IMAPsize is a Windows utility for IMAP account maintenance and it has a function to do incremental backups of an IMAP account. Just a few clicks and the process can be left to do its job. Then you can burn it to a CD and keep it in a safe place.
When I look at some of what the XO was designed to do I can think how useful it can be in the developed countries (not just the USA).
Think of what mesh networking capability can do in a city where many people's hardware does it by default. Would you need to purchase connectivity? Can P2P connectivity do to the telecoms what P2P file transmission has done to the mafiaa? (or at least what the mafiaa believes it is doing to them?) Now could one push such a project where the aim is letting people communicate freely by sharing where in the present they have to pay for the connectivity? It's easier to get the project going by making it a charitable cause that doesn't compete with existing strong market forces.
Anyway, this strange communist thought of having people sharing connectivity is ridiculous and unamerican. It is as if cities made streets and sidewalks free for public use and we could actually walk from one part of the city to another without having to pay tolls for the operators of the toll streets. Sure if we want to reach the local mall we have to pay for the connectivity? Well, I'm getting off topic and I'm not even American...
> The issue is that Microsoft is shipping insecure code in Office 2007 and 2003 > which may break when these files are opened and allow malicious executable code > to run in the user's security context. Rather than fix this insecure code in > a shipping product, their policy is to turn off the code and tell the user, > "if you want to take the risk, turn it back on, but we won't make it easy."
Then perhaps all one needs to do in order not to have to tweak one's registry is to just remove all kind of security, firewall, anti-virus and all, and wait for a little while until a virus comes along and does what's needed to turn on the risky code... Shouldn't take long now that MS has published precise instructions how to turn the risky code on and pointers on what's needed to exploit it...
I have an original WIN98 disk, and everything that came with it, including the original PC it came own. Several years ago I had to reformat the HD and reinstall WIN98. It was not the first time I did it. After instalation the usual thing to do is to install all the available security updates. The way they designed WIN98 is that there was an "automatic update" feature that did it. It was advertised as an important element in the OS. However when MS stopped supporting this OS they not only stopped providing new updates, security or no. They also removed all the old ones from the automatic updates site, replacing the functionality with a message that says they no longer support this product. So you're stuck with the original 1998 that cannot be updated with all the security updates that were produced until they dropped support. Well... it's not that you cannot get the updates: you can download all the hundreds of updates produced over the years as individual files, then manually install them one by one, if you know what you're doing. So I thought there must be a way to get all of them bundled in one file. I called M$. I was identified as their customer (I did send in the registration card: the one that said "Do you want to know who the most important person is at microsoft? (flip page) It you! The customer!") Well, I was on file, they know I have WIN98, they don't have any other way to provide the udates to WIN98 except by hundreds of individual files, but they offered to sell me an upgrade to WinXP for the full price.
So this is certainly not the first time they remove functionality from their products. They could leave the WIN98 update site in the state it was on the last day they still supported the product. Or they could pack all the updated so one could get them in one installer file if one needed to reinstall the OS. They chose to remove the automatic update functionality and push anyone who needs to reinstall to original 1998 version with no updates (except for a few made manually if one really needs them).
I didn't get XP for that machine. It was not strong enough for XP, and I saw no reason to pay for an OS that would eventually be made dysfunctional by the vendor who believes that end of support means also removal of all past updates. I have WIN98 partially installed on that PC. "partially" means the OS is installed, but no drivers and no apps are. Like all Windows installations several hours of shoving various vendor CDs in and out are needed to make it useful, and puting in a lightweight liveCDE Linux distro takes much less time...
I'm not worried too much about government abusing internet censoring in free countries. I am much more worried about how this kind of filtering would change the internet.
As I see it ISP's main franchise (in countries where they are regulated) is to provide customers with IP protocol access to the internet. The customer's client software contacts content providers directly through channels supplied by the ISP. Now what these kind of "mandated filtering" laws do is tell the ISPs that they must check the contents of the customers communication with content providers. If they don't they might face criminal charges. So in effect it seems that the direct communications model is broken. The model becomes one where the customer only communicates with the ISP and the ISP communicates with content providers and sometimes fetches content and delivers to the customer and sometimes doesn't. Many people who do not understand the technology believe that this is exactly what ISPs do: they provide web content from various sources, just like cable TV operators provide content they obtain from many different content providers. I remember on a radio program here in Israel on "Internet Safety Day" a couple of years ago a woman that said "the basic bundle in cable TV doesn't include porn. It should be the same with the basic internet bundle. people should not ask for porn to be filtered out but those who want it have to purchase an extra porn deal like they do on cable TV". This was in response to explanations about optional available filtering from ISPs or as PC based software. My main point here is not that people want filtering to be the default but that people view their ISP as the supplier of the content, and ISPs are very happy with this. It ties customers in because the customer believe that changing ISP might change the mix of content they are getting. Mandated filtering laws escalate this by encoding into the law the requirement that ISPs act as content providers. It establishes their role as content brokers. They are no longer just providing of channels that connect computers to the network. They are mediators that go out and get content and then deliver content to customers that paid for it.
