Posts by Shannon Jacobs

Can't hurt to ask?

Just came from the Huawei website. Anyone have any idea if they are vulnerable to the shell shock (bash) problems? (I currently have three Huawei devices.)

They JUST noticed?

This has been going on for YEARS in various forms. However, this kind of crap doesn't bother me nearly as much as the ones targeting children, and many of the fake charity pitches are quite offensive, too. Then we get the ones that rudely share my email address with long lists of random suckers, or the ones that abuse supposedly reputable companies. Lately it looks like Apple users make especially good suckers. Then we get into phishing scams...

Hey, here's a dumb idea. Why don't we attack the spammers' business models? I'm not saying we can make them into decent human beings, but if we cut them away from the money, most of them will crawl under less visible rocks.

Do the math. There are BILLIONS of email addresses out here, and ALL of them hate spam. There are only a TINY number of suckers who feed the spammers with money or valuable personal information. If it was easier for ANY significant fraction of the billions of spam-haters to get in the way, then the spammers could not connect to their suckers. Such stupidity is truly a rare and precious resource for the spammers.

The most obvious implementation would be integrated right into a major email system. When a wannabe spam-fighter triggers it, the spam in question would be analyzed in several steps. Essentially at each step you should see an expanded webform with analytic options to confirm or extend or anti-spammer measures to endorse or reject. The simple goal would be to attack ALL of the spammers' infrastructure, pursue ALL of the spammers' accomplices, and help and defend ALL of the spammers' vcitims. Amusing that the victims includes the feds in the example of this article, eh?

Why don't ANY of the major email providers try to convert some of the spammer hate to a good purpose? Instead, it's hard not to wind up hating all email, giving the volume of the spam.

How is it possible for Adobe's software to be so bad?

They patch it several times a month. They do not add ANY new functions, certainly not visible ones. And yet their program is still crashing frequently, usually several times a day. Each time it crashes, my browser is locked up for a while until it releases.

Let me guess. Since Adobe has no good news, they just create bad news. At least we're still noticing them, eh?

Actually, I think they're a kind of nice company in some ways, but they need to FIX their software.

Why dost thou spam?

Hint: Not just because you're a sociopath. It's because thou art a sociopath and making money from the spam.

I'm not saying we can cure them. I'm saying we can attack their business models so they get less money and they will send less spam. Symantec is the wrong locus of an economic attack because their business model depends on the visibility of spammers, scammers, black-hat hackers, and various other free advertising.

The companies that have the business model that is directly related to the value of email OUGHT to be the email providers like Yahoo (hopelessly incompetent), Gmail (EVIL), and Microsoft (new spots on an old leopard?). They all pretend to hate spam, but none of them are sincere about it. If they were, then they would offer integrated anti-spam tools so we could help attack ALL of the spammers' infrastructure, pursue ALL of the spammers' accomplices, and protect ALL of the spammers' victims, even from themselves.

The suckers that feed the spammers are a very precious and limited resource. That's why the spammers send out billions of pieces of carp (polite fudge) to tap them. If it were easier for the wannabe good Samaritans who hate spam to get in the middle, then we could completely overwhelm the limited supply of suckers. Let's stop the spammers from feeding, eh?

It's the humans, stupid, and boy, are they stupid

I think the single approach that would most hurt the criminals would be if the suckers would stop installing their apps, and the single kind of information that would most deter the suckers from installing the apps is knowing the REAL financial motivations of whoever is distributing the app.

Of course, that kind of "reality" is too much to hope for, but if some attempt were made to present the financial information, then it would help in a lot of cases. Most of the legitimate financial models are pretty well known, and the google could basically offer them as selectable options--and in most of those cases the google could offer some independent evidence as to whether or not the developer is telling the truth, and lock that part down so the developer can't tamper with it. Does the developer say he will get money from ads? Then the google can say they are paying advertising revenue. Is it a limited version for a paid version? Then the google can report that a paid version actually exists and is actually earning some sales.

Of course the google doesn't understand this, do they?

Abuse of the First Amendment

If you're so proud of your actions, why the mask?

In general I am quite opposed to censorship, but I just want to go on record (since the topic has apparently not been addressed clearly) that this is clearly on the other side of the bright line, and the censorship is fully justified. This was a deliberate crime performed for the sake of creating the video and with the deliberate intention of propagating the video to threaten other innocent people.

