Ok, I wasn't talking about the actual article (we're on/.) but about the editor comment, which implied it should go to prison just because it's a spammer. If you go that route, you'll require jail time for blog spammer, and even for slashdot trolls and ACs !
You say that like it's a bad idea. I don't think it is.
... this kook. Regularly invents conspiracy scenarios in his own mind, creates complaints about spam and forwards them to people who shouldn't even be targeted for complaints, then blames everyone around him for his own mistakes.
Kooks of the first water. Jamie, meet Jeff. Jeff, this is Jamie. You two should get along rather well, I'd think.
Honestly, I hate people who steal software as much as I hate companies that charge too much for their crap. But you know what? It's THEIRS to charge whatever they wish.
That's a hard concept for a lot of people.
Ahh, that's where you are mistaken, grasshopper. MS is free to charge what the market will bear for their operating system. What you are hearing and seeing is the market rebelling against overly inflated software costs. At $450 a crack * millions of purchases, you can't tell me they've not recovered their costs to produce the product.
Ballmer is clearly out of touch with reality on this. Cheap hardware will not change the software piracy problem a whit. Why do people pirate software? Because operating systems run $80-$120, Microsoft's Office suite costs $450, Anti-virus runs $40-$80.
These ridiculous software prices, the constant need to upgrade and relicense and pay the same prices over and over and over -- that's what drives people to pirate software. Or turn to open source software solutions. Microsoft's trash got tossed out of my house on its ear 5 years ago. Nuttin' but Linux and there are scant few things I can do without their virus propagation system.
Follow the money. Pull the licenses of the mortgage brokers. Pull the licenses of any other individual or company who pays a spammer affiliate money, commissions, or any other types of payments based on results of spamming. Delist public companies that pay spammers and fax.com in cash and stock to blast fax and spambomb advertisements to promote and raise awareness of their penny and dollar stocks.
You could do this yourself. Next time you bag a mortgage spam, visit the website. Fill it out with some fake name, your neighbor's address, and your own phone number. When the mortgage lenders start calling, asking for my canary's name, I tell them this:
"I'm sorry, but the identity of Jose Guerrero is a figment of my imagination. I created that identity specifically to enter on a mortgage spammer's website form. You've been buying leads from spammers. Thanks for all your help in further promoting the use of unsolicited email ads."
I've heard all kinds of excuses in response. "I'm just trying to make a living, man," is their favorite. Just goes to show you, mortgage lenders are just as ethically corrupt as the spammers.
This has no effect on how many domains a spammer can register over time -- for much the same reason that you can still have huge bandwidth even if your latency is crap. It's just a question of reducing the initial delay from registration to activation.
No, but it certainly allows them to now rotate nameservers for their domains quickly. Imagine where they've got a number of nameservers for their domains setup, and in order to make it more difficult to determine where the nameservers are hosted, they bounce them around every five minutes from one machine to the next, possibly rotating through as many as 600 different machines in a day!
I think you mean that this would be more handy for sites who lose a DNS server. Note that if the machine in an NS record for a domain goes dead, the domain can be left unresolvable until the root servers update. Now with every five second updates on the root servers, change the NS records and yer back up and running.
Happened to me with my vanity domain when afraid.org was cut off for about 8 hours due to abuse issues. His upstream provider cut him off due to spammers hosting DNS there and he had to take steps to get back online. Meanwhile, my domain was unresolvable. I ended up putting up secondaries to prevent this from happening again.
[W]e're not talking about a person that looked like your stereotypical 'hacker'; AKMA is an ordained priest.
So, are we saying that this person was running around in his priestly robes or his Roman collar, or some other garb that would have made him easily identified? Last time I checked, a priest in street clothes looks just like any other Joe on the street.
