If anyone is surprised by this news, they need to think about what they think they know about spam.
Sure not many people like to see the unsolicited ads for herbal viagra and pirated copies of photoshop. But why do the spammers send them out in the first place? It isn't because they hate us, and it isn't just because they can send out billions of them at next-to-no cost to themselves.
They send them out because they make money doing it. Which means that someone, somewhere, is paying for spam as a service. Which means that even if 100 spammers were instantaneously taken offline and thrown into pound-me-in-the-ass prison, 100 new spammers would emerge to fill there places and likely send out even more spam.
If we want to stop spam, we need to remove the economic incentive. And throwing spammers in jail does not accomplish that. So naturally the spam epidemic was largely unchanged by these arrests.
They could have designed the botnet with a dead man's switch
Isn't it more likely that the PCs in their botnet were just swiftly taken over by somebody else's worm and are now pumping out spam on a different botnet?
Sure, there may be no incentive for spammers to cooperate with each other (and each others' botnets) but why would they want to poison the well?
That is an interesting idea, but what would be the incentive for spammers to cooperate?
I suspect it is more likely that the systems in their botnet - of which many are compromised windows PCs - were re-compromised by someone else's worm and is now doing someone else's botnet work.
Feel free to point out how you feel it is untrue, rather than just claiming it to be that way.
your making a habit of it
You're making a habit of bad grammar.
And what were you saying about grammar?
I was saying your grammar is terrible. And if you are the same AC, then it hasn't improved.
on previous versions (not sure about 10) the same version for different systems had different capabilities
If there is a grammatical error there, why don't you show it specifically rather than just posting an entire line you disagree with?
a nice touch of hypocrisy to your essentially flawed argument.
Your argument seems to revolve around repeating your claim of mine being lacking, while not ever showing how you reached that conclusion. Your argument doesn't exactly come across as flawless when you can't actually build it on anything other than repetition of your own fact-free opinion.
your eagerness to prove your devotion to the sect of the "Opener than Thou"
Not sure how you came to that conclusion but it would be kind of me to merely discard it as short-sighted.
There are plenty of things not to like about flash, beyond the fact that it is closed source.
lazy webmasters and web designers use it where regular html would do just fine (all-flash sites)
it is more resource intensive than most other interactive implementations for the web and can drag down client systems
on previous versions (not sure about 10) the same version for different systems had different capabilities
versions have often not identified correctly and would attempt to do things they could not
actual flash files on the web would ask for inappropriate versions as well
the information on the other side of the flash site often is not completely index-able or not index-able at all - hence many flash-only sites (and their content) are not found through google or any other search engine
very few flash-only sites bother to put up anything useful for those who cannot or will not use flash; this is particularly difficult for people who are visually impaired and rely on text-to-speech for reading on the web (a "download flash 17" screen is not helpful)
And those are just problems with flash that occur to me in the first few minutes. Something that was supposed to be an improvement for users has instead become a monster that has impaired communication for many users.
Actually, last I checked, Dreamweaver still makes more money for the company than Flash authoring tools do.
That I was not aware of, I don't have access to their sales or profit numbers. I just notice that every time I look at more sites on the web, I find yet more that are mostly or entirely flash. And unless I am mistaken, Adobe profits from essentially all sites that use flash, while there are plenty of non-flash sites that Adobe makes no money from.
And of course there is plenty of usable code that can be written and implemented without any Adobe tools at all.
It appears that all they did was ping every address they could, and then track which addresses responded and which ones did not. Consdiering how many systems are either configured to not respond to ping, or sit behind firewalls that stop the ping from getting through, this seems like a method of marginal value.
Wouldn't there be a better way to query the addresses than this? In some areas, I suspect checking DNS records might be more informative if what you are looking for is which addresses are unused (though of course DNS isn't mandatory either).
Does the FTC have the ability to freeze overseas funds, though? I could be wrong but I don't see any way that they could do that. And the article mentioned that the credit card transactions were processed overseas and then an online system was used to funnel the money around.
Which would make it seem to me to be outside the jurisdiction of any American office. Though this is one of those times where I would like to be proven wrong...
