Wouldn't it make more sense to download SQL Server 2000 Service Pack 3 instead, which supposedly includes the fix for this problem, among other fixes? See the advisory and click on Additional information about this patch to see that it's included in SP3.
I'm not aware of the other things you mentioned about Bechtel, perhaps I've been living in a cave or something. But at least I read the article that explicitly states that None of the three design contractors... will be allowed to bid on the actual work. So I guess they're pretty safe from bechtelism.
Because they seem to have a deal with Dell. From the last page:
Dell Small Business department has 10% off all Notebook computers until the 26th of November through our TweakTown Deals section. If you choose to buy a new computer system from Dell, click this link, and you'll be supporting TweakTown!
Everyone here must know that Microsoft is at One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052-6399, but I hadn't noticed Apple's address before I saw it in the article:
Wouldn't you like to see Vorbis on the super-sexy iPod? We would, too. Here's some contact information for Apple Computer (URL):
Apple 1 Infinite Loop
Cupertino, CA 95014
Telephone: 408-996-1010
Oh, the joys of being able to name the roads if you're a big enough company.
It doesn't even have the colours in hexadecimal (see here). Sorry, I'll just use the colour picker in Paint Shop Pro, it'll give out the colour in hex and I can easily cut and paste that value to my web pages. I guess I could use the RGB values as well, but I'm not used to using them yet:)
I don't know if this is the reason you've been blocked out of Google search, but this is a possibility:
Some email harvesting programs use Google and other search engines to search for email addresses. If you enter "house" as the search term, the program will open several network connections to Google to retrieve all the pages that have the search term "house" somewhere on them. There are some 46 million of them at the moment according to Google. Now that the harvesting program has the URLs, it'll get those pages from the web and search for email addresses from the page they just retrieved. Voilà, you have a database of email addresses that have something to do with "house" and you can spam them to hell with mortgage offers. Isn't that beautiful? Some harvesting programs can do the same for Usenet news -- with the help of groups.google.com. It's surprising that your netblock hasn't been blocked out of that (yet).
The point is that getting those millions of hits out of Google will place quite a load on Google search. If I were a Google admin, I'd surely block the network that's causing that kind of problems, especially if the purpose of the exhaustive search is to search for email addresses.
As the AC mentioned in a previous message, it doesn't have any CD logos on it. Not on the CD, not on the paper prints and most surprisingly of all, not even on the plastic jewel case. Have a look at any CD you have, you'll notice that there's a Compact Disc digital audio in the top-right and bottom-left corner of the jewel case. There is no such logo on her CD case. Perhaps they've received a friendly notice from Philips stating that they're not allowed to use the logo on their CDs that are not really CDs.
Seems like they were more careful this time, as there were several Compact Disc logos on the Shakira CD that I mentioned in an earlier message. The small 'will _not_ play on PC/MAC' notice on the front cover (bottom-right corner) looks just like the notice that was on Shakira's CD, the colours are just a bit different.
There's a quite an effective way to prevent ICQ spam -- don't let people who aren't on your contact list send you messages. In my ICQ (98a, quite old), the setting can be found by clicking on the ICQ button, then Security and Privacy, select the Ignore list tab and check the "Accept messages only from users on my contact list". While you're at it, consider turning on the options "Do not accept EmailExpress messages" and "Do not accept WWPager messages" as well. ICQ spam hasn't been bothering me since I made those changes. It might prevent some legitimate messages, but frankly, I don't care. ICQ is a secondary contact method for me anyway.
In my opinion it seems quite appropriate that FTC starts taking care of those spammers, as the spammers ARE mostly U.S. taxpayers. Sure, the email address might be sdfgffgfd@isp.kr or something like that, but you shouldn't count on that -- the email addresses are almost always forged anyway. The products that those spammers are trying to sell me are "U.S. based" (ie. things/services you really aren't even theoretically interested in other parts of the world) and the possible mail box addresses and phone numbers mentioned in the spam are almost always in U.S.
Don't confuse open relays with this, the people who spam are mostly U.S. citizens, but the mail might be relayed through some Japanese elementary school's open mail relay. The people operating the open relay are of course partially responsible for the whole mess, but if there weren't spammers open relays wouldn't be that much of a problem for anyone.
