And moderators, don't fall for something that just *sounds* informative.
lol - are you kidding me? This post gets modded "Informative", yet my reply (with the actual facts) gets modded "Overrated"? Not sure if someone defaced the Wikipedia article everybody got this misinformation from, but CRTs televisions cannot display 1080p (1920x1080), period. Go look it up somewhere else.
The number of outdated or incorrect statements in that article are laughable. If I didn't know any better, I'd say the Toronto Sun was attempting some massive troll against plasma owners.
If you properly break-in a plasma display (100 hours), and you keep the brightness off "torch mode" (used in the showroom to draw attention, but not actually watchable), you won't get "burn-in". Plasma displays released in the past couple years by Pioneer and/or Panasonic are rated at 60,000 hours, not 40,000. Direct sunlight is a problem for *any* TV, not just plasma (duh?).
What's even funnier- the Slashdot moderators fell for this, essentially questioning the buying decision of people who just spent thousands of dollars on a new plasma TV. Nice!
CRTs offer *far* better resolution at the present time than LCDs, plasmas, LCoS, DLP, and every other non-military display technology.
Wrong. 1080p LCDs are quite common, especially for 32in-42in displays. A handful of 1080p plasmas are now available, and 1080p DLP/LCoS displays have been around for months. There are no 1080p CRT televisions, only 480p and/or 1080i. So LCD/plasma/DLP resolution > CRT resolution.
Also, how the heck can you draw all these assumptions and conclusions from a post which was written semi-coherently and was quite visible missing half of what it was supposed to say? Not to mention that some of your conclusions are downright absurd, as there is evidently a specific aim in the original post explicit or not.
Ahh yes, shame on me for not realizing you omitted certain key portions of your original post. I usually spend a few minutes reading the mind of anybody I decide to reply to, but I was feeling a bit lazy earlier.
Either way - I agree with you on this one. Why did I assume that your semi-coherent ramblings were worthy of a reply? Obviously, you don't care about what you're doing beyond the level of self-amusement, so why did I waste my time replying? I have no idea!
I was not invalidating all usage of the data but rather a particular form of usage, as well as attempts to derive certain conclusions from such data. In other words it is a response to people who want the government to have full access to such data to find "terrorists" and whatnot. It's also a response to the people posting in blogs trying to find amusing links in the data.
Look at the subject of this post, "Data mining such things is silly". Sure sounds to me like you're covering "data mining" as a whole, not just misinterpretations of the data.
Of course it contains potential leads; or rather it has the potential to make people think that without the anonymous ids it would contain such leads. All you need is a nice law that gives the police access to the data with full user information attached and they can parse it for all the leads they wants.
So it would contain "leads", but not without a new law allowing police to use hearsay, gathered from the Internet, as evidence when obtaining arrest warrants against the general public. Sure - ignoring the multiple conflicts that law would have with the US Constitution, I guess it's not too much of a stretch. Thanks for the insight; admittedly, I rarely consider imagined unconstitutional laws when responding to Slashdot posts.
I would recommend re-reading your original message so you can sync up with yourself on what your original opinion was. I'm not going to waste any more time responding to frantic backpedaling..
The data was intended to show exactly what you described - samples of search engine usage. There's no such thing as a "useful lead" or a "false lead", because the data doesn't contain leads - it contains search strings.
Really, the only way to invalidate this data would be to prove that the test subjects were conscious of AOL's intent to publish the data, causing them to alter their search habits. Other than that, it is what it is. If you don't understand the value of something like this, it's because you don't fall under AOL's original target audience for this data.
Sounds to me like you pissed off someone with the ability to influence the local police. Traffic tickets always have a spot to fill in the current conditions.. so "bright & sunny", "4:30PM", and "no headlights - $285". I wouldn't even bother with a lawyer for that nonsense - there's absolutely no way you could be found guilty.
On top of that, I don't care if they search my house illegally while they're holding me against my will for something I'll eventually walk away from. They could unearth an underground casino that gets customers from a tunnel leading from the Mexican border -- it's illegal search & seizure -- anything they find will be thrown out.