Have they really accomplished much here? If we RTFA (I know, we don't do that here on slashdot), there is a lot of hype and not a lot of clear progress. It looks like about half of the article is information that spamhaus already likely has. And if the botnet was ordered shutdown by an IL court, I'm not sure what use that would likely be.
I could see it being a rather difficult contest under the terms "cannot divert your eyes" if you have no say in the movies. Thelma and Louise are cinematic masterworks when compared to some othersthat simplyshouldn't even beconsidered fit for human consumption. Those even make notoriously badscience fictionmovies from the days before the day look great. If any of those beforementioned instruments of torture came up in the rotation I would do anything humanly possible to escape the contest.
Two? I'd say one and a half, at best. Considering how she pretty well made herself look like a feminine facsimile of what McCain has made himself into, there wasn't enough "character" in her to qualify as a fully unique character.
Interesting that a search for "maverick" doesn't turn up any of the "mavericks" matches. And the search box says to use anything 3 letters long or longer...
I will have to watch the debate again, but I'm pretty sure Palin referred to herself as a "maverick" at least once in the debate, but I cannot find it by using the tool to search for "maverick".
The historical context of these two men is important. In 1908 the Democratic party wanted to teach christian principles in school (instead of evolution), and the Republican party wanted to work to ensure equal rights and opportunities for all.
How on earth is a dead hard drive offtopic when the topic is IT? Unless this administrator in question runs his entire operation with SSD's, he likely has some dead hard drives sitting around somewhere.
And going hands-on is exactly the right way to make your work relevant to children. No kid wants to sit through a power point talk.
That all depends on how you define the battle field. Many were captured in places where no battles were being fought.
They are prisoners of war.
And just what war are you talking about? And if they were prisoners of war, then they could at least expect to be released at the conclusion of the war.
Except that we are not in a war that has a defined end point. Really, we aren't in a war at all because there is no opposing state.
The purpose is to keep them from returning to the battle field.
Again, what battle field? They weren't all captured in combat of any sort. Many were not taken from anything that resembles a battle field.
Should we have charged captured Germans in WWII?
Is there a conflict anywhere involving the US that resembles WWII in even the slightest?
Of course not.
In WWII when Germans were captured in Europe it was well understood the terms of their capture and when they would be released.
And no great numbers of them were shipped to the other side of the hemisphere.
The logical result of what you seem to be proposing is that the military would stop taking prisoners altogether.
No. My proposal is that they actually pay attention to who they capture, and that they actually adhere to the Geneva conventions for dealing with who they capture.
And being as there is no war, those captured are nothing more than suspected criminals who need to be tried or released. Instead the US government has held prisoners for several years with no clear intent of ever doing anything with them beyond holding them until the end of time.
These beliefs are only frightening to the naive or ignorant.
Insulting me will get you nowhere.
The US is in a huge moral deficit with those imprisoned at Guantanamo and elsewhere. People from all over the world have been detained without rights to the due process that are afforded to other criminals. The government has turned their noses at human rights and the Geneva conventions. If you think for a minute that we are in any way better than any second or third world country in treatment of foreign prisoners, you aren't paying enough attention to how we have trampled all over basic human rights at Guantanamo.
But could it be that Dodge wanted to cleanse it from their palette to start on a new sports car? That Dodge EV is certainly nothing like the old General Motors EV1 that was so loved by its lessees when it was available as a plug-in electric vehicle.
Slashdot Mirror
That is an interesting idea, but what would be the incentive for spammers to cooperate?
A couple of bullets to the back of their head! Of course, they won't exactly cooperate after that, but the next spammer will.
Actually I was referring to whether or not there was any incentive for the spammers to cooperate with each other. I read the previous statement
If they sent the keys to that botnet via email.
To be asking whether one spammer sent botnet control to another.
If anyone is surprised by this news, they need to think about what they think they know about spam.
Sure not many people like to see the unsolicited ads for herbal viagra and pirated copies of photoshop. But why do the spammers send them out in the first place? It isn't because they hate us, and it isn't just because they can send out billions of them at next-to-no cost to themselves.
