If you just sit at your desk all day, hammering out code anyone could do, you are replacable.
Concerning the subject title of this post, I am both.
Let me explain.
I have right now well over a megabyte of (Visual) C(++) code bits available I can use to write programs with.
I personally wrote a sizable bit of it using the most obvious, straightforward techniques to code it. For example, here is my file copy function I use when I need it:
signed short int FileCopy(CString infnam, CString outfnam) {
FILE *inf, *outf; // BKBUFSIZE = 362496(or other value) in stdafx.h
unsigned char buf[BKBUFSIZE];
int rstread, rstwrite;
if ((inf = fopen(infnam,"rb")) != NULL)
{
if ((outf = fopen(outfnam,"wb")) != NULL)
{
while (!feof(inf))
{
rstread = fread(buf,1,BKBUFSIZE,inf);
if (rstread > 0)
{
rstwrite = fwrite(buf,1,rstread,outf);
fclose (inf);
fclose (outf);
return 0;// assume no error
}
else
{
fclose (inf);
return -1;// can't open outf
}
}
else
return -1;//can't open inf; }
As you can see the code is simple, straightforward, and will fail gracefully with an error code should that occur. When I need a file copy function, I just drop this into the source code and use a function call to it like so:
The rest I found on the web and adapted for my uses.
The latest, most memorable bit I got from Google Groups(Usenet) was to help solve an important programming problem I had at the time. One guy posted half a page of code to solve the problem. Another guy replied with TWO LINES OF CODE that did the same thing. I took the two lines and added a 6 other lines to it that were needed and had the solution function to my problem.
Albert Einstein is quoted as saying "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." The 'Keep It Simple Stupid' is paramount in my software coding. Many a time I had to go back and tweak and enhance code I wrote some time before. If I had made things more complicated when I first wrote it, it would have been disastrous for me.
At this point, a codemonkey could take these bits of code and 'cut and paste' together a working application as the code is known and available for use.
But what to do when you need source code that isn't written yet.
The smart thing to do is to use existing code to create the new software tools you need. This is something I've done plenty of times in the past.
But then there are times you have to write code from scratch.
For that, you have to approach the codewriting task as an artisan seeking the best, most elegant solution to the problem at hand. You have to give long and careful thought to the problem to come up with the best solution. I hold off writing the actual code as long as possible as I write 'notes to myself' as source code coments. I use these notes later as a guide to write the actual code by thinking about the actual source code statemets themselves and typing them in.
No preplaning at this low a level.
No flowcharts.
No writeups (that could be done from my notes if needed).
Even at this level, keeping it simple is still the order of the day.
I find myself writing the code in one spot of a function and adding in variables at the top of the function as needed. A great help to this is using a handf
This rant is right up there with his (actually Peter Finch's Oscar winning performance) 'mad as hell' rant from Network (1976): angry, impassioned, thought-provoking, insightful -- a catalyst for real change in society for the issue addressed by said rant.
This is where it is even scarier that spammers are "hooking up" with virus writers. Sure, it used to be the virus would just send copies of itself to your friends and family. But, now they're getting sophisticated enough to become open relays for spamming or even *hosting the website* that the spam points to (!).
Just like the 'Virhaus' I personally IP banned via my program CF13 after it filtered out several virus-infected attachments eminating from this particular IP. This could well be a classic case of Net abuse and ISP apathy:
The ISP is not rfc-compliant, the IP in question who belongs to said ISP spewed nothing but malware. Since my PC didn't get pwned by these losers, they used that compromised IP to Joe Job me as a mudslinging tactic. This incident is proof that CF13 is causing spammers grief with its effective spam filtering heuristics that make it virtually impossible for spammers to trick you to read their crap. Here, such messages are archived in a 'spam' file along with the occasional 'false positive' deemed spam due to improper blacklisting, whitelisting, or sender ignorance of CF13's stringent email policy. For the naysayers, pure whitelisting with only known senders is the best way to avoid a false positive but there are still problems possible with this methodology.
Spammers are wasting their time emailing me. If I get mailbombed, I'll just use the 'spamblaster' version of CF13 with proper whitelists and delete most of the junk at the server level after just analyzing the email headers. There is a sense of accomplishment whenever I notify the proper parties after I recive a fraudulent or virus infected email from someone....
