>> VBScript compared to perl/bash etc.? lol. >Perl works just fine with Windows Script Host if that is your >preference. Bash scripts are akin to writing batch files, ugly.
You obviously have never written a sophisticated bash script or batch file. There is a huge amount of difference.
>Compared to UNIX instrumentation tools like SNMP? lol x2. >>Yes, compared to SNMP. I can query/change programs, OS settings, >>drivers, services, users, etc. using SQL in about 2 lines of >>code. You?
I can query and change program configuration with an editor without even bothering with code. You?
>>Try remote admining your Windows box from a PDA on a train on your way >>to work, fella. >There are RDP clients for PDAs, fella.
Sure, but *for any service on the machine*? Forget it. Windows remote admin is a joke -- if it weren't, Windows machines wouldn't require onsite admins, and they always do. Linux machines *routinely* run without an admin being present for years at a time.
If you did your response formatting on a remote Windows machine, it is even more of a joke.
You'd have to run an audit to confirm the absence of anything. That's what an audit is - collecting info on what's running on the machines. Just *saying* there's nothing that is in violation isn't good enough.
I don't know where you live, but in the United States we have something called search warrants that require probable cause. Absent sworn and perjured testimony falsifying that probable cause, what could compel someone to let the BSA in?
Is there a lower risk of a BSA audit if you run Linux? Wouldn't the fact that you are buying a bunch of Windowless PCs be more likely to attract the BSA's attention?
I'm not saying that's a reason to stay with Windows, but how do you figure you are immune from audits by running Linux?
How do you figure the BSA can run an audit if you have no proprietary-license software running on your machines?
Apparently you don't read. I am using SPEWS data and have been continuously. I just stopped using relays.osirusoft.com, that's all. Osirusoft != SPEWS.
You've obviously never run a mail server that has actual human customers on it.
Having run them since 1988 when ucbvax!foosystem!user was still a common form of
address, I would have to differ with that. So would the tens of thousands of users
who have received and sent mail on systems I have run.
Ever get one of those rejection messages from Osirusoft and try to figure out what to do next? (answer: there's nothing you can do except repent.)
No, I have not. I am abuse contact for hundreds of domains, and the number of spam complaints I get per year can be counted on my 21 appendages. I have never had a system listed on a blacklist other than one on ORBS several years ago.
Now imagine an end user, or a customer getting one of those. This is improving e-mail? And the server admin has no ability whatsoever to fix it, other than to try and convince the jackboots at SPEWS or some other dipshit little club that they've mnade a mistake.
They rarely have made a mistake *by their criteria*. When they have, they correct it quickly.
But don't look for sympathy from me. My customers got their mail yesterday, with about 90% of the spam filtered out through more tactful means.
Guess what? Mine got their email too. I had already removed
relays.osirusoft.com due to the ongoing DDoS attacks and changed over to
a local DNSBL off of SPEWS data.
The phones in customer service didn't light up like a Christmas tree, and I didn't have to explain to the CEO why a message from his mother resulted in a cryptic rejection notice.
IP blacklisting is for lazy pricks and idiots who couldn't figure out that this was going to happen someday.
So say you. I had no problems, and my customers had 99% of their spam miss their
inbox. At least the ones who are on systems protected by blocking. The *only* spam
complaints I get are on the systems which won't run SBL/SPEWS/*proxies* lists, and
they go like this:
I beg to differ. I work for one and constantly have to deal with
spews bs, on many occasions, for some for some REALLY reaching
spam associations.
If you constantly have to deal with SPEWS BS, that means you constantly
have spammers using your services for more than a few hours in a row.
That means you are part of the problem -- and your opinion against SPEWS
is because it inconveniences you and you are apparently too lazy to
thoroughly purge them from your systems.
Not surprising, considering you can't seem to get it together to format a reply.
No, it really isn't necessary to block 65536 ip addresses to stop spam from one person, particularly when x block of address space being used (in some cases as small as a/30) is swip'd, identifiable, and can be completely isolated from the rest of the subnet. Spews doesn't pay any attention to this at all.
