each day"
While it's nice that police are able to respond to election fraud, it's better to have a system which intrinsically prevents it. It's easier to run, for a start. Also bear in mind that when the police arrest people, their first targets will be those showing the fallibility of the system by demonstrating how easy it is to cheat. Like for example, the poster you responded to - such people are easier to catch because they want to alert the world to problems that need fixing. So your FBI agents will be enforcing security through lititgation, and preventing some serious problems from being resolved.
"This is a perfect example of why I really hate software patents."
Those who can, do. Those who can't, patent.
"I don't have the technical skills necessary to make a product out of idea x, therefore I'll patent it, and make sure that nobody else can make a product eithter."
I think the comparaison was with the "dog in a manager" fable. Patents are for people who want to prevent others from creating things.
"(1) Avoiding single points of failure for the entire human race (e.g., giant asteroid nails Earth);"
For that to occur, we need lots of people (150 at least) in a self-sustaining location in space. Two people on ISS doesn't count. Four people on a space shuttle doesn't count. Stations that need resupplies for things as simple as food, air, and water don't count.
While the "saving a backup of humanity" is undoubtedly useful, why waste vast amounts of money on manned spaceflight that doesn't achieve that goal? Surely unmanned vehicles capable of setting-up the environment that will eventually be required is a better way towards the goal of an off-planet colony.
Somebody mentioned what I think could be an exciting proposal here, X-prize 2 for whoever builds a moon-base or space station and keeps it manned for a year. (You could offer 1.6 billion dollars, and it would still cost less than reparing the space shuttle)
X-prize 3 for the first baby born and raised in space? Face it, that's what you really need to have any hope of surviving the loss of Earth.
Meanwhile, the government programmes could spend their money on something like robots to handle water on mars, robotic space-stations capable of growing plants, and of course, space-elevator research.
Not only are the confluences nearer together where you are, but they're all on land, and nobody has visited any of them yet. I don't know if there's a section in DCP for other planets though...
"I once worked with a fellow who wrote software for ICBM's and he commented that one of the worst places to be in the event of a nuclear exchange was at Lat 0, Long 0 because there where several possible failure modes where the missiles would try to find their way here"
As anyone who's forgotten to convert radians to degrees knows, the area within 3deg of (0,0) can be quite busy in some flight simulations...
Slashdot Mirror
A case of idealism running smack into the wall of artificial monopolies and government-granted control of ideas and business-methods.
"Apple Laptops run Linux with full hardware support VERY nicely and have over a broad generation of laptops."
Got any more information on this? When I asked YellowDog about their iBook pre-loaded with linux, there were a number of things not supported, including critical things like support for an external monitor.
"But can I get one without linux pre installed?"
Quote from the top of every HP hardware page, in big bold letters:
"HP recommends Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional"
"Is anybody else unhappy with some of the changes in GIMP2?"
Well, the constant crashes on the Windows version aren't an ideal advertisement for free software...
The interface seems about the same though... not particularly easier to use, not particularly harder to use... It's the same tools and panels that were always available, so I wouldn't really expect any great productivity gains from rearranging them.
"What right does this person have to dictate what his boss should do?"
What right? Well, companies have been harping on for years about how it's okay and perfectly legal to monitor employees' use of work computers. Why should it be any less legal if it's a manager that gets caught?
"This idiot overstepped his boundaries."
A sysadmin knowing what's going on on company computers is "overstepping his boundaries"?
"Perhaps his boss can do his job and play Solitaire at the same time. Maybe that's why he ended up as Boss."
lol. very good.
"What makes it worse is that he was a government employee and demonstrated an intent to use his position as system administrator to spy on other government employees"
Government employee saving government money, and improving the efficiency of government departments is, I believe, the phrase you're looking for. Taxpayers are having x% taken out of their salaries to finance this guy doing nothing and getting paid for it.
"This is completely unacceptable, and it was entirely appropriate to fire his dipshit ass."
We look forward to your company firing sysadmins who do their job instead of ignoring problems then?
"when you start it the first time a dialog comes up and says "do you want the stripped down "easy" interface, or the full version for "advanced" users"
Why separate the options into "newbie", "idiot", and "developer" though? Surely it would make more sense to reveal options depending on what you're likely to use?
[*] Organising mode. Suddenly, all the context menus have the gzip options, cut/copy/paste, erase/wipe, while the file-manager gets a tree-view and history display
[*] Multimedia mode. Now, the context menus have "open in GIMP", "send to iPod", "print with gimp-print" options, a preview pane appears on the left of your file-manager, and directories have their big thumbnails.
