I would say that indicates that filters are losing the war on spam, because the spammers just find new ways around them.
Spammers "just" find new ways around them about as easily as spam filters "just" adapt to new forms of spam. You can't consider one to be an insurmountable task that indicates failure while the other is an easy way of mitigating the progress of the other side. You are applying a double-standard here. Both pose problems for the other side and both can be adapted to.
Your filters do nothing to remove the incentive.
My filters? I don't come up with my own filters, I use common anti-spam filters that are used by many people, including ISPs. For instance, I'm a web developer and I provide mail service to my clients. All the spam that is filtered out on behalf of my clients is spam that my clients could have bought from. The incentive is diminished by every spam that could have made it to a willing recipient but did not.
One could even argue that filters add incentive to spammers, because they know that there are plenty of joe users with machines that have simple geek-squad-installed spam filtering, who just might be willing suckers if the spam can get through.
This makes no sense. Without the filters, they would still be willing suckers.
Hence, filtering does nothing to stop the problem.
Problem: My email is unusable because legitimate mail comprises 1% of my incoming mail. I use a filter. My email is now usable. The problem is stopped.
Sure, there's a larger problem of how to stop the spam from being sent in the first place, but that doesn't mean that spam filters don't solve problems in a very real way.
Just because you can hide from spam, and turn your back to it for a few weeks until the spammers find a way past your newest algorithm doesn't mean that you're winning at all.
Have you ever maintained a mail server? While spam filters do have to be upgraded every so often, it's not a case of turning your back for a few weeks and then disaster strikes as all the spammers in the world find a new technique and implement it together. Unmaintained filters slowly become less effective over time, but things like sa-update etc mitigate this and the problem is not at all how you characterise it.
Indeed, we're all losing because the spammers are still making enough money to pay for registration and hosting costs.
Our disagreement is that you define anything other than bankrupt spammers as a total failure, while I think that there are lots of problems that can be solved that make things better for users and worse for spammers. I don't think solving those problems is "losing".
I'm frankly rather baffled at the lengths that people will go to in order to try to {filter / reject / stop transmission of} spam. We've already seen for years that such efforts are futile, because the same spammers will just adapt and find a way to pump out their crap anyways.
I receive approximately one spam email every 45 seconds. Constantly. Without spam filtering, I would go to bed with an empty inbox and wake up to 500 spam emails. Spam filtering, far from being futile, is the only thing that makes email usable for me. Without spam filtering, I would simply have to give up on email.
Can it stop all spam? No. Do filters have to adapt? Yes. But that hardly means that filtering is futile, it just means that it's not as easy as we'd all like it to be.
It seems to be greylisting, except instead of rejecting the message during delivery and relying on standard SMTP features, he wants to accept the message, send a bounce, have the other party install software to automatically re-send the message upon receipt of the bounce, and then add the sender's mail server to a whitelist the second time the email comes through. Awful idea for all different kinds of reasons.
If the logic and relevant facts are preserved, then it's an entirely valid approach. My point is that the idea that you can protect freedom by restricting freedom isn't as absurd as heinousjay made out. My evidence of that is law that it's reasonable to assume heinousjay agrees with.
Look at the context. I'm not talking about justification of law, I'm talking about the nature of law. Can you name a single law that doesn't restrict freedom? Or do you accept that all law restricts freedom in some way?
I'm not sure if you are being sarcastic or not, but if you are, then please be aware that taking freedoms away to protect other freedoms is the basis of all law. You aren't free to hit me because you've had that freedom taken away from you.
Unless you are an anarchist, you really have no basis for criticising the GPL in this regard, because you agree with this logic applied to different areas.
How is this information not necessary for a robust autoupdating/autonotifying infrastructure?
The argument is not that the information is unnecessary for an autoupdate/autonotify feature. The argument is that people should be able to easily opt-out from this feature. Having said that, the contents of $_SERVER seem unnecessary. That can leak things like usernames and paths.
Since so much incompatibility may be caused by funky $_SERVER variables, you need to know their contents.