When police officers do stupid things (like make up their own laws or search a house without a warrant), all they're doing is inviting bad press and wasting tax payers money (resulting in even more bad press). You won't find too many cops willing to make that mistake repeatedly (or they'll find themselves unemployed).
I still don't believe you have to let anybody in if they don't have a warrant. Think about it - they were threatening you because you wouldn't yield to a search, not because you locked your door and refused to let them in (or something along those lines). They were after your consent, because they needed it to enter.
Personally, I'm willing to spend a couple days in jail if a situation like that comes up. When it's all said and done, there's very little chance I will get charged with anything, and there's zero-chance I'll get convicted (it's also unlikely that they will follow-through with obtaining a warrant to search). I can do a night or two in jail standing on my head.. but taking away my right to privacy? That doesn't fly.
Then again, I usually have at least 6-8 human kidneys, photographs of myself photographing police officers, and 50-75kg of cocaine spread between my car and house at any given time. So.. YMMV.
People who still aren't using Firefox have no freakin' idea what "source code" is. Plus, to make things worse, some of them don't even know their own last name.
Is it too late to just hand out Blow-Pops or Tootsie Rolls?
I agree with you 100%. I would probably pay $500+ for a graphics card that would allow me to use additional features within XGL (or rather the same features, just faster). So I'm very interested in 3D acceleration, yet I haven't played a PC game since I ditched Windows 5 years ago. If I had a brand new $500 graphics card, I still wouldn't use it to play games -- I would be buying it to accelerate my desktop performance.
It's not that I need things to happen any faster in order to increase my productivity.. it's that I like smooth, high-resolution desktop graphics.
Uhh, they'll need to know something about what's going on, because they'll be the ones deciding which programs run in which virtual environment, when that virtual environment has been compromised, and all the side-effects associated with doing work inside VMs.
Not that any of that is really difficult, but like I said.. they can't even handle Windows Update. A lot of the virtualization can be handled deep inside the OS, but if the OS could successfully determine each and every time its been compromised (or in this case, had a VM compromised), I think that would have been added as a normal feature quite some time ago.
Good luck explaining all that to Joe User who has no clue what the hell a virtual machine is. People aren't even willing to update their computers by clicking "Windows Update". What makes you think they're going to do everything you just mentioned?
So, "Spyware and spam will NOT remain to be problems" for YOU. Congratulations.
Here's another good one: boot your OS from CD and don't store any data. Problem solved! Spyware and spam will NOT remain to be problems!
To me, the shocking thing about all these hateful posts is that this guy wasn't a serial killer or a rapist; he committed white collar crimes. Securities fraud. Wire fraud. Making false statements to banks.
You can dance around and tell me that his actions resulted in thousands of millions of deaths or whatever else, but he wasn't charged or convicted for any of those things. Let's see - he ended up with about ten convictions, resulting in possibly up to 30 years in jail (had he made it to sentencing).. and he was evil?
I think you folks need to take a step back and look at what you're saying. Even if he personally stole thousands of dollars from you, does that really equate to being "evil"?..and giving you the right to do whatever you want to his dead corpse, or literally "piss" all over his family? Seriously, have you people gone completely fucking mad?
This guy broke modern-day accounting laws. Yes, some people lost lots of money. Welcome to the wonderful world of "investing" - that's why you get interest on the money, because there are no risk-free investments, period.
I'm not an especially spiritual individual, but I sure do pray that this "mob" attitude doesn't represent the majority. Oh, and you can write off what I say as "Troll" or "Flamebait".. just trying to provoke a reaction. Please --- don't reply. Just stop and think about what you're saying. Think about the bad things you've done in life, and how someone who might not know the full story could perceive those things as being much worse than they actually were. I wonder how many people in this thread have a school-zone speeding ticket or a DUI. Are you evil?
This suffers from the same issue that everything else related to technology- if all you have is one single point of failure, and it fails, you are screwed.
Not trying to turn your own words against you, but wouldn't this statement support centralized storage over a local copy? Even if some redundancy exists locally, a company that specializes in storing documents is going to have more invested in fault tolerance (hardware, power, offsite backup storage, a DR site, etc). To do this yourself would definitely be cost prohibitive (or a monumental waste of money).
