Re:Phishing is a big problem for hosting companies
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Anti-Phishing Tools
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Every phishing scam I've seen get through my spam filters gave itself away, because the e-mails are all written by people who are either not fluent in English or who are too illiterate to get a job as a junior secretary in any English-speaking country.
The biggest threat would be if any of these guys ever hires a native English speaker who can write, and thinks a bit about what a real e-mail from a big corporation might look like.
Making ethanol from corn the way it's done now is wildly inefficient and expensive (it actually costs considerably more energy than you get from burning the ethanol, and oil is burned in the process of making it, so it doesn't help with US energy independence, it hurts). And using enough of the US corn crop to fuel everything on ethanol would put a big dent in the world food supply.
There are better techniques being developed, that would allow the use of the corn stalks, husks, etc rather than the grain and that won't be so wasteful. But right now, the ethanol subsidy is a payoff to the state of Iowa that no presidential candidate dare touch, because Iowa has the first presidential caucus.
I can't belive that people modded this guy up to 5. Do people think that Microsoft is logging every file you download? That's simply not feasible; the traffic would overwhelm even Microsoft's bandwidth.
It appears that the idea is to record a log on your machine about the origins of each download, for easier tracking if someone tricks you into installing malware. I have no idea if they've taken any measures to make it harder for malware to just erase the log.
I would presume that if you use another app to do downloads, you won't get logging if you bypass whatever DLL IE uses to do the download.
Don't forget that the people sending in reports are self-selecting. People who had problems are far more motivated to write a report on those problems that people who had no problems.
Let's wait until we have some real data, as in definitive reports that particular applications break.
Red Hat has a very good record of putting out everything they produce as free software; even the few exceptions to this they have generally fixed as time went on. Given their track record, I see no risk in contributing patches to them. Should they do something that they have never done in their entire corporate history and take a free program proprietary, the free software community can fork the program, starting from the last GPL release. But with Red Hat, all the movement has been in the other direction; they have repeatedly bought proprietary code and made it free.
Novell, on the other hand, was until recently a completely proprietary software company. It would seem more likely that they might be tempted to use contributed Evolution code in proprietary products. If you can't stand that idea, don't contribute to Evolution. But consider: if you found and fixed a bug in XFree86 (or Xorg) would you be willing to send it in along with an assignment? Remember, that code is non-copylefted, so you might become an unpaid employee of some proprietary company that uses the code. And if you do use Evolution, and you were motivated enough to fix an Evolution bug, why wouldn't you want to send it in? Would you want to create a fork, just to deny Novell the ability to use that patch in proprietary software? It would seem that unless you refuse to send patches to fix non-copylefted software either, you're being inconsistent. Even RMS advocates cooperating with non-copylefted free software projects and not trying to create GPL forks.
A hell of a lot of people have written free software that I use every day while on the Red Hat payroll. I'm fine with Red Hat making enough money to keep these folks working and fed. All things being equal, I'd prefer for the FSF to own the copyright over Red Hat, but I'm not particularly worried about the issue.
I have a 2003 Prius, and I get anywhere from 45 to 48.5 miles per gallon (measured by dividing miles driven by gasoline purchased, the real-time fuel efficiency gauge is a bit off). This isn't far from the 47/52 rating. Some other folks I know get less, it really depends how you drive. If you're a leadfoot you'll probably get only 40, or even less. The problem that the EPA rating is higher than what you actually get is true for all cars, not just hybrids, and that's because the auto company hires an expert who knows how to drive the car just right to do well on the test.
HP's a business, not a charity. If they try something and they don't make money, they won't do it again. If people don't buy their Linux laptops, they'll stop supplying Linux laptops.
If they do abandon the product, the customer is in vastly better shape than, say, an abandoned OS/2 customer, since the community can support Linux, the customer can continue getting updates from Novell or install a different distro.
