Okay, once and for all....OPENNIC DELEGATES.COM AND.NET RIGHT BACK TO VERISIGN.
Sorry to get pissy, but people keep suggesting this idea, everywhere, and apparently no one understands what a 'root server' is. A root server tells you where to look up.cc,.com,.info,.whatever, they are in charge of the seemingly fictional '.' domain name, the dot that all domain names have invisibly at the end.
And all root servers, alternate or regular, say the correct place to look up.com and.net addresses is Verisign, or servers that are synced off Verisign's. All root servers do is say 'Hey, you've got a.com there, the place to go is [insert a Verisign IP].', just like Verisign's server will then say 'Hey, you've got a.example.com there, the place to look it up is [insert example.com's nameservers here].'.
Someone has to say 'I will now put example.com into the database that I maintain and others sync off of.'. If anyone could do anything they wanted to any domain name it would be chaos...and Verisign has a contract with ICANN to maintain this database. (A contract that ICANN would now be looking into, if ICANN had any moral integrity left. But it doesn't.)
Alternate root servers have more TLDs, and don't require people managing them to go through all the hassle that it took to get.info and.biz. If you want a.sheep, you can go and get it from OpenNIC for a nominal fee, or possibly free, if you can prove you can run a TLD. But all existing TLDs are delegated back to what ICANN says they are, because otherwise those TLDs wouldn't work.
However, the reason we're in this mess is that ICANN is a bunch of amoral idiots, and that also incidently happens to be the reason that alternate roots exist. Switching to an alternate root is a good idea if you don't want to be hit with other ICANN crapitude, or as a protest, but it's not going to help with any Verisign crap, because only ICANN has to power to do anything about them, all the alternate roots have exactly two choices, either look up.com and.net using Verisign, or someone synced off them, or don't look them up at all.
They've just set up the largest spamtrap on the planet...do you know how long invalid domains stay on 'million address' CDs? If they removed one, they'd only have 999,999 address CDs, wouldn't they?
Not to mention all the misconfigured mail servers out there that accept and then bounce spam instead of rejecting it. All invalid domains now bounce straight back to Verisign. (And now no mail server is rejecting any domain as being invalid!)
All those people talking about DDoSing them by doing millions of lookups are confused. That's attempting to throw a hand grenade at someone in the middle of a thermonuclear explosion.
And that's just considering email. No wonder their 'mail server' isn't RFC complient.
You can't do that, because a lot of places will see connections that ask for a bunch of nonexistence people and then don't send them email...which is indistingishable from a dictionary attack.
AOL is one of these places. You ask about a bunch of nonexistent users, you get blocked from sending them email.
Like I said elsewhere here, if I saw someone holding a sign saying 'Too moral to be a telemarketer, can't get any other job, please help', I'd be more likely to give them money.
What self-respect would you sell and what would you be willing to do for twice minimum wage oh spineless one?
Heh! I'm reminded of the exchange:
'Would you sleep with me for a billion dollars?'
'Yes.'
'Would you sleep with me for a dollar?'
'What kind of lady do you think I am?!' 'We've already established what kind of lady you are, we're just negotiating a price.'
Tell me, Anonymous Coward, what kind of unethical job would you do, and for what price? We know you're willing to annoy (Let's estimate three minutes a person.) 20 people for ten dollars, repeatedly. That's a person for 50 cents.
Now, would you murder an infant for a billion dollars? Does the method of murder matter, would you charge more for having to stab it vs. smothering it? Would you steal a pack of chewing gum for a dollar? Does the flavor matter?
Would you punch an old lady in the face for a thousand? An old man? Would you mock a crippled man for a twenty? Does it go up if it's a war veteran?
Would you beat a dog to death for a million? What if it was an annoying dog, like a poodle? Would you key someone's car for a fiver? Is the color relevant?
What, exactly, are your standards, and what is your price?
I dunno, I'd argue that prostitution and drug dealing are not immoral per se. They are only offering services that others wish to purchase.