Just my two eurocents worth.. YMMV, this is just my observation.
What I really meant was this: pmgdirect.com (the marketing group that is running the campaign) had hosted the wehavethewayout.com site on THEIR OWN HARDWARE and the marketing company's OS of choice wasn't a Microsoft product. Of course, the web site has since then been moved to a box running Microsoft OS (the damage control part) and Netcraft hasn't yet caught up with the change. Netcraft does cache the results, see their FAQ.
Moral of the story: if you're promoting an operating system with the help of a marketing agency, make sure the marketing agency runs the web site in question on the "correct" operating system.
I guess I found the reason for the strange server version information. Have a look at the HTML source for www.wehavethewayout.com and you'll notice that the form contents will be emailed to info@pmgdirect.com. Now, if you look at what www.pmgdirect.com is running you'll notice some similarities to www.wehavethewayout.com's information (note the OS differences, though).
Starting nmap V. 2.54BETA22 ( www.insecure.org/nmap/ ) Interesting ports on www.wehavethewayout.com (130.94.214.143): (The 1 port scanned but not shown below is in state: closed) Port State Service 80/tcp open http
Remote OS guesses: Windows Me or Windows 2000 RC1 through final release, MS Windows2000 Professional RC1/W2K Advance Server Beta3, Windows Millenium Edition v4.90.3000
Nmap run completed -- 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 3 seconds
Replying to myself to clarify one thing that I missed. The Shakira CD that I mentioned doesn't use UMG's new copy protection scheme as was described in the article, ie. there is no way to play this CD even on Windows, as opposed to UMG's scheme. Sorry for the confusion, but I thought I'd mention this case anyway as it was somewhat related.
I bought Shakira's album Laundry Service about a week ago. Unfortunately for me, I didn't notice the small print on the cover and on the CD itself ("will _not_ play on PC/MAC") until I got home and tried to convert it to MP3s. I have encoded all my CDs to MP3 files so that I wouldn't have to change the CD in the CD player whenever I want to listen to some other artists. I have a high stack of CDs, the MP3s are there just for extra convenience.
A small hint to everyone: get an Evation IRman infrared receiver so you can control your MP3 player remotely. I couldn't live without it.
Oh, back to copy protection.. I was unable to play or rip that CD with any of the computers that I have at home. I tried various ripping programs, but none of then did the trick. They didn't even recognize that there was a CD in the CD drive. My regular Technics CD player played the disc just fine, along with my DVD player in CD audio mode (this was somewhat surprising). Computers were completely unable to play the CD.
Yes, the CD does have the Compact Disc digital audio logo on it. Or actually, it's "Compact Disc digital audio TEXT". However, that additional "text" part hasn't stopped ripping some other CDs that I have. The actual reason why the CD didn't want to cooperate was most probably the fact that it had a nice "SACEM/SDRM" logo right next to the Compact Disc logo. You can see an image of the CD here if you're interested about the details. Unfortunately the image quality isn't very good as my scanner is kind of old and the print quality on the CD itself leaves something to be desired.
Fortunately, a friend of mine at work had the same CD without the copy protection scheme applied so I was able to encode that troublesome CD to MP3.
Seems like they released a few copy protected CDs to test how the consumers would react. Both of those CDs were manufactured in Austria.. go figure.
Well, at least I know I'll have to be more careful the next time I go shopping for CDs.. I would have most probably returned the CD if I had found some non-computer device that was unable to play the CD, but as I found none, I guess I'll just keep this as a reference in case someone asks my opinion about copy protected CDs. You can bet I won't buy another CD that won't let me encode it to MP3s.
The same thing happened when I found an interest in Broadcast 2000. As soon as I decided to spend some time with it they pulled it from their site! Quite frustrating!
I'm sure most of us here would be delighted if you suddenly decided to spend some time learning how to use MS Windows (and other MS products) more efficiently. Could you please do this?
