You know, Heinlein's idea of mandatory government service to get the vote is a bit silly, but what if there was mandatory government service to run for office?
You want to be the police chief? You're required to have at least two years on a force.
You want to be an elected judge? You have to have operated as a lawyer. (Actually, we kinda do this, but it's not legally required.)
You want to be commander-in-chief of the armed forces? You have to be in the damn military. (Or, at least, attempt to be there.)
Actually, maybe you should only have to have been in the military if you try to use the military, outside of a constitutionally declared war. If you weren't in the military, all you can do is use it how Congress says.
Talking about what photons do when you take away their speed is silly, as you cannot do that.
And it would take an infinite amount of energy if you could. So it's not absurd to say it would end up with an infinite mass...that energy would have to end up somewhere.;)
(No, I'm not talking about outside of a vacuum. That isn't really taking away their speed.)
There's a series somewhere that has humanity establish trans-temporal wormholes, with the ends hundreds of years apart in almost the same place.
But they don't use them for 'time travel', they put them between solar systems, and fly at slow-than-light (with suspended animation and time dilation shortening the trip) to them, go back in time, and continue their flight, arriving mere days after they left the other planet, after a trip that took hundreds of years.
They have to have a comm blackout and autopilot so they don't transmit messages back in time, and people protecting both the uptime and downtime end. And some of the series revolves around what can happen if the rules aren't followed.
And the sad thing is, this causes people to deny cookies, even tracking cookies, that don't harm them.
Like the apache session tracking cookies that make it easy to follow someone's through a progress through a website. They don't reveal any more information than an IP (In fact, if you have a IP address that doesn't change between visits, they reveal less information.), but get around the confusion of web proxies and whatnot, so we can say 'This vistor came on our site here, did this stuff, and this was his last page', which if you have an objection to a website tracking that, you shouldn't be on the net.;)
So thank you, marketers, for screwing up a useful tool for me, a webmaster. I'll go back to guessing by IP address and knowing that IPs that visit my sites fifty times more than everyone else are probably proxies and I shouldn't pay attention to them other than statistically.
Now, that doesn't mean everything they say is a lie. But their profession is to lie about products and services to get people to buy them, and hence it's probably wise to automatically distrust anything they say to start with until someone who's not a professional liar backs it up.
To those who are going to say that marketers tell the truth about products to people who don't know the truth...fuck that. That was true in 1955, and was called advertising. It's not true in 2005, and it's called marketing.
Someone should make an autostarting CD that disables autostart. Any game company that did that would be my hero. Hey, if it's legal to install fucking device drivers without asking, it's certainly legal to toggle an OS setting without asking.
And people who say 'But I don't want to figure out what to do'....I have no problem with the 'double click on the CD icon and run a certain program' part of autostart. It's running one on insertion that's the issue.
Of course it means 'This works when done here, but should it actually be done somewhere else?'. No one pages through source code and puts 'What is this?' in as a question, that doesn't make any sense. Either figure it out or ask the maintainer.
And as for ' many draconian surveillance measures would you be willing to tolerate', the spam problem is a result of deliberate 'inattention' on the part of various ISPs.
Everyone knows what IP the spammers are on, because, due, they got spam from there, and the ISP knows who had that IP at what time. It's not rocket science.
So there's no 'surveillance' needed, although that might be a nice option for dynamic IP users instead of blocking port 25.
Oh, heh, I forgot I had to use that also. I know of none other that can use mysql.
Or, really, none other at all. The 'standard' one, cyrus, has the same baggage as sendmail, although at least it's not that old.
Courier-imap is nice and clean and usable and works. It's just ultimately packaged by a jerk. (You can kinda tell that by the inability to run it from inetd. Not that I want to, but I can't.)
That's not 'implimenting a blacklist', that's using a damn blacklist, but that's already been addressed.
I'm here to issue a challenge to you: Point to me one public spam filter that deletes mail based on a hit on a blacklist. Just one. Or one ISP or free mail service.