Regards
Bryan Taylor Author/user of CF13(TM) POP3 Email Client For Windows Stops spam, fraud, AND ALL MALWARE! http://www.cf13.com/
It is now 'out of print' for security reasons per link above. I guess all the brainpower that went into it will be lost in the interest of national security once all the Blackbirds are utterly scrapped or are (heavily guarded) museum pieces.... =/
Disable java, javascript, (and all other scripting) and activex and you're golden. If that isn't enough, use a text-based browser like Lynx or use a time-consuming web-to-email interface if those still exist....
No need to add a new wrinkle to SMTP, just analyze the SMTP traffic to detect relaying by remote users and refuse to relay and force the local users to POP-BEFORE-SMTP to use the mail server. This is a simple 1-2 punch to stamp out a lot of spam
I got a message or two archived as spam by my program, CF13 that were deliberatly designed to poision and render ineffective Bayesian filters and their ilk. Instead, my program takes a heristic approach at filtering spam and has been very effective without the overhead of time and system resources that Bayesian-like filtering methods require to work properly.
As an added benifit, my program renders malware inert and 'safe to handle'.
I've done lots of ad hoc research on prime numbers, primality proving, and whatnot.
I've come to the conclusion that using a symmetric cipher with a much smaller verifyable (I use the first handfull of prime numbers and one application of Fermat's Little Theorem) prime number (say 256 bits) and Diffie-Hellman as the 'key exchange' offers faster yet reasonable security over the monstrous sized 'primes' generated for RSA that's only likely gone through eight applications of the Miller-Rabin Test or so which is a probablistic test.
I wrote my own multiprecision integer package a while back and it generates 128-bit primes within 3 seconds in most cases. I've used UBASIC's ECM program to double check my work and found my resulting work to be correctly coded. The nice part about my package is that it is written in 100% C code (with help from VC++ CString) with no assembler trickery. The fun part is that my package makes it very easy (but drudgery for large tasks) to manually re-write standard C type integer computations and comparisons to the equivalent version using multiprecision intergers.
I've skimmed through other people's multiprecision code available on the Web and found them eminently verbose and somewhat confusing. I wrote mine with 'Keep It Simple, Stupid' in mind and searched the Web for the fastest, most straightforward algorithms possible to use to write it.
If you want to use crypto, and don't wan't to deal with the baggage and complexity of GPG/PGP give the handfull of code that is PCP a try. It advertises itself as:
Welcome to PCP The Pure Crypto Project based on Modular Exponentiation and RSA alone
It is written in PYTHON, but I was able to read it and translate one of it's routines into C for use with my multiprecision integer package.
Feel free to comment on this post. I am interested in reading what others have to say about the matters set forth in this post.
This is, quite simply, the Cliff Notes version of Dr. Strangelove. It brilliantly coalesces the madness of MAD into a nigh unforgettable satiric masterpiece!
The last (most recent) arcade game I played was Galaga (1981),a 22+ year old arcade game!
Back then, arcade game graphics were OK (if that) but those old games had one thing most modern games today don't have:
PLAYABILITY!
The high resoulution graphics didn't seduce people to play games like Pong (1972), Pac-Man (1980), or Galaga because (in retrospect) there weren't any!
Classic videogames offered enough diversity of play to overcome stone-age graphics. The best example of this would be TRON (1982). This game is 'pattern-driven' like Pac-Man but the minigames and the random order you play them offered enough diversity to assure the game eminent playability.
As for the graphics rant, the last 'Eye Candy' game I played a lot was Marvel vs. Capcom 2 (2000), one of a handfull of such games I played regularly. The others were other playable fighting games put out by CAPCOM or SNK with their Samurai Showdown series (1993 - 1997)
The thing to do is to get emulated retrogaming out of the legal gray zone and back into the arcades where it belongs....
Your best bet would be to use a payphone to anonymously phone in the location of that stuff.
You risk personally getting into trouble/hurt/killed for handling military property without proper authorization.
Once the dumbell military person(s) is found who left valuable (likely [top] secret) equipment lying around like this faces everything from reprimands, demotion up to and including court martial, imprisonment, and execution.
Until music is considered and treated as an artform first and foremost, the commercial music industry will remain permanently broken as their priorities are transposed.
