As a web host, we have a BIG problem with AOL just blocking us on a whim, and when you don't get any sort of bounce or refusal from their end your email server THINKS it delivered email properly. Meaning we don't know it's happening until the complaints start.
I host a little over 13,000 web sites, on over 60 servers. We allow people to run CGI and PHP (I mean people wouldn't like it much if we didn't) and as a result we do get the occasional open formmail.cgi or formmail.php being used to spam. We usually catch them pretty fast and it doesn't happen "that" often. But it happens, and before we can stop it there might be several thousand emails sent. Which is enough to get us on AOL's block, we've been silently placed on their block roughly 7 times now. The thing is EACH TIME I signup for this "in the loop" mailing so I am SUPPOSED to get a warning as soon as spam is reported from one of my servers, ok fine, know what? Not one warning, not a single one, and we were still blocked 6 more times after that.
I applaud AOL's efforts at stopping spam, but they've got to get it to be a little less troublesome.
I will say, we haven't been blocked in a couple months now, so MAYBE we're finally on the white list "for real" so here's hoping things ARE improving.
I like earthlink's challenge response better, I'll get a couple of these per day, some are from spam with my domain forged, most are from things like invoices/reciepts/other business, I click the link and jump through the hoops and from then on things seem to flow to that email account from our billing or forum system.
Before I say anything, I think what the RIAA is doing is not right.
However I don't think they're going after people like you, they're not picking on people with some old tunes on their share or a few lesser known bands, indie artists, etc. They're mainly going after folks with thousands of very new and "popular" songs up for share, the people downloading and sharing Britney and Metallica and other "mainstream" artists. And sharing thousands of those popular files to boot.
I get my mp3's from a russian site that's for "pay" and supposedly "legal" (though of course they aren't I'm sure). I find things obscure and not easily found, I can't go diddy bopping into Best Buy and find these songs nor can I go to iTunes and find them either, mainly heavy metal and other hardcore music. If I COULD buy the cd's for most of these folks easily I would, and when I do find them I'll buy them, I'm not a pirate I just don't like what's "popular" and sometimes finding what I want is a search.
I was looking around for an Apple notebook, Ebay/Yahoo/Amazon etc, was looking at the $2999 17" Apple notebook at Amazon and noticed the "X new & used from $1720" I was like "hmm $1720 that's a pretty good price" and I checked it out, the guy who was selling it said his grandmother got him one for Xmas as a going to college present but he'd already gotten one through a school program, etc etc, so it seemed legitimate enough to this point. So I asked how did he want payment, and he wanted to use an "escrow server because it's safer for us both" (uh huh....) well he gave me the URL for the escrow and I whois'd it, the domain was less than a week old (???) Verisign logos, etc yet the certificate was an instant-ssl free certificte (???x2).
Definite scam, emailed Amazon and the hosting provider, site was pulled, Amazon never replied, I forgot all about it, about a month later I get ANOTHER email from this guy, different Amazon account, same URL, new host... the cycle continues...
Apparently Amazon did nuke his account, and his web host pulled the fake escrow site, DNS update, new Amazon account, and he's back up and running.
Kinda makes you want to go to Chuck E Cheese and play whack-a-mole, for all the good you do tracking these bastards down they just pop up out of another hole.
Hahahaha did I say I worked? I own my company I work in the family room, my commute consists of waking up, scratching my nuts and stumbling downstairs to my computer.
My kid is within arm's reach pretty much all day, so sue me, we like to watch Spongebob and Fairly Oddparents on Nick (Tivo'd usually) and I like my South Park fix. So losing the Viacom channels would aggravate me.
I wish I were so neglected as a kid...
Oh well, I'm out of Troll Chow guess I'll have to get another bag for next time.
I'm not a Dish subscriber, I live in the woods and no satellite service has a snowball's chance in hell of reaching me here, unless I throw up a 100 foot or taller pole to sit the antenna on.
Why do I say this? Because I'm sick and tired of the scrolling on my screen whining about this, it doesn't affect me, I don't care. If MY cable company yanks these channels you can bet I WILL scream bloody murder, having a 3 year old, many of these channels are viewed quite a lot around here.
If I WERE a Dish subscriber I'd be plenty pissed right now though, and probably no longer a subscriber.
