Suppose I hated you. I see you have a link to your homepage-- many users do. That page, being an expression of personal taste, might have information about music you like. Yours does. Now, yours is a "CD collection", but it could just as easily be a list of songs you bought of iTunes (as many other users do, in a list, in their blog, etc). So I pick something from your list, say A Perfect Circle - Emotive (good choice, BTW). Google tells me your real name is Zach Robinson. One of your email addresses is zachd at microsoft dot com (obfuscated for your benefit). So I whip up a batch of itunes encoded A Perfect Circle with your name and mail address in it. I throw them on all the P2P sites I can find, wait a couple weeks, then drop a dime to the RIAA. It's trivial moments of effort for me.
Now you have copyrighted music with a label that says "owned by Zach Robinson" floating around, and a group of lawyers looking to extort a couple grand out of you. Sure you could make up a fake name and a fake email address that you use exclusively for purchasing from iTunes-- but why should the onus of not being sued be on you? Or, why couldn't Apple instead have taken a secret internal customer id number, hashed it using the date/time of purchase as a salt, run it through a secret algorithm, and slapped that into the "owned by" field so that I couldn't reproduce it? (Until their method is cracked and we're back to square one, that is)
Really, it all comes down to normalization. What describes a song? The artist, the album, the year of release, the genre-- all that fun stuff. Does YOUR name and email address describe the song? No. Then it doesn't belong in a song file. It belongs in your iTunes account, along with a list of songs you "own".
So it only serves to harm the innocent, is a poor method of tracking ownership, and introduces unrelated data to a set. There is NO reason for it to be there.
If you want to stop the botnet, you need to remove its incentive. The botnet operates not for someones jollies, but because it is profitable to have a botnet. If you remove the profit motive the botnet will self-disassemble over time.
And how do you propose we do that? Spam is profitable even when only one in 10,000 people respond to them, so how do you stop something like that?
Seems easier to eliminate the 1 in 10,000 than the botnet. Take down one spammer. Seize his customer list. Mail to each of them a cyanide capsule marked "free V!Agara sample". No customers = no sales = no profit = no spam.
Before you do that, be sure to post the "why your spam idea won't work" list first. (Some people)
Either you're going to listen to the rest of the advice in sibling posts, or you'll reject it because your idea is, indeed, awesome enough to be stolen.
In that case, do the following:
Every time you write some code, burn it to a CD and mail it to yourself. TEH INSTANT PROOFZ!
Before you hand in your assignments, go through it line by line and crapify it. Add some compiler warnings, take out any optimization you've done, and make sure it's bloated and near unrunnable. You'll get an awful grade, but then no one will want to steal it. And then you can take the real codez to the money printers! Don't worry about grades, anyways. No one in the real world cares about them, except for sheeple who you won't work for anyways. Besides, you'll be a billionare by your Sophomore year, and you can drop out and just wait for them to beg you to take their honorary doctorate of Awesomenezz.
Just before making the predictions, Kurzweil did preface them with a "by the way". My copy of The Age of Spiritual Machines is at home, but to paraphrase:
I'm going to make some predictions. Some will come true, and some aren't. This is how I see them, but I'm not an all seeing oracle. In all fairness, I might be off by ten or twenty years, it's very hard to predict the near future. There are too many unseen forces. And really, it's the far future ones that are much more fun.
So he does acknowledge that predictions are just that, guesses, and that he's only aiming for modicum of accuracy. If that's a disclaimer or an excuse is up to the reader.
Slightly off topic, but if you get a chance, pick up the album Spiritual Machines by Our Lady Peace. Its a concept album based on The Age Of Spiritual Machines, and is quite good. It includes Ray reading selected sections from the book, including an abridged conversation with Molly. Plus it has "In Repair" which is on my top 50.
I get sick of explaining this, but the sig (which could not completely fit because of/.)... void PAUSE(){ printf("\nPress any key to continue. .."); while(1) getch(); }// enforce the 'any' key
Just a note: The sig char limit seems to have been increased to 120. I don't know when that happened, but if you go to Help & Preferences, General, scroll down to Sig and click the [?], it says 120.
An upgrade like that, I don't mind. As for the userpage, it's still ruined one of my favorite parts of Slashdot, and I'm fucking bitter about it
The interesting thing I found about the old gamecube is that I spent just about $50 on the thing, which is good- but the used games were still damn close to $60 each.