Why does anybody other than the owner of the weblog need to know this?
Windows Update has to send far MORE intrusive information.
Firstly, if you are differing content based upon the User-Agent header, you are doing it wrong. The User-Agent header was intended for bug workarounds, not feature queries. If you want to know if a browser supports a particular document type, you use the Accept header.
Secondly, another person posted that they block the Accept header. That's a real problem.
Thirdly, proxies that alter content are nothing new. There is an HTTP header that allows authors to mark content that should not be altered by proxies. It is Cache-Control: no-transform. Hardly anybody has heard of it, so I doubt Vodafone respects it, but if they do, then nobody should be complaining. Just use that to stop them messing with it. If they don't support it, then complain and ask them to add support.
If even Google, a very reactive company when web security matters
Google are among the worst when it comes to being reactive. Example:
For over two years Google has had an script insertion flaw, I reported it two years ago, and again a couple of months ago, but still it's not been fixed.
Are you advocating that each customer gets to outline their game, and the developer will design and code it, along with all artwork, sounds, etc? I suppose people might pay $100,000 for a game, but I'm pretty sure they'd rather pay just $20. I can't afford to pay for a year's worth of coding, art and sound design just to play some bespoke FPS or car game.
No, he's advocating a business model based on making games for money. The business model cliffski and most game developers use is based on manufacturing copies of games for money.
Just because you are paid to create a game, it doesn't mean that you can only have one customer and that customer tells you what to do. There are other business models. Look at the Street Performer Protocol for instance. Create your game, release it into the public domain when you've made a profit.
That's what copyright is. It's not a natural right. The state takes away the right to copy from everybody else in order to give you a monopoly, an incentive to create. That grant of exclusivity, at society's expense, is the subsidy. Your monopoly is paid for with the freedom of everybody else. Just because your benefit isn't paid by cheque it doesn't mean you aren't being subsidised.
If I make a product people like, I deserve to do well, and will stay in business. This is called capitalism.
To be more accurate: "If I make a product people like and the government protects me from competition, I will stay in business." This is not capitalism.
To suggest that preventing people taking luxury good like PC games from their creators without payment is somehow an evil government subsidy is just nonsense.
I never said the subsidy is evil. I'm merely pointing out that if anybody is the communist here, it's you. You seem to equate communism with being evil (hence your attempt to tar anti-copyright people with that brush), but not everybody thinks that way.
What job do you do that is still viable if the consumer takes the product for free?
I'm a web developer. I write code for a living, just like you.
Unless you are an anarchist / communist who believes copyright should be abolished
It looks like you are using loaded language in a pejorative way, and inaccurately too.
If anything is "communist" in the copyright debate, it's the idea that the rest of society should have their freedom restricted in order to subsidise your game development. State-granted monopolies are not a normal feature of capitalism.
Most reasonable people who find that they agree that 99% of DMCA takedowns are entirely justified.
Which hasn't got anything to do with the parent comment or the subject of the article, which is the anti-circumvention part of the DMCA, not the takedown part of the DMCA.
There is much more to code efficiency than a freshman C class.
Oh of course, because if I'm disagreeing with you, then clearly I must be an idiot, right? Please debate in good faith instead of throwing snarky ad hominems at me.
You would pretty much have to fork the survive function to handle both configurations reasonably.
If the survive function was significantly different depending on the #if, then its definition should also be #ifed. Which, again, results in no runtime bloat.
Putting a bunch of #if 0's into complex, bloated code doesn't make it slim and efficient.
#ifs are preprocessor directives. They are evaluated at compile-time and have absolutely no effect on efficiency when the kernel is running. Sorry, but you're going to have to look elsewhere for your "bloat".
Surprise surprise, a European court decided to rob an American company of half a billion dollars
Surprise surprise, a European court punished a company for breaking the law. Don't blame the EU for not slapping them on the wrist like the USA did. Perhaps if the USA enforced its own laws properly then it wouldn't have been necessary for the EU to pursue this case.
I don't know where "beats Microsoft over the head" comes in.
