Does it matter? It had to be done anyway. It wasn't like people were going to just live with the spam because someone like you says it won't solve the problem.
They could have instead chosen to invest in something that is capable of solving the problem. Instead a number of people like yourself selected the response to spam that was most convenient, without concern for its long-term consequences, or its ultimate lack of effectiveness at actually solving the problem.
If nobody is getting the spam, people won't bother to have it delivered or they won't pay enough to make ti worth anyone to send.
You're making the inaccurate assumption that you can actually filter out all the spam from all the email. Even if you were able to get every email address on the planet to consent, you still would not be able to filter out all the spam, 100% of the time, with zero FP.
What can you do besides filter it out and try to prosecute egregious offenders when you can?
I have answered that question multiple times now. There is no point in repeating what you deliberately decide not to read.
It doesn't matter how much the software cost, it still required time to set up, consumed CPU time, required storage space, needed to be retrained periodically, and still missed spam, incorrectly tagged legitimate email, or both.
I dont' really understand what your issue is.
If you are willing to accept those costs, then say so. But don't keep running around pretending that filtering is somehow without cost.
Ok, so what? It isn't like we can NOT use the filters.
Actually, we can. We can skip the filters, and invest time and energy in real solutions. There is no law that we have to use the filters, and in some cases we may be better off without them.
I'm afraid you're wrong on that. If filtering was "one stop ahead" then why does it need to be retrained? The spammers will always find ways around filtering rules. Filters are a band-aid for a massive gushing head wound.
And yet, somehow, mysteriously, the filters work. I don't get spam.
You've already said you have to retrain your filters. Contradicting yourself, you also claimed the filters to be "one step ahead" of the spammers. Both cannot be true. Hence you are either oblivious or a liar - which is it?
In the meantime they do nothing whatsoever to discourage spammers from sending out spam.
Read TFA. Spamming is getting less and less profitable every day. If that isnt' discouragement, I don't know what is.
There is no mention of the fact that the three credit card processing outfits who handle >90% of all business for the spamvertised domains were recently identified and have been pressured to stop dealing with their often criminal customers.
Of course, since you refuse to acknowledge the answer to spam that I have repeatedly supported, you probably won't consider that this would have an impact on the cost of spam, either.
You don't even have a solution of your own.
I don't know if you have a reading disability, or if you are intentionally not reading the solution that I have repeatedly proposed. I won't propose it again to you since you won't bother reading it even if I do. The important point is that here on planet earth we realize that we cannot filter our way out of the spamming epidemic.
I can't even imagine a way for you to be more wrong. Filtering consumes money, time, and resources. It only encourages spammers to further obfuscate their email to find ways around filtering rules.
They spend time and money figuring out how get around filters while I make a minimal investment in filtering on my end
Multiply your "minimal investment" by all the other users around the world making the same "minimal investment", and add in all the money spent on hardware, storage, bandwidth, and power for the same, and it is no longer a "minimal investment", is it?
What solution do ou suggest that doesn't involve any kind of investment?
Well, if we consider time to be free, or trivially inexpensive enough to be called a "minimal investment", then we should put our time into disrupting the payment system. Spam is sent out because people are paying spammers to send it. Filtering won't stop that, but if the spammers aren't getting paid, they have no incentive to send out the spam. After all, they aren't generally selling the goods themselves - someone else has that duty - nor are they sending out spam just to piss people off (in spite of various claims to the contrary).
The thing about spam is that the more you try to obfusctate it, the less it looks like legitimate email and the easier it sot filter out!
Perhaps we are looking at obfuscation differently. Spam isn't obfuscated with random jibberish; it is obfuscated by adding in commonly used phrases. It may be trying to sell you counterfeit viagra, but it is using common discussion phrases to evade your filtering rules.
Filtering is getting better, not worse.
Resource consumption, and FR rates, point to the contrary.
Why do people who insist on filtering have to continually spend more time, money, and resources on filtering?
Do they? Maybe Google is, but I'm not seeing the cost since it is a free service
Just because you don't write a check to Google doesn't mean their service costs you nothing. There is no free lunch, even on the internet.
When I worked as a sysadmin, I was able to use free tools to filter out spam for a college. It added a bit to my workload, but it wasn't anything that required any significant increase in resources.
It doesn't matter how much the software cost, it still required time to set up, consumed CPU time, required storage space, needed to be retrained periodically, and still missed spam, incorrectly tagged legitimate email, or both.
Be that as it may, we've been one step ahead of them for years now
I'm afraid you're wrong on that. If filtering was "one stop ahead" then why does it need to be retrained? The spammers will always find ways around filtering rules. Filters are a band-aid for a massive gushing head wound.
