For your enjoyment, Dead indoor plants strengthen belief in global warming. The linked page provides an abstract and these highlights:
- Participants were surveyed in a room where trees with or without any foliage were displayed.
- They were asked to report their own beliefs toward global warming.
- Participants were more likely to believe in global warming in presence of the trees without foliage.
Hat Tip @RichardTol.
From the paper:
Though the other questions aren’t provided in the paper, it seems that they didn’t ask any other “environment” questions, leading me to wonder if the results would have been the same if they asked questions about biodiversity, pollution etc.
Good grief. Sort of like turning off the air conditioning in the hearing room for James Hansen’s testimony in 1988. Anything…ANYTHING… to get people to do what you want. Now that showing people dead trees is known to be effective, count on lots of pictures of dead trees in hysterical CAGW propaganda.
SteveF – looking at the author’s other publications in the reference list I’m not sure that was the point, though it could be used that way.
Perhaps a subconscious projection of desire for warmth in winter.
Perhaps a subconscious realization that leafy trees provide cooling shade while converting CO2 to wood and oxygen.
Since AGW is supposed to be a matter of science rather than belief…except the science does not support the belief…we can infer that IPCC AR4 and 5 authors must work in largely barren surroundings. Also explains Mann, since most of his trees were dead and leafless, except for those darned living green leafy ones whose ‘decline’ had to be hidden.
The meanings/uses for this stunning discovery are limitless.
/sarc off
bill_c,
I suspect the broader point is to demonstrate how surroundings affect survey results. Those writing survey’s already know that slight tweaking or questions, question order and so on affect answers. That dead plants in the room also affect is actually rather interesting as one would think that the evidence for or against global warming doesn’t get stronger or weaker depending on whether an indoor plant was thriving or dead. Yet it did affect the responses– which is rather interesting if you are interested in discovering what sorts of things might skew a survey result.
SteveF
Though this is probably not the intended application by the authors of that paper, I anticipate precisely that. 🙂
Just to show you that Professor Nicolas Gueguen does not stop at the critical issue of global warming, the link below shows some all important other work that he has done. It would appear that his work is concentrated on whimsy. Whimsy and position on global warming might well be an important factor of the residuals once political leanings were removed. Whether that is how the study relating dead plants to positions on global warming was approached I would not know and I would not pay $40 to find out.
http://www.spring.org.uk/2013/05/the-incredible-dating-power-of-a-guitar-case.php
“Then he smiled and gazed into their eyes. The poor chap had to do this in three different conditions while holding either:
• a guitar case,
• a sports bag or,
• no bag at all.
What happened was that when he wasn’t holding anything he got a number 14% of the time. The sports bag, though, put women off and dropped his average to just 9%.
It was the guitar case that did the trick, bumping up his chances to 31%. Not bad at all considering he was approaching random strangers in the street.”
It seems a pretty big step to get any reliable conclusion on that observation alone unless we are in the thousands or ten of thousand responses. Or so my stats prof would have said I believe.
Kenneth,
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some of his funding comes from adverting companies with a fraction of results kept proprietary. Lots and lots of people are interested in:
1) How to get people to buy stuff ( including buying more drinks in bars)
2) How to persuade people to do or not do things ( like support a policy, not litter etc.)
3) How to get people to make donations.
With respect to (3) if you do pick up your phone, from time to time, political groups will phone. You’ll notice there are often head scratching ‘survey questions’ whose goal seems not to be information gathering but to get you to utter the word “yes”. (I could give examples…) After that, they might hit you up for money. A long, long time ago I read an article that said getting people to agree with something before asking for money tends to make them more likely to say yes to a follow on request. I don’t know if the practice works, but if some fund raisers believe it works, that would explain why I seem to experience it. (Mind you, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the practice is fairly effective.)
@Kenneth
Gueguen is a serious psychologist with a knack for experiments that stick in your mind, but also reveal something about human nature.
Well, finally something that makes sense so I can connect the dots. If dead trees make people more concerned about global warming, then if the UK burns vast tracks of forests in the Carolinas in the form of wood pellets from those trees for renewable fuel based power, then folks in these red states will be more concerned about global warming.
I wonder if seeing “braised penguin” on a restaurant menu would have the same effect?
Lucia, Bill_C, Richard Tol,
What I am waiting for is psychologists like Gueguen to conduct studies to learn what surroundings/conditions lead to a lower level of belief that global warming is an urgent problem which demands immediate and draconian public action.
.
I won’t hold my breath while I wait for those studies to be published.