Also note that there have been no insider trades since this past April, when the stock started it's nosedive to it's current bargain-basement levels. Here's the proof. Prior to April 7, Thomas Raimondi sold off $1,196,507 of stock. Another insider, Reginald Charles Broughton, during the period between 20 Jun 03 and 17 Sep 03, while the stock was on the rise and nearing the top of the bubble, sold off $3,425,458 worth of stock, most of it trading at in excess of $12/share and even as high as $20/share. Pump and dump? You bet ya. I can't wait to see what happens when the SEC goes public with their investigation.
If most of the updates will be available for current versions of Windows, what is the incentive to upgrade?"
These updates will be handed out a' la Windows 98 SE style. You'll have to buy an upgrade edition to apply to your XP for the low, LOW! price of $379.85. It will inevitably gork up your registry, good portions of the file system will be damaged by the install process, you'll suffer irrepairable data loss, and the disclaimer in the EULA will have even more ridiculous terms than the fact that you can't get more than $5 or the price of the software if you decide to sue, whichever is least.
*THEN*, after about a year or 18 months of massive amounts of bugfix patches, service packs and other silly nonsense, they will release Shoehorn, the bastard stepchild of Windows XP SE and Longhorn's ugly second cousin OS that's only been seen on a production server somwhere in the MS complex in Redmond. That will cost you your first child, rights to half the real property you own, and $1,999.
This, my friends, is *INNOVATION*!! Yes sir, sign me *RIGHT UP*!
Business is not about friends and enemies. Business is about achieving objectives.
So, from your reasoning, SCO's litigious antics would be perfectly fine, well and good.
Fuck that shit.
Corporations had best adopt a sense of morals and ethics, and quickly lest they find themselves slowly slaughtered. It's happening. Look at SCO's close today. Look at Microsoft. Look at Enron and Worldcom. Same with spammers. Adopt a clean business plan, one that doesn't promote immoral, illegal acts, and you'll do fine. Keep up the scams, spams and crazy bullshit, and yer going broke. It may take time, but it will happen.
Then there was the time I hosted a small barbecue of anti-spammers in the Detroit area at Metropolitain Beach in Washington Township, MI. I brought along a few cans of spam, one of which ended up on the barbecue. It took about an hour and a half but the can eventually popped the top off in a loud burst, showering the area with juices. We left the can on the grill to cook to a crackly, charcoal doneness. Mmmm, yummy, burnt spam. Made a nice football.
Secure your systems and ensure they're running the latest copy of everything, avoid using old software that is likely to have security holes that are well-known.
Log as much detail as you can to tell when an attack happens and where it's coming from. Without that kind of info, you'll not know what's going on with your systems.
Abuse reports on especially egregious behavior should be filed. We want to discourage this kind of behavior, so the only thing to do is to check your logs regularly for anything that appears *not right*. If you find a large block of attempts from one source, extract those log entries and include them in a *polite* letter to abuse@[originating ISP].
Then firewall off the source, not just the single IP source but the/24 surrounding it, is my own motto. If one asshole can abuse you, and being that most abusive assholes live on DSL/cable with DHCP and can be in any address within a certain block, block enough space to cover any possible ingress. Then and *only then* can you rest easy.
Hah! After suing everyone and their brother, SCO thinks they have an OS to sell. Of course, it's based on an ancient piece of claptrap that should have been retired 10 years ago, but never mind all that, this is the NEW SCO UNIXWARE! Ring the bells and shout out, "HALLELIEUAH!!" Whatever are we going to do without it?
"Lawyer Anthony J. Dain has said the ads are 'annoyances you have to deal with in a free society."
Anthony needs to sit in one place while someone beats him about the head with a flyswatter, and needs to be told that being hit with a flyswatter about the head multiple times is just an annoyance he has to deal with in a free society. Then maybe he'd get it.
It sounds to me like SCO is no more. They are out of money and are being taken to court by their own investors. Never mind the fact that no one believes their claims anymore. I think we can safely ignore SCO news now.
Ignore SCO? Not so soon, bucko.
SCO still has considerable cash, though it's a finite sum. They will continue to find ways to trim the budget. The expenditures earmarked to prosecute the DaimlerChrysler suit are now lessened and money budgeted for it can either be funnelled to the other suits or to their regular operating expenses.