There's no indication that filters will just stop working
That statement only makes sense if you ignore the fact that filters have to be continually adjusted. Eventually they will no longer be useful as the FP rates will become unacceptable. In the meantime they do nothing whatsoever to discourage spammers from sending out spam.
You're not applying any reasoning to this particular issue
I've laid out my reasoning for you. Just because it doesn't fit your own assumptions about how reality works does not mean it is not reasoning.
You're making generalizations.
You keep pointing to your own experiences - where you repeatedly ignore the big picture - and try to extrapolate the experience of the rest of the known universe from that. How on earth you arrive at the assertion that generalizations are coming from my end I do not see.
You dont' know what you're talking about.
Your narrow assumptions won't help you against spam, and they aren't helping you in this discussion, either.
Maintenance of filters is not an issue, just give people a 'spam' button to press and the filter can learn
That is a poor choice, depending on the users to identify the spam that the filters couldn't find on their own. Filters shoudl waste less human and CPU time, not more.
I was using spamassassin about 10 years ago, it's free and feeding it a few days' worth of spam messages got it to the level where it was correctly identifying over 99.9% of the spam coming into the account.
If it works for your own application, great. I hope you're content with the FP level. But don't fool yourself into thinking that it is somehow a long-term or permanent solution. You already told us how you had to train it, and how it needs to be periodically retrained. You didn't mention the FP rate, which will go up over time unless you are going back and checking the messages it filtered for you to find the ones that don't belong in the spam bucket.
And what you completely ignored is that filtering only starts an arms race with the spammers. Your filter autojunks certain messgaes, so they change the body of their messages to get around it. Then you adjust your filter again, and they adjust their email bodies again. They just increase the obfuscation of their messages to get around more filtering rules and pretty soon your FP rate goes up to try to keep up with them; eventually you have to stop filtering in order to see anything useful.
In the meantime, the spammers were still making money, and you were still paying to try to keep their spam away from you. Who won? Not you.
For some reason I feel like I'm feeding the troll here...
I am not familiar with this strange new meaning of troll you are employing here. Perhaps you need to adjust your filter...
Filtering works and it is a great long term solution. It is the only solution
I can't even imagine a way for you to be more wrong. Filtering consumes money, time, and resources. It only encourages spammers to further obfuscate their email to find ways around filtering rules. Eventually spam becomes obfuscated enough that the false positive rate for filtering reaches completely unacceptable levels and then people who cling to filtering will have to wake up and realize that they didn't solve the problem, and that with filtering alone they never had any hope to doing so.
All you can do is stop end users from getting the spam
Except filtering eventually won't do that either.
The economic incentive is being removed by both saturation and filtering
Wrong. You can repeat yourself, but you won't become right by repetition. Why do people who insist on filtering have to continually spend more time, money, and resources on filtering? Because you're only taking part in an arms race with the spammers. And you cannot win that arms race, not with filtering anyways. You can make yourself feel better, but you won't stop spam that way. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.
But better filters have a big impact on the economics.
No, they don't. Filters don't help, for several reasons:
Many users don't use filters anyways
The cost of sending an email is so trivial that it doesn't matter how many get through
The people most likely to use filters are the least likely to buy from spam anyways
The filters have to be maintained to be relevant, which only increases the cost of internet access for everyone
So in the end, filtering does not help the problem. Indeed an argument could be made that it makes it worse because we just end up throwing more resources into filtering techniques in the form of filter rule updates, new hardware, more storage, more power consumption, more bandwidth required, etc. Even if gmail is your only email, you are still paying for google to do it for you in one way or another.
cuts down the number of customers. This means lower or even negative profits
Extremely unlikely. As I mentioned the people who use filters are the least likely to buy anyways. Spam still gets through and the spammers keep working on ways to get around filters; its just an arms race that nobody can win.
The only solution that will ever be able to work is to deal with the economic factors behind the spam. Reduce the profitability of it by making it more difficult for the spammers to get paid. This can and has been done, and it works well. Filtering is a waste of time and resources by comparison because it will never bring about a permanent solution.
This has nothing to do with filters. I repeat, nothing. Filters are just an act of throwing good money after bad money, in the hopes that the good money will somehow stop the flow of the bad money. It's like saying that installing a new toilet in your house in the suburbs will stop homeless people from pissing on the street downtown.
Spam volume naturally rises and falls. Anytime someone congratulates themselves for a reduction in spam volume, they are proven wrong shortly later when it comes back up. If anything, a few of the prominent relays that were pushing spam out went down. More likely it's just been a slow week.
