You're only playing whac-a-mole when you go after individual spammers and spam gangs like this. Knock one out, and another will rise to take their place. Even if you disassemble a botnet, that will only be a momentary setback until they build a new one of a different set of compromised PCs.
If you want to really stop spam, you need to deal with the underlying cause of spam. You need to reject the foolish notion that spam is sent to piss you off personally, and acknowledge that spam is sent to make money. You need to go after the people who are funding the spam; if you can cut off the funding to the spammers (from the owners of the spamvertised domains) you will see spam finally whither and die.
Until then, all other changes are temporary and hollow at best.
... don't require attendance as part of the grade. Hence you should encourage the kids who are goofing off on their laptops all period in class to stay home and goof off on their laptops there instead. They aren't taking notes while playing farmville anyways....
That is just a blanket term used by the right for everything they oppose, regardless of whether or not it makes any sense. See:
Government takeover of General Motors
Government takeover of Wall Street
Government takeover of Health Care
And now
Government takeover of the Internet
The right screamed nonstop about the inevitability of the first three, none of which actually happened. Now they are screaming that the fourth will happen (either instead, or as well, depending on your take on reality). I'm not holding my breath.
Basically, if someone is claiming the government is about to "takeover" something, and they don't specify a military invasion as a tool in doing so, they have likely been listening to conservative media again. If you actually try to start a serious conservation with them on the issue you will likely find out in less than 30 seconds that they have no factual information to support their claims.
A large part of the spammers are actually in the US - see any statistics on spam origins.
Be careful with how you interpret the statistics. The numbers often come regarding not the location of the spammer, but the location of the systems that relay the actual spam. And of course, with the vast numbers of enormously vulnerable systems in the US who are left turned on 24/7 on broadband that is not at all surprising.
Finding the location of the spammer is another situation altogether. You need to follow more than just the MX record, you need to follow the money. Look at the WHOIS data on the spamvertised domain and find out who is greasing the wheels. There you will find the international diversity of the current spamming epidemic.
In other words, the only way we will ever stop spam is to address the economic issues behind spam.
That's what Mr. Balsam is doing - addressing the economic issues.
By adding a financial burden, ie. litigation, to spam
The problem with that assumption is that the litigation actually adds zero - or very close to zero - actual cost to spam. This is because of several important factors, not the least being that most spam is run by groups that are not within the jurisdiction of US law. You might as well file a personal lawsuit against Osama Bin Laden while you're at it, the result will be just as relevant.
If you want to make a difference, you need to go after the companies that are funding the spammers. The spammers, are, after all, largely paid just for the act of spamming, with no direct connection to sales numbers. If the merchants who are funding the spammers found themselves under the (economic) gun with regards to their choice of marketing tools, then you would see spam start to dry up.
Earlier proposals, generally variants of a per-email fee, had two problems: they invariably charged innocent people, and they gave the money to corporations or the government, not the people
I agree that those particular types of proposals were rubbish, and I never endorsed any of them as having any merit. The email system that exists right now is not compatible with such a notion anyways.
At least lawsuits like this give the money to the party that was actually damaged by the spam
That statement assumes that actual money will be made in the process. Which is, in actuality, a pipe dream. No spammers of any significance will be caught in this effort, no matter how good it sounds. The final revenue from the matter will be dwarfed by the legal fees anyways, so unless you feel that the attorneys were "damaged by the spam" (ironic notion considering the origin of the oldest known piece of email spam), nobody will actually benefit anyways.
So, go after the suckers that buy from spammers? But there's a sucker born every minute!
No. You need to disconnect the spammers from the people who are funding the spammers. Spammers get paid for sending the spam, regardless of whether or not any product sells as a result.
Point of fact the US accounts for fully 80% of spam.http://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/countries.lasso
That is not relevant to my point. The money that drives spam comes from all over the world. However, the numbers they use for that page refer to the number of open spam incidents per country, which doesn't have much of anything to do with where the spam is actually coming from or who is funding it; they are looking at where systems are located that are relaying that spam.
But more so you suggest that to stop spam we transfer fully half of our wealth to other countries? good luck with that one.
No.
I have no idea how you came to that utterly disconnected conclusion.
There is almost no realistic chance of this turning out to anything useful. The spammers you want to go after are in countries where US laws and verdicts have no jurisdiction. You might as well try to shout at your inbox as an anti-spam measure, it would be just as useful.
If you want to actually make a difference in the spam epidemic, you need to address the underlying cause of spam. You need to accept the fact that spammers are not spamming you to piss you off; rather they are spamming you because they make money doing so.
In other words, the only way we will ever stop spam is to address the economic issues behind spam.
If you can get the drive itsself, interfacing them to a modern motherboard isn't that hard.
I know that part. I've used plenty of drives over the years, I just don't have one currently.
