Re:Finally some use for my spam!
on
Buy Low, Spam High
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Except that if you read the story you'll see that while the spammer makes money, buyers of the stocks usually lose. It seems that stocks typically lose 4-7% of their value on the days after the spam run. The spammers make their money by buying the day before and selling the day after; buying the spam on the same day that you see the first spams is unlikely to give you the same return.
Some people have considered shorting the stocks they see advertised on the assumption that the stocks will go down in value ("shorting" a stock is essentially making a bet that the stock will lose value). I don't think the study addresses that, but it also looks like a risky strategy: there are too many uncertainties involved, not least of which that the spammer will continue pumping out the spam (and pumping up the price) and you'll end up having to buy the stock at a higher price.
Trading in spammed stocks is just a complicated way to give spammers your money. You might do better just to write them a check and save yourself the broker's fee.
SeaWorld's new Goldfish Spectacular failed to impress visitors yesterday. After several hours of waiting for the fish to do backflips, leap through hoops, whistle recognizable tunes, or walk across the water on their tails, most of the crowd left in disgust. Despite assurances that the highly-trained goldfish were "just a little out of sorts today" and that tomorrow's performance would be more dramatic, few SeaWorld visitors seemed eager to attend the goldfish show. "They're just a bunch of dumb-ass goldfish," said Billy J, 6, "I want to see the dolphins!". Another visitor was similarly outspoken. "The best bit of the show was always when the chick in the bikini rides on the dolphin's back, but that really doesn't work with goldfish. They tried to cover it up, but I think she squeezed one of them to death between her thighs." observed the middle-aged man, who declined to give his name.
In Hollywood, executives at Warner Brothers were said to be reconsidering plot changes made to "Free Willy 4". Recent doubts about cetacean intelligence had led to the substitution of an extremely-large orange-red goldfish named Sunny for the film's iconic killer whale during principal photography but the poor reception of the SeaWorld performances might lead to another reversal. Director Simon Wincer criticized the new change of heart, claiming that a story about a twelve-year-old boy trying to liberate the goldfish from his bowl on the living room table has much more dramatic impact than the earlier movies. "Now that we know that whales are just big dumb mammals, you can't empathize with them any more," said Wincer. "But when Sunny jumps out of his bowl and lies gasping on the carpet, that's real tragedy. We're watching an intelligent creature just seconds away from death. There's no way we're going back to using killer whales now."
No highly-intelligent goldfish were harmed in the making of this report.
I'm disappointed to see that 'pluton.com' is already registered and has been since 1999. Someone was way ahead of the IAU. Of course it's being used as a link farm, which is an uninspired use for a domain that could be used to share essential information about plutons: where do they come from, what do they want, and how do they manage to stay so fetchingly slim and petite in a galaxy full of much more massive bodies?
An auction system puts buyers at the mercy of someone with more money. Suppose I put an initial bid down on 'pinkfluffybunny.com', which I want to use for a website about pink fluffy bunnies. Currently, the fact that no one else has expressed any interest in this means that I can get it for about $8.
Under the auction system, as soon as I put in my bid, Domain Squatters Inc detects that someone's willing to pay for 'pinkfluffybunny.com' and puts in a counter-bid. They don't want the domain for themselves, they just want to be able to sell it to me for more than I would otherwise pay for it. Their bid-sniping software will probably get them the domain too, at which point I can either reconcile myself to life without 'pinkfluffybunny.com', or bite the bullet and reward Domain Squatters Inc for their bad behavior by buying from them for the price they ask.
Of course, Domain Squatters Inc. is taking a risk here. If I don't buy from them, they could end up paying for a domain that no one else wants to buy. But my guess is that if they fine tune their tactics, they can probably end up selling more domains than they keep. Or they could lease the domain with a restrictive agreement: "We bought this domain for $30, it's yours for $15, but you have to carry our ads and share information about your site visitors."
I'm not convinced that auctions would serve the best interests of 'the public'. It seems to me that they'd just give rise to a different kind of abuse.
In response to AOL's controversial proposal to charge Internet users for priority delivery of email, angusmci, owner and operator of at least one mail and web server, announced plans to levy a charge on abuse of his mail forms by AOL customers. Speaking to an imaginary group of journalists assembled in his bedroom, angusmci set out the principles of the new system.
"Like many other website owners, I've grown used to seeing an apparent AOL customer probing my mail forms for security weaknesses. Today he's called WintOlympLovr99, last week he was SusanMcD677, the week before that... well, you get the idea. And up until now, this AOL customer has enjoyed a free ride. They have benefited from the valuable services that I offer - such as having their probe attempts unceremoniously dropped in the bit bucket and getting their address logged in my log files - without paying a penny. Well, that stops today."
angusmci is pleased to announce that, effective forthwith, access to premium ProbeDiscard services and the popular WriteYourStolenAOLAddressToMyLogFiles feature will only be available to paying customers. A modest charge of $1.00 per probe attempt will be levied, and continued probe attempts will constitute an ipso facto agreement to this charging rate.
AOL users StarlaK8099, charleses3229, mhkoch321, jrubin3546, PeiCanteenMc, battsl1005, bbarnholtz, beacon5919, charleselegb, charleselegbed, SusanMcD677 and WintOlympLovr99 could not be reached for comment at press time. AOL's abuse desk could not be reached at all, at any time.
On what grounds do you say that they are not effective against terrorism?
Because of the way that they were implemented. When the bag searches were in force, they were not carried out at all subway stations - it was months before I saw any searches taking place at the station closest to me. Even at the busiest stations, searches only occurred on some days or at certain times. Any would-be bomber could simply turn around and walk to a different station if he saw a checkpoint in place. My guess is that they'd not need to try more than one or two before finding one where they could enter unsearched. Passengers on public buses were not searched.