The only thing approaching reasonable in the summary is that indeed economic factors are at play. As I've said before, the only way to stop spam is with economic action; spam is so prevalent today because it is so cheap and profitable, which is why filtering will never lead to a permanent solution.
Belfast is in Northern Ireland, not Ireland itself. People from Northern Ireland are loyalists to the British monarchy and are just as likely to call themselves British as they are to call themselves Irish.
Overlooking that ignores the great numbers of people who have died as a result of the wars for Irish identity.
There is also lack of clear evidence that rules restricting the sale of tobacco, alcohol, and porn to minors is making a difference. For that matter, the closest analogue is probably R-rated movies, and there isn't any evidence that restricting those at the theatre is useful, either.
I honestly don't parse my httpd-error log all that closely; I look at it a couple times a week and say "oh, some other script kiddie is looking for phpmyadmin in a place where it doesn't exist".
That said my instinctive response is that the script kiddies just pass through transiently and their IP addresses are seldom if ever seen again. For example, the last person looking for phpmyadmin at my site was from address 220.194.56.86, and visited my server on Sunday June 19. I see three visits from that address and that's it; going all the way back to January of 2007 in my httpd-error.log I don't see that address occur any other time. Even if I go back a bit further in history to June 13 where I find address 91.121.120.204 made 30 attempts on my site to get phpmyadmin (or similar) in one day, I don't see that address occur any time earlier either.
Of course those are only two addresses in a very long list of addresses. I could write a perl script to run through that log and look to see if we have any repeat offenders, just in case something is hiding in there that I am not noticing. Although depending on who owns any given IP address, even seeing the same address repeatedly might not mean much; I think it might be more useful to take addresses from the error log and use them to search the regular access log to see if any of the script kiddies start out with legitimate access on the same site - I haven't seen it happen yet.
What I am actually more inclined to do is write one php page that would be a symlink destination for all the most common pages that the script kiddies look for. That page would then capture their address, do the usual whois lookup and everything else, and put the results in a database for me. It would of course watch to see how many attempts they make, and then once they are done for an hour, send me an email with the results.
I'm not sure that tar-pitting them would be of much use because they rarely make more than a few dozen attempts to find pages, and are never very creative about it. If by chance they do get to a page with the ability to log in, then they may deploy some password cracking utilities (this is conjecture since they haven't gotten that far on my server yet), where tar-pitting could be potentially useful - although I'm not sure how effective that would be for http attempts.
Years ago 404 errors were not that uncommon when people were looking for something based on a poorly written link or whatever else. At that time, it was cute to have a custom 404 error for the misdirected.
However, by my experience with my home web server at least, >>99% of 404 errors are the result of script kiddies trying to find vulnerabilities in my web site (usually looking for phpmyadmin or similar). They won't read the 404 error anyways, so whether it is cute, vulgar, or plain, it doesn't matter because their automatic system that is trolling for vulnerabilities will discard the error message anyways.
Yet another reason that users might think twice before depending on Facebook for photo storage.
I'm not sure why someone would want to be completely dependent on an online company to store their photos. Sure, it's nice to be able to show them off over the web, but I still think it would be wise for people to keep their own copies somewhere, just in case.
and need a way to post blog updates on the trip and send back photos
I have taken plenty of vacations in Canada and did not find myself with such a need. Waiting until I returned was plenty adequate for blog updates and showing off photos. You can buy a lot of storage for your camera for what wireless internet might cost you in the middle of nowhere for a week.
Blackberry phones aren't anymore secure than an Android of iPhone with the proper corporate sync apps installed
I think security is a pretty small bit of it. I think it has more to do with BB enterprise applications, as well as the fact that the BB platform is pretty homogeneous. If you swap an employee between two or three different BB phones, you can count on the same desktop software working in the same way for all of them. You can also manage the remote data for all of them the same way.
In contrast, Android for all its strengths is a nightmare of conflicting setups. There is no consistent sync software that I've seen so far, likely at least in part due to all the different deployments of Android across the different vendors with their Android phones.
And then the iPhone. Even if you overlook that it locks you into iTunes, the iPhone does have one huge downfall in the eyes of some users - which other seem to consider a great asset. I'm referring to being completely dependent on the touch screen for everything since it has only one button on the entire phone. Some people still prefer physical keys, and a touch screen that makes a clicking sound won't do it for that.
My tax dollars are not there to pay for others dumb decisions.
All our tax dollars are paying for some catastrophically dumb decisions that were made back in 2002 and 2003, at a dramatically higher cost than flood repair has ever forced upon our country. I and many other opposed those decisions back then but we don't get to dictate our taxes won't be used to fund them anyways; that isn't how the federal budget works.