That's because the submitter completely forgot to mention the connection they were making here. Normally you'd expect the editor to... well edit submissions so that they make sense, but this is Slashdot, where apparently 'Editor' is the job title for monkeys who hit the 'Approve' button occasionally.
Anyway, I assume that the connection here is that a lot of the FUD being thrown at the OpenDocument Format is that Microsoft Office is nicer than OpenOffice when it comes to accessibility features. While that's true, it's got nothing to do with the document format and everything to do with particular implementations. In any case, IBM improving OpenOffice in this way makes the FUD go away (at least in theory). Thus Microsoft's work in this area is harming their own ability to unfairly criticise ODF.
Seeing as "Our team is familiar with..." plays no part in this decision whatsoever, I'd say that we are dealing with kids writing Their First Site. Or, looking at the peculiar phrasing and noting the date, kids who have just received their first homework assignment for a project that requires them to submit a plan first.
he learned from it and I doubt he will do it again.
That's not what it looks like to me at all. He started off by wanting people to justify why they wanted to see the site rather than trying to justify why he should be blocking it. He then wrote off the people complaining as sock puppets for the site owner and moaned that they were "making a fuss". Then when people continued to complain, he removed it "for now", and "reserved the right to reinstate".
I think the most accurate part of the thread was this: "Just for the record, I'm not out for some kind of p*ssing contest here with him. All I want to do is block & go." He thought that he could just impose his views on his users without anybody realising or putting up a fight. When he realised that he couldn't get away with it, people complained to him until he eventually backed down. I don't think he's changed his mind at all, I think he's just reverted it because he's embarrassed and doesn't want to deal with the complaints.
It's not only the fact that he did it once, it's the way he dealt with the complaints that makes me think that a month down the line, some other site he doesn't like (or this one again) will be sneaked into the filter.
Yes. The maintainer of one of the popular Adblock Plus filter lists actually added this site to their filter list because it bad-mouthed Adblock Plus and he felt insulted.
If you're using the EasyList filter with Adblock Plus, you should be aware that it has crossed the line from blocking adverts to censorware. I don't think that's a good thing, no matter how dumb the opinions being silenced might be.
I haven't gotten into the depths of the HTML 5 spec. but AFAIK it hasn't actually changed from previous versions of HTML at a practical level.
You could characterise the differences between HTML and HTML 5 as nit picking, but if you were totally fair, you'd have to characterise the differences between HTML and XHTML served as text/html as nit picking too, and nobody wants to do that. On a practical level, the differences cause problems in edge cases. But there's a double standard involved because XHTML isn't trendy any more, so people only want to see the bad in XHTML and the good in HTML 5. I mean, HTML 5 and XHTML both have similar subtle syntax differences compared with HTML, but one of the editors of the HTML 5 specification that condones subtle syntax differences is also the author of the XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful essay where he tells everybody that the subtle syntax details are enough to avoid using XHTML as text/html!
All that's really happening I believe is that they're officially specifying the behaviour that every browser already uses. Bascially they're retconning HTML parsing to make every implementation correct instead of trying to get browsers to change.
So basically it's HTML 3.2 all over again and they are just rubber-stamping a mess.
I wouldn't. Have you noticed that practically everybody using a custom page layout on MySpace uses a tool to do it? Jane Random Teen isn't writing HTML by hand. If any tool like that produced errors, people would simply use one that didn't.
Not writing by hand, but from what I've seen (admittedly not a great deal) they do often copy and paste peices of HTML from multiple sources which can very easily lead to nesting issues under XML variants.
You seem to be confusing validity and well-formedness. Copy and pasting code into places where it shouldn't be causes validity errors. XML parsers are only required to throw a fatal error when they encounter a document that is not well-formed. But even so, my point still stands: if somebody is supplying code that breaks their MySpace layouts, they will copy and paste from a source that doesn't supply broken code. I don't know why people are so intent on pretending people won't react to these errors and just blindly use code that gives them errors. It's a common attitude, but seems to bear no resemblance to reality. People are usually rational. If something is obviously broken to the point of complete lack of functionality, they won't use it.
