Sounds like he's just passing the buck. Last time I checked it was the legal system's job to enforce laws -- not some private company that provides internet access. Not that this exactly qualifies as law enforcement since the sites are still out there -- they're just kinda-sorta-maybe blocked in PA (motto: "Yet Another Hillbilly State").
Were all the internet child porn cases coming through his court cutting into his golf time? Did someone forget to give him the memo that would have clued him in to the fact that a lot of this shit is hosted by the russian mafia and isn't exactly a stationary target because (suprise!) even people on the internet hate kiddie porn?
That is one area I will give Microsoft credit for - they made IE and Outlook seperate programs.
I think that part of the reason a monolithic Mozilla is such a freaky big issue for many people is simply because it isn't the organized the "Microsoft Way" that they're used to. For those of us who have been using Communicator for years Mozilla seems perfectly ordinary and the number of loud complaints about its "bloat" seem overblown. I can see how Mozilla might be considered a little heavy, but it's far from obese...
While I think this change is good for the project, I hope that the components will be able to seamlessly re-integrate as this is what we will want to distribute to the users at my place of employment.
Well you could try going after real estate with a current resident and having them call their phone company (or call them yourself and give them the current occupant's number) to enquire about the availability of DSL.
I'll be the first to admit that companies providing DSL are far too coy about it for their own good. I know someone who works for SBC. This guy swears up and down that they recently finished laying fiber and installing equipment for DSL in my neighborhood and that I should be able to get it. However when I call my phone company (or any other CLEC) they say it's not available because I'm just out of range (same old story).
Of course SBC can't tell whether or not I'm within range of their DSL service because I don't subscribe to their POTS. Obviously the stiff competition from other DSL providers is causing them great pain.
Intentional. I really do have that little respect for people who game search engines. Without exception they strike me as being complete asses who never once consider the idea that perhaps their site doesn't *deserve* to be ranked first.
From this article interviewing Daniel Brandt (the man behind Google Watch as well as Namebase):
We have tens of thousands of these pages indexed in Google. If you don't spend time understanding how the search engines work, you can forget about attracting any serious traffic to your site.
Where have we heard this before? Oh yeah, I remember now: From every marketroid who ever got in a tizzy because his web site wasn't appearing at the top of the list the way the highly paid search engine gaming conslutant promised it would.
Oddly, almost every telemarketer that I said this to would politely say "OK, you can expect calls to cease within 3 weeks" or something like that.
I'm pretty sure that doesn't cut the legal mustard (at least in the U.S.). If my skim of the JunkBusters site picked up the right info, once you tell them to put you on their do-not-call list they can't call you again for ten years or you can quite easily file some legal papers and get $500 per infringement out of the bastards.
I never get telemarketing calls (a combination of luck and a very careful selection of who gets my phone number) or I would be keeping a list and checking it twice to try to cash in on this.
ramming speed isn't uncommon. I saw captains do the same thing on Babylon 5.
However when it comes time in a Star Trek episode or film for the captain (or whoever is standing in for him) to come up with a brilliant plan to save the day "ramming speed" is almost definitely NOT the correct answer.
It IS however a cheap ploy resorted to by writers and producers desperate for something that is garunteed to put asses in seats with a minimal amount of expense, effort or thought. The general audience pays for the explosions, the Star Trek fans for what is exploding.
Of course overuse of this tactic will cause even the general audience to realize that they're paying $8.50 to see the same object explode over and over again. I think that brings me to where we are right now...
Exactly! How can anyone mistake these automated conversions for "art" or even for "something that took more than ten minutes"? There was a time when people who tried to pass this shit off as the real thing were ridiculed and ostracised. Now it seems to be a big trend.
Why not a/. story with links to JED's ansimations or an interview with Lord Jazz or something?
There was a time when I wanted to see this genre make an impact on the art world, but after seeing that WIRED "illustration" (pasting photos inside text was one of the first things I learned in Photoshop) I think I'd rather it stayed obscure.
Last time I tried it eMule didn't make a good drop-in replacement for Kazaa. I always recommend WinMX because it seems to work better and (unlike Kazaa/Grokster/etc.) it doesn't come with spyware.
Sure, you could use KazaaLite or bypass Grokster's spyware manually but I would rather support a network that doesn't foist spyware on millions of clueless users.
IBM and the hardware manufacturers are saying: "TCPA is just a gun! It can be used for good or evil purposes!"
Microsoft is saying "Palladium is just a bullet! It can be used for good or evil purposes and it stops piracy which is illegal! Do not look behind the curtain marked 'this machine kills linux'!"