The early masters like Mozart and Beethoven were supported/sponsored by patrons thus freeing them to indulge their creativity and create truly legendary music that has outlasted their mortal lives and should last long after the members of commercial music industry sponsored music acts meet a similar fate....
I got mine (the spade one no less!) playing the old Nintendo Entertainment System game Casino Kid.
I had to do a double take when I saw the cards on the screen--didn't have to draw anything! I was careful to hold all the cards then play the hand against the computer opponent--that was a memorable hand!...
That's incredible, being dealt the ultimate natural poker hand with a 1 chance in 649,740 probability of occuring!...
BTW, I do not gamble in real life as it can be very addictive. I know from first hand as many years ago as a kid I blew through $5.00 on a video poker machine inside of 5-10 minutes....
So I wrote and played my own video poker game on my TRS-80 Color Computer I had at the time.
Years later, I got the shareware version of Workware's Poker Compiler and fiddled around with that. I had coded an AI I dubbed 'Spock' as 'he' never bluffed and strictly played the odds. 'He' held 'his' own against the other AIs that came with the game. Too bad the game was limited to 10,000 deals before you had to start all over (incentive to buy the registered version).
I could (given enough time) 'recreate' the bare essential elements of the Poker Compiler at the Visual C level (The gameplay environment and the AIs to play in it only).
'Twould be fun to watch 10 copies of the (C recoded) 'Spock' AI play in a rake/norake Hold 'Em environment to see how long they last....
When it comes to matters affecting national security or federal government interests.
A few examples:
Counterfeitting U.S. currency is a '20-years in prison' offence.
Restricted airspace over government buildings such as the Pentagon and the White House.
Federal employees are considered Government property: It is a felony offense to threaten the President's life. It is an automatic 25-year sentence in prison to assault/kill a U.S. Postal Service mail carrier.
These two guys brought trouble on their own heads as the Feds likely used the 'eminent domain' card to make their little mapping project backfire.
Again people,
When it comes to matters affecting national security or federal government interests...
DO NOT FOOL WITH THE FEDS!...
(Definitely not now after the the events of 2001-09-11 in New York City, Washington D.C., and Stonycreek Township, Pennsylvannia.)
I repeat what I've said before. The only way to kill spam is to stop having all email be totally, absolutely, "free" of charge in any quantity. This is not the topic to discuss solutions, but they are certainly possible, and they aren't SPF.
But 'munging' is 'giving in' to the spammers and making it difficult for people to contact you via email -- like a CAPTCHA.
'Munging' won't stop 'manual spammers'. I have had in the past one email address posted on a website of mine as a bitmap. That email address still got spammed, either by 'manual spammers' who read and manually added my email address to a spamlist or by a OCR-aware spambot that was able to read my email address imbedded in it (probably possible).
Even the smart spammers could analyze the munging techniques used here on Slashdot and still properly decode munged email addresses insided a spambot they program....
Because spammers are so aggressive and invasive, it seems the only way to keep them out of your email inbox is to make it virtually impossible for spammers to communicate while still making it possible to receive unsolicited email from 'unapproved senders'.
Troi (2XXX) - Starring Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, Marina Sirtis, Gates McFadden, LeVar Burton, Michael Dorn, Brent Spinner, and John DeLancie.
Plot Synopsis: Alien superbeing Q abducts the officers of the Starship Enterprise and transplants them to Ancient Greece to re-enact the fall of Troy brought about by the counselor that lauched a thousand star^Wships, Deanna Troi.
Me: http://www.cf13.com/ Slashdot: Not newsworthy. You decide. PS: Read first before emailing me. (Because if you violate CF13's email policy, your email WILL be treated as spam and processed as such.)
All the spam I've received since 2004-03-15 08:30:58 UTC has been archived into a single file for easy perusal and deletion. If I wanted to, I could use an even more draconian version of CF13 that would delete most spam at the server level after just analyzing the email headers!
CF13 does not have the overhead or resource consumption that all other Bayesian-ish email filters have.
Rather than 'play games' with spammers, CF13 changes the rules of unsolicited email communications--making it virtually impossible for spammers to successfully deliver their unwanted messages.
As an added benefit, the current SMTP/POP3 email network infrastructure remains intact--making it unecessary to discard it for 'something new and improved' that doesn't have the widespread acceptance and reliability that SMTP/POP3 has.
