It's like making the argument that a movie isn't art because you're sitting on your ass while watching it, whereas a painting you have to stand up for.
Art is not about the person VIEWING or EXPERIENCING - it is about the creator.
Clearly WATCHING a movie or PLAYING a video game is not art.
Have you ever seen Google sue offensively? Cuz I haven't. It seems Google uses their patents for defensive cases (i.e. so someone else can't sue them), not as a patent troll. At least, that's been the rule so far.
SPF is the way to go. Most public email out there (GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo) will mark email as spam if an email is sent from a server that isn't listed on the SPF record. Obviously this isn't the only technique to fight spam (You validate that the sender really belongs to X.com, not that X.com isn't a spammer), but it helps.
As for the link to "SPF is harmful", that's about the biggest load of bull I've ever seen. It's inaccurate, and is an uncommon case (how often does mail forwarding happen these days with everyone using non-ISP-bound free email services?). It's like saying we should shutdown the internet because it's not completely accessible to devices with black&white screens.
As I said before, all the major free email service providers take SPF into account (test it out yourself - setup your domain with SPF, and send an email to your gmail/hotmail from an unauthorized IP).
That said, SPF is pretty easy to setup. Just a quick little txt in your domain and you're good to go. This site will help you with generating your SPF: http://www.openspf.org/Tools
Woohoo let's kill Google so that Microsoft can rule the world even more. Why didn't I think of that...
Not to mention that like many others mentioned, the top 1000 sites (some which are owned by Google, like maps, orkut, gmail, etc.) piss away $1 million a week.
So I'm lucky enough to get to try out Wave. It's cool - and I agree that maybe for the general public it won't have much use.
But I would say that the statement that it is "not as productive as Twitter or email" is a pretty ridiculous and uninformed statement.
Now if the author would've said something like "I would rather have a videoconference/meeting to discuss a new idea instead of using Wave". OK, that's a valid point. A meeting is fast and has quick turnaround times.
But the real idea behind Wave is, you know, those emails like this:
> I think bla bla 1 Good point John, didn't think about bla bla 1
>> What do you think of bla bla 2? Will it work? > I think we should use bla bla 2 in addition to bla bla 1 You are both correct, John and Jenny. We should definitely look into bla bla 2
Wave makes looking at an email message like that a lot cleaner, a lot simpler, a lot easier, and a lot more productive.
Now how you would compare the above use-case to using Twitter... is beyond me. And as for the above email format being more productive than Wave, well then, maybe you should stop using email and go back to writing snail mail.
If on the other hand you would rather have a meeting or videoconference to have a discussion as above, well then... you're right, that is more productive. But it's not always an option, and Wave fills in that gap nicely.
Heh he was always kind of a spaz on things like this, he wouldn't really get the technical details of things so he'd jump the gun and then later have to go back on it.
Clearly, "Anonymous Coward", you are the naive one. Did you even checkout the Google Image Labeler application/game, and how it works?
I'm guessing that you clearly did not, or you wouldn't have left such an uninformed comment.
The way the labeler works is that 2 people "play" to label words in the game - 2 random people, from across the world. The ability to "seed false data" into the database is impossible, as clearly pointed out by the creator, Luis von Ahn. Watch his video:
I'm pretty sure that's correct - there was a big hubbub about SP1 updating the kernel to match the Server 2008 kernel, i.e. 6.1.
I have windows server 2008 and it doesn't say this (it says 6.0 build 6001, same as vista SP1), but that version doesn't make any sense - if Vista was 6.0, and SP1 updated the kernel... how can it still be 6.0? At the very least, if it was a minor change (which it wasn't), it'd be 6.0.1.
So it seems like this blog writer didn't really do their research (also shown by the fact that they have XP as NT 5.1, it was actually NT 5.5), and are actually incorrect.
You and xaosflux have clearly not used Chrome. Yes, it sucks to have another browser out there. But you really should give it a whirl - things load fast, smoothly, and correctly.
Sooner or later you'll have to upgrade to a new version of Firefox or IE that will be full of bugs, so why not take the opportunity to try a new one?
If our mentality is going to be "new is bad", then why don't we go back to Netscape? Or better yet, Mosaic?