Why no control group interviews in a room with no trees?
SteveF (#118301): “what surroundings/conditions lead to a lower level of belief that global warming is an urgent problem which demands immediate and draconian public action [?]”
The flip side of the study’s results is that more leaves lead to abated concern. Higher concentrations of CO2 lead to more greenery. Hence the more CO2 there is, the less important it is to worry about it.
I’d call that negative feedback.
“What I am waiting for is psychologists like Gueguen to conduct studies to learn what surroundings/conditions lead to a lower level of belief that global warming is an urgent problem which demands immediate and draconian public action.”
Did you miss Lewanowsky’s paper? We know this. Right-wing ideology and (other) conspiracist ideations are correlated with that delusion.
Perhaps the CO2 levels were higher in the non-green rooms, and the survey participants were unconsiously aware that the higher CO2 levels that they could “sense” would lead to more AGW.
Or perhaps not.
Can’t read article but if they surveyed on 20 topics then one expects 1/20 to show significance at .05 level even if no actual effect is present. Thus getting 1 significant result has no significance at all. I suspect that this is a nonsense study.
SteveF,
More houseplants!
And what about plastic trees and artificial flowers? Might be an enlightening study.
😉
It may be supportive of why so many false claims are made about conditions be due to or caused by AGW. See bad things, attribute bad things to AGW, general population will support favored CO2 reduction measures. Truth comes out later, but general population believes initial headlines
Bob Koss:
Why no control group interviews in a room with no trees?
The second experiment was performed in five settings:
“five indoor plant conditions: no indoor plant, one plant with foliage, one plant without foliage, three indoor plants with foliage, and three indoor plants without foliage. ”
Otherwise, the last para of the Discussion suggests possible uses of the dead tree imagery for enhancing the effect of global warming propaganda.
” Using dead plants might also be an option to test whether we can change people’s behaviors. “
†Using dead plants might also be an option to test whether we can change people’s behaviors. “
What? They are monsters! They would kill plants without any qualms just to get their point across? Unbelievable.
Robert (Idiot… er IdiotTracker),
Nice to hear from the pretentious medical doctor again. Nice also that you can use exactly the same kind of condescending, obnoxious commentary both at work and in commenting on climate blogs.
jknapp,
I suspect it’s real. It shows how details that “should” be irrelevant to belief about ‘X’ will affect answers on a survey asking about ‘X’.
Whether the effect is temporary– meaning it only affects the answer to the survey, or whether sitting in the room has a long term effect isn’t revealed. But I suspect the effect is temporary.
SteveF,
Presumably, if dead plants in the room made one more likely to answer they were worried about climate change, live ones made them less likely to answer they were worried. But the results are framed as dead plants make one more worried rather than the converse.
I’m looking out the window at live plants right now. I guess that should make me worry less? Idiot Tracker’s office must be full of dead plants. . . 🙂
Hi Robert (IdiotTracker),
Your mention of Lewandowsky reminded me. Do you know anything about the bizarre photoshop images found on http://www.sksforum.org? I don’t know if you have any affiliation to SkS or not, but I thought I’d ask anyway. If so, what were the purpose of those?
I’d like to mend my counter factual right wing ideological thinking and look at this from the correct perspective, but I must admit I’m at a loss as to what a reasonable mainstream guy ought to make of it, and no explanation from official sources seems forthcoming.
Thanks!
Lucia,
Jedi mind tricks only work on the weak minded. I think you’ll be OK. For my part, I’m keeping my tin foil hat close. 😉
Lucia,
“Idiot Tracker’s office must be full of dead plants. . .”
.
More likely plastic…. which would at least make them ‘not live’; ‘dead’ would not be a good adjective.
Mark Bofill,
I think a lot of the images are either (a) juvenile jokes or (b) self denigrating humor (i.e. ‘SS’ short for Skeptical Science sounds like Nazi allusion.) Or, possibly, some of them were images they found elsewhere. Then someone on the forum uploaded so they could complain about the to each other. Who knows? But I did do a google search for similar on some– and didn’t find them elsewhere so I suspect (b).
To me, the really strange thing is that it seems in response to Anthony’s post, the renamed the subdirectory making the links die. But then all that did was reveal the directory structure with links to each directory. So someone visiting the images saw the directory and if curious easily found all the images by just clicking the “allgone” (or similar) directory. I clicked that, and there they were. Evidently I was not the only one to do that. Why didn’t they just drop
Options All -Indexes
in their .htaccess file? Or just add an index.html file to the appropriate subdirectories? I couldn’t figure out if they didn’t know the directory would display, didn’t think curious people were “smart” enough to click on links, thought people wouldn’t be curious or what? All very odd.