I've been toying with similar ideas as my spam:real email ratio is currently around 20:1. However, I'd like to amend your suggestion with one enhancement that I just figured out. One problem with automatically sending messages like "sorry, please enter the 8th digit of Pi to continue" is that some web services/forums/etc need to verify that your email address is valid before they let you proceed with the service, and the address they use in the verification email From: field isn't always that obvious so that you could put that address in your whitelist beforehand. And if you don't put that address to your whitelist, the mailing bots on those sites will most probably get confused when they get a reply that they'd be required to write a special reply to the error message. Having your own domain name so that you can use "random" email addresses helps (I do it myself as well), but that option is not available to everyone.
Here's my suggestion: Instead of sending an automated reply to the sender, put the received email that failed the whitelist tests to a special "hold" folder. Process that hold folder every three days or so, and mail a summary of the contents to yourself, such as:
Potential spam email received between 16 Feb and 20 Feb:
From: gzqug@luso.pt
To: gzqug@luso.pt
Subject: KNOW HOW YOUR EMPLOYEES SPEND THEIR TIME..
Quote: Stealth-Eyes "Simply the best computer monitoring software available anywhere..."
From: cwadl30629@aol.com
To: Undisclosed.Recipients@taas.iki.fi
Subject: No Risk, No Money Down Business Opportunity !
Quote: IpVecIpV="%3Cbody%20onload%3D%22pops%28%29%3B%22%3 Cbody%22%3C%2FA%3E%3C%2
From: long.lost.friend@company.com
To: myself@mydomain.com
Subject: Hi, long time no see
Quote: Greetings from the east coast. I figured that I haven't emailed you for a long time, so here goes..
This way I'd reduce the amount of spam I get from about 60 per week, down to two summary emails per week. The valid emails can be then rescued from the hold folder after I've read the summary email. This way I can be sure that I don't send any automated replies to addresses where they don't belong. The golden rule of handling spammers also applies -- don't reply to spammers. Using your method would send the spammer (or rather, the person whose address was forged into the headers) an email, confirming that my email is valid but it is not currently accepting email from that address. The obvious downside is that people who aren't yet on my whitelist may experience a minor delay in email delivery, but they'll most probably understand when I explain the situation. I guess I'll try implementing this method on my own mail server some day.
Seems like the Time magazine cover story was OK with Apple, as there's a link to TIME.com right on the front page. Obviously the "spoiled surprise" was just a neat marketing trick.
Thanks for the clarification, I kind of forgot that speciality in.pro.
But while we're at it, I wonder how the verification process is going to work for non-US residents. If I were a Chinese doctor and told you that my license number was 9828616724, how the heck are you going to figure out that it's a valid license number? I don't know of other countries, but at least here in Finland the license number for doctors contains a check digit, so you could theoretically check that to see if it's valid. It'd be easy to circumvent, however, as it's only one digit and thus you could just keep on trying until you find the correct number.
I suppose you'll have to trust the applicant in this case (unless you have an "agent" in each country), and take the domain into closer inspection only if someone complains about its validity, but that will mean you'll get quite a lot of paper work when that happens.. It sure doesn't sound like an easy job to administer the.pro domain and I guess that shows in the domain registration fees.
As the article implies, this will most probably lead to existing companies reserving more domain names in new TLDs.
Let's take an example, say, Finnair, our beloved Finnish airline.
finnair.fi already belongs to Finnair finnair.com as well, as they're doing business in many countries so they'll need an "international" commercial domain finnair.aero just because they're dealing with aviation finnair.biz because they're doing business finnair.pro - well, they're professionals after all finnair.info, timetables anyone?
Nice move, ICANN.
moving the box without shutting it down
on
Linux Kernel 2.4.10
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I assume you don't have one of those computers with two (or more) redundant power supplies in it, as in some Dell Poweredge servers. I had to move our file server from one room to another, but didn't want to shut it down just for that. So, I got a long power cord and attached it to the 2nd power supply and disconnected the first. Then I moved the computer towards the other room and switched it to use the other power supply and disconnected the now-unneeded power cord. I repeated this procedure a few times and finally the server was happily churning in its new place, all without rebooting. Using this method for moving the computer was absolutely unnecessary, as there was nobody at work at that time (except for me), but at least I managed to keep the high uptimes:)
Unfortunately nearly the whole city lost its electricity for a few hours just a few days after I had moved the computer. Damn lightning strikes.. And as Murphy's law dictates, our UPS was just having its battery replaced so it didn't help in this case. Bummer.
