It clearly states that you will allow the program to monitor your internet usage in exchange for the free antivirus software.
"Monitor your Internet usage" sounds a bit too harmless. Among other things, they eavesdrop on your online banking sessions (including your authentication credentials) and analyze your financial transactions. Consequently, quite a few banks filter access from the MarketScore SSL proxies (yes, they carry out a MITM attack on SSL, by installing new root certificates). However, this provides only limited protection to customers because MarketScore can switch to more stealthy eavesdropping schemes.
The secret is out...no one can gain by covering up the problem...no one, that is, but the people perpetrating the click fraud.
Not true. If you've got a solution for click fraud, you should keep it to yourself because it enables you to give better service to your customers, especially better than the competition who doesn't know of your discovery.
Have a look at spam filter heuristics for some inspiration. The most effective ones are not widely published, and thus not widely used. I don't think this is a coincidence.
Security through obscurity doesn't work in cryptography. A competitive edge through trade secrets is not completely unheard of. In the end economics win, and not cryptography.
I really like the specs on the Tyan S4882. Quad Opteron, 32GB RAM, and lots of stuff you probably don't want/need. It's a sweet motherboard, nonetheless.
I doubt it's really overkill. To reach the 32 GB, you must use 4 Opteron CPUs because you can't get a board/CPU combination which supports more than 8 GB per CPU.
Get a Sun. You can get very large memory systems. You can go up to 192 gigs of memory.
192 GB is no longer very large nowadays, and Sun indeed offers systems with larger per-node memory sizes. The price tag is hefty, of course, but so is anything which goes beyond 32 GB (maybe even 64 GB).
Maybe this interface is perceived as new in the U.S. because text messaging using mobile phones is rather esoteric, and not as widespread as in other countries?
Being Linus works for OSDL, that pretty much means BitKeeper has to go or Linu[s] has to leave OSDL. It is the same case for Andrew Morton. I think Linu[s] prefers to drop Bitkeeper.
And this surprises me most. I would have expected OSDL to fire Tridge and solve the problem the easy way. They didn't do this, probably because they don't view their employees as slaves (something Larry can't understand, apparently).
Apparently not. The press release states that they provide ABI compatiblity using special shared libraries ("[...] compatibility is implemented through the use of dynamically linked shared libraries[...]", similar to WINE). Maybe they have ported GNU libc to LynxOS and use some free software. But apparently, no Linux kernel code is involved.
Re:Live Concerts are owned by Label
on
EZTree Shuts Down
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· Score: 1
What's worse, distributing bootlegs is not really consistent with the myth that music swappers care about artists and just hate the recording industry. I can understand the latter, but recording and even distributing something an artist has created only for the moment of a live performance is not just illegal under current copyright laws, it's also morally wrong.
The current mess is understandable from a company perspective. You don't want to give free tools to someone who develops a replacement of these tools. Even if the person in question does it in his or her spare time. Companies tend to think that they own everything their employees do, so no problem here.
However, I'm sure one of the leading kernel developers will claim in a future interview that the new kernel SCM tool is "far more usable" than Bitkeeper. This may take a year or two, and it might be a very subjective statement, but it could create a marketing problem for Bitmover.
Subversion is not an obvious choice because it requires a completely different development model. This is not necessarily a bad thing (the current model has to be a bit flawed because it fails to deliver kernels that can be used by end users), but I doubt that the developers are ready for such a move.
FWIW, Japan is in the process of switching from trial decided by judges to trials decided by juries.
Interesting. Japan has (for a democracy) rather unique problems with its justice system, though, so a radical change could actually result in an improvement.
Or do you not consider Japan "civilized?"
Believe it or not, I still consider the U.S. part of the civilized world.
Re:Babies have an instinctive understanding of 're
on
The Baby Bootstrap?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Cycorp is not a poorly funded idea in the wrong direction.
It's certainly not poorly funded. Whether it's adequately funded, or on the right track, is a different question, of course.
Cycorp chose a different tack; they decided that rather than trying to build a reality and correctness filter, they'd rely on human brains to do it for them (like trusting your parents implictly) and instead concentrated on the connectivity of the 'facts' accrued by the 'baby.'
