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Comment Re:Your uncle's right (Score 4, Informative) 340

Have you ever heard of backscatter spam?

Spammers use bots to browse the internet and scoop up email addresses. Then they send messages with one of those addresses in the "From" header and one in the "To" header. If the messages go through, one person receives spam. If they don't go through, the other person receives spam. Either way, someone gets spam.

None of this requires much technical knowledge. I can make backscatter spam by filling in a registration form on any website. I just put your address in the "email address" field, and the site sends you a confirmation email, typically from a no-reply@whatever.com email address. So it's basically impossible to stop.

Backscatter spam works because it looks like it came from someone it didn't. It's why web sites shouldn't provide alerts for messages that weren't delivered and why "out of office" messages or messages to confirm addresses are bad. Because any bot (or any person, too) can fill in a form and turn your website into a backscatter machine.

Comment "From" is like the upper left of an envelope. (Score 4, Insightful) 340

Tell him that the "from" that shows up in emails is like the upper left corner of an envelope.

I could write a letter, address it, and in the upper left corner write

PRESIDENT BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA
1600 PENNSYLVANIA AVE. NW
WASHINGTON, DC 20500-0003

And you could mail the letter. And the letter might even be delivered. But that doesn't mean that the President really sent that letter. It just means that whoever sent it claimed to be someone else when they were sending it.

Earth

Strong Climate Change Opinions Are Self-Reinforcing 655

An anonymous reader writes "A study recently published in Nature (abstract) looked at how personal beliefs altered a person's perception of climate change. Surveying a sample of people in 2008 and then the same people again in 2011, the study looked for 'motivated reasoning,' where 'high belief certainty influenced perceptions of personal experience,' and 'experiential learning,' where 'perceived personal experience of global warming led to increased belief certainty.' According to the article, 'When you categorize individuals by engagement — essentially how confident and knowledgeable they feel about the facts of the issue — differences are revealed. For the highly-engaged groups (on both sides), opinions about whether climate is warming appeared to drive reports of personal experience. That is, motivated reasoning was prevalent. On the other hand, experience really did change opinions for the less-engaged group, and motivated reasoning took a back seat.None of that is truly surprising, but it leads to a couple interesting points. First, the concrete here-and-now communication strategy is probably a good one for those whose opinions aren't firmly set — fully 75 percent of Americans, according to the polling. But second, that tack is unlikely to get anywhere with the 8 percent or so of highly-engaged Americans who reject the idea of a warming planet, and are highly motivated to disregard anything that says otherwise.'"
Medicine

No More "Asperger's Syndrome" 602

cstacy writes "The American Psychiatric Association is dropping Asperger's Syndrome from the upcoming edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5) Its symptoms will be included under the umbrella of Autism Spectrum Disorder, which includes everything from severe autism such as children who do not talk or interact, to milder forms of autism. Asperger's disorder is impairment in social interaction and repetitive and stereotyped patterns of behavior, activities and interests, without significant delay in language or cognitive development. Often the person has high intelligence and vast knowledge on narrow subjects but lacks social skills. DSM-5 comes out in May and will be the first major rewrite in 19 years."

Comment Re:Glacial pace (Score 5, Informative) 373

Mod parent way up.

CSS3 prefixes are something that's added to a CSS property if support for the final standard isn't complete, so you end up with things like

border-radius: 15px;
-moz-border-radius: 15px;
-ms-border-radius: 15px;
-o-border-radius: 15px;
-webkit-border-radius: 15px;

Vendor prefixes are something that's done by every vendor for testing. That includes Microsoft. Here's a page from MSDN with a Microsoft representative explaining that:

As you may know, all browsers have a set of CSS features that are either considered a vendor extension (e.g. -ms-interpolation-mode), are partial implementations of properties that are fully defined in the CSS specifications, or are implementation of properties that exist in the CSS specifications, but aren’t completely defined. According to the CSS 2.1 Specification, any of the properties that fall under the categories listed previously must have a vendor specific prefix, such as '-ms-' for Microsoft, '-moz-' for Mozilla, '-o-' for Opera, and so on.

As part of our plan to reach full CSS 2.1 compliance with Internet Explorer 8, we have decided to place all properties that fulfill one of the following conditions behind the '-ms-' prefix:

If the property is a Microsoft extension (not defined in a CSS specification/module)
If the property is part of a CSS specification or module that hasn’t received Candidate Recommendation status from the W3C
If the property is a partial implementation of a property that is defined in a CSS specification or module
This change applies to the following properties, and therefore they should all be prefixed with '-ms-' when writing pages for Internet Explorer 8 (please note that if Internet Explorer 8 users are viewing your site in Compatibility View, they will see your page exactly as it would have been rendered in Internet Explorer 7, and in that case the prefix is neither needed nor acknowledged by the parser):

If a site designer doesn't code things correctly by also including the CSS property *without* vendor-specific prefixes that's a problem with the quality of the site designer and not with Safari.

Comment Velcro ties (Score 1) 242

Walmart has some velcro strap in the sewing section. It's about 1" thick, and is spooled around itself. Whenever I need to tie a cable, I just wrap it around the bunch of cables and cut. It works a lot better than things like plastic ties or twist ties, because it can easily be undone.

If I have a bunch of cables tied together and you can't identify them(like networking cable), I will wrap a piece of paper masking tape around each end of each cable(like a flag made of tape rather than like a band going around the wire), and then write a description of the cable on both sides of the tape and on both sides of each flag.

Comment Re:OK, stick a fork in them, they're done. (Score 1) 743

What part of

If you count the iPhone, iPad and iPod vs Android phones and all other Android-based devices, iOS has more marketshare.

didn't you understand?

The number of Android-based phones is greater than the number of iOS-based phones.

BUT

The total number of iOS-based devices is greater than the total number of Android-based devices.

Comment Re:OK, stick a fork in them, they're done. (Score -1, Flamebait) 743

It's a common misconception that Android has more marketshare than iOS.

Android has more marketshare if you count only phones.

If you count the iPhone, iPad and iPod vs Android phones and all other Android-based devices, iOS has more marketshare.

That's not even counting the marketshare of OS X(which iOS evolved from).

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