HTML's forgiveness isn't cumulative in most cases though. Generally speaking if you can get away with something once you can get away with it a thousand times and never experience an actual break.
Have you ever actually seen a newbie write code? I've seen professional web designers write tables nested a dozen levels deep before getting to a point where something is broken and they have no idea what or how to fix it. Throwing newbies into that sort of environment is not a good way for them to learn.
You can't really keep twisting more and more because you're not technically doing anything wrong, just being a bit scrappy at worst.
Where does this myth come from that you can do pretty much whatever you like in HTML and it's not technically wrong? HTML isn't that lax, it's got fairly strict syntax rules. It's typical browser error handling that's lax. Once you reach that point, you are definitely "technically doing something wrong".
If you do something truly wrong then odds are it will show in the rendering and can be fixed from there.
No, this is simply not the case. Browsers have well over a decade of kludges built i
"&" outside an entity is wrong, but almost normal.
This is not true. Ampersands are not parsed as entity references in HTML unless they are followed by a letter or '#' and a number.
It would be helpful if we could at least insist that pages parse correctly into a tree.
You're missing the point I was making. HTML does insist that pages parse into a tree. If they don't parse into a tree, then they aren't HTML and it is an error condition.
You're saying that it would be useful to force mandatory error handling rather than letting user-agents attempt to work around errors, and I agree, but that doesn't change the fact that HTML's parsing rules are as unambiguous as XHTML's.
Slashdot Mirror
Spammers "just" find new ways around them about as easily as spam filters "just" adapt to new forms of spam. You can't consider one to be an insurmountable task that indicates failure while the other is an easy way of mitigating the progress of the other side. You are applying a double-standard here. Both pose problems for the other side and both can be adapted to.
My filters? I don't come up with my own filters, I use common anti-spam filters that are used by many people, including ISPs. For instance, I'm a web developer and I provide mail service to my clients. All the spam that is filtered out on behalf of my clients is spam that my clients could have bought from. The incentive is diminished by every spam that could have made it to a willing recipient but did not.
This makes no sense. Without the filters, they would still be willing suckers.
Problem: My email is unusable because legitimate mail comprises 1% of my incoming mail. I use a filter. My email is now usable. The problem is stopped.
Sure, there's a larger problem of how to stop the spam from being sent in the first place, but that doesn't mean that spam filters don't solve problems in a very real way.
Have you ever maintained a mail server? While spam filters do have to be upgraded every so often, it's not a case of turning your back for a few weeks and then disaster strikes as all the spammers in the world find a new technique and implement it together. Unmaintained filters slowly become less effective over time, but things like sa-update etc mitigate this and the problem is not at all how you characterise it.
Our disagreement is that you define anything other than bankrupt spammers as a total failure, while I think that there are lots of problems that can be solved that make things better for users and worse for spammers. I don't think solving those problems is "losing".
I receive approximately one spam email every 45 seconds. Constantly. Without spam filtering, I would go to bed with an empty inbox and wake up to 500 spam emails. Spam filtering, far from being futile, is the only thing that makes email usable for me. Without spam filtering, I would simply have to give up on email.
Can it stop all spam? No. Do filters have to adapt? Yes. But that hardly means that filtering is futile, it just means that it's not as easy as we'd all like it to be.
It seems to be greylisting, except instead of rejecting the message during delivery and relying on standard SMTP features, he wants to accept the message, send a bounce, have the other party install software to automatically re-send the message upon receipt of the bounce, and then add the sender's mail server to a whitelist the second time the email comes through. Awful idea for all different kinds of reasons.
If the logic and relevant facts are preserved, then it's an entirely valid approach. My point is that the idea that you can protect freedom by restricting freedom isn't as absurd as heinousjay made out. My evidence of that is law that it's reasonable to assume heinousjay agrees with.
Look at the context. I'm not talking about justification of law, I'm talking about the nature of law. Can you name a single law that doesn't restrict freedom? Or do you accept that all law restricts freedom in some way?
