Agreeing with many posters here on the 'importance' of tech in the 'war on terrorism', here are a couple of mirrors of a story that first appeared in The Weekly Standard.
The site in question, a Canadian smokers' rights group, was forced to remove their image of the flag after Mr. Ovens contacted them.
The Ministry of Health is at all out war with the Tobacco industry up here. You see it in posters, on TV, over the radio and on the Health Canada website. The site in question is run by their opponents.
I have a problem with *dial-up* ISPs (never mind broadband ones) blocking *outbound* PPTP so I can't get to my own server sitting on a C$250/month server park. Do you try to block people using VPNs to run pirate networks or just want to make sure your connections aren't used for work?
And why ban PPTP when you don't ban SSH? You can use SCP to share files over SSH, or for that matter, port-forward all the P2P ports!
We're not mature enough for globalism yet
on
Defining Globalism
·
· Score: 1
This article provoked a lot of thought and I wanted to share it. That thought seems to conclude that we're not grown up enough to deal with the whole world yet.
A friend of mine once told me about debates he had with friends of his. We are a group of historical reenactors and the Roman Empire comes up frquently. We agreed that if the Romans had their priorities straight, they had the resources and the will to completely take over (kinda like the Roman Earth we saw on some episode of Star Trek:TOS) and if they had, by now we'd have colonized all the Earth's surface, the Moon and quite possibly a neighbouring star system or two. One reason was because the Romans took their tech seriously and built things to last, and their engineers were bound by a contract that didn't pay them until some thirty years after a structure was completed (Sorry, I forget the sources where they got that). But you get the idea. There were other reasons too, which I can't recall at the moment.
Too many people wanted bits of Rome for themselves, especially people who weren't Roman. We got childish. We probably weren't mature enough to sustain Rome and we probably aren't mature enough to sustain a World Nation of any kind either... yet. Too many people have their own agenda and their own goals (M$ wants a PC empire, the likes of Red Hat and Debian want to chip away and eventually crumble it... hm, I wonder if Microsoft can learn from Rome.)
"The Fall of the American Empire" touches on this ever so slightly in the beginning.
There are still far too many factions within Humanity so far polarized (!) against each other. We can't see past the political and religious dogma referred to here to see the other person for who they are - a brother or sister, maybe with a few odd quirks but still a brother or sister who deserves respect. We're too caught up playing our little games to pay any attention to all that. We won't have another Rome simply because no one wants that right now - we're all having too much fun. No one wants a Microsoft to rule the world or a Time-Warner or a USA 'cause that would mean working and no one wants to lose their play time.
What would you do if you were in charge of Microsoft? After having built it up from a few paper tapes with computer code on it all the way up to Windows XP? We all know what to do with it if we suddenly became in charge of it TODAY, but what about if we had to built it up from nothing? Are you mature enough to continue a vision? Will the vision you introduce instead cause the empire to crumble and your vision with it? What would happen?
I'm not a historian or sociologist so I can't come up with sound theories and solutions. I guess I'm not mature enough to see the answers 'cause I'm only human too. I have some growing up to do.
Public utilities don't have the same enforcement powers as private companies over their own property. They can't concern themselves with content or abuse of their systems as closely as a private company can.
I know that private companies suck at this too, but when they get off their butts to fix an abuse problem, like a spammer, they can kick them off. "We reserve the right to refuse service." Public utilities can't do that as easily because they're public, especially when it turns into an 'essential service.'
Is there a way for a publicly owned operation, like a municipal ISP, to enforce a set of terms of use? If so, I'd like to see something like that hammered out. I also seem to recall some cities are run by a 'corporation' (such as the Corporation of Richmond, British Columbia) and they're effectively a 'privately operated city.' These guys might have an easier time operating a municipal ISP because they are 'private' and can enforce a set of terms.
"I guess they really only exist to inflate the income of domain registrars."
To the people who think multiple TLDs are going to end an 'artificial scarcity' of names: Guess what? It only makes trademark holders pay five, six, ten (?) times the amount for a domain name, stress the hell out of the namespace, confuse the hell out of visitors, and by confusing the hell out of visitors discourage them from buying anything online.
