Everybody knows that government is important, and necessary to provide services that people themselves are too stupid to provide.
Actually, our government is there to provide for common services that no individual, group, of individuals, city, or state can provide. I certainly can't defend the United States against a terrorist attack or attack by missiles from North Korea by myself. I've entrusted the Federal Government to provide for my defense, to hopefully provide some kind of retirement if I can't doit for myself, and to make sure the infrastructure of this country operates so that I can go about my daily tasks without having to worry if there will be roads, electricity, etc.
That said, the current structure of our Federal government is inadequate to the task. It's not about what's good for all Americans, but what's good for legislators and their cronies, on both sides of the aisle. Our Founding Fathers had the right idea, but they could not forsee the changes that would take place in technology and culture all over the world. But they did leave us an out: the ability to change and amend the Constitution to take into account these changes. I've said it for many years now: what this country needs is a Constitutional Convention, to bring the Constitution more up-to-date and to iron out inequities in the system.
I have a friend who is very much anti-Bush. This is a man who sees real reasons to mistrust Bush. He is suspicious of our president on every count. This is a good thing. I think Bush has shown himself untrustworthy in many areas. Yet this same friend wants to give over his family's health care into his (and his cronies') hands. He wants to give this government control over who gets to do business with him and how they do business. I just don't get it.
But you can extend such arguments back to any President you choose. Would we have had a 9/11 if Clinton had actually ordered the missile strike on Bin Laden, instead of being overly concerned about the political repercussions in the middle of the Lewinsky scandal? Just how much did Reagan know about selling arms to the Contra Rebels? Why did Kennedy feel compelled to launch the Bay of Pigs invasion when it would have been easier to simply bide his time and have Castro assassinated?
No President can be trusted wholly, even if everybody voted for him. Same holds for Congress. The power that these people get exposed to is intoxicating. When you sit at the highest peak, and the functioning of the country turns on the decisions you make, how hard is it to resist the urge to put your own personal predilections into play and shape the country as you see fit? Pretty hard, I imagine. It was just this kind of thing George Washington feared when he stepped down as President.
Yes, yes it is. Oh, do you mean legal according to their laws, or legal according to ours?
Well, according to our laws it is, but let's face it: what country is actually going to invite our spying on them? Francis Gary Powers didn't actually get a warm reception when the Soviet Union shot down his U-2. We can justify spying in terms of our security, but no other country will gladly hand over its secrets for our perusal, even they do the same thing to us and are quite unapologetic. The point I was trying to make is that the US Government routinely violates laws, whether our own or those ofother countries, and it's the height of hubris to think they're simply going to stop, even when something like this is exposed. When you think about it, if they wanted to protect our security, they's be shutting these brokers down, as they could sell the information to anyone, even terrorists (though it would be of dubious value to them).
This is a good example of the real problem. The government is spending money buying records when they know EXACTLY where the criminals are. Why don't they spend the $30Million cleaning up the areas of DC and Baltimore that the the police are afraid to go into.
Because then they would be doing someone else's job. It's up the police departments of Baltimore and Washington, D.C. to clean up crime on their streets. If they need more money, they need to petition their local governments for more and then the local government will go to Capitol Hill to try and get Federal funds. The sad part is, Congress has oversight of Washington, D.C.'s budget and they have been short-changing them for years.
This all comes down to what you are scared of and who you trust.
Scared of: unfettered Government, people with criminal intent, and the day there's a knock on my door and they tell me that because one of my genes is linked to future terorist behavior, I'm being preventatively detained.
Who I trust: Myself, my wife, the most immediate members of my family, my best friend and his family and nobody else I don't know inside and out.
Most people cannot handle freedom and they want someone else to tell then what they can and cannot do. We need to fix the people more than we need to fix the government.
I agree. I'm suggesting we "fix" anybody with an IQ lower than 100. Letting them breed is a bad idea.
People are people; many have more than a few brain cells to rub together, they just haven't been trained to use them. That is indeed the fault of the educational system, which is run by the states (bad idea) and has no cohesion or standardization. We're spending so much time on helping children develop their feelings, that while they are very in touch with themselves, they haven't got the common sense of a kangaroo rat. They do stupid things like believe the guy on the other end of the IM "wants to be their friend"; then they grow up and believe "the government is only doing its job."
