> Do you honestly think that someone would risk . ..snoop email addresses
Would you think that a company that you've entrusted with your email address or other information would risk its reputation and relationship with its customers by selling info that they shouldn't?
Yet it happens.
As for the "snoop in the middle", *I* certainly wouldn't do that, but people have been known to do some pretty stupid things, and I expect that there is more than one person out there who, if offered a few hundred bucks for a slew of email addresses, would be willing to make unauthorized use of data.
Furthermore, our hypothetical "employee" wouldn't be fired if his employer TOLD him to do it (unless the scheme was publicized and they needed someone to hang...) If he's stupid enough, he might even believe some line about the feed being used for an internal research project or something, so he doesn't blow the whistle on his employer, who's enhancing their profit a little. Is his employer taking a risk? If he's not associated with an end point of the connection, what are the odds that they'll get caught? In the right spot, you could generate a high volume of email addresses at a very low cost.
Now I'm not some paranoid who thinks that everyone is sniffing me; I'm just pointing out that it's quite possible, so you can't be *100%* sure that the company you're doing business with is responsible for the leak. I wish you COULD prove it; one could probably get rich suing companies for breach of contract...
Likely? No. Possible? If you believed that there was no potential for dishonesty between you and the other end, there wouldn't be much use for encryption....
Oh, I'm sorry. I wasn't talking about the web session. I just assumed that if you gave them an email address, you had actually received email from them, and the smtp stream was what I was thinking of.
Several people have mentioned using unique email addresses to "figure out who sold my email address". But while it may be LIKELY that (in this case) allofmp3.com sold you out, it could also be the operator of any of 15 routers between you and them. It wouldn't take much for an employee of a major ISP to tap a router and have it scan TCP packets for email addresses.
I would guess that -- at least initially (before all the corporate Microsoft Update cycles start) -- the ratio of users-to-downloads for Firefox is significantly greater than for IE. Firefox users tend to be more technical (and bandwidth-conscious) on average, and Microsoft tends to make it difficult to download full install packages that can be re-used without requiring further Internet access. I just downloaded Firefox once, and installed it on several machines at home, as well as making it available at the office. I probably have 10 "users" from that one download right now. While I'm sure that's way higher than the average, I'd bet that IE is a lot closer to 1:1 than Firefox is.
> Nobody wants to say they've got counterfeit gear inside > their enterprises that can all of a sudden stop working.
To bad it's hardware, and not router firmware that's "counterfeit" -- If it was truly different and not an exact duplicate, your fake equipment might be the only stuff working after a good attack!:-)
An excellent solution. Too bad that (in my experience) most companies don't have someone that thinks very fast in charge of overseeing the website -- and the outside designer (and certainly not the bandwidth provider, as has been pointed out) don't care.
And, of course, as has also been suggested, adding a little advertising banner to said page would help pay for bandwidth...
Yup, they will indeed be "spinning [it] wicked". But boy, wouldn't it be fun to see what would happen if the source for IE were opened up and a team of bug-finders who really liked their job spent a while ripping it apart?
I couldn't find find anywhere in the article that said he didn't use the internet, and I know that some people *do* access the Internet on their old Commodores.
If your system informs you that you ran out of memory, then you apparently didn't have enough for what you were doing. If you have never received such an error, then I'd say you have plenty...
Hmmm, that might explain the unusually large number of dead crabs I saw littering the beach around Newport when I was there earlier this summer. I figured it was the normal wash-up-and-get-roasted population, but my wife said they were way too many, and most of them looked like they were already at least "mostly dead" before they washed up.
Think back to your childhood. Remember when you were 6, and you thought you were a pretty big kid? And when you were 12, you remembered being 6 and immature, but you were quite sure that you were "pretty grown up now". As you look back and remember the memories of our youth, it doesn't seem that we were much different from now. We felt about as adult -- or more -- then as we do now, the only difference being that now some things that seemed to make perfect sense to us then don't quite now. ("I really thought that?")
My experience is that MANY (but certainly not all) people who haven't yet married and chosen to have children (many are in school, but many more are busy chasing careers looking for fulfilment) show many signs of maturity -- but like the 6 year-old, they don't view themselves as immature (and neither do their friends in a similar state), but instead look down on everyone else around them as inferior. They see themselves as more mature than everyone else around them, even though to others they look like educated idiots. When that view is threatened, they often throw fits that reveal their underlying lack of confidence gained through maturity and varied responsibilities.
I think that having children (and actually participating actively in the raising of them) does a lot to mature young adults, particularly men. It's amazing to see the changes that can happen in a young man when he has a child under the proper circumstances (i.e. where he has married and with his wife chosen to have children, not just slept with her and gotten stuck with the child support).