Oh, that's right, there aren't any. Because all mail servers have such a check built in, and they reject it before delivery, and thus any tool to check mail against a single blacklist and delete it would be completely pointless.
There are tools that check blacklists as part of scoring the message, and those tools may end up deleting the message, like spamassassin. As part of literally dozens of tests to figure out if something is spam, though.
That's not to say someone couldn't code something that deletes against a blacklist and use it internally, but at that point you're arguing against hypotheticals. There's no reason to do that when you can just type the address of the blacklist into the mailserver.
You can tell the writer of Courier is an asshat just by looking the install.
Why? Well, the lack of providing an RPM, which is just annoying, and the delibrate inability to compile the RPM as root.
Total asshat clue, right there. 'Let's force people to set up an RPM compiling area as a normal user!'
The first person to say 'You shouldn't be doing things as root' gets a punch in a mouth. I'm installing the damn thing as root, aren't I? I rather obviously trust the code, why wouldn't I trust the compile?
Well, no, I'm not it as root, I'm installing postfix.
But I am using maildrop, because I couldn't get the postfix built-in delivery agent to use mysql right. (It's probably fixed now.)
It's weird, qmail's author seems to be a jerk too. Is there some sort of school producing MTA-writing jerks?
The only sane choices for MTAs out there seem to to be Postfix and exim. (Sendmail is not written by a jerk, but...gah, can we just kill that thing already? Whenever I think of sendmail, I imagine a giant mechanical framework around a dead horse, moving its legs so it's appearing to walk.)
Vigilantes don't technically 'have' to break the law.
For example, in many places it's legal to do a citizen's arrest if you see someone actually committing a crime. If someone suspects a crime will be commited and hangs around armed with the intent of bringing the person in, that's vigilantism, and perfectly legal. Or even hanging around waiting to call the cops.
Or if, for example, people keep getting attacked in a certain part of town, so you, who happen to have a blackbelt, wander through there, waiting to be attacked so you can fight back...
It's usually not called vigilantism if it's legal, but if you are attempting to do the work of the legal system, it is being a vigilante.
However, vigilantism requires enforcing a law, be it an actual law or just a made up one. Or punishing someone who already broke the law. (Or, as sometimes happens, you merely suspect broke the law.)
Whereas spam fighting may be interacting with the results of a crime, it's no more vigilantism than picking up litter is, or rebuilding a house torched by arson. The crime already happened, no one's trying to punish or catch the criminals, they're trying to undo the harm caused.
I guess you technically could call spam reporters 'civil vigilantes', by analogy, because they are reporting a contract violation between two third parties to one of those parties. Instead of taking criminal offenses into their own hands, they're taking civil ones. But that's getting a bit silly.
With the minor quibble he rented to a drug dealer and then refused to cease renting to him when it became obvious the guy was, in fact, a drug dealer.
At that point, hell yes the police should shut down the whole damn mall, because something funny is going on there.
Of course, this analogy doesn't work, because this wasn't the police, it was simply people refusing to visit the mall, because no one would do anything about the damn drug dealer.
Well, see, that's where you've fallen for the lies. No fault of yours.
On every blacklist that lists entire ISPs, that ISP hasn't been responding to spamming complaints for a hell of a long time.
There is plenty of leeway. You get a spammer, you respond to complaints, you remove them, you never end up on a blacklist.
Notice it's never the blocked ISP that complains, at least not anymore? It's always some random guy on that ISP. No ISP ever shows up and says 'We were unfairly blocked.'. Not one who's willing to state their name. Think about why that is.
It's because they know they'd have hundreds of people immediately leaping on them, asking 'Why are you still hosting spammer X?'.
In fact, they only time they do stand up is to say 'We've gotten rid of all our spammers and are still blocked!!' and the response there is usually 'You had spammers for two years, and removed them last week? Well, a large organization like you must recognize how slow things can be...I'm sure our staff can get around to it in a few months...'.
