And we'd want to spend time paying enough attentio to post to wikipedia why, again?

This defense doesn't work for the torrent aggregation sites (Pirate Bay, Isohunt, etc.) and it would only work here if the various spam lists really were willing to staff the "unlist us" addresses as thoroughly as the "list us" addresses.

I work at a nonprofit that has health care and gang outreach as two chunks of what we do. I have had emails inviting a group of people to a meeting around gang violence flagged as spam in the past, because the subject line was thought to be spammy. Heaven forfend that one of our providers should dare to talk about viagra or erectile dysfunction in an email.

I am not sure if it was Spamhaus per se, but one of the times we were added to a blacklist, I was able to get us pulled immediately. But I was warned by the fully automated removal system that that was a one-time deal and if we were listed again, I would have to wait patiently while they got around to deciding what to do.

With the Barracuda list, there's a for-profit company with 800 numbers that are answered, at least. I don't remember now who it was, but one of the RBL providers got into a pissing match with Yahoo over their mailing list configuration and blackholed Yahoo's outbound mail servers a few years ago.

Accountability with these lists is a problem. The court case immediately at hand isn't interesting one way or another, since it wasn't contested.

Accountability, on the other hand, is something that needs to be addressed a lot better by the RBLs.

I have the impression that about all we're able to get out of decades of recording whale and dolphin communications is "say what?" We've only just lately stumbled on infrasound communication between elephants over very long distances, and again we're pretty much at "say what?" We're a little bit better at certain communications when they're almost always accompanied by fighting, fucking, or scattering but by and large we have a huge number of what many of us assume are less-complicated-than-our-own-oh-so-wondrous communications - and by and large, we can do fuck-all as far as figuring them out.

Faced with that, we tend to either forget that they may convey more information than we can parse, or state that they do not convey that information, since they are not able to convey it to us. Not that they convey, say, the works of Shakespeare of the Pachyderms, but rather that they may well be conveying quite a bit more information than we realize.

One of my favorite bits of the history of language study is that language needed a lot of redefinition after Karl von Frisch figured out how bees were using dance to communicate place and direction of things not visible to the rest of the hive, food and water. Quite a bit of a problem for a lot of what had been thought about what language was up until that time.

I want to thank the original poster for a jaw-droppingly stimulating post.

If the talks aren't new and interesting, and you are just going to socialize, that's okay, but it's hardly what the conference could be. It's not what I want to go to Defcon for; I liked the first few I went to, where there were some very good technical talks and that was the expectation. What you are describing sounds a lot like retirement or senescence.

It seems that many speakers are chosen based on who they know, and there's way too much inside baseball going on in speaker selection. An example seems to be the talk I walked out on early today, where some kid who's professor is a friend of Kaminsky's gave a presentation pointing out that university hostname assignment and resolution practices may constitute a privacy leak. Now, the talk may have heated up something fierce after I left the room, but tieing a DNS lookup to an ARP address and then having the (attractive blonde) professor talk about how the uni had recruited the student who presented, and about the legality or not of it, and then who knows what Dan contributed, if anything? I left to see if the biohacking guy had anything to say. Sadly, he did not; he had very few examples, and lots and lots of words explaining why he thought biohackers were of interest. Fewer words and more examples, possibly even an actual biohacker - would have helped immensely.

One thing I thought was interesting last year and did not particularly see this year was talk about policy. I got called out on an incident in the middle of Saturday afternoon, so sadly I missed the long analysis of the PLA, and I hope that is worth watching later. Last year, though I disagreed with it a great deal, there was a long policy panel. (The thrust was 'we're done, this is what we are suggesting to the Feds, please congratulate us.' The speakers were current or former military. They were not interested in actual input from the audience and were very insulting of audience members who wanted to give any. It was good to see these guys out in daylight and understand what they were doing, though.)

No one had interesting SCADA work to talk about this year? Really? Last year there was a talk about SCADA that seems to me to have pretty much had to have been a stepping stone for more. But I didn't see any such talks this year.

The poster who compared Defcon to Burning Man may have hit it on the head. Defcon is unusual in that it brings together a lot of very different perspectives - the lock folks were out in force again this year, and did a pretty good presentation which was good to see.

There's still a real opportunity for Defcon to be interesting, but this year was indeed a fail. Also, they are bound for fire marshall trouble if they don't get the fuck out of the Riviera. They made a decision this year to axe what had been the largest room in the venue and put most of the big talks into a four room area served by a single hallway. They cleared each room ahead of the next talk; if you wanted to see two talks deemed by the group to be interesting back to back, you were SOL - and so was everyone else, as the halls clotted insanely.

As of now, I'm unlikely to go back until such time as the con moves out of the Riviera. And by then, it will probably be larger, fluffier and have even less content - I don't see it relocating too soon, and it's going to keep being bigger and bigger.

What's needed is more stuff like FX' presentation, exploiting Cisco routers with one packet giving you configuration access - using ICMP! Now damn, that was good stuff. Less UFOs, less inspirational speakers, less interest in media whoring. These would all be valuable things.