I am not Australian but the Australian legislation worries me. I am Israeli and Israel has similar laws in process. Israeli legislators are looking at the Australian example, and Australia is considered a free country, unlike some other countries that employ Internet filtering. What happens in Australia here has the potential to affect what happens in other countries, because if it is successful legislators in other countries could use it as an example and as proof that "it works". And as almost all people don't really mind the internet becoming anther kind of "Cable TV" where service providers provide a mix of content that they choose it will certainly "work" to the satisfaction of most people. Only a minority really utilize the openness of internet communications. The result might be that there would be no way to get direct IP protocol access to the internet except by getting an expensive commercial deal with the ISP, because consumer deals would only be ones where the ISP sends gets the data and delivers it to the customer (i.e., consumer "unfiltered" deal might mean that the ISP goes out and fetches whatever web content you ask for and delivers it, but you don't get any direct connection to the internet. Only http proxying by the ISP. The rest of it is not "for consumers" and if you want it you have to be a business).
So what I see happenning here is "net neutrality" going out the back door. ISPs would be able to block content because they are liable unless they do it, and they have to do it because otherwise they might allow content in that the law forbids them to. So they would have a legal excuse to block whatever content they want to, as long as they provide a way to dispute their decisions. Now try to access your independent email provider, or your webhost, or your independent DNS provider's control panel when the
Perhaps like spammers need "bullet proof hosting" users of pornography, file-sharers, spammers and all types of people who have incriminating info on their PCs need "bullet proof PC repair" services...
> Isn't the article's premise the exact situation which the OLPC designers feared?
Perhaps what they feared was that without controls to limit the distribution of the cheap devices they could be distributed to a wider audience and become a very good cheap alternative to much more expensive equipment the manufacturers that are needed to make the devices sell to the public.
The specs are very good for business use. A cheap and "childproof" device is something a company can supply to workers who would not get a laptop, and this device can probably do much more than a cellphone, even a modern expensive one. And if they can for their own wireless network with all endpoints acting as routers then perhaps a western city full of such devices would create much less demand for communication services (bandwidth) from whoever currently sell them (telecoms etc.)
So perhaps the limitations are not there to prevent children of developed countries from enjoying the benefits of the OLPC XO but rather to make sure that those companies that need to cooperate do not feel threatened that wide adoption of the technology might risk some of of their sources of income?
When my younger son was 3 years old he started using Google Images. He used it to fund images to paste into his MS Paint creations. I didn't create any special tools for him but he did use a piece of hardware called "older brother" an I/O device... Soon he decided that he needs to learn English since he gets much more results in English than his native language (Hebrew). When he was 4 and we went for a long trip abroad he got Google-sick and painted lots of pictures of coloful G O O G L E.
When he was about 5 years old he learned how to use Art of Illusion to make 3D scenes and GameMaker to create games. I did not have to do much more than put the software on the kids' PCs. Of course the little one had the benefit of an older brother that can solve problems, but basically both of them learn by trial and error, and the older brother sometimes learns from the younger one who is really good at discovering things. Don't forget that young kids naturally learn languages with no help. They learn how to use software much like they learn a language.
Last week his PC sort of died. So he just went to the old PC on my desk that's currntly running Damn Small Linux, looked around, found xpaint, and used it. I'm not amazed that kids do it. It's what I expect them to do. They learn by exploring. You to provide the software that would interest them, and they would find out how to use it.
I corrected it now (not necessarily to your liking).
I think more academics need to monitor and fix Wikipedia articles, as it is a source of information to their students. Or we can supervise our students doing it.
Wikipedia is NOT just another source. Wikipedia is editable. Student can edit Wikipedia. And teachers can send students to edit Wikipedia.
Instead of banning Wikipedia citations (or allowing) and instead of telling students about theoretical "source criticism" teachers should send students to edit Wikipedia (that is to add/correct information, not to vandalize). This way the student will get true understanding of what sources are or can be, and why facts need to be based on several independent sources.
Teachers can also initiate and supervise student's activity on Wikipedia, and even give credit for such activity. Both their student and the rest of humanity would benefit.
Finally, the fact a source is "authoritative" and the author is an expert in the field does not mean the facts are correct. I have seen false staements published in professional peer reviewed mathematical publications as theorems with proofs, only the theorems are false (with easy counter-examples) and the proofs contain mistakes. SO does Wikipedia. The difference is that if one sees a mistake in Wikipedia one can immediately correct it, or at least record it in the article discussion.
As TFA mentions, the said spammer was located in the nearby office is Netanya, Israel.
Finding real botnet based spammers in Netanya is not that difficult. Netanya Academic College has hired in the past the services of botnet-based spam to advertise its services. In 25 January 2007 a spam message advertising them was received by me. The source was a consumer dsl connection in Verizon's network in Santa Monica, California (http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/ipall.ch?ip=71.109.181.242) and it was positively identified as being sent by a known spammer (MailMedia of Israel) whose activity certainly looks like botnet-based spam, as spam messages it sends arrive from a multitude of IP addresses that are mostly consumer dynamic connections (http://israblog.nana10.co.il/blogread.asp?blog=383074&blogcode=5950596 Hebrew. Links to DNSstuff are in English, though).
The Academic College of Netanya is not some kind of illegal or semi-legal operation such as gambling sites or unlicensed online pharmacies. It's a real academic college. The same spammer has advertised many other Israeli higher education institutions, financial institutions and other so called legitimate businesses. There is no way to make the financial activities of these institutions illegal. If law enforcement wanted they could get information from these institutions leading closer to the botnet-operating spammer. For all I know they did. The spammer is contactable as he advertises his cellphone number as a means of contacting him and he hosts a website marketing his services at one of the major Israeli ISPs (013.net). The police knows about the spammer. They cannot do anything about the email advertising which is legal, and they cannot get a conviction on charge of using computer viruses just based on the evidence that the spam arrives from many different locations.