No, they just have their customers go out and hassle people. Those customers, I'm sad to say, are collateral damage of the spam war, but not of the spamfighters. They're being held up as human shields.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, wait, no it's not.
You want to be the police chief? You're required to have at least two years on a force.
You want to be an elected judge? You have to have operated as a lawyer. (Actually, we kinda do this, but it's not legally required.)
You want to be commander-in-chief of the armed forces? You have to be in the damn military. (Or, at least, attempt to be there.)
Actually, maybe you should only have to have been in the military if you try to use the military, outside of a constitutionally declared war. If you weren't in the military, all you can do is use it how Congress says.
No, they're shooting their customers in the foot, which has never harmed Microsoft in the least in their entire history.
And it would take an infinite amount of energy if you could. So it's not absurd to say it would end up with an infinite mass...that energy would have to end up somewhere. ;)
(No, I'm not talking about outside of a vacuum. That isn't really taking away their speed.)
But they don't use them for 'time travel', they put them between solar systems, and fly at slow-than-light (with suspended animation and time dilation shortening the trip) to them, go back in time, and continue their flight, arriving mere days after they left the other planet, after a trip that took hundreds of years.
They have to have a comm blackout and autopilot so they don't transmit messages back in time, and people protecting both the uptime and downtime end. And some of the series revolves around what can happen if the rules aren't followed.
Atomic bombs existed before anything went into space.
And, no, I'm not some Trek fanboi. It's not that good, it's just not a soap opera.
There are plenty of scifi series that are soap operas. Buffy springs to mind. But not Trek.
Like the apache session tracking cookies that make it easy to follow someone's through a progress through a website. They don't reveal any more information than an IP (In fact, if you have a IP address that doesn't change between visits, they reveal less information.), but get around the confusion of web proxies and whatnot, so we can say 'This vistor came on our site here, did this stuff, and this was his last page', which if you have an objection to a website tracking that, you shouldn't be on the net. ;)
So thank you, marketers, for screwing up a useful tool for me, a webmaster. I'll go back to guessing by IP address and knowing that IPs that visit my sites fifty times more than everyone else are probably proxies and I shouldn't pay attention to them other than statistically.
I like the 'Cookie Button' extension instead, because 'Permit Cookies' steals my damn Ctrl+Insert.
marketing==lying
Now, that doesn't mean everything they say is a lie. But their profession is to lie about products and services to get people to buy them, and hence it's probably wise to automatically distrust anything they say to start with until someone who's not a professional liar backs it up.
To those who are going to say that marketers tell the truth about products to people who don't know the truth...fuck that. That was true in 1955, and was called advertising. It's not true in 2005, and it's called marketing.
And people who say 'But I don't want to figure out what to do'....I have no problem with the 'double click on the CD icon and run a certain program' part of autostart. It's running one on insertion that's the issue.
However, I doubt that implimentation uses a third-party blacklist at all. They're just deleting mail from IPs they don't like.
Everyone should have damn autostart turned off anyway.
Of course it means 'This works when done here, but should it actually be done somewhere else?'. No one pages through source code and puts 'What is this?' in as a question, that doesn't make any sense. Either figure it out or ask the maintainer.
Except, of course, that OpenBSD won't support his hardware.
Everyone knows what IP the spammers are on, because, due, they got spam from there, and the ISP knows who had that IP at what time. It's not rocket science.
So there's no 'surveillance' needed, although that might be a nice option for dynamic IP users instead of blocking port 25.
Or, really, none other at all. The 'standard' one, cyrus, has the same baggage as sendmail, although at least it's not that old.
Courier-imap is nice and clean and usable and works. It's just ultimately packaged by a jerk. (You can kinda tell that by the inability to run it from inetd. Not that I want to, but I can't.)
I'm here to issue a challenge to you: Point to me one public spam filter that deletes mail based on a hit on a blacklist. Just one. Or one ISP or free mail service.
Oh, that's right, there aren't any. Because all mail servers have such a check built in, and they reject it before delivery, and thus any tool to check mail against a single blacklist and delete it would be completely pointless.