Moreover, the searches were cursory, and only the largest bags were searched. Smaller bags that could still have contained enough of a high-powered explosive to do serious damage were not inspected. An only bags were searched, although many suicide bombers now carry their explosives strapped to their bodies. In Israel, bombers are sometimes detected because they are seen to be wearing heavy coats during hot weather; if you wanted to stop everyone wearing a heavy coat during a New York winter, the city would basically come to a halt.
It's not that it was a compromise: "Well, we can only search 30% of subway stops, so that gives us a 30% chance of stopping bombings, which is better than nothing.". Searching 30% of subway stops gives you a 0% chance of stopping a bombing, not a 30% chance. It's clear that whatever the purpose was, it wasn't a serious attempt to prevent bombings.
The kindest interpretation I can put on it is that it was a token gesture, designed to reassure the public that something was being done. A more cynical interpretation might be that it was an attempt to ward off potential criticism if someone did get a bomb into the subway (you can imagine the outrage if a bombing occurred and no searches at all had been carried out). The most cynical or paranoid interpretation was that it was either (a) a way to let the NYPD go on fishing expeditions for potential criminals, or (b) that it was intended to promote the atmosphere of fear and uncertainty that our politicians seem to thrive on just now.
the whole system is pointless. Lets say Joe Terrorist wants to pass a message to another cell. Does he fire up his hotmail account and send an email to durkadurka@hotmail.com? Of course he doesn't.
Like bag searches in the New York subway, this has little or no utility in preventing terrorist attacks. However, like bag searches it does give law enforcement a look-see at what you're doing. I presume that (as with bag searches) anything they happen to discover can be used as grounds for arrest and, eventually, as evidence. To me, there's something a little sinister about the way that terrorism is being used repeatedly to justify measures that are obviously ineffective against terrorism but which do increase the power of the authorities and make it easier to stifle dissent.
If you're innocent, you have nothing to fear. If you're innocent, you have nothing to fear. If you're innocent... nope... it isn't working.
I'm behind the times. We used Tapestry 3 for our project, and I haven't yet seen Tapestry 4, although I know my colleagues have adopted it as a standard (I've just been working on other stuff, so I haven't needed to use it yet). But even Tapestry 3 seemed better thought-out than JSF, and certainly met our needs well for at least 95% of what we needed to do.
I've worked with Tapestry. Is it a decent framework? Yes. Did we end up choosing it over JSF for our project? Yes, we did. Did it make development "a breeze"? No.
In my experience, Tapestry simplifies some complex tasks and helps you write reasonably clean, well-structured code. This is, I think, all anyone should realistically hope for from any framework. However, it isn't a magic bullet and we did find that things became a little gnarly as soon as we tried to do stuff that the Tapestry developers hadn't really anticipated or designed for (and the things we were trying to do weren't really very exotic).
Of the frameworks I've seen lately, Ruby on Rails is the one that bends the curve the furthest in the trade-off between 'what you can do' and 'how easy it is to do it'. Tapestry is a way behind that, but it's nevertheless a solid addition to anyone's toolkit, so long as you don't have unrealistic expectations of what it can do for you.
Some of the sexually explicit spam that I get... not 'a lot' by any means... is now marked 'SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT'.
And some of it is marked SEXUALLY*EXPLICIT, SEXUALLY_EXPLICIT, SEXUALLY~EXPLICIT, SexyaI!y Exp!!sit, SexyaIIu E}{p!!zit and Sexy/\l1u Ehp11sit.
This is not a joke on spammer spelling: those are actual strings from spam subject lines. Quite why spammers do this I don't know, but my guess is that they think CAN-SPAM is as big a joke as I do.
Since CAN-SPAM was enacted, my spam load has risen from a peak of 700 messages a day (spread across several accounts) to somewhere more than 900 a day currently. Doesn't look like a huge success from where I'm sitting, but maybe this is just another instance of the time-honored US government strategy: no matter what the reality is, declare victory and leave.
But if the terrorists take out the Internet, we won't be able to shop at Amazon and eBay! And the president has told us to keep shopping because if we don't keep shopping, the terrorists win!
I demand that we take steps to defend this vital piece of national infrastructure before the anti-consumerist enemies of freedom interfere with our fundamental democratic right to buy junk online and have it in our hands the next day without even leaving the house. What could be more basic to our way of life than that?
Also, I want my porn and my pirated MP3s and that funny video where the cute kitten does that wacky thing. If I can't have those, the terrorists have definitely won.
Having spent many years watching really clever people struggling to get their computers to show even some minimal degree of "smarts", it doesn't surprise me in the least that the first "true" artificial intelligence should come from a smallcap company that specializes in 'innovative multimedia'. Why, they probably had one of their engineers whip up artificial intelligence in a weekend as a side project.
I'm looking forward to their announcement of time travel and antigravity as well.
If I remember correctly, Jeff Goldblum's character in "Independence Day" was able to pwn the alien mothership by uploading a virus to it from his Macintosh PowerBook. Clearly, computer systems are interoperable galaxy-wide at a fundamental level. Perhaps Windows has even evolved independently on many different planets. In any case, we're clearly in deadly danger.
The big question, of course, is what the aliens will do once they've taken over our PCs. My guess is that they'll use them to send spam. The danger is that by the time our inboxes start filling with tentacle-enlargement spams and three-headed lizard porn, it will be too late for us to do anything.
I think this is - or should be - known as the "snowcrash" phenomenon, in homage to Neal Stephenson.
Let's hope that the state-of-the-art in network security advances faster than the state-of-the-art in neural implantation, otherwise we risk seeing problems that make having your PC co-opted into a botnet look trivial by comparison.
Bot: I didn't find any good matches 4 U, but may I ask you a question?
Me: No.
Bot: Mm hm. Such negativity. You are in need of some holiday spirit! Type M.
Me: Shan't.
Bot: OK, I'm searching for matches 4 U. Gimme a sec.
If you let it ask you a question, it goes into a kind of 'interactive' question and answer mode. It's easy to get stuck in this mode, with no obvious way to revert to generalized searches. The best way to get back to the 'top level' behavior (where it takes anything you type as a search keyword) is by swearing at it. There's a moral there somewhere, I suppose.