A decade ago, they still hoped that once they had manually laid the groundwork, the system would bootstrap itself, reading newspapers and so on. Bootstrapping was expected to start in the late 90s, like commercial adaption (integration into Windows, for example). It seems that neither has happened, at least in the predicted scale. Cyc may not be a failure (it's hard to tell, because a lot of it is a trade secret), but it couldn't reach its ambitious goals.
Jury duty is pretty much compulsory. Unless you can give the judge and attorneys good reason to drop you, make them think you are biased for or against the plaintiff, or convince them you are fricken insane you have to attend.
Uh-oh, then I prefer publication bans to sequestration.
We have hobbyist judges in Germany, too, but as judges, they can ask questions, and this tends to cause problems. At least there's an easy way to be dismissed: just refer to the defendant as "perpretator" or "offender", showing your bias. Unfortunately, too many hobbyist do this unintentionally (which quite understandable).
Because we all know that there is no such thing as a corrupt judge. It's a lot harder to buy off 12 people, vs. 1.
In other jurisdiction, significant crimes deserve multiple judges. And both the prosectution and the defendant can appeal. This is rather expensive for the public, and I hope we can continue to afford it, at least for serious crime (it helps if you have less, of course).
In the US, the latter would be an unconstitutional prior restraint on speech, not to mention completely impossible to enforce.
Doesn't the US deal with this problem by holding jury members in relative captivity, without access to mainstream media? This is barely acceptable either, and only if jury membership is truly voluntary. Nevertheless, it results in biased juries.
Are you seriously suggesting that the jury system should be abolished? What do you suggest it be replaced with?
Guilt should be determined by professionals, i.e. judges, as in most parts of the civilized world. Professionals are less likely to be affected by their personal grudges and media campaigns.
Canada takes quite seriously the concept of making sure that suspects receive a fair trial.
But apparently they don't go far enough. They clearly see that the jury system has significant problems, but yet they resort to workarounds which are less and less effective, instead of abolishing it.
No, it's the "intelligent design" argument, but I see your point. Fortunately, intelligent design is not an empiric theory, and darwinism is rather close to one (the precambrian rabbit etc.). To me, the intelligent design folks seem to criticize darwinism because it lacks the reproducibility of an empiric theory, but go ahead and replace it with something that is purely metaphysical. This is inconsistent, and it's also the only argument against intelligent design. You cannot argue based on facts, because a metaphysical theory is not really concerned with (or affected by) facts.
Event horizons and closed time-like curves cannot exist in the real world for the simple reason that they are inconsistent with quantum mechanics.
And photons do not exist because they contradict the double-slit experiment? Give me a break. It doesn't make sense to proclaim that something does not exist because it contradicts an established theory, especially if there is quite a bit of evidence that it's actually there. It's the other way round: If such a thing exists, the theory needs fixing (and not just in an ad-hoc manner).
Apparently, the author makes some claims with respect to the observable behavior of "dark energy stars" which differ from black holes, so his theory could be empirical after all, but the quoted paper does not rigorously derive these properties.
As far as I know pretty much every other TLD follows ICANN rules and procedures here. Why should.us be special?
Many of the ccTLDs are older than ICANN and thus not subject to ICANN regulations. I couldn't find a contract between.US and ICANN on the ICANN website, which could mean that there is none, and.US is still an independent ccTLD.
It's been reported on a mailing list that the article is actually about FairUCE, which implements something completely different which makes at least some sense (for scoring, not for outright blocking).
Usually just being arrested means that you will be fingerprinted and your picture taken. Isn't this pretty much the same thing?
It depends. A regular DNA fingerprint doesn't really reveal anything about your genetic disposition, so it's not such a big problem. However, it's not clear if DNA fingerprinting is as resistant to collisions as it is generally perceived to be. It's fine if you match one sample against a few hundred suspects connected with the case; it's very unlikely that there is a false positive. But if you match thousands of samples a day against a database of millions of completely unrelated DNA fingerprinters, the odds of a false positive increase significantly.
If they aren't already logging who was using what IP at what time, they'll probably get boned by law enforcement when one of their customers does something illegal and the ISP can't help them track the criminal;p
Europe currently lacks mandatory data rentention. On the contrary, many countries prohibit telcos from retaining call data records and the like for more than just a few months. As a result, ISPs can safely claim they do not collect that data. Currently, they simply don't have to.