The double irony is that the victim had dedicated his life to the First Amendment. The vicious murderer in the mask would never understand why.

P.S. Other countries have other tags for the freedom of speech, but I'm just framing it from the American perspective because it was also the victim's.

No reason to get so unreasonable--unless it's on the list of optins

What we need is an integrated anti-spammer anti-scammer system. Actually, it should have a provision for bringing in external scams, too, but you basically want to be as open as possible, so no matter which way the spammers and scammers turn, you can still hit them. I'm not saying that they will become decent human beings, even without the fingers, but just that they are driven by the profits, and the smaller the profits, the smaller the problem.

The system should involve several iterations of analysis and targeting. At each point the human spam-fighting volunteer will either confirm or correct the server's analysis. After a couple of rounds of analysis, the webforms will be focusing on the most effective countermeasures. The basic idea is to break ALL of the spammers' infrastructure, pursue ALL of the spammers' accomplices, and help (as mostly protect them from their own stupidity) ALL of the spammers' victims. Yes, I might make a mistake in my analysis of a particular piece of spam, but a bunch of people will be extremely likely to get it right and even reach an agreement on the best responses.

Look at it this way. There are LOTS of people who hate scammers, but only a few suckers out there. If you make it easier to block the spammers away from their suckers, then their money will get really small. Like their penises.

This is why "Live and let spam" is EVIL

As long as it's profitable, the spammers will continue to develop their business models.

Hey, here's a stupid idea. Why doesn't one of the big email services provide really effective anti-spammer tools? Integrate them into the email system so we can help break ALL of the spammers' infrastructure, pursue ALL of the spammers' accomplices, and help out ALL of the spammers' victims? Yeah, I know the spammers' human victims are idiots that need to be protected from themselves and the corporate victims are mostly EVIL, but still... Less spam would still make the Internet more valuable for all of us.

Or perhaps more to the point, wouldn't it be more valuable to you if you had an email system that the spammers feared? It could be done, but "Live and let spam" remains the dominant business model.

Of course you aren't, you EVIL lying sons of...

It was only a few years ago that I thought google was a good thing. Now it makes me feel so innocent and naive. EVIL is the rule of business in America, and google has become as EVIL as any of them.

Hey, google, would you like to get your soul back? You'd have to sacrifice a tiny fraction of your profits. Oh, not interested. Why am I not surprised?

I might have been interested until I saw who wrote the pitch

It's the climate change denier moron. Why would anyone trust ANY pitch or promise from such a fool? And no wonder the Register is becoming desperate for fresh blood.

No such thing as uncontested connections

The issue is NOT wireless versus wired. The issue is CONTROL, as in the big companies (and their pet governments) want to control our access to the Internet. If most of the content was moving locally via shared WiFi networks, then they wouldn't have any chokepoints. Yes, there are some natural monopolies, but information is NOT one of them.

If the spammers weren't making money, then they would stop sending the spam. Even worse, the money they do make is used to fund ever more diabolical and vicious forms of spam (like the latest round of ransom-ware), but what really angers me is that the spammers gladly target weak victims like children and people who know very little about computers.

Meanwhile, the big email companies that do understand the threats have adopted the business model of "Live and let spam", which also infuriates me. The spammers obviously LOVE filters, since the filters just give more credibility to the spam that slips through while ignoring the blizzards of spam that disguise the new and more dangerous attacks.

Why don't any of the major email providers provide REAL anti-spammer tools to break the spammers' business models? I'm not saying that we can eliminate all spam or turn the spammers into decent human beings. I'm just saying that we could reduce their profits, and that many of the spammers would respond by crawling under less visible rocks. Less spam would make the Internet more valuable for everyone.

Considering the numbers, the approach that seems most promising would be crowd-driven analysis and counterattack targeting. Essentially there are lots of people who hate spam and only a few suckers who feed the spammers. If ANY email system made it easier for the wannabe good Samaritans to help out, then the crowd can help cut the spammers away from the suckers. The integrated anti-spammer tools could allow volunteer spam-fighters to help analyze the spam in several steps. At each step the automatic analyses would be confirmed or corrected or refined, eventually focusing on the most effective countermeasures to disrupt ALL of the spammers' infrastructure, to pursue ALL of the spammers' accomplices, and to help defend and protect ALL of the spammers' victims, even including the poor corporations whose reputations and customers are abused by the spammers. (Concrete examples of specific targeting suggestions available upon request. There are LOTS of obvious ones.)