Many of us run Linux. The whole system was produced by reverse engineering products we didn't have license to. Reverse engineering is a right, unless that right is explicitly given up (by agreeing to a contract that waives the right).
Please don't mod this as a troll on reflex. I'm continually scared by those horseless carriages. Horses are huge business, and the entire industry might be eliminated. What's going to happen to all the stable hands and the buggy whip makers? Even the folks who clean up all the horse manure will find themselves out of work. In my view, we should limit those contraptions to 3 miles an hour, and require that a man with a red flag walk in front to warn people that one of these contraptions is coming.
God forbid that technological or social progress ever eliminate anyone's job.
SPF will still be useful to me even if it has no impact on spam in general. What I'm most looking forward to is that I'll no longer get bounces from forged email (mainly from viruses) sent out with my email address listed as sender. Widely deployed SPF will put a major dent in the spread of email viruses, and forging the sender will be less successful. If the true sender is used, it will be easier to track down and isolate the infected PCs.
There's an old saying that the perfect is the enemy of the good. SPF won't be a magic bulled that stops spam for "at *least* ten years". There isn't one. But it will help, and the problems with it can be solved.
The FSF has picked these patents for two reasons: first, they are doing damage; second, the EFF has reason to believe that they can be beaten.
The Clear Channel patent (which I submitted to the contest, though I suspect that a number of others submitted as well) is particularly stupid, and is being used to further Clear Channel's out-of-control power in the music industry (they own 1200+ radio stations and they also control most of the concert venues, or booking for those venues, in large American cities).
Most of mukund's points were addressed by Doctorow's article; specifically, the point about DRM systems only needing to put off the super clever guys. The point is that the super clever guys will immediately tell everyone else, unless you create the most totalitarian police state ever known to prevent them.
Doctorow also talked specifically about the "put the key in the hardware, glue it down with epoxy" idea. Someone will take one apart and word will leak out. The only way to stop it will be to censor every communication to make sure that no one is telling anyone else anything about DRM.
Before long, no one will be allowed into computer science or electrical engineering programs without a security clearance.
Or we could just pitch the whole thing, allow free copying, and find some other mechanism to compensate artists.
Amdahl's Law just says there is a part of the work that can't be parallelized; in a system that follows Amdahl's Law, adding more resources always makes things slightly faster, though there are diminishing returns.
Brooks' Law says that you can actually make the project later by adding more people. That's because the new people have to be brought up to speed, all the team members have to communicate, so you can lose more time than you gain.
Which reminds me of a line from the book. Something like: it takes nine months to produce a child, no matter how many women are assigned to the project.
The official model of the US, put in place by the Founding Fathers, is "E Pluribus Unum" or "Out of many, one". The founders did not share the philosophical view of Ayn Rand, and creating a state was exactly what they were committed to.
Besides, energy efficiency is a national security interest. Over-dependence on oil imports means the US is more likely to engage in foreign wars.
Rather, processors are consuming so much power that they will melt when you turn them on. Pushing chip design forward is getting tougher and tougher, and the processor architects have decided that it's easier to put multiple CPU cores on a chip (without increasing clock speed) than to continue to boost the performance of individual CPUs.
This spells trouble for many programmers. A lot of people have gotten spoiled; they can keep adding features and bloat to their programs, making them slower and slower, knowing that Intel and AMD will put out faster processors every year. The paradigm is changing; instead of faster processors, you'll get twice as many. That means we're going to have to learn how to parallelize our apps.
Dogbert: I can predict the future by assuming that money and male hormones are the driving forces for new technology. Therefore when virtual reality gets cheaper than dating, society is doomed.
They are not extremely socialist now either: the economy is on the road to being dominated by private companies with connections to an authoritarian state, which is not that different from Indonesia under Suharto or Taiwan back in the Chiang Kai-Shek days.