Don't confuse drug dealers with drug pushers. The fact they merely sell drugs doens't mean they're running around hooking small children on them by giving out free samples in playgrounds. Many people who sell drugs in this country are just drug users who know where to get it in bulk, cheap, so they sell off their extra and make enough to cover their own drugs. Many of them neither need nor want more customers.
Of course, that's not to pretend all drug dealers are fine, upstanding citizens, most aren't. But selling someone some drugs is not an inherently immoral act, unless you believe that using drugs is an inherently immoral act.
Likewise, I don't really have an objection to prostitutes at all, and I don't really understand why anyone else does. I have an objection to how they advertise, if you ever end up in a part of town where they are, and attempt to walk down the street, you'll be harrassed, but that's mainly due to a lack of legal means of advertising.
But the actual service hookers sell is even less objectionable then, say, selling cigarettes. No one gets addicted, there are a few slight risks, but everyone's had those drilled into them since childhood. (And hookers aren't notably more likely to have STD than random sexually active people.)
Telemarketing, now...telemarketing is like someone's figured out how to steal a single item of change out of people's pocket, and they've managed to legalize the damn thing. This is much worse than pickpocketing. Not only have these thieves somehow got the idea they aren't thieves, but no one realizes they're getting stolen from, unless you one of the people where the telemarketers illegally turn their machine on you repeatedly and steal all your change every day.
I was wondering about that. Under what system of ethics is it unethical to mug an (actual) mugger?
Obviously, if you just thought someone was a mugger, you shouldn't mug them, but if someone attempts to mug me with a knife, and I happen to have a gun for some reason, and I don't really want to deal with the police...I have no moral qualms about demanding his wallet. Hell, I'd probably demand every single item of clothing just for fun. Leave him there naked in an alley to reconsider his choice of job.
Hey, for all I know, he has other people's wallets on him, and I can return those.
If he has a problem with this, he can go to the police and complain that I mugged him while he was trying to mug me. Of course, he'd be immediately fingered by four other victims who were reporting their mugging to the police, so they probably wouldn't believe him.
I probably wouldn't do this, because it's technically illegal, and he'd be a lot worse off in jail than he would be if I just took his wallet. But I don't have any moral issues with it.
I could make an silly comment about policemen putting thieves out of a job, but instead I will say:
They're damn lucky most people in this country are so apathic they are still alive.
A person who's so lowered themselves to work a job where the point is to basically annoy a hundred people a day deserves zero sympathy. They'd probably be out raping grandmothers if they could figure out a way for it to pay the bills.
Like in a fucking shelter if you can't find any work. Become a begger and carry around a sign that says 'Too moral to be a telemarketer.', I bet people will give you money.
" The hiring process, in part, is based upon the reputation of one's previous employers."
False. The only information allowed is if the person worked for you, and durin what periods of time. any other information is illegal, and if found out that you did give out other informtion, you will be sued, and you will lose.
Reread what he said, please. He said the reputation of the company, not the reputation of the employee. It's not illegal to base your decisions to hire someone based on the reputation of the company they used to work for. That is actually the original point of listing companies, so you can be judged on their reputation.
And regardless of the fact it may be illegal, (Or, at least open them up to a lawsuit, I do not think it's 'illegal' in any meaningful sense of the word, it's just very very easy for someone to sue for slander if the company cannot back up every single claim they made.) for a company to give out anything beyond a few facts, it's not illegal for the hiring company to base their decision on facts that the first company was not supposed to give out. (Which makes me think it's not a 'law', per se, it's a CYA companies have as their policy to keep from getting sued...after all, what do they care that someone they didn't like gets hired elsewhere?)
So that's kind a stupid argument, anyway. If I call up someone to check their references, and the person at the other end told me they smoked crack in the bathroom every lunch hour...well, they just opened themself up to mind-numbing lawsuit, but I can, in fact, choose to not hire the person based on this information.
Of, course if your ISP moves you won't remain in the public blacklists, which is, of course, why public blacklists like SPEWS and the SBL are a good thing.