I hear you. It seems that the good gamecube games are kept high in price because you can play them on the Wii. So Paper Mario isn't an 8-year-old game for an ancient console-- it's a title for a current gen system featuring the company's flagship character. So it's "expensive"
Used PS2 games are kept a bit high because the console is, as the article mentions, still quite around. Having visited a lot of EB/Gamestops over the holiday, they're average $10-$20 for the "older, not bad" games. This is probably also factoring in the fact that some people have a backwards compatible PS3, and it's possible that sometime in the future, all PS3s can become backwards compatible with the right firmware update.
Original XBox, on the other hand, is more or less an abandoned console. There's some backwards compatibility, but Microsoft seems to be going the downloadable-content route for popular older games. I was picking some really good Xbox games for less than $5 (Doom 3, most any Project Gotham game, any Silent Hill I could find), and in some cases $1 or less (Cold Fear as a prime example, Brute Force). Even though they were released at the same time as their PS2 counterparts, and often for the same price, there just isn't a current demand for the discs.
EMV is a good step in the right direction, but still has its flaws. The biggest flaw is, of course, systems that don't use the chip. "The door is locked but I was never given a key". "Oh, come on in".
The second is just a subset of the first: More chip-n-pin systems, if they detect a damaged chip, will default to the standard swipe method. This is because a small number of chips will be damaged-- magnets, static shock, wear and tear, etc. If they don't flip to the swipe method, the customer is SOL at the POS. So if you want to use a stolen chip'n'pin card, just damage the chip.
The third is a bit more esoteric but doable. If you control a POS handset, you can reroute its functionality to a wireless card, which goes to a computer, which goes to an accomplice at a merchant's POS with a fake card that is actually reciving the communications from your fake POS. If you time it right, this is what happens:
Alice puts her EMV card into your fake terminal to pay for, say, lunch
Bob puts his fake card into the terminal at Worst Buy, ready to pay for a plasma TV
Worst Buy sends a "please authenticate and authorize" request to the fake card
The fake card relays that information to your fake terminal at the restaurant
Alice gets a message saying "Enter your pin and authorize your $5.99 salad
Alice authenticates, and her chip signs the transaction
Your fake terminal sends the signed and sealed transaction back to Bob's fake card
Bob's plasma TV purchase is now authorized. And it was all done with a secure chip
Now, the REAL threat is actually liability. In the UK, a PIN is considered to be enough of a security device that if it is compromised, it is because the PIN holder didn't do due diligence. Thus, the card holder is responsible for the loss, not the card issuer. Banks have gotten off the hook, even in the face of massive fraud, because of the PIN. Now UK credit card companies can do the same-- even if was because someone stole a card, took it to Germany where the chip system isn't in place, and bought 50,000 EU of bratwurst.
Fortunately for those in North America, credit card transactions are always the responsibility of the card issuer (or merchant), and not the consumer. The terms of service have been updated to reinforce that. But, IMHO, that is "for now", and we'll see what happens once everyone is irrevocably switched over to the chip and pin cards
Reference, and a really good read: Chip and Spin. Includes a great whitepaper on how the whole EMV authentication system works.
This is too true. At the high school my fiancee teaches at, the filters because useless the moment they prevented the science department from accessing materials about lab safety protocols (Contents: Explosives and Dangerous Knowledge), biology (Contents: sexually explicit information), or the chemical composition of tobacco (Contents: tobacco or cigarettes).
The solution for my fiancee was literally to go to her students and say "Ok, I know you all have a way around the filters. What is it". Fortunately, she's liked as a teacher, so they showed her.
So to reiterate: students blocked from accessing bad material: 0. Teachers blocked from material about how to keep students from accidentally killing themselves in the lab: all
You should get a bunch of national friends together, then, and work to mess it up. Have them walk by constantly, staring at the board. Have them skew the numbers so harshly in the positive direction that the ad companies go bankrupt whilst clamoring to put up ads in the "valuable space".
Crap like this just reminds me of that fallacy-based advert: "You just proved bench advertisement works". No, you just proved that anyone who reads a bench ad reads a bench ad. I've never bought bench advertisements, so it obviously doesn't work.