The Toqueville people say they are going to quote people like Dennis Ritchie and Richard Stallman. What those Ritchie and Stallman almost certainly told them is that Linux is a faithful re-implementation of Unix and thus not highly original or ground-breaking; also that Linus is often given credit for functionality that is not in the kernel (you know, the whole GNU/Linux flamewar). And all that's true. The problem is that the Toqueville people don't get that this is perfectly legitimate; the Posix standard that specifies the behavior of Unix-like systems is a public standard, the code is all original and there were no patents in the way.
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Every phishing scam I've seen get through my spam filters gave itself away, because the e-mails are all written by people who are either not fluent in English or who are too illiterate to get a job as a junior secretary in any English-speaking country.
The biggest threat would be if any of these guys ever hires a native English speaker who can write, and thinks a bit about what a real e-mail from a big corporation might look like.
There are better techniques being developed, that would allow the use of the corn stalks, husks, etc rather than the grain and that won't be so wasteful. But right now, the ethanol subsidy is a payoff to the state of Iowa that no presidential candidate dare touch, because Iowa has the first presidential caucus.
It appears that the idea is to record a log on your machine about the origins of each download, for easier tracking if someone tricks you into installing malware. I have no idea if they've taken any measures to make it harder for malware to just erase the log.
I would presume that if you use another app to do downloads, you won't get logging if you bypass whatever DLL IE uses to do the download.
Let's wait until we have some real data, as in definitive reports that particular applications break.
Novell, on the other hand, was until recently a completely proprietary software company. It would seem more likely that they might be tempted to use contributed Evolution code in proprietary products. If you can't stand that idea, don't contribute to Evolution. But consider: if you found and fixed a bug in XFree86 (or Xorg) would you be willing to send it in along with an assignment? Remember, that code is non-copylefted, so you might become an unpaid employee of some proprietary company that uses the code. And if you do use Evolution, and you were motivated enough to fix an Evolution bug, why wouldn't you want to send it in? Would you want to create a fork, just to deny Novell the ability to use that patch in proprietary software? It would seem that unless you refuse to send patches to fix non-copylefted software either, you're being inconsistent. Even RMS advocates cooperating with non-copylefted free software projects and not trying to create GPL forks.
A hell of a lot of people have written free software that I use every day while on the Red Hat payroll. I'm fine with Red Hat making enough money to keep these folks working and fed. All things being equal, I'd prefer for the FSF to own the copyright over Red Hat, but I'm not particularly worried about the issue.
I have a 2003 Prius, and I get anywhere from 45 to 48.5 miles per gallon (measured by dividing miles driven by gasoline purchased, the real-time fuel efficiency gauge is a bit off). This isn't far from the 47/52 rating. Some other folks I know get less, it really depends how you drive. If you're a leadfoot you'll probably get only 40, or even less. The problem that the EPA rating is higher than what you actually get is true for all cars, not just hybrids, and that's because the auto company hires an expert who knows how to drive the car just right to do well on the test.
HP's a business, not a charity. If they try something and they don't make money, they won't do it again. If people don't buy their Linux laptops, they'll stop supplying Linux laptops.
If they do abandon the product, the customer is in vastly better shape than, say, an abandoned OS/2 customer, since the community can support Linux, the customer can continue getting updates from Novell or install a different distro.
Microsoft makes huge amounts of money from the OS and from Office. Everything else they do either loses money or makes very little money.
They are now returning their pile of cash in the form of dividends because they can't think of anything better to do with it.
Real has done nothing wrong, and the DMCA is an immoral law (though it doesn't even appear to apply in this case).
Many of us run Linux. The whole system was produced by reverse engineering products we didn't have license to. Reverse engineering is a right, unless that right is explicitly given up (by agreeing to a contract that waives the right).
God forbid that technological or social progress ever eliminate anyone's job.
SPF will still be useful to me even if it has no impact on spam in general. What I'm most looking forward to is that I'll no longer get bounces from forged email (mainly from viruses) sent out with my email address listed as sender. Widely deployed SPF will put a major dent in the spread of email viruses, and forging the sender will be less successful. If the true sender is used, it will be easier to track down and isolate the infected PCs.