The guy had 2000000 addresses. Let's say he sends only one spam message every week. That's approximately 50x2000000=100000000 (one hundred million) messages a year. so now suppose that the time it takes to "just hit delete" (that is verify that the message is not legotimate, decide it's safe to delete it and delete it) is approximately 3.6 seconds, just so we have a nice round number. Then it's 360000000 working seconds (100000 working hours) to clean the junk he sends. So if you can get work at less than 45 cents an hour it would cost less than puting the guy in jail (assuming this costs $45000 a year).
The time of most email users is worth much more than 45 cents an hour, so the cost of spam is much more than $45000, even if one includes only the cost of "just hit delete".
You can exchange some of the cost of "just hit delete" by filtering, and then you get the price of false positives and loss of business as a result of lost email. Even the best filtering technology has a small percentage of loss of legitimate email, and for 2000000 recipients receiving billions of legitimate messages per year it would probably mean costs even higher than the cost of "just hit delete".
What amazes me is that the court accepts that lack of evidence of direct cost to ISPs in filtering equipment means they have to use the spammer's income as a last resort, when it is so easy to see that the cost of "just hit delete" is higher than the spammer's income. In advertising it used to be that the advertiser paid for the use of the media (such as for inches or seconds of airtime). Spam is based on stealing the media, and even iof the cost of the media is just the cost of a few seconds of work handling the cleaning up of the junk, it accumulates to huge costs, and there's no need for exact figures when it can be easily proved that the cost is much higher than a very conservative estimate.
Spam sent using a zombie PC leads to that machine. The problem is then getting to that specific machine.
What we lack is some standard way to use information about origin of spam to have the police actually contact a person and say: "we found out your machine was hijacked and we have some info tying it to whoever paid to abuse your machine. We hope we can get enough evidence by checking you PC so we can prosecute". Not all spam but some of it can be tied to whoever paid for it, and if people who own the hijacked machines can be reached, some of them would gladly help the police nail the bastard who broke into their PC, or at leastthe bastard who paid to use the PC that was broken into!
People don't "see spam" but they also don't see other mail that is filtered with their spam. At gmail I did see legitimate mail end up in the junk box. That's only what ended up in the junk mail. There's no info about what they completely discard. The real damage in spam is not seeing it but losing email functionality, and losing trust in email as a reliable medium.
People can see that they have less spam. They most often don't know that they lost some legitimate messages because they don't see them, and gmail's filters while perhaps being quite good are not perfect, and do have some false positives.
Perhaps the fact that Google are so confident in their filtering ability is one reason why they let spammers use gmail addresses to receive orders. I've seen several spammers use gmail addresses as the only means of contact they provide in their spam, and the fact that they continue sending spam with the same gmail contact address means they achieve positive results this way, and that their gmail mailboxes are not closed despite of receiving responses to spam messages. I've reported such abuse to gmail several times and as far as I can tell at least some of the drop boxes I reported are still used by the same spammers that continue to send spam directing to send email to those addresses for "more information" on their products or services.
SO perhaps they don't send their spam out using gmail transmitters, but there are spammers using botnet-based transmitters that use gmail to receive inquiries.
Advertisers hire spammers that hire botnet herders. If advertisers can indirectly fund botnet operations and go free we would always have botnets. They would just have to hide it down an extra level or two of accountability so law enforcement doesn't gain access to someone that can be prosecuted. So the law has to adapt and make whoever purchases services based on stolen computer or network resources accountable. This would have the effect of establishing trade practices where advertisers would not buy services that don't have established reputation of not using stolen resources either directly or indirectly.
It is quite easy to find most advertisers using spam, as they have to make money somehow, and they are usually operating in the same market as the receivers of their spam. So what's needed is a way to have received spam data collected and tied to botnet activity. An advertiser whose many spam advertisements can be tied to many sources that are identified as a botnet can then be persecuted, and either be punished or cooperate and reveal the next level of accountability (i.e., whoever sold the botnet-based services).
How do you get people whose computers are infected and become part of a botnet to tell law enforcement about their computers being broken into, and inviting law enforcement to collect evidence (as they would have done if their house was broken into? This is the real challenge. These people usually don't know their computer has been broken into, and if they find out they just have their Anti-Virus/Anti-malware software remove the malware and any evidence about the computer having been broken into. The sources that can tell which computers are broken into are headers and content in received spam, but these are also just disposed off. What we need is to collect all this info, analyze it, map the botnets and tie them to their end users (advertisers who paid for spam to be sent). This might be done through anti-spam and anti-malware software, whose behavior must be changed so instead of just getting rid of the annoyances they would also contribute available evidence that can be used against those who cause the annoyances.
> I'm for a little deregulation of things like pot that aren't that addictive or dangerous, > but a completely uncontrolled drug system would be at least as bad or worse...
Currently commerce in "illegal drugs" is completely uncontrolled. There is regulated commerce in drugs and you can get those with a prescription (or without) at any licensed pharmacy. But there are drugs you cannot get at licensed pharmacies and those you get in the "free market". So what completely banning those drugs achieved is actually deregulation and complete lack of control.
The problem with copyright law is that if you don't explicitly allow use of your content then no use is allowed (except "fair" use that is not well defined).