THe solution is simple: Americans need to take back their government, put people in positions of authority with some common sense and foresight, and teach kids to read, write, do math and take responsibility for themselves and their actions.
Numerous federal and local law enforcement agencies have bypassed subpoenas and warrants designed to protect civil liberties and gathered Americans' personal telephone records from private-sector data brokers.
These brokers, many of whom advertise aggressively on the Internet, have gotten into customer accounts online, tricked phone companies into revealing information and even acknowledged that their practices violate laws, according to documents gathered by congressional investigators and provided to The Associated Press.
So, the US Government, which tells us it is trying to protect us, is doing it by buying illegal records. What else is new?
When it comes to security, any kind of security, it's a black ops world. The Federal Government is not going to have any qualms about getting what it wants, precisely because it wields so much unfettered power. While we elect our President and Congressional Representatives, once we do, we tend to let them go their own way and the average American doesn't apply much oversight to them, unless they've done something blatantly wrong, and even then people don't always react appropriately.
So here's the Government, telling us it needs our phone records and plenty of people are like "oh sure, if it's for security reasons," little realizing that it doesn't matter if they give their ok or not -- the Feds will get the data, even if from admittedly illegal sources. Come on -- do you think spying on another country is "legal?"
Of course now someone is going to decide to sue the government, taking them to task for dealing with these brokers. There will be Congressional hearings on the matter, a lot of harrumphing, and in the meantime, the Government will simply find another way to get the data it wants.
You hear that America! Now China is about to outdo is in another category: cheating! Are we going to stand for this?!?
Precisely why do we care? Admittedly, if China's colleges and universities get filled with these industrious but otherwise dim individuals, we won't have to worry about China being a technological force to be reckoned with.
This means that spies could just design and use cameras which look non-suspicious by the sensors. And then again, what will happen when common glasses have integrated cameras in them?
Even easier: since this system will eventually work off infrared frequecise, you merely cover you lens with a substance the reflects or absorbs infrared light. Shouldn't matter to the camera and then you've neutralized the scanning portion, rendering the rest obsolete.
You write that as if it's a joke. Sub-Saharan Africa is a big emerging supplier of tech labor, in the position that India was 20 years ago. We're already seeing major efforts in Nigeria, don't think for a minute that much of the rest of Africa won't follow.
It's already well underway; I get emails from nice people in Nigeria all the time offering to share their money with me. They must be working pretty hard coding all those emails!
Now, now, he did work on DOS... admittedly after he purchased it from someone else. And he didn't so much improve it as obfuscate it, to make it look like his own work. But yes, he did program... after a fashion.
Mr Gates himself was once moved to declare Mr Ozzie "one of the top five programmers in the universe" and revealed that he and Mr Ballmer had wanted for more than a decade to persuade him to join Microsoft. To the outside world, Mr Ozzie's programming prowess is known mainly through Lotus Notes, the e-mail and collaboration software that he masterminded, which was acquired by IBM in 1995.
And we know that if BG says it, it must be true!
There's no doubt that Ozzie has some programming credit and no one will argue (I'm going out on a limb here) that Lotus Notes was genius back in the day, pre-Internet-as-we-know it. But despite his desire to streamline programs, reduce the bloat, and re-establish some respectability, he's not going to get very far. First, he'll have to lock horns with Ballmer and dodge chairs. Then he'll find that Microsoft has become so mired in its own muck that spurring the current crop of programmers who've been indoctrinated in the "Microsoft Way" will prove nigh impossible. He will also have to live in the shadow of BG, who despite the announcement, isn't really going anywhere, and will be haunting the halls of Redmond like some anti-Obi Wan.
I give him 18 months before he resigns in frustration.
I really can't take you seriously after this point. If you honestly believe this, you have not travelled enough. Our government provides the most avenues for recourse for the general citizen than any other form of government today. We have plenty of problems, (my particular beef is with the overbearing power of the oil lobby, and our completely asinine foreign policy when it comes to Israel), but we are light-years ahead of any other form of government, and really any other system in the world that I've seen. Most of the corruption in the American system is not institutional. Contrast this with the Iranian government, where until Ahmadinejad came into power, very little on the institutional level got done without bribery.