However this on-air squabbilng was somewhat entertaining, overall I really couldn't care less and would prefer not to see the scrolling on my screen.
Yes the scammer is at FAULT but then again, if you don't take due diligence of your own then you're also partly to blame.
I recently ran into a scammer on Amazon, I was poking around looking at high end apple laptops, and this guy had one "he got for Xmas but didn't need" for about $1000 less than the normal price ($1800 for the $3000 17" apple). Which is still expensive enough you can almost buy it, "granny bought me a laptop, I'm in the UK and I can't return it, shipping it back to her would be rude AND costly, etc" so I asked about it. I mean had he wanted $1000 for it you'd be like "pshyeah right" but $1800 is just expensive enough to sound legitimate.
He wanted payment via Escrow, hmmm, the url for the escrow company? Registered 2 days before. The site LOOKED legitimate, but with just a LITTLE bit of digging it was obviously a scam. No SSL despite a big Verisign sticker on the site. And escrow but "no paypal" is a red flag to begin with.
Sure it's wrong of the scammer but sometimes it's also wrong to not do your own investigations.
Furthermore half the time someone bitches it's because Paypal asks them for supporting papers they do NOT have, Junior using Mom's CC now Paypal wants a light bill, check stub, etc to verify and Junior don't want mommy knowing he's been selling crap on ebay or getting Paypal for his graphic designs, etc etc etc. So he bitches about Paypal sucking... This is one example I watched in action, kid was 15, was selling web templates, logos etc and getting paid via paypal, well to OPEN that account he used mommy's credit card, and her bank account, without mommy's knowledge. Well he had a couple complaints after he did some slow work, Paypal asks for supporting evidence that he is really (he isn't, he's junior) and he doesn't want mommy to know what he'd been up to, plus Paypal has a rule about under 18 account holders. So he went on to post about how paypal sucked, etc. Never mentioning the whole story.
I was also somewhat like this as a kid, unkempt, ratty clothes, more comfortable with a PC than another person.
I learned most of my social skills working in fast food (my family was on the "poor side" and if I wanted a car, or decent clothes, as in not thrift store crap, I had to buy it myself). Working the registers and drive thru I learned how to interact with people, a sorely needed trait. By the time I got out of college (ok I quit as a junior) and had been working fast food and driving for dominos nearly 6 years, I could interact with people, talk to women, etc. I was no "Don Juan" but I'd grown up. In the work force I even made a halfway decent salesman except I couldn't lie or stretch the truth about a product or offering if I were ordered to.
The only real solution I guess is just getting "out there" and having to deal with the assholes, villains, and other players life has for you.
if there were few complaints, did I read that right, the volume of more than $12.2 billion last year, yowza, if they didn't have some people out there screaming bloody murder about something, I'd be suspicious.
I've seen several "horror stories" with Paypal first hand. EVERY single time, every one, the person screaming was partly (if not nearly fully) at fault. They sent stuff to people who had shady looking order details, etc, or they ordered things "too cheap to be true".
And before you mark me off as someone who doesn't know let me fill in a few blanks.
I have used Paypal since hell I can't even remember, 1998? 99? 00 at the latest. My paypal rating is over 1100 and I recieve "in the neighborhood" of a dozen payments via paypal per day (yes day). I use my Paypal debit card constantly, for nearly everything "day to day" related, buying dinner, groceries, gas, movie tickets, you name it, anything that's not a business expense (use my business credit card for that so I have an unquestionable paper trail for my accountant).
And let me tell you a story about Friday, I went out to eat, got done and went to pay, "do not honor" card denied (paypal debit card), called card services "oh we tried to call you today and verify some purchases but we got no answer" (well suspending my card is one way to get an answer). I verified some personal information, verfied a few purchases, and then handed the waiter my card back, and all was well. I wasn't mad, or pissed, I was damn glad that Paypal saw a big old $430 charge for something "kinda odd" for me to buy and took action to make sure I wasn't getting drained by some carder.
I've had a couple chargebacks, they debited the amount from my balance, life went on, I've had a couple disputed charges, paypal asked me for info, I gave it, they asked the buyer for info, I assume they gave it, and in the end paypal either refunded them their money, or told them "tough noogies" and left the transaction as it was.