I should also mention that with all the different firewalls that are used at academic institutions, I needed a solution that I knew would work around anything that might reasonably be deployed in the reasonable future. VPN could be blocked various ways, but blocking reverse ssh is so impractical - and counter-productive from an IS management standpoint - that I figured I could count on it. In fact, I cannot ssh in to that system, as that is blocked by the campus firewall. However if I have that system ssh in to my home system first, reverse ssh lets me get what I want, and all that is seen on the remote end is an outgoing ssh connection.
That's a fair question, and perhaps a different person might find that better in some ways. However my priority for this was to make sure that the system required as little intervention on his part as possible, which I accomplished with this. Basically the only thing I ever have to do is ask him to power cycle the system (damn Dell Optiplex system with its faulty capacitors) if it is hung. I have a cron job set up on it that automatically checks the ssh tunnel to my home system every half hour, and reestablishes it if it is found to be down.
At one point I had figured out a way that I could get that system to auto-fetch articles from specific publishers based on their pubmed ids, although it was based on wget commands and then the publisher changed how some of their websites work...
Really, the only problem with journals now is regarding older material. The NIH is the largest government funding source for biomedical research in this country, and they set a requirement for results to be in open-access or accessible formats for NIH-funded work. This means that new work funded by NIH grants, even if it is published in Nature or other notoriously expensive journals, will have its published results available free of charge.
Of course, academics are aware of the problems getting to other expensive journals and their archives. If you can find someone on the inside sympathetic to your cause, you can probably work something out. I won't name names, but I was able to talk a friend of mine at a large university to let me set up an old Linux system in his lab, that automatically sets up an X-forwarding reverse SSH connection to my own system at home. The result of that of course is I can run an X application on that system - which is inside their network - anytime I want access to journals that they subscribe to.
Certainly other people could make similar arrangements through friends, friends-of-friends, or similar.
Taxpayer funded research should not be behind pay walls or restricted in any other manner
The largest funding source for biomedical research in the US is the National Institutes of Health (NIH). They recently passed a rule requiring NIH-funded work to be published in an accessible manner. This has had some interesting results, as now journals such as Nature and Science have ways to release articles to the public so that they can be in their high-impact journals and accessible freely.
Of course, this only applies to grants that are approved 2010 and onwards; work funded by older grants does not need to worry about this. However, grants that are were issued originally prior to 2010, and are being renewed, do.
In other words, less federally funded work is published behind paywalls now than ever before.
Using natural and man-made disasters to demigod your political opposition. We really have turned into a pathetic bunch. This tripe doesn't belong on Slashdot.
I was seeing regular ads here on slashdot (from townhall.com I believe) asking me to blame Obama for gas prices (nevermind they were down 10% at the time compared to 2 weeks prior). We've had all kinds of conservative articles on here over the past several months as well.
If this somehow strikes you as a new trend here on slashdot, I suggest you either should read the slashdot front page more often, or just stop. And no, I don't like slashdot's political bend either but it is what it is.
You want a BS degree, but without taking liberal education courses that you think are below you? So do a lot of other people. A lot of online schools claim they will grant you exactly that; why don't you go find one and try their curriculum. Go through their paces, get their degree - you can probably even do it mostly online without ever going to a campus.
Then take that online degree, put it on your resume and go look for a job.
Later on, you'll be back at a brick-and-mortar accredited school taking lib ed courses, only you'll be older and financially worse off than you would have been otherwise.
In other words go through the standard process like the rest of us. You can bitch about it later, and the a few years after that you'll see kids joining your workplace complaining about the same thing and you can tell them to get off your lawn.
Tesla would likely be disappointed to know that there are people who are as thoroughly and utterly incorrect in their understanding of Tesla Motors. They might be even yet more disappointed to know that lack of knowledge on your caliber is making front-page news at a technology site such as what slashdot used to be.
It's great to see something get this kind of fuel economy, to see where we can take the technology, but it might not be entirely honest to call it a "car".
The illiterate goon who was credited with this "story" couldn't bother to read the article he was linking to. Hence there is no reason to expect that providing a link to anything else would be useful, either. He apparently believes that the cars he clearly has no knowledge of are some sort of worthless milk trucks that get passed by intoxicated snails on the sidewalk. There is no point in correcting him with actual information because he clearly cannot process it anyways.
The real question is how on earth he found the article that he provided (but did not read). He is clearly incapable of using google; I can't even think of a news source that would so badly massacre information intentionally.
Slashdot Mirror
Does it matter? It had to be done anyway. It wasn't like people were going to just live with the spam because someone like you says it won't solve the problem.
