There's *lots* of Spice getting routed through the Khyber Pass these days, or whatever other direction is most convenient for getting it out of Afghanistan. The Afghan government occasionally tries to keep the US happy by burning a few fields of it or trying to bully the farmers into growing hashish instead, but the last time there was any real control over it was when the Taliban were still the US's allies in the Noble War On Drugs, before the US bombed most of their country and destroyed the local economy.
For the last N years, production was down in Burma's Golden Triangle, but it's apparently gone back up substantially this year, so there's a bit of competition, but most of the world's heroin production is still in Afghanistan.
Putting a cute name on it is a way to get funding and get the users to use the tools they're given and of course
get reputation points for your department. You'll find that the Real World has difficulty with those problems just like the Air Force, and if you don't have an annoying central IT administration group keeping an iron grip on everybody's entire software configuration, it's really hard to make sure everything reasonable gets done.
So if Airman Snuffy is as clever as many of them are, he'll send himself a virusgram from a cybercafe or "accidentally" download a malware ad-banner from typosquatter.cm, use the Cyber Sidearm to report it, and then get his extra points toward promotion? Shouldn't be harder than blueboxing the base PBX to make free long-distance calls on Autovon...
Or will the Air Farce figure out the trick after the first few dozen people try it and only give out points if they catch official test virusgrams and not real ones?
Let them be useful, finding false positives in the leftovers from spam filters. They'll probably miss them, but having a bunch of convicted spammers working in parallel means that there's less chance of them getting missed.
Or give them the stream of email from other convicted spammers to wade through.
You don't need to torture spammers - just make them spend as much time deleting spam as their recipients have, or triple that as punitive damages, kind of like making litterers clean up trash as punishment. Put them in front of a machine and make them hit DEL until either all the spam is gone.
The new millimeter-wave radar that the TSA's trying to deploy *does* have applications besides letting the TSA rent-a-cops look at people naked in black&white. The main one is looking for low-metal weapons.
The recent proposals said they'd have the viewing only be done remotely, not by local personnel, and that they'd fuzz the *faces* of the voyeurees. While it does make it harder for the TSA single out the hot-looking women for extra scanning, it's still tacky of them.
John Edwards has talked a lot over the years about his opinions on surveillance, wiretapping, etc. in the "War on Terror". He's a scary dude - he likes the stuff as much as Bush's gang (and their FBI/NSA predecessors like Louis Freeh) though he's not rabidly pro-war like they are and therefore less likely to recruit lots of new terrorists.
It's not like Hillary or her husband have ever been radically anti-surveillance, but at least she's not as actively pro-surveillance as Edwards.
The article mentions a 2005 murder in Russia, but there were also a couple of spammers in New Jersey who got murdered a few years ago, and the general rumor was that they'd annoyed some New York City Russian mafiosi in a stock scam.
A friend of mine bought an old missile bunker in the UK to use as a data center back during the late-90s boom. It had redundant power-grid connections, lots of cooling, and raised floors, so it cost a lot less to condition the space for data-center use than if he'd started with a basic warehouse shell like many of his competitors, and it was close enough to London for latency not to be a problem but far enough that the real-estate costs were cheaper.
U.S. geography isn't always that cooperative - most of the missile bunkers were out in not-even-flyover parts of the country like North Dakota and eastern Montana, where there was almost no telecom infrastructure nearby and it was tens of milliseconds away from SF, NYC, or even Chicago.
And Canada has their own problems - even though most of the people live within 50 miles of the US border, the Canadian government has been doing things like offering tax incentives to put call centers in remote areas to deal with unemployment - former fishing ports in Prince Edward Island, etc. - where there's not enough local telecom infrastructure to get high bandwidth connections or diverse routes. Too bad, since they've got a pool of educated people who speak good English and something that passes for French and could use the jobs.
Sure, it uses N times as much bandwidth if you limit the number of recipients per connection, but that's not usually a significant cost factor except for a few large mail systems, because email isn't a large fraction of your bandwidth usage unless you're just a mail handler or a spammer (web and BitTorrent are the big bandwidth consumers), and the bandwidth costs are balanced by other costs including all the spam-filtering and CPU utilization.