Non-sequiteur. You are re-advancing the idea that you should try to surgically block spam, i.e. play whack-a-mole and try to block only the spammer until they are disconnected and them rinse and repeat.
No, SPEWS is out to get clueless, complicit, or malicious ISPs like the ones you work for -- the ones who won't kill spammers root and branch at a high level of priority when they are found. Your ISP is like a restaurant who leaves mayonnaise out -- "Oh, it won't hurt to wait until tomorrow to stop those spammers". Phooey.
Sure, and if there's one person dealing drugs in a house, then all occupants of the building should all be killed.
Are all anti-blocklist people logic-impaired? Do you think your arguments make sense?
Equating killing with the rejection of an email message is way over the top.
The proper analogy would be that you refused a call from a caller with caller ID indicating they were using the phone lines of a drug dealer. That's all. Killing? Are you insane?
Even more insane are the people who would mod something like that up. I have have lost an incredible amount of respect for the users of Slashdot today.
What makes you think they don't? Most U.S. based ISPs don't require anything more than enough complaints with reasonable evidence to shut spammers down.
And most US-based ISPs are not in the blacklists, either.
The ones who *do* have a problem shutting down spammers because of cluelessness, complicity, or malice have constant problems with blacklists.
It's really unnecessary to block an entire/24 or/16 if you think that's what is necessary to get attention.
You make that statement, but it it is obviously false to fact. That measure was taken precisely because blocking only spam sources did not work; no one allows spam to be *sourced* from their network any more.
Spamcop, ordb, dsbl, & maps are just great and actually are bold enough to let the world know who they are and what they are doing. Spews takes it WAY too far, are completely irresponsible, are the worst chickenhawks on the net, and completely ineffective.
Again you make statements that are false to fact in every case except SpamCop. MAPS is the epitome of not-effective; but the others you mention are locking a barn door that doesn't have any horses behind it; open relay is not the problem any more.
Just for argument's sake, a couple years back, I used osirusoft for about a month with not even a dent in the amount of crap I received in my inbox. But did lose a lot of email from people that should have never been associated with their listings. This cost me time and money.
I simply don't believe you, sir. I used Osirusoft.com for over one year, and never received a single complaint from one of my thousands of users. I *did* receive complaints about the spam load from users on systems which were not protected by relays.osirusoft.com; and when that protection was added those complaints dropped off to nothing. Besides just SPEWS, relays.osirusoft.com included the SBL, its own open relays list, and an open proxies list for most of that time. It was proven to block large quantities of spam, so your "didn't make a dent" is an obvious lie.
... and walked onto OSU's campus, closed my eyes, and started spraying bullets around everywhere, because hey, some of them were the rioters we've all heard so much about. Yeah, I killed a few non-rioters, but, hey, it'll just make the famlies of the students I killed ask for harsher punishments of the rioters. And I didn't decide to kill anyone, ballistic physics did!
You are logic-impaired.
If you used a spam blocklist, you refused a call from someone with a caller ID that indicated they were representatives of your local Mafia fence.
The problem is that collective IP blacklisting is so mistake-prone that it's just unacceptable. I had a server, one that hosted e-mail for several domains (none of which do anything remotely spam-like), and somebody forged the IP in a header, and the server got into some darned blacklist based on three anonymous "reports". Thankfully, most people are smart enough to use better anti-spam measures such as keyword or header filtering, which don't cede control to external mobs.
Apparently you are dumb enough to believe this spammer claptrap.
There are three basic choices available for admins running mail servers in today's spam flood.
1. Little or weak filtering or blocking means communications are lost as
people have scan-and-delete errors due to battle fatigue from their
daily fight with spam in their mailbox. Much legitimate email is
lost, and it is lost and *neither party knows it was never read*.
This collateral damage is spread over every part of the net,
spam-friendly or no.
