Slashdot Mirror

''Click here,'' says my spamming mentor. Hovering over my chair, he points to the computer screen. ''Now click on that file of e-mail addresses there.'' I have been invited by a master for an education in spamming, the practice of blasting millions of unsolicited e-mail messages into the Internet in order to advertise everything from loans with easy terms to women of easy virtue.

Advertisement

''Let's go online and download some software,'' says my guide. His name is Richard Colbert. On the Rokso, or Register of Known Spam Operations (a kind of Most Wanted List for the Internet posted on an antispam Web site called spamhaus.org), Colbert is described plainly: ''Nonstop scam spammer, kicked off so many hosts and I.S.P.s'' -- or Internet service providers -- ''it's hard to count.''

Dressed in blue shorts and a purple T-shirt, Colbert, 31, has blondish hair stuffed under a baseball cap, a prominent diamond earring and a mild twang that betrays his Atlanta origin. He lights up a Monarch menthol as he shows me his computer room, an intimate homemade space built off the side of an aging two-tone mobile home -- robin's-egg blue and white -- which sits among hundreds of Airstreams and Miami Deco single-wides in the Sunset Colony Mobile Home Park in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

Colbert claims that he's now on a sabbatical from spamming, but he's watching current events and weighing a return. During this interlude, he has agreed to help me learn how the avalanche of solicitations I receive winds up in my online mailbox every day. Who are these guys? Who hires them? How do they get legitimate e-mail addresses? And finally, can federal legislation currently under consideration actually stop them?

First off, Colbert doesn't think about spam the way I do (or, most probably, the way you do). He likes to call it ''bulk e-mailing,'' for starters. And he considers it just one of the many exciting new markets available on the Internet. He's the kind of guy who is always interrupting himself to tell you about some smart economic angle he has figured out, some new edge.

''These shorts are Dockers,'' he says, pointing at the clothes he has on. ''And I got them off eBay. Shirt? Tommy Hilfiger. EBay. Shoes? Nikes. EBay.''

Colbert and I dig around on the Internet until, under his direction, I find a piece of software that allows for mass e-mailing. These are common and legal, used legitimately by professional archaeologists, say, or chess enthusiasts to form an online group and conduct chats or exchange information.

Right away there's a problem. The software we've selected requires registration or payment. But Colbert says he once used this very piece of software, slightly altered, when he worked with some other spammers who live nearby. So he snatches his phone and calls a neighbor for support. A minute later, we are back in business. It turns out that an unusually large number of spammers live in this area, the stretch of beaches north of Miami that old-timers loosely call Boca and new-timers know as a staging ground for the smarmier characters in Carl Hiaasen's novels.

According to Steve Linford, who maintains the Rokso list, there's a good reason that so many spammers wind up on Spam Beach: ''Boca Raton is where they used to run those pump-and-dump investment scams and where the telemarketing sweatshops are.'' The phone scammers and infomercial wannabes of the 80's and 90's -- who themselves supplanted the land speculators who established Florida's earliest cities upon shifting sand and sinking swamps -- have been pushed aside by the new boys on the block, the bulk e-mailers of the Internet.

2.

It gets even worse than that; when the chips were down, Rodney Rocha cut and ran just like every-damned-else-body:

By then, Mr. Rocha said, he decided to go along. "I lost the steam, the power drive to have a fight, because I just wasn't being supported," he said. "And I had faith in the abilities of our team."

He waited through the weekend until the Boeing engineers closed out the last bit of their analysis, and on Sunday, Jan. 26, he wrote a congratulatory e-mail message to colleagues, saying the full analysis showed no "safety of flight" risk. "This very serious case could not be ruled out and it was a very good thing we carried it through to a finish," he wrote.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/26/national/nationa lspecial/26ENGI.html?pagewanted=3 [nytimes.com]
[scroll to the very bottom of the page]

Here is the direct google link to the story for anyone who cares:
Dogged Engineer's Effort to Assess Shuttle Damage

---

By then, Mr. Rocha said, he decided to go along. "I lost the steam, the power drive to have a fight, because I just wasn't being supported," he said. "And I had faith in the abilities of our team."

He waited through the weekend until the Boeing engineers closed out the last bit of their analysis, and on Sunday, Jan. 26, he wrote a congratulatory e-mail message to colleagues, saying the full analysis showed no "safety of flight" risk. "This very serious case could not be ruled out and it was a very good thing we carried it through to a finish," he wrote.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/26/national/nationa lspecial/26ENGI.html?pagewanted=3
[scroll to the very bottom of the page]

For those like me who do not wish to register with NYT

Here's the NYT story itself (I think), for those who don't want to register and don't mind hacking around a bit. Fight the Man!