So yeah, it's annoying in theory, but that just means you need a mail transfer agent that has a limit on the number of recipients per connection that it will send. Postfix does, and I think sendmail does (based on mailing-list-manager discussions from 2004 about Hotmail rejecting messages with too many recipients:-)
Most mail-system managers I've talked to don't accept 100 recipients on a message except for internal communications inside a company. The problem is precisely that spammers have abused the feature - some people limit connections to 1 recipient, some to small numbers like 10, but in general if you accept a lot more you just get spammed.
It does sound to me like the too-many-recipients failure should be a 452 rather than 552, but other people have commented that mail senders are supposed to know how to deal with that.
Standard telco voice runs at 64kbps, which is 80kbps after you add UDP/IP overhead. If you compress the voice, you're typically looking at 20-30kbps after UDP/IP overhead (because you've still got 40+ header bytes per packet even though the compressed voice fits in 8kbps.) So the typical US broadband connection, which has 128kbp or 384kbps of upstream, is plenty big enough for VOIP. You could get fancier and use higher-quality voice codecs with stereo and higher sampling rates, but usually those get compressed so they're still around 80kbps.
Even videoconferencing doesn't need much - corporate teleconferencing usually runs about a 384kbps codec, so it wants a bit faster than 384kbps upstream, but talking-heads video is just fine at 128kbps, and the new H.264 codecs use about half the bandwidth of the earlier ones - so it's cheaper to burn a bit more CPU and get a 192kbps bitstream than to upgrade the broadband infrastructure.
I've had both. Bad British food is bad bad bad, as bad as the worst of American bus station food. Think of bangers and mash when the mash is lumpy reconstituted powder and the bangers are boiled to death, accompanied by vegetables boiled into limpness, and fish&chips where the fish didn't totally thaw out while the batter was getting burned. That's not something that post-war rationing influenced, it's just bad cooking on dishes that need to be cooked well.
I was a carnivore the last time I was in Britain, and the meat dishes ranged from the above to really good. Now that I'm vegetarian, there's less of traditional English cooking that's interesting, but some of it's still good, especially the cheeses, and of course the best place in the world to get Indian food is London (though I tend to prefer the southern Indian cuisines which were less common there.)
Another poster put out a list of foods and asked which the bad ones were, with the desired conclusion of the two American dishes - hamburgers and hot dogs. Sorry, wrong answer, even though you're picking out German-American dishes as opposed to English-American. Hot dogs are pretty dreadful imitations of their German predecessors, but cooking them over fire helps, and I've had Chicken Tikka Masala that's almost as bad and bangers that are worse. And hamburgers can be cooked badly, but good hamburgers are hard to beat - with good meat cooked over fire (or even fried at the right temperature) on a good toasted bun with onions and optionally some decent ketchup.
Broadband's only interesting if you can do cool stuff with it, and we're only "falling behind" if there's cool stuff we can't do.
IMHO, watching broadcast TV isn't cool, it's just getting it from a different cable. Surfing the net a bit faster is always nice, but not a real breakthrough. Web servers at home are semi-cool, and for most people DSL or cable is enough. Playing interactive games is cool, and uses peer-to-peer connections as well as client-server, but again, DSL is enough. Uploading and downloading music and video is semi-cool, and it'd be easier if everybody had a few Mbps of upstream instead of just fast down, slow up, but I haven't heard that there's anything radical happening in that space in Japan or Korea (and anime compresses really well compared to real video:-).
Grocery-shopping by internet is something that old people in Korea have been doing - that's semi-cool. Video conferencing from home is something I've done since dialup days, though 384kbps was a big step up - but I'm not going to put a Cisco Telepresence rig in my house.
It's a well-protected backdoor - only works if you enable it, and you can only enable it if you're authorized (and being undocumented makes it less likely you'll do that:-), so it's not like an always-unlocked backdoor that only your IT staff and ex-employees and the NSA know about, unlike some products I've seen over the years. But it does still mean that you can boot the system once without typing in the regular password, which means it's still dangerous.