More realistically, can we please write a law that would allow class action suits against any user who opens an attachment sent to them by email with the promise that it contains nekkid pictures of Britney Spears? And every dipshit everywhere who has ever bought anything advertised by spam?
If people didn't open viral attachments, the zombie problem would be significantly smaller. If people didn't buy from spammers, the spam problem wouldn't exist at all. Ergo, all the hours I spend trying to keep the systems that I administer spam- and virus-free are the fault of the idiots who believe that their mother wants them to see Anna Kournikova's panties, that Mrs Mariam Abacha has $25 million for them, that DUDD.OB is really going to EXPLODE next Monday, and that buying sugar pills from 'hugeorgan4u.com' will give them the monster instrument they've always dreamed of. I want to bill them for my time. Hell, I want to bill them for everyone's time. And every other cost associated with spam.
While I'm at it, can I sue everyone who's ever connected an insecure Windows PC to the Internet, or who failed to apply security patches in a timely manner? And the ISPs that won't do anything to take compromised hosts offline, and the hosting companies who won't take action against spam sites and phishing sites running on their systems? And the registrars who accept obviously fraudulent registrations and don't do anything about them even when they get the WDPRS notifications? Or the elected representatives who drafted and passed the entirely toothless CAN-SPAM Act?
Just say I can, and I'm putting my lawyer's number on speed-dial right now...
Yes and no. Apple introduced PowerPC machines in 1993; the real panic and the flood of "Apple is doomed" stories came in during Gil Amelio's period at Apple, from 1996 to 1997. Apple's use of emulation to allow 68K software to run under PowerPC blunted quite a lot of the pain of the transition.
Of course it also meant that Macintosh machines underperformed hideously, because parts of the OS still ran under emulation even in later OS releases. The obvious speed difference between Windows and MacOS was just one of the things that hurt them in the latter half of the decade. I think you're also right when you say that they were genuinely in deep trouble at that point. It's debatable whether Apple offered a better user experience than Windows 9x (I feel it did, but others disagree), but the core architecture of Mac OS represented an evolutionary dead end, and Apple's management didn't seem to have any clear idea how they could hold things together while they tried to develop a completely new (but backwards compatible) replacement from scratch.
So the Apple crisis was real, but I think it was exacerbated by negative coverage. A lot of the stuff that I read at the time seemed to have been written by people who had no idea what things like 'virtual memory' or 'preemptive multitasking' actually meant (as proven by the sometimes laughable explanations they tried to give of those concepts) but had just been told that you needed them and Apple didn't have them (well, System 7 and later had VM, but Lord knows, it wasn't up to much). Some of the negative coverage was informed and gave an accurate picture of Apple's perilous state, but much of it read as if someone who had previously covered sports and local supermarket openings had been given a list of talking points and told to write a technology story. And more than anything it was the sheer volume of bad press that threatened to sink Apple for good.
Ironically, it may actually have saved Apple, because it forced them to take the desperate step of handing the reins back to Steve Jobs, rather than muddling on downhill. And whatever Jobs' strengths and weaknesses, it does seem likely that his combination of showmanship and autocracy may have been a key factor in turning Apple around at a time when they didn't have too many other options.
Dvorak has always been a fairly clueless commentator, but lately he seems to have been exceeding his previous best efforts. This is in line with his recent 'misses the point entirely' would-be hatchet-job on Creative Commons.
Dvorak is too old an industry hand not to know how things work. Quite aside from whatever Apple's doing behind the scenes to encourage people to write about them (or encourage editors to demand stories on Apple), there's the fact that Apple is currently The Story. They've turned their business and their stock price around, they have a charismatic leader (Jobs) and a charismatic product (iPod), and they're aggressively rolling out new products which can be expected to sell well. Whether you want to write an "It can't last" or a "Apple is unstoppable" story, there's lots of material for even the laziest journo to work with. Whereas most journalists realize that writing a "Vista still isn't close to being ready, but it'll be really wonderful when it is." story looks a little ridiculous. ("Still not king.")
It's worth remembering that not so long ago, Apple was getting a lot of coverage and none of it was good. I've always wondered how much of the Apple crisis of the '90s that nearly sunk the company before His Steveness came riding to the rescue was actually caused by the negative coverage they got, and how much of that negative coverage was 'encouraged' by certain interested parties (no names, no pack drill). If I'm right that a certain amount of that coverage was the product of someone whispering in the shell-like ears of the industry editors that they might like to run a few more "Apple is doomed" stories, then presumably those same someones will be back when Vista is good and ready, and we'll see nothing but "Microsoft triumphant" and "Vista changes the future of humanity" stories for six solid months.
Coverage has everything to do with what the editors decide is The Story this week. It has nothing to do with today's journalists being Apple-centric because (unlike John "Manly Man" Dvorak) they're too wimpish to go mano-a-mano with a balky Windows box and don't know what real computing is. Nice try, John, but you're still talking rubbish.
Does the offence of "wasting police time" exist in the US? Because while IANAPCFL (I Am Not A Publicity Crazed Florida Lawyer) it certainly looks to me as if Jack T's demands that the cops go and harass Tycho and Gabe of Penny Arcade could fall under that heading. It might even be a case of falsely reporting a crime, which has got to be good for a swift rap across the knuckles.
The boys at Penny Arcade seem to be conducting themselves with grace, style and wit in this one. Thompson? Well, let's just say that he probably isn't adding to the circle of his admirers with his current antics. At least, I certainly hope he isn't.
Just like those new DVDs where - despite having paid for the disk - you still have to sit through ten minutes of unskippable previews and advertisements for other releases.
Businesses are continuously struggling to increase revenue. In addition to the traditional ways - increasing sales and reducing costs - they're increasingly looking at leveraging their existing product to generate additional revenue. In the UK, for example, rail companies turned their information lines into premium-rate services, so that each call to find out about train times generated income for them. In the same way, using the distribution medium - cable or DVD - to carry ads, which earn ad revenue, makes commercial sense.