They could have instead chosen to invest in something that is capable of solving the problem. Instead a number of people like yourself selected the response to spam that was most convenient, without concern for its long-term consequences, or its ultimate lack of effectiveness at actually solving the problem.
If nobody is getting the spam, people won't bother to have it delivered or they won't pay enough to make ti worth anyone to send.
You're making the inaccurate assumption that you can actually filter out all the spam from all the email. Even if you were able to get every email address on the planet to consent, you still would not be able to filter out all the spam, 100% of the time, with zero FP.
What can you do besides filter it out and try to prosecute egregious offenders when you can?
I have answered that question multiple times now. There is no point in repeating what you deliberately decide not to read.
It doesn't matter how much the software cost, it still required time to set up, consumed CPU time, required storage space, needed to be retrained periodically, and still missed spam, incorrectly tagged legitimate email, or both.
I dont' really understand what your issue is.
If you are willing to accept those costs, then say so. But don't keep running around pretending that filtering is somehow without cost.
Ok, so what? It isn't like we can NOT use the filters.
Actually, we can. We can skip the filters, and invest time and energy in real solutions. There is no law that we have to use the filters, and in some cases we may be better off without them.
I'm afraid you're wrong on that. If filtering was "one stop ahead" then why does it need to be retrained? The spammers will always find ways around filtering rules. Filters are a band-aid for a massive gushing head wound.
And yet, somehow, mysteriously, the filters work. I don't get spam.
You've already said you have to retrain your filters. Contradicting yourself, you also claimed the filters to be "one step ahead" of the spammers. Both cannot be true. Hence you are either oblivious or a liar - which is it?
In the meantime they do nothing whatsoever to discourage spammers from sending out spam.
Read TFA. Spamming is getting less and less profitable every day. If that isnt' discouragement, I don't know what is.
There is no mention of the fact that the three credit card processing outfits who handle >90% of all business for the spamvertised domains were recently identified and have been pressured to stop dealing with their often criminal customers.
Of course, since you refuse to acknowledge the answer to spam that I have repeatedly supported, you probably won't consider that this would have an impact on the cost of spam, either.
You don't even have a solution of your own.
I don't know if you have a reading disability, or if you are intentionally not reading the solution that I have repeatedly proposed. I won't propose it again to you since you won't bother reading it even if I do. The important point is that here on planet earth we realize that we cannot filter our way out of the spamming epidemic.
I can't even imagine a way for you to be more wrong. Filtering consumes money, time, and resources. It only encourages spammers to further obfuscate their email to find ways around filtering rules.
They spend time and money figuring out how get around filters while I make a minimal investment in filtering on my end
Multiply your "minimal investment" by all the other users around the world making the same "minimal investment", and add in all the money spent on hardware, storage, bandwidth, and power for the same, and it is no longer a "minimal investment", is it?
What solution do ou suggest that doesn't involve any kind of investment?
Well, if we consider time to be free, or trivially inexpensive enough to be called a "minimal investment", then we should put our time into disrupting the payment system. Spam is sent out because people are paying spammers to send it. Filtering won't stop that, but if the spammers aren't getting paid, they have no incentive to send out the spam. After all, they aren't generally selling the goods themselves - someone else has that duty - nor are they sending out spam just to piss people off (in spite of various claims to the contrary).
The thing about spam is that the more you try to obfusctate it, the less it looks like legitimate email and the easier it sot filter out!
Perhaps we are looking at obfuscation differently. Spam isn't obfuscated with random jibberish; it is obfuscated by adding in commonly used phrases. It may be trying to sell you counterfeit viagra, but it is using common discussion phrases to evade your filtering rules.
Filtering is getting better, not worse.
Resource consumption, and FR rates, point to the contrary.
Why do people who insist on filtering have to continually spend more time, money, and resources on filtering?
Do they? Maybe Google is, but I'm not seeing the cost since it is a free service
Just because you don't write a check to Google doesn't mean their service costs you nothing. There is no free lunch, even on the internet.
When I worked as a sysadmin, I was able to use free tools to filter out spam for a college. It added a bit to my workload, but it wasn't anything that required any significant increase in resources.
It doesn't matter how much the software cost, it still required time to set up, consumed CPU time, required storage space, needed to be retrained periodically, and still missed spam, incorrectly tagged legitimate email, or both.
Be that as it may, we've been one step ahead of them for years now
I'm afraid you're wrong on that. If filtering was "one stop ahead" then why does it need to be retrained? The spammers will always find ways around filtering rules. Filters are a band-aid for a massive gushing head wound.