I don't doubt Paypal has fucked up royally on a few occasions, but EVERY time I've seen a problem, either my own or someone I knew, Paypal handled it and typically quickly and without too much aggravation.
You don't process BILLIONS a year and have millions of customers without pissing a few of them off.
I was recently invited to Houston for the EV1 Houston Bowl by Robert Marsh and spent 4 nights in the Sheraton on his dime and had a chance to tour the data center.
EV1 currently has over 18,000 dedicated servers, MOST are linux based. MOST not some, not a few, MOST.
I have no clue why Robert would do this, but if I were to venture a guess SCO more or less gave them the IP license for a nominal sum, in order to release this press release.
A Fortune 1000 company? EV1 is big but are they that big? Hmmmmm....
They're just tracking sales and supply chain and that sort of thing. How do they know YOU bought beer if you paid in cash? Or really even via credit card it's not like the card swiper the clerk uses is hooked into "BudNet" to give them your information. They're just tracking sales not individuals.
This is the worst case of chicken little-ism I've seen on slashdot in a while (and that's saying something sometimes/. gets worked up over pretty innocuous things).
I see absolutely NOTHING here to concern me, this is more of a tech issue "how are they doing it?" "what are they using to do it?" "is it running on Linux?" that sort of thing, not an OH MY GOD THEY'RE TRACKING MY BEER BUYING type thing.
Calm down, take off the foil hats and take a real look at what you're crying about here, it's nothing no one else does to try and track what they're selling, when they're selling it, and how can they sell more.
Let the fbi show up at my door with a search warrant for a customer's data and they'll be given a choice of how they want the data handed to them, and then they'll have it, in as much time as it takes me to open the case and hand them the secondary harddrive of the system (break the raid) or if they have a minute I can burn 'em a CD rom of the customer's data in as much time as it takes to tar and scp the data to the machine with the burner in it. Time required would be measured in minutes, and no toes required to count them.
After reading about this story in a few places I said from the first I heard of it "there's more to this". They host an irc network, bastions of warez and mp3s (hey I like IRC too, and have my own server but I know what happens on them if they're not policed heavily). They are (accused) of being carder/hacker friendly and their "ddos proof" hosting and irc services definitely sounds like something a hacker would like... It's sounding like they slept with the pigs and are covered in mud.
Another choice comment: The seizure isn't standard procedure, and there's no way to know exactly what prompted it.
That sounds to me like a thinly veiled attempt at insinuating foonet might not be as innocent as they'd like to be seen, "isn't standard procedure" "no way to know exactly what prompted it".
Call me a chicken or even (gasp) a Republican but if a lowly sheriff's deputy shows up with a warrant he's gonna get 100% cooperation and anything he wants ASAP from me, let the FBI show up? Shit that's when I get out my shoeshine kit...
Whoa this dude is my hero and he sounds just like my old buddy John haha great times.
The funniest was this lady who insisted whoever helped her was rude, usually while they were loading her PC FOR HER into her car. She came back several times with a "bad pc" we could find nothing wrong with it. She told my assistant that the owner was rude to her (our owner was nothing but sugar and honey to customers, sometimes it made me sick he'd tell them WHATEVER they wanted to hear regardless of the facts, but you couldn't have made him get rude if you smacked him then pissed on him). Then she told John I was rude, then she told the owner Chris was rude, typically shedding some tears in the process (really creepy).
We finally gave her a new machine, took hers, reformatted it and sold it as new to someone else (ugh some of the crap we did under orders). She never had a problem with the new one, and the guy who bought her old one never had a problem either.
She brought me a big plate of homemade peanut butter fudge for Xmas, everyone else was too scared to eat it, I half expected it to be laced with something, I ate it anyway. I survived.
Our "Ken" was named John, and this was at a small mom&pop local PC store I worked in the late 90's.
His mantra was "educate the customer" but he should have added "whether they like it or not" he'd sometimes spend hours with a customer teaching them why their system screwed up and what they did to screw it up, whether they wanted to hear the lecture or not, I've even heard him say (something like) "look I can't help you if you won't listen to what I'm telling you else this will just happen again".