So if you want the content you post to be freely and legally usable by everyone you have to license it. You don't have to bother with all kinds of FOSS licenses as you can just declare that it is in the public domain, which means that you are still the copyright holder but you license your work to everyone to do whatever they want with it.
So the OP raises a valid point: that code represents a risk to the organization he works for. Perhaps a small risk, but if later it is discovered it might cost money to the organization. If this was code used in a FOSS project and someone posted a comment about it I believe the issue would be immediately addressed by either locating the source and verifying that it is reusable (and documenting the fact in the source0 or replacing it. A closed source project might react differently (such as by making sure the code is not exposed to the outside world so that infringement can not be detected) but it still would want to reduce the risks involved in using unlicensed content.
This aspect of copyright law was perhaps good at the time when the mere fact that a work is published indicated that someone made an effort and investment in publishing it. It is very inappropriate today because no real effort and practically no investment is needed to publish content, and people do post lots of content with the intention that everybody could use it freely. This should be changed and this change would be good for everybody, and especially for those who don't want their works freely distributed, because one of the arguments available now is that there is no way to tell content that is freely distributable from content that is not, and most of the unmarked content out there was meant to be freely distributable by the autheor, despite the author's failure to explicitly attach a license (including a license that puts the content in the public domain).
There's prior art to mapping the brain onto electronic computing devices:
It was done in at least one episode of Star Trek.
And if future prior art published in the distant past is not suitable, then Wallace's cross human-rabbit brain mapping ("Wallace & Gromit - The Curse of the Were-Rabbit") might apply (a rabbit's brain IS a kind of electronic computing device, as is a human brain.
Both examples are both "prior" and "art"!
If not applicable, prepare to either pay a licensing fee or stop using your brain (if you haven't done so already). Perhaps legislators should prepare by creating a special tax and mandatory license. And the free culture community should devise alternatives that bypass the patent by accomplishing the same functionality without the usage of a brain (plants provide plenty of prior art to brainless existence, as do most inanimate objects.
Anyway, if such patents are accepted and legislators do not prepare in advance it might be quite difficult to invalidate it because the judges and jury would depend on the patented technology to do their job...
> Even in a web page, someone can make an image that > looks exactly like a default message box...
Such as "Enter the password for the default security device" that Firefox password manager displays? (either that or some similar text, or perhaps my browser have been hacked a very long time ago?)
> I sue The Economist for infecting my machine. > The Economist turns around and sues Doubleclick.... > Doubleclick may then turn around and sue the company that made the malicious ads...
What's happenning here is a CRIME. So you file complaint at your local police department which (hopefully) ionvestigates it (or the FBI or whatever investigates) so they question The Economist that blaims Doubleclick that blames the company that made the malicious ads that turns out ro be an intermediary that point a finger elsewhere and eventually everyone is guilty of a little bit of negligence but not enough to be punishable by a court of law, and somewhere along the line the chain breaks or leads to some jurisdiction that is not entirely unreachable but is not practically reachable do to such limitations as budgets of law enforcement agencies.
So the criminals won because they invented distributed crime: no one is punishable because everyone's part is too small to be punishable. Criminal law is quite helpless dealing with crime that is broken into such small parts that no single reachable entity can be blamed for playing a significant role.
I stopped using ICQ around 2001. Almost all the traffic was spam (requests to be added to the contact list with text such as "come see my pics"). I don't think hiding would have helped since the ICQ address space is very small. ICQ just used sequential numbers.
I have almost complete control over how my email is handled through multiple addresses and through scripts that filter my email any way I wants it. All this costs next to nothing.
I cannot disconnect a phone or IM client selectively except for very limited options such as whitelist+blacklist. I have no way in my phone to junk SMS spam so I cannot use SMS as a means of receiving important messages.
I would have liked to allow my students to contact me through Skype, but that would mean that I would either have to let them see I'm available whenever I want to be available to my family members, or I would have to have a separate account just for that and I would not be able to be available to my family and friends on my main account when I make myself available to my students on the account I would advertise to them (because the proprietary client or perhaps the protocol itself doesn't support being connected through multiple accounts at the same time. So even two family members sharing a computer cannot have both accounts "available" at the same time). And then of course it's just one proprietary network. And you have to use all of them to be connected to everyone. So I use none.
I guess flat availability ("available"/"unavailable") is good for teenagers that use IM or whatever just to communicate with "friends" or perhaps with some teachers, but when it comes to having many different types of contacts it fails.
Email with IMAP idle means I can respond to email in about the same amount of time it takes to respond to a phone call or IM message, but I am in full control.
sixdegrees.com (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SixDegrees.com) preceded all these "social networks" by ten years. And like sixdegrees, you cannot count on any of these propietary "networks" not to reach a point when they decide to close the business and sell the acquired info.
Email, on the other hand, is an open standard that does not belong to anyone, and people and businesses can count on it to work reasonably well for them if their application stay close enough to the standard. Email is guaranteed to work in the future so it will stay. Email for communications is as outdated as sex is for reproduction!
It doesn't work on classic cars (pre 1972 they say). Gangsters would go back to good old gangster cars. Police will go back to classic police cars. Then we will get to see those classic car chases without having to go watch a classic movie like the Blues Bros. and everybody benefits from the situation!