Then again, I have to agree that there are a plenty of people with quite a few children that make me think "Will someone please STERILIZE them!??" -- my sister being one of them...:-/ Actually, she is truly mentally retarted (fetal alcohol effect) but not so much that many people would have noticed. My mother is raising her first child that she abandoned, but couldn't do much about the rest of them that she delivered and raised in terrible circumstances due to poor choices she continues to make. Then again, she probably doesn't view having more kids as stupid, because the state pays her more money for every one she gets, so neither her nor the latest bum she hooks up with has to work....
"It's hard to figure out if you're insane, because if you are, your best diagnostic tool is broken!" This holds true for self-evaluation of maturity, too. The best I can do is to try to objectively catalog my actions and see if I do things that might not be the best choice, then try to correct any tendancies to do things that don't further my goals and values, and just keep trying to "grow up"!
We decided that there was just no perfect way to organize books, so my wife, tired of the ugliness and inefficiency of our shelves, decided to break books up into size ranges, and assign each range a letter code. Then, each unique new book gets a serial#, and they're ordered by that. Multiple copies of the exact same book get the same code, and if there are multiple books in a series, she uses a decimal point and a seq#, e.g. "F311.4". Doesn't do much to help you find a book if you don't know what you want, but it allows you to have your shelves sized just big enough, and they look great. She also has a series of color bands on the books that tell what age ranges the book is appropriate for.
Once she introduced me to it and showed me her spreadsheet that she was tracking them in, I didn't change anything, but added to it:
Each physical book is assigned a separate serial# (doesn't matter if it's a duplicate) and barcoded. THAT serial# is the key in the database; all of the other info from my wife's categorizations is in other fields, along with other info about the book (scanned covers coming eventually). I then have other tables to track patrons, checkouts, ratings, etc.
I wrote (er, started) a custom application several years ago to make the whole thing nice and friendly, but I got distracted by other more pressing projects, so for the past few years I've been entering data directly in the [MS Access] tables, figuring that one day I'll either finish the program, or be satisfied (raw or modified) with something already out there, and convert my data.
Sorry, no solutions, but maybe it'll give you some more ideas.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
> Do you honestly think that someone would risk . . .snoop email addresses
Would you think that a company that you've entrusted with your email address or other information would risk its reputation and relationship with its customers by selling info that they shouldn't?
Yet it happens.
As for the "snoop in the middle", *I* certainly wouldn't do that, but people have been known to do some pretty stupid things, and I expect that there is more than one person out there who, if offered a few hundred bucks for a slew of email addresses, would be willing to make unauthorized use of data.
Furthermore, our hypothetical "employee" wouldn't be fired if his employer TOLD him to do it (unless the scheme was publicized and they needed someone to hang...) If he's stupid enough, he might even believe some line about the feed being used for an internal research project or something, so he doesn't blow the whistle on his employer, who's enhancing their profit a little. Is his employer taking a risk? If he's not associated with an end point of the connection, what are the odds that they'll get caught? In the right spot, you could generate a high volume of email addresses at a very low cost.
Now I'm not some paranoid who thinks that everyone is sniffing me; I'm just pointing out that it's quite possible, so you can't be *100%* sure that the company you're doing business with is responsible for the leak. I wish you COULD prove it; one could probably get rich suing companies for breach of contract...
Likely? No. Possible? If you believed that there was no potential for dishonesty between you and the other end, there wouldn't be much use for encryption....
Oh, I'm sorry. I wasn't talking about the web session. I just assumed that if you gave them an email address, you had actually received email from them, and the smtp stream was what I was thinking of.
Several people have mentioned using unique email addresses to "figure out who sold my email address". But while it may be LIKELY that (in this case) allofmp3.com sold you out, it could also be the operator of any of 15 routers between you and them. It wouldn't take much for an employee of a major ISP to tap a router and have it scan TCP packets for email addresses.
Does anyone else find it funny that an article on sewage is on an Ohio site called "Whiz News"?
> we don't have software blocking Internet sites. Sometimes we have trouble accessing them.
I did not have sex with that woman. Sometimes I have trouble accessing my zipper.
I would guess that -- at least initially (before all the corporate Microsoft Update cycles start) -- the ratio of users-to-downloads for Firefox is significantly greater than for IE. Firefox users tend to be more technical (and bandwidth-conscious) on average, and Microsoft tends to make it difficult to download full install packages that can be re-used without requiring further Internet access. I just downloaded Firefox once, and installed it on several machines at home, as well as making it available at the office. I probably have 10 "users" from that one download right now. While I'm sure that's way higher than the average, I'd bet that IE is a lot closer to 1:1 than Firefox is.
> Nobody wants to say they've got counterfeit gear inside
:-)
> their enterprises that can all of a sudden stop working.
To bad it's hardware, and not router firmware that's "counterfeit" -- If it was truly different and not an exact duplicate, your fake equipment might be the only stuff working after a good attack!