You need an old, obscure cable. That's all.
Somewhere, I have one or more adapters that allow the 5.25" floppies to use the 3.5" floppy cable (pins instead of a slot connector). That was an adapter that was commonly given away free with ISA IDE controllers - back when people bought ISA IDE controllers.
They use the same electrical interface as 3.5" floppy drives.
I'm not sure I've ever seen a 5.25" floppy use the 3.5" floppy electrical connector. Every one I even owned used the HD/CD electrical connector instead.
I am certainly not the only person here with boxes of 5.25 floppies around and no working drive to read them... Has anyone found a way to read them directly on a modern system? All of mine are DOS formatted so at least the file system isn't anything too odd. I've expected a 5.25" USB drive to pop up somewhere but as best I know that hasn't yet happened.
BYTE? No, not my favorite. I reached every month for Computer Shopper. Sure, it was 95% (or more) ads, but that was the point. I don't remember a single article I even read in it - really the articles in there were about as memorable as the ones in Playboy - but I found plenty of good deals on RAM and hard drives through that magazine.
And as an added bonus, a single year's worth of Computer Shopper was a stack tall enough to make an end table...
I notice that the town, the school, and the first author are all named Blackawton. When I looked that up on wikipedia all I can find is the town itself, no information on where the name derives from. I was wondering how they decided who would get first-author rights on the paper (very important in the biological sciences)?
And one little thing I noticed on the paper itself when I read the full text (free in html or pdf through the web site) - they didn't cite any sources. Few publications would allow that these days, I would have expected that their corresponding (last) author would have added in some sources to establish the background at the least.
I guess what I want to know now is what have they done for me lately. If they still fulfill a purpose which is more good than evil, let them abide. If not, let's get rid of them.
From my point of view the main accomplishment of unionized labor has been to hold back worker exploitation. Granted, in our system we have still found plenty of ways to exploit workers that the dramatically less powerful unions of the current day haven't done shit about.
That said, if one wants to take a stand for abolishing all union labor I encourage them to first ask themselves the question of how long it would take for large employers to start dramatically exploiting their workers if there was no such thing as organized labor.
Because right now even non-union workers in this country benefit from what was done by organized labor in the first half of the 20th century. I don't know about you, but I would very much prefer not to lose those gains.
Facebook, the movie. I'd rather watch paint dry than see a movie about some wealthy kid making money by doing nothing of value. It could have just as well been a movie about the Kardashians, except he isn't nearly as interesting to look at.
A little free advice for you here - don't feed that troll. The slashdot conservative mantra around here is "unionz iz teh evol!" and is repeated ad nauseum even when it doesn't relate to the situation. You won't get the conservatives to believe otherwise, regardless of the mountains of evidence you put in front of them; their very existence pivots on that assumption and they can't stand to consider it being even the slightest bit wrong.
Locked out since June? This seems newsworthy to me, where is the lame stream media on this story?
Hmmm. Union workers are locked out of their jobs by their employer. I wonder why that didn't make the news, when any case of a union considering a vote on talking about thinking about announcing the possibility of maybe polling to take a vote on a half-day strike makes the news immediately?
And don't forget Mario Kart. 4 player split-screen on one system, and the ability to play over the internet as well. I've passed many an hour in Mario Kart races with friends...
Ahh, I think our definition of "wealthy" may be where we differ on the matter (or our understanding of how people are distributed in the US with regards to it).
Indeed the very wealthy - the top 3% who have somewhere near 25% of the country's wealth - do pretty well when the average income in the country is around $40k if those people are living $50k lifestyles. On the other hand, if those people earning $40 are living $30k lifestyles, then life isn't quite so grand for the top echelons. And frankly they see themselves gaining pretty well nothing if the average goes to $50k incomes living $60k lifestyles, but they themselves remain more elite under the earlier scenario.
Perhaps you shouldn't sit idly by while corporations take over the government,
That's why it's so foolhardy to regulate the internet - you then place the internet in control of whoever happens to wield a lot of power
Except that this isn't about controlling the internet. Nothing in net neutrality changes what content is available on the internet. Nothing in net neutrality prevents sites from going down over carrier disputes, disasters, or DDoS (to name a few). Net neutrality is about how much your ISP can decide for you what content you can access.
Someone needs to write a Perl module to go through the Ruby gems to figure out which gems are redundant with other gems, or abandoned. Once those are tossed out of the count, and the Perl module count is incremented by one for this additional module, Perl should be able to hold of Ruby until at least New Years!
Slashdot Mirror
You're only playing whac-a-mole when you go after individual spammers and spam gangs like this. Knock one out, and another will rise to take their place. Even if you disassemble a botnet, that will only be a momentary setback until they build a new one of a different set of compromised PCs.