I have a kid, he fucks up DVD's and CD's regularly, I make sure he never gets his grubby fingers on an original. $1 dvd-r vs $19.99 original, not a hard call for me to make. He's 3, I don't even expect him to take great care of a CD yet, however for a 3 year old he's damn good at not ruining them. Even if he were 16 and had his own car I'd have him put burns in his car, because little bastards where he'd work or go to school would and probably will steal cd's out of his car (when that time comes) and I'd much rather have a $1 blank stolen as opposed to 10 or 12 purchased CD's.
I own over 300 dvds of various sorts, and hell I don't even know how many CD's 500-1000 I guess. I ripped all my CD's to mp3 LONG ago and I burn cd's to use in my car and stereo, and most of my CD's have been played exactly once, when they were ripped. Same for my DVD's, I buy 'em, rip 'em, and put 'em up, if my kid scratches one, drops one, whatever, I just load the image off my harddrive and burn a new one.
I also built a computer just to hold the images of all the DVD's I've ripped (I haven't ripped ALL my dvd's yet, just the popular ones). It has 4x160 harddrives in a raid stripe, and a 4x DVD-/+RW. Every cd I own and a good bit of the DVD's are on there and ready to reburn when necessary. I can also play the images straight from the computer in my home theatre.
DO I think DVD-X copy is mainly used for piracy? Sure probably is. Does that mean EVERYONE uses it for such? Fuck no. However I personally don't use DVDXCopy, I use DVD Shrink + CopyToDVD but that's just preference in software, still does the same thing.
So yes I do DISPUTE your claim. And this has nothing to do with cost, it has to do with convenience, and keeping what I bought safe so I can use it for years to come.
Ok if I were a terrorist about to do something "nasty" what's the first thing I'd make damn sure I had? Why yes, a valid looking ID. Heck it's not like they're HARD to get, everybody I knew in high school had at least 1 fake ID to get into bars and nightclubs, and most of us had spares "just in case".
So a LACK of ID is like nearly a sure giveaway whoever is lacking ID is probably not up to anything serious.
As for social security numbers, my wife, when I met her, did not have a SSN, I met her a week before her 17th birthday. My family and I helped her get the SSN. I still don't know how the heck her dad filed taxes claiming a kid without a SSN on his taxes.
This man did a few things wrong, he got a little confrontational, he kept shuffling around, and several other things that would put me on guard if I were a cop. He should have stood still, remained calm and done what several other people have mentioned.
First a short bit of introduction, I own a web hosting company, we host over 13,000 web sites across over 50 web servers, so SPAM is part of my life.
CAN-SPAM is a dismal failure, I would call it a joke, but it is far, far from funny.
Now not only do I have to deal with the usual spammers, and open formmail scripts getting us aggravated by the anti spam groups (will people EVER learn to install formmail.php|pl|cgi securely?) But now I have a new aggravation, people who want to spam citing CAN-SPAM because they are using it to legitimize their spam "But we're following ALL of the rules in CAN-SPAM we are NOT breaking any laws!!!" I'm hearing this quite a bit, and it's pissing me off.
I just point to the part of our AUP that says "no bulk email, period" and send them on their way. But now not only do I have to worry about shutting down spammers and open scripts and dealing with spews and spamcop (et al) about the spam, I have to worry that some damned spammer is gonna sic his lawyers on us because we won't let him spam yet he's staying within the CAN-SPAM guidelines.
Somedays I am tempted to enroll in some junior college and learn how to be a mechanic, or welding, welding is cool, take two pieces of metal, and make them into one! haha
Absolutely, my wife, bless her heart, cannot hope to get me the right gift because if it's clothes, getting the right size is hard, and she always underestimates. If it's a "geek" gift it'll be the wrong one, or type, or model. If it's a non geek gift ditto. For Xmas she got me a gas grill, which she knew I was looking into getting a new one. But I'd already shopped and knew the one I wanted, stainless, 4 burners, NO side burner (god these are impossible to find) and built in rotisserie, well she got me one with a side burner (making half the shelf space less usable) and no rotisserie meaning I have to add one myself, and it costed $100 more than the perfect grill I'd already found at Lowes (was waiting for after Xmas sales in the hopes that it'd get put on clearance).
You wanna get him something? Take that $100 and get a hotel room away from the computer, and boff his socks off and order in pizza and beer to the room.
