Comment Re:A little late to the party... (Score 4, Informative) 140
Google was the first to roll out SSL for everything, the first to do SSL forward secrecy
Google was the first to roll out SSL for everything, the first to do SSL forward secrecy
Article can be summed up as, "Sending mail people actually want is soooooo hard, I have to do all kinds of privacy-invasive things and that makes me a spammer!"
I've not seen such rambling nonsense for a long time. The guys domains appeared in spamhaus because - reality check - they are open proxies. Every single open URL redirector on the internet gets ruthlessly pillaged by spammers who are trying to avoid domain name blocks, so a URL like "http://my-proxy.com/render?url=http://buy-cheap-meds.info" inevitably lands my-proxy.com on spam-filter blacklists, because they learn that 99% of the time my-proxy.com appears in an email, that email is unwanted. URL shorteners are especially vulnerable to this.
As to the other ideas - hey, here's a great one. How about instead of using image bugs to try and figure out if your last 50 (!!) mails were ignored, why not ask users to re-opt in every so often if they want to continue receiving your mails? Was that really so hard? Keeping a good reputation with spam filters really isn't magic, so it blows me away that people host webinars on the topic - send mail people want. That's pretty much 95% of it. The other 5%? Avoid sharing resources that get abused by spammers - like URL shorteners.
I think Bennet may just have to give up on what he's trying to do here. If his proxies get abused by spammers to work around spam-filter URL domain reputation, then communicating lists of open proxies via email is inevitably going to break.
You're probably very right, but for those of us who know little about medicine, can someone explain where that BILLION dollars would go? I know there will need to be trials run, data studied, scientists paid etc but a billion dollars is an awful lot of money
Yeah, that's great, except that in the real world apps like Gmail have to support all kinds of wacky browsers, including old ones that get kicked to "legacy" UIs, mobile browsers, browsers that are technically standards compliant but are much faster or slower than other browsers and so on.
I used to work on a server that vended browser specific code based on the user-agent (for a variety of reasons it had to be browser specific choices on the server side). It was a server that vended some self contained code that got embedded into lots of different web sites and properties. Anyway, the most painful browser to support was by far Internet Explorer. It blew my mind how badly they managed to screw this up. It's not that modern IE's are bad browsers, you see, they aren't really - after letting the web rot for years they finally reacted to their retreating market share by staffing up the IE team again, and nowadays it can render things nice and fast. The problem is their totally broken compatibility architecture.
Modern Internet Explorers are not a single browser. They're actually a wrapper around multiple different versions of the IE rendering engine, along with a horrific pile of heuristics, hacks and magical downloaded lists to try and select the right one. There's actually a giant flow chart that tries to describe what combination of bugs IE will try to emulate in any given situation, although that dates from 2010. Undoubtably it's now even more complicated. This is a total disaster. Firstly, IE isn't capable of always doing the right thing - a notorious example being the case where a top level document requests one kind of "document mode" (i.e. Trident version) and then an iframe requests a different kind, well, Trident can't recursively embed old versions of itself, so the iframe'd document just doesn't get the docmode it requested. If your code is run inside an iframe the only way to find out what docmode you're actually running in is to test it on the client side using JavaScript! If you then discover you have the wrong version of your JS loaded because IE lied to you, well, tough luck. Time to go reload it.
Combine this with trying to run code iframed into sites like Blogger where users are allowed to control their own toplevel HTML, and you can just forget about anything sane happening. But it gets even more confusing, because new versions of the rendering engine still have "quirks mode". You pretty quickly find yourself having to draw up giant matrices of how IE might behave in any given scenario.
What's worse, there are lots of different ways to ask IE for a specific mode. There are META tags, magic HTTP headers, DOCTYPE tags, and this Microsoft compatibility list which can override those in various situations, except that it works on a per domain basis and sites like google.com have tons of different apps hanging off different endpoints, some of which might no longer be really maintained, requiring a "flag day" where everyone co-ordinates to prepare for changes in the compatibility list. Oh yes, and users can and do modify their browser settings (as we see in this story), resulting in yet another column in the compatibility matrix.
Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera
What makes you think they aren't going to learn from previous attempts?
Right. Look at Bitcoin. Most of the standard financial scams have been replicated in the Bitcoin world. Ponzi schemes, fake stocks, fake stock markets, brokers who took the money and ran, crooked escrow services, "online wallet" services that stole customer funds - that's Bitcoin.
Actually, no. That is, as you said, "standard financial scams" which usually rely on convincing people to give up control of their money. The whole point of Bitcoin is you don't have to give your money to random untrustworthy third parties. The fact that P2P financial technology is in its infancy and some holders of that currency choose to do so anyway, says more about the importance of decentralising all aspects of finance than it does about Bitcoin itself.
