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1) Don't contribute to the problem. Attacking botrunners directly, or vigilante action doesn't help, and may actually be harmful - by teaching them how to build better drones. See http://fm.vix.com/internet/security/superbugs.html

2) As for US gov't agencies, if you or the attacker seem to be in the US, http://www.ic3.gov/ is likely to be interested. http://www.cert.org/csirts/national/contact.html can also put you in touch with nationial computer security incident response teams, who will also be interested (you only need to contact the one local to you, please don't shotgun complaints to all of them.)

3) As for private companies and research organizations, if the bot isn't already clearly and specifically detected by antivirus, report it to them, following their reporting guidelines. Shadowserver (http://www.shadowserver.org) seems to be interested in researching and gathering intelligence on botnets also.

http://www.vix.com/personalcolo/

It started from a thread on the NANOG list, and seems like a good starting point.

Paul Vixie maintains a directory of services providing personal colo for power users. You might find something there to fit your needs.

You can pretty much do the sensible version of this - which is to refuse all email that comes 'dynamic' addresses (as per various RBLs), or with malformed 'HELO' entries.

Yes, the first is a pain for the handful of genuine geeks who *are* equipped to run a properly-administered mail server that does direct-to-MX delivery from a residential DSL service. I know, I've been one. But botnets are now so prevalent, and hosting (especially virtual-hosting on something like UML or Xen) so cheap, that I'm changing my tune to the point of advocating RBL'ing dynamic space, period. (Paul Vixie has a nice article up on why this makes sense and how to go about it - see http://www.vix.com/personalcolo/)

Between the two, I've so far seen exactly one false-positive, from a very poorly administered web forum that insisted on sending registration confirmation emails from 'webadmin@localhost' - and frankly, systems like that deserve to get a kicking until they fix things! And it has taken the volume of spam that actually gets accepted into my systems through the floor.

See here

The key paragraph:

If you'd like a more topical example, consider "spam". People began altering their e-mail "From:" lines in order to make their addresses harder to guess or aggregate; people began doing pattern matching in order to catch known-bad messages and either sideline or reject them. Many defenders used many small tricks to protect their inboxes. The result has not been that less spam is sent or even that less spam is received, on an aggregate basis. Things are worse now than they've ever been. (I say this as co-founder of MAPS LLC, by which I hope to establish my credentials in the spam field for those of you who do not know me.) Today a small number of highly advanced defenders is spam-immune only because they are a small number and their techniques are not widely effective against the attackers; and a small number of highly advanced attackers can "spam at will" a far larger population than ever before. And the trend is that things are getting worse, and getting worse faster than ever before.

see Paul Vixie or to cite a less well-known example, and one that even more directly profits from his non-anonymity: Michael Crawford

and I am google hit #6 for Luke Crawford

I don't host anything of my own at work. Take a look at the Personal Co-location Registry. You'll find a bunch of inexpensive providers for your servers or apps.

Not really a review site but a good listing of personal colo sites. Personal Co-location Registry

I think the legitimate question is "should a consumer expect full freedom to engage in potentially risky behavior from a consumer-grade ISP service?" I think the answer is, VERY unfortunately, no. If you want to have greater freedom (e.g., running your own network services, having unrestricted outbound SMTP, etc.), then you should seriously consider colocation. Paul Vixie has been nice enough to catalog many places all across the US and a few places internationally where you can get a box (or virtual vmware box) hosted for relatively cheap: Personal Co-location Registry

Paul Vixie mantains a list of people offering inexpensive 1U colo services. You might start there and then try to search for testimonials or experiences with any that seems like good deals.

You should also check out the advertising forums on WebHostingTalk.com, where you will find many, many good deals on dedicated servers, colo, VPS, shared, etc.

The prices of the service listed in this article are, quite frankly, laughable. Their cheapest plan would be $43/month for a paultry 50GB of traffic. For around $50 to $75 you could get either a full 1Mbit (approx 316GB/month) 1U colo, or you could rent a dedicated server with probably a couple hundred GB metered. And in the latter you don't have to buy a machine.

For the $25 to $50 range get a VDS. You get all the control of a dedicated machine, without the cost. And you could most definitely do a heck of a lot better than a measly 50GB a month for a $40 or $50 VDS.

I just don't understand why you'd want to colo a mac mini. The small, sexy design is meaningless if it's locked in a datacenter, so you might as well just get a standard 1U server and be done with it. You have MANY more options for hosting a 1U or 2U server than some dinky little mac mini. Competition = better deals.