The first thing I check is the access_log for referrers and somewhere along the way it wasn't showing a referrer in the logs. It was looking as if it were raw hits straight to the url, no referrer listed in apache logs so I then figured it was a DDOS until I saw the link here.
Now that the site's on a differnt server it's no big deal, the pipe ain't the problem, it's slashdotting a site on a shared server with 300 other small sites on there with it;)
Though I'm sure the customer will appreciate it, since he'll probably wake up in the morning wondering how in the heck he owes $XX in overages and it's only the 3rd day of the month! haha
Suspended sites NORMALLY redirect to the control panel but suspending this site didn't help the server recover so I removed the control panel redirect which resulted into a redirect to www.8-95.com (still not sure where I managed to set that at) which then resulted in www.8-95.com getting hammered.
Now that I know this isn't a ddos (which is what I thought it was at first) I've put the content on a new server that should be able to handle this traffic.
DNS is also pointing to the new server.
In case you didn't figure it out I host this web site and have spent the last 30 minutes fighting what I THOUGHT was a DDOS and now that I check slashdot and see the link to this customer's site right on the top of the page, I KNOW what's happening and have done what I can to relieve the load.
Then after I suspend the site thinking it's being DDOS'd I come refresh slashdot and what do I see?
Folks that site is on a small shared server, their hosting plan is like a 3 gig per MONTH plan (and they've never used much over 2.5 gigs in a month) so that server croaked FAST.
Now that I know it isn't a DDOS I'll see if I can get them on something that can handle it.
(I host this site and just suspended it due to the traffic killing the server).
They're on an empty server and DNS is updated, with some redirects going on, hopefully that'll help now.
Reading through all of these replies, it's the same tired arguments, both for and against spews that I've heard at least 2 dozen times before in other forums (mostly hosting related).
Spews hurt innocent businesses - fact Spews is a shadow organization and cannot be held accountable for their actions - fact Spews pisses me off - fact Spews works - fact
Spews pisses me the hell off, hardcore, they block innocent bystanders and hurt the business of people who have no affiliation whatsoever to spam, other than having the bad luck to be using a connectivity provider listed in spews.
I have yet to find any major data center that does NOT have a few ips listed in Spews - ev1, nac, gnax, xo, he, and a few others I've checked in just the last few -days-.
But, begrudgingly I have to admit those spews blocks work, the last time I was splattered with the spews dirt thanks to sharing a/19 with spammer (yes/19 my humble/26 was within the/19 they blocked). The listing was removed within a week after I crawled all over the data center to solve the problem or ELSE (and else meant losing my business and more). Oh and the complaint against the data center? Do you think spam was being sent? No, there was a DNS server resolving some ips that were part of a spammers domain. Yeah DNS, golly. The DNS servers were null routed, the newsgroup for spews notified and within 4 days the block was gone.
So, as much as they piss me off, Spews' tactics do seem to work.
Slashdot Mirror
As a web host, we have a BIG problem with AOL just blocking us on a whim, and when you don't get any sort of bounce or refusal from their end your email server THINKS it delivered email properly. Meaning we don't know it's happening until the complaints start.
I host a little over 13,000 web sites, on over 60 servers. We allow people to run CGI and PHP (I mean people wouldn't like it much if we didn't) and as a result we do get the occasional open formmail.cgi or formmail.php being used to spam. We usually catch them pretty fast and it doesn't happen "that" often. But it happens, and before we can stop it there might be several thousand emails sent. Which is enough to get us on AOL's block, we've been silently placed on their block roughly 7 times now. The thing is EACH TIME I signup for this "in the loop" mailing so I am SUPPOSED to get a warning as soon as spam is reported from one of my servers, ok fine, know what? Not one warning, not a single one, and we were still blocked 6 more times after that.
I applaud AOL's efforts at stopping spam, but they've got to get it to be a little less troublesome.
I will say, we haven't been blocked in a couple months now, so MAYBE we're finally on the white list "for real" so here's hoping things ARE improving.
I like earthlink's challenge response better, I'll get a couple of these per day, some are from spam with my domain forged, most are from things like invoices/reciepts/other business, I click the link and jump through the hoops and from then on things seem to flow to that email account from our billing or forum system.
Before I say anything, I think what the RIAA is doing is not right.
