...it's really important to use them properly. "No pretense of ambivalence," indeed! What, are reference materials supposed to be ambivalent?
From http://www.hyperdictionary.com/dictionary/ambivale nt:
1. [adj] uncertain or unable to decide about what course to follow; "was ambivalent about having children" 2. [adj] characterized by a mixture of opposite feelings or attitudes; "she felt ambivalent about his proposal"; "an ambivalent position on rent control"
Is that really what anyone would expect from a reference material? I think the poster wanted "...no pretense of objectivity."
Windows web defacements are the fault of a crappy, inherently insecure operating system from a criminal monopoly.
Linux defacements are the fault of stupid admins who can't be bothered to install the latest patches, or who are too incompetent to install the OS and configure it for security.
I agree that the means in the case cited in the article are fine and even ethical. However, my comment was in response to the quote-that-I-quoted from the submitter, which seemed to be a blanket endorsement of *anything* as long as it "slows down spam."
Spam is nasty, spammers should be fined, jailed, or pressured. But, as I said, there are plenty of things that would slow down spam that I at least would not consider to be good things.
Also, plese note that the phrase "ends justify the means" is commonly understood to be shorthand for the philosophy that, if the goals are lofty enough, there are no ethical or moral limits on the means used to achieve those goals -- in short, exactly what the submitter seemed to be saying. Though you're quite right that a literal interpretation of the words by someone not familiar with english could lead to confusion, as "means" in general are indeed used to achieve "ends." Though even then, a non-english speaker might pick up on the implication that the means *need* to be justified, and are therefore suspect in and of themselves.
This needs to be publicised, as anything which slows down spam can only be a good thing.
Things which would slow down spam, but which most of us would not consider to be "good things.":
Massive DoS attacks against root name servers or other infrastructure that significantly impair the operation of the Internet
"Upstream readers": a new policy where you are charged $1.50 per email sent. Funds go to a government organization which all mail must be routed through. Bureaucrats read your outgoing mail and decide if it's worthy of being on the Internet.
More to the point: vigilante gangs start killing people who are rumored to be spammers. Thousands of innocents die, but possibly a few genuine spammers as well.
Come on, people. Aren't techies, of all people, smart enough to see that "the ends justify the means" is *not* a valid rationale?
So if a spammer "I am a spammer", it means that they're not? And if you mistakenly accuse someone of being a spammer (hey, it happens sometimes) and they deny it, their denial means nothing because they're a spammer and therefore lying?
Damn, this problem is more difficult than I thought. There's mass stupidity on *both* sides.
It's a good thing this open source stuff is so much more secure than MS products! I mean, open source is install-and-forget, and those MS bozos really have to stay on their toes with security patches. That MS software is so full of bugs and security holes that a casual use who just installs it and forgets it is definitely going to get themselves 0wned.
Whatever happend to the whole "companies should be liable for security flaws in their products" movement, anyway? That would show those bastards who release imperfect software!
Oh, wait.
(And yes, I know you weren't bashing MS, so please don't take this little bit of sarcasm personally; I completely agree with your post, it just brought these thoughts to mind).
Look at how well (as measured by effeciency, cost, quality) the government administers those police, fire departments, etc. Sure, the people who do the work are almost uniformly (ha!) good people, but the bureaucracy around them makes the groups slow to innovate and/or respond to changing community needs.
I'm sure the government could bring the same level of bureaucrazy and expense to open source. Do you really want them to?
I think this is one for the "be careful what you wish for" files.
Sure -- so post a link to the list of opinions it is illegal to express, and please highlight where it says that it is illegal to advocate violent overthrow of the government. Sure, it's a stupid thing to say, and actually *acting* on it is illegal in a number of ways, but just advocatiung revolution didn't used to be illegal.
Which is a good thing, or else poor old Benjamin Franklin would have been in the slammer ("Never trust your government. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. A revolution is needed every twenty years just to keep the government honest.")
I still think you're confused about the difference between words and actions. Historically, they have been treated differently. Sad to say, most of the country seems to be in your boat. I just wonder what thought will go illegal next.
Any other opinions that you think should be illegal? Perhaps anyone who advocates breaking Microsoft up? Or SCO's assertion that Linux includes their IP?
Or is it just people who verbally advocate murder that you'd jail? Like, say, anyone who says we should kill Saddam Houssein if we find him?
Please post a complete list of the opinions that you believe it should be illegal to express.
Hint: put only one type of data in each cell. When you mix data in a single cell, it makes it very hard to sort or analyze. For instance, this spreadsheet has two colums: "Artist" and "Song title (times appearing)".
Would it have been that hard to break out time appearing into another column, so interested people could actually *use* the data for something? No. In fact, it would have been *less* work.