Googly Link

I have full-spectrum lighting, dude!

I can see light in 256 * 256 * 256 colors from my monitor, and that's the only light here in my mom's basement.

Actually this NYTimes.com article [reg-required] points out that most monitors only display a fraction of the NTSC color pallette.

Another federal Judge has stepped in and blocked it according to "Free Speech" rights.

MSN
nytimes

Quote:
U.S. District Judge Edward Nottingham in Denver said, "The Federal Trade Commission has chosen to entangle itself too much in the consumers' decision by manipulating consumer choice and favoring speech by charitable (organizations) over commercial speech."

The FTC's list would prevent telemarketers from calling the phone numbers of those who did not want to hear from them. It would not apply to political or charitable calls.
End quote.

Hmmm 50 million people have voiced their decision by saying they don't want these calls. Stupid Judge!

NYT: Studios Moving to Block Piracy of Films Online

I'm much to tired to call you an uninformed dipshit.

Instead I'll just direct you here, here, and here. Oh, and a Google search of "Bush Administration", deficit, and "federal spending" might enlighten you a tad, also.

Have a wonderful day.

NY Times article
Washington Post article

Ahh, you may be right. It is sort of implied. Here is another link to a nytimes article on the topic: click

It states the following:

Harrison also said the fact that gamers could buy a GameCube and three games for the same price as a PS2 with no games made it a more compelling value for the holidays.

It goes on to commment that the industry was hoping other hardware makers (xbox, ps2) would slash prices, but instead they are offering special bundles. In any case, the answer is no, they do not come bundled with anything.

On that, we agree. Probably for different reasons. You, for instance, seem to think that he's honest and fair. I don't want to say that he was bought off, but something sure seems fishy.

His opinion was that the FTC was not authorized by Congress to take this step. You may disagree, but his reading of the law was well within the boundaries of reasonable interpretation.

Congress appears to disagree. According to the the NYTimes two congressmen believe that the FTC has authorized the FTC to take this action. (This is, BTW, a much better article on the story than the one that /. gives.)

Remainder is a quote from the article.

That view was disputed by two congressmen with a strong interest in the issue ? Billy Tauzin, Republican of Louisiana, the chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce; and John D. Dingell of Michigan, the committee's ranking Democrat.

"Contrary to the court's decision, we firmly believe Congress gave the F.T.C. authority to implement the national do-not-call list," the congressmen said in a statement. "We will continue to monitor the situation and will take whatever legislative action is necessary to ensure consumers can stop intrusive calls from unwanted telemarketers."

Dartmouth just recently stopped billing students for long distance calls because administering billing was more expensive than the total charges... no doubt this VoIP initiative will help them save on total campus phone bills without overburdening the network. Dartmouth has been pretty chill about P2P-- they allowed a home-grown P2P program to be used for awhile. I'm pretty sure that even back in the heady days of Napster, they never totally banned its use, but rather metered Napster bandwidth. Regardless, they've recently upgraded network capacity to connect hubs with gigabit ethernet, and don't anticipate VoIP being a bandwidth burden.

Here is the no registration NYT link.

Not Science Fiction: An Elevator to Space

fortunately for SUNW shareholders, Sun released some rather good news yesterday about a breakthrough they had in CPU interconnects. So, the ultrasparc3/4 might be devalued, but Sun was about to devalue them with their own stuff anyway. In addition, the ultraspac3/4 are still very solid chips, and its easier to have an E15k with zillions of them than to try to figure out how to get zillions of p4's to operate in the same space.
Check out the new info posted about sun's interconnect tech here (free reg, blah blah). With the new tech, processors and/or memory can be directly connected to each other.
I still wish my wife had let me buy AMD a couple months ago when it was in the 5's. They're losing money fast, but...since the stock is up 140% from its price in late June, I guess investors still have hopes for them...

Saturday the NYTimes (reg, you know the drill) reviewed this book. here's the link.

New Sun Microsystems Chip May Unseat the Circuit Board

Via Google

• He says military research is free of moral content. His scientists are
  responsible for discovering what is possible; other agencies will be
  responsible for determining its correct use. I'm all for free exploration,
  but this is calculatedly naive. I think this project in particular was
  created with use in mind, and I think tax funded research should reflect
  what taxpayers feel is in their best interest.
  
  
• He says TIA is aimed exclusively at foreign surveillance (and zeroes in on an
  American hotspot, claiming that American financial data isn't analyzed).
  I doubt this*, but even if it's true, citizens abroad should be letting their governments know about how they feel about the US accessing their data.
  