Moreover, it's almost guaranteed to happen because the business is set up in such a way that they can only perceive the benefits, not the negative effects. They can see the extra money that the ad revenue adds to their bottom line. They can't measure the effect of consumer dissatisfaction, because any decline in sales can be attributed to many other possible causes.
Periodically, I think about how I can protect my 'vital' data (code and digital photographs, mostly) against loss. Options include local backups (a few feet away), backups at my girlfriend's house (a few blocks away), backups at my job (several miles away), backups at a relative's house (hundreds of miles away), or backups at my parents' house (thousands of miles away). This thought experiment has led me to the conclusion that there are some disasters that are not worth preparing against. If anything simultaneously takes out my data and the backup copies in my office a few miles distant, losing my holiday snaps and my bank statements may not be my biggest problem.
Getting back to the original poster's question, the danger is that any device you carry on you such as a Flash drive is liable to get lost, stolen or broken. As for Flash drives that support encryption, how many of those also require special driver software on the target computer to give access to the encrypted data? It would be embarassing to stumble out of the disaster zone still clutching your 'life drive' and discover that you really should have thought to bring the installer CD currently lying somewhere under eight feet of water/radioactive fallout/zombies/radioactive zombies. But maybe you could copy the installer onto the unencrypted part of the drive.
A possible alternative (or additional measure) is to put your data on a foreign website (or, for defence in depth, several, all in different countries). Naturally, you'll want to encrypt it securely and upload/download only over secure links. But if the Internet stays up, then you have a chance of being able to access your data even after the asteroid hits your home city and you've been stripped of everything you're carrying by the feral teenage swamp mutants.
Again, if you use encryption you're hostage to the availability of the decryption software, so you may start thinking about building your own webapp that can decrypt your data on the fly and serve it to you over HTTPS. But that would preclude using any of the free hosting accounts available, so your quest for perfect security and redundancy could lead you to fork out for expensive virtual hosting. Maybe what we need instead is some kind of 'mixmaster' application that would accept a key and some data, and stripe the data across a few thousand locations (call it a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Domains), encrypted and inter-mingled with other people's data in such a way that nothing intelligible would be recoverable without the key. Redundancy would be built in from the ground up such that even if half the planet goes offline, your data could still be retrieved from the surviving hosts.
Even if something like this doesn't already exist, it shouldn't be hard to build: all the technologies already exist in one form or another (PGP, BitTorrent, mixmasters, PAR/RAR etc etc). All it needs is a team of dedicated geeks, plus a healthy dose of paranoia, and you and your data can step smiling and unscathed into the bright nuclear dawn of the New Age (watch out for the zombies, though).
When I worked in France, the lab where I worked was outfitted with devices known as PTI's (from "Protection de Travailleur Isole" - "Protection for Isolated Workers"). The device was a small box that you could wear on your belt, that connected wirelessly to the office alarm system (which was remotely monitored). It had a panic button that you could press. It also had an orientation sensor, so that if you fell down and didn't move for any length of time, it would trigger an alarm. And it had a wire loop that you could pass through a belt loop: any attempt to snatch the device from you would snap the loop and trigger the alarm.
Because people worked alone in the lab outside normal office hours, there was apparently a legal requirement to have these things, but I don't know if there was any legal requirement to actually use them. We sat through the briefing, then put them away in a closet and never looked at them again. However, in an industrial or agricultural setting, or for someone working in a service station, they might be quite practical.
I presume that any devices intended for use by cabin crew might have similar characteristics, including an anti-snatch feature.
It is unlikely that Lexmark will bring a patent infringement suit against an individual end user for refilling his or her printer cartridge, but that does not mean that they are unable to do so.
Individual users are definitely not what Lexmark has in mind. The aim is to go after remanufacturers (who refill and resell cartridges), makers of 'compatible' cartridges or refill kits that are specifically designed or advertised for refilling Lexmark cartridges.
Lexmark, like some other big corporations, appears to feel that they have a natural right to a certain level of sales and that this right should be guaranteed to them by law. The mechanism they have found to protect this "natural right" is patent law, raising the question of whether the features in question are genuinely innovative or necessary, or are merely distinctive characteristics that Lexmark can use to support their claim: patent law used to protect profits, rather than innovation.
The battle over ink cartridges is particularly vicious because printers are sold as 'loss leaders'. The hardware is sold below cost because the manufacturer aims to make its profit on the sale of overpriced consumables. Anything that cuts into their revenue stream from the consumables threatens their whole business model. The same kind of model is at work in the sale of mobile phone services, which is why high-tech phones are given away to users who agree to be locked into a lucrative service contract.
It's curious how accepting we have become of this kind of pricing model, which is anti-competitive at heart and firmly stacked in the manufacturer's favor. Would we buy a new car if we were contractually bound to refill it with gas from Exxon and subject to legal penalties if we ever dared to pull into a Texaco?
In the UK during the Thatcher years, the government created an agency called the Child Support Agency, whose role was to go after parents (typically fathers) who owed child support and make sure they paid what they owed. After it had been in operation for a little while, documents surfaced that showed that the agency's official policy was not to pursue 'difficult' cases (i.e. real "deadbeat dads", who didn't pay or couldn't be found), but to put the squeeze on the others: the regular payers who might have fallen behind, the ones who were clearly trying to meet their obligations, but who might have missed a payment or two.
From a practical point of view, it made perfect sense. The Agency's job was to collect as much money as possible. Going after the 'bad' fathers was expensive, time-consuming and unrewarding. Going after the 'good' ones was much easier and more lucrative.
The RIAA and MPAA use the same logic. Downloaders are low-hanging fruit, so the cost/benefit ratio of nailing them makes them the target of choice, even if the real reason that the industry is haemorrhaging money (or, more strictly, is unable to afford as many limousines and swimming pools as it thinks it should be able to) lies elsewhere.
