Oh joy of joys, I was hoping you would be so kind as to bestow unto me the gift of another kind response.
You are a fucking idiot and can not read.
Clearly, you are the truest source of all wisdom. You are a gentleman of caliber previously unattained. I am not worthy of your kindness, dear sir and I bow to your civility.
Please do not continue to use the Internet, as even a short article is apparently beyond your comprehension.
You have graced us with so much kindness in so little space.
one of the ultimate forms of demonstration of your rank stupidity
Why thank you kindly sir. I hope you could be so kind as to continue to heap praise upon me.
Please destroy your computer now, or at the very least disconnect your computer from the internet so that you do not harm other people with your base ignorance
I am so glad that you devoted so much time to discussing the topic at hand. A lesser man might have resorted to slinging insults rather than actually talking about the (lack of) technical merit of the device that this slashvertisement is dedicated to. I am infinitely thankful to you for being so kind and considerate.
The depths of the technical aspects of this conversation are seldom reached or surpassed these days, I thank you for your immense insight and kindness in this matter.
The device takes the form of a 2.5in to 3.5in hard disk caddy with a couple of SATA connectors on the end
Which makes sense, as a 3.5 bracket with a 3.5 hard drive and an SSD would not fit in a standard 3.5 bay.
It may be possible instead to dedicate one of your 3.5 bays to this, running SATA cables from your 3.5 drive to it (and then to the SATA controller). But then you've just used a full bay for one SSD and a silly gizmo.
Besides, have you ever heard of a 2.5" 2TB drive?
No, but we don't let reality get in the way of a good slashvertisement around here.
This adapter is for 2.5" hard drives - if you put a 3.5 drive in it, you wouldn't fit drive+adapter+SSD into a 3.5" bay. Who makes a 2TB 2.5" SATA drive currently? I am not aware of any...
This seems like a lot of money to spend for potentially not a lot of speed. Generally, 2.5" hard drives aren't quite as fast as their 3.5" counterparts anyways, so you're spending a fair bit of money to speed up something that wasn't really made for speed anyways.
Sure, you can "drop it right in" to your existing computer, assuming that your desktop is for some reason already using 2.5" SATA drives. And if your desktop is currently using 2.5" SATA drives you probably didn't build it to be a speed demon anyways.
people thinking I'm dead after not tweeting or updating facebook for more than 24 hrs!
Perhaps jury duty works differently where you are. The last time I was called in, I received notice several weeks beforehand. Ultimately I only went two days for a couple hours each day. I'm quite sure nobody thought I died in that time frame.
Furthermore this may actually only apply to jurors who are drawn for the trial (as opposed to alternates or extras), once the trial has begun. I would be surprised if more than a handful of people per year ended up being disconnected for more than 2 days.
While the moderation system is screwed up (and the metamoderation even more so), you may have missed something when you said
The biggest flaw with the moderation system is that I can't use my mod points to moderate on the actual stories as well as the comments!
That is what the Firehose is (supposed to be) for. You can go to the firehose, set it to show you upcoming stories, and then vote them down if you think they aren't worthy. And if you see stories in the firehose that deserve attention but are not scoring high enough for the front page, you can vote them up at the same time.
And then in proud slashdot tradition, all those votes will be discarded and they will do whatever they feel like (or whatever makes the most money).
how would they distinguish a domain from a spam domain
It would actually be pretty straightforward. Say you receive spam from "big-als-viagra-shop.com". You look up that domain and find the DNS servers that depend on it. You report the spam to the registrar of those DNS servers, and send the same report to (the replacement for) ICANN (because they are spineless profiteering cowards). Currently most spamvertised domains get DNS from a very short list of DNS servers, sold by a very short list of registrars. When more than a certain number of complaints are received for the DNS domain, the registrar is required to shut down the domain or lose their accreditation.
However, ICANN can only regulate accreditation for registrars involved in certain TLDs. As we've seen before, ICANN recently approved the future sale of TLDs themselves, which throws all regulation out the window and opens the flood gates for new spamming opportunities (made possible by new total freedom from registrar regulations).
what would be the registrar's incentive to police that?