Screaming about having no leverage...tough. Some of us don't even have a single broadband ISP. You don't have some mythological right to have broadband, and, thus, make pisspoor choices of said broadband provider. My (only) cable and phone company are the same people, and they're in no hurry to do anything...they have no competition. I can't get their DSL or their cable modem when I live.
But, anyway, you have three choices: Have your mail blocked, demand a better choice of upstream, or get someone to relay outgoing mail for you, which probably costs about five dollars a month. Demand your ISP pays it...you won't get far, but they will realize that their customers, and only their customers, are having to spend money elsewhere, which is a real good way to lose customers to places that don't have that extra cost.
And, yes, they could lose you...you could drop the business static-IP server connection, and just get a cheap virtual server elsewhere, and a cheap, consumer-level broadband connection from them.
As for what blacklist you're in...well, you're on CW, so, basically, you're randomly in quite a few private ones that you'll probably never get out of, some even with a move. (It's not vindictive, it's laziness.) As for public ones...SPEWS does, in fact, still exist, and people do block using it. The fact that it's hard to find is just that...it's just hard to find.
And blacklists are expanded seemingly at random, to continue to place more pressure on ISPs. And are reduced for only one reason: Dropping spammers, which CW will not do.
Note the tripling is for doing it deliberately, which basically all the junk faxers are.
And with regard to the junk fax laws, someone sued fax.com for 2.2 TRILLION dollars about a year ago, and has the faxes to prove the case.
Hilarious quote from him: "I'd be very happy if we just got $100 billion."
fax.com claim to send 3 million faxes a day, and have been in operation four years.
Fun with calculator time: That's 4,380,000,000 faxes. That's 6,570,000,000,000 dollars, which is coincidently almost exactly the national debt last I checked.
In what universe is an upstream that allows an ISP that allows spammers to live there not a 'spam supporting organization'? It boggles my mind that people somehow don't get that everyone, in any way, shape, or form, that (delibrately) provides any connectivity for a spammer, is 'spam supporting'.
Of course, I don't use the term 'spam supporting' at all...they're all just spammers. Spam comes out of their network and they don't stop it just to keep a customer, they are causing that spam to exist, QED, they are spammers. It's driving the car for a bank robbery, and claiming you aren't a bank robber.
You are fully responsible for everything you let people continue to do to others over your network, period, no exception. Doesn't matter if there are four people reselling bandwidth between you and them. If a downstream refuses to do something, you terminate the downstream.
It really is that simple. There will be no waffling, it doesn't matter if they are half your income. You terminate them, or you, and all your customers, will be unable to email others. There will be no more blocking just the spammer..
And eventually your upstream will face the exact same choice: Terminate you, or be blocked.
And if your upstream keeps you, their upstream will face it.
SPEWS is possibly the most brilliant spam-stopping idea, ever. And, yes, it will block email from 'legitimate' sources...but spam's going to destroy email in a few years if nothing's done, so while the cure is painful, it's nothing compared to the disease killing the organism.
SPEWS is like radiation therapy for spam, except the cells next to the cancer keep whining.
We know how the plague was spread, it was spread by fleas. The question is what the fleas were travelling on.
But, yes, the idea of rats travelling from town to town to spread the plague is fairly surreal, as rats don't do that. Only one animal is stupid enough to do that.
But rats certainly spread the plague in towns, long with dogs, horses, and goats. remember that rats were basically considered pets at the time.
Oh, it did. Go read up on lightning rods and churches' reactions to their invention. Plenty of towns ended up with these newfangled lightning rods on all tall buildings except the church.
This apparently caused God to get really pissed at the churches, and pretty soon they were the only buildings being struck by lightning.
Not only that, but they are providing human shields, people to get worked up and to go whine to blacklists about how unfair the blocking is.
Boo-fucking-hoo. They set up business next to a crack house, that was a pretty stupid move. If they did it accidentally, they may get a temporary emergency whitelist for a month. But the only long term solution is to move.
And next time, they need to check why property values are so low, and realize that maybe it's not a good idea to build a business there.
I have no idea how you could possible block SPEWS, as SPEWS sends no email. And Spamassassin does not, in fact, attempt to block email from there.