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Except that if you read the story you'll see that while the spammer makes money, buyers of the stocks usually lose. It seems that stocks typically lose 4-7% of their value on the days after the spam run. The spammers make their money by buying the day before and selling the day after; buying the spam on the same day that you see the first spams is unlikely to give you the same return.
Some people have considered shorting the stocks they see advertised on the assumption that the stocks will go down in value ("shorting" a stock is essentially making a bet that the stock will lose value). I don't think the study addresses that, but it also looks like a risky strategy: there are too many uncertainties involved, not least of which that the spammer will continue pumping out the spam (and pumping up the price) and you'll end up having to buy the stock at a higher price.
Trading in spammed stocks is just a complicated way to give spammers your money. You might do better just to write them a check and save yourself the broker's fee.
SeaWorld's new Goldfish Spectacular failed to impress visitors yesterday. After several hours of waiting for the fish to do backflips, leap through hoops, whistle recognizable tunes, or walk across the water on their tails, most of the crowd left in disgust. Despite assurances that the highly-trained goldfish were "just a little out of sorts today" and that tomorrow's performance would be more dramatic, few SeaWorld visitors seemed eager to attend the goldfish show. "They're just a bunch of dumb-ass goldfish," said Billy J, 6, "I want to see the dolphins!". Another visitor was similarly outspoken. "The best bit of the show was always when the chick in the bikini rides on the dolphin's back, but that really doesn't work with goldfish. They tried to cover it up, but I think she squeezed one of them to death between her thighs." observed the middle-aged man, who declined to give his name.
In Hollywood, executives at Warner Brothers were said to be reconsidering plot changes made to "Free Willy 4". Recent doubts about cetacean intelligence had led to the substitution of an extremely-large orange-red goldfish named Sunny for the film's iconic killer whale during principal photography but the poor reception of the SeaWorld performances might lead to another reversal. Director Simon Wincer criticized the new change of heart, claiming that a story about a twelve-year-old boy trying to liberate the goldfish from his bowl on the living room table has much more dramatic impact than the earlier movies. "Now that we know that whales are just big dumb mammals, you can't empathize with them any more," said Wincer. "But when Sunny jumps out of his bowl and lies gasping on the carpet, that's real tragedy. We're watching an intelligent creature just seconds away from death. There's no way we're going back to using killer whales now."
No highly-intelligent goldfish were harmed in the making of this report.
I'm disappointed to see that 'pluton.com' is already registered and has been since 1999. Someone was way ahead of the IAU. Of course it's being used as a link farm, which is an uninspired use for a domain that could be used to share essential information about plutons: where do they come from, what do they want, and how do they manage to stay so fetchingly slim and petite in a galaxy full of much more massive bodies?
Could this mean the end of Nigerian spam?
"Olubi - this keyboard has no caps lock key! How can I send my emails?"
An auction system puts buyers at the mercy of someone with more money. Suppose I put an initial bid down on 'pinkfluffybunny.com', which I want to use for a website about pink fluffy bunnies. Currently, the fact that no one else has expressed any interest in this means that I can get it for about $8.
Under the auction system, as soon as I put in my bid, Domain Squatters Inc detects that someone's willing to pay for 'pinkfluffybunny.com' and puts in a counter-bid. They don't want the domain for themselves, they just want to be able to sell it to me for more than I would otherwise pay for it. Their bid-sniping software will probably get them the domain too, at which point I can either reconcile myself to life without 'pinkfluffybunny.com', or bite the bullet and reward Domain Squatters Inc for their bad behavior by buying from them for the price they ask.
Of course, Domain Squatters Inc. is taking a risk here. If I don't buy from them, they could end up paying for a domain that no one else wants to buy. But my guess is that if they fine tune their tactics, they can probably end up selling more domains than they keep. Or they could lease the domain with a restrictive agreement: "We bought this domain for $30, it's yours for $15, but you have to carry our ads and share information about your site visitors."
I'm not convinced that auctions would serve the best interests of 'the public'. It seems to me that they'd just give rise to a different kind of abuse.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
In response to AOL's controversial proposal to charge Internet users for priority delivery of email, angusmci, owner and operator of at least one mail and web server, announced plans to levy a charge on abuse of his mail forms by AOL customers. Speaking to an imaginary group of journalists assembled in his bedroom, angusmci set out the principles of the new system.
"Like many other website owners, I've grown used to seeing an apparent AOL customer probing my mail forms for security weaknesses. Today he's called WintOlympLovr99, last week he was SusanMcD677, the week before that ... well, you get the idea. And up until now, this AOL customer has enjoyed a free ride. They have benefited from the valuable services that I offer - such as having their probe attempts unceremoniously dropped in the bit bucket and getting their address logged in my log files - without paying a penny. Well, that stops today."
angusmci is pleased to announce that, effective forthwith, access to premium ProbeDiscard services and the popular WriteYourStolenAOLAddressToMyLogFiles feature will only be available to paying customers. A modest charge of $1.00 per probe attempt will be levied, and continued probe attempts will constitute an ipso facto agreement to this charging rate.
AOL users StarlaK8099, charleses3229, mhkoch321, jrubin3546, PeiCanteenMc, battsl1005, bbarnholtz, beacon5919, charleselegb, charleselegbed, SusanMcD677 and WintOlympLovr99 could not be reached for comment at press time. AOL's abuse desk could not be reached at all, at any time.
Because of the way that they were implemented. When the bag searches were in force, they were not carried out at all subway stations - it was months before I saw any searches taking place at the station closest to me. Even at the busiest stations, searches only occurred on some days or at certain times. Any would-be bomber could simply turn around and walk to a different station if he saw a checkpoint in place. My guess is that they'd not need to try more than one or two before finding one where they could enter unsearched. Passengers on public buses were not searched.