Well, for the next several months or more, ICANN has the ability to strip registrars of their accreditation. Once TLDs are sold then it all goes out the window and we'll see a new game unfold.
I agree, it's an arms race. Technology gets better, they get creative. The 'root economic problem' is no better. You can't stop people wanting to make money
I agree with you that far.
Either email has to fundamentally change on a technical level to defeat spam or 6 billion people need their brain re-wired.
However I see a third option on this. Another option would be to come between the spammer and their financing source - essentially attacking their margins. Spammers themselves are generally part of multi-layered machines, and each layer has its own cost and profit margins. One spot in particular that I have previously suggested cracking down on is the domain registrars that make spamvertising work.
In particular I am thinking of the registrars that sell the domains that are spamvertised (as opposed to the domains that produce the spam), as well as the domains that provide DNS for the spamvertised domains (which are generally owned by spammers, spamvertised profiteers, or others in cohorts with them). The spammers (and their customers) rely on those registrations because it allows them to move quickly from one ISP to another without loss of web service - even if the ISPs are on different continents.
Unfortunately, our friends at ICANN have chosen to make that work much easier - easier for the spammers, that is. When individuals will be able to buy their own TLDs, then the (very flimsy and largely toothless) regulations that we currently have on TLDs go right out the window. Spammers will be buying and selling lifetime domain registrations with obfuscated (or completely absent) registration data, making it impossible to determine where the money came from or is going.
Not directly. The spammers themselves are paid by moderately smart people who are selling products online that are often of questionable legitimacy. While some of those customers are stupid, there are generally fairly crafty individuals making money off of the customers along the way.
The question is: why are people stupid, and how can we make them smarter?
You could ask the same question in the light of why 419 scams work, why old-school pyramid schemes work, etc. Money can make smart people pretty dumb at times.
I would argue that spam is an educational problem
You will not succeed in educating the problem away. Unless you want to impose some sort of requirements for users to access the internet (a la driver's licensure), you won't succeed at educating all the users and getting it to stick. It's like trying to design a better mouse trap; nature will just make a better mouse and then you're back to square one.
If you want to make a meaningful difference in the spam volume, you need to stop the money from flowing to the spammer.
What you can realistically do is increase the cost of getting those messages out.
The proposed "Spam Blocking Discovery" doesn't do jack shit to accomplish that goal. The people who install the spam filters aren't going to buy anything that was spamvertised, anyways. Meanwhile the spammers will continue to adjust their methods to get around the filters that are installed at the ISP level so that they can get their messages out to more people who would be interested.
This craptacular "Discovery" is just another round of whack-a-mole. Hopefully at some point people will finally get tired of this (and realize that they are getting nowhere by doing it) and actually work on the root economic problem, instead of just addressing the symptoms.
As long as there is money to be made in spam, spammers will continue to send spam. This "discovery" does nothing for that. Indeed it just dedicates more CPU time to trying to identify spam, which is just another way that internet users shoulder the cost of the profitability of spamming.
I've said it before, and I'll continue to say it - spam is an economic problem. Until something is done to address the money that spammers make, they will continue to find ways around these "effectively perfect" "discoveries".
People can brag about their filters, white-lists, black-lists, etc, all they want. But if this count is accurate, it gives a good indication of the true cost of spam. If 95% of email is spam, then that means only 1 email of every 20 sent is legit. Which could be extrapolated to mean that what you "pay" - by ISP charges, etc... for your email is also paying for 19 spam messages.
Because in the end, servers around the world are using bandwidth, storage, CPU time, etc, to relay spam. And those servers have to be paid for somehow.
So keep that in mind the next time you think of installing a fancy spam filter to solve your problem; you're really just displacing one cost for another by using some of your own resources to deal with spam once it reaches your inbox. If you want to actually help address the spam problem, look to the root cause of the spam instead of continuing to address only the effects of it.