[*] Development mode. Start displaying a shell at the bottom of the file-manager, while "execute program" takes its proper place on the context menu alongside "edit with...", "upload by FTP", and "open a command prompt here"
[*] Learning mode. You get your graphics-intense display modes, the "dangerous things" are turned off ("execute this file in WINE"), and popup help everywhere.
It would be rather better to have modes according to what you want to do, rather than making someone label themselves "non-expert" because they've turned off the customisation features. They may well be different types of experts, all of whom have different requirements for their interface.
It's also more likely to be elegant or efficient... "the things which happen most often need to be easiest". How do you know what the user wants to do most often, unless you let them tell you, either by customising things, or directly in bugzilla.
"He doesn't ONCE mention what his "problems" with gnome are, besides the fact that apparently the devs are "arrogant twits."
Is that not enough of a problem for you?
As to technical problems with GNOME, I think the writer mentions that he filed several bug reports in GNOME's bugzilla. These bugs were never fixed. There would seem to be little point in re-hashing what he wrote in bugzilla, when the problem is of users' opinions being belittled (to quote your comment, for example: "Ugh, this dude comes off as being an Iiiiddeeeeottt.") and that the problem of a hostile environment for those trying to help needs to be fixed before discussions about technical issues become relevant again.
In short, I think he's probably standing on the right side of the fork. Isn't that what open-source people are supposed to do when discussions stop being technical and start being shouting matches? You try out your way of working, and see if it attracts more users than the other way of working. "other" in this sense, consisting of insulting anyone who disagrees with you.
"Um, am I missing the point, or does the last author completely forget KDE and others ? You already have the freedom, silly."
The freedom to let GNOME stagnate as people migrate to other desktops instead of trying to improve it?
It would seem somewhat unfair to GNOME to take-up this freedom... When people offer bug reports, they are trying to help GNOME. Of course, while "use Windows instead" or "use KDE instead" is a valid response, it doesn't help GNOME get any better.
"Black Moon is even more rare: When no full moons occur in a month (usually February)"
Of course, as someone pointed out, a "back moon" would imply
two blue moons in that year
So are we supposed to give them different names, or is it not possible to uniquely identify each moon in 2018? January Blue Moon and March Blue Moon or something?
And can you change when blue moons occur by selecting an appropriate timezone, or by changing to daylight-savings-time just before a full moon?
"What kind of blind OSS zealotry is this? If somebody said something similar of IE there would be a unanimous uproar of upbraids from the slashdot community against whoever said it."
Well since most of us can't run Internet Explorer (it's not available for the operating system we use) that can be quite a moot point. Besides, you've got to pick one, and it may as well be the one which didn't run all those viruses we saw over the last two years.
That would make it 2018 then?b.t.w. I don't think it's "usually february", I think it is always february. Every month other than february is guaranteed to be longer than the synodic period (about 29.5 days), so is guaranteed to contain a full moon. (apart from the month in which you change from julian to gregorian calendars...)
On Mozilla 1.5, that link causes Mozilla to disappear completely (as in, shuts down all your open windows the same as a kill command would) -- this may be dependant on settings.
"And, like it or not, the world uses MS Office formats. OO.o isn't good enough."
Insightful? C'mon, recognise blatant marketing when you see it, moderators.
"The nurses don't take your pulse while you wait for a doctor in our hospitals - after 4 hours of pulse taking, they would probably not have learnt a great deal more. And that's the emergancy patients."
Well at least they don't greet you with "could I have your bank details and insurance certificate please"
"Do they have an LCD control panel mounted on their chest so I can check and adjust their BP with a little screwdriver?"
Well if it's standard procedure in Star Trek, it must have been invented at some point in the future...
"XP has been ROCK SOLID for me. No weird bugs, no hiccups, no problems. Runs moy software for work as well as games pretty without a single problem."
Actually I should explain better. I wasn't talking about instability problems. (at least, I hope I wasn't). We were discussing whether having WindowsXP on a computer is good or bad, in terms of getting work done. My reply was that it wasn't, for reasons in several categories:
(a) Setup time - By default, XP is awful. (Default for me typically means "as supplied by Dell") Awful as in, the stupid start menu layout, the stupid control panel layout, the stupid default settings, having everything set to "most animated", having everything set up with stupid defaults, that sort of thing. I usually budget about 2 hours per machine, to get a pre-loaded WindowsXP machine into a usable state (where "usable" is pretty similar to Windows 2000 with a few tweaks)
(b) Annoyances - probably in the same class of problems really, but I'm thinking of things like animated dogs when you search for files, or "helpfully" clearing away the icons on your desktop after 30 days, or all the other things like that. You always get flamed by "power-users" saying oh, but you can turn that all off. You can, but it's all time that you're not doing real work.