Slashdot Mirror
It clearly states that you will allow the program to monitor your internet usage in exchange for the free antivirus software.
"Monitor your Internet usage" sounds a bit too harmless. Among other things, they eavesdrop on your online banking sessions (including your authentication credentials) and analyze your financial transactions. Consequently, quite a few banks filter access from the MarketScore SSL proxies (yes, they carry out a MITM attack on SSL, by installing new root certificates). However, this provides only limited protection to customers because MarketScore can switch to more stealthy eavesdropping schemes.
The secret is out...no one can gain by covering up the problem...no one, that is, but the people perpetrating the click fraud.
Not true. If you've got a solution for click fraud, you should keep it to yourself because it enables you to give better service to your customers, especially better than the competition who doesn't know of your discovery.
Have a look at spam filter heuristics for some inspiration. The most effective ones are not widely published, and thus not widely used. I don't think this is a coincidence.
Security through obscurity doesn't work in cryptography. A competitive edge through trade secrets is not completely unheard of. In the end economics win, and not cryptography.
If you need a very fast database (even for random access), another option would be a solid-state disk. Of course, they aren't exactly cheap, either.
I really like the specs on the Tyan S4882. Quad Opteron, 32GB RAM, and lots of stuff you probably don't want/need. It's a sweet motherboard, nonetheless.
I doubt it's really overkill. To reach the 32 GB, you must use 4 Opteron CPUs because you can't get a board/CPU combination which supports more than 8 GB per CPU.
Get a Sun. You can get very large memory systems. You can go up to 192 gigs of memory.
192 GB is no longer very large nowadays, and Sun indeed offers systems with larger per-node memory sizes. The price tag is hefty, of course, but so is anything which goes beyond 32 GB (maybe even 64 GB).
Like a mobile?
Maybe this interface is perceived as new in the U.S. because text messaging using mobile phones is rather esoteric, and not as widespread as in other countries?
Being Linus works for OSDL, that pretty much means BitKeeper has to go or Linu[s] has to leave OSDL. It is the same case for Andrew Morton. I think Linu[s] prefers to drop Bitkeeper.
And this surprises me most. I would have expected OSDL to fire Tridge and solve the problem the easy way. They didn't do this, probably because they don't view their employees as slaves (something Larry can't understand, apparently).
Apparently not. The press release states that they provide ABI compatiblity using special shared libraries ("[...] compatibility is implemented through the use of dynamically linked shared libraries[...]", similar to WINE). Maybe they have ported GNU libc to LynxOS and use some free software. But apparently, no Linux kernel code is involved.
What's worse, distributing bootlegs is not really consistent with the myth that music swappers care about artists and just hate the recording industry. I can understand the latter, but recording and even distributing something an artist has created only for the moment of a live performance is not just illegal under current copyright laws, it's also morally wrong.
The current mess is understandable from a company perspective. You don't want to give free tools to someone who develops a replacement of these tools. Even if the person in question does it in his or her spare time. Companies tend to think that they own everything their employees do, so no problem here.
However, I'm sure one of the leading kernel developers will claim in a future interview that the new kernel SCM tool is "far more usable" than Bitkeeper. This may take a year or two, and it might be a very subjective statement, but it could create a marketing problem for Bitmover.
Subversion is not an obvious choice because it requires a completely different development model. This is not necessarily a bad thing (the current model has to be a bit flawed because it fails to deliver kernels that can be used by end users), but I doubt that the developers are ready for such a move.
FWIW, Japan is in the process of switching from trial decided by judges to trials decided by juries.
Interesting. Japan has (for a democracy) rather unique problems with its justice system, though, so a radical change could actually result in an improvement.
Or do you not consider Japan "civilized?"
Believe it or not, I still consider the U.S. part of the civilized world.
Cycorp is not a poorly funded idea in the wrong direction.
It's certainly not poorly funded. Whether it's adequately funded, or on the right track, is a different question, of course.
Cycorp chose a different tack; they decided that rather than trying to build a reality and correctness filter, they'd rely on human brains to do it for them (like trusting your parents implictly) and instead concentrated on the connectivity of the 'facts' accrued by the 'baby.'
A decade ago, they still hoped that once they had manually laid the groundwork, the system would bootstrap itself, reading newspapers and so on. Bootstrapping was expected to start in the late 90s, like commercial adaption (integration into Windows, for example). It seems that neither has happened, at least in the predicted scale. Cyc may not be a failure (it's hard to tell, because a lot of it is a trade secret), but it couldn't reach its ambitious goals.