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IMAPsize is a Windows utility for IMAP account maintenance and it has a function to do incremental backups of an IMAP account. Just a few clicks and the process can be left to do its job. Then you can burn it to a CD and keep it in a safe place.
When I look at some of what the XO was designed to do I can think how useful it can be in the developed countries (not just the USA).
...
Think of what mesh networking capability can do in a city where many people's hardware does it by default. Would you need to purchase connectivity? Can P2P connectivity do to the telecoms what P2P file transmission has done to the mafiaa? (or at least what the mafiaa believes it is doing to them?) Now could one push such a project where the aim is letting people communicate freely by sharing where in the present they have to pay for the connectivity? It's easier to get the project going by making it a charitable cause that doesn't compete with existing strong market forces.
Anyway, this strange communist thought of having people sharing connectivity is ridiculous and unamerican. It is as if cities made streets and sidewalks free for public use and we could actually walk from one part of the city to another without having to pay tolls for the operators of the toll streets. Sure if we want to reach the local mall we have to pay for the connectivity? Well, I'm getting off topic and I'm not even American
> The issue is that Microsoft is shipping insecure code in Office 2007 and 2003
> which may break when these files are opened and allow malicious executable code
> to run in the user's security context. Rather than fix this insecure code in
> a shipping product, their policy is to turn off the code and tell the user,
> "if you want to take the risk, turn it back on, but we won't make it easy."
Then perhaps all one needs to do in order not to have to tweak one's registry is to just remove all kind of security, firewall, anti-virus and all, and wait for a little while until a virus comes along and does what's needed to turn on the risky code... Shouldn't take long now that MS has published precise instructions how to turn the risky code on and pointers on what's needed to exploit it...
> ... the precedent is well worth bitching about.
...
I have an original WIN98 disk, and everything that came with it, including the original PC it came own. Several years ago I had to reformat the HD and reinstall WIN98. It was not the first time I did it. After instalation the usual thing to do is to install all the available security updates. The way they designed WIN98 is that there was an "automatic update" feature that did it. It was advertised as an important element in the OS. However when MS stopped supporting this OS they not only stopped providing new updates, security or no. They also removed all the old ones from the automatic updates site, replacing the functionality with a message that says they no longer support this product. So you're stuck with the original 1998 that cannot be updated with all the security updates that were produced until they dropped support. Well... it's not that you cannot get the updates: you can download all the hundreds of updates produced over the years as individual files, then manually install them one by one, if you know what you're doing. So I thought there must be a way to get all of them bundled in one file. I called M$. I was identified as their customer (I did send in the registration card: the one that said "Do you want to know who the most important person is at microsoft? (flip page) It you! The customer!") Well, I was on file, they know I have WIN98, they don't have any other way to provide the udates to WIN98 except by hundreds of individual files, but they offered to sell me an upgrade to WinXP for the full price.
So this is certainly not the first time they remove functionality from their products. They could leave the WIN98 update site in the state it was on the last day they still supported the product. Or they could pack all the updated so one could get them in one installer file if one needed to reinstall the OS. They chose to remove the automatic update functionality and push anyone who needs to reinstall to original 1998 version with no updates (except for a few made manually if one really needs them).
I didn't get XP for that machine. It was not strong enough for XP, and I saw no reason to pay for an OS that would eventually be made dysfunctional by the vendor who believes that end of support means also removal of all past updates. I have WIN98 partially installed on that PC. "partially" means the OS is installed, but no drivers and no apps are. Like all Windows installations several hours of shoving various vendor CDs in and out are needed to make it useful, and puting in a lightweight liveCDE Linux distro takes much less time
I'm not worried too much about government abusing internet censoring in free countries. I am much more worried about how this kind of filtering would change the internet.
As I see it ISP's main franchise (in countries where they are regulated) is to provide customers with IP protocol access to the internet. The customer's client software contacts content providers directly through channels supplied by the ISP. Now what these kind of "mandated filtering" laws do is tell the ISPs that they must check the contents of the customers communication with content providers. If they don't they might face criminal charges. So in effect it seems that the direct communications model is broken. The model becomes one where the customer only communicates with the ISP and the ISP communicates with content providers and sometimes fetches content and delivers to the customer and sometimes doesn't. Many people who do not understand the technology believe that this is exactly what ISPs do: they provide web content from various sources, just like cable TV operators provide content they obtain from many different content providers. I remember on a radio program here in Israel on "Internet Safety Day" a couple of years ago a woman that said "the basic bundle in cable TV doesn't include porn. It should be the same with the basic internet bundle. people should not ask for porn to be filtered out but those who want it have to purchase an extra porn deal like they do on cable TV". This was in response to explanations about optional available filtering from ISPs or as PC based software. My main point here is not that people want filtering to be the default but that people view their ISP as the supplier of the content, and ISPs are very happy with this. It ties customers in because the customer believe that changing ISP might change the mix of content they are getting. Mandated filtering laws escalate this by encoding into the law the requirement that ISPs act as content providers. It establishes their role as content brokers. They are no longer just providing of channels that connect computers to the network. They are mediators that go out and get content and then deliver content to customers that paid for it.