First Seattle, then Quebec City. Boring. Protestors can't come up with any more interesting arguments.
Even older news: Most of the industrialized world's leaders signed treates in 1996 (!) to enforce copyright law and property law. The FTAA has little to do with these treaties that were signed yonks ago.
I wish the Jihad here would find a way to quash the myth that the open source movements are about taking property rights away. You are behaving exactly like they say you are and it isn't helping you any.
"On FUD Today[1] 12 AUG 2001, we present a completely one sided view of why no one should have the right to protect their own property while trying to earn a living from it."
Middlemen and cartel behaviour aside, this kind of attitude embarrasses the FSF and the like. No wonder businesses are afraid of the GPL and no wonder Microsoft is happily capitalizing on that fear.
That's a snip from my web server log. Granted I'm running Purveyor Webserver and I hacked it to replace.htp with.ida so it will do server side includes.
It DOES launch the SSI scripts when visited with a regular web browser, but the web server never gets around to launching the scripts when Code Red visits it because it closes the connection before the web server can execute the scripts. This is evident after the "200 OK -" line where the "-" means no data was transferred.
Apache might still process the page anyway and therefore launch the scripts, but aside from that I don't know how it gets as far as to run them.
I'm thinking of running a background job to look at the log for/default.ida whenever the log file changes and then launch the scripts at anything that tried to view this page.
Not only would there be clear identification of who owns it (how can a domain squatter register a third level domain?) but it would save a lot of stress on the DNS AND it would save companies $35.00/year per third level domain - no more paying Veri$ign for each name you registered.
I routinely see this with country branch offices of such things as ibm.com: ca.ibm.com for Canada, us.ibm.com for US specific offices, etc.
Domain and web hosts won't do this for some reason. They call these "vanity domains." What difference does it make to them if they charge the same amount per domain? Or are they under contract with Veri$ign to make us pay V$ for each domain, regardless of level?
Think about it domain / web hosts... save your customers some money so they'll register more level 3+ domains (and pay you more) and not have to pay V$.
Set up a new db.cache, for our companies name servers, which lists all the roots for each domain, including countries, and now I determine who is the legitimate registrar for every TLD
I'd like to see locations where DNS ops can obtain replacement cache files for their DNS servers. Even something as crazy as a homegrown root zone delegating authority for known TLDs is better than all this talk and no immediate way to switch a DNS server over.
Did anyone ever port this game to a modern environment? Yes I know about Win64 (A Commodore 64 emulator for Win32, NOT a 64-bit version of Windows[tm]) but I think we can do better.
This thing was ancient history but the poster's right - you couldn't succeed in MULE without cooperation with the other players, and if the colony's total worth didn't exceed $60k at the end of the game you ALL lost!
Congratualations on a well-written, engaging news story. Clear, concise, interesting with thrilling narrative, factually informative. This entry is a model for all good Slashdot entries.
Bah. It was an over-glorified story of business vs out-and-out pirates. Get a grip people: These cards aren't DeCSS. They were solely designed to steal services from a vendor. The people who enabled the technology rank up there with the vendors of Desktop Sewer 2000, Spamalanche and other spam-ware designed to steal e-mail services for personal gain.
The local rag ran a feature about Canadian 'customers' of DirecTV service - you see, DirecTV was never for sale to Canadians, so the only way to obtain DirecTV service in Canada was to steal it using these pirate cards. Best as I can tell they deserved to lose what they didn't have the privelage to use in the first place.
You want to send a clear message to DirecTV that they suck? Stop patronizing their service. But don't whine if they take back what you stole from them.
My old boss spoke one day of what he referred to as "The Price of Freedom" in Canada. I already read about high taxes, socialized medicine, potentially lame gun control, etc, all of which look like bad points to someone used to lower taxes, private hospitals, and the 2nd Amendment.