For instance, online wallet services - again, the whole point of Bitcoin is you don't have to give your money to a bank. Some idiots do so anyway, because, well, they can't be bothered downloading a wallet app and using it themselves. Or maybe they're just so used to the idea of giving their money to someone else for safe keeping they can't quite let go. Who knows? Lots of people who use Bitcoin managed to avoid all such scams by the simple expedient of understanding the goal of the project and keeping their own money.
Crooked escrow providers? The protocol allows for dispute mediators that can't steal your money, all they can do is decide whether a payment should clear through to the merchant or be refunded. It doesn't get used today because P2P financial technology is hard, and the code needed to do this kind of low-trust dispute mediation isn't finished. Give it a few years and I'm sure it will be.
In the US banking crisis, depositors didn't lose their money.
Directly? No, as is also the case for most other banking crises. Indirectly, yes of course they lost money as did many other people. Banks cannot misallocate vast quantities of resources and there be no impact of that. The losses were merely socialised through other means.
Scamming is such a big part of the Bitcoin economy that almost nobody is using it for anything legitimate.
Says you. By the way, I like how you use the word legitimate and then immediately imply that people trying to escape capital controls is up there with ponzi schemes.
No, their supposed to be spying on every other government and country. They are all spying on us as well. It's the dirty little secret of diplomacy, everyone is spying on everyone else.
I love how people try to sound wise when talking about this stuff, "of course" the USA spies on everyone, everyone knows "everyone spies on everyone else".
Except they don't. Do you really think Brazil or Mexico is running operations hacking President Obama's email account? Do you think Germany is? If "everyone" was doing this stuff the spies would constantly be tripping over each other as they all tried to get access to Obama's email simultaneously.
The brutal reality is that only a few countries seem to be doing this stuff, probably because most countries don't have governments that split the world into "domestic" and "foreign" but rather, have some notion of "allies" vs "enemies".
The decision about what to publish or not is up to the newspapers. Obviously Der Spiegel, being a German newspaper, doesn't really give a shit about what the NSA thinks or whether its spy operations on its neighbours get busted. After all the USA didn't hesitate to hack foreign news firms, would it?
Have you actually been to northern Europe? Do you know anything about intra-EU migration, especially from places like Poland, Romania or Bulgaria?
In 2-3 generations the cost of providing welfare will have plummeted far below what it is today. That's rather the nature of progress.
However, for now, "importing labour" a.k.a. allowing immigration doesn't seem like a terrible way to raise the tax base, now does it? Especially as most northern European countries are getting immigration from eastern European countries where the dominant religions do not involve burqas.
That's your debunking? That Somalia was (according to some guy who wrote a paper) a shithole before anarchy, and is marginally less of a shithole afterwards, therefore anarchy is good?
This is why the ultra-hard libertarian arguments always come across as so flaky. There aren't any examples of places that are both nice to live and stateless.
Not that I'm a fan of anarcho-capitalism (at all), but your points would have fairly ready responses from the crowd that is - obviously, their envisioned utopia doesn't have banks or PayPal equivalents, rather all money is in the form of Bitcoin which cannot be arbitrarily seized like that.
Also, re: power supplies, it often isn't necessary for governments to impose particular technical standards. For instance the internet has developed all kinds of protocols and standards without any government mandates.
I think if you want a fundamental, theoretical justification for the state, the right place to start is fighting of crime.
Who knows? Perhaps his DHCP lease expired and he got reassigned to an IP previously used by a curvy woman?
A lot of these ad systems are based on somewhat black box machine learning models or statistical correlation engines. Even the people who run them can't always explain why a certain choice was made, just that overall it seems to do the right thing.
"Legitimate" companies like Google, who then sell your information to third parties?
I am a Google user. My email address is in my Slashdot profile. Please go buy my personal data from Google and then show it to me. I'll be waiting when you get back.
The solution would have been for Apple to be slapped, hard, when it started claiming that nobody could build tablets or phones anymore even though none of their patents were technically "essential". Then it would have never escalated to that point. However neither the US nor the EU managed to achieve even basic common sense with regards to Apples rampant abuse of the courts, and are focusing on the Korean company instead.
This coming after Obama stepped in personally to ensure Apple wouldn't have to pay up? It sends a bad message, a very bad message to the rest of the world indeed. Basically whichever company is "cooler" gets to win, no matter what the rules of the game were meant to be.
Factorials were someone's attempt to make math LOOK exciting.