I had fun chuckling at some of the images and posting to Twitter for about 1/2 an hour but then someone must have figured out that everyone was still looking at the images and laughing. But really, I don’t think we could know the motivations for the silly images without reading the forum. Presumably they won’t screw up and make their whole forum public again.
I am reminded by the photos of Godwin’s Law. According to Wikipedia: “The law is sometimes invoked prescriptively to mark the end of a discussion when a Nazi analogy is made, with the writer who made the analogy being considered to have lost the argument.”
Which seems perfectly apropos for nearly all of SKS’s rubbish arguments about catastrophic global warming: they already lost on substance (divergence between models and reality); Nazi allusions only confirm it.
lucia (Comment #118349)
August 7th, 2013 at 1:31 pm
Your ideas sound more plausible than anything I’ve been able to concoct anyway.
Yes, looks like someone unfamiliar with web servers was reacting. Makes me wonder; Cook wrote twitterbots, so I wouldn’t have thought web pages would be an area he’d be deficient in. But noting this apparent blunder, when you say,
my answer’d have to be, well, maybe. Who can say what wonders tomorrow may hold. 🙂
Okay, I’m safe in my Faraday cage now so I can take my hat off and speak freely.
Maybe it was all intentional. Maybe it was meant to be found and run on WUWT as fodder for another counterfactual conspiratorial ideation study! What? No I don’t want my meds right now, I’m ideating over here right now, come back later nurse! Lewandowsky wanted us to find it I tell you, it’s all part of his socialist master plan! Electroshock wha? Not now I said, come back later! Later! Go away! laaagghaslksaasksdcxvasdf aewr
/sarc
Mark,
Better to not joke too much; electroshock is what the Lewandowsky crowd wants for you….. repeated weekly until you agree to their rubbish.
SteveF,
Possibly, but I’d come to a bad end with guys like that in charge no matter what I did, even assuming I could keep my dumb jokes to myself and my mouth shut.
Mark Bofill, there’s no way they could have expected someone to find that directory. Most people didn’t even know the site existed. Finding the site and then realizing that directory was viewable required far too much luck
Brandon Shollenberger (Comment #118360)
Actually, I didn’t have time to think it through since reading the update that it was your discovery:
didn’t have time to work it’s way through my brain. So I’ll admit I wondered if it wasn’t ‘fed’ to Anthony by some means.
Oh well. Another perfectly good conspiracy theory shot down for no better reason than reality refusing to cooperate. ~sigh~
🙂
Huh. I didn’t even know that update had been added. I always figured people would be able to guess that e-mail had been from me, but it didn’t seem important to “take credit.” Then again, since it was called professional grade hacking, maybe I ought to.
People could hire me to do things like this again!
Brandon
Finding the images was “professional grade hacking”?!!! Their server was set up to show links to all files in a directories and subdirectories!!!
Ah, but how did I know where the site was? Or how to find the directory? Clearly, those required mad hacker skillz.
Brandon
Uhmm…. someone posted a link to one of the many, many images on some page you happened to view? You guessed there was an /images/ directory?
†Using dead plants might also be an option to test whether we can change people’s behaviors. “
.
More humane than torturing the people I suppose.
lucia, nope. I was going to post the answer to those questions here since I didn’t think anyone would guess them (though they weren’t rhetorical), but it turns out there was an additional development related to them that I only now discovered.
I think I’ll write up what happened in a blog post. Originally I planned to to post such here because it’s an interesting example of security failures, and you discuss site security. I figure it’s more relevant here than at WUWT. However, SkS’s response to my discovery is such that it makes the issue interesting for a larger crowd.
(Sorry for making this a teaser. I really did just stumble across something five minutes ago. It’ll take a little while to write about.)
I think WUWT will be interested. They are fascinated by the images anyway!
If there is a security issue, I’ll be interested in that. I found the new directory just by clicking on links to the dead image links which gave me a directory with clickable links, so it never occurred to me finding them was anything remotely novel.
lucia, once you know about the links, it’s easy to back your way out and see how to find them. Answers are often “obvious” once you know what they are.
In this case, I happened upon the images by chance. I have a post submitted at WUWT discussing how it happened. The post doesn’t cover everything though. I had another avenue of discoery I would have used within a few days. It was just chance I happened upon a more direct process when I did. If I hadn’t, I’d have stumbled across this a couple days later by a totally different route!
