> In its simplest form, couldn't a person's academic credentials be verified by sending a confirmation link to their.edu e-mail
Sure, if you can name a single educational institution with an edu address outside the US. Like the government sites here in Germany, our universities use country-codes. Banning Quatar's single IP address is one thing; alienating academics outside America is quite another.
Much as I'd enjoy seeing 'You searched for RIAA. Did you mean to type Incompetent Bloodsucking Parasites?', it's a path Google really shouldn't go down.
If enforcing vigilante-style justice through its search engine power becomes a trend, well, who's next? The wrong political party? Neutrality isn't just about not being evil to the guys we like...
The hilarious part is that when another civilization discovers our remains they're going to wonder how the hell we were able to predict the apocalypse to within two years. After all, why else would we reckon our time in such a way that the calendar ends exactly then?
I'd rather suggest they don't look at script content at all.
Part of it is practicality, as already implied: With delays, self-writing code, horrible "quirks" that are not browser-independent, it's nearly impossible to predict what the script is going to do in the user's browser. Besides gobbling insane resources on the spidering server, increased by scripts that cause crashes.
Another part is philosophy and good practice - AJAX is for interactive applications, static HTML/XHTML for content. Applications shouldn't be indexed anyway, since the pages are user-specific and extremely dynamic. If you search the web, you're really looking for documents with content - and there's no reason why those shouldn't be entirely static.
Catering to the trend that anything, even simple text content, is only made accessible through barrier-heavy, browser-dependent AJAX applications is a step in the wrong direction. Google might as well execute flash movies, begin using OCR to read text in pictures or voice recognition to index mp3 files by song lyrics.
I'd like to see an alternative demo that could capture a file specified in advance - since this "C:\boot.ini" obviously is far too platform/permissions dependent to really demonstrate the flaw...
I switched to a US keyboard map, and was able to enter my boot.ini path (although of course I don't have read access to it, so it doesn't matter anyway).
With the German key map (QUERTZ), it doesn't work. Neither 'Ö' not ':' are recognized by the page. Interesting.
It does catch the first "c" I type, but it stops after that - colons aren't caught.
Two theories:
1 - One of my numerous Firefox extensions is interfering with the Javascript
2 - I'm using a German "kezboard". Colons are in a different place. Now off to check if my uppercase "Ö" gets captured...
Stopping eavesdropping, but having no effect on what the intended recipient is able to do. And until the intended recipient of the movie has access to their own machine sufficiently castrated (as the media industry is already attempting), this won't stop any piracy.
Until I see statistics, I'm convinced that the majority of illegal distribution is done by the people who either legitimately download or have already received an illegal distribution - not by people who eavesdrop on the video stream of someone else.
From what I've read, quantum encryption only really becomes necessary if common prime-number algorithms are rendered ineffective by unforeseen advances in computing power (say, quantum computing or other stuff now considered science fiction). It's basically a one-time-pad - it is proven to be completely secure if used correctly, but in most cases, other theoretically breakable technologies are enough.
And the only thing you need to transfer the signal is apparently an uninterrupted fibre-optic line.
But this is basically Google and Wikipedia speaking, so I'm waiting for a real expert to correct me on this.
Now, financial or legal problems are one thing (and Wikipedia has had both in the past, afaik). Quality is still something else, and it has that problem too. But a community death can be seen from a mile away as activity declines, and I'm not seeing one.
If this list begins to cover more than the last 2 minutes, it's time to worry.
Which just reminded me - does anyone else realize that G-Mail will be swamped by undeliverable emails to old gmail.de addresses, at least for the next couple of months (and in the case of spam, for many years)?
Of course, most people even here are using the.com TLD, but by far not all. So they'd better have good servers. Inheriting a former Google domain isn't easy.
On the other hand, the irony that heavy reliance on a proprietary Microsoft standard is now preventing people from buying the latest Microsoft product is delicious.
... it is recommended to hide your money under the carpet and your second house key above the door frame - studies show that burglars rarely look there. Up to now.
Thanks for that. I think that this time, I finally *got* it - after months of knowing that this net neutrality thing was important (everyone was talking about it), but having no clue whether the law should be passed or not.
The sheer awesom-- I mean brilliance of this concept is difficult to put in words. (I promised myself to stay away from awesome this year...).
I personally hope they can pull it off.
Even though I suspect that if they use their status as a sovereign nation to declare local copyright law void, there will be an Operation Sealandian Freedom.
Convincing the mainstream Windows userbase to switch to Linux does not seem much more of a challenge to me than convincing them to adjust their security habits.
This doesn't apply to the scenario where Linux comes as a default OS on new hardware, but anyone who cares enough about security to switch from their current OS probably applies patches too.
More likely, IPs are dynamically assigned, and Wikipedia banned the entire IP range of Quatar.
I've seen vandals being blocked - this is usually a slow and extremely lenient process, with something like 2-3 offenses tolerated before they start handing out even day-long blocks for a single IP. I'd like to know what this guy did to make it necessary to prevent him from coming back for a month.
I don't know about spammers though, they might be blocked more quickly.
Slashdot Mirror
> In its simplest form, couldn't a person's academic credentials be verified by sending a confirmation link to their .edu e-mail
Sure, if you can name a single educational institution with an edu address outside the US. Like the government sites here in Germany, our universities use country-codes. Banning Quatar's single IP address is one thing; alienating academics outside America is quite another.
Much as I'd enjoy seeing 'You searched for RIAA. Did you mean to type Incompetent Bloodsucking Parasites?', it's a path Google really shouldn't go down.