Just because your own networking site (friends.ac) hasn't been written about doesn't mean that sites which are written about paid for their coverage (I have put as much sweat and blood into Yuniti as you have into yours). And let me assure you, there was no paid journalism here - I contacted the SNL author telling them about our latest feature, ValidateID, which allows user to prove that they are who they say they are (press release here http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20070821005651&newsLang=en).
She was very interested in the subject, and figured it was newsworthy.
Perhaps you should read the article and research the subject before making presumptions.
Secondly, how do you think MySpace and Friendster get so much coverage? You don't think they have their PR people constantly trying to get stories published?
If you really think it's so easy to just "pay off journalism", I suggest you to try it. I assure you that you'll find journalists and authors have a lot more ethics than you presume they do.
Isn't writing about something that NO OTHER papers are writing about PROPER journalism? If you just write about what everyone else writes about - the major networking sites MySpace and Facebook, how is that news? How is that proper journalism? News is about writing something that people don't know about, not something everyone already knows. That's why Yuniti was perfect for this article.
This is true, but only to some extent - I used the 13.3" MacBook because I wanted to make it a price-fair comparison (low $1000's) - had I chosen the 15" MacBook Pro instead, which does have a 15" screen (and is 135 cubic inches), it already starts at $1,999, $700 more than a Dell similarly equipped.
"Outperforms"? This is highly unlikely seeing as it's an Intel GMA with 64MB SHARED memory. Not to mention games won't run on generic cards, they require an ATI/nvidia chipset. So even if what you were saying is true (it's not), the card is still incompatible with most games. Not to mention you can get the same Intel card on a Dell and drop your pricepoint $50 further.
But you get my point, though - sure, $40 cheaper, $50 cheaper. But it's kind of like buying a game console, you won't find 10-30% price differences, like you will with other PC manufacturers.
Very good point xipietotec - maybe the person who wrote the original article was looking at Dell's suggested retail prices which is NEVER what you ACTUALLY pay for a Dell (what you actually pay is significantly less).
When it comes to mid-range, it's tough to beat Dell.
Woops, I meant PC's/Dell has Apple beat both on low-end AND middle-end, and with a Dell/AlienWare sale, it probalby has Apple beat on the high-end as well.
Alright guys, so to start off, I'm a big Mac fan at heart - I started off on the Mac more than 12 years ago, and was a hardcore mac user (the type that would take an argument with anyone about Macs being better). And I still think that Apple computers are some of the highest quality computers you can get, and believe me, if mid-range Macs were cheaper, I'd have one. But this is simply a ridiculous claim with nothing to back it. For starters, Dell constantly has sales, whereas Macs are always the same price, no drops, no competitive pricing, nothing. A macbook is a macbook is $1,099 is $1,099. No matter where you go. Just going to both the Apple store and the Dell store right now, this is what we have:
MacBook: $1374 (13.3", 2.0 GHz, 1GB, 160GB HD, generic crappy graphics card, 1 year warranty, standard ports + wireless) Dell E1505: $1374 (15", 2.0 GHz, 1GB, 160GB HD, ATI X1400, 2 year warranty, standard ports + wireless)
And mind you this is not even with a Dell sale, this is just your standard off-the-shelf prices. Not only is the Dell $100 cheaper, it comes with a 2 year warranty instead of 1 year, a graphics card you can actually play games with, and a display that's 2" bigger.
Sorry to burt your bubble, but PC's/Dell has apple beat on the low-end. High end I'll even give you, but again, if you get Dell/AlienWare on a sale, I bet you the PC would still be cheaper than a Mac (Apple doesn't have sales).
It's actually not as easy as the "stupid and/or lazy" approach, and that's a bit of a close-minded accusation.
Take someone as myself - I work on my site part-time, and so have a very limited amount of time. I try to test on both browsers, but believe it or not, there is still a lot of things that FireFox doesn't support or does in a funky manner, which Internet Explorer does beautifully.
So, although i agree that it is inexcusable to have a site not function AT ALL under FireFox, there are certain cool things that you can only do in Internet Explorer (and I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy).
Take for instance my site (checkout my page, http://yuniti.com/marquinho). Notice the cool transparencies and shiny effects? That's something that can't be done in FireFox (at least, not as of 3.0).