Stricter punishments for spamming, punishment for ISPs that are particularly bad, better education of people who answer spam, better use of whitelists, blacklists and greylists are all techniques that can help. Every technique has problems. Hence the standard Slashdot response with the checkboxes. However, although each has flaws, together they can be very effective
Because ultimately none of those approaches actually address the economic issue that you and I both acknowledge. Simply inconveniencing the spammer won't accomplish much of anything; they will just send more spam. You'd be just as well off to advocate for their execution.
As I've said before, if you want to stop spam you need to stop the money from flowing. Cut off the spammers from the companies that they pay money to. Crack down on the registrars with some meaningful ICANN policies and watch the spam whither. If they can't do business, they won't make money and they'll find something else to do. Spammers are reliant on networks of DNS servers, registrars, ISPs, etc... Throw a wrench into that machinery and you could accomplish something towards brining it down.
... many spamvertised, spamvertising, and spamming-affiliated domains are registered through registrars overseas. And those overseas registrars (those who actually put something into the WHOIS fields) will either provide WHOIS obfuscation services to their customers, or it will be provided through another overseas company. In the end, we can legislate this all we want, it won't mean squat to the spammers in other countries.
That said, there are likely other reasons why this is useless; this was just the first one that came to mind for me about 1x10^-3 seconds after I read the headline. It is a shame that the judge who passed down this judgement was not knowledgeable enough to know the same.
Post it here, I'll check it for you.. Don't worry, Slashdot blanks your password.
My password is *******
See, blanked out!
Wow, I just tried to match "*******" against a list of bad passwords, and it generated a really long list of matches. Your password must be really bad!
Why not just hash out your password, and try to crack it with John The Ripper or something similar?
That would give you a good indication of how good it is.
Yes, but that wouldn't answer the question I am after with the password list. I want to know how common my passwords are, or if they are even similar to common passwords. 32M passwords is a pretty good set for checking against to answer that kind of question.
I think it would be interesting to search the passwords I use against the list. I like to think that my passwords are pretty good, but it would be interesting to see how similar they are to the passwords that were obtained and used in the study.
If by that you mean a defective T-mobile cell tower, I would say that is plausible. My wife and I, as well as some friends who pass through the area often, are all T-mobile customers and we all know the same dead spot.
I have friends who live in suburban developments near where I live, and I can't get any signal while at their house. Two blocks in one direction from there is 4 bars, one block in another direction is 3 bars (followed by a dead spot another block past). I don't give a damn about 3g on T-mobile (as a T-mobile customer) - I just want to be able to use my phone as a phone. I have a pretty decent signal at home, but I can't very well drive home from anywhere and hold signal all the way home.
And even worse, the coverage maps on T-mobile claim that I should get "good" coverage in these locations where I have no signal. And this is on a quad-band blackberry.
If it's a necessary product, then you should buy it. However most Chinese imports are disposable consumer crap you only think you need because the TV tells you so.
It surprises - and sometimes disgusts - me how often I don't have a choice but to buy Chinese. When I go to my favorite home improvement store, sometimes the plumbing parts I need for my house (at least if I want to have running water) are only available as Chinese-made.
Likewise with some car parts. I drive an American car, made in Michigan. But when I go to the auto parts store, I often end up buying parts that were made in China. Sometimes, when there is a choice of "good, better, best", the "best" one will have been made in Mexico or Japan. But often when there is only one part for the application, it is made in China, regardless of what store I buy it from.
So while there is plenty of disposable consumer crap coming from China, there are also necessary goods as well. At least if I want silly luxuries like running water in my home or brakes on my car.
Never. However if you are one of many people who have seen their real income decrease over the past decade or so, you find yourself choosing between buying low-quality or not buying at all. And you'll have a hard time explaining that to your young child.
Slashdot Mirror
You are a fucking idiot and can not read.
Clearly, you are the truest source of all wisdom. You are a gentleman of caliber previously unattained. I am not worthy of your kindness, dear sir and I bow to your civility.
Please do not continue to use the Internet, as even a short article is apparently beyond your comprehension.
You have graced us with so much kindness in so little space.
one of the ultimate forms of demonstration of your rank stupidity
Why thank you kindly sir. I hope you could be so kind as to continue to heap praise upon me.