If you want to really stop spam, you need to deal with the underlying cause of spam. You need to reject the foolish notion that spam is sent to piss you off personally, and acknowledge that spam is sent to make money. You need to go after the people who are funding the spam; if you can cut off the funding to the spammers (from the owners of the spamvertised domains) you will see spam finally whither and die.
Until then, all other changes are temporary and hollow at best.
... don't require attendance as part of the grade. Hence you should encourage the kids who are goofing off on their laptops all period in class to stay home and goof off on their laptops there instead. They aren't taking notes while playing farmville anyways....
And now
The right screamed nonstop about the inevitability of the first three, none of which actually happened. Now they are screaming that the fourth will happen (either instead, or as well, depending on your take on reality). I'm not holding my breath.
Basically, if someone is claiming the government is about to "takeover" something, and they don't specify a military invasion as a tool in doing so, they have likely been listening to conservative media again. If you actually try to start a serious conservation with them on the issue you will likely find out in less than 30 seconds that they have no factual information to support their claims.
A large part of the spammers are actually in the US - see any statistics on spam origins.
Be careful with how you interpret the statistics. The numbers often come regarding not the location of the spammer, but the location of the systems that relay the actual spam. And of course, with the vast numbers of enormously vulnerable systems in the US who are left turned on 24/7 on broadband that is not at all surprising.
Finding the location of the spammer is another situation altogether. You need to follow more than just the MX record, you need to follow the money. Look at the WHOIS data on the spamvertised domain and find out who is greasing the wheels. There you will find the international diversity of the current spamming epidemic.
I don't really want people to even be able to contact me anonymously
That may be the most ironic piece of writing I have ever seen here from an AC.
In other words, the only way we will ever stop spam is to address the economic issues behind spam.
That's what Mr. Balsam is doing - addressing the economic issues.
By adding a financial burden, ie. litigation, to spam
The problem with that assumption is that the litigation actually adds zero - or very close to zero - actual cost to spam. This is because of several important factors, not the least being that most spam is run by groups that are not within the jurisdiction of US law. You might as well file a personal lawsuit against Osama Bin Laden while you're at it, the result will be just as relevant.
If you want to make a difference, you need to go after the companies that are funding the spammers. The spammers, are, after all, largely paid just for the act of spamming, with no direct connection to sales numbers. If the merchants who are funding the spammers found themselves under the (economic) gun with regards to their choice of marketing tools, then you would see spam start to dry up.
Earlier proposals, generally variants of a per-email fee, had two problems: they invariably charged innocent people, and they gave the money to corporations or the government, not the people
I agree that those particular types of proposals were rubbish, and I never endorsed any of them as having any merit. The email system that exists right now is not compatible with such a notion anyways.
At least lawsuits like this give the money to the party that was actually damaged by the spam
That statement assumes that actual money will be made in the process. Which is, in actuality, a pipe dream. No spammers of any significance will be caught in this effort, no matter how good it sounds. The final revenue from the matter will be dwarfed by the legal fees anyways, so unless you feel that the attorneys were "damaged by the spam" (ironic notion considering the origin of the oldest known piece of email spam), nobody will actually benefit anyways.
So, go after the suckers that buy from spammers? But there's a sucker born every minute!
No. You need to disconnect the spammers from the people who are funding the spammers. Spammers get paid for sending the spam, regardless of whether or not any product sells as a result.
Point of fact the US accounts for fully 80% of spam.http://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/countries.lasso
That is not relevant to my point. The money that drives spam comes from all over the world. However, the numbers they use for that page refer to the number of open spam incidents per country, which doesn't have much of anything to do with where the spam is actually coming from or who is funding it; they are looking at where systems are located that are relaying that spam.
But more so you suggest that to stop spam we transfer fully half of our wealth to other countries? good luck with that one.
No.
I have no idea how you came to that utterly disconnected conclusion.
There is almost no realistic chance of this turning out to anything useful. The spammers you want to go after are in countries where US laws and verdicts have no jurisdiction. You might as well try to shout at your inbox as an anti-spam measure, it would be just as useful.
If you want to actually make a difference in the spam epidemic, you need to address the underlying cause of spam. You need to accept the fact that spammers are not spamming you to piss you off; rather they are spamming you because they make money doing so.
In other words, the only way we will ever stop spam is to address the economic issues behind spam.
If you can get the drive itsself, interfacing them to a modern motherboard isn't that hard.
I know that part. I've used plenty of drives over the years, I just don't have one currently.
You need an old, obscure cable. That's all.
Somewhere, I have one or more adapters that allow the 5.25" floppies to use the 3.5" floppy cable (pins instead of a slot connector). That was an adapter that was commonly given away free with ISA IDE controllers - back when people bought ISA IDE controllers.
They use the same electrical interface as 3.5" floppy drives.