I am not Australian but the Australian legislation worries me. I am Israeli and Israel has similar laws in process. Israeli legislators are looking at the Australian example, and Australia is considered a free country, unlike some other countries that employ Internet filtering. What happens in Australia here has the potential to affect what happens in other countries, because if it is successful legislators in other countries could use it as an example and as proof that "it works". And as almost all people don't really mind the internet becoming anther kind of "Cable TV" where service providers provide a mix of content that they choose it will certainly "work" to the satisfaction of most people. Only a minority really utilize the openness of internet communications. The result might be that there would be no way to get direct IP protocol access to the internet except by getting an expensive commercial deal with the ISP, because consumer deals would only be ones where the ISP sends gets the data and delivers it to the customer (i.e., consumer "unfiltered" deal might mean that the ISP goes out and fetches whatever web content you ask for and delivers it, but you don't get any direct connection to the internet. Only http proxying by the ISP. The rest of it is not "for consumers" and if you want it you have to be a business).
So what I see happenning here is "net neutrality" going out the back door. ISPs would be able to block content because they are liable unless they do it, and they have to do it because otherwise they might allow content in that the law forbids them to. So they would have a legal excuse to block whatever content they want to, as long as they provide a way to dispute their decisions. Now try to access your independent email provider, or your webhost, or your independent DNS provider's control panel when the
Perhaps like spammers need "bullet proof hosting" users of pornography, file-sharers, spammers and all types of people who have incriminating info on their PCs need "bullet proof PC repair" services ...
> Isn't the article's premise the exact situation which the OLPC designers feared?
Perhaps what they feared was that without controls to limit the distribution of the cheap devices they could be distributed to a wider audience and become a very good cheap alternative to much more expensive equipment the manufacturers that are needed to make the devices sell to the public.
The specs are very good for business use. A cheap and "childproof" device is something a company can supply to workers who would not get a laptop, and this device can probably do much more than a cellphone, even a modern expensive one. And if they can for their own wireless network with all endpoints acting as routers then perhaps a western city full of such devices would create much less demand for communication services (bandwidth) from whoever currently sell them (telecoms etc.)
So perhaps the limitations are not there to prevent children of developed countries from enjoying the benefits of the OLPC XO but rather to make sure that those companies that need to cooperate do not feel threatened that wide adoption of the technology might risk some of of their sources of income?
When my younger son was 3 years old he started using Google Images. He used it to fund images to paste into his MS Paint creations. I didn't create any special tools for him but he did use a piece of hardware called "older brother" an I/O device... Soon he decided that he needs to learn English since he gets much more results in English than his native language (Hebrew). When he was 4 and we went for a long trip abroad he got Google-sick and painted lots of pictures of coloful G O O G L E.
When he was about 5 years old he learned how to use Art of Illusion to make 3D scenes and GameMaker to create games. I did not have to do much more than put the software on the kids' PCs. Of course the little one had the benefit of an older brother that can solve problems, but basically both of them learn by trial and error, and the older brother sometimes learns from the younger one who is really good at discovering things. Don't forget that young kids naturally learn languages with no help. They learn how to use software much like they learn a language.
Last week his PC sort of died. So he just went to the old PC on my desk that's currntly running Damn Small Linux, looked around, found xpaint, and used it. I'm not amazed that kids do it. It's what I expect them to do. They learn by exploring. You to provide the software that would interest them, and they would find out how to use it.
I corrected it now (not necessarily to your liking).
I think more academics need to monitor and fix Wikipedia articles, as it is a source of information to their students. Or we can supervise our students doing it.
Wikipedia is NOT just another source. Wikipedia is editable. Student can edit Wikipedia. And teachers can send students to edit Wikipedia.
Instead of banning Wikipedia citations (or allowing) and instead of telling students about theoretical "source criticism" teachers should send students to edit Wikipedia (that is to add/correct information, not to vandalize). This way the student will get true understanding of what sources are or can be, and why facts need to be based on several independent sources.
Teachers can also initiate and supervise student's activity on Wikipedia, and even give credit for such activity. Both their student and the rest of humanity would benefit.
Finally, the fact a source is "authoritative" and the author is an expert in the field does not mean the facts are correct. I have seen false staements published in professional peer reviewed mathematical publications as theorems with proofs, only the theorems are false (with easy counter-examples) and the proofs contain mistakes. SO does Wikipedia. The difference is that if one sees a mistake in Wikipedia one can immediately correct it, or at least record it in the article discussion.
As TFA mentions, the said spammer was located in the nearby office is Netanya, Israel.
Finding real botnet based spammers in Netanya is not that difficult. Netanya Academic College has hired in the past the services of botnet-based spam to advertise its services. In 25 January 2007 a spam message advertising them was received by me. The source was a consumer dsl connection in Verizon's network in Santa Monica, California (http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/ipall.ch?ip=71.109.181.242) and it was positively identified as being sent by a known spammer (MailMedia of Israel) whose activity certainly looks like botnet-based spam, as spam messages it sends arrive from a multitude of IP addresses that are mostly consumer dynamic connections (http://israblog.nana10.co.il/blogread.asp?blog=383074&blogcode=5950596 Hebrew. Links to DNSstuff are in English, though).
The Academic College of Netanya is not some kind of illegal or semi-legal operation such as gambling sites or unlicensed online pharmacies. It's a real academic college. The same spammer has advertised many other Israeli higher education institutions, financial institutions and other so called legitimate businesses. There is no way to make the financial activities of these institutions illegal. If law enforcement wanted they could get information from these institutions leading closer to the botnet-operating spammer. For all I know they did. The spammer is contactable as he advertises his cellphone number as a means of contacting him and he hosts a website marketing his services at one of the major Israeli ISPs (013.net). The police knows about the spammer. They cannot do anything about the email advertising which is legal, and they cannot get a conviction on charge of using computer viruses just based on the evidence that the spam arrives from many different locations.