Then you missed the point of my expostulation. I personally don't believe this, but plenty of Americans do: on the one hand we're the greatest country in the world and on the other, the worst. I've travelled in Europe; I know how good I have it, but the majority of Americans have no inkling. They assume they are pawns in some kind of game and that's why voter turnout is so low here, because most people are convinced they have no say and that their vote doesn't change anything, whereas the opposite is true: by not voting, they perpetuate the system. It's a simple concept but too difficult for the average American to comprehend.
And what Microsoft is doing is bribery, though more subtle despite it's publicity. They are promising Massachusettes something for "free"; in return, they "expect" the government there to quietly kill off attempts to bring OSS/ODF to the state system. It's graft on an enourmous and completely legal scale, as Microsoft is not trying to line anyone's pockets overtly. But graft is graft. Admittedly, it's not the same as having to bribe baggage handlers to get your bags after a long flight, but no matter the scale, it's flat out wrong.
Is there some sort of filtering process during slashdot's account creation process that requires you make stupid, overzealous statements about the evils of government and politics?
No, but now that you mention it...
Look, here in the United States, those of us born, bred, and fed here look at the world in a different light. On the one hand, we are the greatest country on the planet, bar none. On the other, we have the most corrupt and contemptible form of government imagineable, where the little guy is run roughshod over by special interests and votes in Congress and for President are for sale. America has a permanent case of cognitive dissonance, the effect of which is to make us all a little loop, as well as angry and complacent at the same time.
No one here has the right to bitch about the system if they a) haven't voted at all or b) have voted the party line every time. The fact is, our Republic works best when people are voted for on their merits, not on the fact that they've held the job for 20 years already and "hey, look what I've done for you!"
As to this whole dustup between Mass. and MS, whatever happens, happens because a special interest (MS) is holding out a very large carrot, which the representatives of the government of Mass. can't afford to pass up. It has nothing to do with coporate governance, legality, the rights of the citizenry, or even what's best for anyone. It's about money. While using ODF/OSS may benefit Mass. in the long term, politicians think in the short term, and getting a whopping load of anything for "free" from MS can't be bad for the political image, can it? Especially when 80% of the population of Mass. can't tell you waht the fuss is all about in the first place!
And unfortunately, with DNS vulnerabilities being what they are, it's easy enough to spoof or move a domain from one IP to send out the spam then switch the domain somewhere else. A mail server isn't going to know that a domain has been spoofed or moved, just like the postman doesn't know you've moved unless you tell them.
SpamHaus is indeed one of the best outfits around, though I can see the poster's point if you're using one of the more unreliable services. The whole blacklist/whitelist idea is good, except where people abuse it as part of some personal vendetta or one company doesn't like another company. SpamHaus uses much better information to rot out just who is and isn't a spammer -- I'd be willing to bet their false positive rate is pretty low.
When the victim visits the page, they are presented with a message that has been 'injected' onto the genuine PayPal site that says, "Your account is currently disabled because we think it has been accessed by a third party. You will now be redirected to Resolution Center." After a short pause, the victim is then redirected to an external server, which presents a fake PayPal Member log-In page. At this crucial point, the victim may be off guard, as the paypal.com domain name and SSL certificate he saw previously are likely to make him realise he has visited the genuine PayPal web site - and why would he expect PayPal to redirect him to a fraudulent web site?
What will they think of next? I must say, I get more PayPal phishing emails than for anything else. With the profusion of them, and PayPal's constant warnings that they would never ask for such information, it's still amazing how many people will fall for this, especially as the spoofs get more slick and sophisticated.
So Ask--which used to be called Ask Jeeves but dropped Jeeves, a knowing butler, from its logo in February--is taking a different tack. It has come up with ExpertRank, an algorithm that also ranks web pages by incoming links, but is different from Google's PageRank in that it first groups, or "clusters", pages and links by theme. So instead of using a web page's overall popularity to calculate its ranking, it finds the pages that are most popular among experts on a particular subject, a method that often returns better results than Google's. Ask also uses these thematic clusters to suggest the best ways to narrow or expand a search, a feature called "zoom" that is very popular.
Which is the trouble I have with Google; their search results are like a shotgun blast too many times, getting far too wide a spread of sites having anything at all to do with the subject I type in, instead of being more narrowly focused. The problem I see with Ask's method is just how do you define who the experts are and what field they are experts in? Web sites can contain all sorts of content and people will reproduce links at a whim, just because they like what they see. Would they use a system similar to Amazon, where people are ranked by how many people use their recommendation?