I'm not sure if you are being sarcastic or not, but if you are, then please be aware that taking freedoms away to protect other freedoms is the basis of all law. You aren't free to hit me because you've had that freedom taken away from you.
Unless you are an anarchist, you really have no basis for criticising the GPL in this regard, because you agree with this logic applied to different areas.
The argument is not that the information is unnecessary for an autoupdate/autonotify feature. The argument is that people should be able to easily opt-out from this feature. Having said that, the contents of $_SERVER seem unnecessary. That can leak things like usernames and paths.
Why does anybody other than the owner of the weblog need to know this?
You can opt-out of Windows Update.
Firstly, if you are differing content based upon the User-Agent header, you are doing it wrong. The User-Agent header was intended for bug workarounds, not feature queries. If you want to know if a browser supports a particular document type, you use the Accept header.
Secondly, another person posted that they block the Accept header. That's a real problem.
Thirdly, proxies that alter content are nothing new. There is an HTTP header that allows authors to mark content that should not be altered by proxies. It is Cache-Control: no-transform. Hardly anybody has heard of it, so I doubt Vodafone respects it, but if they do, then nobody should be complaining. Just use that to stop them messing with it. If they don't support it, then complain and ask them to add support.
Google are among the worst when it comes to being reactive. Example:
No, he's advocating a business model based on making games for money. The business model cliffski and most game developers use is based on manufacturing copies of games for money.
Just because you are paid to create a game, it doesn't mean that you can only have one customer and that customer tells you what to do. There are other business models. Look at the Street Performer Protocol for instance. Create your game, release it into the public domain when you've made a profit.
That's what copyright is. It's not a natural right. The state takes away the right to copy from everybody else in order to give you a monopoly, an incentive to create. That grant of exclusivity, at society's expense, is the subsidy. Your monopoly is paid for with the freedom of everybody else. Just because your benefit isn't paid by cheque it doesn't mean you aren't being subsidised.
To be more accurate: "If I make a product people like and the government protects me from competition, I will stay in business." This is not capitalism.
I never said the subsidy is evil. I'm merely pointing out that if anybody is the communist here, it's you. You seem to equate communism with being evil (hence your attempt to tar anti-copyright people with that brush), but not everybody thinks that way.
I'm a web developer. I write code for a living, just like you.
It looks like you are using loaded language in a pejorative way, and inaccurately too.
If anything is "communist" in the copyright debate, it's the idea that the rest of society should have their freedom restricted in order to subsidise your game development. State-granted monopolies are not a normal feature of capitalism.
Which hasn't got anything to do with the parent comment or the subject of the article, which is the anti-circumvention part of the DMCA, not the takedown part of the DMCA.
Oh of course, because if I'm disagreeing with you, then clearly I must be an idiot, right? Please debate in good faith instead of throwing snarky ad hominems at me.
If the survive function was significantly different depending on the #if, then its definition should also be #ifed. Which, again, results in no runtime bloat.
#ifs are preprocessor directives. They are evaluated at compile-time and have absolutely no effect on efficiency when the kernel is running. Sorry, but you're going to have to look elsewhere for your "bloat".
Okay, so somebody made a stupid blog post. Why submit it to Slashdot?
60% of the world's population is Asian. For any given strange occurrence, odds are it happened to an Asian, by weight of numbers alone.
Not to mention the fact that sniffing is a constant problem.
Surprise surprise, a European court punished a company for breaking the law. Don't blame the EU for not slapping them on the wrist like the USA did. Perhaps if the USA enforced its own laws properly then it wouldn't have been necessary for the EU to pursue this case.
That's because the submitter completely forgot to mention the connection they were making here. Normally you'd expect the editor to... well edit submissions so that they make sense, but this is Slashdot, where apparently 'Editor' is the job title for monkeys who hit the 'Approve' button occasionally.