But think for a moment where the money goes for these things. We don't hear (too often anyway) about the Prime Minister of Canada taking pleasure trips, though he and MPs may fly free between Ottawa and their home consituency. What we do hear is money put into health care (in spite of what Stockwell Day (CA) or Bill Blakie (NDP) says), money put into paying down our debt to other countries, comparably decent police and fire services paid for by governments, subsidized public transit so people who can't or won't own cars can still get around without paying a fortune... I could go on.
Even in a comparably conservative province like Alberta, I was able, with not much of anything, to get a two year tech diploma paid for via student loans (finally paid off, yeay!), to find a job with government sponsored resources, use gov't supplied computers and fax machines to generate Resume copies, attend gov't sponsored courses on job searching, and it only took me a month after graduation to find that first job.
Some people day God helps those who help themselves. Up here, Governments help those who help themselves. I doubt I'd have the same success in North Dakota, Washington State, New York, or anywhere else in the US of A.
This month I got my tax package for 2001. I'm in the upper tax bracket for the first time in eight years of career work. I work for an American firm and get paid in American money, but still live in Canada and pay Canadian taxes. And I'll be happy to pay those taxes to the same gov'ts who helped me get started in the first place.
I'm sure they laughed at Columbus, Leif Erickson(sp?), etc etc when they sailed off and found the New World, for whatever motivations they had. Even Columbus pointed out that it's always easier to do something once you've seen someone else do it.
Hell, I give this guy full marks for bravery, for being the first.
I saw a post earlier that tried to ask this question but it came across funny. So I'll try to ask it myself.
The earlier versions of Real's streaming server supported one incoming stream from somewhere to feed several outgoing streams. Essentially, I could park a server on a high bandwidth connection and then broadcast from my home PC sitting on 33.6k - the server would relay the incoming feed to many clients. Most of the radio stations that have a streaming server do something like this, because I don't believe their high bandwidth server is IN the radio station itself.
This is, in fact, how modern Radio works - they don't actually broadcast right from the buiding where the studio is. They cable / microwave it out to a transmission tower somewhere else.
Do either of these MP3 streaming solutions support relaying an incoming stream from a remote location? Is there a free / GPL / etc solution that does?
While spoofing mail at the TCP/IP layer has become trivial
When did spoofing TCP connections become trivial? SMTP requires the TCP portion of TCP/IP, meaning it requires a return connection. To have a return connection you need to be able to talk back to the source IP address. You can trace, record and block them.
That guy got black faxes all day long
Sure, lower yourself to the spammer's mentality(sp?) and get yourself charged with theft of communications while you're at it.
Mail servers are wonderful devices - they can automatically copy a single message to multiple recipients regardless of how many recipients you specify. Imagine if your local post office offered the service of copying your letter to hundreds of thousands of recipients for free.
Even a server that limits the number of RCPT TO commands per message to, say twenty-five, can still be forced to send out twenty-five times the amount of garbage as is coming from that little dial-up. Even if this was only AOL recipients, which I doubt highly, as even mail servers are smart enough to use multiple RCPT TO commands for the same domain.
Let's not forget the really 'modern' spamware disguised as CGI scripts running on multiple web servers, complete with their own lists of known open mail servers and e-mail address lists. You have the makings of a DDOS if you got into enough web servers.
I have a 24/7 broadband connection with better then 99.9% uptime at home, and I quite enjoy the minor hobby of being able to run my own tinsy little server on it. I have apache and sendmail, ssh login, etc. The notion of a default policy of filtering ports to the end consumer of bandwidth troubles me enormously.
You've been caught in the middle of this little spam problem and I feel your pain. Unfortunately port blocking and projects like MAPS DUL won't go away any time soon because spammers won't go away any time soon.
The worst DSL related listing in DUL has to be Sympatico Ontatio. This is an exception to the DUL rule of not listing DSL because Sympatico HSE uses PPP(over Ethernet) and can't guarantee the same IP, and they've turned a deaf ear to MAPS and to the Internet community when we complain to them about their spammers.
If the broadband provider's mail server bites, too bad. Find another broadband provider with better service or do what I did: Stick with ISDN and pick and choose between any ISP that does 56k (any server doing v.90 very likely supports ISDN transparently).