It ain't GAIM that is keeping you safe, it is your brain. Trust me on this, I been around long enough to know people will do anything to get infected. Just promise them a juicy picture. We have about the same chance of stopping computer infection as we have of stepping Sexually Transmitted Diseases. When Miss Jpeg flirts with you, you don't think of using a condom. (Oh and using a condom isn't enough, deep kissing can do it too. How many of you practising safe sex make sure no fluids whatever are swapped?)
That's the point. These MSNers are getting infected because they are none too bright, though given they are MSNers, it should go without saying.
BTW, does air count as a bodily fluid? If so, everyone needs to stop breathing when they have sex.
So, two heavyweights(?) in the OSS community are going to start having a little war over what "open source" really means, eh? Must be a slow news day.
Open Source is what it is, and how "open" you want your software to be is your business. You can throw the whole thing open to anyone and let talented people take up the challenge to adapt and improve your code, or you can have one set of "open" code and one set of "closed" code, the former being available to anyone, the latter available for a price. No one is under any obligation, in either case, to use your software. If you want to charge for the "closed" version so you can actually make a living, where's the harm in that?
In an ideal world, there would be no secrets. All software would be open and free to roam the Earth. We are a far cry from an ideal world; commerce dominates and servers and bandwidth cost money. Whether your OSS is "open" or "slightly open" doesn't matter much -- if you can't scrape up the cash to keep the lights on and the servers running, it doesn't much matter how cool your software is. All I can say is, leave it alone.
Pope, speaking in bad Italian accent: Yeah, you see, it's like this Mr. Hawking... the beginning of everything... that's God's work... he wouldn't be too pleased if you found out too much about what he did... he's very private that way... he tends to get upset easily... and we wouldn't want anything to say, happen to you... you wouldn't want to end up in a wheelchair or nothin'... oh wait...
NJ; my coverage is very spotty when I'm riding the train from Trenton up to NYC for work, and my reception in NYC is good except in places like Penn Station.
Slashdot Mirror
Everybody knows that government is important, and necessary to provide services that people themselves are too stupid to provide.
Actually, our government is there to provide for common services that no individual, group, of individuals, city, or state can provide. I certainly can't defend the United States against a terrorist attack or attack by missiles from North Korea by myself. I've entrusted the Federal Government to provide for my defense, to hopefully provide some kind of retirement if I can't doit for myself, and to make sure the infrastructure of this country operates so that I can go about my daily tasks without having to worry if there will be roads, electricity, etc.
That said, the current structure of our Federal government is inadequate to the task. It's not about what's good for all Americans, but what's good for legislators and their cronies, on both sides of the aisle. Our Founding Fathers had the right idea, but they could not forsee the changes that would take place in technology and culture all over the world. But they did leave us an out: the ability to change and amend the Constitution to take into account these changes. I've said it for many years now: what this country needs is a Constitutional Convention, to bring the Constitution more up-to-date and to iron out inequities in the system.
I have a friend who is very much anti-Bush. This is a man who sees real reasons to mistrust Bush. He is suspicious of our president on every count. This is a good thing. I think Bush has shown himself untrustworthy in many areas. Yet this same friend wants to give over his family's health care into his (and his cronies') hands. He wants to give this government control over who gets to do business with him and how they do business. I just don't get it.
But you can extend such arguments back to any President you choose. Would we have had a 9/11 if Clinton had actually ordered the missile strike on Bin Laden, instead of being overly concerned about the political repercussions in the middle of the Lewinsky scandal? Just how much did Reagan know about selling arms to the Contra Rebels? Why did Kennedy feel compelled to launch the Bay of Pigs invasion when it would have been easier to simply bide his time and have Castro assassinated?
No President can be trusted wholly, even if everybody voted for him. Same holds for Congress. The power that these people get exposed to is intoxicating. When you sit at the highest peak, and the functioning of the country turns on the decisions you make, how hard is it to resist the urge to put your own personal predilections into play and shape the country as you see fit? Pretty hard, I imagine. It was just this kind of thing George Washington feared when he stepped down as President.
Yes, yes it is. Oh, do you mean legal according to their laws, or legal according to ours?