Please destroy your computer now, or at the very least disconnect your computer from the internet so that you do not harm other people with your base ignorance
I am so glad that you devoted so much time to discussing the topic at hand. A lesser man might have resorted to slinging insults rather than actually talking about the (lack of) technical merit of the device that this slashvertisement is dedicated to. I am infinitely thankful to you for being so kind and considerate.
The depths of the technical aspects of this conversation are seldom reached or surpassed these days, I thank you for your immense insight and kindness in this matter.
I suspect we may have read different articles. Your assertion of
You mount the fucking 2.5" drive in the caddy and mount your 3.5" HD where you would normally mount it
Does not match the article when it says
The device takes the form of a 2.5in to 3.5in hard disk caddy
So I thank you for your kind concern of
un a fucking cable from your HD to the caddy. Is this so fucking hard to get a grasp on? For christs sake
And I hope you have a very nice day kind sir.
I don't see where a 2.5" HD is required
If you RTFA, you'll see
The device takes the form of a 2.5in to 3.5in hard disk caddy with a couple of SATA connectors on the end
Which makes sense, as a 3.5 bracket with a 3.5 hard drive and an SSD would not fit in a standard 3.5 bay.
It may be possible instead to dedicate one of your 3.5 bays to this, running SATA cables from your 3.5 drive to it (and then to the SATA controller). But then you've just used a full bay for one SSD and a silly gizmo.
Besides, have you ever heard of a 2.5" 2TB drive?
No, but we don't let reality get in the way of a good slashvertisement around here.
This adapter is for 2.5" hard drives - if you put a 3.5 drive in it, you wouldn't fit drive+adapter+SSD into a 3.5" bay. Who makes a 2TB 2.5" SATA drive currently? I am not aware of any...
This seems like a lot of money to spend for potentially not a lot of speed. Generally, 2.5" hard drives aren't quite as fast as their 3.5" counterparts anyways, so you're spending a fair bit of money to speed up something that wasn't really made for speed anyways.
Sure, you can "drop it right in" to your existing computer, assuming that your desktop is for some reason already using 2.5" SATA drives. And if your desktop is currently using 2.5" SATA drives you probably didn't build it to be a speed demon anyways.
people thinking I'm dead after not tweeting or updating facebook for more than 24 hrs!
Perhaps jury duty works differently where you are. The last time I was called in, I received notice several weeks beforehand. Ultimately I only went two days for a couple hours each day. I'm quite sure nobody thought I died in that time frame.
Furthermore this may actually only apply to jurors who are drawn for the trial (as opposed to alternates or extras), once the trial has begun. I would be surprised if more than a handful of people per year ended up being disconnected for more than 2 days.
That's right. As long as Microsoft controls Zapf Wingdings, OpenOffice will never take off.
The biggest flaw with the moderation system is that I can't use my mod points to moderate on the actual stories as well as the comments!
That is what the Firehose is (supposed to be) for. You can go to the firehose, set it to show you upcoming stories, and then vote them down if you think they aren't worthy. And if you see stories in the firehose that deserve attention but are not scoring high enough for the front page, you can vote them up at the same time.
And then in proud slashdot tradition, all those votes will be discarded and they will do whatever they feel like (or whatever makes the most money).
... are they trying to claim that the average windows system is normally stable for more than two hours?
how would they distinguish a domain from a spam domain
It would actually be pretty straightforward. Say you receive spam from "big-als-viagra-shop.com". You look up that domain and find the DNS servers that depend on it. You report the spam to the registrar of those DNS servers, and send the same report to (the replacement for) ICANN (because they are spineless profiteering cowards). Currently most spamvertised domains get DNS from a very short list of DNS servers, sold by a very short list of registrars. When more than a certain number of complaints are received for the DNS domain, the registrar is required to shut down the domain or lose their accreditation.
However, ICANN can only regulate accreditation for registrars involved in certain TLDs. As we've seen before, ICANN recently approved the future sale of TLDs themselves, which throws all regulation out the window and opens the flood gates for new spamming opportunities (made possible by new total freedom from registrar regulations).
what would be the registrar's incentive to police that?