I was a bit worried that this program would actually do something to someone's files, so I took a look at what it does.
First of all, there is no source code for lzip and I don't like running code that I don't know. So I ran it through strings and found the magic JFIF header. Aha, it's really a jpeg image.
It seems it's not protected by GPL (GNU Public Licence) like most Linux programs, but with The Free Object-Oriented License (FOOL). The licence itself is ridiculous: To indicate your agreement with the terms of this license agrement, you
may
sign your computer screen. We will wait for you on the other side,
brother.
Sorry but I've seen better April 1st pranks in my life..
Slashdot Mirror
Wouldn't it make more sense to download SQL Server 2000 Service Pack 3 instead, which supposedly includes the fix for this problem, among other fixes? See the advisory and click on Additional information about this patch to see that it's included in SP3.
I'm not aware of the other things you mentioned about Bechtel, perhaps I've been living in a cave or something. But at least I read the article that explicitly states that None of the three design contractors ... will be allowed to bid on the actual work. So I guess they're pretty safe from bechtelism.
Oh, the joys of being able to name the roads if you're a big enough company.
It doesn't even have the colours in hexadecimal (see here). Sorry, I'll just use the colour picker in Paint Shop Pro, it'll give out the colour in hex and I can easily cut and paste that value to my web pages. I guess I could use the RGB values as well, but I'm not used to using them yet :)
I don't know if this is the reason you've been blocked out of Google search, but this is a possibility:
Some email harvesting programs use Google and other search engines to search for email addresses. If you enter "house" as the search term, the program will open several network connections to Google to retrieve all the pages that have the search term "house" somewhere on them. There are some 46 million of them at the moment according to Google. Now that the harvesting program has the URLs, it'll get those pages from the web and search for email addresses from the page they just retrieved. Voilà, you have a database of email addresses that have something to do with "house" and you can spam them to hell with mortgage offers. Isn't that beautiful? Some harvesting programs can do the same for Usenet news -- with the help of groups.google.com. It's surprising that your netblock hasn't been blocked out of that (yet).
The point is that getting those millions of hits out of Google will place quite a load on Google search. If I were a Google admin, I'd surely block the network that's causing that kind of problems, especially if the purpose of the exhaustive search is to search for email addresses.
As the AC mentioned in a previous message, it doesn't have any CD logos on it. Not on the CD, not on the paper prints and most surprisingly of all, not even on the plastic jewel case. Have a look at any CD you have, you'll notice that there's a Compact Disc digital audio in the top-right and bottom-left corner of the jewel case. There is no such logo on her CD case. Perhaps they've received a friendly notice from Philips stating that they're not allowed to use the logo on their CDs that are not really CDs.
Seems like they were more careful this time, as there were several Compact Disc logos on the Shakira CD that I mentioned in an earlier message. The small 'will _not_ play on PC/MAC' notice on the front cover (bottom-right corner) looks just like the notice that was on Shakira's CD, the colours are just a bit different.
There's a quite an effective way to prevent ICQ spam -- don't let people who aren't on your contact list send you messages. In my ICQ (98a, quite old), the setting can be found by clicking on the ICQ button, then Security and Privacy, select the Ignore list tab and check the "Accept messages only from users on my contact list". While you're at it, consider turning on the options "Do not accept EmailExpress messages" and "Do not accept WWPager messages" as well. ICQ spam hasn't been bothering me since I made those changes. It might prevent some legitimate messages, but frankly, I don't care. ICQ is a secondary contact method for me anyway.
In my opinion it seems quite appropriate that FTC starts taking care of those spammers, as the spammers ARE mostly U.S. taxpayers. Sure, the email address might be sdfgffgfd@isp.kr or something like that, but you shouldn't count on that -- the email addresses are almost always forged anyway. The products that those spammers are trying to sell me are "U.S. based" (ie. things/services you really aren't even theoretically interested in other parts of the world) and the possible mail box addresses and phone numbers mentioned in the spam are almost always in U.S.