I also suggest you read your ISP's terms of service carefully. Chances are they forbid running servers on those connections for the same reasons - too much network abuse.
You might want to read some letters people wrote to the DUL Project about this, and the responses.
2: The second option would be for UU.net to provide the IP ranges for its DIAL Up pool to the DUL project run by MAPS.
IIRC, they do. 63.0/11 appears to be the bulk (heh) of it. By their very definition, open relays usually don't follow the DUL very closely...
Much of the UUNET spam being reported to the MAPS DUL Project happens to be relay spam. This isn't helping the DUL Maintainers because they're already listed. You want to use MAPS RSS and DUL at the same time, and report open relays to RSS as found. See The RSS Project.
I did 'helldesk' double duty during my sysadmin stint from 1996 to 1999. The only thing that kept me sane was that our dial-up access package included a free course in browsing and using e-mail. That took care of maybe 40% of the lusers, and as it turned out the Win95 FAQ I maintained helped another 40% (based on 80/20).
Of course the remaining 20% made me wish I didn't have to go in to work some days.
All this was before DSL of course, but even our backbone ISP's tech support was about as helpful as most of these 'DSL tech support' guys were. Flame away if you must, but we were treated as second class customers solely because we used NT Server as our platform. Their tech support LOATHED us because we had the audacity to run a mission critical and stable business without a *ix platform.
Feh. We assimilated one smaller ISP after two years, and we sold the business a year later at a PROFIT. Our techs, myself included, stayed sane. Our customers stayed with us and renewed again and again. I can't say the same for most ISPs regardless of platform or policy.
I have no sympathy for tech support droids who treat their customers as id10ts, manglement droids who treat their techs as id10ts, nor for the real id10ts who have no business being on the 'net without formal training.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreeing with many posters here on the 'importance' of tech in the 'war on terrorism', here are a couple of mirrors of a story that first appeared in The Weekly Standard.
maxwell.af.mil
Geocities
a canned Google search
And while we're at it, have a look at Osama bin Virus.
Instead, the bug is that any message that has the word "begin" at the beginning of a line will be treated as a garbled attachment from that point on.
You mean the 'begin 644' you see at the start of UUencoded messages? Still beaten with the 'view source' button in a message's properties.
Cute. An old holdover from the days before MIME. I thought they started blocking these after Happy99 caused trouble.
The site in question, a Canadian smokers' rights group, was forced to remove their image of the flag after Mr. Ovens contacted them.
The Ministry of Health is at all out war with the Tobacco industry up here. You see it in posters, on TV, over the radio and on the Health Canada website. The site in question is run by their opponents.
My guess is FARCES[1], oops er, FORCES overstepped the boundaries of parody and deservedly got bitchslapped for it, not unlike another group that tried to emulate a Goverment site.
[1] I'm not a fan of Big Tobacco.
I have a problem with *dial-up* ISPs (never mind broadband ones) blocking *outbound* PPTP so I can't get to my own server sitting on a C$250/month server park. Do you try to block people using VPNs to run pirate networks or just want to make sure your connections aren't used for work?
And why ban PPTP when you don't ban SSH? You can use SCP to share files over SSH, or for that matter, port-forward all the P2P ports!
This article provoked a lot of thought and I wanted to share it. That thought seems to conclude that we're not grown up enough to deal with the whole world yet.
A friend of mine once told me about debates he had with friends of his. We are a group of historical reenactors and the Roman Empire comes up frquently. We agreed that if the Romans had their priorities straight, they had the resources and the will to completely take over (kinda like the Roman Earth we saw on some episode of Star Trek:TOS) and if they had, by now we'd have colonized all the Earth's surface, the Moon and quite possibly a neighbouring star system or two. One reason was because the Romans took their tech seriously and built things to last, and their engineers were bound by a contract that didn't pay them until some thirty years after a structure was completed (Sorry, I forget the sources where they got that). But you get the idea. There were other reasons too, which I can't recall at the moment.