So again, although I try to keep compatibility on both browsers and all recent versions, sorry to dissapoint all the FireFox lovers out there, but there's still a lot it can't do.
So, this court case wasn't so much for MySpace, but for all online communities. I myself am not a MySpace fan, as I think they do nothing to help protect its users (See my journal about their lack of ingenuity and innovation).
However, this call was a necessary one. Although social networking
sites should do what they can to help protect its users, they can't be held
responsible for lousy parenting!
In today's society, everyone is always trying to blame someone else, or sue
someone else. No one takes the blame for what they've done and the
mistakes they've made to cause badness. And who pays the price? Well,
sadly, one of the people who pays the price is kids. What happened to the
day when parents' top priority was their kids? Nowadays, parents are more
concerned with money and the "easy way out", than taking care of their kid.
Why on earth was a 13 year old girl able to talk to some stranger online,
meet with him, without her parents ever knowing? Yes, the guy is a scoundrel.
Yes, she was just a little girl. But why weren't her parents there to
protect her? Why weren't they there to know exactly what she's doing online,
talk to her, find out why she feels the need to meet people online (probably
lonely, not many friends at school, not many boys interested in her at school,
etc.). And not just confronting her and telling her "you're grounded, no
more internet". They need to find out the cause of her feeling she
needs to do this, and try to help.
Lastly, not every guy online is a scoundrel. Maybe this Pete Solis was,
but if the girl's parents had been there to talk to her, and maybe even offer to
go meet this guy with her - what kind of guy who's looking to assault a 13 year
old would agree to that? He would bail out in a second, while on the other hand
any guy who has a shred of decency would accept. That's the other problem
with parents these days - they automatically assume the worst, and of course
teenagers know this. So the teenager has no way of trusting their parent,
because they know that just bringing this up with them will mean "no more
internet".
So, the real issue here is, why are parents allowing their young girls to get
conned online, and what are we doing to resolve this issue?
Mind you that finding a security flaw is not a crime. Testing a security flaw
is not a crime, either. The only thing Samy did which can be considered a crime,
which is what he was convicted for, is damages caused to MySpace.
So, I ask you, was that his intent? To cause damages? I highly doubt it. Given
Samy's blog, and given my own experience writing a script for MySpace
(non-malicious, my site, yuniti.com, gives users the option to import their account from
Myspace), it's frightning how quickly things spread on MySpace.
I guarantee you that Samy just thought it would be fun to try this out, maybe
get 1000 friends. Look at how quickly his worm spread - he wasn't even given a
CHANCE to undo what he had done, or to apologize. 20 hours? Imagine if that were
you. If you'd found this flaw, played around with it, set it up to verify it's a
flaw, and within a few hours, you've spread like a disease. Why don't you try
contacting MySpace. It takes them 2 days just to respond back to you! And as for
a phone number? Try finding a phone number for MySpace on their page. See how
long that takes.
Samy messed up, no doubt about it. But not nearly as much as MySpace did, and
Samy, not being a security firm, being just some random guy with no connections,
could NOT have contaced MySpace. They would've ignored him and dismissed
his attempt (try it yourself, e-mail MySpace, tell them you've found a security
flaw, see what their response is and how quick it is).
So why doesn't MySpace get sued, by their uses, for damages caused for having a
crappy, insecure system? I think they're far more deserving of it, for leaving
such a gaping hole, than Samy is for "accidentally exploiting" it. If Samy was
trying to cause damages to MySpace, he would've done a lot more than add people
as friends (delete people's accounts, mass-mail the script to infected people's
friends, etc.)
Mind you that finding a security flaw is not a crime. Testing a security flaw is not a crime, either. The only thing Samy did which can be considered a crime, which is what he was convicted for, is damages caused to MySpace.
So, I ask you, was that his intent? To cause damages? I highly doubt it. Given Samy's blog, and given my own experience writing a script for MySpace (non-malicious, my site, yuniti.com, gives users the option to import their account from Myspace), it's frightning how quickly things spread on MySpace.
I guarantee you that Samy just thought it would be fun to try this out, maybe get 1000 friends. Look at how quickly his worm spread - he wasn't even given a CHANCE to undo what he had done, or to apologize. 20 hours? Imagine if that were you. If you'd found this flaw, played around with it, set it up to verify it's a flaw, and within a few hours, you've spread like a disease. Why don't you try contacting MySpace. It takes them 2 days just to respond back to you! And as for a phone number? Try finding a phone number for MySpace on their page. See how long that takes.