Me: http://www.cf13.com/ Slashdot: Not newsworthy. You decide. PS: Read first before emailing me. (Because if you violate CF13's email policy, your email WILL be treated as spam and processed as such.)
Let's cut to the heart of this matter, shall we....
To be a true (arcade) 'pro gamer', you have to be cognizant of all the advantages you can eke out of the game playing environment. This can only come from hours and hours of potentially mindnumbing gameplay.
Back in the old days, such tournaments were really endurance contests because the games selected were (likely) 'pattern driven' (i.e. PAC-MAN) or had a favorable 'hidden feature' (i.e. the 'stop-them-from-shooting-at-you' trick for Galaga).
Fast forward years later to player vs. player fighting game tournaments. In this environment, at this level of play, it's primarily about 'glitches' and 'infinites combos' where the gamers take advantage of subtle(?) bugs in the programming of the gaming environment when competing with others players in that environment. Probably the best example of this is the Gambit 'blastoff' maneuver from Marvel Vs. Capcom 2. In this case, a gamer playing as the playing card tossing X-Men can use this 'glitch' to win a round/game/tournament by hitting their opponent's character once then leaping up off the screen and hov'ring there until the round timer runs out--a spectacularly cheap way to win!
I know this technique works because it was used against me in a MvC2 game I played with another player. I don't think it was in a tournament setting but using such a move could be very well considered unsportsmanlike.
I've played lots of Street Fighter-related CAPCOM arcade fighting games in the past and was 'halfway decent'. I got good enough that I could assess the skill level of potential opponents by watching them play the computer or other opponents. I would avoid playing people whose skills were observably less than mine as there is no fun or challenge in playing such players.
Of course, all the above information is applicable to 'pro homegaming' as well as the home console games are as much flawed/pattern driven/'hidden featured' computer programs as their arcade counterparts....
These guys give powerful insight into the problem of incursion of unwanted communications.
"[Spammers] have come to court not because their freedom of speech is threatened but because their profits are; to dress up their complaints in First Amendment garb demeans the principles for which the First Amendment stands." -- US Federal Judge Stanley Sporkin
"Nothing in the Constitution compels us to listen to or view any unwanted communication, whatever its merit. We categorically reject the argument that a vendor has a right under the Constitution or otherwise to send unwanted material into the home of another. If this prohibition operates to impede the flow of even valid ideas, the answer is that no one has a right to press even 'good' ideas on an unwilling recipient. The asserted right of a mailer, we repeat, stops at the outer boundary of every person's domain." -- Chief Justice Warren Berger, U.S. Supreme Court (Quotes obtained from UXN Spam Combat.)
Slashdot Mirror
Concerning the subject title of this post, I am both.
Let me explain.
I have right now well over a megabyte of (Visual) C(++) code bits available I can use to write programs with.
I personally wrote a sizable bit of it using the most obvious, straightforward techniques to code it. For example, here is my file copy function I use when I need it:
As you can see the code is simple, straightforward, and will fail gracefully with an error code should that occur. When I need a file copy function, I just drop this into the source code and use a function call to it like so:
The rest I found on the web and adapted for my uses.
The latest, most memorable bit I got from Google Groups(Usenet) was to help solve an important programming problem I had at the time. One guy posted half a page of code to solve the problem. Another guy replied with TWO LINES OF CODE that did the same thing. I took the two lines and added a 6 other lines to it that were needed and had the solution function to my problem.
Albert Einstein is quoted as saying "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." The 'Keep It Simple Stupid' is paramount in my software coding. Many a time I had to go back and tweak and enhance code I wrote some time before. If I had made things more complicated when I first wrote it, it would have been disastrous for me.
At this point, a codemonkey could take these bits of code and 'cut and paste' together a working application as the code is known and available for use.
But what to do when you need source code that isn't written yet.
The smart thing to do is to use existing code to create the new software tools you need. This is something I've done plenty of times in the past.
But then there are times you have to write code from scratch.
For that, you have to approach the codewriting task as an artisan seeking the best, most elegant solution to the problem at hand. You have to give long and careful thought to the problem to come up with the best solution. I hold off writing the actual code as long as possible as I write 'notes to myself' as source code coments. I use these notes later as a guide to write the actual code by thinking about the actual source code statemets themselves and typing them in.