I just don't see the point in splitting hairs over where something is stored, when how you store it is the important thing. Always assume that everything you write down or save on a disk is going to be read by everyone. If that's not acceptable, encrypt it. By making an informed decision on which encryption algorithm to use, you can be 100% sure that your saved data will never be read by any civilian (number stations are a good example of this in practice). If the government wants to have a look, it will cost them a substantial amount of time & money, almost certainly several orders of magnitude greater than the actual value of the data.
If the file is encrypted by me (i.e., user-controlled encryption), then I am in control of the contents. With regard to the file itself- this isn't a discussion about the operational "what-ifs" of running a service like this - it's about the idea. The day-to-day operation of this service will be built to address the concerns that others have mentioned. For example, there will be uptime & data availability SLAs, multiple off-site backups, redundant power, etc.
There is no doubt in my mind that my data would be safer stored with them than it would be stored on my own PC. Sure, I could build out a mini-datacenter with 99.999% uptime, and then build an identical DR site.. but why go through all that trouble?
I find it funny that most people who disagree with this idea are mentioning MS Office. So the single point of failure chosen to store "mission critical" documents is an Internet-connected PC running Windows. I think a few posters in this thread could benefit from a brief overview of risk analysis.
Just out of curiousity - what are your views on safe deposit boxes? Do you trust the bank not to look through your stuff? They obviously have a key (and if they say they don't, why take the risk?). I wonder how that idea ever took off.. I won't even get into public storage rentals..!
I disagree. I'm very interested in using web-based software, because that software follows me everywhere - regardless of my location, or even my OS. I don't want to waste time by emailing documents to myself.. and then worrying whether or not I have the proper software to edit that document wherever it is I'm going.
I think this is a fantastic idea, and frankly, I'm surprised there have been so many negative reactions posted so far. There are certainly a few downsides to this approach, but for the most part I think people just have an over-inflated fear that third-parties have the time & desire to snoop through their saved files. Any document of mine that is absolutely unfit for public consumption is encrypted.. and I could care less if anybody wants to look through the rest of my stuff - have fun wasting your time. They're all stored in my gmail account.. have a blast.
Either way, ensuring privacy is a very easy problem to work around. For any documents that contain trade secrets or corporate financial data, it's almost trivial to add a layer of encryption (even at the point of user interaction) to eliminate unauthorized access. If PI is planning to market their services to large corporations, some form of user-controlled encryption will need to be built-in to comply with Sarbanes-Oxely/HIPAA/etc, so I doubt this will even be an issue.
A couple people have pointed out that Internet access is required for this model to work, and that's absolutely correct. Even today, my electricity goes out more than my Internet access does, and when that happens, I just use my cell phone & laptop. I would argue that most of their target customers are already in the same situation I am, and if not, they'll be there in time for the release.
I'm well aware that my subnet mask is not a major source of spam. You seem to be missing the point - Trusted Source is obviously using an algorithm that does not sample actual network traffic to calculate IP reputation. For that reason, I don't trust statistical information coming from CipherTrust -- especially when they publish some conclusion that would have required sampling of actual network traffic to prove.
That's a fantastic FAQ entry, but instead of redefining the word 'spam' (and consequently triggering the need for clarification in their FAQ), they could have just used more appropriate wording. Again, very sloppy- which is a reflection of what goes on behind the scenes.
For an example of how to do this right, go take a look at 'Senderbase'. They make no such assumptions about the intent of an IP; they simply provide you with the undisputed facts about the IP (network info, netblock owner, other networks owned by the same person, etc), plus the outbound email volume over the past day/week/month. I've been checking IPs there for years - whatever methodology they have in place for sampling network traffic, I can say from experience that it is consistent and accurate. Their website gives me a headache, but it's a small price to pay for a true peek into the looking glass.
Those who defend Trusted Source are either CipherTrust employees or have never used Senderbase.. and since I'm replying to an AC, my guess is the former.