• Jörg Schilling, cdrtools
  
• Donald Becker, linux ethernet drivers, Beowulf
  
• thekonst, centericq (a console IM client)
  
• Alan Cox, linux kernel guru (I hate that word, but it fits), including being the primary maintainer of the 2.2 tree
  
• Paul Vixie, Vixie cron, BIND, ISC

Many thanks to Paul Vixie, who's biography can be found here , and accomplishments include:

- technical architect of DNS/BIND
- founder of the ISC (Internet Software Consortium)
- cofounder of MAPS (blackhole)
- CIX router ace & CIX-W maintainer
and many others.

> I tried that. Yes, I have my own SMTP server. It was nice, fast, and super reliable
> until AOL/Comcast/Time Warner/pretty much everyone began blocking email
> from everyone except megacorp SMTP servers.

Enter the Personal Co-location Registry.

No wonder that jerk is getting a software patent. What else would you expect from an asshole who is in stupid admiration of Aynd Rand. What a moronic caveman!!!

The original discussion on Nanog can be found here or perhaps here. He originally had the proposal on his site (dead link) but he seems to have taken the page down, and I don't see any reference to him contributing to this draft.

Any non-anecdotal evidence to back up that might broad brush you've got there?

Just 'cause you don't like jocks or fratboys doesn't mean they're rapists.


No, that's backwards. I don't like them because they're mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging rapists. Even though it's not my broad brush, I can't let this go, so try this:

Erhart and Sandler, Campus gang rape: Party Games?, Association of American Colleges, 1985.
[Vast majority of campus gang rapes committed by fraternity members or athletes.]

I found it here.


Or this:

From a sample of sorority, 24% had experienced an attempted rape, 17% were victims of a completed rape. Almost half of these rapes and attempted rapes were perpetrated in a fraternity house. (Copenhaver, Grauerholz, Sex role, vol. 24, nos. 1,2, 1991.)

Found that one here. I don't think those girls were hanging out with the Physics club, do you? More?

Bernstein, Nina "Behind Some Fraternity Walls, Brothers in Crime." New York Times 6 May 1996, late ed. sec A 1+. Bernstein reports that nationally, fraternitites spend one-third of their budgets, "some $30 million dollars a year," to pay liability costs. Discusses specific aspects of date and acquaintance rape in the University of Georgia's Greek community.

Boeringer, Scot B. "Influences of Fraternity Membership, Athletics, and Male Living Arrangements on Sexual Aggression." Violence Against Women, 2(1996): 134-148. Abstract: Investigates fraternal membership, intercollegiate athletic participation and sex composition of living arrangements as possible correlates of sexual coercion. Greater rape proclivity in athletes; More significant use of intoxicants and nonphysical verbal coercion in obtaining sex by fraternity members.

Found those two here. Face it, those motherfuckers exhibit all the moral judgment and respect for others you'd witness with a pack of wild, snarling dogs. Defend them at your peril.

Why not just pick up on where MAPS and ORBS left off. They give a pretty good (arguably, I know) service in marking open mail relays and email addresses used by spammers.

Why not use similar technologies for web sites? Just maintain a list of IPs, domains and specific URLs which should be filtered? What SHOULD happen, though, is some sort of categorization and rating system. In other words, under category "sex" you might have a rating of "1" for partially nude/suggestive pictures and "10" for explicit stuff. The service would have to provide guidelines as to how to rate the URLs.

Taking this example further, one would implement a Slashdot-like moderating system to give URLs "negative karma", where the administrators of the networks using the filtering system have the opportunity to place their votes on which stuff they want hidden most.

On the user's end, the network admins could have the ability to screen based on category and rating (like, filter category Sex with negative karma above 4), and the ability to override the rating of a particular site if they feel that it was marked unfairly (or get user complaints about a bad filter).

This system will obviously be very dependent on good guidelines and good participation on the part of the network admins. Obviously a free system wouldn't be able to afford to have full-time staff finding stuff to filter, but the good part about this is the list would be dynamic. Perhaps the database could be automagically downloaded weekly from a central repository in a cron job somewhere, giving the network the latest and greatest of the filters. Again, the overrides the admin put in place at the user's end would take effect, so any updates to the overridden site's rating will be ignored.