The sole set of data in Torch's possession has been destroyed; no government agency ever had access to it. With Torch's help, we are continuing to make every effort to have the Torch presentation with the one customer's information removed from the Internet.

The sole set of data in Torch's possession has been destroyed; no government agency ever had access to it. With Torch's help, we are continuing to make every effort to have the Torch presentation with the one customer's information removed from the Internet.

The basic idea of calorie restriction is that your body isn't exerting all it's energy digesting food.

you can get the same benifits from periodic fasting. Plus, all the energy that is saved from metabolizing food is directed tword healing and eliminating toxins.

fasting 3-4 days every 2 weeks will leave you in better spirits than calorie restriction.

With fasting, only the 3rd and 4th days are uncomfortable, because of ketosis.

cronic calorie restriction downsides are permanent: metabolism is ALWAYS slow, your reproductive system is shutdown, so you won't want any (worse than not getting any), your cold and clammy and not much fun to be around and look pretty much strung out all the time.

going off on a tanget, who else was afraid that the benefits are lost link would point to a picture of CowboyNeal?

Here's the google link directly to the story.

I think you've overlooked the fact that Windows isn't very secure, and is less secure than other operating systems. There are fewer security problems on other platforms because they were designed with security in mind; with Windows, security was added in as an afterthought.

Check out this New York Times article (free reg required) which talks about why there are fewer viruses and worms for Linux and Mac OS X.

rush limbaugh? give me a f'ing break.

of course you will say the same thing about my NY times link:

here

your statistics show only a portion of taxes being collected (income, not payroll and SS) and prey on a fundamental misunderstanding of mathematics. to put it simply, if a gorup of people is making most of the money they will be paying most of the taxes.

if the top ten percent is receiving 50 percent of GNP then they better be paying atLEAST fifty percent of the taxes. that qould then be FLAT tax. GET IT??

I am not going to play armchair economist, I'm not nearly qualified enough to decide what is the most equitable tax system (and odds are, 99.9% of posters to this thread aren't either). We all want the same things: incentive to work, a healthy and growing middle class, and the wealthy unburdened by government handcuffs. We all want a fair system that encourages growth across all sectors.

If we're going to analyze the tax structure, let's read some REAL economists perspectives.

Taking seriously a talk radio host's arguments on the tax structure is not unlike believing that Congressman who just learned how to send an email should make uninformed rulings on cyber security (DMCA anyone?). There are a few very well respected economists (Nobel Prize winners among them) who are railing against Bush's tax cuts.

Krugman
Ackerloff

For what it's worth, I paid three times in taxes what some of the millionaire CA Gubernatorial candidates paid last year, and I'm no millionaire. I'm in a middle class tax bracket (and fighting like a dog not to slip). And I own a small business which created three jobs last year. How's that fair again?

If you don't like registration, just search news.google.com with appropriate keywords, and Voila! Horse-sized Rodents!

Here is a link that actually works

1/3? I don't know what tax bracket you're in, but after Fed, SS, Medicare, State, Local, property tax, Sales tax, auto registration, and other various fees, most of us in the U.S. pay over 50% of our salaries to the gov.

In a word, no we don't. Not if by "most of us" you mean "most US taxpayers". For a decently readable account of this and other economic "facts", there's a piece in the NY Times (free registration blah blah).

As usual, the google link thwarting the NYtimes registration:

Click Here

You don't even need electricity for that. Just mix beryllium with a good source of alpha particles like radium. Beryllium 9 undergoes an (alpha,n) fusion reaction with an incident alpha particle, generating carbon 12 and a loose neutron.

Beryllium 9 is great because it's essentially two helium nuclei held together by a loose neutron with a very low binding energy (1.66 MeV). It's almost the nuclear equivalent of an alkali metal. You can even pop the thing apart with a gamma ray if you don't want to bother with alpha emitters. For those who worry about berylliosis, boron 11 also works. The (alpha,n) reaction yields nitrogen 14.

This was the setup that Chadwick used for detecting the neutron in 1932. Back then neutrons were referred to as "beryllium radiation" (sort of like how electrons were first called "cathode rays") and were wrongly thought to be some sort of strongly penetrating photons. Chadwick surrounded his beryllium source with wax and measured the energies of the protons that got knocked out by elastic collisions. Wax is a great moderator because it's full of protons, and the neutron slams into a proton in the wax and loses all its energy like a billiard ball. The neutron that emerges from the wax is a slow neutron. Slow neutrons are generally much more useful than fast neutrons because they spend more time in your fissionable material, and there is no Coulomb barrier that they need to overcome so they react with nuclei very easily.