But that's rather moot, I'm not talking about SPEWS, or even blocklists. Everyone everywhere is blocking Rackspace, personally. Some are slowly blocking it piecemeal, some just dropped the whole thing in, and some started off blocking it piecemeal but at this point in time have managed to piecemeal block the whole thing, like me.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry to get pissy, but people keep suggesting this idea, everywhere, and apparently no one understands what a 'root server' is. A root server tells you where to look up .cc, .com, .info, .whatever, they are in charge of the seemingly fictional '.' domain name, the dot that all domain names have invisibly at the end.
And all root servers, alternate or regular, say the correct place to look up .com and .net addresses is Verisign, or servers that are synced off Verisign's. All root servers do is say 'Hey, you've got a .com there, the place to go is [insert a Verisign IP].', just like Verisign's server will then say 'Hey, you've got a .example.com there, the place to look it up is [insert example.com's nameservers here].'.
Someone has to say 'I will now put example.com into the database that I maintain and others sync off of.'. If anyone could do anything they wanted to any domain name it would be chaos...and Verisign has a contract with ICANN to maintain this database. (A contract that ICANN would now be looking into, if ICANN had any moral integrity left. But it doesn't.)
Alternate root servers have more TLDs, and don't require people managing them to go through all the hassle that it took to get .info and .biz. If you want a .sheep, you can go and get it from OpenNIC for a nominal fee, or possibly free, if you can prove you can run a TLD. But all existing TLDs are delegated back to what ICANN says they are, because otherwise those TLDs wouldn't work.
However, the reason we're in this mess is that ICANN is a bunch of amoral idiots, and that also incidently happens to be the reason that alternate roots exist. Switching to an alternate root is a good idea if you don't want to be hit with other ICANN crapitude, or as a protest, but it's not going to help with any Verisign crap, because only ICANN has to power to do anything about them, all the alternate roots have exactly two choices, either look up .com and .net using Verisign, or someone synced off them, or don't look them up at all.
They've just set up the largest spamtrap on the planet...do you know how long invalid domains stay on 'million address' CDs? If they removed one, they'd only have 999,999 address CDs, wouldn't they?
Not to mention all the misconfigured mail servers out there that accept and then bounce spam instead of rejecting it. All invalid domains now bounce straight back to Verisign. (And now no mail server is rejecting any domain as being invalid!)
All those people talking about DDoSing them by doing millions of lookups are confused. That's attempting to throw a hand grenade at someone in the middle of a thermonuclear explosion.
And that's just considering email. No wonder their 'mail server' isn't RFC complient.
AOL is one of these places. You ask about a bunch of nonexistent users, you get blocked from sending them email.
Telemarketing is based on pressuring people into purchasing crap, and as a side not it steals time from every single person in this country.
As for the reason that telemarketers are not rapists, that's due to the fact that being a rapist doesn't pay the bills.
Riiiight...
Like I said elsewhere here, if I saw someone holding a sign saying 'Too moral to be a telemarketer, can't get any other job, please help', I'd be more likely to give them money.
Heh! I'm reminded of the exchange:
'Would you sleep with me for a billion dollars?'
'Yes.'
'Would you sleep with me for a dollar?'
'What kind of lady do you think I am?!'
'We've already established what kind of lady you are, we're just negotiating a price.'
Tell me, Anonymous Coward, what kind of unethical job would you do, and for what price? We know you're willing to annoy (Let's estimate three minutes a person.) 20 people for ten dollars, repeatedly. That's a person for 50 cents.
Now, would you murder an infant for a billion dollars? Does the method of murder matter, would you charge more for having to stab it vs. smothering it? Would you steal a pack of chewing gum for a dollar? Does the flavor matter?
Would you punch an old lady in the face for a thousand? An old man? Would you mock a crippled man for a twenty? Does it go up if it's a war veteran?
Would you beat a dog to death for a million? What if it was an annoying dog, like a poodle? Would you key someone's car for a fiver? Is the color relevant?
What, exactly, are your standards, and what is your price?