(c) Annoyances - networking - WindowsXP networking is so awful, it's in a class of it's own. I'm trying to blank it from my mind, but the two examples that stick are (a) deleting all my settings when I changed "workgroup" to "domain" or something, and (b) when we (6 software engineers) spent about a day trying to figure out why WindowsXP wouldn't let us use it in a network (turns out it baulked at the blank admin password [on a lab network] and silently refused fileshare connections)
(d) Updates - It's standard policy amongst slashdotters that a WindowsXP machine needs to be updated at least weekly, to get the latest patches. And I'm not talking about minor patches that make your email download faster. I'm talking about the ones which if you don't download them, your computer gets used by a criminal gang to send spam and everyone laughs at you for not running Windows Update daily instead of weekly.
(e) Security, day-to-day - Same group as the problems above? Securing a WindowsXP machine can be time-consuming in the extreme, probably because you're never really sure whether you're finished, or if there's something running that you don't know about. Ask all the people who didn't disable LSASS or Windows Messaging... The standard answer is a hardware firewall and virus-checker which really needs to be included in estimates of the cost of Windows.
(f) Security, distasters - and of course, the major one. If all you want to do is "get work done" as the original discussion was about, how would you feel if you lost 3 days to clean-up a virus in your office? Howabout if that happened every few weeks? For some people, you can get away with running Windows and not get viruses (for those of you with firewalls, clued-up users, and no laptops) but there are plenty of people losing a lot of their working hours to Windows viruses.
So... that's 6 ideas why Windows might not be ideal for a computer to assist you in your work. And I don't think I've mentioned instability amongst any of those... they all assume that Windows is working as intended.
"Firefox is not an acceptable replacement for IE for 90% of the users out there so I really think we could have done without the snide comment."
Huh?
Microsoft Internet Explorer isn't an acceptable browser for 90% of the users out there.
Nevermind your "snide" assertions about the websites that don't work, people are getting owned here. It's a serious problem. It's the spam problem and the virus problem and all the tech support problems, all stemming from this one application that's so insecure that everyone, from DHS to MSN themselves recommend getting rid of it immediately.
If your favorite website doesn't work in a generic web-browser, get them to fix it, or get a new supplier. Even the banks have got HTML websites now.
"2K/XP are for Microsoft boxen that do real work. "
XP isn't. You'll spend more time dealing with the operating system (trying to get it to work, fixing it, patching it, securing it, wondering why odd things misbehave, and stopping annoying things happening) and won't have as much time left as you hoped for real work.
"Honestly, I got through 3 examples before giving up. The real test for me is, "Is the link back to the official site? Or does it look like a link and take you to some mysterious 3rd party server?"
;)
In this test *ALL* links pop up to a "for the purposes of this test, this link has been suspended" This makes the whole thing useless."
I trawled through the whole of the test (got a 9, dont'ya know, but didn't supply my email to get a copy of the results), and the fraud emails were mostly asking people to verify their information NOW, HERE, while the legit ones asked you to login through the normal channels and do stuff. Not that I'd believe even those unless I were expecting them, but nevertheless...
The other clues on that sample seemed to be gross unprofessionalism. Would a big comany really start their email saying how big a problem fraud is for them? Would they send short emails without an assload of notes at the bottom? Would they use crappy HTML formatting (the very thought...
The odd ones were "legit" emails that actually did ask people to sign-in and enter information. How do you tell with those? Probably by whether you were expecting it, whether you did business with them, whether they have your account name right, whether they sent it to the right email address, and then you can type the website you know instead of clicking on the link.
But what do I know? They're all HTML emails, which means they'd have been deleted or unread if they appeared in my inbox. And as people have mentioned, there's a lot to be seen in email headers, lack-of-SPF notwithstanding. If only companies would learn how to sign their emails, it's not hard. You'd think that for someone who spent thousands of dollars on a website, and hundreds of dollars for a verisign certificate, that they would at least have heard of PGP...