No preplaning at this low a level.
No flowcharts.
No writeups (that could be done from my notes if needed).
Even at this level, keeping it simple is still the order of the day.
I find myself writing the code in one spot of a function and adding in variables at the top of the function as needed. A great help to this is
using a handf
If he actually existed in the real world.
This rant is right up there with his (actually Peter Finch's Oscar winning performance) 'mad as hell' rant from Network (1976): angry, impassioned, thought-provoking, insightful -- a catalyst for real change in society for the issue addressed by said rant.
Just like the 'Virhaus' I personally IP banned via my program CF13 after it filtered out several virus-infected attachments eminating from this particular IP. This could well be a classic case of Net abuse and ISP apathy:
The ISP is not rfc-compliant, the IP in question who belongs to said ISP spewed nothing but malware. Since my PC didn't get pwned by these losers, they used that compromised IP to Joe Job me as a mudslinging tactic. This incident is proof that CF13 is causing spammers grief with its effective spam filtering heuristics that make it virtually impossible for spammers to trick you to read their crap. Here, such messages are archived in a 'spam' file along with the occasional 'false positive' deemed spam due to improper blacklisting, whitelisting, or sender ignorance of CF13's stringent email policy. For the naysayers, pure whitelisting with only known senders is the best way to avoid a false positive but there are still problems possible with this methodology.
Spammers are wasting their time emailing me. If I get mailbombed, I'll just use the 'spamblaster' version of CF13 with proper whitelists and delete most of the junk at the server level after just analyzing the email headers. There is a sense of accomplishment whenever I notify the proper parties after I recive a fraudulent or virus infected email from someone....
Regards
Bryan Taylor
Author/user of CF13(TM) POP3 Email Client For Windows
Stops spam, fraud, AND ALL MALWARE!
http://www.cf13.com/
The Lockheed SR-71./a>
It is now 'out of print' for security reasons per link above. I guess all the brainpower that went into it will be lost in the interest of national security once all the Blackbirds are utterly scrapped or are (heavily guarded) museum pieces.... =/
Disable java, javascript, (and all other scripting) and activex and you're golden. If that isn't enough, use a text-based browser like Lynx or use a time-consuming web-to-email interface if those still exist....
No need to add a new wrinkle to SMTP, just analyze the SMTP traffic to detect relaying by remote users and refuse to relay and force the local users to POP-BEFORE-SMTP to use the mail server. This is a simple 1-2 punch to stamp out a lot of spam
I got a message or two archived as spam by my program, CF13 that were deliberatly designed to poision and render ineffective Bayesian filters and their ilk. Instead, my program takes a heristic approach at filtering spam and has been very effective without the overhead of time and system resources that Bayesian-like filtering methods require to work properly.
As an added benifit, my program renders malware inert and 'safe to handle'.
I've done lots of ad hoc research on prime numbers, primality proving, and whatnot.
I've come to the conclusion that using a symmetric cipher with a much smaller verifyable (I use the first handfull of prime numbers and one application of Fermat's Little Theorem) prime number (say 256 bits) and Diffie-Hellman as the 'key exchange' offers faster yet reasonable security over the monstrous sized 'primes' generated for RSA that's only likely gone through eight applications of the Miller-Rabin Test or so which is a probablistic test.
I wrote my own multiprecision integer package a while back and it generates 128-bit primes within 3 seconds in most cases. I've used UBASIC's ECM program to double check my work and found my resulting work to be correctly coded. The nice part about my package is that it is written in 100% C code (with help from VC++ CString) with no assembler trickery. The fun part is that my package makes it very easy (but drudgery for large tasks) to manually re-write standard C type integer computations and comparisons to the equivalent version using multiprecision intergers.
I've skimmed through other people's multiprecision code available on the Web and found them eminently verbose and somewhat confusing. I wrote mine with 'Keep It Simple, Stupid' in mind and searched the Web for the fastest, most straightforward algorithms possible to use to write it.
If you want to use crypto, and don't wan't to deal with the baggage and complexity of GPG/PGP give the handfull of code that is PCP a try. It advertises itself as:
Welcome to PCP
The Pure Crypto Project
based on Modular Exponentiation and RSA alone
It is written in PYTHON, but I was able to read it and translate one of it's routines into C for use with my multiprecision integer package.