Teleglobe.net does:
traceroute to marketingmasters.com (209.211.253.74), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 129.125.101.252 (129.125.101.252) 0.788 ms 0.618 ms 0.6 ms
2 AR1.Groningen.surf.net (145.41.81.133) 1.008 ms 2.312 ms 0.862 ms
3 BR2.Enschede.surf.net (145.41.7.241) 4.877 ms 3.87 ms 4.026 ms
4 BR7.Amsterdam.surf.net (145.41.7.169) 7.638 ms 7.382 ms 7.328 ms
5 BR2.NewYork.surf.net (145.41.0.90) 81.094 ms 82.464 ms 84.262 ms
6 if-1-9.core1.NewYork.Teleglobe.net (207.45.196.69) 81.191 ms 79.558 ms 80.556 ms
7 if-7-1.core1.Montreal.Teleglobe.net (64.86.80.29) 86.712 ms 87.256 ms 86.903 ms
8 if-1-0-0.bb1.Montreal.Teleglobe.net (207.45.221.163) 148.554 ms 96.395 ms 107.36 ms
9 * * *
10 * * *
snip: it goes on to 30 hops.

I am glad they do, it makes a big difference in the amount of spam. DUL, RSS and ORBS take care of the small spammers.

Teleglobe.net does:
traceroute to marketingmasters.com (209.211.253.74), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 129.125.101.252 (129.125.101.252) 0.788 ms 0.618 ms 0.6 ms
2 AR1.Groningen.surf.net (145.41.81.133) 1.008 ms 2.312 ms 0.862 ms
3 BR2.Enschede.surf.net (145.41.7.241) 4.877 ms 3.87 ms 4.026 ms
4 BR7.Amsterdam.surf.net (145.41.7.169) 7.638 ms 7.382 ms 7.328 ms
5 BR2.NewYork.surf.net (145.41.0.90) 81.094 ms 82.464 ms 84.262 ms
6 if-1-9.core1.NewYork.Teleglobe.net (207.45.196.69) 81.191 ms 79.558 ms 80.556 ms
7 if-7-1.core1.Montreal.Teleglobe.net (64.86.80.29) 86.712 ms 87.256 ms 86.903 ms
8 if-1-0-0.bb1.Montreal.Teleglobe.net (207.45.221.163) 148.554 ms 96.395 ms 107.36 ms
9 * * *
10 * * *
snip: it goes on to 30 hops.

I am glad they do, it makes a big difference in the amount of spam. DUL, RSS and ORBS take care of the small spammers.

Let's respond to this one... You're wrong here. Very very wrong here, and ignorant. If you couldn't be bothered to look up what you were blathering about, what right do you have to rip the author of this article?

Let's see, look around the maps site, a little bit, ahhh, here it is... two clicks from the front page...

"Subscription via Multihop eBGP4. This is the oldest (and for a while, the only) mechanism for MAPS RBL usage by third parties (which means anybody other than us)."

Wow, they were doing this before the dns method you were talking about.

In the future, check your facts before spewing them out, in the case of INFORMATIVE, your fingers, or in the case of TROLL, your ass.

Let's respond to this one... You're wrong here. Very very wrong here, and ignorant. If you couldn't be bothered to look up what you were blathering about, what right do you have to rip the author of this article?

Let's see, look around the maps site, a little bit, ahhh, here it is... two clicks from the front page...

"Subscription via Multihop eBGP4. This is the oldest (and for a while, the only) mechanism for MAPS RBL usage by third parties (which means anybody other than us)."

Wow, they were doing this before the dns method you were talking about.

In the future, check your facts before spewing them out, in the case of INFORMATIVE, your fingers, or in the case of TROLL, your ass.

Uhm.. UUNET is only in charge of their own network. They are an ISP, and if one of their customers is sending spam then it has to be reported to them so they can get cut off.

UUNET isnt 'in charge' of anything other than that.. They arent 'in charge' of spam - each ISP is responsible for use of its own network.

Only mail that actually originated from (or was relayed through) a UUNET IP address should be reported to abuse@uunet.com - if you are (or were) sending ALL of your spam there then all you are doing is wasting their time..

There is no central organization in charge of spam, and even if there was it would be useless.. Go read http://maps.vix.com, http://www.mail-abuse.net and/or http://www.spamcop.net for real information on the topic of spam, and REAL things ISPs can do about it.

> Of course, I'm also sure that MAPS doesnt wana get sued again

Au contraire! See How to Sue MAPS on their website, where they say "It's our hope that MAPS can help bring about a similar landmark case and carry it all the way to the Supreme Court where federal case law can result." They want to be sued!