Well, for the next several months or more, ICANN has the ability to strip registrars of their accreditation. Once TLDs are sold then it all goes out the window and we'll see a new game unfold.
I agree, it's an arms race. Technology gets better, they get creative. The 'root economic problem' is no better. You can't stop people wanting to make money
I agree with you that far.
Either email has to fundamentally change on a technical level to defeat spam or 6 billion people need their brain re-wired.
However I see a third option on this. Another option would be to come between the spammer and their financing source - essentially attacking their margins. Spammers themselves are generally part of multi-layered machines, and each layer has its own cost and profit margins. One spot in particular that I have previously suggested cracking down on is the domain registrars that make spamvertising work.
In particular I am thinking of the registrars that sell the domains that are spamvertised (as opposed to the domains that produce the spam), as well as the domains that provide DNS for the spamvertised domains (which are generally owned by spammers, spamvertised profiteers, or others in cohorts with them). The spammers (and their customers) rely on those registrations because it allows them to move quickly from one ISP to another without loss of web service - even if the ISPs are on different continents.
Unfortunately, our friends at ICANN have chosen to make that work much easier - easier for the spammers, that is. When individuals will be able to buy their own TLDs, then the (very flimsy and largely toothless) regulations that we currently have on TLDs go right out the window. Spammers will be buying and selling lifetime domain registrations with obfuscated (or completely absent) registration data, making it impossible to determine where the money came from or is going.
Spammers send spam because it makes them money.
Agreed.
It makes them money because people are stupid
Not directly. The spammers themselves are paid by moderately smart people who are selling products online that are often of questionable legitimacy. While some of those customers are stupid, there are generally fairly crafty individuals making money off of the customers along the way.
The question is: why are people stupid, and how can we make them smarter?
You could ask the same question in the light of why 419 scams work, why old-school pyramid schemes work, etc. Money can make smart people pretty dumb at times.
I would argue that spam is an educational problem
You will not succeed in educating the problem away. Unless you want to impose some sort of requirements for users to access the internet (a la driver's licensure), you won't succeed at educating all the users and getting it to stick. It's like trying to design a better mouse trap; nature will just make a better mouse and then you're back to square one.
If you want to make a meaningful difference in the spam volume, you need to stop the money from flowing to the spammer.
What you can realistically do is increase the cost of getting those messages out.
The proposed "Spam Blocking Discovery" doesn't do jack shit to accomplish that goal. The people who install the spam filters aren't going to buy anything that was spamvertised, anyways. Meanwhile the spammers will continue to adjust their methods to get around the filters that are installed at the ISP level so that they can get their messages out to more people who would be interested.
This craptacular "Discovery" is just another round of whack-a-mole. Hopefully at some point people will finally get tired of this (and realize that they are getting nowhere by doing it) and actually work on the root economic problem, instead of just addressing the symptoms.
As long as there is money to be made in spam, spammers will continue to send spam. This "discovery" does nothing for that. Indeed it just dedicates more CPU time to trying to identify spam, which is just another way that internet users shoulder the cost of the profitability of spamming.
I've said it before, and I'll continue to say it - spam is an economic problem. Until something is done to address the money that spammers make, they will continue to find ways around these "effectively perfect" "discoveries".
People can brag about their filters, white-lists, black-lists, etc, all they want. But if this count is accurate, it gives a good indication of the true cost of spam. If 95% of email is spam, then that means only 1 email of every 20 sent is legit. Which could be extrapolated to mean that what you "pay" - by ISP charges, etc ... for your email is also paying for 19 spam messages.
Because in the end, servers around the world are using bandwidth, storage, CPU time, etc, to relay spam. And those servers have to be paid for somehow.
So keep that in mind the next time you think of installing a fancy spam filter to solve your problem; you're really just displacing one cost for another by using some of your own resources to deal with spam once it reaches your inbox. If you want to actually help address the spam problem, look to the root cause of the spam instead of continuing to address only the effects of it.