They send them out because they make money doing it. Which means that someone, somewhere, is paying for spam as a service. Which means that even if 100 spammers were instantaneously taken offline and thrown into pound-me-in-the-ass prison, 100 new spammers would emerge to fill there places and likely send out even more spam.
If we want to stop spam, we need to remove the economic incentive. And throwing spammers in jail does not accomplish that. So naturally the spam epidemic was largely unchanged by these arrests.
They could have designed the botnet with a dead man's switch
Isn't it more likely that the PCs in their botnet were just swiftly taken over by somebody else's worm and are now pumping out spam on a different botnet?
Sure, there may be no incentive for spammers to cooperate with each other (and each others' botnets) but why would they want to poison the well?
If they sent the keys to that botnet via email.
That is an interesting idea, but what would be the incentive for spammers to cooperate?
I suspect it is more likely that the systems in their botnet - of which many are compromised windows PCs - were re-compromised by someone else's worm and is now doing someone else's botnet work.
Like many true geeks, I still have old crap on 5.25 floppies. However, I would rather not build up an old 486 to do it.
I've heard of a way to frankenstein a 5.25 floppy to make it work over USB - does anyone have the method? I have had no luck finding it myself.
or have a large number of friends
This is slashdot we're talking on, here. For some its an accomplishment to have a friend (mother excluded of course).
what I did in the bathroom of the Minneapolisâ"St. Paul International Airport
at least be the recipient of a thorough sweating by the FBI, for dubious behavior in a large American airport
I splashed water on my face to mimic sweat
put on a coat (it was a summer day)
Sound like this could be someone trying to test the security system, or it could be a friend of this guy
Much of what you've just pointed out is untrue
Feel free to point out how you feel it is untrue, rather than just claiming it to be that way.
your making a habit of it
You're making a habit of bad grammar.
And what were you saying about grammar?
I was saying your grammar is terrible. And if you are the same AC, then it hasn't improved.
on previous versions (not sure about 10) the same version for different systems had different capabilities
If there is a grammatical error there, why don't you show it specifically rather than just posting an entire line you disagree with?
a nice touch of hypocrisy to your essentially flawed argument.
Your argument seems to revolve around repeating your claim of mine being lacking, while not ever showing how you reached that conclusion. Your argument doesn't exactly come across as flawless when you can't actually build it on anything other than repetition of your own fact-free opinion.
If Flash weren't available, people who want ugly, useless websites would use something else
I agree with that statement.
However, there are plenty of businesses who wanted to setup functional and useful websites using flash, and ended up with something else.
your eagerness to prove your devotion to the sect of the "Opener than Thou"
Not sure how you came to that conclusion but it would be kind of me to merely discard it as short-sighted.
There are plenty of things not to like about flash, beyond the fact that it is closed source.
And those are just problems with flash that occur to me in the first few minutes. Something that was supposed to be an improvement for users has instead become a monster that has impaired communication for many users.
You position contrasts nicely
Your grammar contrasts even more.
Actually, last I checked, Dreamweaver still makes more money for the company than Flash authoring tools do.
That I was not aware of, I don't have access to their sales or profit numbers. I just notice that every time I look at more sites on the web, I find yet more that are mostly or entirely flash. And unless I am mistaken, Adobe profits from essentially all sites that use flash, while there are plenty of non-flash sites that Adobe makes no money from.
And of course there is plenty of usable code that can be written and implemented without any Adobe tools at all.
Adobe would just encourage more webmasters to write actual code instead of relying on flash for their entire websites.
But of course there wouldn't be much profit incentive for Adobe to do such a thing...
It appears that all they did was ping every address they could, and then track which addresses responded and which ones did not. Consdiering how many systems are either configured to not respond to ping, or sit behind firewalls that stop the ping from getting through, this seems like a method of marginal value.
Wouldn't there be a better way to query the addresses than this? In some areas, I suspect checking DNS records might be more informative if what you are looking for is which addresses are unused (though of course DNS isn't mandatory either).
They froze funds.
Does the FTC have the ability to freeze overseas funds, though? I could be wrong but I don't see any way that they could do that. And the article mentioned that the credit card transactions were processed overseas and then an online system was used to funnel the money around.
