Todd Knarr

Recent Actions

• Commented on Internet ghost-towns: the blocked IPs where the bad guys used to live
  #5: the problem is that DNS lookups are per-address or per-host, not per-domain. Certainly I can go from the address of the spamming host to it's DNS name, and I can probably trim that to get just the domain, but...
• Commented on Craigslist is great the way it is
  Craigslist works. Think a minute about newspaper classified ads. They aren't that much different from Craigslist: a big list of text, no indexes, no search function, no organization beyond broad categories. You had to pretty much read an entire category...
• Commented on GM bailout will never pay off
  #21: no, the GM bailout isn't a good deal. It's a horrible deal. It's the kind of deal you avoid if you've got any better alternative. The problem is, we don't have a better alternative. The alternative is to not...
• Commented on GM bailout will never pay off
  I guess the immediate counter-question: what's the dollar value of keeping all those GM employees on the payroll instead of on the unemployment and welfare rolls? Not just in terms of the tax dollar difference (what they pay vs. what...
• Commented on Future of news and business
  @inkstain: Well, the papers I'm familiar with where I live are having a readership problem. Subscriptions to the print edition are down and continuing to decline. Subscriptions to the Web edition... never really caught on at all. When faced with...
• Commented on Future of news and business
  I'm afraid it's not Google killing the news sites. It's the Internet itself. The Internet made it possible for anybody who wants to to publish cheaply and get read by a world-wide audience, and in the process killed the mere...
• Commented on Verified by Visa: British banks phish their own customers
  I'd prefer a scheme where I paid the merchant, rather than the merchant debiting my account. Have the merchant give me a merchant account ID number and a transaction/invoice number. I go to my bank's Web site through my own...
• Commented on Is Obama Finally Pushing Back on the Wall Street Barons' Supreme Arrogance?
  Part of the problem is that "bonus" as used in describing the pay package for those executives doesn't mean the same thing as "bonus" when those executives are discussing ordinary employees' salaries. For an ordinary employee, a "bonus" is something...
• Commented on Surfrider's "Catch of the Day"
  I'd think this would be a legal minefield waiting to happen. What's the Surfrider Foundation going to do when a merchant sues them for the cost of the merchandise that had to be thrown out because the merchant couldn't verify...
• Commented on Man who set up alternate email for White House dies in plane crash
  I like to think that things like this are just an accident. The odds favor it, after all. But then there's also a rule from the Evil Overlord's List: "In addition to my plan for taking control of the world,...
• Commented on Passwords suck
  Half the problem is that authentication is a two-part process, and passwords and most other methods only work on the second half: authenticating the user to the site. The first half gets pretty much ignored: authenticating the site to the...
• Commented on LHC will not destroy the universe in 5 days
  I tend to agree with the Safety Assessment Group. Still, even so, I have to point out that just before the final Apollo 1 pad test someone undoubtably responded to concerns about the risk of fire in a pure-oxygen environment...
• Commented on Federal court blocks beef exporter from testing for mad cow disease
  #13: I think there are, but they involve a lot of lab work and take several weeks to return results. Even those won't detect the contamination in the early stages, the prion concentration just isn't high enough and there's no...
• Commented on Federal court blocks beef exporter from testing for mad cow disease
  Like themindfantastic pointed out, the USDA's objection wasn't to testing, it was using the test results in a deceptive/misleading way. The test the company wanted to use only starts to detect BSE about 3 months before the animal starts to...
• Commented on YouTube user data must be turned over to Viacom, judge rules
  Airpillo: how long? Already happened. Google for "viacom chris knight"....
• Commented on YouTube user data must be turned over to Viacom, judge rules
  The Video Privacy Protection Act: http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/2710.html In particular, (b)(2)(F) which seems to cover exactly this situation. Note that it makes Viacom, not Google, responsible for providing the prior notice. My data will be in those logs, and I haven't been...
• Commented on Bell Canada's confidential network data reveals that P2P congestion isn't really a problem
  @#5: I'm figuring that the links from the DSLAMs to the ISP's internal backbone (or back to the CO in the case of remote boxes) are the "aggregation" links immediately above the DSLAM links. And those show a markedly lower...
• Commented on Bell Canada's confidential network data reveals that P2P congestion isn't really a problem
  Well, those numbers may indicate a real problem. Close to 5% of links congested may be a pretty high percentage. Or it may not. What exactly do they mean by "congested link"? If that's percentage of links that're at 75%...
• Commented on School has child taken away because "psychic" claimed she was abused
  The part of this that truly makes me angry at the Children's Aid/Child Welfare types is that they're willing to indiscriminately believe accusations with this little support. Sexual abuse is one of those things where, when it really happens, evidence...
• Commented on MediaDefender attacks and cripples Revision3 for locking out its spy-bots
  @WCC #26: Rev3 probably put a drop rule on their firewall for MD's IPs. Nobody's going to set it up to go through the whole TCP handshake and then reset the connection. Too costly in terms of resources. Standard method...
• Commented on MediaDefender attacks and cripples Revision3 for locking out its spy-bots
  @WCC #20: Rev3 did block outside torrents. Or rather, they blocked all torrents that didn't have the same hashcodes as the official torrents they were supposed to host. That's a lot faster and avoids having the tracker have to retrieve...
• Commented on Genetically distinct photoshop fetish discovered
  Ugol's Law. It's not just a good idea. Also, "Please specify color of goat.". I concluded long ago that, if you can describe something, someone somewhere probably has a blog about all the websites dedicated to that thing. And they've...
• Commented on Credit card fraudsters use custom domain
  That looks like registration info for one of those companies that help hide the actual registrant's information for privacy purposes. Things like this are one of the reasons I oppose any hiding of the actual registrant's information in WHOIS records....
• Commented on Senator Kit Bond: Waterboarding is "like swimming"
  Apparently Senator Bond thinks waterboarding is similar to surfboarding or something. Methinks the Senator should receive a personal introduction to the technique to clarify his understanding....
• Commented on McDonald's fines UK drive-thru eaters £125 for staying more than 45 min
  We had something like this here in San Diego a while back. The towing companies got nailed in a major way, at least one was put out of business and the owners faced criminal charges. The problems they had were...
• Commented on NY police train citizens to be bad samaritans
  Tom@22: The police in any large city are, if you're lucky, just going to take that waller or purse and toss it in the lost-property bin at the station and wait for the owner to call looking for it. More...
• Commented on Best Buy apologizes to blogger for nastygram
  I'll take one of my former boss's responses: "I don't want an apology. I want a detailed description of what steps you've taken to make sure your legal department doesn't do this again. If you aren't taking any steps, I'm...
• Commented on Taxpayers pay for gold mining cleanup
  KG: That works for some types of mining, but not gold mining. Almost every gold mine in the US (which is mostly the Carlin Trend in north-eastern Nevada) use the heap-leach process. Any mining company would be insanely stupid to...
• Commented on Taxpayers pay for gold mining cleanup
  Actually, most of the hard-rock mines are obligated to clean up and restore the land to a reasonably natural state after the mine closes. You won't, however, find that obligation under the law quoted. It stems from later environmental laws....
• Commented on Scribd introduces copyright filter
  Svein@18: How high is the cost? Ask Publius, the pseudonym the Federalist Papers were published under....