I've made catfish hunting on Plenty of Fish into an entertaining game. Once you know what to look for, it is pretty easy. The biggest tip-off are well-composed photos. I'll see a profile with those kind of photos and throw them into google image search. I've got about an 80% hit rate there and of those, I'd say 19 out of 20 are fakes (models, photos on multiple profiles in different countries, etc). Another approach is to do a google search on a sentence in the profile's self-description to see if that same sentence has been lifted from somewhere else.
What I don't understand is why the dating sites haven't automated the process. They could could do a google image search on every uploaded photo and any hits would be forwarded to a human for investigation. They could also keep an internal blacklist of photos and well-known scammer cut-n-paste self-description text. The fact that they aren't doing that (because it is so easy for me to do it on active profiles) suggests apathy.
Call me cheap, but I pay for my bandwidth and I don't want to have to deal with slow video streaming or high ping times just so someone I've never met can buy their drugs on silkroad.
A key thing to remember is that each person's social network is relatively small. You don't have to relay traffic for someone you've never met, just for the people you've added as "friends" plus some relatively small amount of overhead for linking into the rest of the "world" in order to do searches for people you want to add as "friends."
Hiding metadata is a difficult problem to solve, but it's vital.
I expect you'll have to burn bandwidth. Broadcast "all" messages to "all" users, users can only decrypt the messages intended for them, discard the others. There are probably tricks you can do to reduce it to a fraction of "all" messages but I bet it will still be a substantial amount of bandwidth.
The article makes it sound like he gave up real quick. That he wrote class materials at a level above where the actual students were and instead of adjusting to their level for the next semester, he just threw up his hands in frustration.
Thanks, I saw the link to it and didn't realize it was current, I thought it was just background on Udacity before this pivot. I probably should have submitted that link instead.
Sure, the article doesn't mention it but there has been other revelations of MOOCs as not being a silver bullet or what they were hyped to be, not just Udacity.
The original letter didn't blame Spike, it asked him to intervene. You are definitely correct in the technical sense, but Spike's responses have been extremely tone-deaf. Instead of saying "not my problem" he should have said, "I'll have someone look into it."
I admire Spike Lee's movies, but from public appearances, he's never struck me as the sort of person who gives much of a shit about what anybody but himself thinks of anything.
Looks like Spike Lee has just made the mother of all hypocritical "its OK to pirate my movie" responses:
“Why Should I Pay Someone Who I Never Met Nor Had Any Contact With Ever? He Never Made Any Deal With Me. Why Don’t You Pay Me For Your Stupid Text On Thanksgiving Day?”
Criminalizing piracy is no trivial thing either. Once you can get over the fact that piracy is a complicated issue, that it is unlike stealing things -- where the owner of some object is deprived of his original possession, we can get to talking about piracy in a serious and mature way.
You miss the point. Spike Lee's argument is that he never employed the artist, even though his film company ultimately decided on the agent who promoted the film.
If he complains about piracy, all we have to do now is state on twitter:
"I Never Heard Of This Spike Lee,If He Has A Beef It's Not With Me.I Did Not Buy Him,Do Not Know Him.Cheap Trick Writing To Me.YO"
Looks like, to me, that unless Lee backs down, he'll be being mocked for quite some time to come :-)
It is still possible to respect intellectual property rights, authorship, be against piracy, support the allegedly-wronged artist, AND find Spike Lee to be an idiot.
The problem with piracy advocates is that they will seize any opportunity to justify piracy, and this is sadly no different. Too many people unfortunately see this as a black-and-white situation where you either support Spike Lee or support pirating his work.
By all means mock him, that's completely deserved.
I'm not saying that you should commit piracy. I'm saying that Spike Lee has put himself in an interesting position where he is now advocating piracy, and this may well be the response he starts getting if he complains his work is stolen in the future.
I am totally on board with you in terms of Spike Lee coming across as a total knob, but, unfortunately, and as evidenced by this thread, there are people who will never fail to latch on to these cases and use strawmen like Spike Lee as an excuse for some eye-for-an-eye Internet justice by means of piracy.
As long as someone can get downvoted to -4 for making that very basic point on Hacker News, the point apparently still has to be made, even though it's a waste of time for people like you who see the nuance of it. :)
Reverse psychology against hackers/spies. Let them think that it was a super obscure, difficult code to crack.
Nope, according to the article it was listed in the instructions handed out to the soldiers who manned the silos. If there had been post-it notes back then, they probably would have stuck one right on the console with the code.
What I don't understand is why the dating sites haven't automated the process. They could could do a google image search on every uploaded photo and any hits would be forwarded to a human for investigation. They could also keep an internal blacklist of photos and well-known scammer cut-n-paste self-description text. The fact that they aren't doing that (because it is so easy for me to do it on active profiles) suggests apathy.