Samy messed up, no doubt about it. But not nearly as much as MySpace did, and Samy, not being a security firm, being just some random guy with no connections, could NOT have contaced MySpace. They would've ignored him and dismissed his attempt (try it yourself, e-mail MySpace, tell them you've found a security flaw, see what their response is and how quick it is).
So why doesn't MySpace get sued, by their uses, for damages caused for having a crappy, insecure system? I think they're far more deserving of it, for leaving such a gaping hole, than Samy is for "accidentally exploiting" it. If Samy was trying to cause damages to MySpace, he would've done a lot more than add people as friends (delete people's accounts, mass-mail the script to infected people's friends, etc.)
Johny is happy, the rest of the sentence does not matter. However, it does. In this example, the "when the sky is purple" is very important. Just like "On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single repeatable observation...". The sentence is simply stating that to debunk a theory, you must find a repeatable observation that disagrees with the theory. It is NOT stating that a theory must be disproveable
That is, however, besides the point. Proving that something CANNOT be disproven is the same as making a theory a law. You must find EVERY instance of an observation that can disprove the theory, and show that it in fact does not disprove the theory. i.e. it is impossible to do
In any case, this discussion has gone on a tangent. de Selby has made some very interesting points that I was not aware of, and I am very interested in looking into them before continuing this discussion.
You took the phrase out of context. The phrase is:
you can disprove a theory by finding even a single repeatable observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory
Just because we can't think of an observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory, does not make it not a theory. Perhaps there is some experiment out there that will, without a doubt, prove that there's no god. Just because our feeble minds can't think of it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Deja vu... that sounds an awful lot like an argument made by one of the believers of evolution earlier today.
Slashdot Mirror
Is Roger Ebert really that dense?
It's like making the argument that a movie isn't art because you're sitting on your ass while watching it, whereas a painting you have to stand up for.
Art is not about the person VIEWING or EXPERIENCING - it is about the creator.
Clearly WATCHING a movie or PLAYING a video game is not art.
MAKING one, on the other hand, can be.
So when is the sports stock exchange opening? I sure would love to bet... eh ehm I mean, "exchange and buy stock", for my favorite team.
Have you ever seen Google sue offensively? Cuz I haven't. It seems Google uses their patents for defensive cases (i.e. so someone else can't sue them), not as a patent troll. At least, that's been the rule so far.
SPF is the way to go. Most public email out there (GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo) will mark email as spam if an email is sent from a server that isn't listed on the SPF record.
Obviously this isn't the only technique to fight spam (You validate that the sender really belongs to X.com, not that X.com isn't a spammer), but it helps.
As for the link to "SPF is harmful", that's about the biggest load of bull I've ever seen. It's inaccurate, and is an uncommon case (how often does mail forwarding happen these days with everyone using non-ISP-bound free email services?). It's like saying we should shutdown the internet because it's not completely accessible to devices with black&white screens.
As I said before, all the major free email service providers take SPF into account (test it out yourself - setup your domain with SPF, and send an email to your gmail/hotmail from an unauthorized IP).
That said, SPF is pretty easy to setup. Just a quick little txt in your domain and you're good to go. This site will help you with generating your SPF:
http://www.openspf.org/Tools
Woohoo let's kill Google so that Microsoft can rule the world even more. Why didn't I think of that...
Not to mention that like many others mentioned, the top 1000 sites (some which are owned by Google, like maps, orkut, gmail, etc.) piss away $1 million a week.
So I'm lucky enough to get to try out Wave. It's cool - and I agree that maybe for the general public it won't have much use.
But I would say that the statement that it is "not as productive as Twitter or email" is a pretty ridiculous and uninformed statement.
Now if the author would've said something like "I would rather have a videoconference/meeting to discuss a new idea instead of using Wave". OK, that's a valid point. A meeting is fast and has quick turnaround times.
But the real idea behind Wave is, you know, those emails like this:
> I think bla bla 1
Good point John, didn't think about bla bla 1
>> What do you think of bla bla 2? Will it work?