Re:CipherTrust? nothx.
on
Spam from Taiwan
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
I just checked again and the site says "Reputation: Spam" for those IP addresses. I didn't make a 'lame interpretation'; that's exactly what I stated and that's exactly what's listed on the site.
Re:CipherTrust? nothx.
on
Spam from Taiwan
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
"If a mailer manages to supply those crippled IPs"... well that's the trick - a mailer can't supply those IPs because they're simply not valid public IPs. If one of CipherTrust's collection points is reporting traffic from any of those IPs I listed, they have a very obvious network configuration problem (or they're getting spoofed, which is 100% avoidable).
Regardless of what the actual cause is, this is the reason why I don't trust any network-realated research they publish.
CipherTrust? nothx.
on
Spam from Taiwan
·
· Score: 2, Informative
CipherTrust operates a service called "Trusted Source" - it allows anybody to input an IP address, searching CipherTrust's DB to see if any spam has come from that IP recently. Aside from being generally useless, here are some of the funnier results:
Since they have most of my favorite subnet masks listed as a "Spam" source, I'm not sure that I trust any "research" that comes from these guys.. YMMV.
Slashdot Mirror
The number of outdated or incorrect statements in that article are laughable. If I didn't know any better, I'd say the Toronto Sun was attempting some massive troll against plasma owners.
If you properly break-in a plasma display (100 hours), and you keep the brightness off "torch mode" (used in the showroom to draw attention, but not actually watchable), you won't get "burn-in". Plasma displays released in the past couple years by Pioneer and/or Panasonic are rated at 60,000 hours, not 40,000. Direct sunlight is a problem for *any* TV, not just plasma (duh?).
What's even funnier- the Slashdot moderators fell for this, essentially questioning the buying decision of people who just spent thousands of dollars on a new plasma TV. Nice!
You should try taking your own advice.
Either way - I agree with you on this one. Why did I assume that your semi-coherent ramblings were worthy of a reply? Obviously, you don't care about what you're doing beyond the level of self-amusement, so why did I waste my time replying? I have no idea!
PS - use commas to break up long sentences!
So it would contain "leads", but not without a new law allowing police to use hearsay, gathered from the Internet, as evidence when obtaining arrest warrants against the general public. Sure - ignoring the multiple conflicts that law would have with the US Constitution, I guess it's not too much of a stretch. Thanks for the insight; admittedly, I rarely consider imagined unconstitutional laws when responding to Slashdot posts.
I would recommend re-reading your original message so you can sync up with yourself on what your original opinion was. I'm not going to waste any more time responding to frantic backpedaling
The data was intended to show exactly what you described - samples of search engine usage. There's no such thing as a "useful lead" or a "false lead", because the data doesn't contain leads - it contains search strings.
Really, the only way to invalidate this data would be to prove that the test subjects were conscious of AOL's intent to publish the data, causing them to alter their search habits. Other than that, it is what it is. If you don't understand the value of something like this, it's because you don't fall under AOL's original target audience for this data.
Anybody else find it ironic that this post was made by "MSFanBoi2"? It's really nothing more than "rabid MS fanboism", at best.
Sounds to me like you pissed off someone with the ability to influence the local police. Traffic tickets always have a spot to fill in the current conditions.. so "bright & sunny", "4:30PM", and "no headlights - $285". I wouldn't even bother with a lawyer for that nonsense - there's absolutely no way you could be found guilty.
On top of that, I don't care if they search my house illegally while they're holding me against my will for something I'll eventually walk away from. They could unearth an underground casino that gets customers from a tunnel leading from the Mexican border -- it's illegal search & seizure -- anything they find will be thrown out.
When police officers do stupid things (like make up their own laws or search a house without a warrant), all they're doing is inviting bad press and wasting tax payers money (resulting in even more bad press). You won't find too many cops willing to make that mistake repeatedly (or they'll find themselves unemployed).
I still don't believe you have to let anybody in if they don't have a warrant. Think about it - they were threatening you because you wouldn't yield to a search, not because you locked your door and refused to let them in (or something along those lines). They were after your consent, because they needed it to enter.