The guy had 2000000 addresses. Let's say he sends only one spam message every week.
That's approximately 50x2000000=100000000 (one hundred million) messages a year. so now suppose that the time it takes to "just hit delete" (that is verify that the message is not legotimate, decide it's safe to delete it and delete it) is approximately 3.6 seconds, just so we have a nice round number. Then it's 360000000 working seconds (100000 working hours) to clean the junk he sends. So if you can get work at less than 45 cents an hour it would cost less than puting the guy in jail (assuming this costs $45000 a year).
The time of most email users is worth much more than 45 cents an hour, so the cost of spam is much more than $45000, even if one includes only the cost of "just hit delete".
You can exchange some of the cost of "just hit delete" by filtering, and then you get the price of false positives and loss of business as a result of lost email. Even the best filtering technology has a small percentage of loss of legitimate email, and for 2000000 recipients receiving billions of legitimate messages per year it would probably mean costs even higher than the cost of "just hit delete".
What amazes me is that the court accepts that lack of evidence of direct cost to ISPs in filtering equipment means they have to use the spammer's income as a last resort, when it is so easy to see that the cost of "just hit delete" is higher than the spammer's income. In advertising it used to be that the advertiser paid for the use of the media (such as for inches or seconds of airtime). Spam is based on stealing the media, and even iof the cost of the media is just the cost of a few seconds of work handling the cleaning up of the junk, it accumulates to huge costs, and there's no need for exact figures when it can be easily proved that the cost is much higher than a very conservative estimate.
Spam sent using a zombie PC leads to that machine. The problem is then getting to that specific machine.
What we lack is some standard way to use information about origin of spam to have the police actually contact a person and say: "we found out your machine was hijacked and we have some info tying it to whoever paid to abuse your machine. We hope we can get enough evidence by checking you PC so we can prosecute". Not all spam but some of it can be tied to whoever paid for it, and if people who own the hijacked machines can be reached, some of them would gladly help the police nail the bastard who broke into their PC, or at leastthe bastard who paid to use the PC that was broken into!
People don't "see spam" but they also don't see other mail that is filtered with their spam. At gmail I did see legitimate mail end up in the junk box. That's only what ended up in the junk mail. There's no info about what they completely discard. The real damage in spam is not seeing it but losing email functionality, and losing trust in email as a reliable medium.
People can see that they have less spam. They most often don't know that they lost some legitimate messages because they don't see them, and gmail's filters while perhaps being quite good are not perfect, and do have some false positives.
Perhaps the fact that Google are so confident in their filtering ability is one reason why they let spammers use gmail addresses to receive orders. I've seen several spammers use gmail addresses as the only means of contact they provide in their spam, and the fact that they continue sending spam with the same gmail contact address means they achieve positive results this way, and that their gmail mailboxes are not closed despite of receiving responses to spam messages. I've reported such abuse to gmail several times and as far as I can tell at least some of the drop boxes I reported are still used by the same spammers that continue to send spam directing to send email to those addresses for "more information" on their products or services.
SO perhaps they don't send their spam out using gmail transmitters, but there are spammers using botnet-based transmitters that use gmail to receive inquiries.
Advertisers hire spammers that hire botnet herders. If advertisers can indirectly fund botnet operations and go free we would always have botnets. They would just have to hide it down an extra level or two of accountability so law enforcement doesn't gain access to someone that can be prosecuted. So the law has to adapt and make whoever purchases services based on stolen computer or network resources accountable. This would have the effect of establishing trade practices where advertisers would not buy services that don't have established reputation of not using stolen resources either directly or indirectly.
It is quite easy to find most advertisers using spam, as they have to make money somehow, and they are usually operating in the same market as the receivers of their spam. So what's needed is a way to have received spam data collected and tied to botnet activity. An advertiser whose many spam advertisements can be tied to many sources that are identified as a botnet can then be persecuted, and either be punished or cooperate and reveal the next level of accountability (i.e., whoever sold the botnet-based services).
How do you get people whose computers are infected and become part of a botnet to tell law enforcement about their computers being broken into, and inviting law enforcement to collect evidence (as they would have done if their house was broken into? This is the real challenge. These people usually don't know their computer has been broken into, and if they find out they just have their Anti-Virus/Anti-malware software remove the malware and any evidence about the computer having been broken into. The sources that can tell which computers are broken into are headers and content in received spam, but these are also just disposed off. What we need is to collect all this info, analyze it, map the botnets and tie them to their end users (advertisers who paid for spam to be sent). This might be done through anti-spam and anti-malware software, whose behavior must be changed so instead of just getting rid of the annoyances they would also contribute available evidence that can be used against those who cause the annoyances.
> I'm for a little deregulation of things like pot that aren't that addictive or dangerous, ...
> but a completely uncontrolled drug system would be at least as bad or worse
Currently commerce in "illegal drugs" is completely uncontrolled. There is regulated commerce in drugs and you can get those with a prescription (or without) at any licensed pharmacy. But there are drugs you cannot get at licensed pharmacies and those you get in the "free market". So what completely banning those drugs achieved is actually deregulation and complete lack of control.
The problem with copyright law is that if you don't explicitly allow use of your content then no use is allowed (except "fair" use that is not well defined).