I'd prefer to see the key stored somewhere other than the main disk drive, e.g. on a USB dongle that might not get stolen or kept. (Or get tricky and use an iPod Shuffle as the dongle, so the thief is more likely to separate the two:-)
Yeah, it's a potentially dangerous feature - but some customers want it anyway, and at least PGP implemented it in a way that's less dangerous than it could have been. I'd have preferred to see some additional hardware involved, e.g. require input from a USB dongle or successful DHCP hit or something in addition to the disk-stored info, but it's hard to get that to work portably and reliably.
There are kinds of businesses where all the offices have IT staff on site, and kinds of businesses that don't. Sure, your corporate data center has people there. But think about a retail store chain, where if the stores are small they've got a couple of clerks, or if they're large there's probably a store manager. There's no IT staff there - I've had banking customers, who are more likely to have technically competent people, that still couldn't dependably get the onsite people to plug the "Line" and "Phone" jacks on a modem into the wall and phone respectively, and other retail environments are mostly less technical.
Even in a high-tech company, your engineers at remote offices may know operating systems better than routers, or the server may be locked in a closet with the PBX and LAN hardware, or the office may be a sales office where there's nobody technical enough to go drag a monitor into the server closet and plug it into the correct server.
If you've had a power hit at your retail store, once it's back up you don't want to wait half a day for an IT staff guy to drive or fly there and connect the console to type a password into it.
It looks very much like the kind of feature that a random bank or retail store would want - if the power goes out at a store, you want the system to be able to come back up and run the cash registers even though there's nobody technical enough to trust to press the "reboot" button much less connect a console and type in passwords.
If you RTFA, you'll see that it's a feature that you can only turn on if you've already got access to the disk, and PGP did it so it only works once.
There are a few reasons that there's more evolutionary pressure on small warm mammals. One is that they're tasty and lower on the food chain than bigger animals, so the non-fittest end up non-surviving because they get eaten. Another is that a given area can support a lot more small animals than large ones, and especially more sprey animals than predators, so there are more of them around to evolve and to compete with each other as well as to avoid getting eaten.
There are small predators as well - weasels, small cats, etc., but in general being small makes you easier to eat.
The standard for ukes is that you spend half your time tuning and half your time playing a bit out of tune. But maybe that's not the kind of consistency you meant?
Real musical instruments are made of real materials like wood, metal, or nylon. As temperature and humidity change, the shape and flexibility of the parts are going to change, and the parts that are held by friction may also move. And the accoustics of the places you're playing will all be different, and the people you're playing with will have different skills and different instruments, and of course if people are singing their voices aren't super-consistent even if they can carry a tune, and sometimes your fingers or mind are more flexible than other times. And if you move your instrument around it'll also be affected by that. So go with the flow, listen to the sounds around you and adapt. (Oh, and bring an electronic tuner - they really do help unless you're one of those people with really good ears who can do it all with a tuning fork.)
I recently opened my baritone uke bag and found that the thing had exploded - must have overheated in the car or something, because the strings had pulled the bridge off the body. That's a bit more extreme than the usual environmental changes in instruments, but it's reasonably large and I'd bought it for $20 on eBay. Glued the bridge back on, and it's sounding a little dull but the strings may need a bit of time to readjust.
If you don't like all this analog behaviour, get yourself an electronic instrument. Or go with something semi-digital, like a horn with valves. The brass'll still change a bit with temperature, and your wind may vary with humidity as well as tiredness, and a small-mouthpiece instrument like a French horn is a lot less forgiving than a baritone horn or tuba. Or get yourself a slide trombone, where you're always going to have to move your the slide to the right distance to get just the right pitch...
It doesn't look like he means SMTP-time - that wouldn't make the SPF-like behaviour work. It looks like if you get a message from stranger@example.com at IP address 1.2.3.4, his system sends a bouncegram to stranger@example.com (using DNS to look up example.com), and if the sender decides to reply to his bouncegram, he whitelists address 1.2.3.4 for example.com, or maybe for stranger@example.com. Here are N reasons why that fails
It's like TMDA, without the lessons learned about why humans who send email hate that sort of thing.
It tries to use autoresponders at the sender's mail client for the bouncegrams so that people who _do_ hate TMDA-grams won't see them directly, though obviously that doesn't work for the CAPTCHA flavor and it's unlikely you'll get Microsoft Outlook to adopt it any time soon.