2. Aggressive filtering and tagging means that legitimate communications
are tagged as false-positives. People usually don't scan their spam
folders carefully, because such a high percentage is spam. Again,
legitimate email is lost and *neither party knows it was never read*.
This collateral damage is spread over every part of the net,
spam-friendly or no.
3. Aggressive blocklisting and bouncing causes some legitimate email to
be lost. However, that collateral damage is limited to spam-friendly
parts of the Internet. The sender knows full well it was not read and
can re-send the message via another channel if it is important. This
knowledge also allows them to take action to correct blocking errors;
and heightens awareness of who is not doing their part to fight spam.
To me, selecting #3 is a no-brainer. When legitimate email gets lost, the sender knows it was not received. And it is almost all lost from networks participating in the massive denial of service attack on the Internet at large that is spam.
AOL, for example, does a simply outstanding job of making sure spam is not sourced from their network. They don't allow spam hosting of any kind. I *never* want to lose mail from them. Same with Earthlink, MSN, and Hotmail. They deserve that consideration due to their effort. If my users lose mail from them due to scan and delete errors, I have not done my job. I would much rather have them lose email from the people who pay the spam-friendly providers.
When my newsletter (confirmed Opt-in for the NANAE people who may be reading) goes out every Tuesday and 8,000 people open it, how am I supposed to deal with these filters DDoSing my site?
That aside, I've always wondered why people get so upset over spam. It's not that hard to hit the delete button. I get about 10 spam mails a day. It takes about 1/2 a second to read the subject, realize it's spam, and hit the delete button. Over the course of a year, I lose 30 minutes. That's not such a big deal to me.
I am trying to decide if you are dumb or a spammer trying the "just hit delete" thing yet again.
If everyone just hits delete, and no one blocks, filters, or complains, spam climbs to even more obscene levels. Your "thirty minutes a year" turns into thirty minutes a month, then a week, then a day.....
Bottom line is, spam needs to stop. The people who complain and blacklist are the only thing keeping spam down to even close to manageable levels. If everyone "just hit delete", email would be completely useless.
A few weeks ago, I happened to see their advertisement promising "99.999% uptime". The subsequent expulsion of my carbonated beverage through my nose injured my delicate nasal passages and frightened my cat.
99.999% uptime is 5 minutes and 15 seconds of downtime per year.
Obviously they don't count the dozen reboots you have to do to install any software or hardware; or that the typical Windows troubleshooting procedure requires at least one reboot. A completely untouched and unchanged system with completely bug-free software must be a condition of that number.
It's perfectly possible for someone to get unsolicited mail from
someone, ask them to not mail them again, and get compliance for that
request, while never revealing to the recipient who the sender is..
And we would be expected to do that once for each of several million companies that
have the capacity to send email? Along with changes of management and "mysterious
database problems"? Bah. Anyone who thinks that unsolicited
bulk email is *ever* correct is either a criminal or criminally stupid.
IP blocks that allow spam are like countries which sponsor turn a blind
eye to terrorism. If they refuse to stop their spammers, then their
citizens must suffer by not being able to send email.
Oh please. Grow up.
Nothing but ad hominem I see from you.
-- Whey you fly planes into buildings, you get bombs dropped on you.
-- When you spam, you can't send email.
Seems like an appropriate
measured response. All analogies vary in degree. We may at one point
get to where you can invoke Godwin at the mention of terrorism, but
we aren't there yet. 8-)
What doesn't differ is that terrorists do it against innocent people and
then hide, with no other effective measures than shunning to be taken
against them. So do spammers.
Perhaps having your concentration broken doesn't interfere with your
livelihood -- judging from your response you seem to want to tear
down rather than build. Tearing down takes little attention, building
takes lots.
If you had to preauthorize it, it wouldn't be email. It wouldn't be simple.
What is simple is this -- don't send email to someone unless either:
It is agreed to beforehand, or...
It can reasonably be expected to be of mutual benefit.
That is the simple position of MAPS, and I agree with it.