There's an old saying that the perfect is the enemy of the good. SPF won't be a magic bulled that stops spam for "at *least* ten years". There isn't one. But it will help, and the problems with it can be solved.
Sorry about that.
The FSF has picked these patents for two reasons: first, they are doing damage; second, the EFF has reason to believe that they can be beaten.
The Clear Channel patent (which I submitted to the contest, though I suspect that a number of others submitted as well) is particularly stupid, and is being used to further Clear Channel's out-of-control power in the music industry (they own 1200+ radio stations and they also control most of the concert venues, or booking for those venues, in large American cities).
Bad patents are not "pro-business", they are more like a tax on business (and furthermore, a tax where the revenue raised is flushed down the drain).
His stock options did not become "nearly worthless", but completely worthless.
On the other hand, they gave him a $10 million severance package when they fired him.
Most of mukund's points were addressed by Doctorow's article; specifically, the point about DRM systems only needing to put off the super clever guys. The point is that the super clever guys will immediately tell everyone else, unless you create the most totalitarian police state ever known to prevent them.
Doctorow also talked specifically about the "put the key in the hardware, glue it down with epoxy" idea. Someone will take one apart and word will leak out. The only way to stop it will be to censor every communication to make sure that no one is telling anyone else anything about DRM. Before long, no one will be allowed into computer science or electrical engineering programs without a security clearance.
Or we could just pitch the whole thing, allow free copying, and find some other mechanism to compensate artists.
Amdahl's Law just says there is a part of the work that can't be parallelized; in a system that follows Amdahl's Law, adding more resources always makes things slightly faster, though there are diminishing returns.
Brooks' Law says that you can actually make the project later by adding more people. That's because the new people have to be brought up to speed, all the team members have to communicate, so you can lose more time than you gain.
Which reminds me of a line from the book. Something like: it takes nine months to produce a child, no matter how many women are assigned to the project.
The official model of the US, put in place by the Founding Fathers, is "E Pluribus Unum" or "Out of many, one". The founders did not share the philosophical view of Ayn Rand, and creating a state was exactly what they were committed to.
Besides, energy efficiency is a national security interest. Over-dependence on oil imports means the US is more likely to engage in foreign wars.
Rather, processors are consuming so much power that they will melt when you turn them on. Pushing chip design forward is getting tougher and tougher, and the processor architects have decided that it's easier to put multiple CPU cores on a chip (without increasing clock speed) than to continue to boost the performance of individual CPUs.
This spells trouble for many programmers. A lot of people have gotten spoiled; they can keep adding features and bloat to their programs, making them slower and slower, knowing that Intel and AMD will put out faster processors every year. The paradigm is changing; instead of faster processors, you'll get twice as many. That means we're going to have to learn how to parallelize our apps.
Woman (to Dogbert): Is Dilbert available?
Dogbert: He's been in the holodeck since March.
They are not extremely socialist now either: the economy is on the road to being dominated by private companies with connections to an authoritarian state, which is not that different from Indonesia under Suharto or Taiwan back in the Chiang Kai-Shek days.
The Toqueville people say they are going to quote people like Dennis Ritchie and Richard Stallman. What those Ritchie and Stallman almost certainly told them is that Linux is a faithful re-implementation of Unix and thus not highly original or ground-breaking; also that Linus is often given credit for functionality that is not in the kernel (you know, the whole GNU/Linux flamewar). And all that's true. The problem is that the Toqueville people don't get that this is perfectly legitimate; the Posix standard that specifies the behavior of Unix-like systems is a public standard, the code is all original and there were no patents in the way.
Almost every single case where someone is using Excel to design a form, I can open the .xls file in OpenOffice 1.1 and it works fine.
And OpenOffice competes very effectively with Microsoft on price.