Moreover, the searches were cursory, and only the largest bags were searched. Smaller bags that could still have contained enough of a high-powered explosive to do serious damage were not inspected. An only bags were searched, although many suicide bombers now carry their explosives strapped to their bodies. In Israel, bombers are sometimes detected because they are seen to be wearing heavy coats during hot weather; if you wanted to stop everyone wearing a heavy coat during a New York winter, the city would basically come to a halt.
It's not that it was a compromise: "Well, we can only search 30% of subway stops, so that gives us a 30% chance of stopping bombings, which is better than nothing.". Searching 30% of subway stops gives you a 0% chance of stopping a bombing, not a 30% chance. It's clear that whatever the purpose was, it wasn't a serious attempt to prevent bombings.
The kindest interpretation I can put on it is that it was a token gesture, designed to reassure the public that something was being done. A more cynical interpretation might be that it was an attempt to ward off potential criticism if someone did get a bomb into the subway (you can imagine the outrage if a bombing occurred and no searches at all had been carried out). The most cynical or paranoid interpretation was that it was either (a) a way to let the NYPD go on fishing expeditions for potential criminals, or (b) that it was intended to promote the atmosphere of fear and uncertainty that our politicians seem to thrive on just now.
Like bag searches in the New York subway, this has little or no utility in preventing terrorist attacks. However, like bag searches it does give law enforcement a look-see at what you're doing. I presume that (as with bag searches) anything they happen to discover can be used as grounds for arrest and, eventually, as evidence. To me, there's something a little sinister about the way that terrorism is being used repeatedly to justify measures that are obviously ineffective against terrorism but which do increase the power of the authorities and make it easier to stifle dissent.
If you're innocent, you have nothing to fear. If you're innocent, you have nothing to fear. If you're innocent ... nope ... it isn't working.
I'm behind the times. We used Tapestry 3 for our project, and I haven't yet seen Tapestry 4, although I know my colleagues have adopted it as a standard (I've just been working on other stuff, so I haven't needed to use it yet). But even Tapestry 3 seemed better thought-out than JSF, and certainly met our needs well for at least 95% of what we needed to do.
I've worked with Tapestry. Is it a decent framework? Yes. Did we end up choosing it over JSF for our project? Yes, we did. Did it make development "a breeze"? No.
In my experience, Tapestry simplifies some complex tasks and helps you write reasonably clean, well-structured code. This is, I think, all anyone should realistically hope for from any framework. However, it isn't a magic bullet and we did find that things became a little gnarly as soon as we tried to do stuff that the Tapestry developers hadn't really anticipated or designed for (and the things we were trying to do weren't really very exotic).
Of the frameworks I've seen lately, Ruby on Rails is the one that bends the curve the furthest in the trade-off between 'what you can do' and 'how easy it is to do it'. Tapestry is a way behind that, but it's nevertheless a solid addition to anyone's toolkit, so long as you don't have unrealistic expectations of what it can do for you.
Some of the sexually explicit spam that I get ... not 'a lot' by any means ... is now marked 'SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT'.
And some of it is marked SEXUALLY*EXPLICIT, SEXUALLY_EXPLICIT, SEXUALLY~EXPLICIT, SexyaI!y Exp!!sit, SexyaIIu E}{p!!zit and Sexy/\l1u Ehp11sit.
This is not a joke on spammer spelling: those are actual strings from spam subject lines. Quite why spammers do this I don't know, but my guess is that they think CAN-SPAM is as big a joke as I do.
Since CAN-SPAM was enacted, my spam load has risen from a peak of 700 messages a day (spread across several accounts) to somewhere more than 900 a day currently. Doesn't look like a huge success from where I'm sitting, but maybe this is just another instance of the time-honored US government strategy: no matter what the reality is, declare victory and leave.
But if the terrorists take out the Internet, we won't be able to shop at Amazon and eBay! And the president has told us to keep shopping because if we don't keep shopping, the terrorists win!
I demand that we take steps to defend this vital piece of national infrastructure before the anti-consumerist enemies of freedom interfere with our fundamental democratic right to buy junk online and have it in our hands the next day without even leaving the house. What could be more basic to our way of life than that?
Also, I want my porn and my pirated MP3s and that funny video where the cute kitten does that wacky thing. If I can't have those, the terrorists have definitely won.
Having spent many years watching really clever people struggling to get their computers to show even some minimal degree of "smarts", it doesn't surprise me in the least that the first "true" artificial intelligence should come from a smallcap company that specializes in 'innovative multimedia'. Why, they probably had one of their engineers whip up artificial intelligence in a weekend as a side project.
I'm looking forward to their announcement of time travel and antigravity as well.
If I remember correctly, Jeff Goldblum's character in "Independence Day" was able to pwn the alien mothership by uploading a virus to it from his Macintosh PowerBook. Clearly, computer systems are interoperable galaxy-wide at a fundamental level. Perhaps Windows has even evolved independently on many different planets. In any case, we're clearly in deadly danger.
The big question, of course, is what the aliens will do once they've taken over our PCs. My guess is that they'll use them to send spam. The danger is that by the time our inboxes start filling with tentacle-enlargement spams and three-headed lizard porn, it will be too late for us to do anything.
I think this is - or should be - known as the "snowcrash" phenomenon, in homage to Neal Stephenson.
Let's hope that the state-of-the-art in network security advances faster than the state-of-the-art in neural implantation, otherwise we risk seeing problems that make having your PC co-opted into a botnet look trivial by comparison.
Rather than swear at it, I tried typing a smiley.
Bot: I didn't find any good matches 4 U, but may I ask you a question?
Me: No.
Bot: Mm hm. Such negativity. You are in need of some holiday spirit! Type M.
Me: Shan't.
Bot: OK, I'm searching for matches 4 U. Gimme a sec.
If you let it ask you a question, it goes into a kind of 'interactive' question and answer mode. It's easy to get stuck in this mode, with no obvious way to revert to generalized searches. The best way to get back to the 'top level' behavior (where it takes anything you type as a search keyword) is by swearing at it. There's a moral there somewhere, I suppose.