As Steven Vaughn-Nichols pointed out last week, this show ain't over. The fat lady may be rehearsing but she's not even been asked to step into the amphitheatre, let alone sing.
In May 2000, I ended up becoming interested in lasik as I had been in glasses -- thick ones -- since I was in second grade in elementary school. I was very nearsighted, usually rated 20/400 on my eye exams but easily correctible. As I aged, my eyes deformed and my vision became increasingly bad. It was to the point that without them, the distance at which I could see *anything* clearly was less than 4" from my face.
Of course, all the ads that started in 1998 or 1999 caught my attention, but at prices as high as $1600 for both eyes here in the States, I wasn't in a hurry to have the surgery done. Since most of the pioneering work was done in Canada and I lived just across the border in metro Detroit from Windsor, Ontario, I began to hear ads featuring a price of $499/eye offered by LasikVision of Canada. Attactive, said I, and began to plan.
With the help of my girlfriend at the time, we saved up enough to go have the surgery done. I went across the border for my first exam and was told that I was an excellent candidate and they scheduled my surgery for June 10th. After a precarious walk from the clinic to a dark restaurant where I had dinner while waiting for my eyes to come back to normal from being dilated for the exam, I drove back home, excited at the prospect of getting my fucking eyes fixed.
I hated those glasses. They were heavy, difficult to find upon waking up, absolutely necessary if I wanted to function. As a kid, I was terribly hard on them, constantly breaking them in my rough and tumble world as a boy growing up. I had tried contacts as a young adult and again became frustrated because my corneas were unusually flat and it was difficult to find a set of contacts that would fit comfortably. Even then, it was a pain in the ass, playing with all the chemicals and the enzymatic cleansers, and having a reaction to the mercury compounds they used at the time (early 80's) as a sterilizing agent just didn't make me want to wear the damned things. I felt trapped in those huge lenses!
June 10 finally arrived. Once again, a quick reference exam to see if there was any unusual variation since my first exam, then drops were placed in my eye to begin the numbing process and I was given 5mg Valium to take the edge off the anxiety I might experience prior to and during the procedure.
I was finally taken back and positioned on the table. They worked on my right eye first, being that I was left-eye dominant. They used a microtome to cut and lift the flap, then the laser to do the cutting necessary to reshape my cornea. I did well with that first eye, but when it came to the second eye, it was like the anesthetic was lessened in effect due to the trauma to the first eye. I had a difficult time keeping my left eye still and may have botched the laser cutting path. This was before the advent ot the pupil tracking technology that most systems have now. As a result, my left eye wasn't a perfect job. It is still a bit fuzzy but workable as close disatances, and my right eye has compensated to handle the distances.
Within about 9 months of my procedure, when I was told to call and make my 1 year followup exam appointment was surprised to get no answer at the clinic in downtown Windsor. Using the 'Net, I found that LasikVision Canada had gone bankrupt! Talk about pissed off! I had been promised lifetime followup and maintenance. After three months of calling to see if this place would open back up, someone finally answered the phone and told me that another group of doctors had bought the practice but would not honor the lifetime followup provisions of my contract. They would do the exam for $50 and $250 for any adjustment procedures. Fuck that, I said, and decided to simply wait and see how things would heal, since the healing process can take up to 18 months to complete.
I did my follow up exams with my local eye doctor and was told that it was probably best not to have any adjustments done, as they would have to make only very fine adjustments t
In the ST:TOS episode "Patterns of Force", Spock and Kirk are sent down to the planet to undo the mess that historian John Gill created when he indoctrinated the Ekosian people with the idea that the Nazi society would work. Before leaving the ship, both Spock and Kirk were injected with a crystal that had similar properties to an RFID chip.
Now, this Mexican official is set! All he needs now is to rip up the bed springs, slit his arm and remove the crystal, and he can burn his way out of his jail cell with a homemade laser!! How cool is that shit?