Personally, I'm willing to spend a couple days in jail if a situation like that comes up. When it's all said and done, there's very little chance I will get charged with anything, and there's zero-chance I'll get convicted (it's also unlikely that they will follow-through with obtaining a warrant to search). I can do a night or two in jail standing on my head.. but taking away my right to privacy? That doesn't fly.
Then again, I usually have at least 6-8 human kidneys, photographs of myself photographing police officers, and 50-75kg of cocaine spread between my car and house at any given time. So.. YMMV.
Thanks for clearing that up. I feel honored that you corrected my "source code" joke as opposed to the 70-80 others you had to choose from.
People who still aren't using Firefox have no freakin' idea what "source code" is. Plus, to make things worse, some of them don't even know their own last name.
Is it too late to just hand out Blow-Pops or Tootsie Rolls?
I agree with you 100%. I would probably pay $500+ for a graphics card that would allow me to use additional features within XGL (or rather the same features, just faster). So I'm very interested in 3D acceleration, yet I haven't played a PC game since I ditched Windows 5 years ago. If I had a brand new $500 graphics card, I still wouldn't use it to play games -- I would be buying it to accelerate my desktop performance.
It's not that I need things to happen any faster in order to increase my productivity.. it's that I like smooth, high-resolution desktop graphics.
Uhh, they'll need to know something about what's going on, because they'll be the ones deciding which programs run in which virtual environment, when that virtual environment has been compromised, and all the side-effects associated with doing work inside VMs.
Not that any of that is really difficult, but like I said.. they can't even handle Windows Update. A lot of the virtualization can be handled deep inside the OS, but if the OS could successfully determine each and every time its been compromised (or in this case, had a VM compromised), I think that would have been added as a normal feature quite some time ago.
Good luck explaining all that to Joe User who has no clue what the hell a virtual machine is. People aren't even willing to update their computers by clicking "Windows Update". What makes you think they're going to do everything you just mentioned?
So, "Spyware and spam will NOT remain to be problems" for YOU. Congratulations.
Here's another good one: boot your OS from CD and don't store any data. Problem solved! Spyware and spam will NOT remain to be problems!
To me, the shocking thing about all these hateful posts is that this guy wasn't a serial killer or a rapist; he committed white collar crimes. Securities fraud. Wire fraud. Making false statements to banks.
..and giving you the right to do whatever you want to his dead corpse, or literally "piss" all over his family? Seriously, have you people gone completely fucking mad?
.. just trying to provoke a reaction. Please --- don't reply. Just stop and think about what you're saying. Think about the bad things you've done in life, and how someone who might not know the full story could perceive those things as being much worse than they actually were. I wonder how many people in this thread have a school-zone speeding ticket or a DUI. Are you evil?
You can dance around and tell me that his actions resulted in thousands of millions of deaths or whatever else, but he wasn't charged or convicted for any of those things. Let's see - he ended up with about ten convictions, resulting in possibly up to 30 years in jail (had he made it to sentencing).. and he was evil?
I think you folks need to take a step back and look at what you're saying. Even if he personally stole thousands of dollars from you, does that really equate to being "evil"?
This guy broke modern-day accounting laws. Yes, some people lost lots of money. Welcome to the wonderful world of "investing" - that's why you get interest on the money, because there are no risk-free investments, period.
I'm not an especially spiritual individual, but I sure do pray that this "mob" attitude doesn't represent the majority. Oh, and you can write off what I say as "Troll" or "Flamebait"
I just don't see the point in splitting hairs over where something is stored, when how you store it is the important thing. Always assume that everything you write down or save on a disk is going to be read by everyone. If that's not acceptable, encrypt it. By making an informed decision on which encryption algorithm to use, you can be 100% sure that your saved data will never be read by any civilian (number stations are a good example of this in practice). If the government wants to have a look, it will cost them a substantial amount of time & money, almost certainly several orders of magnitude greater than the actual value of the data.
If the file is encrypted by me (i.e., user-controlled encryption), then I am in control of the contents. With regard to the file itself- this isn't a discussion about the operational "what-ifs" of running a service like this - it's about the idea. The day-to-day operation of this service will be built to address the concerns that others have mentioned. For example, there will be uptime & data availability SLAs, multiple off-site backups, redundant power, etc.