In the words of Marvin:
More realistically, can we please write a law that would allow class action suits against any user who opens an attachment sent to them by email with the promise that it contains nekkid pictures of Britney Spears? And every dipshit everywhere who has ever bought anything advertised by spam?
If people didn't open viral attachments, the zombie problem would be significantly smaller. If people didn't buy from spammers, the spam problem wouldn't exist at all. Ergo, all the hours I spend trying to keep the systems that I administer spam- and virus-free are the fault of the idiots who believe that their mother wants them to see Anna Kournikova's panties, that Mrs Mariam Abacha has $25 million for them, that DUDD.OB is really going to EXPLODE next Monday, and that buying sugar pills from 'hugeorgan4u.com' will give them the monster instrument they've always dreamed of. I want to bill them for my time. Hell, I want to bill them for everyone's time. And every other cost associated with spam.
While I'm at it, can I sue everyone who's ever connected an insecure Windows PC to the Internet, or who failed to apply security patches in a timely manner? And the ISPs that won't do anything to take compromised hosts offline, and the hosting companies who won't take action against spam sites and phishing sites running on their systems? And the registrars who accept obviously fraudulent registrations and don't do anything about them even when they get the WDPRS notifications? Or the elected representatives who drafted and passed the entirely toothless CAN-SPAM Act?
Just say I can, and I'm putting my lawyer's number on speed-dial right now ...
Yes and no. Apple introduced PowerPC machines in 1993; the real panic and the flood of "Apple is doomed" stories came in during Gil Amelio's period at Apple, from 1996 to 1997. Apple's use of emulation to allow 68K software to run under PowerPC blunted quite a lot of the pain of the transition.
Of course it also meant that Macintosh machines underperformed hideously, because parts of the OS still ran under emulation even in later OS releases. The obvious speed difference between Windows and MacOS was just one of the things that hurt them in the latter half of the decade. I think you're also right when you say that they were genuinely in deep trouble at that point. It's debatable whether Apple offered a better user experience than Windows 9x (I feel it did, but others disagree), but the core architecture of Mac OS represented an evolutionary dead end, and Apple's management didn't seem to have any clear idea how they could hold things together while they tried to develop a completely new (but backwards compatible) replacement from scratch.
So the Apple crisis was real, but I think it was exacerbated by negative coverage. A lot of the stuff that I read at the time seemed to have been written by people who had no idea what things like 'virtual memory' or 'preemptive multitasking' actually meant (as proven by the sometimes laughable explanations they tried to give of those concepts) but had just been told that you needed them and Apple didn't have them (well, System 7 and later had VM, but Lord knows, it wasn't up to much). Some of the negative coverage was informed and gave an accurate picture of Apple's perilous state, but much of it read as if someone who had previously covered sports and local supermarket openings had been given a list of talking points and told to write a technology story. And more than anything it was the sheer volume of bad press that threatened to sink Apple for good.
Ironically, it may actually have saved Apple, because it forced them to take the desperate step of handing the reins back to Steve Jobs, rather than muddling on downhill. And whatever Jobs' strengths and weaknesses, it does seem likely that his combination of showmanship and autocracy may have been a key factor in turning Apple around at a time when they didn't have too many other options.
Dvorak has always been a fairly clueless commentator, but lately he seems to have been exceeding his previous best efforts. This is in line with his recent 'misses the point entirely' would-be hatchet-job on Creative Commons.
Dvorak is too old an industry hand not to know how things work. Quite aside from whatever Apple's doing behind the scenes to encourage people to write about them (or encourage editors to demand stories on Apple), there's the fact that Apple is currently The Story. They've turned their business and their stock price around, they have a charismatic leader (Jobs) and a charismatic product (iPod), and they're aggressively rolling out new products which can be expected to sell well. Whether you want to write an "It can't last" or a "Apple is unstoppable" story, there's lots of material for even the laziest journo to work with. Whereas most journalists realize that writing a "Vista still isn't close to being ready, but it'll be really wonderful when it is." story looks a little ridiculous. ("Still not king.")
It's worth remembering that not so long ago, Apple was getting a lot of coverage and none of it was good. I've always wondered how much of the Apple crisis of the '90s that nearly sunk the company before His Steveness came riding to the rescue was actually caused by the negative coverage they got, and how much of that negative coverage was 'encouraged' by certain interested parties (no names, no pack drill). If I'm right that a certain amount of that coverage was the product of someone whispering in the shell-like ears of the industry editors that they might like to run a few more "Apple is doomed" stories, then presumably those same someones will be back when Vista is good and ready, and we'll see nothing but "Microsoft triumphant" and "Vista changes the future of humanity" stories for six solid months.
Coverage has everything to do with what the editors decide is The Story this week. It has nothing to do with today's journalists being Apple-centric because (unlike John "Manly Man" Dvorak) they're too wimpish to go mano-a-mano with a balky Windows box and don't know what real computing is. Nice try, John, but you're still talking rubbish.
Does the offence of "wasting police time" exist in the US? Because while IANAPCFL (I Am Not A Publicity Crazed Florida Lawyer) it certainly looks to me as if Jack T's demands that the cops go and harass Tycho and Gabe of Penny Arcade could fall under that heading. It might even be a case of falsely reporting a crime, which has got to be good for a swift rap across the knuckles.
The boys at Penny Arcade seem to be conducting themselves with grace, style and wit in this one. Thompson? Well, let's just say that he probably isn't adding to the circle of his admirers with his current antics. At least, I certainly hope he isn't.
Just like those new DVDs where - despite having paid for the disk - you still have to sit through ten minutes of unskippable previews and advertisements for other releases.