Once the WUWT post goes live (assuming Watts decides to post it), I can share the details of what I’m talking about. In fact, I may make it into a blog post about security if you don’t mind. It’s a pretty good example of how security can be breached.
Brandon
So… you were a super hacker!!! (Ok… I know security can often be breached with no hacking at all. Heck… I have a dynamic robots.txt that gives different instructions to known good robots and other bots. Because I know that some bots read robots.txt and immediately check out the directories they are told not to visit. Some people also read robots.txt and do the exact same thing. This is not “hacking”. And in the case of *people* they aren’t even doing anything that’s ‘wrong’. Robots.txt exists precisely to keep bots from wasting both their and your bandwidth while having files that you perfectly well might want people to load.)
Lucia,
I don’t know about that. As Brandon notes, answers are obvious once you know what they are. Just because an attack is relatively simple doesn’t mean it’s not an attack?
(pointless rambling digression alert):
Although an argument can be made about the word ‘hacking’. I’d heard in the media that the term was supposedly reserved for master programmers, not ‘hackers’ in the sense of breaking into systems. On the other hand, I’ve been a professional programmer for +25 years now and strangely enough I’ve never heard the term ‘hacker’ used for much of anything except people who break into systems. the word ‘hack’ is different, in my experience when the word ‘hack’ is used it means someone went in and made code changes without much consideration to design (I.E., I went in there hacking away, I’ll have to go back and clean up). Still, if you want to think of ‘hacking’ as … elite computer skills I suppose, maybe then there’s an argument to be had that simple attacks aren’t ‘hacks’…
(end of pointless rambling digression)
Although I haven’t thought about it from this perspective:
…If you’re more or less reading public road signs to get to a destination, can you call that an attack… hmm.. maybe not.
Okay, maybe this isn’t ‘hacking’.
Mark Bofill (Comment #118372)
You are correct that attacks are not defined by how difficult they are.
The problem is that loading a valid url for a static resource in your browser is not “an attack” of any sort. Clicking a link one web page 1 pointing to a static resource on the same domain is not an attack. Suggesting either is “an attack” is like saying looking at a storefront window is “an attack”. Or walking down the sidewalk and viewing a house is “a attack”. Or even reading the sign that says “Open house, please enter”, then walking up to the door, ringing the bell and being let in is “an attack”.
The latter is exactly like clicking a link on skepticalscience’s web page to an image file on skepticalsciences web page. Which is precisely what I did when I found the alternate file — as had been previously found by others who likely did exactly the same thing.
These things are simple and not ‘attacks’.
,
Lucia,
Yes. I’m having a hard time forming a precise definition of ‘attack’ that makes the relevant distinction, but I agree it’s not reasonable to call common intended use an ‘attack’.
The problem I’ve got I guess is the incompetence of the ‘defenders’, this muddies the waters for me. If I mean to hide something and I’m not competent to put it inside my house and close and lock the door / draw the shades, can I reasonably say that anybody who saw what I was incompetently trying to hide was spying on me. This is what I’m stumbling on I think.
Mark–
But if, what you were trying to hide was the 4 foot “major award” (i.e. lighted leg lamp) you put in the front room in front of the huge window, left the shades open and lived on a busy street, and reasoned “it’s in my house. People can only see it if they are invited in the house.” passers by who saw it would not be spies or peeping toms.
Now, it might be that you think they are peeping toms or spies. But that’s because you are deluded.
In the case of the proverbial leg lamp or the images at SkS, no one passing by would even have any reason to think they were supposed to avert their eyes from an item in full public display or not click the link displayed on the SkS page.
:> Fra gi le! That must be Italian!
Yes, but the analogy is different because I think it wasn’t that SkS defender was obviously deluded, it was that s/he was incompetent. Moving the files to A11gon3 seemed to demonstrate the intent to conceal, and to a layperson without any knowledge of how web servers work it wasn’t a crazy thing to think. I don’t know that it in fact makes a difference.
The problem with what I’m saying (in my eyes) is that it seems to matter whether or not somebody thinks they are ‘defending’, and that seems dubious to me…
Just trying to puzzle out how to draw the lines I guess.
I think that for something of this sort to qualify as a security attack, would require that the person specifically target the person or organization with the intent to “out” them on information they meant to keep private.
Simply clicking on some links & being able to parse URLs, then seeing what is in that directory wouldn’t qualify as a security attack. That’s more like “following bread crumbs”.