An excellent solution. Too bad that (in my experience) most companies don't have someone that thinks very fast in charge of overseeing the website -- and the outside designer (and certainly not the bandwidth provider, as has been pointed out) don't care.
And, of course, as has also been suggested, adding a little advertising banner to said page would help pay for bandwidth...
> A Microsoft-sponsored study found that Vista will be a boon to
> European economy, as it will create more than 50,000 technology jobs
Are they including the lawyers in that number?
Yup, they will indeed be "spinning [it] wicked". But boy, wouldn't it be fun to see what would happen if the source for IE were opened up and a team of bug-finders who really liked their job spent a while ripping it apart?
I couldn't find find anywhere in the article that said he didn't use the internet, and I know that some people *do* access the Internet on their old Commodores.
h tml ) ...and there are probably more.
A quick search immediately reveals 2 browsers for the C-64:
- Hyperlink ( http://www.armory.com/~spectre/cwi/hl/ )
- Contiki ( http://www.sics.se/~adam/contiki/apps/webbrowser.
If your system informs you that you ran out of memory, then you apparently didn't have enough for what you were doing. If you have never received such an error, then I'd say you have plenty...
Hmmm, that might explain the unusually large number of dead crabs I saw littering the beach around Newport when I was there earlier this summer. I figured it was the normal wash-up-and-get-roasted population, but my wife said they were way too many, and most of them looked like they were already at least "mostly dead" before they washed up.
Doh! Who turned my keyboard around backwards? At least I didn't use a backslash! {grin}
I think it's high time he made one for all of us ./ers, eh?
:-)
Maybe something simple like this: http://boling.us/temp/google-slashdot.png
Think back to your childhood. Remember when you were 6, and you thought you were a pretty big kid? And when you were 12, you remembered being 6 and immature, but you were quite sure that you were "pretty grown up now". As you look back and remember the memories of our youth, it doesn't seem that we were much different from now. We felt about as adult -- or more -- then as we do now, the only difference being that now some things that seemed to make perfect sense to us then don't quite now. ("I really thought that?")
:-/ Actually, she is truly mentally retarted (fetal alcohol effect) but not so much that many people would have noticed. My mother is raising her first child that she abandoned, but couldn't do much about the rest of them that she delivered and raised in terrible circumstances due to poor choices she continues to make. Then again, she probably doesn't view having more kids as stupid, because the state pays her more money for every one she gets, so neither her nor the latest bum she hooks up with has to work....
My experience is that MANY (but certainly not all) people who haven't yet married and chosen to have children (many are in school, but many more are busy chasing careers looking for fulfilment) show many signs of maturity -- but like the 6 year-old, they don't view themselves as immature (and neither do their friends in a similar state), but instead look down on everyone else around them as inferior. They see themselves as more mature than everyone else around them, even though to others they look like educated idiots. When that view is threatened, they often throw fits that reveal their underlying lack of confidence gained through maturity and varied responsibilities.
I think that having children (and actually participating actively in the raising of them) does a lot to mature young adults, particularly men. It's amazing to see the changes that can happen in a young man when he has a child under the proper circumstances (i.e. where he has married and with his wife chosen to have children, not just slept with her and gotten stuck with the child support).
Then again, I have to agree that there are a plenty of people with quite a few children that make me think "Will someone please STERILIZE them!??" -- my sister being one of them...
"It's hard to figure out if you're insane, because if you are, your best diagnostic tool is broken!" This holds true for self-evaluation of maturity, too. The best I can do is to try to objectively catalog my actions and see if I do things that might not be the best choice, then try to correct any tendancies to do things that don't further my goals and values, and just keep trying to "grow up"!
We decided that there was just no perfect way to organize books, so my wife, tired of the ugliness and inefficiency of our shelves, decided to break books up into size ranges, and assign each range a letter code. Then, each unique new book gets a serial#, and they're ordered by that. Multiple copies of the exact same book get the same code, and if there are multiple books in a series, she uses a decimal point and a seq#, e.g. "F311.4". Doesn't do much to help you find a book if you don't know what you want, but it allows you to have your shelves sized just big enough, and they look great. She also has a series of color bands on the books that tell what age ranges the book is appropriate for.
:-)
Once she introduced me to it and showed me her spreadsheet that she was tracking them in, I didn't change anything, but added to it:
Each physical book is assigned a separate serial# (doesn't matter if it's a duplicate) and barcoded. THAT serial# is the key in the database; all of the other info from my wife's categorizations is in other fields, along with other info about the book (scanned covers coming eventually). I then have other tables to track patrons, checkouts, ratings, etc.
I wrote (er, started) a custom application several years ago to make the whole thing nice and friendly, but I got distracted by other more pressing projects, so for the past few years I've been entering data directly in the [MS Access] tables, figuring that one day I'll either finish the program, or be satisfied (raw or modified) with something already out there, and convert my data.
Sorry, no solutions, but maybe it'll give you some more ideas.