Don't confuse drug dealers with drug pushers. The fact they merely sell drugs doens't mean they're running around hooking small children on them by giving out free samples in playgrounds. Many people who sell drugs in this country are just drug users who know where to get it in bulk, cheap, so they sell off their extra and make enough to cover their own drugs. Many of them neither need nor want more customers.
Of course, that's not to pretend all drug dealers are fine, upstanding citizens, most aren't. But selling someone some drugs is not an inherently immoral act, unless you believe that using drugs is an inherently immoral act.
Likewise, I don't really have an objection to prostitutes at all, and I don't really understand why anyone else does. I have an objection to how they advertise, if you ever end up in a part of town where they are, and attempt to walk down the street, you'll be harrassed, but that's mainly due to a lack of legal means of advertising.
But the actual service hookers sell is even less objectionable then, say, selling cigarettes. No one gets addicted, there are a few slight risks, but everyone's had those drilled into them since childhood. (And hookers aren't notably more likely to have STD than random sexually active people.)
Telemarketing, now...telemarketing is like someone's figured out how to steal a single item of change out of people's pocket, and they've managed to legalize the damn thing. This is much worse than pickpocketing. Not only have these thieves somehow got the idea they aren't thieves, but no one realizes they're getting stolen from, unless you one of the people where the telemarketers illegally turn their machine on you repeatedly and steal all your change every day.
Obviously, if you just thought someone was a mugger, you shouldn't mug them, but if someone attempts to mug me with a knife, and I happen to have a gun for some reason, and I don't really want to deal with the police...I have no moral qualms about demanding his wallet. Hell, I'd probably demand every single item of clothing just for fun. Leave him there naked in an alley to reconsider his choice of job.
Hey, for all I know, he has other people's wallets on him, and I can return those.
If he has a problem with this, he can go to the police and complain that I mugged him while he was trying to mug me. Of course, he'd be immediately fingered by four other victims who were reporting their mugging to the police, so they probably wouldn't believe him.
I probably wouldn't do this, because it's technically illegal, and he'd be a lot worse off in jail than he would be if I just took his wallet. But I don't have any moral issues with it.
They're damn lucky most people in this country are so apathic they are still alive.
A person who's so lowered themselves to work a job where the point is to basically annoy a hundred people a day deserves zero sympathy. They'd probably be out raping grandmothers if they could figure out a way for it to pay the bills.
Like in a fucking shelter if you can't find any work. Become a begger and carry around a sign that says 'Too moral to be a telemarketer.', I bet people will give you money.
And they also don't have to pay for the phone lines and equipment.
False. The only information allowed is if the person worked for you, and durin what periods of time. any other information is illegal, and if found out that you did give out other informtion, you will be sued, and you will lose.
Reread what he said, please. He said the reputation of the company, not the reputation of the employee. It's not illegal to base your decisions to hire someone based on the reputation of the company they used to work for. That is actually the original point of listing companies, so you can be judged on their reputation.
And regardless of the fact it may be illegal, (Or, at least open them up to a lawsuit, I do not think it's 'illegal' in any meaningful sense of the word, it's just very very easy for someone to sue for slander if the company cannot back up every single claim they made.) for a company to give out anything beyond a few facts, it's not illegal for the hiring company to base their decision on facts that the first company was not supposed to give out. (Which makes me think it's not a 'law', per se, it's a CYA companies have as their policy to keep from getting sued...after all, what do they care that someone they didn't like gets hired elsewhere?)
So that's kind a stupid argument, anyway. If I call up someone to check their references, and the person at the other end told me they smoked crack in the bathroom every lunch hour...well, they just opened themself up to mind-numbing lawsuit, but I can, in fact, choose to not hire the person based on this information.
Screaming about having no leverage...tough. Some of us don't even have a single broadband ISP. You don't have some mythological right to have broadband, and, thus, make pisspoor choices of said broadband provider. My (only) cable and phone company are the same people, and they're in no hurry to do anything...they have no competition. I can't get their DSL or their cable modem when I live.