There's no indication that filters will just stop working
That statement only makes sense if you ignore the fact that filters have to be continually adjusted. Eventually they will no longer be useful as the FP rates will become unacceptable. In the meantime they do nothing whatsoever to discourage spammers from sending out spam.
You're not applying any reasoning to this particular issue
I've laid out my reasoning for you. Just because it doesn't fit your own assumptions about how reality works does not mean it is not reasoning.
You're making generalizations.
You keep pointing to your own experiences - where you repeatedly ignore the big picture - and try to extrapolate the experience of the rest of the known universe from that. How on earth you arrive at the assertion that generalizations are coming from my end I do not see.
You dont' know what you're talking about.
Your narrow assumptions won't help you against spam, and they aren't helping you in this discussion, either.
Maintenance of filters is not an issue, just give people a 'spam' button to press and the filter can learn
That is a poor choice, depending on the users to identify the spam that the filters couldn't find on their own. Filters shoudl waste less human and CPU time, not more.
I was using spamassassin about 10 years ago, it's free and feeding it a few days' worth of spam messages got it to the level where it was correctly identifying over 99.9% of the spam coming into the account.
If it works for your own application, great. I hope you're content with the FP level. But don't fool yourself into thinking that it is somehow a long-term or permanent solution. You already told us how you had to train it, and how it needs to be periodically retrained. You didn't mention the FP rate, which will go up over time unless you are going back and checking the messages it filtered for you to find the ones that don't belong in the spam bucket.
And what you completely ignored is that filtering only starts an arms race with the spammers. Your filter autojunks certain messgaes, so they change the body of their messages to get around it. Then you adjust your filter again, and they adjust their email bodies again. They just increase the obfuscation of their messages to get around more filtering rules and pretty soon your FP rate goes up to try to keep up with them; eventually you have to stop filtering in order to see anything useful.
In the meantime, the spammers were still making money, and you were still paying to try to keep their spam away from you. Who won? Not you.
For some reason I feel like I'm feeding the troll here...
I am not familiar with this strange new meaning of troll you are employing here. Perhaps you need to adjust your filter...
Filtering works and it is a great long term solution. It is the only solution
I can't even imagine a way for you to be more wrong. Filtering consumes money, time, and resources. It only encourages spammers to further obfuscate their email to find ways around filtering rules. Eventually spam becomes obfuscated enough that the false positive rate for filtering reaches completely unacceptable levels and then people who cling to filtering will have to wake up and realize that they didn't solve the problem, and that with filtering alone they never had any hope to doing so.
All you can do is stop end users from getting the spam
Except filtering eventually won't do that either.
The economic incentive is being removed by both saturation and filtering
Wrong. You can repeat yourself, but you won't become right by repetition. Why do people who insist on filtering have to continually spend more time, money, and resources on filtering? Because you're only taking part in an arms race with the spammers. And you cannot win that arms race, not with filtering anyways. You can make yourself feel better, but you won't stop spam that way. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.
But better filters have a big impact on the economics.
No, they don't. Filters don't help, for several reasons:
So in the end, filtering does not help the problem. Indeed an argument could be made that it makes it worse because we just end up throwing more resources into filtering techniques in the form of filter rule updates, new hardware, more storage, more power consumption, more bandwidth required, etc. Even if gmail is your only email, you are still paying for google to do it for you in one way or another.
cuts down the number of customers. This means lower or even negative profits
Extremely unlikely. As I mentioned the people who use filters are the least likely to buy anyways. Spam still gets through and the spammers keep working on ways to get around filters; its just an arms race that nobody can win.
The only solution that will ever be able to work is to deal with the economic factors behind the spam. Reduce the profitability of it by making it more difficult for the spammers to get paid. This can and has been done, and it works well. Filtering is a waste of time and resources by comparison because it will never bring about a permanent solution.
This has nothing to do with filters. I repeat, nothing. Filters are just an act of throwing good money after bad money, in the hopes that the good money will somehow stop the flow of the bad money. It's like saying that installing a new toilet in your house in the suburbs will stop homeless people from pissing on the street downtown.
Spam volume naturally rises and falls. Anytime someone congratulates themselves for a reduction in spam volume, they are proven wrong shortly later when it comes back up. If anything, a few of the prominent relays that were pushing spam out went down. More likely it's just been a slow week.
The only thing approaching reasonable in the summary is that indeed economic factors are at play. As I've said before, the only way to stop spam is with economic action; spam is so prevalent today because it is so cheap and profitable, which is why filtering will never lead to a permanent solution.
Belfast is in Northern Ireland, not Ireland itself. People from Northern Ireland are loyalists to the British monarchy and are just as likely to call themselves British as they are to call themselves Irish.