Feel free to comment on this post. I am interested in reading what others have to say about the matters set forth in this post.
Count your blessings,
:p
:P
I've seen the goatse version of this.... (>_<);;;
Thankfully, I've forgotten the URL.
I'm sure some poster here will remedy that oversight....
ROTFLMAOIT!!! XD
This is, quite simply, the Cliff Notes version of Dr. Strangelove. It brilliantly coalesces the madness of MAD into a nigh unforgettable satiric masterpiece!
The last (most recent) arcade game I played was Galaga (1981), a 22+ year old arcade game!
Back then, arcade game graphics were OK (if that) but those old games had one thing most modern games today don't have:
PLAYABILITY!
The high resoulution graphics didn't seduce people to play games like Pong (1972), Pac-Man (1980), or Galaga because (in retrospect) there weren't any!
Classic videogames offered enough diversity of play to overcome stone-age graphics. The best example of this would be TRON (1982). This game is 'pattern-driven' like Pac-Man but the minigames and the random order you play them offered enough diversity to assure the game eminent playability.
As for the graphics rant, the last 'Eye Candy' game I played a lot was Marvel vs. Capcom 2 (2000), one of a handfull of such games I played regularly. The others were other playable fighting games put out by CAPCOM or SNK with their Samurai Showdown series (1993 - 1997)
The thing to do is to get emulated retrogaming out of the legal gray zone and back into the arcades where it belongs....
Mad as hell about spam?
Can't take it anymore?
Do what I do now....
Take away the 'Spammer's Character Set'!
Your best bet would be to use a payphone to anonymously phone in the location of that stuff.
You risk personally getting into trouble/hurt/killed for handling military property without proper authorization.
Once the dumbell military person(s) is found who left valuable (likely [top] secret) equipment lying around like this faces everything from reprimands, demotion up to and including court martial, imprisonment, and execution.
Until music is considered and treated as an artform first and foremost, the commercial music industry will remain permanently broken as their priorities are transposed.
The early masters like Mozart and Beethoven were supported/sponsored by patrons thus freeing them to indulge their creativity and create truly legendary music that has outlasted their mortal lives and should last long after the members of commercial music industry sponsored music acts meet a similar fate....
I got mine (the spade one no less!) playing the old Nintendo Entertainment System game Casino Kid.
I had to do a double take when I saw the cards on the screen--didn't have to draw anything! I was careful to hold all the cards then play the hand against the computer opponent--that was a memorable hand!...
That's incredible, being dealt the ultimate natural poker hand with a 1 chance in 649,740 probability of occuring!...
BTW, I do not gamble in real life as it can be very addictive. I know from first hand as many years ago as a kid I blew through $5.00 on a video poker machine inside of 5-10 minutes....
So I wrote and played my own video poker game on my TRS-80 Color Computer I had at the time.
Years later, I got the shareware version of Workware's Poker Compiler and fiddled around with that. I had coded an AI I dubbed 'Spock' as 'he' never bluffed and strictly played the odds. 'He' held 'his' own against the other AIs that came with the game. Too bad the game was limited to 10,000 deals before you had to start all over (incentive to buy the registered version).
I could (given enough time) 'recreate' the bare essential elements of the Poker Compiler at the Visual C level (The gameplay environment and the AIs to play in it only).
'Twould be fun to watch 10 copies of the (C recoded) 'Spock' AI play in a rake/norake Hold 'Em environment to see how long they last....
When it comes to matters affecting national security or federal government interests.
A few examples:
Counterfeitting U.S. currency is a '20-years in prison' offence.
Restricted airspace over government buildings such as the Pentagon and the White House.
Federal employees are considered Government property: It is a felony offense to threaten the President's life. It is an automatic 25-year sentence in prison to assault/kill a U.S. Postal Service mail carrier.
These two guys brought trouble on their own heads as the Feds likely used the 'eminent domain' card to make their little mapping project backfire.
Again people,
When it comes to matters affecting national security or federal government interests...
DO NOT FOOL WITH THE FEDS!...
(Definitely not now after the the events of 2001-09-11 in New York City, Washington D.C., and Stonycreek Township, Pennsylvannia.)
Filter spam out and preserve the current email infrastructure.
Understood.