If enforcing vigilante-style justice through its search engine power becomes a trend, well, who's next? The wrong political party? Neutrality isn't just about not being evil to the guys we like...
Meant for this story, obviously. Sorry about that.
So if you have no clue how to create a robots.txt file with two simple lines in it, the alternative is to fill the pockets of lawyers.
The hilarious part is that when another civilization discovers our remains they're going to wonder how the hell we were able to predict the apocalypse to within two years. After all, why else would we reckon our time in such a way that the calendar ends exactly then?
If 10 meters of water on average is an ocean planet, what is Earth? We are covered to two thirds in water, and a lot of it is hundreds of meters deep.
If the water depth would be ten meters on average, those oceans would be puddles compared to ours.
Unless of course this "10 meter" average is some really stupid number in which higher ground is counted as "negatively submerged".
I'd rather suggest they don't look at script content at all.
Part of it is practicality, as already implied: With delays, self-writing code, horrible "quirks" that are not browser-independent, it's nearly impossible to predict what the script is going to do in the user's browser. Besides gobbling insane resources on the spidering server, increased by scripts that cause crashes.
Another part is philosophy and good practice - AJAX is for interactive applications, static HTML/XHTML for content. Applications shouldn't be indexed anyway, since the pages are user-specific and extremely dynamic. If you search the web, you're really looking for documents with content - and there's no reason why those shouldn't be entirely static.
Catering to the trend that anything, even simple text content, is only made accessible through barrier-heavy, browser-dependent AJAX applications is a step in the wrong direction. Google might as well execute flash movies, begin using OCR to read text in pictures or voice recognition to index mp3 files by song lyrics.
The point being?
If both Googlebot and users see the rewritten content, the original advertisement is never displayed.
Except for the few users that have Javascript disabled, but that's not the stupid-user target group that clicks on spam anyway...
I'd like to see an alternative demo that could capture a file specified in advance - since this "C:\boot.ini" obviously is far too platform/permissions dependent to really demonstrate the flaw...
I switched to a US keyboard map, and was able to enter my boot.ini path (although of course I don't have read access to it, so it doesn't matter anyway).
With the German key map (QUERTZ), it doesn't work. Neither 'Ö' not ':' are recognized by the page. Interesting.
Windows XP Pro, SP2. Running Firefox 2.0.0.2.
It does catch the first "c" I type, but it stops after that - colons aren't caught.
Two theories:
1 - One of my numerous Firefox extensions is interfering with the Javascript
2 - I'm using a German "kezboard". Colons are in a different place. Now off to check if my uppercase "Ö" gets captured...
Stopping eavesdropping, but having no effect on what the intended recipient is able to do. And until the intended recipient of the movie has access to their own machine sufficiently castrated (as the media industry is already attempting), this won't stop any piracy.
Until I see statistics, I'm convinced that the majority of illegal distribution is done by the people who either legitimately download or have already received an illegal distribution - not by people who eavesdrop on the video stream of someone else.
In Soviet Russia, a Beowulf cluster of Netcrafts imagines you!
(Triple score!)
From what I've read, quantum encryption only really becomes necessary if common prime-number algorithms are rendered ineffective by unforeseen advances in computing power (say, quantum computing or other stuff now considered science fiction). It's basically a one-time-pad - it is proven to be completely secure if used correctly, but in most cases, other theoretically breakable technologies are enough.
And the only thing you need to transfer the signal is apparently an uninterrupted fibre-optic line.
But this is basically Google and Wikipedia speaking, so I'm waiting for a real expert to correct me on this.
Now, financial or legal problems are one thing (and Wikipedia has had both in the past, afaik). Quality is still something else, and it has that problem too. But a community death can be seen from a mile away as activity declines, and I'm not seeing one.
If this list begins to cover more than the last 2 minutes, it's time to worry.
Of course, most people even here are using the
My gmail.com address will continue to work, even though I am in Germany.
Because if I have to convince everyone to write out "googlemail" in the future (let alone all the GPG issues that come with it), there's trouble.
> Apple, Nintendo
I deny that that is the case! I bash Apple and Nintendo as vigorously as the others!
Now if you'd said Google...
----
(This, for the unaware, was an attempt to be +1 Funny, not -1 Moron.)
I want to wake up from this nightmare.
On the other hand, the irony that heavy reliance on a proprietary Microsoft standard is now preventing people from buying the latest Microsoft product is delicious.
... it is recommended to hide your money under the carpet and your second house key above the door frame - studies show that burglars rarely look there. Up to now.
Thanks for that. I think that this time, I finally *got* it - after months of knowing that this net neutrality thing was important (everyone was talking about it), but having no clue whether the law should be passed or not.
The sheer awesom-- I mean brilliance of this concept is difficult to put in words. (I promised myself to stay away from awesome this year...).
I personally hope they can pull it off.
Even though I suspect that if they use their status as a sovereign nation to declare local copyright law void, there will be an Operation Sealandian Freedom.
[tried to mod parent funny, slipped and got "overrated"]
Convincing the mainstream Windows userbase to switch to Linux does not seem much more of a challenge to me than convincing them to adjust their security habits.
This doesn't apply to the scenario where Linux comes as a default OS on new hardware, but anyone who cares enough about security to switch from their current OS probably applies patches too.
More likely, IPs are dynamically assigned, and Wikipedia banned the entire IP range of Quatar.
I've seen vandals being blocked - this is usually a slow and extremely lenient process, with something like 2-3 offenses tolerated before they start handing out even day-long blocks for a single IP. I'd like to know what this guy did to make it necessary to prevent him from coming back for a month.
I don't know about spammers though, they might be blocked more quickly.