If you don't like it, don't watch it, then.

If there's something that I've liked about anime, is that it is much more free, than western artforms, in that it doesn't consciously try to teach a moral (or at least the same morals). The best part of it, is that it is pretty far away from political correctness.

Just face it, Political Correct Anime, would just be the same plain boring stuff that you see on american tv.

Also I find it very ironic that you mention women being oppressed in America. Real facts prove, that it is men that are being oppressed, and that your behavior is just driving this oppression, with real consequences such as an alarmingly high suicide rate among american males. For the real facts, about oppression, see here, and here.

Who is John Galt?

the way they blackhole anyone who runs an open SMTP server, even if it's not being used for spamming

I think you have them confused with ORBS.

From the MAPS site:
"the most common reason for a host or network being in the MAPS RBL is that it was used by a spammer as a mail relay ... Open relays may be entered immediately onto the RBL to stop spam-in-progress"

MAPS does not scan for open relays, so how do they know that a relay is open unless a spammer uses it?

Contrary to your belief, it's _HARD_ to get into the MAPS RBL - you have to screw up and refuse to fix it; it's also very easy to get off the RBL - fix your relay, and notify them.

You should visit the MAPS page at maps.vix.com for more information.

Really, MAPS is not ORBS.

Add it to the MAPS Realtime Blackhole List!

I took a look at Camp Sussex and other than the name of the camp itself, which you think would also cause problems for 1000's of British sites...

Two years ago I gave a talk to a bunch of two-year college marketing folks (NCMPR) and one of them asked me how to get their site unblocked from these services.

Their college's name? Middlesex Community College

I had a hard time believing (at the time) that they could have been blocked just cause the word "sex" is in their name. I figured there had to be something else (like a student's home page or something) doing this.

Now I have to worry about my own college, because we have a campus located in Sussex County, Delaware. Heaven's forbid if we put up a page that describes the location of the campus...

What I don't understand is the amount of people who get upset and threaten to sue about being on the RBL list, a list that every site is manually dealt with and has instructions for how to get off of it, yet there are no cries from both near and far about this censorware crap.

Regardless, the RBL focuses on open relays

He managed to piss everyone in the list off by saying that (essentially) the problem with the internet was poorly written software such as BIND and Sendmail (actually he is pissed because he was RBLed) to the point where Paul Vixie actually joined the list just to post a couple of messages in response.

(Off-topic note to CmdrTaco et al.: Fix extrans mode or remove it!)

Then there's the most annoying problem i faced, which is admins that either don't know how to prevent relaying, or don't care that they are being used as a relay.

• Most shipping mail packages include relay protection, many by default, so newly installed servers generally aren't vulnerable.
• Old machines are constantly being taken out of service, reducing relay supply.
• Organizations like MAPS and ORBS put pressure on open relays to close.
• as the number of open relays decrease, spammers will hit the remaining ones harder and harder.

Ummm.....If there are viable private solutions to this scourge, then why haven't we seen them already?

(One of the great things about MAPS is that the more participants, the better it gets. If you use MAPS to filter your mail, then report spam you receive back to MAPS appropriately, you will be helping to improve the service -- thus reducing your future spam intake and everyone else's.)

I am not sure if a private solution would work in this situation because of the "free speech" arguements and also of the multi-juristdictional nature of the problem.

"Freedom of speech", as protected by the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights and the U.S. Constitution (among others), is more accurately described as the freedom to use your own resources, including your voice and your property, to speak your mind. It does not justify your use of other people's property to speak your mind. That, however, is what spammers do -- they use my mail server, without my permission, to spam me, my users, and others. In the civilized world we call that "theft of services" -- just as if I owned a printing press and you crept in by night and used my press to print up your leaflets.

The legal trouble, then, lies in defining "permission". Some would argue (and have argued) that by connecting a mail server to the Internet you are implicitly granting everyone permission to use it as much as they want, for whatever purpose they want -- including spamming. The opposite extreme is to hold that only explicitly solicited mail is granted permission -- which would rule out a lot of perfectly legitimate mail. Both of these are IMHO ridiculous extremes. A legal attempt to stop spam, however, must deal with these issues in defining spam. Veer to far towards the first position, and you violate property rights; veer too far towards the second, and you violate freedom of speech. A private attempt to stop spam can define permission extensionally -- i.e. by example. This is exactly what cooperative, voluntary systems like MAPS's lists do. The lists are made up of addresses associated with actual pieces of spam received and reported by participants.