Overlooking that ignores the great numbers of people who have died as a result of the wars for Irish identity.
Just to let you know, the MPAA rating system is purely voluntary by the studios and the theaters.
Sure, but the theatres face all kinds of hell if they intentionally allow unaccompanied minors in to R-rated movies in the states.
There is also lack of clear evidence that rules restricting the sale of tobacco, alcohol, and porn to minors is making a difference. For that matter, the closest analogue is probably R-rated movies, and there isn't any evidence that restricting those at the theatre is useful, either.
I honestly don't parse my httpd-error log all that closely; I look at it a couple times a week and say "oh, some other script kiddie is looking for phpmyadmin in a place where it doesn't exist".
That said my instinctive response is that the script kiddies just pass through transiently and their IP addresses are seldom if ever seen again. For example, the last person looking for phpmyadmin at my site was from address 220.194.56.86, and visited my server on Sunday June 19. I see three visits from that address and that's it; going all the way back to January of 2007 in my httpd-error.log I don't see that address occur any other time. Even if I go back a bit further in history to June 13 where I find address 91.121.120.204 made 30 attempts on my site to get phpmyadmin (or similar) in one day, I don't see that address occur any time earlier either.
Of course those are only two addresses in a very long list of addresses. I could write a perl script to run through that log and look to see if we have any repeat offenders, just in case something is hiding in there that I am not noticing. Although depending on who owns any given IP address, even seeing the same address repeatedly might not mean much; I think it might be more useful to take addresses from the error log and use them to search the regular access log to see if any of the script kiddies start out with legitimate access on the same site - I haven't seen it happen yet.
What I am actually more inclined to do is write one php page that would be a symlink destination for all the most common pages that the script kiddies look for. That page would then capture their address, do the usual whois lookup and everything else, and put the results in a database for me. It would of course watch to see how many attempts they make, and then once they are done for an hour, send me an email with the results.
I'm not sure that tar-pitting them would be of much use because they rarely make more than a few dozen attempts to find pages, and are never very creative about it. If by chance they do get to a page with the ability to log in, then they may deploy some password cracking utilities (this is conjecture since they haven't gotten that far on my server yet), where tar-pitting could be potentially useful - although I'm not sure how effective that would be for http attempts.
Years ago 404 errors were not that uncommon when people were looking for something based on a poorly written link or whatever else. At that time, it was cute to have a custom 404 error for the misdirected.
However, by my experience with my home web server at least, >>99% of 404 errors are the result of script kiddies trying to find vulnerabilities in my web site (usually looking for phpmyadmin or similar). They won't read the 404 error anyways, so whether it is cute, vulgar, or plain, it doesn't matter because their automatic system that is trolling for vulnerabilities will discard the error message anyways.
Yet another reason that users might think twice before depending on Facebook for photo storage.
I'm not sure why someone would want to be completely dependent on an online company to store their photos. Sure, it's nice to be able to show them off over the web, but I still think it would be wise for people to keep their own copies somewhere, just in case.
and need a way to post blog updates on the trip and send back photos
I have taken plenty of vacations in Canada and did not find myself with such a need. Waiting until I returned was plenty adequate for blog updates and showing off photos. You can buy a lot of storage for your camera for what wireless internet might cost you in the middle of nowhere for a week.
Blackberry phones aren't anymore secure than an Android of iPhone with the proper corporate sync apps installed
I think security is a pretty small bit of it. I think it has more to do with BB enterprise applications, as well as the fact that the BB platform is pretty homogeneous. If you swap an employee between two or three different BB phones, you can count on the same desktop software working in the same way for all of them. You can also manage the remote data for all of them the same way.
In contrast, Android for all its strengths is a nightmare of conflicting setups. There is no consistent sync software that I've seen so far, likely at least in part due to all the different deployments of Android across the different vendors with their Android phones.
And then the iPhone. Even if you overlook that it locks you into iTunes, the iPhone does have one huge downfall in the eyes of some users - which other seem to consider a great asset. I'm referring to being completely dependent on the touch screen for everything since it has only one button on the entire phone. Some people still prefer physical keys, and a touch screen that makes a clicking sound won't do it for that.
My tax dollars are not there to pay for others dumb decisions.
All our tax dollars are paying for some catastrophically dumb decisions that were made back in 2002 and 2003, at a dramatically higher cost than flood repair has ever forced upon our country. I and many other opposed those decisions back then but we don't get to dictate our taxes won't be used to fund them anyways; that isn't how the federal budget works.