This would be a good time to review SkS’s position on Gleickgate. It is my impression it is okay by SkS standards to actively steal other people’s private information, which posing as a board member qualifies as, as long as one’s “heart is in the right place. [tm]
Brandon wrote up his method of “hacking”.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/08/mad-haxor-skillz-godwinize-skeptical-science/
It seems to me he found the directory doing things plain-ol-ordinary people have been doing to navigate web sites since at least the 90s. (I use it at data sites all the time. You see a link to whetever.com/sub1/sub2/sub3/nifty_data
If the nifty_data isn’t quite what you like, you try just whetever.com/sub1/sub2/sub3/. If the directory lists, you click some of the links that look interesting. If it doesn’t you try whetever.com/sub1/sub2/ and so on.
This is sometimes the fastest way to find what you want. I don’t think anyone considers it “hacking”.
lucia:
If people want to call me one, I’m cool with that. I’m especially cool with them saying I do “professional-grade” hacking. It just means people should pay me for this sort of thing!
Goodness knows I’ve spent enough time on climate change discussions that I should be monetizing it. I’m a fool for doing this stuff for free!
Mark Bofill:
A hacker is just someone who uses a system in an unintended way. That includes people who break into computer networks, and it includes people who make mods for video games. You’ll get a lot of different impressions if you listen to the media, but listening to the media is about the worst thing you could possibly do for trying to understand computer technology.
By the way, I find it fascinating SkS deleted the post that inadvertently led me to their forums. They could have just fixed the links in the post. More importantly, I’d have found the exact same thing within a couple days if not for that post. I had an avenue of research that would have led directly to it in my backlog.
I think I’ll see if I can write this up in a blog post about security. I want to have lunch first though.
Carrick:
I know what you mean, but most security attacks don’t specifically target anyone. They indiscriminately look for victims. And they rarely have anything to do with disseminating information.
The key aspect to all attacks is using resources is an manner unintended by the network/server setup. What matters isn’t what the admin desired; it’s what he actually did. If he took steps to secure something and you overcome those steps, you attacked his system. If he took steps to secure something and you happened to bypass them because he did a terrible job, you didn’t attack his system.
Yeah. I’m closing the book in my mind on this in this manner:
Brandon certainly wasn’t hacking. He was looking at something SkS didn’t want anybody to see, but something SkS didn’t take any reasonable steps to hide.
Brandon:
I agree with your description of course. I was thinking specifically of this set of general circumstance where personal/proprietary information becomes public, which I figure you understand but am just clarifying:
Simply because the data were already “public” due to a security lapse, doesn’t mean it wasn’t an attack. And simply because they didn’t want the data disseminated doesn’t mean it was an attack.
Brandon
I think it’s a bit more complicated than this though. It has to be more complicated otherwise someone can define doing a terrible job as failing to make your site impregnable. And that can’t be right because if so there would be no failed attacks, since by definition, if the security thwarts the attack, it’s considered not an attack.
Now for example: I consider would consider someone who is not authorized to enter the ‘admin’ side of the blog trying to guess passwords log into wp-login.php an ‘attack’, and I consider it even if one of the users was named ‘admin’ and had a password of ‘password’ and the intruder guess this on try #1. This is the meat world equivalent of my seeing the neighbor puts their key under their mud mats and using it to enter their house to do whatever I wish inside. I know the key is not there for me. I know their security sucks. But it’s still knowing intentional trespassing.
The reason I see someone guessing a password as an ‘attack’ is that the person doing that knows that they are not supposed to enter if they are not authorized to guess and enter.
But now let’s consider clinking links in a directory structure that displays itself. First: Web masters may quite easily permit directory structures to display themselves or not do so. It’s one line in an .htaccess file.
Second: Sometimes, some people want the convenience of having a directory structure that displays itself. For example: I might want to share files without taking the trouble of creating and updating a web page with links. I can easily do this by letting my directory structure show a listing, and telling people the domain name and letting them see the directory tree. Then can then navigate around. This is often convenient and I have sometimes permitted the directory structure to display on purpose– for my own convenience! But if I set it up this way, I know I am creating an entire public and navigable web page. I’m just doing it the laziest possible way — it’s self creating based on what’s in the directory.
So: I absolutely don’t see people clicking on links on a directory listing as ‘an attack’. Links displaying on a page are the normal way to permit those visiting a page to navigate and there is no reason for anyone landing on a directory that lists to assume that the links are secret, private or anything similar. From their point of view they are just at a garden variety, ordinary web page with clickable links.