You also mention the "multi-jurisdictional nature of the problem". This, too, is a problem solely for legal attempts to stop spam, and not private ones. Private cooperation among ISPs and among users may easily ignore governmental borders -- indeed, it already does. MAPS participants come from all corners of the globe.

For all those anti-government folks, I am surprised to see that a creation of a civilian anti-spam force is so distrubing to you.

As a Libertarian, I object to government meddling in private affairs. I also object to crime (i.e. the violation of people's rights), and I consider spamming to be criminal, regardless of whether or not government thinks it is. Spamming is a violation of the property rights of those spammed, and of the owners of mail servers that relay and store the spam. I support people taking private action to protect themselves from crime, insofar as they feel the need to do so, and can do so without violating others' rights in the process -- and that is exactly what MAPS and similar systems do.

If you are emotionally dependent on government to protect your rights -- in other words, if you are unwilling to protect them yourself -- what rights do you really have?

I'm pretty gung-ho about private solutions to technical problems. I'm far more confident in my abilities, and those of my technical compatriots, than I am in the ability of our government to enforce a law appropriately.

So I'm generally a firm believer in my ability to take care of things on my own. ORBS and The RBL have certainly been shown to be an extremely successful method of filtering out spam. Since I got my mail server set up with MAPS and ORBS, I get about 2 pieces of spam a week. That's pretty managable. (And good, because I'm the kind of guy that gets spam and calls the company to bitch. Total waste of time.)

However, I don't run an ISP. I worked at one, as all good geeks must, back in '95. Spam wasn't a problem then -- I shutter to think what it must be like these days. Spam is obviously a huge loss to these people, MAPS or no MAPS. Because of the direct financial losses that result from the actions of spammers, I can't help but, although reluctantly, support federal legislation to limit UCE. It seems like the only method of stopping it.

God help us all...I'm in favor of a law. :)

-Waldo

We use three spam lists:

RSS
DUL
RBL
The RSS is a toned down version of ORBS; it only lists relays that have been used to spam, which makes it easier to explain the problem. The DUL blocks any direct from dialup spam. The RBL blocks blackhole sites. The main problem with ORBS is that it is harder to explain (with RSS you can say 'spam _has_ been sent through this server'), and it blocks a lot more sites, which makes it hard to handle on anything larger than a personal mail machine.

Take a look at the MAPS RBL. Fairly sure its both free and trustworthy. Hell, you don't even have to register to use the service. They only ask big companies that use it to endorse them (not a whole lot though). Granted it takes a bit of work to get somebody on the list (they like to give people the benefit of the doubt), but it keeps known and unrepentant spammers out of your mailbox. It looks like a couple of people that really dislike spam... Not sure, haven't really investigated them, but have a look-see and decide for yourself.

--

I agree with this guy.

1. The Internet is a collection of computers and users who volunteer adherence to IP.
2. The new Corporate Internet is migrating away from IP. As a result, it will not be peer-to-peer, and it will not be open, and it will not be (is not) reliable.
3. Corporate networks appear to be DAMAGED (Dain Bramaged?) to traditional (good) IP hosts.
4. IP routes around damage in the network. Check out the (RBL) evolution of the Internet's Killer App: email . This is a strong and specific example of the old-school Internet segmenting the new-school Pseudo-internet. The new school sues, and the RBL lives! Paul Vixie is free to write software and distribute it, and we are all (somewhat) free to run sendmail, preserving the usefulness of our email system.
5. Like email, the rest of the real internet, loyal to our proven principles of good hosting, will simply fork off and let the Corp ses rot in isolation.

Don't get me wrong, it's a good effort, but Paul Vixie himself believes it to be a crude and poor solution for the problem, and a temporary hack at best.

In order to get on the MAPS RBL, you not only have to be running an open relay (or third-party relay), you have to be widely abused to send junkmail (let's not call it spam, please -- that's a USENET term), and you have to be openly and patently unwilling or unable to configure your mail server to close the open/third-party relay hole, or you are an active junkmailer yourself.

In order to get off the MAPS RBL, you just need to demonstrate that you're willing to operate in good faith and start work to close your open/third-party relay hole, or stop your junkmail activities.