Well, according to our laws it is, but let's face it: what country is actually going to invite our spying on them? Francis Gary Powers didn't actually get a warm reception when the Soviet Union shot down his U-2. We can justify spying in terms of our security, but no other country will gladly hand over its secrets for our perusal, even they do the same thing to us and are quite unapologetic. The point I was trying to make is that the US Government routinely violates laws, whether our own or those ofother countries, and it's the height of hubris to think they're simply going to stop, even when something like this is exposed. When you think about it, if they wanted to protect our security, they's be shutting these brokers down, as they could sell the information to anyone, even terrorists (though it would be of dubious value to them).
This is a good example of the real problem. The government is spending money buying records when they know EXACTLY where the criminals are. Why don't they spend the $30Million cleaning up the areas of DC and Baltimore that the the police are afraid to go into.
Because then they would be doing someone else's job. It's up the police departments of Baltimore and Washington, D.C. to clean up crime on their streets. If they need more money, they need to petition their local governments for more and then the local government will go to Capitol Hill to try and get Federal funds. The sad part is, Congress has oversight of Washington, D.C.'s budget and they have been short-changing them for years.
This all comes down to what you are scared of and who you trust.
Scared of: unfettered Government, people with criminal intent, and the day there's a knock on my door and they tell me that because one of my genes is linked to future terorist behavior, I'm being preventatively detained.
Who I trust: Myself, my wife, the most immediate members of my family, my best friend and his family and nobody else I don't know inside and out.
Most people cannot handle freedom and they want someone else to tell then what they can and cannot do. We need to fix the people more than we need to fix the government.
I agree. I'm suggesting we "fix" anybody with an IQ lower than 100. Letting them breed is a bad idea.
People are people; many have more than a few brain cells to rub together, they just haven't been trained to use them. That is indeed the fault of the educational system, which is run by the states (bad idea) and has no cohesion or standardization. We're spending so much time on helping children develop their feelings, that while they are very in touch with themselves, they haven't got the common sense of a kangaroo rat. They do stupid things like believe the guy on the other end of the IM "wants to be their friend"; then they grow up and believe "the government is only doing its job."
THe solution is simple: Americans need to take back their government, put people in positions of authority with some common sense and foresight, and teach kids to read, write, do math and take responsibility for themselves and their actions.
Numerous federal and local law enforcement agencies have bypassed subpoenas and warrants designed to protect civil liberties and gathered Americans' personal telephone records from private-sector data brokers.
These brokers, many of whom advertise aggressively on the Internet, have gotten into customer accounts online, tricked phone companies into revealing information and even acknowledged that their practices violate laws, according to documents gathered by congressional investigators and provided to The Associated Press.
So, the US Government, which tells us it is trying to protect us, is doing it by buying illegal records. What else is new?
When it comes to security, any kind of security, it's a black ops world. The Federal Government is not going to have any qualms about getting what it wants, precisely because it wields so much unfettered power. While we elect our President and Congressional Representatives, once we do, we tend to let them go their own way and the average American doesn't apply much oversight to them, unless they've done something blatantly wrong, and even then people don't always react appropriately.
So here's the Government, telling us it needs our phone records and plenty of people are like "oh sure, if it's for security reasons," little realizing that it doesn't matter if they give their ok or not -- the Feds will get the data, even if from admittedly illegal sources. Come on -- do you think spying on another country is "legal?"
Of course now someone is going to decide to sue the government, taking them to task for dealing with these brokers. There will be Congressional hearings on the matter, a lot of harrumphing, and in the meantime, the Government will simply find another way to get the data it wants.
You hear that America! Now China is about to outdo is in another category: cheating! Are we going to stand for this?!?
Precisely why do we care? Admittedly, if China's colleges and universities get filled with these industrious but otherwise dim individuals, we won't have to worry about China being a technological force to be reckoned with.
This means that spies could just design and use cameras which look non-suspicious by the sensors. And then again, what will happen when common glasses have integrated cameras in them?
Even easier: since this system will eventually work off infrared frequecise, you merely cover you lens with a substance the reflects or absorbs infrared light. Shouldn't matter to the camera and then you've neutralized the scanning portion, rendering the rest obsolete.
You write that as if it's a joke. Sub-Saharan Africa is a big emerging supplier of tech labor, in the position that India was 20 years ago. We're already seeing major efforts in Nigeria, don't think for a minute that much of the rest of Africa won't follow.
It's already well underway; I get emails from nice people in Nigeria all the time offering to share their money with me. They must be working pretty hard coding all those emails!