Lucia,
Thanks. This might be the distinction I was searching for and missing, I’ll think it through.
lucia, I don’t necessarily disagree. I just view attacks as successful attempts. Anything that doesn’t succed is an attempted attack. It’s akin to murder. Even if a persob fails to commit murder, the attempt is bad and can get them locked up.
Whether or not you suceed, the question is if you sought to overcome an obstacle put in place to stop you.
Brandon,
I always thought in most contexts you got attack credit for making the attempt, regardless of the outcome. Is there some reason you’ve come across to hone the meaning of this word?
Assault is assault regardless of the effect. Murder is a little different; someone has to die, and the attempt doesn’t make it so unless someone does.
I view attack and assault as similar in usage, don’t you, in the end?
j ferguson:
Here is how I understand it:
In the US, “assault” is the threat or commission of violence and is a crime regardless of the outcome. For something to be “assault” it has to meet certain tests for motives. Waving a gun around may not be assault, but pointing a finger may. Assault and attack are generally considered to be synonymous.
“Battery” or “murder” are the result of successful attacks, these are outcomes and so don’t depend as much on the motive. “Defacing” a website, illegal distribution of private data, etc are all outcomes.
Oddly if you are a police officer and you commit an act of battery, like in this obvious case, it can be reclassified as a “personnel matter.”
I want to become a police officer, so I can rob banks and face “disciplinary measures” (watch the video to understand), rather than jail time.
Sweet job perk.
Brandon
No. It’s not like murder. An attack is an attack whether or not it succeeds.
You can find lots of examples of “repelled the attack”
http://saharareporters.com/news-page/indigenes-repels-attacks-kill-five-gunmen-southern-kaduna
“According to our source, some of the locals who repelled the attacks suffered some injuries.”
http://www.whenshtf.com/threads/48464-Deadly-Force-to-Repel-Dog-Attacks/page2
“Deadly Force to Repel Dog Attacks”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States
Has a list of “Failed attacks”.
We can find scads of examples of attacks that fail because that’s the way the word is used. So: there are successful attacks and there are failed attacks. Both are attacks. The adjective modifies them.
Sure. The word murder only applies if you managed to kill someone. We don’t happen to have a stand alone word for “attempted murder”. But that tells us nothing about the definition of “attack”.
The same happens with lots of words or word groups. For example if a woman is talking to her friends says “He was hitting on me all evening.” you don’t know whether the woman ultimately decided to take him up on the suggestion or turned him down. You need to learn more details of the story.
Carrick,
Horrible video. Criminal prosecution for battery is the only reasonable outcome, along with firing of all those above the officer who allowed him to not be prosecuted. I rather suspect that after the CNN broadcast, things are not going well for that particular department. The odd thing is: several of the aggressive/violent/antisocial kids I knew in high school ended up being police officers. Something is wrong with the selection process.
SteveF, I admit doing my part to get this story as widely known as possible. There was an infant right beside her, at the point where he clearly attacked her. How that doesn’t end up as a charge is just really strange. The idea that it’s okay to treat this non-criminally and strangely protect the rights of the police officer, as if he were the victim instead of the perp in this case, is really, really bizarre.
As to your other observation, it does seem that violent antisocial youth are drawn to positions where they have authority over other people. It also seems that the system selects for these type of people, especially when “being a little scary” is considered a good quality in an individual for a job.
Sideshow Bob
Matt
Ummm, arguably they did with the IPCC…..
Brandon – I consider all attempts to be attacks and respond harshly. Yesterday morning’s web log report showed 402 separate IP addresses attempted to open wp_login.php on one of the domains I host. It also happens to be a personal domain and it doesn’t have WordPress installed. I use it and a few others as equivalent spam trap email addresses. If they attract a nibble the nibbler goes into the packet filter.
For each of those 402 IP addresses I find the parent CIDR block and put the entire block in IPTABLES which prohibits connections to any of my listening ports from any IP in that block and in a /16 block that is a lot of addresses. Most were from all of the Asia mainland, the Indian subcontinent, Indonesia, Japan, eastern Europe, and much of South America. There are now thousands of these blocked IP blocks . With scripting it takes about an hour for this quantity. So far there has been no downside but the upside is reduced bandwidth, better security, a declining threat base, and far less spam email. And if I thought my customers would let be get away with blocking all of Yahoo they’d be in there in a heartbeat.