Personally, I favor a 5-penny charge for every email that is sent, with no bulk discount. People who didn't want to pay it could use ICQ; and it would stop spammers dead in their tracks.
I am afraid I have to disagree with the latest EFF position paper. So
much so that my future contributions to the EFF will come under review.
Spammers are like terrorists. They prevent me from using email like I
want to, steal my time, and interfere with legitimate traffic. By
distracting me with misleading subject lines and addresses, they
interfere with my livelihood, as my work requires intense periods of
concentration.
IP blocks that allow spam are like countries which sponsor turn a blind
eye to terrorism. If they refuse to stop their spammers, then their
citizens must suffer by not being able to send email.
For instance, no one sending from China can send me email. Why? Because
China lets spammers run amok. If I allowed email from China, I would
receive 100 more spam emails a week. I know; I have tried it.
Filtering is a non-issue. The best filters that run no significant
chance of blocking legitimate email are those of AOL, and we know how
ineffective those are.
Brightmail makes me jump through hoops -- I don't want to spend my time
every day with it.
Spammers are terrorists, and IP blocks that allow spam should be treated
like countries which harbor terrorists. Forcing an airport to accept
airplanes (or even snail mail nowadays) originating in Afghanistan is
sheer stupidity; why is email any different?
To the people who say "it only takes a couple of seconds to delete, it
is worth it" I say -- WHO ARE YOU TO TELL ME WHAT TO DO WITH MY TIME?
Let people sign up for AOL if they want all legitimate mail at the cost
of mindnumbingly time-wasting stupidity.
You ignore the fact that Windows either enforces or encourages access by the regular user to all files and resources. As long as they don't make it a pain to run as "Administrator" (or horrors, the monolithic permissions of Win9x/ME) then their model sucks.
The other problem is that reinstalling and rebooting is considered to be a valid mechanism for doing things. As long as you do that, security is problematic; the more reboots the less secure the machine is, no matter the OS. Running all of your init procedures repeatedly invites a trojan.
Isn't it interesting that one of the most common criticisms of free software (insufficient/clumbsy UI) also exists in expensive commercial software?
It is the complaint about almost every bit of software. As an author myself, I would place it second to the docs as the numero uno source of complaints.
Both docs and UI are excruciatingly boring grunt work, but even that would be acceptable if you received any thanks for it. 8-) The thanks seems to come from the wizzy features.
The really disappointing thing about doing docs is even if you do them, many of the users have not progressed far enough to use grep(1) or a similar search facility to look for text. So you receive complaints even if the docs exist and can be found.
Is this realy a good idea? Especialy since there is a root exploit for every known version of perl in existance? Perl doesnt and will never run on my machine.
Another constructive ****** user, no doubt.
Perl runs on *at least* 50% of the Internet servers in the world, in some capacity or another. Now if there was a root exploit for every known version don't you think we would have heard about it in the news by now?
Good commenting style is as difficult to develop as good coding practices (the two really go hand in hand). Mental discipline (did you ever say to yourself "I'll go back and comment it later"? Did you?), clear exposition of an algorithm (no, the code is not a clear exposition -- remember code is CODE, it's meant for a stupid machine, not an intelligent human), maintainability, etc. Comments should be written in complete sentences wherever possible. Don't comment like this:
/*
* this comment
* is pretty
* but hard to format again
* when you change it
*/
Rather, write them like this:
/* This comment is a paragraph. Any text editor can reformat this comment after you change it. */
If you have a reasonable programmer's editor this is not necessary. My favorite, vim, allows you to simply highlight the block and press a key. Any comment with a standard beginning character (#, *, >, etc.) will be reformatted with the quoting character re-inserted appropriately. It is trivial to write a filter to do this -- use your favorite programming language and comment it well if you like. 8-)
This is self-regulating -- feedback like this causes companies to reduce or improve the targeting of their mailings. Economic incentive works well in this way.
Actually, I greatly prefer junk postal mail to spam email.
Delivered once per day in one place.
Economic incentive (lower cost of bulk rate) assures that non-important messages will be readily identifiable by the postmark.