I shouldn't say too much more or else I'll get myself placed on the Bush Administration's new list of 100,000 maniacs. But if you're building a fission bomb, these reactions are really handy because your implosion doesn't last very long and you need to get hold of lots of slow neutrons in a hurry. If you're building a nuclear reactor for power generation, you're under less of a tight schedule and can probably wait a millisecond or two for neutrons from cosmic rays or spontaneous fissions to get your pile going.

In its responding motion, SCO says its actions are protected by, among other rights, First Amendment protections of free speech.

Well that's interesting, because it was recently ruled in a Californian court that a Nike publicity campaign was actually "commercial speech" and so unprotected by the First Amendment.

Personally, I think that companies claiming the rights of citizens can't be a good thing - after all, when did you hear of human rights abuses against corporations?

RIAA, Verizon Head Back To Court Over Subpoenas

Contributed by Mike on Tuesday, September 16th, 2003 @ 01:40AM
from the continuing-the-battle dept.
While Verizon failed in its original bid to protect the privacy of one of their users from random RIAA subpoenas not backed up by a lawsuit, the case is still going on. In fact, Verizon has expanded the case. While, originally, they argued that they were exempt from the DMCA subpoenas since they weren't storying anything on their own servers - but that the file sharing was being done on individuals' home computers. Now, however, they're challenging the very constitutionality of the DMCA subpoena power, which makes it possible for anyone to send a subpoena just by filling out a form and claiming that a copyright violation has occurred. There's simply no oversight, and Verizon says they wonder how this can be constitutional. While (obviously), Verizon is doing this out of self-interest (not to be bombarded with subpoenas - and possibly because they know that file sharing is a prime motivator for getting folks to sign up for DSL), the claims do make sense. Already there have been stories of porn sites using the subpoena power to hit up ISPs to get records on everyone who visits their site. Of course, we have a long way to go before a final decision. The latest set of arguments will go before the Court of Appeals, meaning we still have to wait a while before it is (inevitably) appealed again to the Supreme Court. It may be years before a decision is reached. In the meantime, all we can hope for is that some politicians come to their sense and pre-emptively change the law. Update: Meanwhile, the NY Times is reporting that SBC remains the loan holdout refusing to cough up names to the RIAA, claiming that they feel obligated to protect their subscribers' privacy. The RIAA says the case is all about how SBC profits from file sharing - but I'm not sure why that would matter. After all, one assumes the RIAA is filing these lawsuits in the first place because they're hoping (wishfully, it seems) to profit as well.

Link without registration

Same article, no registration required.

The karma points for this post will be donated to hungry orphans.

Google access and a new scientist story on the same thing.

In their new study, AT&T Labs researchers found the following:

"We developed a data set of 312 popular movies and located one or more samples of 183 of these movies on file sharing networks, for a total of 285 movie samples. 77% of these samples appear to have been leaked by industry insiders."

Gee, big surprise.

Read the full article on NYTimes (registration required)

In their new study, AT&T Labs researchers found the following:

"We developed a data set of 312 popular movies and located one or more samples of 183 of these movies on file sharing networks, for a total of 285 movie samples. 77% of these samples appear to have been leaked by industry insiders."

Gee, big surprise.

First NYTimes article WITHOUT registration

*Sigh*

...courtesy of google: not above stealing themselves musicians internet

Please, submitters - take a few seconds to look up these links - it'll save those of us who block cookies and/or are always on public computers and so loathe having to reregister for every single story (for whoever remembers their password for throw-away accounts?) quite a bit of time.

...courtesy of google: not above stealing themselves musicians internet

Please, submitters - take a few seconds to look up these links - it'll save those of us who block cookies and/or are always on public computers and so loathe having to reregister for every single story (for whoever remembers their password for throw-away accounts?) quite a bit of time.

...courtesy of google: not above stealing themselves musicians internet

Please, submitters - take a few seconds to look up these links - it'll save those of us who block cookies and/or are always on public computers and so loathe having to reregister for every single story (for whoever remembers their password for throw-away accounts?) quite a bit of time.

Google link to the article

google link to article :-)

I don't think I have ever subscribed to online content where I had to pay money. Another thing I don't do, which Clay mentioned in his article, is sign up to the people who force you to fill out their questioneers to read their content. I have definitely found that I can find the information through Google via Usenet which, despite people claiming is dead or whatever, is a very good resource for many types of info, including world events in which the posters themselves might be taking part in. So being an average consumer myself, his words ring very true to me.

Zen

indeed

Honestly people, why keep linking to the "reg required" links?

NYTimes Story
Alternate story