Sorry to bitch and moan, but spreadsheet abuse is one of my pet peeves.
Just like it was a huge bluder for UC to do tons of research on networking and implement a TCP stack for MS to take it and charge everyone for it?
That would be a fair comparison if you could cite an article written by Microsoft pointing out (one could say "gloating about") the various failures that came from UC.
You mean Microsoft may actually be working to skew news coverage and public opinion towards the things they've been successful at? And away from technical and marketing blunders?
What an outrage! I'm going to write to my representatives right now and demand a new law that forces companies to educate consumers about both their strengths and weaknesses, and that requires them to spend an equal amount on publicizing past failures as they do on promoting new initiatives.
I'm shocked. Shocked, I tell you. What a failure of the market! What an unconscionable series of dirty tricks from Microsoft! How dare they! Hey, does anyone know what the school assembly is about today?
I'm sure I saw this exact same post on/. in 1998. Except then it said we'd run out of addresses by 2000.
Hello? There's this thing called NAT, you see, and in many ways it's preferable to not have every one of your 100 IP-enabled devices sitting there on the real internet just waiting to get hacked.
Cheers -b
Re:calling clueful car manufacturers
on
Pods Unite
·
· Score: 1
I'm not sure that the degradation from the casette adapter or FM transmission would be noticeable, when your source is probably a 128kbit MP3. In fact, the characteristic loss of high frequencies from the casette adapter might be merciful and serve to mask what MP3 does to high hats and such.
You know what's worse? Even word of mouth recommendations are outright fraud. There's no way that someone could realistically tell you all of the complexities and nuances of their opinion about something verbally.
And don't get me started on packaging! It's all an evil fraud perpetrated by abusive corporations. "Tastes great," my ass. How can they claim to know what I will think tastes great.
I really think you're on to something here. Perhaps if we banned all communication, we could put an end to this troublesome fraud once and for all.
So, to summarize, since all communication is fundamentally fraudulent, it's pointless to talk about degrees of fraud. Everyone knows the world is black and white, so unless you're going to bring suit again hired spokespeople, it's not reasonable to go after Doubleclick for intentionally deceptive ads that fooled nontechnical people into thinking they were clicking on a message from their own computer system.
I don't think anyone was suggesting this was some kind of altruistic plan, where they were going to lose millions of dollars but get it out for the good of the fans.
Anything in business is (hopefully) strategized. It's just nice to see a business realize that it can do something a bit different than usual and either make the same revenue while pleasing fans, or perhaps make extra revenue.
Wow. I'm trying to be as nice as possible here, but you don't have a lot of experience in the real world, do you?
Let's say that just 6,000 websites are defaced. How many of those, do you think, will be Fortune 1000 corporations? And how many of them will be small businesses that may or may not be incorporated? Is it somehow evil to run a business as a corporation rather than a sole proprietership or general partnership?
And you seem to want to have it both ways; on the one hand, large corporations somehow exaggerate what it costs to recover from a hack, and on the other hand anyone who *is* hacked is incompetent and deserves what they get.
In fact, in the unlikely event that IBM's site is defaced, it would certainly cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars.
There's a lot more to recovering from defacement than you seem to think. Hint: you are not done when you copying the original HTML page back in place.
For a large company, it means doing a massive project to determine what other systems could have been accessed using the defaced server as a middleman. And then examining those systems for signs of intrusion.
In the much more likely and frequent instances of a small business being defaced, it may or may not be financially ruinous, but it's certainly a lot more than the minor and greatly exaggerated inconvenience that you paint it as. These businesses don't have large IT staffs, and/or the technical know-how to slap themselves on the head and say "Damn! We should have installed that latest IIS hotfix."
It's an ugly situation, but it is absolutely an expensive one and has far wider repercussions than you seem to think.
Yeah, and likewise with con artists. If all 7 billion people on the planet agreed that they would no longer be conned, there would be no scammers left.
The problem with spam is that it exploits statistics: Even if 99.99% of people just delete it, that.001% represents something like 5,000 internet users, which can be enough to make the whole thing profitable (since sending the spam is free, using stolen resources).
Slashdot Mirror
...it's really important to use them properly. "No pretense of ambivalence," indeed! What, are reference materials supposed to be ambivalent?
e nt :
From http://www.hyperdictionary.com/dictionary/ambival
1. [adj] uncertain or unable to decide about what course to follow; "was ambivalent about having children"
2. [adj] characterized by a mixture of opposite feelings or attitudes; "she felt ambivalent about his proposal"; "an ambivalent position on rent control"
Is that really what anyone would expect from a reference material? I think the poster wanted "...no pretense of objectivity."