Can be taken to the toilet for reading if I haven't trashed it the moment I saw it.
If they did this once a year, it won't be a big deal, but if they do it every month it would be a PITA.
Well, if EBay is the only company you deal with, I agree that it is not that big a deal. However....
I deal with dozens of different companies, and over time have purchased from hundreds. If every damn one of them sent me one or two of these a year, it would be a big problem.
Barnes and Noble is amongst the most rude, IMHO. It was confided to me that if you haven't ordered from them for three months, they figure they have lost you and that they may as well spam you against your preference in case you have forgotten them and will then order. If every company operated this way, email would be unusable.
That is why a preference once expressed should remain the preference forever. If you screw up the database and spam your customers you should be sanctioned like any two-bit MMFer.
Slashdot Mirror
>> VBScript compared to perl/bash etc.? lol.
>Perl works just fine with Windows Script Host if that is your
>preference. Bash scripts are akin to writing batch files, ugly.
You obviously have never written a sophisticated bash script or batch
file. There is a huge amount of difference.
>Compared to UNIX instrumentation tools like SNMP? lol x2.
>>Yes, compared to SNMP. I can query/change programs, OS settings,
>>drivers, services, users, etc. using SQL in about 2 lines of
>>code. You?
I can query and change program configuration with an editor
without even bothering with code. You?
>>Try remote admining your Windows box from a PDA on a train on your way
>>to work, fella.
>There are RDP clients for PDAs, fella.
Sure, but *for any service on the machine*? Forget it. Windows remote
admin is a joke -- if it weren't, Windows machines wouldn't require
onsite admins, and they always do. Linux machines *routinely* run
without an admin being present for years at a time.
If you did your response formatting on a remote Windows machine,
it is even more of a joke.
You'd have to run an audit to confirm the absence of anything. That's what an audit is - collecting info on what's running on the machines. Just *saying* there's nothing that is in violation isn't good enough.
I don't know where you live, but in the United States we have something called search warrants that require probable cause. Absent sworn and perjured testimony falsifying that probable cause, what could compel someone to let the BSA in?
Is there a lower risk of a BSA audit if you run Linux? Wouldn't the fact that you are buying a bunch of Windowless PCs be more likely to attract the BSA's attention?
I'm not saying that's a reason to stay with Windows, but how do you figure you are immune from audits by running Linux?
How do you figure the BSA can run an audit if you have no proprietary-license software running on your machines?
>> Mine got their email too.
>Yeah... BECAUSE YOU TURNED OFF SPEWS!
Apparently you don't read. I am using SPEWS data and have been continuously. I just stopped using relays.osirusoft.com, that's all. Osirusoft != SPEWS.
Having run them since 1988 when ucbvax!foosystem!user was still a common form of address, I would have to differ with that. So would the tens of thousands of users who have received and sent mail on systems I have run.
Ever get one of those rejection messages from Osirusoft and try to figure out what to do next? (answer: there's nothing you can do except repent.)
No, I have not. I am abuse contact for hundreds of domains, and the number of spam complaints I get per year can be counted on my 21 appendages. I have never had a system listed on a blacklist other than one on ORBS several years ago.
Now imagine an end user, or a customer getting one of those. This is improving e-mail? And the server admin has no ability whatsoever to fix it, other than to try and convince the jackboots at SPEWS or some other dipshit little club that they've mnade a mistake.
They rarely have made a mistake *by their criteria*. When they have, they correct it quickly.
But don't look for sympathy from me. My customers got their mail yesterday, with about 90% of the spam filtered out through more tactful means.
Guess what? Mine got their email too. I had already removed relays.osirusoft.com due to the ongoing DDoS attacks and changed over to a local DNSBL off of SPEWS data.
The phones in customer service didn't light up like a Christmas tree, and I didn't have to explain to the CEO why a message from his mother resulted in a cryptic rejection notice. IP blacklisting is for lazy pricks and idiots who couldn't figure out that this was going to happen someday.