Don't confuse open relays with this, the people who spam are mostly U.S. citizens, but the mail might be relayed through some Japanese elementary school's open mail relay. The people operating the open relay are of course partially responsible for the whole mess, but if there weren't spammers open relays wouldn't be that much of a problem for anyone.
Just my two eurocents worth.. YMMV, this is just my observation.
What I really meant was this: pmgdirect.com (the marketing group that is running the campaign) had hosted the wehavethewayout.com site on THEIR OWN HARDWARE and the marketing company's OS of choice wasn't a Microsoft product. Of course, the web site has since then been moved to a box running Microsoft OS (the damage control part) and Netcraft hasn't yet caught up with the change. Netcraft does cache the results, see their FAQ.
Moral of the story: if you're promoting an operating system with the help of a marketing agency, make sure the marketing agency runs the web site in question on the "correct" operating system.
I guess I found the reason for the strange server version information. Have a look at the HTML source for www.wehavethewayout.com and you'll notice that the form contents will be emailed to info@pmgdirect.com. Now, if you look at what www.pmgdirect.com is running you'll notice some similarities to www.wehavethewayout.com's information (note the OS differences, though).
[anssi@karhu anssi]$ lynx -head -dump http://www.pmgdirect.com/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 02 Apr 2002 08:11:54 GMT
Server: Rapidsite/Apa/1.3.20 (Unix) FrontPage/4.0.4.3 mod_ssl/2.8.4 OpenSSL/0.9.6
Last-Modified: Thu, 08 Nov 2001 19:46:57 GMT
ETag: "f003735-144b-3beae131"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 5195
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
[anssi@verkko cgi-bin]# nmap -O -p 80-81 www.wehavethewayout.com
Starting nmap V. 2.54BETA22 ( www.insecure.org/nmap/ )
Interesting ports on www.wehavethewayout.com (130.94.214.143):
(The 1 port scanned but not shown below is in state: closed)
Port State Service
80/tcp open http
Remote OS guesses: Windows Me or Windows 2000 RC1 through final release, MS Windows2000 Professional RC1/W2K Advance Server Beta3, Windows Millenium Edition v4.90.3000
Nmap run completed -- 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 3 seconds
Replying to myself to clarify one thing that I missed. The Shakira CD that I mentioned doesn't use UMG's new copy protection scheme as was described in the article, ie. there is no way to play this CD even on Windows, as opposed to UMG's scheme. Sorry for the confusion, but I thought I'd mention this case anyway as it was somewhat related.
I bought Shakira's album Laundry Service about a week ago. Unfortunately for me, I didn't notice the small print on the cover and on the CD itself ("will _not_ play on PC/MAC") until I got home and tried to convert it to MP3s. I have encoded all my CDs to MP3 files so that I wouldn't have to change the CD in the CD player whenever I want to listen to some other artists. I have a high stack of CDs, the MP3s are there just for extra convenience. A small hint to everyone: get an Evation IRman infrared receiver so you can control your MP3 player remotely. I couldn't live without it.
Oh, back to copy protection.. I was unable to play or rip that CD with any of the computers that I have at home. I tried various ripping programs, but none of then did the trick. They didn't even recognize that there was a CD in the CD drive. My regular Technics CD player played the disc just fine, along with my DVD player in CD audio mode (this was somewhat surprising). Computers were completely unable to play the CD. Yes, the CD does have the Compact Disc digital audio logo on it. Or actually, it's "Compact Disc digital audio TEXT". However, that additional "text" part hasn't stopped ripping some other CDs that I have. The actual reason why the CD didn't want to cooperate was most probably the fact that it had a nice "SACEM/SDRM" logo right next to the Compact Disc logo. You can see an image of the CD here if you're interested about the details. Unfortunately the image quality isn't very good as my scanner is kind of old and the print quality on the CD itself leaves something to be desired.
Fortunately, a friend of mine at work had the same CD without the copy protection scheme applied so I was able to encode that troublesome CD to MP3. Seems like they released a few copy protected CDs to test how the consumers would react. Both of those CDs were manufactured in Austria.. go figure.