Indeed. We seem lucky so far that most such scams are falling down at the most obvious hurdles. However, it does make you think about the awful lack of security amongst many comanies that you do business with.
The main thing stopping me being defrauded by email scams is the lack of people who know enough about the transactions I'm doing to imitate them. Sure it's easy to recognise a letter from a bank which isn't mine, or that doesn't even operate in my country, but what happens when someone finally tries it on with a 2-person company that I'm doing business with? It's scary the amount of trust we have in "obscurity".
[+] The buck has to start with the banks really, because they're supposed to be the gold standard for internet security. And it's worrying that Natwest (and possibly still HSBC) were denying access to customers unless they use Internet Explorer on Windows, even after all the spoofing attacks that were (are?) so trivial on that browser.
[+] Then you get the medium-sized companies. People like Maplin Electronics, who display your password on screen, and then send it to you by email.
[+] Small companies. My website provider. I get the distinct and worrying impression that they'll follow orders from anyone who sends an email with my name in the "From" field.
Do you think it's possible for a criminal to guess information about who you're buying from or selling to? Ask the people with Windows viruses -- their entire email history is available and regularly used by the virus.
How many windows users have got emails from you? If any of them opens an EXE attachment, the virus-writer can imitate everything, right down to the way you sign-off your emails, and you can't beat that if you want the people on someones' contact list to trust an email you send... Don't talk about encryption and signatures here -- I've never got a PGP message from someone who I didn't setup the keys myself.
[+] And of course, we have the one-person internet companies. "Security? Yes we have SSL" Aargh. People who you're talking to about confidential stuff, you ask for a PGP key and they respond "we're planning to get HTTPS on our website sometime". I don't care - it's how secure is the computer you're keeping my details on that counts, and it had better not be connected to the internet.
Let's finish with a quote from 2600. This is the standard that ecommerce should be aiming for, not "Citibank reveals another thousand sets of customer account details in a database fuck-up"
Is it worthwhile to make a system wide-open to cheating, and then ask someone (you suggest the FBI) to shore-it-up by trying to catch those who cheat?
It sounds like a Microsoft maintenance plan... "No need for a secure system, we'll just keep fixing it each day"
While it's nice that police are able to respond to election fraud, it's better to have a system which intrinsically prevents it. It's easier to run, for a start. Also bear in mind that when the police arrest people, their first targets will be those showing the fallibility of the system by demonstrating how easy it is to cheat. Like for example, the poster you responded to - such people are easier to catch because they want to alert the world to problems that need fixing. So your FBI agents will be enforcing security through lititgation, and preventing some serious problems from being resolved.
"This is a perfect example of why I really hate software patents."
Those who can, do. Those who can't, patent.
"I don't have the technical skills necessary to make a product out of idea x, therefore I'll patent it, and make sure that nobody else can make a product eithter."
I think the comparaison was with the "dog in a manager" fable. Patents are for people who want to prevent others from creating things.
"(1) Avoiding single points of failure for the entire human race (e.g., giant asteroid nails Earth);"
For that to occur, we need lots of people (150 at least) in a self-sustaining location in space. Two people on ISS doesn't count. Four people on a space shuttle doesn't count. Stations that need resupplies for things as simple as food, air, and water don't count.
While the "saving a backup of humanity" is undoubtedly useful, why waste vast amounts of money on manned spaceflight that doesn't achieve that goal? Surely unmanned vehicles capable of setting-up the environment that will eventually be required is a better way towards the goal of an off-planet colony.
Somebody mentioned what I think could be an exciting proposal here, X-prize 2 for whoever builds a moon-base or space station and keeps it manned for a year. (You could offer 1.6 billion dollars, and it would still cost less than reparing the space shuttle)
X-prize 3 for the first baby born and raised in space? Face it, that's what you really need to have any hope of surviving the loss of Earth.
Meanwhile, the government programmes could spend their money on something like robots to handle water on mars, robotic space-stations capable of growing plants, and of course, space-elevator research.
"I'm posting from Mars, you insensitive clod!"
Not only are the confluences nearer together where you are, but they're all on land, and nobody has visited any of them yet. I don't know if there's a section in DCP for other planets though...
"I once worked with a fellow who wrote software for ICBM's and he commented that one of the worst places to be in the event of a nuclear exchange was at Lat 0, Long 0 because there where several possible failure modes where the missiles would try to find their way here"
As anyone who's forgotten to convert radians to degrees knows, the area within 3deg of (0,0) can be quite busy in some flight simulations...