So say you. I had no problems, and my customers had 99% of their spam miss their inbox. At least the ones who are on systems protected by blocking. The *only* spam complaints I get are on the systems which won't run SBL/SPEWS/*proxies* lists, and they go like this:
Can't you do something about all the spam?
If you constantly have to deal with SPEWS BS, that means you constantly have spammers using your services for more than a few hours in a row. That means you are part of the problem -- and your opinion against SPEWS is because it inconveniences you and you are apparently too lazy to thoroughly purge them from your systems.
Not surprising, considering you can't seem to get it together to format a reply.
No, it really isn't necessary to block 65536 ip addresses to stop spam from one person, particularly when x block of address space being used (in some cases as small as aNon-sequiteur. You are re-advancing the idea that you should try to surgically block spam, i.e. play whack-a-mole and try to block only the spammer until they are disconnected and them rinse and repeat.
No, SPEWS is out to get clueless, complicit, or malicious ISPs like the ones you work for -- the ones who won't kill spammers root and branch at a high level of priority when they are found. Your ISP is like a restaurant who leaves mayonnaise out -- "Oh, it won't hurt to wait until tomorrow to stop those spammers". Phooey.
Sure, and if there's one person dealing drugs in a house, then all occupants of the building should all be killed.
Are all anti-blocklist people logic-impaired? Do you think your arguments make sense?
Equating killing with the rejection of an email message is way over the top.
The proper analogy would be that you refused a call from a caller with caller ID indicating they were using the phone lines of a drug dealer. That's all. Killing? Are you insane?
Even more insane are the people who would mod something like that up. I have have lost an incredible amount of respect for the users of Slashdot today.
What makes you think they don't? Most U.S. based ISPs don't require anything more than enough complaints with reasonable evidence to shut spammers down.
/24 or /16 if you think that's what is necessary to get attention.
And most US-based ISPs are not in the blacklists, either.
The ones who *do* have a problem shutting down spammers because of cluelessness, complicity, or malice have constant problems with blacklists.
It's really unnecessary to block an entire
You make that statement, but it it is obviously false to fact. That measure was taken precisely because blocking only spam sources did not work; no one allows spam to be *sourced* from their network any more.
Spamcop, ordb, dsbl, & maps are just great and actually are bold enough to let the world know who they are and what they are doing. Spews takes it WAY too far, are completely irresponsible, are the worst chickenhawks on the net, and completely ineffective.
Again you make statements that are false to fact in every case except SpamCop. MAPS is the epitome of not-effective; but the others you mention are locking a barn door that doesn't have any horses behind it; open relay is not the problem any more.
Just for argument's sake, a couple years back, I used osirusoft for about a month with not even a dent in the amount of crap I received in my inbox. But did lose a lot of email from people that should have never been associated with their listings. This cost me time and money.
I simply don't believe you, sir. I used Osirusoft.com for over one year, and never received a single complaint from one of my thousands of users. I *did* receive complaints about the spam load from users on systems which were not protected by relays.osirusoft.com; and when that protection was added those complaints dropped off to nothing. Besides just SPEWS, relays.osirusoft.com included the SBL, its own open relays list, and an open proxies list for most of that time. It was proven to block large quantities of spam, so your "didn't make a dent" is an obvious lie.
You are logic-impaired.
If you used a spam blocklist, you refused a call
from someone with a caller ID that indicated they were representatives of your local Mafia fence.
The problem is that collective IP blacklisting is so mistake-prone that it's just unacceptable. I had a server, one that hosted e-mail for several domains (none of which do anything remotely spam-like), and somebody forged the IP in a header, and the server got into some darned blacklist based on three anonymous "reports". Thankfully, most people are smart enough to use better anti-spam measures such as keyword or header filtering, which don't cede control to external mobs.
Apparently you are dumb enough to believe this spammer claptrap.
There are three basic choices available for admins running mail servers in today's spam flood.