First of all, the scammer guy in Nigeria couldn't sue someone from outside Nigeria, and besides, I'd think they've have a clean hands doctrine that would prevent him from suing. The clean hands doctrine states that if you're throwing mud, you can't sue someone else because your shirt got dirty when they threw mud at you.
Actual fraud? Hah! Frauding a fraudster is simply justice in my own viewpoint. I'd love to catch an American spammer using this same tactic.
Slashdot Mirror
You say that like it's a bad idea. I don't think it is.
Jamie just returned after a long silence over the past couple of days, whining about some spammer or the other. Funny guy, that one.
ROFL! I created it?? No, not me. Someone else. I simply was aware of that domain and have too much experience dealing with its target.
Jamie, is that you?
... this kook. Regularly invents conspiracy scenarios in his own mind, creates complaints about spam and forwards them to people who shouldn't even be targeted for complaints, then blames everyone around him for his own mistakes.
Kooks of the first water. Jamie, meet Jeff. Jeff, this is Jamie. You two should get along rather well, I'd think.
Ahh, that's where you are mistaken, grasshopper. MS is free to charge what the market will bear for their operating system. What you are hearing and seeing is the market rebelling against overly inflated software costs. At $450 a crack * millions of purchases, you can't tell me they've not recovered their costs to produce the product.
s/few things I can/few things I *can't*/
Get me going on a rant... grin
Ballmer is clearly out of touch with reality on this. Cheap hardware will not change the software piracy problem a whit. Why do people pirate software? Because operating systems run $80-$120, Microsoft's Office suite costs $450, Anti-virus runs $40-$80.
These ridiculous software prices, the constant need to upgrade and relicense and pay the same prices over and over and over -- that's what drives people to pirate software. Or turn to open source software solutions. Microsoft's trash got tossed out of my house on its ear 5 years ago. Nuttin' but Linux and there are scant few things I can do without their virus propagation system.
You could do this yourself. Next time you bag a mortgage spam, visit the website. Fill it out with some fake name, your neighbor's address, and your own phone number. When the mortgage lenders start calling, asking for my canary's name, I tell them this:
"I'm sorry, but the identity of Jose Guerrero is a figment of my imagination. I created that identity specifically to enter on a mortgage spammer's website form. You've been buying leads from spammers. Thanks for all your help in further promoting the use of unsolicited email ads."
I've heard all kinds of excuses in response. "I'm just trying to make a living, man," is their favorite. Just goes to show you, mortgage lenders are just as ethically corrupt as the spammers.
You may be interested in this:
Link
No, but it certainly allows them to now rotate nameservers for their domains quickly. Imagine where they've got a number of nameservers for their domains setup, and in order to make it more difficult to determine where the nameservers are hosted, they bounce them around every five minutes from one machine to the next, possibly rotating through as many as 600 different machines in a day!
I think you mean that this would be more handy for sites who lose a DNS server. Note that if the machine in an NS record for a domain goes dead, the domain can be left unresolvable until the root servers update. Now with every five second updates on the root servers, change the NS records and yer back up and running.
Happened to me with my vanity domain when afraid.org was cut off for about 8 hours due to abuse issues. His upstream provider cut him off due to spammers hosting DNS there and he had to take steps to get back online. Meanwhile, my domain was unresolvable. I ended up putting up secondaries to prevent this from happening again.
Now spammers can rotate through domains faster than ever before!!
So, are we saying that this person was running around in his priestly robes or his Roman collar, or some other garb that would have made him easily identified? Last time I checked, a priest in street clothes looks just like any other Joe on the street.
For that matter, I'm an ordained minister myself. Only cost me $30.
Also note that there have been no insider trades since this past April, when the stock started it's nosedive to it's current bargain-basement levels. Here's the proof. Prior to April 7, Thomas Raimondi sold off $1,196,507 of stock. Another insider, Reginald Charles Broughton, during the period between 20 Jun 03 and 17 Sep 03, while the stock was on the rise and nearing the top of the bubble, sold off $3,425,458 worth of stock, most of it trading at in excess of $12/share and even as high as $20/share. Pump and dump? You bet ya. I can't wait to see what happens when the SEC goes public with their investigation.