The content industries are saying "DRM is another kind of bullet! It can be used for good or evil purposes and it stops piracy which is illegal! What is this 'fair use' you speak of?"
The whole bunch of them are saying "We are forming a club. All club members will communicate with secret decoder rings which you are perfectly free not to use however don't expect to be able to join the club without using them!"
I have no way to independantly verify WHO was responsible for the blockage. So being an "informed consumer" in this case is practically impossible. Changing ISPs every few weeks as they drift onto and off of the various block list is not practical either.
If you care that much then get your own domain and run your own mail server. Otherwise get used to the fact that unless you can trust your ISP you'll never know for sure what's going on -- with your e-mail or anything else. A few months ago there was a three or four day period when my cable modem was dropping off the network promptly at 1:00 in the morning every day and coming back up after 10 minutes to half an hour of downtime. When I called the support line after the third time it happened (open 24 hours, incredibly enough) they said they had no idea what it could be. My suspicion is that someone somewhere was performing some kind of maintenance but nobody had bothered to tell the support department. Granted this is pretty minor stuff, but it illustrates my point.
On the internet your connectivity is always going to be in the hands of someone else. You can either buy some fiber and become a player who can negotiate (and re-negotiate if necesary) or you can continue to use consumer level services with the features and drawbacks that most consumers are comfortable with.
As for my opinion on end-user software for spam "blocking" (which by that point is really just spam deletion) my journal says it all.
If you can't tell is there a problem? And you appear to claim a dead DNS entry does something - what I can't imagine.
I know this may be hard to imagine, but some ISPs actively collaborate with spammers. They switch their spammers around to different IP blocks, pretend to cancel their accounts and play tricks with the DNS. If an ISP is going to claim that a spammer is no longer their customer there needs to be no trace of the spammer on the ISPs machines that is visible to the outside world or there are going to be questions raised as to the veracity of the claim. This is not a difficult thing to arrange for an ISP that has really, truly and fully booted a spammer.
Check with me in April. spam probably won't be gone by then
Isn't that what I just wrote?
bouncing all relay email doesn't end spam. Look at the history - it hasn't.
Neither does (or has) honeypots. The real open relays will always outnumber the fake ones. Honeypots also do nothing against spamhauses. Who needs open relays when there are plenty of cash strapped ISPs willing to sell connectivity to spammers for a quick buck?
That honeypot of yours is cute, but the 6000 user ISP I work for has blocked almost 4000 messages today thanks to SPEWS and other blocklists. If you want evidence just check out how many spammers there are crying their eyes out in NANAE because of SPEWS.
To become so widely blocked your ISP had to ignore complaints. Acting slowly is most definitely their fault. If the spamming customer paid his bills first so they were "forced" to allow him to continue spamming it is still their fault for not having a proper acceptable use policy. There is no reason why their policies can't give them the leeway to kick off any customer found to be spamming at any time without a refund. Some ISPs even charge a cleanup fee.
Any measure for stopping spam must ensure that all non-spam messages reach their intended recipients.
This is what is stopping me from donating to the EFF. They do a lot of good work, however this is a ridiculous position that refuses to acknowledge the realities of the situation. E-mail is and has been from the very beginning an unreliable way of sending information. With this paper the EFF is taking the position that anyone with an e-mail address is required to recieve anything sent to it. Because after all, even speech from someone abusing their right could stop at any time! So we'd better not try to block them because they might realize the error of their ways and send an apology and if it couldn't get through then we would be evil oppressors of free speech!
Not to mention that there's been more than one case in NANAE where the collateral damage was suffered by someone related to an ISP that had long ago booted the spammer but had not removed all traces.
That's life in the big city. Most of the time this happens when an ISP thinks that it's good enough to just remove the web site but still host DNS or mail for the spammer. This is called "spam support services" and is a no-no. Even on the rare occasion when it's something like IP addresses still showing up as being allocated to the spammer, how is anyone outside the ISP supposed to know that the spammer is no longer a customer? So many ISPs come to NANAE begging to be delisted when they have done literally nothing about their blatant spam problems that why should the one out of ten that is simply incompetent be given special consideration?
And, of course, the brutal blocking actions haven't ended spam
Oh somebody call a waaaaam-bulance. Free clue: Nothing will end spam. Even if e-mail becomes metered you will still get spam -- it will just come from the people who send you paper junk mail instead of Alan Ralsky.
A GOOD mail filtering solution doesn't rely on content. Not only is this a slippery slope that can lead to some very nasty places, it also won't be long before the spammers find out how to bypass the filters. Then it's hack and counter-hack until you're rejecting even more legitimate e-mail than you would be if you simply blocked IPs.