Also: If I hack the board and throw up the Bill Hicks video, and they track how many people watch that, what do you think the outcome would be?
Forget Griffin. The real decision Obama is going to have to make with NASA is whether or not to tell people the big secret: that the chimps they sent into space came back super-intelligent.
Slashdot Mirror
Or if you prefer, here's a Slashdot post that has a link to the pic awesome!!
Nobody likes me
Everybody hates me
Going into space to eat worms!
Let me throw you a hypothetical here.
Suppose I hated you. I see you have a link to your homepage-- many users do. That page, being an expression of personal taste, might have information about music you like. Yours does. Now, yours is a "CD collection", but it could just as easily be a list of songs you bought of iTunes (as many other users do, in a list, in their blog, etc). So I pick something from your list, say A Perfect Circle - Emotive (good choice, BTW). Google tells me your real name is Zach Robinson. One of your email addresses is zachd at microsoft dot com (obfuscated for your benefit). So I whip up a batch of itunes encoded A Perfect Circle with your name and mail address in it. I throw them on all the P2P sites I can find, wait a couple weeks, then drop a dime to the RIAA. It's trivial moments of effort for me.
Now you have copyrighted music with a label that says "owned by Zach Robinson" floating around, and a group of lawyers looking to extort a couple grand out of you. Sure you could make up a fake name and a fake email address that you use exclusively for purchasing from iTunes-- but why should the onus of not being sued be on you? Or, why couldn't Apple instead have taken a secret internal customer id number, hashed it using the date/time of purchase as a salt, run it through a secret algorithm, and slapped that into the "owned by" field so that I couldn't reproduce it? (Until their method is cracked and we're back to square one, that is)
Really, it all comes down to normalization. What describes a song? The artist, the album, the year of release, the genre-- all that fun stuff. Does YOUR name and email address describe the song? No. Then it doesn't belong in a song file. It belongs in your iTunes account, along with a list of songs you "own".
So it only serves to harm the innocent, is a poor method of tracking ownership, and introduces unrelated data to a set. There is NO reason for it to be there.
That'd be
Note to editors: even if it's nearly two years old, it's still a dupe
First pos... oh, a pretty sound. I should do something else.
Seems easier to eliminate the 1 in 10,000 than the botnet. Take down one spammer. Seize his customer list. Mail to each of them a cyanide capsule marked "free V!Agara sample". No customers = no sales = no profit = no spam.
Before you do that, be sure to post the "why your spam idea won't work" list first. (Some people)
It probably just thought you were ripping off Lou Reed's last record in his RCA contract
Not if you make nice with the NRA =)
Either you're going to listen to the rest of the advice in sibling posts, or you'll reject it because your idea is, indeed, awesome enough to be stolen.
In that case, do the following:
Just before making the predictions, Kurzweil did preface them with a "by the way". My copy of The Age of Spiritual Machines is at home, but to paraphrase:
I'm going to make some predictions. Some will come true, and some aren't. This is how I see them, but I'm not an all seeing oracle. In all fairness, I might be off by ten or twenty years, it's very hard to predict the near future. There are too many unseen forces. And really, it's the far future ones that are much more fun.
So he does acknowledge that predictions are just that, guesses, and that he's only aiming for modicum of accuracy. If that's a disclaimer or an excuse is up to the reader.
Slightly off topic, but if you get a chance, pick up the album Spiritual Machines by Our Lady Peace. Its a concept album based on The Age Of Spiritual Machines, and is quite good. It includes Ray reading selected sections from the book, including an abridged conversation with Molly. Plus it has "In Repair" which is on my top 50.
Just a note: The sig char limit seems to have been increased to 120. I don't know when that happened, but if you go to Help & Preferences, General, scroll down to Sig and click the [?], it says 120.
An upgrade like that, I don't mind. As for the userpage, it's still ruined one of my favorite parts of Slashdot, and I'm fucking bitter about it
I'd say that if you use a single number, the peril would be 52.994.
I hear you. It seems that the good gamecube games are kept high in price because you can play them on the Wii. So Paper Mario isn't an 8-year-old game for an ancient console-- it's a title for a current gen system featuring the company's flagship character. So it's "expensive"
Used PS2 games are kept a bit high because the console is, as the article mentions, still quite around. Having visited a lot of EB/Gamestops over the holiday, they're average $10-$20 for the "older, not bad" games. This is probably also factoring in the fact that some people have a backwards compatible PS3, and it's possible that sometime in the future, all PS3s can become backwards compatible with the right firmware update.