Now, now, he did work on DOS... admittedly after he purchased it from someone else. And he didn't so much improve it as obfuscate it, to make it look like his own work. But yes, he did program... after a fashion.
I feel so unclean all of a sudden.
Chairman Ballmer did it in the Conference Room with a Chair
Mr Gates himself was once moved to declare Mr Ozzie "one of the top five programmers in the universe" and revealed that he and Mr Ballmer had wanted for more than a decade to persuade him to join Microsoft. To the outside world, Mr Ozzie's programming prowess is known mainly through Lotus Notes, the e-mail and collaboration software that he masterminded, which was acquired by IBM in 1995.
And we know that if BG says it, it must be true!
There's no doubt that Ozzie has some programming credit and no one will argue (I'm going out on a limb here) that Lotus Notes was genius back in the day, pre-Internet-as-we-know it. But despite his desire to streamline programs, reduce the bloat, and re-establish some respectability, he's not going to get very far. First, he'll have to lock horns with Ballmer and dodge chairs. Then he'll find that Microsoft has become so mired in its own muck that spurring the current crop of programmers who've been indoctrinated in the "Microsoft Way" will prove nigh impossible. He will also have to live in the shadow of BG, who despite the announcement, isn't really going anywhere, and will be haunting the halls of Redmond like some anti-Obi Wan.
I give him 18 months before he resigns in frustration.
I really can't take you seriously after this point. If you honestly believe this, you have not travelled enough. Our government provides the most avenues for recourse for the general citizen than any other form of government today. We have plenty of problems, (my particular beef is with the overbearing power of the oil lobby, and our completely asinine foreign policy when it comes to Israel), but we are light-years ahead of any other form of government, and really any other system in the world that I've seen. Most of the corruption in the American system is not institutional. Contrast this with the Iranian government, where until Ahmadinejad came into power, very little on the institutional level got done without bribery.
Then you missed the point of my expostulation. I personally don't believe this, but plenty of Americans do: on the one hand we're the greatest country in the world and on the other, the worst. I've travelled in Europe; I know how good I have it, but the majority of Americans have no inkling. They assume they are pawns in some kind of game and that's why voter turnout is so low here, because most people are convinced they have no say and that their vote doesn't change anything, whereas the opposite is true: by not voting, they perpetuate the system. It's a simple concept but too difficult for the average American to comprehend.
And what Microsoft is doing is bribery, though more subtle despite it's publicity. They are promising Massachusettes something for "free"; in return, they "expect" the government there to quietly kill off attempts to bring OSS/ODF to the state system. It's graft on an enourmous and completely legal scale, as Microsoft is not trying to line anyone's pockets overtly. But graft is graft. Admittedly, it's not the same as having to bribe baggage handlers to get your bags after a long flight, but no matter the scale, it's flat out wrong.
Is there some sort of filtering process during slashdot's account creation process that requires you make stupid, overzealous statements about the evils of government and politics?
No, but now that you mention it...
Look, here in the United States, those of us born, bred, and fed here look at the world in a different light. On the one hand, we are the greatest country on the planet, bar none. On the other, we have the most corrupt and contemptible form of government imagineable, where the little guy is run roughshod over by special interests and votes in Congress and for President are for sale. America has a permanent case of cognitive dissonance, the effect of which is to make us all a little loop, as well as angry and complacent at the same time.
No one here has the right to bitch about the system if they a) haven't voted at all or b) have voted the party line every time. The fact is, our Republic works best when people are voted for on their merits, not on the fact that they've held the job for 20 years already and "hey, look what I've done for you!"
As to this whole dustup between Mass. and MS, whatever happens, happens because a special interest (MS) is holding out a very large carrot, which the representatives of the government of Mass. can't afford to pass up. It has nothing to do with coporate governance, legality, the rights of the citizenry, or even what's best for anyone. It's about money. While using ODF/OSS may benefit Mass. in the long term, politicians think in the short term, and getting a whopping load of anything for "free" from MS can't be bad for the political image, can it? Especially when 80% of the population of Mass. can't tell you waht the fuss is all about in the first place!
And unfortunately, with DNS vulnerabilities being what they are, it's easy enough to spoof or move a domain from one IP to send out the spam then switch the domain somewhere else. A mail server isn't going to know that a domain has been spoofed or moved, just like the postman doesn't know you've moved unless you tell them.