But it's very possible that Defcon is in some ways intentionally aping burning man - and hopes one day in the future to start co-hosting events with burning man.

Oh, thank goodness. Here and my largest concern in life was that we were about to run out of babies on the planet.

How much coudl the old Avantgo servers actually be worth, anyway?

I'm not sure what the advantage of Sunrise is? Is it faster than just defining the channels in plucker? Plucker is pig slow.

Sunrise, however, was only able to load the Christian Science Monitor for me (granted, with only using the point-click-drool install method and the canned 'showcase' channels) despite downloading many meg of channels which it claimed would land on the device after sync. But only CSM. And in a layout that's a pain on the Palm screen. I gave up on it for now - but not before figuring out that it helps to install Sunrise in your Palm folder, you avantgo refugees. This will help get rid of a shitload of "file not found" messages on launch.

Sunrise may work and may be faster than just using Pluckr by itself. I suppose it has to be. Dear god pluckr by itself has a hard time.

That is one thing Avantgo does extremely well - collate content the once and spit it back out to one and all, formatted in a way that really made sense for a palmtop.

My experience with avantgo was that the problems were more often with the content providers than with Avantgo itself.

I've been using Avantgo for 10 years, and am sorry to see it go buh-bye, but am not that suprised. Given the advantages palm + avantgo have together over Kindle (you decide how often to update; touchscreen; small device unlikely to be accidentally folded/bent,) I wonder if any bright sparks over at Palm are talking to Sybase about buying the servers and putting them on a truck so they can offer the service for the Pre.

Yes, I understand the Pre has its own always-on signal. Throwing avantgo in as a way of saving people on costs would go over well, though, if there's a client that would work or could be made to work on the pre.

holy crap. I'm now starting on channel #2 with pluckr.

Why are people claiming pluckr is superior to Avantgo? Granted, any site can be plucked - but for sites with mobile-condensed channels, which is all I'm pointing this at, it's wicked slow and the layout's not that good (I admit: I dry fired with the Onion before adding in the full complement.)

I can't imagine how much fun it would be to wait on this for regular websites.

wow. Now I'm up to channel 4. It looks like pluckr by itself requires more patience than us internet peeps typically have, unless it's able to integrate only the deltas and not the whole site each time content changes. (My impression is that it is not able to do that, that it needs to respider if there's been an update.)

Well, I'm reading it right now. I am by no means a mathematician (a year of college calculus, a semester of physical chemistry and a fair amount of exposure to the kind of thermodynamics that describe chemicals in solution.)

I am enjoying it, and I'm noticing that so far (120 pages?) it's entirely math-free. Yes, there are some appendices containing proofs of some of the statements in the book. I was not impressed with the appendix on pythagoras' theorem; we did a much better job with that in high school and since it's in an appendix, I didn't understand why the treatment was as informal as it was. One big point of the section it is first cited in was to discuss the importance of formal, rigorous proofs.

I am concerned that beyond the biographical sketches of Math Greats, I'm really just getting mind candy. My training is in biology, and last night I ran across the rather insubstantial discussion of prime numbers and cicada lifespans. As presented, it was a rather weak just so story. My general rule of thumb is that if someone's not impressing me much in discussing the stuff I actually did spend time studying in depth, the prose may be entertaining on the other stuff, but it's unlikely to actually teach me anything much, and in the worst case may be telling me things which are wrong.

It's a fun book, but I wouldn't have any real interest in using it as a teaching aid for a math course.

Assigning a decent translation of one of the Greek math texts used as source material, and asking for an oral presentation of one of the classical geometric or arithmetic proofs, or perhaps of one of the proofs requiring the use of imaginary numbers? I could see doing that.

But reading a book report about a bunch of books (which is what Singh's book is) - even a well-written one - and using it in an actual math class seems wrong, somehow.

Where to start.

None of what you say about US phone call monitoring applies, since Skype is not a phone call, it's an internet transmission. The law on collecting packets is a lot weaker than the law on collecting analog signals.

The point of this is that the "crypto" in Skype can be broken and has been broken per a government request. What this means is that virtually any Skype conversation since 2001 should be assumed to be available for review by the Feds. September 11 2001, the Feds installed packet sniffers at consumer ISPs across the country, and told the NOC staffs "this will only be for a few weeks, while we get the Tier 1 taps in place."

http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2001/09/46747?currentPage=all

On to your trusting lunacy about phones: We don't know what the NSA program does and does not do, nor what it is or is not designed to do, nor what it is doing nor how the data can be reexamined in the future. We know a very small amount about what it could do circa 2004 from good reporting, but no one's ever testified about it in a courtroom.

What we do know is that speaking about it in the past tense is amusing.

The scenario you outline - only targeted calls are intercepted - is the current legal justification for continuing to permit it and for retroatively legalizing it.

Once you have the ability to start snarfing those calls, without a warrant and without asking the carrier for further assistance, you will start snarfing a whole lot more. If you accidentally leave your equipment on, you'll just have collected a lot more. Since there is no oversight, there's no reason to be concerned about being reprimanded.