There is no doubt in my mind that my data would be safer stored with them than it would be stored on my own PC. Sure, I could build out a mini-datacenter with 99.999% uptime, and then build an identical DR site.. but why go through all that trouble?
I find it funny that most people who disagree with this idea are mentioning MS Office. So the single point of failure chosen to store "mission critical" documents is an Internet-connected PC running Windows. I think a few posters in this thread could benefit from a brief overview of risk analysis.
Just out of curiousity - what are your views on safe deposit boxes? Do you trust the bank not to look through your stuff? They obviously have a key (and if they say they don't, why take the risk?). I wonder how that idea ever took off.. I won't even get into public storage rentals..!
I disagree. I'm very interested in using web-based software, because that software follows me everywhere - regardless of my location, or even my OS. I don't want to waste time by emailing documents to myself.. and then worrying whether or not I have the proper software to edit that document wherever it is I'm going.
I think this is a fantastic idea, and frankly, I'm surprised there have been so many negative reactions posted so far. There are certainly a few downsides to this approach, but for the most part I think people just have an over-inflated fear that third-parties have the time & desire to snoop through their saved files. Any document of mine that is absolutely unfit for public consumption is encrypted.. and I could care less if anybody wants to look through the rest of my stuff - have fun wasting your time. They're all stored in my gmail account.. have a blast.
Either way, ensuring privacy is a very easy problem to work around. For any documents that contain trade secrets or corporate financial data, it's almost trivial to add a layer of encryption (even at the point of user interaction) to eliminate unauthorized access. If PI is planning to market their services to large corporations, some form of user-controlled encryption will need to be built-in to comply with Sarbanes-Oxely/HIPAA/etc, so I doubt this will even be an issue.
A couple people have pointed out that Internet access is required for this model to work, and that's absolutely correct. Even today, my electricity goes out more than my Internet access does, and when that happens, I just use my cell phone & laptop. I would argue that most of their target customers are already in the same situation I am, and if not, they'll be there in time for the release.
That's a fantastic FAQ entry, but instead of redefining the word 'spam' (and consequently triggering the need for clarification in their FAQ), they could have just used more appropriate wording. Again, very sloppy- which is a reflection of what goes on behind the scenes.
For an example of how to do this right, go take a look at 'Senderbase'. They make no such assumptions about the intent of an IP; they simply provide you with the undisputed facts about the IP (network info, netblock owner, other networks owned by the same person, etc), plus the outbound email volume over the past day/week/month. I've been checking IPs there for years - whatever methodology they have in place for sampling network traffic, I can say from experience that it is consistent and accurate. Their website gives me a headache, but it's a small price to pay for a true peek into the looking glass.
Those who defend Trusted Source are either CipherTrust employees or have never used Senderbase.. and since I'm replying to an AC, my guess is the former.
I just checked again and the site says "Reputation: Spam" for those IP addresses. I didn't make a 'lame interpretation'; that's exactly what I stated and that's exactly what's listed on the site.
"If a mailer manages to supply those crippled IPs" ... well that's the trick - a mailer can't supply those IPs because they're simply not valid public IPs. If one of CipherTrust's collection points is reporting traffic from any of those IPs I listed, they have a very obvious network configuration problem (or they're getting spoofed, which is 100% avoidable).
Regardless of what the actual cause is, this is the reason why I don't trust any network-realated research they publish.
CipherTrust operates a service called "Trusted Source" - it allows anybody to input an IP address, searching CipherTrust's DB to see if any spam has come from that IP recently. Aside from being generally useless, here are some of the funnier results:
0 255.0.0.0 - "Spam"1 224.0.0.1 - "Unverified"
http://www.trustedsource.org/query.php?q=255.0.0.
http://www.trustedsource.org/query.php?q=0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 - "Spam"
http://www.trustedsource.org/query.php?q=224.0.0.
Since they have most of my favorite subnet masks listed as a "Spam" source, I'm not sure that I trust any "research" that comes from these guys.. YMMV.
Why "controversial"..? Read the non-AC replies to the original post. Does everybody seem to be in agreement?