Spammers impersonate people, and so if you send a bouncegram to joe@example.com when you get mail pretending to be him, and he exists but it was a spammer joejobing him, you'll annoy him while he's getting mailbombed by other bouncegrams, and also he may get his ISP (or yours) to block you. If he doesn't exist, that'll annoy his ISP. If he does exist, and his ISP has autoreply software that reponds without getting human feedback you're not learning any new information.
Many sites have multiple IP addresses - example.com might send the mail from 1.2.3.5 next time. So if you're rejecting mail because it didn't come from the same IP address that got used last time, you'll reject the good mail, or if you permit that anyway, you're not rejecting mail from infected-zombie@cable-modem-ISP.net.
It sends lots of extra bouncegrams, most of which don't get read because they're replying to spam.
Yahoo and Hotmail already have SPF-like authentication - if you aren't using that, why should they add your system?
The author's proposal isn't particularly novel [insert the usual checklist here], but it has a few good properties
It doesn't replace SMTP with some protocol nobody's using that's not really any better.
This is especially good because the author doesn't really understand all the protocol details or the state of the art:-)
It doesn't require everybody else to adopt it before it works - you can do it with your own email, and worst case is that you'll annoy some humans who you want to be able to send you email and won't annoy some robots that you wanted to be able to send you email. It's a lot like TMDA.
If the major providers do adopt his proposal, the people who use his approach will annoy fewer Hotmail and Yahoo users (but who cares?), and also fewer Outlook users (i.e. people at work.)
But the proposal is seriously broken in a few ways
It doesn't deal well with sending domain names that use multiple IP addresses, in other words, almost any large email server.
It's not clear if it deals well with email senders that use different IP addresses for outbound and inbound mail.
TMDA already does most of what he suggests, and people generally hate it, though they don't always hate it that much.
The similarity to TMDA and lack of lessons learned from it indicates that the author doesn't have much experience....
If you've got one of those fancier slide rules with the K scale, you can just do cube roots directly, but if you don't, there's a hack where you take the slide, turn it upside down, and find the cube root from the scales that line up that way.
Both of these web slide rules have the K scale, so the fact that they're missing the "turn slide upside down" isn't a huge loss, but it's still a limited imitation of the real thing. It's also missing the "sling the slide rule so the slide flies out at your fellow students" feature that was very popular in junior high..., though it does retain the "girls will think you're geeky" aspects.
Sure, the Chinese government is still hung up about the KuoMinTang government fleeing to Taiwan and claiming to still govern the mainland after Mao ran them out of the country, but that's not really relevant.
Yes, there's lots of computer manufacturing in Taiwan. But some of it's _really_ in Taiwan, and some of it's Taiwanese companies doing the design and high-level work with the factories themselves in China. In general you can't tell which ones are which, but less of the money goes to China if you're buying from Taiwan.
A gigapixel is about 30,000 pixels square (or some similar number if it's round), so at.5m/pixel, that's about 15km wide. That's an interesting size if you want to do surveillance of a city like New York (well, Manhattan plus Brooklyn and some nearby areas) or San Francisco - Manhattan's 11 miles long, and SF is about 7 miles square.
So you park a balloon over the city and you can track every car in real time, or launch a helicopter if you're trying to track anybody specific. If cars go 20 mph / 30kph, that's about 8 meters/sec or 2 meters / 4 pixels per frame, less than a car-length, and even if they're going at highway speeds it shouldn't be too hard to track them. You could track car accidents, or track where the police cars are, or where all the taxis are, or where the mayor's main political opponent is going....
Slashdot Mirror
For the last N years, production was down in Burma's Golden Triangle, but it's apparently gone back up substantially this year, so there's a bit of competition, but most of the world's heroin production is still in Afghanistan.
- Virus checkers
- Personal Firewalls
- Anti-Phishing DNS servers
- Remote Sysadmin Printscreen Tools
- Microsoft Patch Tuesday
- Intrusion-Detection / Intrusion-Prevention servers
- etc.