1. Little or weak filtering or blocking means communications are lost as
people have scan-and-delete errors due to battle fatigue from their
daily fight with spam in their mailbox. Much legitimate email is
lost, and it is lost and *neither party knows it was never read*.
This collateral damage is spread over every part of the net,
spam-friendly or no.
2. Aggressive filtering and tagging means that legitimate communications
are tagged as false-positives. People usually don't scan their spam
folders carefully, because such a high percentage is spam. Again,
legitimate email is lost and *neither party knows it was never read*.
This collateral damage is spread over every part of the net,
spam-friendly or no.
3. Aggressive blocklisting and bouncing causes some legitimate email to
be lost. However, that collateral damage is limited to spam-friendly
parts of the Internet. The sender knows full well it was not read and
can re-send the message via another channel if it is important. This
knowledge also allows them to take action to correct blocking errors;
and heightens awareness of who is not doing their part to fight spam.
To me, selecting #3 is a no-brainer. When legitimate email gets lost,
the sender knows it was not received. And it is almost all lost from
networks participating in the massive denial of service attack on the
Internet at large that is spam.
AOL, for example, does a simply outstanding job of making sure spam is
not sourced from their network. They don't allow spam hosting of any
kind. I *never* want to lose mail from them. Same with Earthlink, MSN,
and Hotmail. They deserve that consideration due to their effort. If my
users lose mail from them due to scan and delete errors, I have not done
my job. I would much rather have them lose email from the people who pay
the spam-friendly providers.
Duh...don't put HTML in your email?
Meanwhile, say the 3,990,000 other people who received the email wasted each one second in disposing of it.
That is 1,110 hours of wasted time by others. At an average business cost of 10 dollars per hour (and with benefits it is much higher than that).
That comes to 11,000 dollars or more than the supposed profit.
The *world* has lost from this, which is why it is illegal most places now.
So these spammers are simply criminals who steal from others, and the people who employ them are receiving stolen property.
or
That aside, I've always wondered why people get so upset over spam. It's not that hard to hit the delete button. I get about 10 spam mails a day. It takes about 1/2 a second to read the subject, realize it's spam, and hit the delete button. Over the course of a year, I lose 30 minutes. That's not such a big deal to me.
I am trying to decide if you are dumb or a spammer trying the "just hit delete" thing yet again.
If everyone just hits delete, and no one blocks, filters, or complains, spam climbs to even more obscene levels. Your "thirty minutes a year" turns into thirty minutes a month, then a week, then a day.....
Bottom line is, spam needs to stop. The people who complain and blacklist are the only thing keeping spam down to even close to manageable levels. If everyone "just hit delete", email would be completely useless.
99.999% uptime is 5 minutes and 15 seconds of downtime per year.
Obviously they don't count the dozen reboots you have to do to install any software or hardware; or that the typical Windows troubleshooting procedure requires at least one reboot. A completely untouched and unchanged system with completely bug-free software must be a condition of that number.
No wonder it should be a C&C.
And we would be expected to do that once for each of several million companies that have the capacity to send email? Along with changes of management and "mysterious database problems"? Bah. Anyone who thinks that unsolicited bulk email is *ever* correct is either a criminal or criminally stupid.
Nothing but ad hominem I see from you.
-- Whey you fly planes into buildings, you get bombs dropped on you.
-- When you spam, you can't send email.
Seems like an appropriate measured response. All analogies vary in degree. We may at one point get to where you can invoke Godwin at the mention of terrorism, but we aren't there yet. 8-)
What doesn't differ is that terrorists do it against innocent people and then hide, with no other effective measures than shunning to be taken against them. So do spammers.
Perhaps having your concentration broken doesn't interfere with your livelihood -- judging from your response you seem to want to tear down rather than build. Tearing down takes little attention, building takes lots.
Nope.
If you had to preauthorize it, it wouldn't be email. It wouldn't be simple.
What is simple is this -- don't send email to someone unless either:
- It is agreed to beforehand, or...
- It can reasonably be expected to be of mutual benefit.