Businesses are continuously struggling to increase revenue. In addition to the traditional ways - increasing sales and reducing costs - they're increasingly looking at leveraging their existing product to generate additional revenue. In the UK, for example, rail companies turned their information lines into premium-rate services, so that each call to find out about train times generated income for them. In the same way, using the distribution medium - cable or DVD - to carry ads, which earn ad revenue, makes commercial sense.
Moreover, it's almost guaranteed to happen because the business is set up in such a way that they can only perceive the benefits, not the negative effects. They can see the extra money that the ad revenue adds to their bottom line. They can't measure the effect of consumer dissatisfaction, because any decline in sales can be attributed to many other possible causes.
Periodically, I think about how I can protect my 'vital' data (code and digital photographs, mostly) against loss. Options include local backups (a few feet away), backups at my girlfriend's house (a few blocks away), backups at my job (several miles away), backups at a relative's house (hundreds of miles away), or backups at my parents' house (thousands of miles away). This thought experiment has led me to the conclusion that there are some disasters that are not worth preparing against. If anything simultaneously takes out my data and the backup copies in my office a few miles distant, losing my holiday snaps and my bank statements may not be my biggest problem.
Getting back to the original poster's question, the danger is that any device you carry on you such as a Flash drive is liable to get lost, stolen or broken. As for Flash drives that support encryption, how many of those also require special driver software on the target computer to give access to the encrypted data? It would be embarassing to stumble out of the disaster zone still clutching your 'life drive' and discover that you really should have thought to bring the installer CD currently lying somewhere under eight feet of water/radioactive fallout/zombies/radioactive zombies. But maybe you could copy the installer onto the unencrypted part of the drive.
A possible alternative (or additional measure) is to put your data on a foreign website (or, for defence in depth, several, all in different countries). Naturally, you'll want to encrypt it securely and upload/download only over secure links. But if the Internet stays up, then you have a chance of being able to access your data even after the asteroid hits your home city and you've been stripped of everything you're carrying by the feral teenage swamp mutants.
Again, if you use encryption you're hostage to the availability of the decryption software, so you may start thinking about building your own webapp that can decrypt your data on the fly and serve it to you over HTTPS. But that would preclude using any of the free hosting accounts available, so your quest for perfect security and redundancy could lead you to fork out for expensive virtual hosting. Maybe what we need instead is some kind of 'mixmaster' application that would accept a key and some data, and stripe the data across a few thousand locations (call it a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Domains), encrypted and inter-mingled with other people's data in such a way that nothing intelligible would be recoverable without the key. Redundancy would be built in from the ground up such that even if half the planet goes offline, your data could still be retrieved from the surviving hosts.
Even if something like this doesn't already exist, it shouldn't be hard to build: all the technologies already exist in one form or another (PGP, BitTorrent, mixmasters, PAR/RAR etc etc). All it needs is a team of dedicated geeks, plus a healthy dose of paranoia, and you and your data can step smiling and unscathed into the bright nuclear dawn of the New Age (watch out for the zombies, though).
When I worked in France, the lab where I worked was outfitted with devices known as PTI's (from "Protection de Travailleur Isole" - "Protection for Isolated Workers"). The device was a small box that you could wear on your belt, that connected wirelessly to the office alarm system (which was remotely monitored). It had a panic button that you could press. It also had an orientation sensor, so that if you fell down and didn't move for any length of time, it would trigger an alarm. And it had a wire loop that you could pass through a belt loop: any attempt to snatch the device from you would snap the loop and trigger the alarm.
Because people worked alone in the lab outside normal office hours, there was apparently a legal requirement to have these things, but I don't know if there was any legal requirement to actually use them. We sat through the briefing, then put them away in a closet and never looked at them again. However, in an industrial or agricultural setting, or for someone working in a service station, they might be quite practical.
I presume that any devices intended for use by cabin crew might have similar characteristics, including an anti-snatch feature.
Eric Smith wrote:
Individual users are definitely not what Lexmark has in mind. The aim is to go after remanufacturers (who refill and resell cartridges), makers of 'compatible' cartridges or refill kits that are specifically designed or advertised for refilling Lexmark cartridges.
Lexmark, like some other big corporations, appears to feel that they have a natural right to a certain level of sales and that this right should be guaranteed to them by law. The mechanism they have found to protect this "natural right" is patent law, raising the question of whether the features in question are genuinely innovative or necessary, or are merely distinctive characteristics that Lexmark can use to support their claim: patent law used to protect profits, rather than innovation.
The battle over ink cartridges is particularly vicious because printers are sold as 'loss leaders'. The hardware is sold below cost because the manufacturer aims to make its profit on the sale of overpriced consumables. Anything that cuts into their revenue stream from the consumables threatens their whole business model. The same kind of model is at work in the sale of mobile phone services, which is why high-tech phones are given away to users who agree to be locked into a lucrative service contract.
It's curious how accepting we have become of this kind of pricing model, which is anti-competitive at heart and firmly stacked in the manufacturer's favor. Would we buy a new car if we were contractually bound to refill it with gas from Exxon and subject to legal penalties if we ever dared to pull into a Texaco?
In the UK during the Thatcher years, the government created an agency called the Child Support Agency, whose role was to go after parents (typically fathers) who owed child support and make sure they paid what they owed. After it had been in operation for a little while, documents surfaced that showed that the agency's official policy was not to pursue 'difficult' cases (i.e. real "deadbeat dads", who didn't pay or couldn't be found), but to put the squeeze on the others: the regular payers who might have fallen behind, the ones who were clearly trying to meet their obligations, but who might have missed a payment or two.
From a practical point of view, it made perfect sense. The Agency's job was to collect as much money as possible. Going after the 'bad' fathers was expensive, time-consuming and unrewarding. Going after the 'good' ones was much easier and more lucrative.
The RIAA and MPAA use the same logic. Downloaders are low-hanging fruit, so the cost/benefit ratio of nailing them makes them the target of choice, even if the real reason that the industry is haemorrhaging money (or, more strictly, is unable to afford as many limousines and swimming pools as it thinks it should be able to) lies elsewhere.