> I think we should use bla bla 2 in addition to bla bla 1
You are both correct, John and Jenny. We should definitely look into bla bla 2
Wave makes looking at an email message like that a lot cleaner, a lot simpler, a lot easier, and a lot more productive.
Now how you would compare the above use-case to using Twitter... is beyond me. And as for the above email format being more productive than Wave, well then, maybe you should stop using email and go back to writing snail mail.
If on the other hand you would rather have a meeting or videoconference to have a discussion as above, well then... you're right, that is more productive. But it's not always an option, and Wave fills in that gap nicely.
Heh he was always kind of a spaz on things like this, he wouldn't really get the technical details of things so he'd jump the gun and then later have to go back on it.
Clearly, "Anonymous Coward", you are the naive one. Did you even checkout the Google Image Labeler application/game, and how it works?
I'm guessing that you clearly did not, or you wouldn't have left such an uninformed comment.
The way the labeler works is that 2 people "play" to label words in the game - 2 random people, from across the world. The ability to "seed false data" into the database is impossible, as clearly pointed out by the creator, Luis von Ahn. Watch his video:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143&ei=OlP2SKSaPIb-qAOcy8D8Dw&q=von+ahn
(Who is also mentioned in the AI article).
I wrote the Yuniti article, and I assure you, this new captcha would be unbreakable.
I'm pretty sure that's correct - there was a big hubbub about SP1 updating the kernel to match the Server 2008 kernel, i.e. 6.1.
I have windows server 2008 and it doesn't say this (it says 6.0 build 6001, same as vista SP1), but that version doesn't make any sense - if Vista was 6.0, and SP1 updated the kernel... how can it still be 6.0? At the very least, if it was a minor change (which it wasn't), it'd be 6.0.1.
So it seems like this blog writer didn't really do their research (also shown by the fact that they have XP as NT 5.1, it was actually NT 5.5), and are actually incorrect.
Shame on you slashdot, shame!
You and xaosflux have clearly not used Chrome. Yes, it sucks to have another browser out there. But you really should give it a whirl - things load fast, smoothly, and correctly. Sooner or later you'll have to upgrade to a new version of Firefox or IE that will be full of bugs, so why not take the opportunity to try a new one? If our mentality is going to be "new is bad", then why don't we go back to Netscape? Or better yet, Mosaic?
Just because your own networking site (friends.ac) hasn't been written about doesn't mean that sites which are written about paid for their coverage (I have put as much sweat and blood into Yuniti as you have into yours). And let me assure you, there was no paid journalism here - I contacted the SNL author telling them about our latest feature, ValidateID, which allows user to prove that they are who they say they are (press release here http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20070821005651&newsLang=en). She was very interested in the subject, and figured it was newsworthy. Perhaps you should read the article and research the subject before making presumptions. Secondly, how do you think MySpace and Friendster get so much coverage? You don't think they have their PR people constantly trying to get stories published? If you really think it's so easy to just "pay off journalism", I suggest you to try it. I assure you that you'll find journalists and authors have a lot more ethics than you presume they do.
Isn't writing about something that NO OTHER papers are writing about PROPER journalism? If you just write about what everyone else writes about - the major networking sites MySpace and Facebook, how is that news? How is that proper journalism? News is about writing something that people don't know about, not something everyone already knows. That's why Yuniti was perfect for this article.
This is true, but only to some extent - I used the 13.3" MacBook because I wanted to make it a price-fair comparison (low $1000's) - had I chosen the 15" MacBook Pro instead, which does have a 15" screen (and is 135 cubic inches), it already starts at $1,999, $700 more than a Dell similarly equipped.
"Outperforms"? This is highly unlikely seeing as it's an Intel GMA with 64MB SHARED memory. Not to mention games won't run on generic cards, they require an ATI/nvidia chipset. So even if what you were saying is true (it's not), the card is still incompatible with most games. Not to mention you can get the same Intel card on a Dell and drop your pricepoint $50 further.
But you get my point, though - sure, $40 cheaper, $50 cheaper. But it's kind of like buying a game console, you won't find 10-30% price differences, like you will with other PC manufacturers.