These updates will be handed out a' la Windows 98 SE style. You'll have to buy an upgrade edition to apply to your XP for the low, LOW! price of $379.85. It will inevitably gork up your registry, good portions of the file system will be damaged by the install process, you'll suffer irrepairable data loss, and the disclaimer in the EULA will have even more ridiculous terms than the fact that you can't get more than $5 or the price of the software if you decide to sue, whichever is least.
*THEN*, after about a year or 18 months of massive amounts of bugfix patches, service packs and other silly nonsense, they will release Shoehorn, the bastard stepchild of Windows XP SE and Longhorn's ugly second cousin OS that's only been seen on a production server somwhere in the MS complex in Redmond. That will cost you your first child, rights to half the real property you own, and $1,999.
This, my friends, is *INNOVATION*!! Yes sir, sign me *RIGHT UP*!
So, from your reasoning, SCO's litigious antics would be perfectly fine, well and good.
Fuck that shit.
Corporations had best adopt a sense of morals and ethics, and quickly lest they find themselves slowly slaughtered. It's happening. Look at SCO's close today. Look at Microsoft. Look at Enron and Worldcom. Same with spammers. Adopt a clean business plan, one that doesn't promote immoral, illegal acts, and you'll do fine. Keep up the scams, spams and crazy bullshit, and yer going broke. It may take time, but it will happen.
Then there was the time I hosted a small barbecue of anti-spammers in the Detroit area at Metropolitain Beach in Washington Township, MI. I brought along a few cans of spam, one of which ended up on the barbecue. It took about an hour and a half but the can eventually popped the top off in a loud burst, showering the area with juices. We left the can on the grill to cook to a crackly, charcoal doneness. Mmmm, yummy, burnt spam. Made a nice football.
Secure your systems and ensure they're running the latest copy of everything, avoid using old software that is likely to have security holes that are well-known.
/24 surrounding it, is my own motto. If one asshole can abuse you, and being that most abusive assholes live on DSL/cable with DHCP and can be in any address within a certain block, block enough space to cover any possible ingress. Then and *only then* can you rest easy.
Log as much detail as you can to tell when an attack happens and where it's coming from. Without that kind of info, you'll not know what's going on with your systems.
Abuse reports on especially egregious behavior should be filed. We want to discourage this kind of behavior, so the only thing to do is to check your logs regularly for anything that appears *not right*. If you find a large block of attempts from one source, extract those log entries and include them in a *polite* letter to abuse@[originating ISP].
Then firewall off the source, not just the single IP source but the
Hah! After suing everyone and their brother, SCO thinks they have an OS to sell. Of course, it's based on an ancient piece of claptrap that should have been retired 10 years ago, but never mind all that, this is the NEW SCO UNIXWARE! Ring the bells and shout out, "HALLELIEUAH!!" Whatever are we going to do without it?
Anthony needs to sit in one place while someone beats him about the head with a flyswatter, and needs to be told that being hit with a flyswatter about the head multiple times is just an annoyance he has to deal with in a free society. Then maybe he'd get it.
Ignore SCO? Not so soon, bucko.
SCO still has considerable cash, though it's a finite sum. They will continue to find ways to trim the budget. The expenditures earmarked to prosecute the DaimlerChrysler suit are now lessened and money budgeted for it can either be funnelled to the other suits or to their regular operating expenses.
As Steven Vaughn-Nichols pointed out last week, this show ain't over. The fat lady may be rehearsing but she's not even been asked to step into the amphitheatre, let alone sing.
In May 2000, I ended up becoming interested in lasik as I had been in glasses -- thick ones -- since I was in second grade in elementary school. I was very nearsighted, usually rated 20/400 on my eye exams but easily correctible. As I aged, my eyes deformed and my vision became increasingly bad. It was to the point that without them, the distance at which I could see *anything* clearly was less than 4" from my face.