By the way, I think you have to limit the anti-spammer tools to the targeting, and the actual kill buttons should remain under the control of the professional spam fighters working for the email services. I would be WAY too eager to pull the trigger.

P.S. Proof of concept: Stock market pump-and-dump spam has almost entirely stopped. The stock exchanges acted to block the profits, and the spammers gave up.

Shades of Couch Potatoes of the World, Unite

Seriously, that's the result of my analysis of alternative time-based economic models. I disagree with Carlos, however. Lots of people simply aren't creative, and you can't force them to be creative. They can still make contributions to the economy by their consumption of other people's creative efforts, but I am not aware of any economists who are thinking along those lines. Conventional economists are just looking where the light is bright. Easy to measure money, but time is a more difficult thing. (Actually, when I discussed it with a google guy, he put it in terms of attention, and I sort of agree, but I also think that time can be enhanced with more attention...)

Freedom <> Obscene profits

Freedom is about meaningful and unconstrained choice, but that is NOT equal to monopolistic profit maximization, which is fundamentally about removing choice. If the consumers actually have meaningful options and can freely choose among them, then the free market will effectively minimize the profits. Not eliminate profits, but certainly prevent monopolistic price gouging. Heaven forbid, but you'll have to actually WORK for a FAIR profit against your competitors. Don't you just hate that?

Intuitively obvious to the most casual observer, but any questions?

The only good profit is an obscene profit?

Sorry, it's the rules of the game that are obscene. What do you expect when all of the laws are written by the most cheaply bribed politicians working for the least ethical and greediest businessmen based on the 'cancer is GOOD' business model. Unfortunately, it still can't help them solve their problem. You see, their problem is that they don't have enough money, and there is NO amount of money that would be "enough" for such sick personalities.

Let me make clear that most businesspeople are good folks. They just want to play the game fairly and by the rules. They are NOT the 0.1% of the businessmen who are buying the politicians to rig the game.

Oh yeah. About Samsung. I don't know if they are bribing politicians with the aggressiveness of the google. What I do know is that profit is based on the small difference between two large numbers. It is only a small fraction of the manufacturing costs and net sales income. The stock market only cares about these actually tiny fluctuations because it is just a sick gambling game that has NO relationship to the original purposes of issuing shares to pool risk for large capital expenditures.

Arguments in defense of the NSA

(1) When you do the math, it turns out that keeping the data is free. You only incur a cost when you erase the information. Therefore the NSA is just trying to save money.

(2) As the marginal cost of storing data declines, the cost of keeping your personal information is approaching zero. However, the cost of evaluating information to insure that it does not have any value and will never have any value is quite large, obviously much larger than zero. Therefore, even if they never looked at the information, the NSA can't afford to assess it for deletion.

In conclusion, we are SO screwed.

Still asking why (anything post XP)

My primary OS these days is, per force, Windows 7, but I still can't say why. Seriously, I cannot give you a single solid reason to adopt any new Microsoft OS. I was going to say "after XP", but I'm kind of hard-pressed to see anything really great about XP, now that I think about it. I suppose you can argue that XP was the ready for prime time version of Windows 2000, and Windows 95 certainly added some crucial TCP/IP support, but...

There are some fuzzy reasons, mostly in terms of speed. However, I think that's mostly a matter of Microsoft playing games. I firmly believe that Microsoft could have souped up XP to run faster than Windows 7 if they had expended about half the effort in that direction. These days it actually seems like Microsoft is trying to make Windows 7 run slower and slower, especially in booting. (Anyone else noticing increasingly slow boots on their Windows 7 boxes?)

The new feature justification is really thin, especially as the new features increase the sheer number of potential security vulnerabilities. At this point, I have given up trying to figure out what services and overhead is being wasted on my newer machines. Yeah, Microsoft has reduced the BSoDs, but Adobe seems to be picking up that slack very nicely. (My newest theory about Adobe is that they think the crashes and constant updates are some kind of cheap marketing visibility.)

How can I help fight the EVIL?

As someone who used to think the google was going to make the world better... Well, I'm not sure what to say about it, but I'm definitely sad that the google is so EVIL now. It actually took a couple of years to persuade me they had gone to the dark side, so to speak, but it still saddens me. I actually noticed the first signs at least several years ago--and I still don't know what it was about, though I ask the google from time to time. They've stopped talking to peasants, obviously, but I think that's just a secondary symptom of the creeping EVIL.