Putting a cute name on it is a way to get funding and get the users to use the tools they're given and of courseget reputation points for your department. You'll find that the Real World has difficulty with those problems just like the Air Force, and if you don't have an annoying central IT administration group keeping an iron grip on everybody's entire software configuration, it's really hard to make sure everything reasonable gets done.
Or will the Air Farce figure out the trick after the first few dozen people try it and only give out points if they catch official test virusgrams and not real ones?
Or give them the stream of email from other convicted spammers to wade through.
You don't need to torture spammers - just make them spend as much time deleting spam as their recipients have, or triple that as punitive damages, kind of like making litterers clean up trash as punishment. Put them in front of a machine and make them hit DEL until either all the spam is gone.
The recent proposals said they'd have the viewing only be done remotely, not by local personnel, and that they'd fuzz the *faces* of the voyeurees. While it does make it harder for the TSA single out the hot-looking women for extra scanning, it's still tacky of them.
It's not like Hillary or her husband have ever been radically anti-surveillance, but at least she's not as actively pro-surveillance as Edwards.
The article mentions a 2005 murder in Russia, but there were also a couple of spammers in New Jersey who got murdered a few years ago, and the general rumor was that they'd annoyed some New York City Russian mafiosi in a stock scam.
U.S. geography isn't always that cooperative - most of the missile bunkers were out in not-even-flyover parts of the country like North Dakota and eastern Montana, where there was almost no telecom infrastructure nearby and it was tens of milliseconds away from SF, NYC, or even Chicago.
And Canada has their own problems - even though most of the people live within 50 miles of the US border, the Canadian government has been doing things like offering tax incentives to put call centers in remote areas to deal with unemployment - former fishing ports in Prince Edward Island, etc. - where there's not enough local telecom infrastructure to get high bandwidth connections or diverse routes. Too bad, since they've got a pool of educated people who speak good English and something that passes for French and could use the jobs.
So yeah, it's annoying in theory, but that just means you need a mail transfer agent that has a limit on the number of recipients per connection that it will send. Postfix does, and I think sendmail does (based on mailing-list-manager discussions from 2004 about Hotmail rejecting messages with too many recipients
It does sound to me like the too-many-recipients failure should be a 452 rather than 552, but other people have commented that mail senders are supposed to know how to deal with that.
Even videoconferencing doesn't need much - corporate teleconferencing usually runs about a 384kbps codec, so it wants a bit faster than 384kbps upstream, but talking-heads video is just fine at 128kbps, and the new H.264 codecs use about half the bandwidth of the earlier ones - so it's cheaper to burn a bit more CPU and get a 192kbps bitstream than to upgrade the broadband infrastructure.
I was a carnivore the last time I was in Britain, and the meat dishes ranged from the above to really good. Now that I'm vegetarian, there's less of traditional English cooking that's interesting, but some of it's still good, especially the cheeses, and of course the best place in the world to get Indian food is London (though I tend to prefer the southern Indian cuisines which were less common there.)
Another poster put out a list of foods and asked which the bad ones were, with the desired conclusion of the two American dishes - hamburgers and hot dogs. Sorry, wrong answer, even though you're picking out German-American dishes as opposed to English-American. Hot dogs are pretty dreadful imitations of their German predecessors, but cooking them over fire helps, and I've had Chicken Tikka Masala that's almost as bad and bangers that are worse. And hamburgers can be cooked badly, but good hamburgers are hard to beat - with good meat cooked over fire (or even fried at the right temperature) on a good toasted bun with onions and optionally some decent ketchup.
IMHO, watching broadcast TV isn't cool, it's just getting it from a different cable. Surfing the net a bit faster is always nice, but not a real breakthrough. Web servers at home are semi-cool, and for most people DSL or cable is enough. Playing interactive games is cool, and uses peer-to-peer connections as well as client-server, but again, DSL is enough. Uploading and downloading music and video is semi-cool, and it'd be easier if everybody had a few Mbps of upstream instead of just fast down, slow up, but I haven't heard that there's anything radical happening in that space in Japan or Korea (and anime compresses really well compared to real video
Grocery-shopping by internet is something that old people in Korea have been doing - that's semi-cool. Video conferencing from home is something I've done since dialup days, though 384kbps was a big step up - but I'm not going to put a Cisco Telepresence rig in my house.