SpamHaus is indeed one of the best outfits around, though I can see the poster's point if you're using one of the more unreliable services. The whole blacklist/whitelist idea is good, except where people abuse it as part of some personal vendetta or one company doesn't like another company. SpamHaus uses much better information to rot out just who is and isn't a spammer -- I'd be willing to bet their false positive rate is pretty low.
When the victim visits the page, they are presented with a message that has been 'injected' onto the genuine PayPal site that says, "Your account is currently disabled because we think it has been accessed by a third party. You will now be redirected to Resolution Center." After a short pause, the victim is then redirected to an external server, which presents a fake PayPal Member log-In page. At this crucial point, the victim may be off guard, as the paypal.com domain name and SSL certificate he saw previously are likely to make him realise he has visited the genuine PayPal web site - and why would he expect PayPal to redirect him to a fraudulent web site?
What will they think of next? I must say, I get more PayPal phishing emails than for anything else. With the profusion of them, and PayPal's constant warnings that they would never ask for such information, it's still amazing how many people will fall for this, especially as the spoofs get more slick and sophisticated.
So Ask--which used to be called Ask Jeeves but dropped Jeeves, a knowing butler, from its logo in February--is taking a different tack. It has come up with ExpertRank, an algorithm that also ranks web pages by incoming links, but is different from Google's PageRank in that it first groups, or "clusters", pages and links by theme. So instead of using a web page's overall popularity to calculate its ranking, it finds the pages that are most popular among experts on a particular subject, a method that often returns better results than Google's. Ask also uses these thematic clusters to suggest the best ways to narrow or expand a search, a feature called "zoom" that is very popular.
Which is the trouble I have with Google; their search results are like a shotgun blast too many times, getting far too wide a spread of sites having anything at all to do with the subject I type in, instead of being more narrowly focused. The problem I see with Ask's method is just how do you define who the experts are and what field they are experts in? Web sites can contain all sorts of content and people will reproduce links at a whim, just because they like what they see. Would they use a system similar to Amazon, where people are ranked by how many people use their recommendation?
Before Redmond runs out of chairs.
* White Star Lines Pronounces Titanic "Unsinkable"
* Hindenburg Safest Way To Fly
* Ford Pinto Named Safest Car For 1973
It ain't GAIM that is keeping you safe, it is your brain. Trust me on this, I been around long enough to know people will do anything to get infected. Just promise them a juicy picture. We have about the same chance of stopping computer infection as we have of stepping Sexually Transmitted Diseases. When Miss Jpeg flirts with you, you don't think of using a condom. (Oh and using a condom isn't enough, deep kissing can do it too. How many of you practising safe sex make sure no fluids whatever are swapped?)
That's the point. These MSNers are getting infected because they are none too bright, though given they are MSNers, it should go without saying.
BTW, does air count as a bodily fluid? If so, everyone needs to stop breathing when they have sex.
So, two heavyweights(?) in the OSS community are going to start having a little war over what "open source" really means, eh? Must be a slow news day.
Open Source is what it is, and how "open" you want your software to be is your business. You can throw the whole thing open to anyone and let talented people take up the challenge to adapt and improve your code, or you can have one set of "open" code and one set of "closed" code, the former being available to anyone, the latter available for a price. No one is under any obligation, in either case, to use your software. If you want to charge for the "closed" version so you can actually make a living, where's the harm in that?
In an ideal world, there would be no secrets. All software would be open and free to roam the Earth. We are a far cry from an ideal world; commerce dominates and servers and bandwidth cost money. Whether your OSS is "open" or "slightly open" doesn't matter much -- if you can't scrape up the cash to keep the lights on and the servers running, it doesn't much matter how cool your software is. All I can say is, leave it alone.
Pope, speaking in bad Italian accent: Yeah, you see, it's like this Mr. Hawking... the beginning of everything... that's God's work... he wouldn't be too pleased if you found out too much about what he did... he's very private that way... he tends to get upset easily... and we wouldn't want anything to say, happen to you... you wouldn't want to end up in a wheelchair or nothin'... oh wait...
"The hive mind sometimes doesn't do a thorough job," says Jason Calacanis, CEO of Weblogs, Inc., a blog network acquired last year by AOL."
And AOL does do a thorough job? A thorough job of screwing up, maybe...
NJ; my coverage is very spotty when I'm riding the train from Trenton up to NYC for work, and my reception in NYC is good except in places like Penn Station.