Well, at least I know I'll have to be more careful the next time I go shopping for CDs.. I would have most probably returned the CD if I had found some non-computer device that was unable to play the CD, but as I found none, I guess I'll just keep this as a reference in case someone asks my opinion about copy protected CDs. You can bet I won't buy another CD that won't let me encode it to MP3s.
Thanks!
Here's my suggestion: Instead of sending an automated reply to the sender, put the received email that failed the whitelist tests to a special "hold" folder. Process that hold folder every three days or so, and mail a summary of the contents to yourself, such as: This way I'd reduce the amount of spam I get from about 60 per week, down to two summary emails per week. The valid emails can be then rescued from the hold folder after I've read the summary email. This way I can be sure that I don't send any automated replies to addresses where they don't belong. The golden rule of handling spammers also applies -- don't reply to spammers. Using your method would send the spammer (or rather, the person whose address was forged into the headers) an email, confirming that my email is valid but it is not currently accepting email from that address. The obvious downside is that people who aren't yet on my whitelist may experience a minor delay in email delivery, but they'll most probably understand when I explain the situation. I guess I'll try implementing this method on my own mail server some day.
Seems like the Time magazine cover story was OK with Apple, as there's a link to TIME.com right on the front page. Obviously the "spoiled surprise" was just a neat marketing trick.
Don't bother spending your money with Google, here they are: one and two.
As an extra bonus, if you're a pussy lover you'll definitely have to visit this site. Enjoy!
Thanks for the clarification, I kind of forgot that speciality in .pro.
.pro domain and I guess that shows in the domain registration fees.
But while we're at it, I wonder how the verification process is going to work for non-US residents. If I were a Chinese doctor and told you that my license number was 9828616724, how the heck are you going to figure out that it's a valid license number? I don't know of other countries, but at least here in Finland the license number for doctors contains a check digit, so you could theoretically check that to see if it's valid. It'd be easy to circumvent, however, as it's only one digit and thus you could just keep on trying until you find the correct number.
I suppose you'll have to trust the applicant in this case (unless you have an "agent" in each country), and take the domain into closer inspection only if someone complains about its validity, but that will mean you'll get quite a lot of paper work when that happens.. It sure doesn't sound like an easy job to administer the
As the article implies, this will most probably lead to existing companies reserving more domain names in new TLDs. Let's take an example, say, Finnair, our beloved Finnish airline.
finnair.fi already belongs to Finnair
finnair.com as well, as they're doing business in many countries so they'll need an "international" commercial domain
finnair.aero just because they're dealing with aviation
finnair.biz because they're doing business
finnair.pro - well, they're professionals after all
finnair.info, timetables anyone?
Nice move, ICANN.
I assume you don't have one of those computers with two (or more) redundant power supplies in it, as in some Dell Poweredge servers. I had to move our file server from one room to another, but didn't want to shut it down just for that. So, I got a long power cord and attached it to the 2nd power supply and disconnected the first. Then I moved the computer towards the other room and switched it to use the other power supply and disconnected the now-unneeded power cord. I repeated this procedure a few times and finally the server was happily churning in its new place, all without rebooting. Using this method for moving the computer was absolutely unnecessary, as there was nobody at work at that time (except for me), but at least I managed to keep the high uptimes :)
Unfortunately nearly the whole city lost its electricity for a few hours just a few days after I had moved the computer. Damn lightning strikes.. And as Murphy's law dictates, our UPS was just having its battery replaced so it didn't help in this case. Bummer.
You seem to have missed Best Linux when you were searching for Finnish Linux distributions.
First of all, there is no source code for lzip and I don't like running code that I don't know. So I ran it through strings and found the magic JFIF header. Aha, it's really a jpeg image.
It seems it's not protected by GPL (GNU Public Licence) like most Linux programs, but with The Free Object-Oriented License (FOOL). The licence itself is ridiculous: To indicate your agreement with the terms of this license agrement, you may sign your computer screen. We will wait for you on the other side, brother.
Sorry but I've seen better April 1st pranks in my life..