Jury duty is pretty much compulsory. Unless you can give the judge and attorneys good reason to drop you, make them think you are biased for or against the plaintiff, or convince them you are fricken insane you have to attend.
Uh-oh, then I prefer publication bans to sequestration.
We have hobbyist judges in Germany, too, but as judges, they can ask questions, and this tends to cause problems. At least there's an easy way to be dismissed: just refer to the defendant as "perpretator" or "offender", showing your bias. Unfortunately, too many hobbyist do this unintentionally (which quite understandable).
Because we all know that there is no such thing as a corrupt judge. It's a lot harder to buy off 12 people, vs. 1.
In other jurisdiction, significant crimes deserve multiple judges. And both the prosectution and the defendant can appeal. This is rather expensive for the public, and I hope we can continue to afford it, at least for serious crime (it helps if you have less, of course).
In the US, the latter would be an unconstitutional prior restraint on speech, not to mention completely impossible to enforce.
Doesn't the US deal with this problem by holding jury members in relative captivity, without access to mainstream media? This is barely acceptable either, and only if jury membership is truly voluntary. Nevertheless, it results in biased juries.
Are you seriously suggesting that the jury system should be abolished? What do you suggest it be replaced with?
Guilt should be determined by professionals, i.e. judges, as in most parts of the civilized world. Professionals are less likely to be affected by their personal grudges and media campaigns.
Canada takes quite seriously the concept of making sure that suspects receive a fair trial.
But apparently they don't go far enough. They clearly see that the jury system has significant problems, but yet they resort to workarounds which are less and less effective, instead of abolishing it.
No, it's the "intelligent design" argument, but I see your point. Fortunately, intelligent design is not an empiric theory, and darwinism is rather close to one (the precambrian rabbit etc.). To me, the intelligent design folks seem to criticize darwinism because it lacks the reproducibility of an empiric theory, but go ahead and replace it with something that is purely metaphysical. This is inconsistent, and it's also the only argument against intelligent design. You cannot argue based on facts, because a metaphysical theory is not really concerned with (or affected by) facts.
From the paper's summary:
Event horizons and closed time-like curves cannot exist in the real world for the simple reason that they are inconsistent with quantum mechanics.
And photons do not exist because they contradict the double-slit experiment? Give me a break. It doesn't make sense to proclaim that something does not exist because it contradicts an established theory, especially if there is quite a bit of evidence that it's actually there. It's the other way round: If such a thing exists, the theory needs fixing (and not just in an ad-hoc manner).
Apparently, the author makes some claims with respect to the observable behavior of "dark energy stars" which differ from black holes, so his theory could be empirical after all, but the quoted paper does not rigorously derive these properties.
Read the only version at Signposts in Cyberspace. There's an interesting section on Verisign's Site Finder service.
As far as I know pretty much every other TLD follows ICANN rules and procedures here. Why should .us be special?
.US and ICANN on the ICANN website, which could mean that there is none, and .US is still an independent ccTLD.
Many of the ccTLDs are older than ICANN and thus not subject to ICANN regulations. I couldn't find a contract between
It's been reported on a mailing list that the article is actually about FairUCE, which implements something completely different which makes at least some sense (for scoring, not for outright blocking).
Usually just being arrested means that you will be fingerprinted and your picture taken. Isn't this pretty much the same thing?
It depends. A regular DNA fingerprint doesn't really reveal anything about your genetic disposition, so it's not such a big problem. However, it's not clear if DNA fingerprinting is as resistant to collisions as it is generally perceived to be. It's fine if you match one sample against a few hundred suspects connected with the case; it's very unlikely that there is a false positive. But if you match thousands of samples a day against a database of millions of completely unrelated DNA fingerprinters, the odds of a false positive increase significantly.
If they aren't already logging who was using what IP at what time, they'll probably get boned by law enforcement when one of their customers does something illegal and the ISP can't help them track the criminal ;p
Europe currently lacks mandatory data rentention. On the contrary, many countries prohibit telcos from retaining call data records and the like for more than just a few months. As a result, ISPs can safely claim they do not collect that data. Currently, they simply don't have to.