Very good point xipietotec - maybe the person who wrote the original article was looking at Dell's suggested retail prices which is NEVER what you ACTUALLY pay for a Dell (what you actually pay is significantly less). When it comes to mid-range, it's tough to beat Dell.
Sorry, that was a typo :) The dell was priced at $1274 heh, not sure how I missed that. Thanks for spotting it!
Woops, I meant PC's/Dell has Apple beat both on low-end AND middle-end, and with a Dell/AlienWare sale, it probalby has Apple beat on the high-end as well.
Alright guys, so to start off, I'm a big Mac fan at heart - I started off on the Mac more than 12 years ago, and was a hardcore mac user (the type that would take an argument with anyone about Macs being better).
And I still think that Apple computers are some of the highest quality computers you can get, and believe me, if mid-range Macs were cheaper, I'd have one.
But this is simply a ridiculous claim with nothing to back it. For starters, Dell constantly has sales, whereas Macs are always the same price, no drops, no competitive pricing, nothing. A macbook is a macbook is $1,099 is $1,099. No matter where you go.
Just going to both the Apple store and the Dell store right now, this is what we have:
MacBook: $1374 (13.3", 2.0 GHz, 1GB, 160GB HD, generic crappy graphics card, 1 year warranty, standard ports + wireless)
Dell E1505: $1374 (15", 2.0 GHz, 1GB, 160GB HD, ATI X1400, 2 year warranty, standard ports + wireless)
And mind you this is not even with a Dell sale, this is just your standard off-the-shelf prices. Not only is the Dell $100 cheaper, it comes with a 2 year warranty instead of 1 year, a graphics card you can actually play games with, and a display that's 2" bigger.
Sorry to burt your bubble, but PC's/Dell has apple beat on the low-end. High end I'll even give you, but again, if you get Dell/AlienWare on a sale, I bet you the PC would still be cheaper than a Mac (Apple doesn't have sales).
It's actually not as easy as the "stupid and/or lazy" approach, and that's a bit of a close-minded accusation. Take someone as myself - I work on my site part-time, and so have a very limited amount of time. I try to test on both browsers, but believe it or not, there is still a lot of things that FireFox doesn't support or does in a funky manner, which Internet Explorer does beautifully. So, although i agree that it is inexcusable to have a site not function AT ALL under FireFox, there are certain cool things that you can only do in Internet Explorer (and I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy). Take for instance my site (checkout my page, http://yuniti.com/marquinho). Notice the cool transparencies and shiny effects? That's something that can't be done in FireFox (at least, not as of 3.0). So again, although I try to keep compatibility on both browsers and all recent versions, sorry to dissapoint all the FireFox lovers out there, but there's still a lot it can't do.
However, this call was a necessary one. Although social networking sites should do what they can to help protect its users, they can't be held responsible for lousy parenting!
In today's society, everyone is always trying to blame someone else, or sue someone else. No one takes the blame for what they've done and the mistakes they've made to cause badness. And who pays the price? Well, sadly, one of the people who pays the price is kids. What happened to the day when parents' top priority was their kids? Nowadays, parents are more concerned with money and the "easy way out", than taking care of their kid.
Why on earth was a 13 year old girl able to talk to some stranger online, meet with him, without her parents ever knowing? Yes, the guy is a scoundrel. Yes, she was just a little girl. But why weren't her parents there to protect her? Why weren't they there to know exactly what she's doing online, talk to her, find out why she feels the need to meet people online (probably lonely, not many friends at school, not many boys interested in her at school, etc.). And not just confronting her and telling her "you're grounded, no more internet". They need to find out the cause of her feeling she needs to do this, and try to help.
Lastly, not every guy online is a scoundrel. Maybe this Pete Solis was, but if the girl's parents had been there to talk to her, and maybe even offer to go meet this guy with her - what kind of guy who's looking to assault a 13 year old would agree to that? He would bail out in a second, while on the other hand any guy who has a shred of decency would accept. That's the other problem with parents these days - they automatically assume the worst, and of course teenagers know this. So the teenager has no way of trusting their parent, because they know that just bringing this up with them will mean "no more internet".
So, the real issue here is, why are parents allowing their young girls to get conned online, and what are we doing to resolve this issue?
Woops, sorry guys, messed up my formatting...