Which would make it seem to me to be outside the jurisdiction of any American office. Though this is one of those times where I would like to be proven wrong...
Have they really accomplished much here? If we RTFA (I know, we don't do that here on slashdot), there is a lot of hype and not a lot of clear progress. It looks like about half of the article is information that spamhaus already likely has. And if the botnet was ordered shutdown by an IL court, I'm not sure what use that would likely be.
Wow, and I remember when old flight sims would just crash my computer...
I could see it being a rather difficult contest under the terms "cannot divert your eyes" if you have no say in the movies. Thelma and Louise are cinematic masterworks when compared to some others that simply shouldn't even be considered fit for human consumption. Those even make notoriously bad science fiction movies from the days before the day look great. If any of those beforementioned instruments of torture came up in the rotation I would do anything humanly possible to escape the contest.
Ummm..last I knew a maverick was a wild horse-do we want a wild horse in the White House?
Wild horses or not, I'm not interested in seeing those two in the White House.
Rolling Stone has an interesting article about John McCain, the make-believe maverick and how he came to claim that title.
McCain and Palin are just two characters
Two? I'd say one and a half, at best. Considering how she pretty well made herself look like a feminine facsimile of what McCain has made himself into, there wasn't enough "character" in her to qualify as a fully unique character.
It claims two results for "mavericks",
Interesting that a search for "maverick" doesn't turn up any of the "mavericks" matches. And the search box says to use anything 3 letters long or longer...
I will have to watch the debate again, but I'm pretty sure Palin referred to herself as a "maverick" at least once in the debate, but I cannot find it by using the tool to search for "maverick".
The historical context of these two men is important. In 1908 the Democratic party wanted to teach christian principles in school (instead of evolution), and the Republican party wanted to work to ensure equal rights and opportunities for all.
How on earth is a dead hard drive offtopic when the topic is IT? Unless this administrator in question runs his entire operation with SSD's, he likely has some dead hard drives sitting around somewhere.
And going hands-on is exactly the right way to make your work relevant to children. No kid wants to sit through a power point talk.
These people were captured on the battle field.
That all depends on how you define the battle field. Many were captured in places where no battles were being fought.
They are prisoners of war.
And just what war are you talking about? And if they were prisoners of war, then they could at least expect to be released at the conclusion of the war.
Except that we are not in a war that has a defined end point. Really, we aren't in a war at all because there is no opposing state.
The purpose is to keep them from returning to the battle field.
Again, what battle field? They weren't all captured in combat of any sort. Many were not taken from anything that resembles a battle field.
Should we have charged captured Germans in WWII?
Is there a conflict anywhere involving the US that resembles WWII in even the slightest?
Of course not.
In WWII when Germans were captured in Europe it was well understood the terms of their capture and when they would be released.
And no great numbers of them were shipped to the other side of the hemisphere.
The logical result of what you seem to be proposing is that the military would stop taking prisoners altogether.
No. My proposal is that they actually pay attention to who they capture, and that they actually adhere to the Geneva conventions for dealing with who they capture.
And being as there is no war, those captured are nothing more than suspected criminals who need to be tried or released. Instead the US government has held prisoners for several years with no clear intent of ever doing anything with them beyond holding them until the end of time.
These beliefs are only frightening to the naive or ignorant.
Insulting me will get you nowhere.
The US is in a huge moral deficit with those imprisoned at Guantanamo and elsewhere. People from all over the world have been detained without rights to the due process that are afforded to other criminals. The government has turned their noses at human rights and the Geneva conventions. If you think for a minute that we are in any way better than any second or third world country in treatment of foreign prisoners, you aren't paying enough attention to how we have trampled all over basic human rights at Guantanamo.
A while ago Dodge announced they would sell the Viper division. many people expected it was due only to weak sales (the Corvette crushes it in sales every year).
But could it be that Dodge wanted to cleanse it from their palette to start on a new sports car? That Dodge EV is certainly nothing like the old General Motors EV1 that was so loved by its lessees when it was available as a plug-in electric vehicle.