But 'munging' is 'giving in' to the spammers and making it difficult for people to contact you via email -- like a CAPTCHA.
'Munging' won't stop 'manual spammers'. I have had in the past one email address posted on a website of mine as a bitmap. That email address still got spammed, either by 'manual spammers' who read and manually added my email address to a spamlist or by a OCR-aware spambot that was able to read my email address imbedded in it (probably possible).
Even the smart spammers could analyze the munging techniques used here on Slashdot and still properly decode munged email addresses insided a spambot they program....
Because spammers are so aggressive and invasive, it seems the only way to keep them out of your email inbox is to make it virtually impossible for spammers to communicate while still making it possible to receive unsolicited email from 'unapproved senders'.
Troi (2XXX) - Starring Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, Marina Sirtis, Gates McFadden, LeVar Burton, Michael Dorn, Brent Spinner, and John DeLancie.
Plot Synopsis: Alien superbeing Q abducts the officers of the Starship Enterprise and transplants them to Ancient Greece to re-enact the fall of Troy brought about by the counselor that lauched a thousand star^Wships, Deanna Troi.
This was funny and cute and well worth listening to -- reminiscent of his priceline.com commercial work! XD (^_^)
Read about it here.
Me: http://www.cf13.com/ Slashdot: Not newsworthy. You decide. PS: Read first before emailing me.
(Because if you violate CF13's email policy, your email WILL be treated as spam and processed as such.)
Kidding aside, Mr. Cumming, but how about using an unmunged email address here on Slashdot like I do?
My program, CF13, which I use to 'protect' iamcf13@hotpop.com, takes a 'I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!' approach to fighting spam and emailed fraud and malware. It is surprisingly effective!
All the spam I've received since 2004-03-15 08:30:58 UTC has been archived into a single file for easy perusal and deletion. If I wanted to, I could use an even more draconian version of CF13 that would delete most spam at the server level after just analyzing the email headers!
CF13 does not have the overhead or resource consumption that all other Bayesian-ish email filters have.
Rather than 'play games' with spammers, CF13 changes the rules of unsolicited email communications--making it virtually impossible for spammers to successfully deliver their unwanted messages.
As an added benefit, the current SMTP/POP3 email network infrastructure remains intact--making it unecessary to discard it for 'something new and improved' that doesn't have the widespread acceptance and reliability that SMTP/POP3 has.
Me: http://www.cf13.com/ Slashdot: Not newsworthy. You decide. PS: Read first before emailing me.
(Because if you violate CF13's email policy, your email WILL be treated as spam and processed as such.)
Let's cut to the heart of this matter, shall we....
To be a true (arcade) 'pro gamer', you have to be cognizant of all the advantages you can eke out of the game playing environment. This can only come from hours and hours of potentially mindnumbing gameplay.
Back in the old days, such tournaments were really endurance contests because the games selected were (likely) 'pattern driven' (i.e. PAC-MAN) or had a favorable 'hidden feature' (i.e. the 'stop-them-from-shooting-at-you' trick for Galaga).
Fast forward years later to player vs. player fighting game tournaments. In this environment, at this level of play, it's primarily about 'glitches' and 'infinites combos' where the gamers take advantage of subtle(?) bugs in the programming of the gaming environment when competing with others players in that environment. Probably the best example of this is the Gambit 'blastoff' maneuver from Marvel Vs. Capcom 2. In this case, a gamer playing as the playing card tossing X-Men can use this 'glitch' to win a round/game/tournament by hitting their opponent's character once then leaping up off the screen and hov'ring there until the round timer runs out--a spectacularly cheap way to win!
I know this technique works because it was used against me in a MvC2 game I played with another player. I don't think it was in a tournament setting but using such a move could be very well considered unsportsmanlike.
I've played lots of Street Fighter-related CAPCOM arcade fighting games in the past and was 'halfway decent'. I got good enough that I could assess the skill level of potential opponents by watching them play the computer or other opponents. I would avoid playing people whose skills were observably less than mine as there is no fun or challenge in playing such players.
Of course, all the above information is applicable to 'pro homegaming' as well as the home console games are as much flawed/pattern driven/'hidden featured' computer programs as their arcade counterparts....
Here are simple, uncomplicated techniques to stop a lot of spam and keep the existing system intact.