Mind you that finding a security flaw is not a crime. Testing a security flaw is not a crime, either. The only thing Samy did which can be considered a crime, which is what he was convicted for, is damages caused to MySpace.
So, I ask you, was that his intent? To cause damages? I highly doubt it. Given Samy's blog, and given my own experience writing a script for MySpace (non-malicious, my site, yuniti.com, gives users the option to import their account from Myspace), it's frightning how quickly things spread on MySpace.
I guarantee you that Samy just thought it would be fun to try this out, maybe get 1000 friends. Look at how quickly his worm spread - he wasn't even given a CHANCE to undo what he had done, or to apologize. 20 hours? Imagine if that were you. If you'd found this flaw, played around with it, set it up to verify it's a flaw, and within a few hours, you've spread like a disease. Why don't you try contacting MySpace. It takes them 2 days just to respond back to you! And as for a phone number? Try finding a phone number for MySpace on their page. See how long that takes.
Samy messed up, no doubt about it. But not nearly as much as MySpace did, and Samy, not being a security firm, being just some random guy with no connections, could NOT have contaced MySpace. They would've ignored him and dismissed his attempt (try it yourself, e-mail MySpace, tell them you've found a security flaw, see what their response is and how quick it is).
So why doesn't MySpace get sued, by their uses, for damages caused for having a crappy, insecure system? I think they're far more deserving of it, for leaving such a gaping hole, than Samy is for "accidentally exploiting" it. If Samy was trying to cause damages to MySpace, he would've done a lot more than add people as friends (delete people's accounts, mass-mail the script to infected people's friends, etc.)
Mind you that finding a security flaw is not a crime. Testing a security flaw is not a crime, either. The only thing Samy did which can be considered a crime, which is what he was convicted for, is damages caused to MySpace. So, I ask you, was that his intent? To cause damages? I highly doubt it. Given Samy's blog, and given my own experience writing a script for MySpace (non-malicious, my site, yuniti.com, gives users the option to import their account from Myspace), it's frightning how quickly things spread on MySpace. I guarantee you that Samy just thought it would be fun to try this out, maybe get 1000 friends. Look at how quickly his worm spread - he wasn't even given a CHANCE to undo what he had done, or to apologize. 20 hours? Imagine if that were you. If you'd found this flaw, played around with it, set it up to verify it's a flaw, and within a few hours, you've spread like a disease. Why don't you try contacting MySpace. It takes them 2 days just to respond back to you! And as for a phone number? Try finding a phone number for MySpace on their page. See how long that takes. Samy messed up, no doubt about it. But not nearly as much as MySpace did, and Samy, not being a security firm, being just some random guy with no connections, could NOT have contaced MySpace. They would've ignored him and dismissed his attempt (try it yourself, e-mail MySpace, tell them you've found a security flaw, see what their response is and how quick it is). So why doesn't MySpace get sued, by their uses, for damages caused for having a crappy, insecure system? I think they're far more deserving of it, for leaving such a gaping hole, than Samy is for "accidentally exploiting" it. If Samy was trying to cause damages to MySpace, he would've done a lot more than add people as friends (delete people's accounts, mass-mail the script to infected people's friends, etc.)
How exactly is that out of context?
An example of what you did:
Johny is happy when the sky is purple
Johny is happy, the rest of the sentence does not matter. However, it does. In this example, the "when the sky is purple" is very important. Just like "On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single repeatable observation...". The sentence is simply stating that to debunk a theory, you must find a repeatable observation that disagrees with the theory. It is NOT stating that a theory must be disproveable
That is, however, besides the point. Proving that something CANNOT be disproven is the same as making a theory a law. You must find EVERY instance of an observation that can disprove the theory, and show that it in fact does not disprove the theory. i.e. it is impossible to do
In any case, this discussion has gone on a tangent. de Selby has made some very interesting points that I was not aware of, and I am very interested in looking into them before continuing this discussion.
Thanks everyone for your input!
You took the phrase out of context. The phrase is: you can disprove a theory by finding even a single repeatable observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory
Just because we can't think of an observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory, does not make it not a theory. Perhaps there is some experiment out there that will, without a doubt, prove that there's no god. Just because our feeble minds can't think of it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Deja vu... that sounds an awful lot like an argument made by one of the believers of evolution earlier today.