But, anyway, you have three choices: Have your mail blocked, demand a better choice of upstream, or get someone to relay outgoing mail for you, which probably costs about five dollars a month. Demand your ISP pays it...you won't get far, but they will realize that their customers, and only their customers, are having to spend money elsewhere, which is a real good way to lose customers to places that don't have that extra cost.
And, yes, they could lose you...you could drop the business static-IP server connection, and just get a cheap virtual server elsewhere, and a cheap, consumer-level broadband connection from them.
As for what blacklist you're in...well, you're on CW, so, basically, you're randomly in quite a few private ones that you'll probably never get out of, some even with a move. (It's not vindictive, it's laziness.) As for public ones...SPEWS does, in fact, still exist, and people do block using it. The fact that it's hard to find is just that...it's just hard to find.
And blacklists are expanded seemingly at random, to continue to place more pressure on ISPs. And are reduced for only one reason: Dropping spammers, which CW will not do.
And with regard to the junk fax laws, someone sued fax.com for 2.2 TRILLION dollars about a year ago, and has the faxes to prove the case.
Hilarious quote from him: "I'd be very happy if we just got $100 billion."
fax.com claim to send 3 million faxes a day, and have been in operation four years.
Fun with calculator time: That's 4,380,000,000 faxes. That's 6,570,000,000,000 dollars, which is coincidently almost exactly the national debt last I checked.
Do you need an alibi, and how did you do it? Poison in the wine?
Of course, I don't use the term 'spam supporting' at all...they're all just spammers. Spam comes out of their network and they don't stop it just to keep a customer, they are causing that spam to exist, QED, they are spammers. It's driving the car for a bank robbery, and claiming you aren't a bank robber.
You are fully responsible for everything you let people continue to do to others over your network, period, no exception. Doesn't matter if there are four people reselling bandwidth between you and them. If a downstream refuses to do something, you terminate the downstream.
It really is that simple. There will be no waffling, it doesn't matter if they are half your income. You terminate them, or you, and all your customers, will be unable to email others. There will be no more blocking just the spammer..
And eventually your upstream will face the exact same choice: Terminate you, or be blocked.
And if your upstream keeps you, their upstream will face it.
SPEWS is possibly the most brilliant spam-stopping idea, ever. And, yes, it will block email from 'legitimate' sources...but spam's going to destroy email in a few years if nothing's done, so while the cure is painful, it's nothing compared to the disease killing the organism.
SPEWS is like radiation therapy for spam, except the cells next to the cancer keep whining.
They're also hosting the annoyences messagemedia.com and linkexchange/listbuilder.
Oh, and skylist.net and lamailer.com.
Those are just the ones that have annoyed me.
For a most detailed listing of the spammers that are currently hosted by these fucktards, check here.
THIRTY-NINE fucking spammers CURRENTLY listed.
You're lucky you can talk to anyone. Forget SPEWS, you're in the damn SBL, dude.
You are not only not a lawyer, you are completely wrong. It is specifically legal to make as many copies of software as required to run it.
Symantec is not happy about that at all.
You cannot legally send invoices using UPS or FedEx, unless they're with a package. The USPS has a legal monopoly on paper mail of that sort.
Not that he's a vampire, it's just a lot of fun.
But, yes, the idea of rats travelling from town to town to spread the plague is fairly surreal, as rats don't do that. Only one animal is stupid enough to do that.
But rats certainly spread the plague in towns, long with dogs, horses, and goats. remember that rats were basically considered pets at the time.
This apparently caused God to get really pissed at the churches, and pretty soon they were the only buildings being struck by lightning.
Boo-fucking-hoo. They set up business next to a crack house, that was a pretty stupid move. If they did it accidentally, they may get a temporary emergency whitelist for a month. But the only long term solution is to move.
And next time, they need to check why property values are so low, and realize that maybe it's not a good idea to build a business there.
But that's rather moot, I'm not talking about SPEWS, or even blocklists. Everyone everywhere is blocking Rackspace, personally. Some are slowly blocking it piecemeal, some just dropped the whole thing in, and some started off blocking it piecemeal but at this point in time have managed to piecemeal block the whole thing, like me.