That is the simple position of MAPS, and I agree with it.Personally, I favor a 5-penny charge for every email that is sent, with no bulk discount. People who didn't want to pay it could use ICQ; and it would stop spammers dead in their tracks.
I am afraid I have to disagree with the latest EFF position paper. So
much so that my future contributions to the EFF will come under review.
Spammers are like terrorists. They prevent me from using email like I
want to, steal my time, and interfere with legitimate traffic. By
distracting me with misleading subject lines and addresses, they
interfere with my livelihood, as my work requires intense periods of
concentration.
IP blocks that allow spam are like countries which sponsor turn a blind
eye to terrorism. If they refuse to stop their spammers, then their
citizens must suffer by not being able to send email.
For instance, no one sending from China can send me email. Why? Because
China lets spammers run amok. If I allowed email from China, I would
receive 100 more spam emails a week. I know; I have tried it.
Filtering is a non-issue. The best filters that run no significant
chance of blocking legitimate email are those of AOL, and we know how
ineffective those are.
Brightmail makes me jump through hoops -- I don't want to spend my time
every day with it.
Spammers are terrorists, and IP blocks that allow spam should be treated
like countries which harbor terrorists. Forcing an airport to accept
airplanes (or even snail mail nowadays) originating in Afghanistan is
sheer stupidity; why is email any different?
To the people who say "it only takes a couple of seconds to delete, it
is worth it" I say -- WHO ARE YOU TO TELL ME WHAT TO DO WITH MY TIME?
Let people sign up for AOL if they want all legitimate mail at the cost
of mindnumbingly time-wasting stupidity.
So say I.
You ignore the fact that Windows either enforces or encourages access by the regular user to all files and resources. As long as they don't make it a pain to run as "Administrator" (or horrors, the monolithic permissions of Win9x/ME) then their model sucks.
The other problem is that reinstalling and rebooting is considered to be a valid mechanism for doing things. As long as you do that, security is problematic; the more reboots the less secure the machine is, no matter the OS. Running all of your init procedures repeatedly invites a trojan.
Isn't it interesting that one of the most common criticisms of free software (insufficient/clumbsy UI) also exists in expensive commercial software?
It is the complaint about almost every bit of software. As an author myself, I would place it second to the docs as the numero uno source of complaints.
Both docs and UI are excruciatingly boring grunt work, but even that would be acceptable if you received any thanks for it. 8-) The thanks seems to come from the wizzy features.
The really disappointing thing about doing docs is even if you do them, many of the users have not progressed far enough to use grep(1) or a similar search facility to look for text. So you receive complaints even if the docs exist and can be found.
Yet Microsoft itself was hit with Code Red. How many "decent IIS admins" are there out there? More than a dozen?
Another constructive ****** user, no doubt.
Perl runs on *at least* 50% of the Internet servers in the world, in some capacity or another. Now if there was a root exploit for every known version don't you think we would have heard about it in the news by now?
* this comment
* is pretty
* but hard to format again
* when you change it
*/
Rather, write them like this:
If you have a reasonable programmer's editor this is not necessary. My favorite, vim, allows you to simply highlight the block and press a key. Any comment with a standard beginning character (#, *, >, etc.) will be reformatted with the quoting character re-inserted appropriately. It is trivial to write a filter to do this -- use your favorite programming language and comment it well if you like. 8-)
Actually, I greatly prefer junk postal mail to spam email.
Well, if EBay is the only company you deal with, I agree that it is not that big a deal. However....
I deal with dozens of different companies, and over time have purchased from hundreds. If every damn one of them sent me one or two of these a year, it would be a big problem.
Barnes and Noble is amongst the most rude, IMHO. It was confided to me that if you haven't ordered from them for three months, they figure they have lost you and that they may as well spam you against your preference in case you have forgotten them and will then order. If every company operated this way, email would be unusable.
That is why a preference once expressed should remain the preference forever. If you screw up the database and spam your customers you should be sanctioned like any two-bit MMFer.