Not that I care that much, of course.
Cheers
-b
It was a joke, son.
-b
Windows web defacements are the fault of a crappy, inherently insecure operating system from a criminal monopoly.
Linux defacements are the fault of stupid admins who can't be bothered to install the latest patches, or who are too incompetent to install the OS and configure it for security.
I thought everyone knew that.
Cheers
-b
Ah, a sophist!
I agree that the means in the case cited in the article are fine and even ethical. However, my comment was in response to the quote-that-I-quoted from the submitter, which seemed to be a blanket endorsement of *anything* as long as it "slows down spam."
Spam is nasty, spammers should be fined, jailed, or pressured. But, as I said, there are plenty of things that would slow down spam that I at least would not consider to be good things.
Also, plese note that the phrase "ends justify the means" is commonly understood to be shorthand for the philosophy that, if the goals are lofty enough, there are no ethical or moral limits on the means used to achieve those goals -- in short, exactly what the submitter seemed to be saying. Though you're quite right that a literal interpretation of the words by someone not familiar with english could lead to confusion, as "means" in general are indeed used to achieve "ends." Though even then, a non-english speaker might pick up on the implication that the means *need* to be justified, and are therefore suspect in and of themselves.
Cheers
-b
Things which would slow down spam, but which most of us would not consider to be "good things.":
Come on, people. Aren't techies, of all people, smart enough to see that "the ends justify the means" is *not* a valid rationale?
Cheers
-b
So if a spammer "I am a spammer", it means that they're not? And if you mistakenly accuse someone of being a spammer (hey, it happens sometimes) and they deny it, their denial means nothing because they're a spammer and therefore lying?
Damn, this problem is more difficult than I thought. There's mass stupidity on *both* sides.
Cheers
-b
It's a good thing this open source stuff is so much more secure than MS products! I mean, open source is install-and-forget, and those MS bozos really have to stay on their toes with security patches. That MS software is so full of bugs and security holes that a casual use who just installs it and forgets it is definitely going to get themselves 0wned.
Whatever happend to the whole "companies should be liable for security flaws in their products" movement, anyway? That would show those bastards who release imperfect software!
Oh, wait.
(And yes, I know you weren't bashing MS, so please don't take this little bit of sarcasm personally; I completely agree with your post, it just brought these thoughts to mind).
Cheers
-b
Microsoft says Windows better than Linux! Linux advocates disagree!
In other news, a communist revolution has shaken Russia, and Napoleon suffered a shocking defeat at Waterloo.
Cheers
-b
Look at how well (as measured by effeciency, cost, quality) the government administers those police, fire departments, etc. Sure, the people who do the work are almost uniformly (ha!) good people, but the bureaucracy around them makes the groups slow to innovate and/or respond to changing community needs.
I'm sure the government could bring the same level of bureaucrazy and expense to open source. Do you really want them to?
I think this is one for the "be careful what you wish for" files.
Cheers
-b
Sure -- so post a link to the list of opinions it is illegal to express, and please highlight where it says that it is illegal to advocate violent overthrow of the government. Sure, it's a stupid thing to say, and actually *acting* on it is illegal in a number of ways, but just advocatiung revolution didn't used to be illegal.
Which is a good thing, or else poor old Benjamin Franklin would have been in the slammer ("Never trust your government. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. A revolution is needed every twenty years just to keep the government honest.")
I still think you're confused about the difference between words and actions. Historically, they have been treated differently. Sad to say, most of the country seems to be in your boat. I just wonder what thought will go illegal next.
-b
Any other opinions that you think should be illegal? Perhaps anyone who advocates breaking Microsoft up? Or SCO's assertion that Linux includes their IP?
Or is it just people who verbally advocate murder that you'd jail? Like, say, anyone who says we should kill Saddam Houssein if we find him?
Please post a complete list of the opinions that you believe it should be illegal to express.
Cheers
-b
Even more entertaining is to add a disallow: /secret.cgi entry, and then have secret.cgi log the IP address, datetime, etc, of requests.
For bonus points, you can have secret.cgi automatically add requesting IP's to an apache rewrite config file.
Cheers
-b
Ah, you just want to use the labor of someone who you consider to be a whore, so you can keep your pristine innocence. That's very noble.
Cheers
-b
Hint: put only one type of data in each cell. When you mix data in a single cell, it makes it very hard to sort or analyze. For instance, this spreadsheet has two colums: "Artist" and "Song title (times appearing)".
Would it have been that hard to break out time appearing into another column, so interested people could actually *use* the data for something? No. In fact, it would have been *less* work.
Sorry to bitch and moan, but spreadsheet abuse is one of my pet peeves.