Besides, you're only hiding the problem -- not solving it. See the link in my (one and only) journal entry.
You were almost looking credible there until you linked to AntiSpews. You do know that it's run by a well known spammer don't you? The.org is also rather deceptive as they have started to sell mail server hosting.
If your ISP is listed in SPEWS you need to talk to them about it. They need be informed that either the spammers go or you go. Obviously some ISPs value spammers' business more than that of their legitimate customers. Why would you want to do business with a company with ethics like that anyway?
However I guess I can count on Slashdot to throw their fists in the air when reading about Alan Ralsky then turn around and pay their bandwidth bills to ISPs with the same attitudes as his just because it's "convenient".
At my place of employment we have been filtering all incoming e-mail for ourselves and our small ISP through SPEWS and various other lists. Just now I checked and found that since 4:00am when the logs switched over we've blocked just over 2000 messages. About 1600 of them were because of SPEWS. This is a system with 6000 users and we've only had two or three complaints since we started filtering a few years ago.
That seems pretty effective to me.
Oh, and the boss loves it. As soon as we implemented the filters his spam load saw a *huge* decrease. He has even used the filters as a way to persuade a few of our more foolish clients to fix their open relays.
"I merely said that if a product is released in X format, and you dont have X format, than you are SOL."
Here in the real world there are these nearly magical programs that will extract things from proprietary formats for conversion into XviD or what-have-you. The catch is that you've got to have the codecs installed to do it.
"I just dont use those sites"
That's right, just keep your goddamn mouth shut and sit at the back of the bus like you're supposed to. I don't usually call people tools, but in your case I think I'll make an exception.
"and miss out on life because of some 'ideals' that if its not on linux its bad"
This isn't about linux or Microsoft, you fucktard. It's about a future with no history because it's all locked up in DRM-encrusted formats that can't be viewed or salvaged because the companies that made them ditched them or went out of business or were borged and had the responsible divisions eliminated.
But I don't expect you to actually understand that, so on second thought: Have fun watching the spoilerific trailer for the final crappy TNG movie and enjoy the -1 (Flamebait)!
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like he's just passing the buck. Last time I checked it was the legal system's job to enforce laws -- not some private company that provides internet access. Not that this exactly qualifies as law enforcement since the sites are still out there -- they're just kinda-sorta-maybe blocked in PA (motto: "Yet Another Hillbilly State").
Were all the internet child porn cases coming through his court cutting into his golf time? Did someone forget to give him the memo that would have clued him in to the fact that a lot of this shit is hosted by the russian mafia and isn't exactly a stationary target because (suprise!) even people on the internet hate kiddie porn?
You aren't reading it right. When MS says they can make something "better" they don't mean "better for the user" they mean "better for Microsoft".
That is one area I will give Microsoft credit for - they made IE and Outlook seperate programs.
I think that part of the reason a monolithic Mozilla is such a freaky big issue for many people is simply because it isn't the organized the "Microsoft Way" that they're used to. For those of us who have been using Communicator for years Mozilla seems perfectly ordinary and the number of loud complaints about its "bloat" seem overblown. I can see how Mozilla might be considered a little heavy, but it's far from obese...
While I think this change is good for the project, I hope that the components will be able to seamlessly re-integrate as this is what we will want to distribute to the users at my place of employment.
When did this happen? I wandered into Best Buy a few weeks ago and found MP3 CD capable Discman players sitting next to their Rio Volt competition...
You stone cold trippin, bee-yotch!
Well you could try going after real estate with a current resident and having them call their phone company (or call them yourself and give them the current occupant's number) to enquire about the availability of DSL.
I'll be the first to admit that companies providing DSL are far too coy about it for their own good. I know someone who works for SBC. This guy swears up and down that they recently finished laying fiber and installing equipment for DSL in my neighborhood and that I should be able to get it. However when I call my phone company (or any other CLEC) they say it's not available because I'm just out of range (same old story).
Of course SBC can't tell whether or not I'm within range of their DSL service because I don't subscribe to their POTS. Obviously the stiff competition from other DSL providers is causing them great pain.
Can you hear my eyes rolling?
Intentional. I really do have that little respect for people who game search engines. Without exception they strike me as being complete asses who never once consider the idea that perhaps their site doesn't *deserve* to be ranked first.
We have tens of thousands of these pages indexed in Google. If you don't spend time understanding how the search engines work, you can forget about attracting any serious traffic to your site.
Where have we heard this before? Oh yeah, I remember now: From every marketroid who ever got in a tizzy because his web site wasn't appearing at the top of the list the way the highly paid search engine gaming conslutant promised it would.