Originally my feeling was that the google was sort of innocent. As the system works in America, most businesspeople are fine and upstanding and just want to play fair, but the definition of "fair" has been attacked or even destroyed. The so-called rules of the business game in the US are written by the most cheaply bribed politicians working for the least ethical and greediest businessmen. They love the business model of cancer, and the only problem they understand is not solvable: No matter how much they rig the game, they will NEVER have enough money. Their love of money is insane, and they don't care that the cancer always kills its host.

However, as I noted, originally I thought the google was sort of innocent. Then I found out the google has become the leading lobbyist among high tech companies. In other words, the google is now helping to write the crooked laws. If you know of any evidence to the contrary, let me know, but I haven't seen it yet. (Though some of their legislative initiatives seem to be neutral or at least not obviously EVIL, I suspect it's because I just can't see the rest of the picture, and some of the legislation they are pushing is clearly EVIL.)

Constructive solution time (to be ignored, of course). A better economic model is evolutionary, not cancerous. It would also increase freedom (in the form of meaningful and unconstrained choice). If a company is sufficiently successful, the company should be obliged to reproduce, NOT simply continue with mindless and cancerous growth. Several ways to do it, though I think the amoeba offers one of the simplest models. The company splits into (at least) two independent entities that have to compete against each other, each evolving in its own ways and offering MORE choices and MORE freedom.

Where's the financial model? TANSTAAFL

I like the idea, but I spent some time on the OWM website, and the current implementation is not seriously flawed. More like MASSIVELY flawed. The technology is actually kind of clever, but only in an narrow and ignorant way.

There are some solutions that could make this work, but the fundamental problem is always the money. In brief, if you offer to give away something of any conceivable value, you can rest assured that it will be abused. It's one of those two out of three jokes. You can have accountability, privacy, and minimal investment (approximately "free" in the economic sense), but NOT all three at the same time. I could go into quite a bit of detail in the analysis, but since there is no evidence of such deep thinking on the OWM website and since this is basically a comment on what that website says, I'll skip it. If someone involved in the project wants to discuss the problems and more importantly, some SOLUTIONS, then feel free to drop me a line.

Overall I think the EFF was a good idea, but they are just too confused. Feeling charitable and based on my study of other languages, I'd be willing to say that it comes from the essential confusion in English about "free", "freedom", and related words, but since the EFF is supposed to be a pack of lawyers, that discussion would be like the opposite of trying to teach your grandma how to suck eggs.

I really wouldn't mind if you mooch off my Internet connection, but only as long as you are a nice person. As OWM stands now, it's just an invitation to not-nice persons to do not-nice things.

Freedom is about meaningful and unconstrained choice. Not beer.

Bug me and get squashed

I know it's the Reg, but can't you think of ANY constructive solution? I know it's the Reg, so I feel like I'm wasting the keystrokes, but maybe you want to be a hero and maybe the Reg has more credibility than I've noticed, so here's the obvious solution:

Users should have the option to post a 'greeting' message to people who want to have a link. Of course everyone might be a little different, but I can make it more clear with the concrete example of what mine would say (if only I could):

(1) If you are an old friend, then I'm interested in hearing what you've been up to. However, my memory isn't so great these days, so please include enough data to convince me you really are you. (2) If you have some legitimate reason to get in touch with me, make it EXTREMELY clear, but beware the next case. (3) If you are ANY kind of spammer and you are bothering me, then I will do everything I can to nuke your account and your business model and put you in jail, too.

Unfortunately, to make (3) really work, then the SMS in question would need to get sincere about fighting spammers, and so far I haven't noticed any SMS or even any email service that is so serious. The spammers' business models certainly are vulnerable, but "Live and let spam" is the basic model of the google of EVIL and all of their friends. (That's actually a different topic, but evidently no one has the guts to offer customer-pull advertising (auctioning off the customers' LIMITED time) as an option to advertiser-driven-push advertising.)

I was at the meeting, but not many non-Japanese

I was actually in the 6th row or thereabouts, and one of the noisiest hecklers was about 4 rows behind me. However, the largest disturbance was around 10:15 in the back of the room. I think it was in the right corner and went on for some minutes.

However, I'm beginning to think this sort of thing is just sort of normal for Sony... I remember seeing a guy charge the stage at one of the meetings.