While I go through the vetting process of the to-be-blocked lists it is very interesting to learn where the visit was from. In the 1960s as an avid shortwave DX listener I’d have been pleased to identify radio signals from any of these places, but TCP/IP isn’t passive and I am not pleased by most of these visits.
I understand how “attack” is defined, but I find that definition impractical. Any attempt to breach security is an attack. That means every time someone turns a knob to see if it’s locked, they launch an attack. Every time someone looks over your shoulder while you type, they’re launching an attack. I find that too broad to be useful.
What I view as an “attack” is actually a “successful attack.” It’s a subset of the “attack” category. It may diminish clarity to use the word this way, but doing so means I don’t have to type “successful” every time I type “attack.” Given I almost never use “attack” to refer to the actual attack category, that’s convenient.
There’s a long history of subsets being conflated with full sets in terminology for convenience. It usually happens when a subset is discussed frequently while the full set isn’t referred to often. It isn’t “right, but it is convenient.
I don’t see this as important. It’s just an issue of (lazy) semantics, and it doesn’t affect any point I was trying to make.
Brandon
Yes. And there is nothing impractical about this definition. If you want to differentiate between severity of attacks you can use adjectives. That includes “successful attack”.
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No. Because the person turning the knob might be authorized to enter. They also aren’t all authorized by security to test whether all doors are locked (which could be the case at a high security facility.)
But people who are not authorized to enter who come up to turn a knob and walk up and turn it, jiggle it, and so on to see if they can enter are attacking the residence or room.
Once again: No. They might be coauthors– authorized to be there. And so on. But people peering over your shoulder as you enter your password and trying to see what you are entering? Yes. Attack.
It does diminish clarity. A. Lot. Because you are communicating with other people and you are using an idiosyncratic meaning not shared by other speakers of English.
Well… but then you say things that people believe are incorrect– like saying something is not an attack if it fails. And then we get into long detailed conversations about what attack means, and conversations get derailed. I would think it’s much less inconvenient for you to add the adjective “successful” in front of attack rather than using the word idiosyncratically and expecting people to know that in Brandon-speak attacks never fail, but all other English speakers use it differently.
I think your choice is very inconvenient for everyone else (and in the end you.)
Mind you, if there is some subset of co-workers you work with, jargon can be ok. But you need to switch when you talk to others.
Yes. You are the on being lazy and not wanting to use an adjective.
We’re all just using the word the way it is defined. That is not laziness.
If you need a different word to describe “wimpy attacks that fail”, you are going to need to suggest one. But you can’t unilaterally redefine attack. The word is already used and communication requires collective usage.
What I view as an “attack†is actually a “successful attack.â€
thats nice. so when somebody tries to penetrate your system
and fails, you dont report that you thwarted the attack.
And if the boss asks you ‘have the attcks on our system diminished?”
you report back that there have been no attacks to begin with
This definition is especially great if you are war and try to attack your opponent and fail.
general; Brandon, how did the attack go
Brandon; what attack
general: look I’ve seen the corpses
Brandon; oh, those. well, we were not attacking. It only counts
if we are successful.
general: look, you were told to attack, your actions were consistent with attacks, successful or otherwise. if the outcome were different you would have called it an attack, and you just made the sentence “my attack failed” into a logical contradiction
lucia:
I agree. I just didn’t think about it until you guys brought the issue up. If I had, I would have worded things differently. Other than that, I was just trying to explain why I do use it that way.
Yup. In most conversations I have, I refer to “successful attacks” far more than attacks. Combined with laziness, that makes me slip into unclear terminology.
Steven Mosher:
Nothing I’ve said indicates this. The fact I (mis)use a word in a particular way in no way means I disbelieve in a concept or intentionally misinterpret people. Moreover, nothing about using “attack” the way I do prevents me from using phrases like “attempted attack.”
You have to try pretty hard to misinterpret me like you just did Mosher.
Re: Brandon Shollenberger (Aug 10 01:32),
Please stop now. That comment was completely unnecessary. If you think Mosher is a troll, the correct response is to ignore him.
DeWitt Payne, I had no intention of saying more on the matter. However, I do not agree that my comment was “completely unnecessary.” Calling out people on bad behavior serves a vital role. Mosher has even emphasized the importance of doing just that.
Brandon, blog communication is tricky enough without molesting the words.
There are several who comment here whose thoughts seem to me well worth consideration but deny me, at least, enough words to grasp them. Hear that Mosh?
And then there a couple of others who are able to condense a four word idea into pages and pages of comment – definitely not pithing contest material.