The MAPS RSS (Realtime Spam-Stopper) list is a little less difficult to get onto -- you just have to actually be abused to send out junkmail. The ORBS (Open Relay Blocking System) is even easier to get onto -- you just have to have a machine that appears to be an open/third-party relay, or hosted on a network that blocks access to the ORBS relay tester (e.g., all AboveNet customers).

Of course, there's also the MAPS DUL (Dial-Up List), which gives you the netblocks of the dial-up networks for most of the large providers around the world, because as ISPs shut down their open/third-party relays, their customers are taking to trying to send junkmail directly from their dial-up account to other open/third-party relay servers around the world.

If you want to properly understand all this, I suggest you visit http://maps.vix.com/ and http://www.orbs.org/.

--

Actually, as someone pointed out, it has already been done. Although the mailserver admin must add a few things to his setup in the config file, things such as

http://www.orbs.org (and)
http://maps.vix.com/rbl/

already implement this.
I work at an ISP, and we co-locate hundreds of boxes for customers. ORBS is quite effective, and so is MAPS.

I remember a while back, a customer was completely clueless on how to setup a mailserver. Rather than ASK how to do it (we would have setup his sendmail, it doesn't take long), he instead set up his mailserver as an open relay, no restrictions, and forwarded all mail onto the main server. Since he was "inside" our company network, as he was colocated, our mailserver accepted his mail. (this oversight has since been corrected. ;)

Therefore, as they always do, spammers located his box quite quickly and spam mail poured through his server. The traffic load was caught by one of the admins within an hour or so, and the IP of his box was blocked from our mailserver, but it was too late and the damage had already been done.

Since the colocated customer was relaying into our main mail server, ORBS placed our primary mail server on their list. A good percent of our mail (I'd say about 40% or so) was returned to us by ISP's subscribing to the (free) ORBS database, with a nice note stating that our mailserver was on the ORBS spam list and therefore the messages could not be delivered. heh.

One of our admins completed the process with ORBS to remove our server from their list, and after they verified there were indeed no possibilities of relay, they promptly removed us from their list.

ORBS did indeed adjust their records quickly, and our mail returned to normal status the next day, with no blocking.

So ORBS and the MAPS RBL do indeed work quite well. I'm glad they're there, and that they do indeed function. We had a lot of headaches from customer calls, etc asking what the HELL was wrong with our mail servers, but in the end, it served its purpose and we corrected our customers mistake. :)

Click here to get info on signing up for MAPS RBL, and/or here to get info on signing up for ORBS.

It'd be nice to see this extended to other services, I'm not sure how feasable it would be. I suppose a centralized procmail filter database would be feasible.

Take a look at the Realtime Black Hole List. This is a DNS-based hack that publishes the domain names of sites that allow spammers to send through their mailservers - in a form that lets mail transfer agents do a quick DNS inquiry and dump mail if it is coming from such a site.

Interestingly, it's an example of anarchism in action. Anybody can publish such a list. Anybody can hack their sendmail to use such a list - and pick any such list they chose. (As far as I know there's only one such list at the moment - probably a sign that it's doing a good job.)

The RBH client code is included in current Linux distributions. (I saw it as a {recommended} sendmail configuration option in Red Hat 6.1, for instance.) I've heard estimates that about 60% of the email inboxes in the world are now behind mail transfer agents that subscribe to RBH and thus bounce mail from any site on the list.

I'll go you one better (because if you're procmailing, the spammer has already wasted your resources) and point you to the MAPS Realtime BlackHole List.

The point of a parody is that it resembles its target in some key fashion. There was nothing parodic in your summary of my position -- it was a heavy-handed lie. Learn the difference between parody and mere sarcasm, and do it quickly.

If you want to posit a systematic conspiracy against women everywhere but in our schools, that's your privilege. It is up to the intelligent reader to decide which environment is likelier to be bias-prone -- the world of the standardized test, the great wide world of events, or the cloistered, female-dominated world of school. While you're at it, you can hypothesize about black helicopters and New World Orders. Thinking adults are unlikely to join you in your fantasies.

I find it amusing that you seek to compare the status of blacks with the status of women. As Warren Farrell points out in The Myth of Male Power, it is men who die early, get less education, and work in dangerous jobs, not women. If we are to make a racial analogy based on the facts, you are very likely to lose.

You claim that your workplace conspiracy against women is "amply documented", but tellingly you fail to include such documentation. Perhaps you hope to rely on popular misapprehensions -- what "everyone knows". I think you should make an effort to educate yourself about the myth of the glass ceiling, the myth of the wage gap, and other lies you've been told -- and been telling.