I'd prefer to see the key stored somewhere other than the main disk drive, e.g. on a USB dongle that might not get stolen or kept. (Or get tricky and use an iPod Shuffle as the dongle, so the thief is more likely to separate the two
Yeah, it's a potentially dangerous feature - but some customers want it anyway, and at least PGP implemented it in a way that's less dangerous than it could have been. I'd have preferred to see some additional hardware involved, e.g. require input from a USB dongle or successful DHCP hit or something in addition to the disk-stored info, but it's hard to get that to work portably and reliably.
Even in a high-tech company, your engineers at remote offices may know operating systems better than routers, or the server may be locked in a closet with the PBX and LAN hardware, or the office may be a sales office where there's nobody technical enough to go drag a monitor into the server closet and plug it into the correct server.
If you've had a power hit at your retail store, once it's back up you don't want to wait half a day for an IT staff guy to drive or fly there and connect the console to type a password into it.
If you RTFA, you'll see that it's a feature that you can only turn on if you've already got access to the disk, and PGP did it so it only works once.
There are small predators as well - weasels, small cats, etc., but in general being small makes you easier to eat.
Real musical instruments are made of real materials like wood, metal, or nylon. As temperature and humidity change, the shape and flexibility of the parts are going to change, and the parts that are held by friction may also move. And the accoustics of the places you're playing will all be different, and the people you're playing with will have different skills and different instruments, and of course if people are singing their voices aren't super-consistent even if they can carry a tune, and sometimes your fingers or mind are more flexible than other times. And if you move your instrument around it'll also be affected by that. So go with the flow, listen to the sounds around you and adapt. (Oh, and bring an electronic tuner - they really do help unless you're one of those people with really good ears who can do it all with a tuning fork.)
I recently opened my baritone uke bag and found that the thing had exploded - must have overheated in the car or something, because the strings had pulled the bridge off the body. That's a bit more extreme than the usual environmental changes in instruments, but it's reasonably large and I'd bought it for $20 on eBay. Glued the bridge back on, and it's sounding a little dull but the strings may need a bit of time to readjust.
If you don't like all this analog behaviour, get yourself an electronic instrument. Or go with something semi-digital, like a horn with valves. The brass'll still change a bit with temperature, and your wind may vary with humidity as well as tiredness, and a small-mouthpiece instrument like a French horn is a lot less forgiving than a baritone horn or tuba. Or get yourself a slide trombone, where you're always going to have to move your the slide to the right distance to get just the right pitch...
- It doesn't replace SMTP with some protocol nobody's using that's not really any better.
- This is especially good because the author doesn't really understand all the protocol details or the state of the art
:-) - It doesn't require everybody else to adopt it before it works - you can do it with your own email, and worst case is that you'll annoy some humans who you want to be able to send you email and won't annoy some robots that you wanted to be able to send you email. It's a lot like TMDA.
- If the major providers do adopt his proposal, the people who use his approach will annoy fewer Hotmail and Yahoo users (but who cares?), and also fewer Outlook users (i.e. people at work.)
But the proposal is seriously broken in a few waysBoth of these web slide rules have the K scale, so the fact that they're missing the "turn slide upside down" isn't a huge loss, but it's still a limited imitation of the real thing. It's also missing the "sling the slide rule so the slide flies out at your fellow students" feature that was very popular in junior high..., though it does retain the "girls will think you're geeky" aspects.
Yes, there's lots of computer manufacturing in Taiwan. But some of it's _really_ in Taiwan, and some of it's Taiwanese companies doing the design and high-level work with the factories themselves in China. In general you can't tell which ones are which, but less of the money goes to China if you're buying from Taiwan.
So you park a balloon over the city and you can track every car in real time, or launch a helicopter if you're trying to track anybody specific. If cars go 20 mph / 30kph, that's about 8 meters/sec or 2 meters / 4 pixels per frame, less than a car-length, and even if they're going at highway speeds it shouldn't be too hard to track them. You could track car accidents, or track where the police cars are, or where all the taxis are, or where the mayor's main political opponent is going....