Cheers
-b
Now teachers will be able to tell which students to write off earlier, so they don't waste so much time on those likely to drop out.
Hooray, progress!
Cheers
-b
That would be a fair comparison if you could cite an article written by Microsoft pointing out (one could say "gloating about") the various failures that came from UC.
So where's the link?
Cheers
-b
You mean Microsoft may actually be working to skew news coverage and public opinion towards the things they've been successful at? And away from technical and marketing blunders?
What an outrage! I'm going to write to my representatives right now and demand a new law that forces companies to educate consumers about both their strengths and weaknesses, and that requires them to spend an equal amount on publicizing past failures as they do on promoting new initiatives.
I'm shocked. Shocked, I tell you. What a failure of the market! What an unconscionable series of dirty tricks from Microsoft! How dare they! Hey, does anyone know what the school assembly is about today?
Cheers
-b
I'm sure I saw this exact same post on /. in 1998. Except then it said we'd run out of addresses by 2000.
Hello? There's this thing called NAT, you see, and in many ways it's preferable to not have every one of your 100 IP-enabled devices sitting there on the real internet just waiting to get hacked.
Cheers
-b
I'm not sure that the degradation from the casette adapter or FM transmission would be noticeable, when your source is probably a 128kbit MP3. In fact, the characteristic loss of high frequencies from the casette adapter might be merciful and serve to mask what MP3 does to high hats and such.
Cheers
-b
You know what's worse? Even word of mouth recommendations are outright fraud. There's no way that someone could realistically tell you all of the complexities and nuances of their opinion about something verbally.
And don't get me started on packaging! It's all an evil fraud perpetrated by abusive corporations. "Tastes great," my ass. How can they claim to know what I will think tastes great.
I really think you're on to something here. Perhaps if we banned all communication, we could put an end to this troublesome fraud once and for all.
So, to summarize, since all communication is fundamentally fraudulent, it's pointless to talk about degrees of fraud. Everyone knows the world is black and white, so unless you're going to bring suit again hired spokespeople, it's not reasonable to go after Doubleclick for intentionally deceptive ads that fooled nontechnical people into thinking they were clicking on a message from their own computer system.
Did I get that right?
Cheers
-b
Yahoo (and presumably other search engines follow suit) keeps some bogus entries in the DB so they can detect someone stealing their whole DB.
Some print newspapers run bogus classified ads so they can detect a competitor trying to bulk up their own classified section.
Some anti-spam companies post to newsgroups specifically to get addresses harvested; any email to those addresses is the sign of a spammer.
Handy, but hardly breaking news. Might as well run an article about a researcher discovering the usefulness of packet switched networks.
Cheers
-b
I don't think anyone was suggesting this was some kind of altruistic plan, where they were going to lose millions of dollars but get it out for the good of the fans.
Anything in business is (hopefully) strategized. It's just nice to see a business realize that it can do something a bit different than usual and either make the same revenue while pleasing fans, or perhaps make extra revenue.
Nothing wrong with that.
Cheers
-b
Wow. I'm trying to be as nice as possible here, but you don't have a lot of experience in the real world, do you?
Let's say that just 6,000 websites are defaced. How many of those, do you think, will be Fortune 1000 corporations? And how many of them will be small businesses that may or may not be incorporated? Is it somehow evil to run a business as a corporation rather than a sole proprietership or general partnership?
And you seem to want to have it both ways; on the one hand, large corporations somehow exaggerate what it costs to recover from a hack, and on the other hand anyone who *is* hacked is incompetent and deserves what they get.
In fact, in the unlikely event that IBM's site is defaced, it would certainly cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars.
There's a lot more to recovering from defacement than you seem to think. Hint: you are not done when you copying the original HTML page back in place.
For a large company, it means doing a massive project to determine what other systems could have been accessed using the defaced server as a middleman. And then examining those systems for signs of intrusion.
In the much more likely and frequent instances of a small business being defaced, it may or may not be financially ruinous, but it's certainly a lot more than the minor and greatly exaggerated inconvenience that you paint it as. These businesses don't have large IT staffs, and/or the technical know-how to slap themselves on the head and say "Damn! We should have installed that latest IIS hotfix."
It's an ugly situation, but it is absolutely an expensive one and has far wider repercussions than you seem to think.
Cheers
-b
Just the one table?
-b
Yeah, and likewise with con artists. If all 7 billion people on the planet agreed that they would no longer be conned, there would be no scammers left.
.001% represents something like 5,000 internet users, which can be enough to make the whole thing profitable (since sending the spam is free, using stolen resources).
The problem with spam is that it exploits statistics: Even if 99.99% of people just delete it, that
Cheers
-b