Original XBox, on the other hand, is more or less an abandoned console. There's some backwards compatibility, but Microsoft seems to be going the downloadable-content route for popular older games. I was picking some really good Xbox games for less than $5 (Doom 3, most any Project Gotham game, any Silent Hill I could find), and in some cases $1 or less (Cold Fear as a prime example, Brute Force). Even though they were released at the same time as their PS2 counterparts, and often for the same price, there just isn't a current demand for the discs.
I'm not sure which rules the LED league uses, but if it's anything like the NFL, I'll still prefer my Canadian Football League, thank you.
EMV is a good step in the right direction, but still has its flaws. The biggest flaw is, of course, systems that don't use the chip. "The door is locked but I was never given a key". "Oh, come on in".
The second is just a subset of the first: More chip-n-pin systems, if they detect a damaged chip, will default to the standard swipe method. This is because a small number of chips will be damaged-- magnets, static shock, wear and tear, etc. If they don't flip to the swipe method, the customer is SOL at the POS. So if you want to use a stolen chip'n'pin card, just damage the chip.
The third is a bit more esoteric but doable. If you control a POS handset, you can reroute its functionality to a wireless card, which goes to a computer, which goes to an accomplice at a merchant's POS with a fake card that is actually reciving the communications from your fake POS. If you time it right, this is what happens:
Now, the REAL threat is actually liability. In the UK, a PIN is considered to be enough of a security device that if it is compromised, it is because the PIN holder didn't do due diligence. Thus, the card holder is responsible for the loss, not the card issuer. Banks have gotten off the hook, even in the face of massive fraud, because of the PIN. Now UK credit card companies can do the same-- even if was because someone stole a card, took it to Germany where the chip system isn't in place, and bought 50,000 EU of bratwurst.
Fortunately for those in North America, credit card transactions are always the responsibility of the card issuer (or merchant), and not the consumer. The terms of service have been updated to reinforce that. But, IMHO, that is "for now", and we'll see what happens once everyone is irrevocably switched over to the chip and pin cards
Reference, and a really good read: Chip and Spin. Includes a great whitepaper on how the whole EMV authentication system works.
What, no Optimus keyboard? After all the press coverage and love it got here, it wasn't featured? Or mentioned?
For a moment, I thought this was about the AI for the Lich King kicking back and playing some Neopets or something during server upgrades.
Is asking "Is [insert overarching, overly vague trend here] dead?" dead?
If your theory holds, Trojans owes Coors some money.
You can backup the entirety of techno onto a 1.44MB floppy. Two midi files and a handful of loop instructions are dreadfully small.
This is too true. At the high school my fiancee teaches at, the filters because useless the moment they prevented the science department from accessing materials about lab safety protocols (Contents: Explosives and Dangerous Knowledge), biology (Contents: sexually explicit information), or the chemical composition of tobacco (Contents: tobacco or cigarettes).
The solution for my fiancee was literally to go to her students and say "Ok, I know you all have a way around the filters. What is it". Fortunately, she's liked as a teacher, so they showed her.
So to reiterate: students blocked from accessing bad material: 0. Teachers blocked from material about how to keep students from accidentally killing themselves in the lab: all
You should get a bunch of national friends together, then, and work to mess it up. Have them walk by constantly, staring at the board. Have them skew the numbers so harshly in the positive direction that the ad companies go bankrupt whilst clamoring to put up ads in the "valuable space".
Crap like this just reminds me of that fallacy-based advert: "You just proved bench advertisement works". No, you just proved that anyone who reads a bench ad reads a bench ad. I've never bought bench advertisements, so it obviously doesn't work.
Also: If I hack the board and throw up the Bill Hicks video, and they track how many people watch that, what do you think the outcome would be?
Yes, but after I read them, I have to read them AGAIN!
Turn off the PC, save the world. And some money on your electric bill.
Forget Griffin. The real decision Obama is going to have to make with NASA is whether or not to tell people the big secret: that the chimps they sent into space came back super-intelligent.