Too many people wanted bits of Rome for themselves, especially people who weren't Roman. We got childish. We probably weren't mature enough to sustain Rome and we probably aren't mature enough to sustain a World Nation of any kind either... yet. Too many people have their own agenda and their own goals (M$ wants a PC empire, the likes of Red Hat and Debian want to chip away and eventually crumble it... hm, I wonder if Microsoft can learn from Rome.)
"The Fall of the American Empire" touches on this ever so slightly in the beginning.
There are still far too many factions within Humanity so far polarized (!) against each other. We can't see past the political and religious dogma referred to here to see the other person for who they are - a brother or sister, maybe with a few odd quirks but still a brother or sister who deserves respect. We're too caught up playing our little games to pay any attention to all that. We won't have another Rome simply because no one wants that right now - we're all having too much fun. No one wants a Microsoft to rule the world or a Time-Warner or a USA 'cause that would mean working and no one wants to lose their play time.
What would you do if you were in charge of Microsoft? After having built it up from a few paper tapes with computer code on it all the way up to Windows XP? We all know what to do with it if we suddenly became in charge of it TODAY, but what about if we had to built it up from nothing? Are you mature enough to continue a vision? Will the vision you introduce instead cause the empire to crumble and your vision with it? What would happen?
I'm not a historian or sociologist so I can't come up with sound theories and solutions. I guess I'm not mature enough to see the answers 'cause I'm only human too. I have some growing up to do.
Public utilities don't have the same enforcement powers as private companies over their own property. They can't concern themselves with content or abuse of their systems as closely as a private company can.
I know that private companies suck at this too, but when they get off their butts to fix an abuse problem, like a spammer, they can kick them off. "We reserve the right to refuse service." Public utilities can't do that as easily because they're public, especially when it turns into an 'essential service.'
Is there a way for a publicly owned operation, like a municipal ISP, to enforce a set of terms of use? If so, I'd like to see something like that hammered out. I also seem to recall some cities are run by a 'corporation' (such as the Corporation of Richmond, British Columbia) and they're effectively a 'privately operated city.' These guys might have an easier time operating a municipal ISP because they are 'private' and can enforce a set of terms.
"I guess they really only exist to inflate the income of domain registrars."
To the people who think multiple TLDs are going to end an 'artificial scarcity' of names: Guess what? It only makes trademark holders pay five, six, ten (?) times the amount for a domain name, stress the hell out of the namespace, confuse the hell out of visitors, and by confusing the hell out of visitors discourage them from buying anything online.
"Would you like a dot-biz with that dot-com?"
First Seattle, then Quebec City. Boring. Protestors can't come up with any more interesting arguments.
Even older news: Most of the industrialized world's leaders signed treates in 1996 (!) to enforce copyright law and property law. The FTAA has little to do with these treaties that were signed yonks ago.
I wish the Jihad here would find a way to quash the myth that the open source movements are about taking property rights away. You are behaving exactly like they say you are and it isn't helping you any.
"On FUD Today[1] 12 AUG 2001, we present a completely one sided view of why no one should have the right to protect their own property while trying to earn a living from it."
Middlemen and cartel behaviour aside, this kind of attitude embarrasses the FSF and the like. No wonder businesses are afraid of the GPL and no wonder Microsoft is happily capitalizing on that fear.
[1] What Slashdot should be called.
64.221.96.210 - - [12/Aug/2001:00:07:49 -0500] "GET /default.ida?[snip query data] HTTP/1.0" 200 -
.htp with .ida so it will do server side includes.
/default.ida whenever the log file changes and then launch the scripts at anything that tried to view this page.
That's a snip from my web server log. Granted I'm running Purveyor Webserver and I hacked it to replace
It DOES launch the SSI scripts when visited with a regular web browser, but the web server never gets around to launching the scripts when Code Red visits it because it closes the connection before the web server can execute the scripts. This is evident after the "200 OK -" line where the "-" means no data was transferred.
Apache might still process the page anyway and therefore launch the scripts, but aside from that I don't know how it gets as far as to run them.