Oddly, almost every telemarketer that I said this to would politely say "OK, you can expect calls to cease within 3 weeks" or something like that.
I'm pretty sure that doesn't cut the legal mustard (at least in the U.S.). If my skim of the JunkBusters site picked up the right info, once you tell them to put you on their do-not-call list they can't call you again for ten years or you can quite easily file some legal papers and get $500 per infringement out of the bastards.
I never get telemarketing calls (a combination of luck and a very careful selection of who gets my phone number) or I would be keeping a list and checking it twice to try to cash in on this.
ramming speed isn't uncommon. I saw captains do the same thing on Babylon 5.
However when it comes time in a Star Trek episode or film for the captain (or whoever is standing in for him) to come up with a brilliant plan to save the day "ramming speed" is almost definitely NOT the correct answer.
It IS however a cheap ploy resorted to by writers and producers desperate for something that is garunteed to put asses in seats with a minimal amount of expense, effort or thought. The general audience pays for the explosions, the Star Trek fans for what is exploding.
Of course overuse of this tactic will cause even the general audience to realize that they're paying $8.50 to see the same object explode over and over again. I think that brings me to where we are right now...
Exactly! How can anyone mistake these automated conversions for "art" or even for "something that took more than ten minutes"? There was a time when people who tried to pass this shit off as the real thing were ridiculed and ostracised. Now it seems to be a big trend.
/. story with links to JED's ansimations or an interview with Lord Jazz or something?
Why not a
There was a time when I wanted to see this genre make an impact on the art world, but after seeing that WIRED "illustration" (pasting photos inside text was one of the first things I learned in Photoshop) I think I'd rather it stayed obscure.
I've actually been waiting quite a while for this.
Last time I tried it eMule didn't make a good drop-in replacement for Kazaa. I always recommend WinMX because it seems to work better and (unlike Kazaa/Grokster/etc.) it doesn't come with spyware.
Sure, you could use KazaaLite or bypass Grokster's spyware manually but I would rather support a network that doesn't foist spyware on millions of clueless users.
Let me get this straight:
IBM and the hardware manufacturers are saying: "TCPA is just a gun! It can be used for good or evil purposes!"
Microsoft is saying "Palladium is just a bullet! It can be used for good or evil purposes and it stops piracy which is illegal! Do not look behind the curtain marked 'this machine kills linux'!"
The content industries are saying "DRM is another kind of bullet! It can be used for good or evil purposes and it stops piracy which is illegal! What is this 'fair use' you speak of?"
The whole bunch of them are saying "We are forming a club. All club members will communicate with secret decoder rings which you are perfectly free not to use however don't expect to be able to join the club without using them!"
Thank you! This may be exactly what I've been looking for.
I have no way to independantly verify WHO was responsible for the blockage. So being an "informed consumer" in this case is practically impossible. Changing ISPs every few weeks as they drift onto and off of the various block list is not practical either.
If you care that much then get your own domain and run your own mail server. Otherwise get used to the fact that unless you can trust your ISP you'll never know for sure what's going on -- with your e-mail or anything else. A few months ago there was a three or four day period when my cable modem was dropping off the network promptly at 1:00 in the morning every day and coming back up after 10 minutes to half an hour of downtime. When I called the support line after the third time it happened (open 24 hours, incredibly enough) they said they had no idea what it could be. My suspicion is that someone somewhere was performing some kind of maintenance but nobody had bothered to tell the support department. Granted this is pretty minor stuff, but it illustrates my point.
On the internet your connectivity is always going to be in the hands of someone else. You can either buy some fiber and become a player who can negotiate (and re-negotiate if necesary) or you can continue to use consumer level services with the features and drawbacks that most consumers are comfortable with.
As for my opinion on end-user software for spam "blocking" (which by that point is really just spam deletion) my journal says it all.
If you can't tell is there a problem? And you appear to claim a dead DNS entry does something - what I can't imagine.
I know this may be hard to imagine, but some ISPs actively collaborate with spammers. They switch their spammers around to different IP blocks, pretend to cancel their accounts and play tricks with the DNS. If an ISP is going to claim that a spammer is no longer their customer there needs to be no trace of the spammer on the ISPs machines that is visible to the outside world or there are going to be questions raised as to the veracity of the claim. This is not a difficult thing to arrange for an ISP that has really, truly and fully booted a spammer.
Check with me in April. spam probably won't be gone by then
Isn't that what I just wrote?
bouncing all relay email doesn't end spam. Look at the history - it hasn't.