Anyway, I assume that the connection here is that a lot of the FUD being thrown at the OpenDocument Format is that Microsoft Office is nicer than OpenOffice when it comes to accessibility features. While that's true, it's got nothing to do with the document format and everything to do with particular implementations. In any case, IBM improving OpenOffice in this way makes the FUD go away (at least in theory). Thus Microsoft's work in this area is harming their own ability to unfairly criticise ODF.
Seeing as "Our team is familiar with..." plays no part in this decision whatsoever, I'd say that we are dealing with kids writing Their First Site. Or, looking at the peculiar phrasing and noting the date, kids who have just received their first homework assignment for a project that requires them to submit a plan first.
That's not what it looks like to me at all. He started off by wanting people to justify why they wanted to see the site rather than trying to justify why he should be blocking it. He then wrote off the people complaining as sock puppets for the site owner and moaned that they were "making a fuss". Then when people continued to complain, he removed it "for now", and "reserved the right to reinstate".
I think the most accurate part of the thread was this: "Just for the record, I'm not out for some kind of p*ssing contest here with him. All I want to do is block & go." He thought that he could just impose his views on his users without anybody realising or putting up a fight. When he realised that he couldn't get away with it, people complained to him until he eventually backed down. I don't think he's changed his mind at all, I think he's just reverted it because he's embarrassed and doesn't want to deal with the complaints.
It's not only the fact that he did it once, it's the way he dealt with the complaints that makes me think that a month down the line, some other site he doesn't like (or this one again) will be sneaked into the filter.
Yes. The maintainer of one of the popular Adblock Plus filter lists actually added this site to their filter list because it bad-mouthed Adblock Plus and he felt insulted.
If you're using the EasyList filter with Adblock Plus, you should be aware that it has crossed the line from blocking adverts to censorware. I don't think that's a good thing, no matter how dumb the opinions being silenced might be.
You could characterise the differences between HTML and HTML 5 as nit picking, but if you were totally fair, you'd have to characterise the differences between HTML and XHTML served as text/html as nit picking too, and nobody wants to do that. On a practical level, the differences cause problems in edge cases. But there's a double standard involved because XHTML isn't trendy any more, so people only want to see the bad in XHTML and the good in HTML 5. I mean, HTML 5 and XHTML both have similar subtle syntax differences compared with HTML, but one of the editors of the HTML 5 specification that condones subtle syntax differences is also the author of the XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful essay where he tells everybody that the subtle syntax details are enough to avoid using XHTML as text/html!
So basically it's HTML 3.2 all over again and they are just rubber-stamping a mess.
You seem to be confusing validity and well-formedness. Copy and pasting code into places where it shouldn't be causes validity errors. XML parsers are only required to throw a fatal error when they encounter a document that is not well-formed. But even so, my point still stands: if somebody is supplying code that breaks their MySpace layouts, they will copy and paste from a source that doesn't supply broken code. I don't know why people are so intent on pretending people won't react to these errors and just blindly use code that gives them errors. It's a common attitude, but seems to bear no resemblance to reality. People are usually rational. If something is obviously broken to the point of complete lack of functionality, they won't use it.
Have you ever actually seen a newbie write code? I've seen professional web designers write tables nested a dozen levels deep before getting to a point where something is broken and they have no idea what or how to fix it. Throwing newbies into that sort of environment is not a good way for them to learn.
Where does this myth come from that you can do pretty much whatever you like in HTML and it's not technically wrong? HTML isn't that lax, it's got fairly strict syntax rules. It's typical browser error handling that's lax. Once you reach that point, you are definitely "technically doing something wrong".
No, this is simply not the case. Browsers have well over a decade of kludges built i
This is not true. Ampersands are not parsed as entity references in HTML unless they are followed by a letter or '#' and a number.
You're missing the point I was making. HTML does insist that pages parse into a tree. If they don't parse into a tree, then they aren't HTML and it is an error condition.
You're saying that it would be useful to force mandatory error handling rather than letting user-agents attempt to work around errors, and I agree, but that doesn't change the fact that HTML's parsing rules are as unambiguous as XHTML's.
This has always been part of HTML, but is being dropped from HTML 5 because no major browser ever implemented it.