I'm thinking of running a background job to look at the log for
Not only would there be clear identification of who owns it (how can a domain squatter register a third level domain?) but it would save a lot of stress on the DNS AND it would save companies $35.00/year per third level domain - no more paying Veri$ign for each name you registered.
I routinely see this with country branch offices of such things as ibm.com: ca.ibm.com for Canada, us.ibm.com for US specific offices, etc.
Domain and web hosts won't do this for some reason. They call these "vanity domains." What difference does it make to them if they charge the same amount per domain? Or are they under contract with Veri$ign to make us pay V$ for each domain, regardless of level?
Think about it domain / web hosts... save your customers some money so they'll register more level 3+ domains (and pay you more) and not have to pay V$.
The DVD Infomatrix FAQ has a page that describes this kind of scripting and how to defeat it: http://faq.inmatrix.com/faq_entry0025.html.
I'd like to see locations where DNS ops can obtain replacement cache files for their DNS servers. Even something as crazy as a homegrown root zone delegating authority for known TLDs is better than all this talk and no immediate way to switch a DNS server over.
If you really needed to read regular floppies and maybe need more than 8 MB, the comparably stable LS-120 drives handle that easily.
Did anyone ever port this game to a modern environment? Yes I know about Win64 (A Commodore 64 emulator for Win32, NOT a 64-bit version of Windows[tm]) but I think we can do better.
This thing was ancient history but the poster's right - you couldn't succeed in MULE without cooperation with the other players, and if the colony's total worth didn't exceed $60k at the end of the game you ALL lost!
Bah. It was an over-glorified story of business vs out-and-out pirates. Get a grip people: These cards aren't DeCSS. They were solely designed to steal services from a vendor. The people who enabled the technology rank up there with the vendors of Desktop Sewer 2000, Spamalanche and other spam-ware designed to steal e-mail services for personal gain.
The local rag ran a feature about Canadian 'customers' of DirecTV service - you see, DirecTV was never for sale to Canadians, so the only way to obtain DirecTV service in Canada was to steal it using these pirate cards. Best as I can tell they deserved to lose what they didn't have the privelage to use in the first place.
You want to send a clear message to DirecTV that they suck? Stop patronizing their service. But don't whine if they take back what you stole from them.
My old boss spoke one day of what he referred to as "The Price of Freedom" in Canada. I already read about high taxes, socialized medicine, potentially lame gun control, etc, all of which look like bad points to someone used to lower taxes, private hospitals, and the 2nd Amendment.
But think for a moment where the money goes for these things. We don't hear (too often anyway) about the Prime Minister of Canada taking pleasure trips, though he and MPs may fly free between Ottawa and their home consituency. What we do hear is money put into health care (in spite of what Stockwell Day (CA) or Bill Blakie (NDP) says), money put into paying down our debt to other countries, comparably decent police and fire services paid for by governments, subsidized public transit so people who can't or won't own cars can still get around without paying a fortune... I could go on.
Even in a comparably conservative province like Alberta, I was able, with not much of anything, to get a two year tech diploma paid for via student loans (finally paid off, yeay!), to find a job with government sponsored resources, use gov't supplied computers and fax machines to generate Resume copies, attend gov't sponsored courses on job searching, and it only took me a month after graduation to find that first job.
Some people day God helps those who help themselves. Up here, Governments help those who help themselves. I doubt I'd have the same success in North Dakota, Washington State, New York, or anywhere else in the US of A.
This month I got my tax package for 2001. I'm in the upper tax bracket for the first time in eight years of career work. I work for an American firm and get paid in American money, but still live in Canada and pay Canadian taxes. And I'll be happy to pay those taxes to the same gov'ts who helped me get started in the first place.
I'm sure they laughed at Columbus, Leif Erickson(sp?), etc etc when they sailed off and found the New World, for whatever motivations they had. Even Columbus pointed out that it's always easier to do something once you've seen someone else do it.
Hell, I give this guy full marks for bravery, for being the first.