--

Your translation is a crude attempt to lie about what I said. Read for meaning or get lost.

You simultaneously slam me for not going along with the claim that women are at a disadvantage in education (while declining to say why I should believe you) and ignore the fact that men are provably at such a disadvantage (and if you're ignorant of that, take a look at the anti-male sex disparity in college enrollment). Your objections are self-contradictory if you're not a sexist, and at variance with the facts either way.

If you can show where I said women were stupid...well, who am I kidding? If you could show it, you could quote it. In fact, I explicitly mentioned that women are making technical contributions. They're not sitting around whining about how tough they have it -- they're out there being tough. Go and do thou likewise.

--

3.Anyone have any idea how to fix the problem of dynamic IPs?

• Read Bill LeFebvre's article on Internet Black Holes to learn how the Real-Time Black Hole system uses DNS creatively. You can also go write to the source if you prefer. Here's an excerpt:

  The simplest way to get started using the MAPS RBL to protect your mail relay against theft of service by spammers is to arrange for it to make a DNS query (of a stylized name) whenever you receive an incoming mail message from a host whose spam status you do not know.

• Here's the abstract for TCP Splicing for Application Layer Proxy Performance, by Pravin Bhagwat et al.:

  Application layer proxies already play an important role in today's networks, serving as firewalls and HTTP caches -- and their role is being expanded to include encryption, compression, and mobility support services. Current application layer proxies suffer major performance penalties as they spend most of their time moving data back and forth between connections, context switching and crossing protection boundaries for each chunk of data they handle. We present a technique called TCP Splice that provides kernel support for data relaying operations which runs at near router speeds. In our lab testing, we find SOCKS firewalls using TCP Splice can sustain a data throughput twice that of normal firewalls, with an average packet forwarding latency 30 times less.

• Here's the abstract for Improving HTTP Caching Proxy Performance with TCP Tap:

  Application layer proxies are an extremely popular method for adding new services to existing network applications. They provide backwards compatibility, centralized administration, and the convenience of the application layer programming environment. Since proxies act as traffic concentrators, serving multiple clients at the same time, during peak load periods they often become performance bottlenecks. In this paper we present an extension of the TCP Splice technique called TCP Tap that promises to dramatically improve the performance of a HTTP caching proxy, just as TCP Splice doubled the throughput of an application layer firewall proxy.

• Cohen, A., S. Rangarajan, and H. Slye. On the Performance of TCP Splicing for URL-aware Redirection. In: Proceedings of the USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems, pp. 117-125, October 1999.

  Recently, the focus of the work on NEPPI applications was mostly on high performance URL-aware switching using TCP splicing. TCP splicing is a technique for bridging TCP connections at the IP level within the kernel, thus avoiding the overhead of application-level copying between sockets as performed by programs such as proxies. URL-aware switching with TCP splicing can be utilized in layer 7 switches to achieve high performance content-aware redirection of HTTP requests. We have developed of prototype of a layer 4/7 switch based on NEPPI.

• A Mobile Networking System based on Internet Protocol(IP) Pravin Bhagwat, Charles Perkins. Proceedings of USENIX Symposium on Mobile and Location Independent Computing, August, 1993, Cambridge, MA.

  Due to advances in wireless communication technology there is a growing demand for providing continuous network access to the users of portable computers, regardless of their location. Existing network protocols cannot meet this requirement since they were designed with the assumption of a static network topology where hosts do not change their location over time. Based on IP's Loose Source Route option, we have developed a scheme for providing transparent network access to mobile hosts. Our scheme is easy to implement, requires no changes to the existing set of hosts and routers, and achieves optimal routing in most cases. An outline of the proposed scheme is presented and a reference implementation is described.

• A Mobile Host Protocol Supporting Route Optimization and Authentication IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, special issue on "Mobile and Wireless Computing Networks," 13(5):839-849, June 1995. c IEEE. Andrew Myles Department of Electronics

  Host mobility is becoming an important issue due to the recent proliferation of notebook and palmtop computers, the development of wireless network interfaces, and the growth in global internetworking. This paper describes the design and implementation of a mobile host protocol, called the Internet Mobile Host Protocol (IMHP), that is compatible with the TCP/IP protocol suite, and allows a mobile host to move around the Internet without changing its identity. In particular, IMHP provides host mobility over both the local and wide area, while remaining transparent to the user and to other hosts communicating with the mobile host. IMHP features route optimization and integrated authentication of all management packets. Route optimization allows a node to cache the location of a mobile host and to send future packets directly to that mobile host. By authenticating all management packets, IMHP guards against possible attacks on packet routing to mobile hosts, including the interception or ...