I'm not sure I've ever seen a 5.25" floppy use the 3.5" floppy electrical connector. Every one I even owned used the HD/CD electrical connector instead.
I am certainly not the only person here with boxes of 5.25 floppies around and no working drive to read them... Has anyone found a way to read them directly on a modern system? All of mine are DOS formatted so at least the file system isn't anything too odd. I've expected a 5.25" USB drive to pop up somewhere but as best I know that hasn't yet happened.
BYTE? No, not my favorite. I reached every month for Computer Shopper. Sure, it was 95% (or more) ads, but that was the point. I don't remember a single article I even read in it - really the articles in there were about as memorable as the ones in Playboy - but I found plenty of good deals on RAM and hard drives through that magazine.
And as an added bonus, a single year's worth of Computer Shopper was a stack tall enough to make an end table...
You don't have to take the word of the magazine as to what is in the article - you can read it for yourself
Conveniently enough the P in PLoS stands for Public - as in you can download the articles from anywhere without paying for a subscription.
I notice that the town, the school, and the first author are all named Blackawton. When I looked that up on wikipedia all I can find is the town itself, no information on where the name derives from. I was wondering how they decided who would get first-author rights on the paper (very important in the biological sciences)?
And one little thing I noticed on the paper itself when I read the full text (free in html or pdf through the web site) - they didn't cite any sources. Few publications would allow that these days, I would have expected that their corresponding (last) author would have added in some sources to establish the background at the least.
... And you know it ... makes you a liar
Wow, someone really misses Pudge, eh?
I guess what I want to know now is what have they done for me lately. If they still fulfill a purpose which is more good than evil, let them abide. If not, let's get rid of them.
From my point of view the main accomplishment of unionized labor has been to hold back worker exploitation. Granted, in our system we have still found plenty of ways to exploit workers that the dramatically less powerful unions of the current day haven't done shit about.
That said, if one wants to take a stand for abolishing all union labor I encourage them to first ask themselves the question of how long it would take for large employers to start dramatically exploiting their workers if there was no such thing as organized labor.
Because right now even non-union workers in this country benefit from what was done by organized labor in the first half of the 20th century. I don't know about you, but I would very much prefer not to lose those gains.
"The Social Network" was actually a good movie because of the human drama that it is intertwined into the story
So what? There was human drama taking place during the course of my own undergraduate career, but nobody is begging me to sell them the screenplay.
Its not about how a wealthy kid makes even more money but how and possibly why he did it.
Meh. It is only because of the fact that people are familiar with the product that the movie was even made.
Can you fold under pressure?
Like a lawnchair I can!
Facebook, the movie. I'd rather watch paint dry than see a movie about some wealthy kid making money by doing nothing of value. It could have just as well been a movie about the Kardashians, except he isn't nearly as interesting to look at.
A little free advice for you here - don't feed that troll. The slashdot conservative mantra around here is "unionz iz teh evol!" and is repeated ad nauseum even when it doesn't relate to the situation. You won't get the conservatives to believe otherwise, regardless of the mountains of evidence you put in front of them; their very existence pivots on that assumption and they can't stand to consider it being even the slightest bit wrong.
Locked out since June? This seems newsworthy to me, where is the lame stream media on this story?
Hmmm. Union workers are locked out of their jobs by their employer. I wonder why that didn't make the news, when any case of a union considering a vote on talking about thinking about announcing the possibility of maybe polling to take a vote on a half-day strike makes the news immediately?
And don't forget Mario Kart. 4 player split-screen on one system, and the ability to play over the internet as well. I've passed many an hour in Mario Kart races with friends...
Ahh, I think our definition of "wealthy" may be where we differ on the matter (or our understanding of how people are distributed in the US with regards to it).
Indeed the very wealthy - the top 3% who have somewhere near 25% of the country's wealth - do pretty well when the average income in the country is around $40k if those people are living $50k lifestyles. On the other hand, if those people earning $40 are living $30k lifestyles, then life isn't quite so grand for the top echelons. And frankly they see themselves gaining pretty well nothing if the average goes to $50k incomes living $60k lifestyles, but they themselves remain more elite under the earlier scenario.
Perhaps you shouldn't sit idly by while corporations take over the government,
That's why it's so foolhardy to regulate the internet - you then place the internet in control of whoever happens to wield a lot of power
Except that this isn't about controlling the internet. Nothing in net neutrality changes what content is available on the internet. Nothing in net neutrality prevents sites from going down over carrier disputes, disasters, or DDoS (to name a few). Net neutrality is about how much your ISP can decide for you what content you can access.
Someone needs to write a Perl module to go through the Ruby gems to figure out which gems are redundant with other gems, or abandoned. Once those are tossed out of the count, and the Perl module count is incremented by one for this additional module, Perl should be able to hold of Ruby until at least New Years!