There are tools that check blacklists as part of scoring the message, and those tools may end up deleting the message, like spamassassin. As part of literally dozens of tests to figure out if something is spam, though.
That's not to say someone couldn't code something that deletes against a blacklist and use it internally, but at that point you're arguing against hypotheticals. There's no reason to do that when you can just type the address of the blacklist into the mailserver.
Um, duh. Why the fuck do you think I had the word 'knowingly' in there?
Why we even have basebal bats is beyond me.
Why? Well, the lack of providing an RPM, which is just annoying, and the delibrate inability to compile the RPM as root.
Total asshat clue, right there. 'Let's force people to set up an RPM compiling area as a normal user!'
The first person to say 'You shouldn't be doing things as root' gets a punch in a mouth. I'm installing the damn thing as root, aren't I? I rather obviously trust the code, why wouldn't I trust the compile?
Well, no, I'm not it as root, I'm installing postfix.
But I am using maildrop, because I couldn't get the postfix built-in delivery agent to use mysql right. (It's probably fixed now.)
It's weird, qmail's author seems to be a jerk too. Is there some sort of school producing MTA-writing jerks?
The only sane choices for MTAs out there seem to to be Postfix and exim. (Sendmail is not written by a jerk, but...gah, can we just kill that thing already? Whenever I think of sendmail, I imagine a giant mechanical framework around a dead horse, moving its legs so it's appearing to walk.)
For example, in many places it's legal to do a citizen's arrest if you see someone actually committing a crime. If someone suspects a crime will be commited and hangs around armed with the intent of bringing the person in, that's vigilantism, and perfectly legal. Or even hanging around waiting to call the cops.
Or if, for example, people keep getting attacked in a certain part of town, so you, who happen to have a blackbelt, wander through there, waiting to be attacked so you can fight back...
It's usually not called vigilantism if it's legal, but if you are attempting to do the work of the legal system, it is being a vigilante.
However, vigilantism requires enforcing a law, be it an actual law or just a made up one. Or punishing someone who already broke the law. (Or, as sometimes happens, you merely suspect broke the law.)
Whereas spam fighting may be interacting with the results of a crime, it's no more vigilantism than picking up litter is, or rebuilding a house torched by arson. The crime already happened, no one's trying to punish or catch the criminals, they're trying to undo the harm caused.
I guess you technically could call spam reporters 'civil vigilantes', by analogy, because they are reporting a contract violation between two third parties to one of those parties. Instead of taking criminal offenses into their own hands, they're taking civil ones. But that's getting a bit silly.
With the minor quibble he rented to a drug dealer and then refused to cease renting to him when it became obvious the guy was, in fact, a drug dealer.
At that point, hell yes the police should shut down the whole damn mall, because something funny is going on there.
Of course, this analogy doesn't work, because this wasn't the police, it was simply people refusing to visit the mall, because no one would do anything about the damn drug dealer.
On every blacklist that lists entire ISPs, that ISP hasn't been responding to spamming complaints for a hell of a long time.
There is plenty of leeway. You get a spammer, you respond to complaints, you remove them, you never end up on a blacklist.
Notice it's never the blocked ISP that complains, at least not anymore? It's always some random guy on that ISP. No ISP ever shows up and says 'We were unfairly blocked.'. Not one who's willing to state their name. Think about why that is.
It's because they know they'd have hundreds of people immediately leaping on them, asking 'Why are you still hosting spammer X?'.
In fact, they only time they do stand up is to say 'We've gotten rid of all our spammers and are still blocked!!' and the response there is usually 'You had spammers for two years, and removed them last week? Well, a large organization like you must recognize how slow things can be...I'm sure our staff can get around to it in a few months...'.
No, they just have their customers go out and hassle people. Those customers, I'm sad to say, are collateral damage of the spam war, but not of the spamfighters. They're being held up as human shields.
Now find a single blacklist that blacklists ISPs without notifying them and waiting for them to remove the spammer.
Oh, wait, there aren't any.