• RFC 2230 has some words that might be relevant here:

  Dial-Up Host Example

  This example outlines a possible use of KX records with mobile hosts that dial into the network via PPP and are dynamically assigned an IP address and domain-name at dial-in time.

  Consider the situation where each mobile node is dynamically assigned both a domain name and an IP address at the time that node dials into the network. Let the policy require that each mobile node act as its own Key Exchanger. In this case, it is important that dial-in nodes use addresses from one or more well known IP subnets or address pools dedicated to dial-in access. If that is true, then no KX record or other action is needed to ensure that each node will act as its own Key Exchanger because lack of a KX record indicates that the node is its own Key Exchanger.

  Consider the situation where the mobile node's domain name remains constant but its IP address changes. Let the policy require that each mobile node act as its own Key Exchanger. In this case, there might be operational problems when another node attempts to perform a secure reverse DNS lookup on the IP address to determine the corresponding domain name. The authenticated DNS binding (in the form of a PTR record) between the mobile node's currently assigned IP address and its permanent domain name will need to be securely updated each time the node is assigned a new IP address. There are no mechanisms for accomplishing this that are both IETF-standard and widely deployed as of the time this note was written. Use of Dynamic

  DNS Update without authentication is a significant security risk and hence is not recommended for this situation.

You can do a lot to fight spam. Junkbusters has a site devoted to getting these intrusions out of our lives. I've used their anti-junk snailmail system, and it really does work well. They've also got a nice page on stopping computer UBE crud, too.

Personally, I never hide my mail address. It's dishonest, and, technically, against the rules. My real address, tchrist@perl.com, is sitting right here in this message, on the header for this comment, and is also posted in a hundred thousand different places--if not more. But you know what? I don't see much spam. I auto-bounce at least fifty pieces of spam per day. And most days, not more than a couple make it through -- but only once.

Some of them get bounced using sendmail's anti-spam features. I'm a big fan of the Realtime Blackhole List, which sendmail can be configured to access.

Some spammage get bounced because the sender is on my own blacklist of forbidden addresses, which lately includes things like /\b\d+\.net/. Others are bounced because they look like spam, or because they're mime-encrypted. This is all taken care of by a custom receiving program, plus some other scripts to dynamically update the blacklist.

I don't automatically bounce mail that violates reasonable netiquette, but I do have a periodic posting about the idiotic Jeopardy mail.

And yes, now and then a few innocent men are sent to the gallows. This is the price we pay on the war against spam. If it's important, they'll figure out another way to mail me.

I disagree. While for the vast majority of people, there is no technical reason why sendmail should be preferred over other MTAs, there are cases where more obscure things need to be done and sendmail is simply the only functional choice.

I can do things with sendmail rewrite rules that are simply impossible (or at least *extremely* difficult) in other MTAs. This is why postfix is only 99% sendmail-compatible, since that last 1% is a killer.


Of course, sendmail *is* the best documented MTA in the world (it actually has two books written on the subject, Sendmail: Theory and Practice by Avolio and Vixie, and the definitive reference sendmail (now in it's second edition) by Bryan Costales with Eric Allman.

Then there's the increased available online documentation, both the FAQ, and my own Sendmail Performance Tuning for Large Systems paper that I wrote and presented at SANE'98.

While perhaps not strictly a technical reason, available documentation (or the lack thereof) is a very strong motivating factor as to why many people choose to select particular products, SMTP MTAs included.

I suggest you read http://maps.vix.com/tsi/ar-what.html before you make more of an ass of yourself.

The MAPS (Mail Abuse Prevention System) Realtime Blackhole List is one of his projects. As far as I know, he's still going to be working on that...

As for other stuff, check out Vixie Enterprises. He does work with IETF, I think he runs an ISP, and he's got a bunch of other projects, though I'm not sure what they all are off the top of my head...

- strabo

At this point, I sent an e-mail to the Boeing Employees' Credit Union HR department. [name deleted for Slashdot post] was under contract to them for IT services. I pointed out [name deleted for Slashdot post] used their time and resources to make defamatory remarks that I sodomized my step-son, and to make a post comparing the size of [name deleted for Slashdot post] anal orifice before and after being sodomized by a priest. They terminated his contract.