I should also mention that with all the different firewalls that are used at academic institutions, I needed a solution that I knew would work around anything that might reasonably be deployed in the reasonable future. VPN could be blocked various ways, but blocking reverse ssh is so impractical - and counter-productive from an IS management standpoint - that I figured I could count on it. In fact, I cannot ssh in to that system, as that is blocked by the campus firewall. However if I have that system ssh in to my home system first, reverse ssh lets me get what I want, and all that is seen on the remote end is an outgoing ssh connection.
That's a fair question, and perhaps a different person might find that better in some ways. However my priority for this was to make sure that the system required as little intervention on his part as possible, which I accomplished with this. Basically the only thing I ever have to do is ask him to power cycle the system (damn Dell Optiplex system with its faulty capacitors) if it is hung. I have a cron job set up on it that automatically checks the ssh tunnel to my home system every half hour, and reestablishes it if it is found to be down.
At one point I had figured out a way that I could get that system to auto-fetch articles from specific publishers based on their pubmed ids, although it was based on wget commands and then the publisher changed how some of their websites work...
Really, the only problem with journals now is regarding older material. The NIH is the largest government funding source for biomedical research in this country, and they set a requirement for results to be in open-access or accessible formats for NIH-funded work. This means that new work funded by NIH grants, even if it is published in Nature or other notoriously expensive journals, will have its published results available free of charge.
Of course, academics are aware of the problems getting to other expensive journals and their archives. If you can find someone on the inside sympathetic to your cause, you can probably work something out. I won't name names, but I was able to talk a friend of mine at a large university to let me set up an old Linux system in his lab, that automatically sets up an X-forwarding reverse SSH connection to my own system at home. The result of that of course is I can run an X application on that system - which is inside their network - anytime I want access to journals that they subscribe to.
Certainly other people could make similar arrangements through friends, friends-of-friends, or similar.
Taxpayer funded research should not be behind pay walls or restricted in any other manner
The largest funding source for biomedical research in the US is the National Institutes of Health (NIH). They recently passed a rule requiring NIH-funded work to be published in an accessible manner. This has had some interesting results, as now journals such as Nature and Science have ways to release articles to the public so that they can be in their high-impact journals and accessible freely.
Of course, this only applies to grants that are approved 2010 and onwards; work funded by older grants does not need to worry about this. However, grants that are were issued originally prior to 2010, and are being renewed, do.
In other words, less federally funded work is published behind paywalls now than ever before.
Using natural and man-made disasters to demigod your political opposition. We really have turned into a pathetic bunch. This tripe doesn't belong on Slashdot.
I was seeing regular ads here on slashdot (from townhall.com I believe) asking me to blame Obama for gas prices (nevermind they were down 10% at the time compared to 2 weeks prior). We've had all kinds of conservative articles on here over the past several months as well.
If this somehow strikes you as a new trend here on slashdot, I suggest you either should read the slashdot front page more often, or just stop. And no, I don't like slashdot's political bend either but it is what it is.
You want a BS degree, but without taking liberal education courses that you think are below you? So do a lot of other people. A lot of online schools claim they will grant you exactly that; why don't you go find one and try their curriculum. Go through their paces, get their degree - you can probably even do it mostly online without ever going to a campus.
Then take that online degree, put it on your resume and go look for a job.
Later on, you'll be back at a brick-and-mortar accredited school taking lib ed courses, only you'll be older and financially worse off than you would have been otherwise.
In other words go through the standard process like the rest of us. You can bitch about it later, and the a few years after that you'll see kids joining your workplace complaining about the same thing and you can tell them to get off your lawn.
in fact the real hold up was convincing a grad student to stick that thermometer up the dinosaur's ass.
Are you kidding?
The grad student was probably happy to do it, since it meant the adviser was finally off of their ass!
Tesla would likely be disappointed to know that there are people who are as thoroughly and utterly incorrect in their understanding of Tesla Motors. They might be even yet more disappointed to know that lack of knowledge on your caliber is making front-page news at a technology site such as what slashdot used to be.
Passengers? Just one, the driver
Doors? None
Power Windows? Nope, no windows at all
Wheels? Just three
It's great to see something get this kind of fuel economy, to see where we can take the technology, but it might not be entirely honest to call it a "car".
The illiterate goon who was credited with this "story" couldn't bother to read the article he was linking to. Hence there is no reason to expect that providing a link to anything else would be useful, either. He apparently believes that the cars he clearly has no knowledge of are some sort of worthless milk trucks that get passed by intoxicated snails on the sidewalk. There is no point in correcting him with actual information because he clearly cannot process it anyways.
The real question is how on earth he found the article that he provided (but did not read). He is clearly incapable of using google; I can't even think of a news source that would so badly massacre information intentionally.