“You have to try pretty hard to misinterpret me like you just did Mosher.”
No brandon I am pointing out that if you define attack as “successful attack” then you will have a problem with an locution like “failed attack”
Here is what you wrote
“What I view as an “attack†is actually a “successful attack.—
Under that view the locution “failed attack” would be rendered meaningless.
Now, is this a mis interpretation of what you wrote?
No, its an interpretation. And thus I conclude that you make no sense, or perhaps you didnt think through the logical conclusions of what you wrote. Or perhaps when you wrote what you wrote you meant something different. Dunno. Perhaps you are trying too hard to excuse your rather benign attack on Sks. And in my view since “attack” means poking around, benignly of course, you were attacking. hehe. not really.
Or maybe peeping tom would be a better analog. If you were walking through the forest and happened upon somebody taking a bath in a stream where they thought they had privacy would you watch them?
Mosher: “If you were walking through the forest and happened upon somebody taking a bath in a stream where they thought they had privacy would you watch them?”
.
Women? In the nude? You are right Mosher, Brandon is excused.
Mosher:
Good looking? Or ugly? 🙂
Anyway, I don’t know whether I knew they thought they had privacy. Is there a screen? Was there a fence? Was there any sign saying “private area”? Etc. If it’s just a public nude watering hole I would follow the same behavior as at a public non-nude watering area. Which is to say, I would tend to avoid gawking, but would also not avert my gaze. I would consider any stream I came across in while walking along the beaten path in a public park or forest a public area. So no one should expect privacy. If they do expect privacy they are just nuts.
So, with an exposed directory, I treat it as a public web site: Click links, look, comment.
Re: Brandon Shollenberger (Aug 10 06:35),
Really, I tried, but I can’t resist.
Translation: {whine}Mosher was mean to me.{/whine}
To be followed by your response to me that you weren’t whining, Mosher really was mean to you.
No, he wasn’t.
You were clearly channeling Humpty Dumpty (Words mean ….) and both lucia and Mosher called you out on it. But Mosher could probably agree with you that the sky is blue and you would still manage to take offense.
Boring.
j ferguson, I try to write simply and clearly. I just don’t always succeed.
DeWitt Payne, you confuse me. Nothing in any of my comments indicated any sort of whining. I’ve also, prior to this comment, not claimed to have not been whining. I didn’t even know whining was supposedly an issue.
On top of that, you claim I was intentionally redefining words in this conversation when that has already been shown to be untrue. As lucia put it, I was using jargon picked up from conversations with a particular group of people. Once I realized that, I acknowledged the problem.
I don’t understand your comments here. At all.
Mosher, nothing about my usage would make “failed attack” meaningless. Theft is only theft if something is stolen, and there are still failed thefts. So yes, you are misinterpeting what I said.
Steven Mosher:
It would be a bit creepy IMO to “stay and watch”. As I see it “California privacy rules” apply here— you don’t stare at people while they’re getting dressed for the beach where there isn’t a place for them to go change in private. You respect their need/desire for privacy here too.
But the sks forum directory was a public directory, easy to find without mad hacking skills, and some files are/were associated with posts and further there isn’t anything that indicates it was meant t to be private.
If I were to leave a directory open for search, I’d expect people to look through it. The opposite of expectation of “decency behavior/non-creepy lurking behavior” that your analogy conjures up.
One’s expectation here is, given it is an image directory clearly associated with a technical blog, that there would be some technical “mind-candy” graphics associated with past SkS posts. It just begs for somebody to go looking through it.
I’d suggest Cook could easily have put in a index.html file, with no additional skill in web-page design, like this:
Data Downloads
Email me if you need a particular file--clt.
Replace “clt” (my initials) with his name of course… and yes this is what I do since I don’t want people leafing through the files in my data download directory. In my case, I don’t want to have to worry about getting permission to place files that people have given me on a public server that I have permission to share with colleagues.
But wtf John Cook!? Are you really that much of a noob that you don’t know about automatically indexed directories?
Lots of sites show directory listings. I assume the choice is intentional. For example:
http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/
Lets me find versions.
My assumption when I find of these pages is that the web master decided that the default listing was convenient– or at least didn’t consider display private. I don’t consider reading this page or clicking the links violating uah.edu’s privacy. I don’t consider the fact that UAH didn’t create an html page (that would require effort to be updating) an indication that visiting the easy to maintain auto-created page to be ‘peeping’, ‘snooping’ or in anyway discouraged.
http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/
looks public. Similarly, sks’s /image page looked public to me.