I saw a post earlier that tried to ask this question but it came across funny. So I'll try to ask it myself.
The earlier versions of Real's streaming server supported one incoming stream from somewhere to feed several outgoing streams. Essentially, I could park a server on a high bandwidth connection and then broadcast from my home PC sitting on 33.6k - the server would relay the incoming feed to many clients. Most of the radio stations that have a streaming server do something like this, because I don't believe their high bandwidth server is IN the radio station itself.
This is, in fact, how modern Radio works - they don't actually broadcast right from the buiding where the studio is. They cable / microwave it out to a transmission tower somewhere else.
Do either of these MP3 streaming solutions support relaying an incoming stream from a remote location? Is there a free / GPL / etc solution that does?
When did spoofing TCP connections become trivial? SMTP requires the TCP portion of TCP/IP, meaning it requires a return connection. To have a return connection you need to be able to talk back to the source IP address. You can trace, record and block them.
Sure, lower yourself to the spammer's mentality(sp?) and get yourself charged with theft of communications while you're at it.
Mail servers are wonderful devices - they can automatically copy a single message to multiple recipients regardless of how many recipients you specify. Imagine if your local post office offered the service of copying your letter to hundreds of thousands of recipients for free.
Even a server that limits the number of RCPT TO commands per message to, say twenty-five, can still be forced to send out twenty-five times the amount of garbage as is coming from that little dial-up. Even if this was only AOL recipients, which I doubt highly, as even mail servers are smart enough to use multiple RCPT TO commands for the same domain.
Let's not forget the really 'modern' spamware disguised as CGI scripts running on multiple web servers, complete with their own lists of known open mail servers and e-mail address lists. You have the makings of a DDOS if you got into enough web servers.
Let's see, theft of services (relay hijacking), theft of identity (ibm.net), theft of services again (recipients pay to receive spam).
What do your local laws say is an adequate punishment for repeated theft?
You've been caught in the middle of this little spam problem and I feel your pain. Unfortunately port blocking and projects like MAPS DUL won't go away any time soon because spammers won't go away any time soon.
The worst DSL related listing in DUL has to be Sympatico Ontatio. This is an exception to the DUL rule of not listing DSL because Sympatico HSE uses PPP(over Ethernet) and can't guarantee the same IP, and they've turned a deaf ear to MAPS and to the Internet community when we complain to them about their spammers.
If the broadband provider's mail server bites, too bad. Find another broadband provider with better service or do what I did: Stick with ISDN and pick and choose between any ISP that does 56k (any server doing v.90 very likely supports ISDN transparently).
I also suggest you read your ISP's terms of service carefully. Chances are they forbid running servers on those connections for the same reasons - too much network abuse.
You might want to read some letters people wrote to the DUL Project about this, and the responses.
Much of the UUNET spam being reported to the MAPS DUL Project happens to be relay spam. This isn't helping the DUL Maintainers because they're already listed. You want to use MAPS RSS and DUL at the same time, and report open relays to RSS as found. See The RSS Project.
I did 'helldesk' double duty during my sysadmin stint from 1996 to 1999. The only thing that kept me sane was that our dial-up access package included a free course in browsing and using e-mail. That took care of maybe 40% of the lusers, and as it turned out the Win95 FAQ I maintained helped another 40% (based on 80/20).
Of course the remaining 20% made me wish I didn't have to go in to work some days.
All this was before DSL of course, but even our backbone ISP's tech support was about as helpful as most of these 'DSL tech support' guys were. Flame away if you must, but we were treated as second class customers solely because we used NT Server as our platform. Their tech support LOATHED us because we had the audacity to run a mission critical and stable business without a *ix platform.
Feh. We assimilated one smaller ISP after two years, and we sold the business a year later at a PROFIT. Our techs, myself included, stayed sane. Our customers stayed with us and renewed again and again. I can't say the same for most ISPs regardless of platform or policy.
I have no sympathy for tech support droids who treat their customers as id10ts, manglement droids who treat their techs as id10ts, nor for the real id10ts who have no business being on the 'net without formal training.