Spam is ultimately an economic problem
Have you been reading my journal articles? Not to mock you for being late to the party, but I've been discussing that for a while; I brought it up a few months ago as well.
Unfortunately I think you miss the boat:
Stricter punishments for spamming, punishment for ISPs that are particularly bad, better education of people who answer spam, better use of whitelists, blacklists and greylists are all techniques that can help. Every technique has problems. Hence the standard Slashdot response with the checkboxes. However, although each has flaws, together they can be very effective
Because ultimately none of those approaches actually address the economic issue that you and I both acknowledge. Simply inconveniencing the spammer won't accomplish much of anything; they will just send more spam. You'd be just as well off to advocate for their execution.
As I've said before, if you want to stop spam you need to stop the money from flowing. Cut off the spammers from the companies that they pay money to. Crack down on the registrars with some meaningful ICANN policies and watch the spam whither. If they can't do business, they won't make money and they'll find something else to do. Spammers are reliant on networks of DNS servers, registrars, ISPs, etc... Throw a wrench into that machinery and you could accomplish something towards brining it down.
... many spamvertised, spamvertising, and spamming-affiliated domains are registered through registrars overseas. And those overseas registrars (those who actually put something into the WHOIS fields) will either provide WHOIS obfuscation services to their customers, or it will be provided through another overseas company. In the end, we can legislate this all we want, it won't mean squat to the spammers in other countries.
That said, there are likely other reasons why this is useless; this was just the first one that came to mind for me about 1x10^-3 seconds after I read the headline. It is a shame that the judge who passed down this judgement was not knowledgeable enough to know the same.
Post it here, I'll check it for you.. Don't worry, Slashdot blanks your password.
My password is *******
See, blanked out!
Wow, I just tried to match "*******" against a list of bad passwords, and it generated a really long list of matches. Your password must be really bad!
Why not just hash out your password, and try to crack it with John The Ripper or something similar?
That would give you a good indication of how good it is.
Yes, but that wouldn't answer the question I am after with the password list. I want to know how common my passwords are, or if they are even similar to common passwords. 32M passwords is a pretty good set for checking against to answer that kind of question.
I think it would be interesting to search the passwords I use against the list. I like to think that my passwords are pretty good, but it would be interesting to see how similar they are to the passwords that were obtained and used in the study.
May be a defective device?
If by that you mean a defective T-mobile cell tower, I would say that is plausible. My wife and I, as well as some friends who pass through the area often, are all T-mobile customers and we all know the same dead spot.
I have friends who live in suburban developments near where I live, and I can't get any signal while at their house. Two blocks in one direction from there is 4 bars, one block in another direction is 3 bars (followed by a dead spot another block past). I don't give a damn about 3g on T-mobile (as a T-mobile customer) - I just want to be able to use my phone as a phone. I have a pretty decent signal at home, but I can't very well drive home from anywhere and hold signal all the way home.
And even worse, the coverage maps on T-mobile claim that I should get "good" coverage in these locations where I have no signal. And this is on a quad-band blackberry.
If it's a necessary product, then you should buy it. However most Chinese imports are disposable consumer crap you only think you need because the TV tells you so.
It surprises - and sometimes disgusts - me how often I don't have a choice but to buy Chinese. When I go to my favorite home improvement store, sometimes the plumbing parts I need for my house (at least if I want to have running water) are only available as Chinese-made.
Likewise with some car parts. I drive an American car, made in Michigan. But when I go to the auto parts store, I often end up buying parts that were made in China. Sometimes, when there is a choice of "good, better, best", the "best" one will have been made in Mexico or Japan. But often when there is only one part for the application, it is made in China, regardless of what store I buy it from.
So while there is plenty of disposable consumer crap coming from China, there are also necessary goods as well. At least if I want silly luxuries like running water in my home or brakes on my car.
... which spent that much just on strippers. But hey, it was really important to get that part right!
When did cheap become equal too good?
Never. However if you are one of many people who have seen their real income decrease over the past decade or so, you find yourself choosing between buying low-quality or not buying at all. And you'll have a hard time explaining that to your young child.