So if you want the content you post to be freely and legally usable by everyone you have to license it. You don't have to bother with all kinds of FOSS licenses as you can just declare that it is in the public domain, which means that you are still the copyright holder but you license your work to everyone to do whatever they want with it.
So the OP raises a valid point: that code represents a risk to the organization he works for. Perhaps a small risk, but if later it is discovered it might cost money to the organization. If this was code used in a FOSS project and someone posted a comment about it I believe the issue would be immediately addressed by either locating the source and verifying that it is reusable (and documenting the fact in the source0 or replacing it. A closed source project might react differently (such as by making sure the code is not exposed to the outside world so that infringement can not be detected) but it still would want to reduce the risks involved in using unlicensed content.
This aspect of copyright law was perhaps good at the time when the mere fact that a work is published indicated that someone made an effort and investment in publishing it. It is very inappropriate today because no real effort and practically no investment is needed to publish content, and people do post lots of content with the intention that everybody could use it freely. This should be changed and this change would be good for everybody, and especially for those who don't want their works freely distributed, because one of the arguments available now is that there is no way to tell content that is freely distributable from content that is not, and most of the unmarked content out there was meant to be freely distributable by the autheor, despite the author's failure to explicitly attach a license (including a license that puts the content in the public domain).
There's prior art to mapping the brain onto electronic computing devices:
It was done in at least one episode of Star Trek.
And if future prior art published in the distant past is not suitable, then Wallace's cross human-rabbit brain mapping ("Wallace & Gromit - The Curse of the Were-Rabbit") might apply (a rabbit's brain IS a kind of electronic computing device, as is a human brain.
Both examples are both "prior" and "art"!
If not applicable, prepare to either pay a licensing fee or stop using your brain (if you haven't done so already). Perhaps legislators should prepare by creating a special tax and mandatory license. And the free culture community should devise alternatives that bypass the patent by accomplishing the same functionality without the usage of a brain (plants provide plenty of prior art to brainless existence, as do most inanimate objects.
Anyway, if such patents are accepted and legislators do not prepare in advance it might be quite difficult to invalidate it because the judges and jury would depend on the patented technology to do their job...
> Even in a web page, someone can make an image that ...
> looks exactly like a default message box
Such as "Enter the password for the default security device" that Firefox password manager displays? (either that or some similar text, or perhaps my browser have been hacked a very long time ago?)
> I sue The Economist for infecting my machine. .... ...
> The Economist turns around and sues Doubleclick
> Doubleclick may then turn around and sue the company that made the malicious ads
What's happenning here is a CRIME. So you file complaint at your local police department which (hopefully) ionvestigates it (or the FBI or whatever investigates) so they question The Economist that blaims Doubleclick that blames the company that made the malicious ads that turns out ro be an intermediary that point a finger elsewhere and eventually everyone is guilty of a little bit of negligence but not enough to be punishable by a court of law, and somewhere along the line the chain breaks or leads to some jurisdiction that is not entirely unreachable but is not practically reachable do to such limitations as budgets of law enforcement agencies.
So the criminals won because they invented distributed crime: no one is punishable because everyone's part is too small to be punishable. Criminal law is quite helpless dealing with crime that is broken into such small parts that no single reachable entity can be blamed for playing a significant role.
I stopped using ICQ around 2001. Almost all the traffic was spam (requests to be added to the contact list with text such as "come see my pics"). I don't think hiding would have helped since the ICQ address space is very small. ICQ just used sequential numbers.
I have almost complete control over how my email is handled through multiple addresses and through scripts that filter my email any way I wants it. All this costs next to nothing.
I cannot disconnect a phone or IM client selectively except for very limited options such as whitelist+blacklist. I have no way in my phone to junk SMS spam so I cannot use SMS as a means of receiving important messages.
I would have liked to allow my students to contact me through Skype, but that would mean that I would either have to let them see I'm available whenever I want to be available to my family members, or I would have to have a separate account just for that and I would not be able to be available to my family and friends on my main account when I make myself available to my students on the account I would advertise to them (because the proprietary client or perhaps the protocol itself doesn't support being connected through multiple accounts at the same time. So even two family members sharing a computer cannot have both accounts "available" at the same time). And then of course it's just one proprietary network. And you have to use all of them to be connected to everyone. So I use none.
I guess flat availability ("available"/"unavailable") is good for teenagers that use IM or whatever just to communicate with "friends" or perhaps with some teachers, but when it comes to having many different types of contacts it fails.
Email with IMAP idle means I can respond to email in about the same amount of time it takes to respond to a phone call or IM message, but I am in full control.
sixdegrees.com (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SixDegrees.com) preceded all these "social networks" by ten years. And like sixdegrees, you cannot count on any of these propietary "networks" not to reach a point when they decide to close the business and sell the acquired info.
Email, on the other hand, is an open standard that does not belong to anyone, and people and businesses can count on it to work reasonably well for them if their application stay close enough to the standard. Email is guaranteed to work in the future so it will stay.
Email for communications is as outdated as sex is for reproduction!
You don't get it:
It doesn't work on classic cars (pre 1972 they say).
Gangsters would go back to good old gangster cars.
Police will go back to classic police cars.
Then we will get to see those classic car chases without having to go watch a classic movie like the Blues Bros. and everybody benefits from the situation!
Keeping all spam requires lots of storage...
Does the white house have any other communications worth keeping?