Neither does (or has) honeypots. The real open relays will always outnumber the fake ones. Honeypots also do nothing against spamhauses. Who needs open relays when there are plenty of cash strapped ISPs willing to sell connectivity to spammers for a quick buck?
That honeypot of yours is cute, but the 6000 user ISP I work for has blocked almost 4000 messages today thanks to SPEWS and other blocklists. If you want evidence just check out how many spammers there are crying their eyes out in NANAE because of SPEWS.
To become so widely blocked your ISP had to ignore complaints. Acting slowly is most definitely their fault. If the spamming customer paid his bills first so they were "forced" to allow him to continue spamming it is still their fault for not having a proper acceptable use policy. There is no reason why their policies can't give them the leeway to kick off any customer found to be spamming at any time without a refund. Some ISPs even charge a cleanup fee.
Any measure for stopping spam must ensure that all non-spam messages reach their intended recipients.
This is what is stopping me from donating to the EFF. They do a lot of good work, however this is a ridiculous position that refuses to acknowledge the realities of the situation. E-mail is and has been from the very beginning an unreliable way of sending information. With this paper the EFF is taking the position that anyone with an e-mail address is required to recieve anything sent to it. Because after all, even speech from someone abusing their right could stop at any time! So we'd better not try to block them because they might realize the error of their ways and send an apology and if it couldn't get through then we would be evil oppressors of free speech!
Not to mention that there's been more than one case in NANAE where the collateral damage was suffered by someone related to an ISP that had long ago booted the spammer but had not removed all traces.
That's life in the big city. Most of the time this happens when an ISP thinks that it's good enough to just remove the web site but still host DNS or mail for the spammer. This is called "spam support services" and is a no-no. Even on the rare occasion when it's something like IP addresses still showing up as being allocated to the spammer, how is anyone outside the ISP supposed to know that the spammer is no longer a customer? So many ISPs come to NANAE begging to be delisted when they have done literally nothing about their blatant spam problems that why should the one out of ten that is simply incompetent be given special consideration?
And, of course, the brutal blocking actions haven't ended spam
Oh somebody call a waaaaam-bulance. Free clue: Nothing will end spam. Even if e-mail becomes metered you will still get spam -- it will just come from the people who send you paper junk mail instead of Alan Ralsky.
A GOOD mail filtering solution doesn't rely on content. Not only is this a slippery slope that can lead to some very nasty places, it also won't be long before the spammers find out how to bypass the filters. Then it's hack and counter-hack until you're rejecting even more legitimate e-mail than you would be if you simply blocked IPs.
Besides, you're only hiding the problem -- not solving it. See the link in my (one and only) journal entry.
You were almost looking credible there until you linked to AntiSpews. You do know that it's run by a well known spammer don't you? The .org is also rather deceptive as they have started to sell mail server hosting.
If your ISP is listed in SPEWS you need to talk to them about it. They need be informed that either the spammers go or you go. Obviously some ISPs value spammers' business more than that of their legitimate customers. Why would you want to do business with a company with ethics like that anyway?
However I guess I can count on Slashdot to throw their fists in the air when reading about Alan Ralsky then turn around and pay their bandwidth bills to ISPs with the same attitudes as his just because it's "convenient".
At my place of employment we have been filtering all incoming e-mail for ourselves and our small ISP through SPEWS and various other lists. Just now I checked and found that since 4:00am when the logs switched over we've blocked just over 2000 messages. About 1600 of them were because of SPEWS. This is a system with 6000 users and we've only had two or three complaints since we started filtering a few years ago.
That seems pretty effective to me.
Oh, and the boss loves it. As soon as we implemented the filters his spam load saw a *huge* decrease. He has even used the filters as a way to persuade a few of our more foolish clients to fix their open relays.
It's probably the Ralph Bakshi animated version.
"I merely said that if a product is released in X format, and you dont have X format, than you are SOL."
Here in the real world there are these nearly magical programs that will extract things from proprietary formats for conversion into XviD or what-have-you. The catch is that you've got to have the codecs installed to do it.
"I just dont use those sites"
That's right, just keep your goddamn mouth shut and sit at the back of the bus like you're supposed to. I don't usually call people tools, but in your case I think I'll make an exception.
"and miss out on life because of some 'ideals' that if its not on linux its bad"
This isn't about linux or Microsoft, you fucktard. It's about a future with no history because it's all locked up in DRM-encrusted formats that can't be viewed or salvaged because the companies that made them ditched them or went out of business or were borged and had the responsible divisions eliminated.
But I don't expect you to actually understand that, so on second thought: Have fun watching the spoilerific trailer for the final crappy TNG movie and enjoy the -1 (Flamebait)!