Of course, all the ads that started in 1998 or 1999 caught my attention, but at prices as high as $1600 for both eyes here in the States, I wasn't in a hurry to have the surgery done. Since most of the pioneering work was done in Canada and I lived just across the border in metro Detroit from Windsor, Ontario, I began to hear ads featuring a price of $499/eye offered by LasikVision of Canada. Attactive, said I, and began to plan.
With the help of my girlfriend at the time, we saved up enough to go have the surgery done. I went across the border for my first exam and was told that I was an excellent candidate and they scheduled my surgery for June 10th. After a precarious walk from the clinic to a dark restaurant where I had dinner while waiting for my eyes to come back to normal from being dilated for the exam, I drove back home, excited at the prospect of getting my fucking eyes fixed.
I hated those glasses. They were heavy, difficult to find upon waking up, absolutely necessary if I wanted to function. As a kid, I was terribly hard on them, constantly breaking them in my rough and tumble world as a boy growing up. I had tried contacts as a young adult and again became frustrated because my corneas were unusually flat and it was difficult to find a set of contacts that would fit comfortably. Even then, it was a pain in the ass, playing with all the chemicals and the enzymatic cleansers, and having a reaction to the mercury compounds they used at the time (early 80's) as a sterilizing agent just didn't make me want to wear the damned things. I felt trapped in those huge lenses!
June 10 finally arrived. Once again, a quick reference exam to see if there was any unusual variation since my first exam, then drops were placed in my eye to begin the numbing process and I was given 5mg Valium to take the edge off the anxiety I might experience prior to and during the procedure.
I was finally taken back and positioned on the table. They worked on my right eye first, being that I was left-eye dominant. They used a microtome to cut and lift the flap, then the laser to do the cutting necessary to reshape my cornea. I did well with that first eye, but when it came to the second eye, it was like the anesthetic was lessened in effect due to the trauma to the first eye. I had a difficult time keeping my left eye still and may have botched the laser cutting path. This was before the advent ot the pupil tracking technology that most systems have now. As a result, my left eye wasn't a perfect job. It is still a bit fuzzy but workable as close disatances, and my right eye has compensated to handle the distances.
Within about 9 months of my procedure, when I was told to call and make my 1 year followup exam appointment was surprised to get no answer at the clinic in downtown Windsor. Using the 'Net, I found that LasikVision Canada had gone bankrupt! Talk about pissed off! I had been promised lifetime followup and maintenance. After three months of calling to see if this place would open back up, someone finally answered the phone and told me that another group of doctors had bought the practice but would not honor the lifetime followup provisions of my contract. They would do the exam for $50 and $250 for any adjustment procedures. Fuck that, I said, and decided to simply wait and see how things would heal, since the healing process can take up to 18 months to complete.
I did my follow up exams with my local eye doctor and was told that it was probably best not to have any adjustments done, as they would have to make only very fine adjustments t
In the ST:TOS episode "Patterns of Force", Spock and Kirk are sent down to the planet to undo the mess that historian John Gill created when he indoctrinated the Ekosian people with the idea that the Nazi society would work. Before leaving the ship, both Spock and Kirk were injected with a crystal that had similar properties to an RFID chip.
Now, this Mexican official is set! All he needs now is to rip up the bed springs, slit his arm and remove the crystal, and he can burn his way out of his jail cell with a homemade laser!! How cool is that shit?
You've forgotten two important aspects:
First of all, the scammer guy in Nigeria couldn't sue someone from outside Nigeria, and besides, I'd think they've have a clean hands doctrine that would prevent him from suing. The clean hands doctrine states that if you're throwing mud, you can't sue someone else because your shirt got dirty when they threw mud at you.
Actual fraud? Hah! Frauding a fraudster is simply justice in my own viewpoint. I'd love to catch an American spammer using this same tactic.
I should correct myself here. That's zarb.org, and the the Penguin Liberation Front.