However I don't think they're going after people like you, they're not picking on people with some old tunes on their share or a few lesser known bands, indie artists, etc. They're mainly going after folks with thousands of very new and "popular" songs up for share, the people downloading and sharing Britney and Metallica and other "mainstream" artists. And sharing thousands of those popular files to boot.
I get my mp3's from a russian site that's for "pay" and supposedly "legal" (though of course they aren't I'm sure). I find things obscure and not easily found, I can't go diddy bopping into Best Buy and find these songs nor can I go to iTunes and find them either, mainly heavy metal and other hardcore music. If I COULD buy the cd's for most of these folks easily I would, and when I do find them I'll buy them, I'm not a pirate I just don't like what's "popular" and sometimes finding what I want is a search.
I was looking around for an Apple notebook, Ebay/Yahoo/Amazon etc, was looking at the $2999 17" Apple notebook at Amazon and noticed the "X new & used from $1720" I was like "hmm $1720 that's a pretty good price" and I checked it out, the guy who was selling it said his grandmother got him one for Xmas as a going to college present but he'd already gotten one through a school program, etc etc, so it seemed legitimate enough to this point. So I asked how did he want payment, and he wanted to use an "escrow server because it's safer for us both" (uh huh....) well he gave me the URL for the escrow and I whois'd it, the domain was less than a week old (???) Verisign logos, etc yet the certificate was an instant-ssl free certificte (???x2).
Definite scam, emailed Amazon and the hosting provider, site was pulled, Amazon never replied, I forgot all about it, about a month later I get ANOTHER email from this guy, different Amazon account, same URL, new host... the cycle continues...
Apparently Amazon did nuke his account, and his web host pulled the fake escrow site, DNS update, new Amazon account, and he's back up and running.
Kinda makes you want to go to Chuck E Cheese and play whack-a-mole, for all the good you do tracking these bastards down they just pop up out of another hole.
Hahahaha did I say I worked? I own my company I work in the family room, my commute consists of waking up, scratching my nuts and stumbling downstairs to my computer.
My kid is within arm's reach pretty much all day, so sue me, we like to watch Spongebob and Fairly Oddparents on Nick (Tivo'd usually) and I like my South Park fix. So losing the Viacom channels would aggravate me.
I wish I were so neglected as a kid...
Oh well, I'm out of Troll Chow guess I'll have to get another bag for next time.
I'm not a Dish subscriber, I live in the woods and no satellite service has a snowball's chance in hell of reaching me here, unless I throw up a 100 foot or taller pole to sit the antenna on.
Why do I say this? Because I'm sick and tired of the scrolling on my screen whining about this, it doesn't affect me, I don't care. If MY cable company yanks these channels you can bet I WILL scream bloody murder, having a 3 year old, many of these channels are viewed quite a lot around here.
If I WERE a Dish subscriber I'd be plenty pissed right now though, and probably no longer a subscriber.
However this on-air squabbilng was somewhat entertaining, overall I really couldn't care less and would prefer not to see the scrolling on my screen.
Yes the scammer is at FAULT but then again, if you don't take due diligence of your own then you're also partly to blame.
I recently ran into a scammer on Amazon, I was poking around looking at high end apple laptops, and this guy had one "he got for Xmas but didn't need" for about $1000 less than the normal price ($1800 for the $3000 17" apple). Which is still expensive enough you can almost buy it, "granny bought me a laptop, I'm in the UK and I can't return it, shipping it back to her would be rude AND costly, etc" so I asked about it. I mean had he wanted $1000 for it you'd be like "pshyeah right" but $1800 is just expensive enough to sound legitimate.
He wanted payment via Escrow, hmmm, the url for the escrow company? Registered 2 days before. The site LOOKED legitimate, but with just a LITTLE bit of digging it was obviously a scam. No SSL despite a big Verisign sticker on the site. And escrow but "no paypal" is a red flag to begin with.
Sure it's wrong of the scammer but sometimes it's also wrong to not do your own investigations.
Furthermore half the time someone bitches it's because Paypal asks them for supporting papers they do NOT have, Junior using Mom's CC now Paypal wants a light bill, check stub, etc to verify and Junior don't want mommy knowing he's been selling crap on ebay or getting Paypal for his graphic designs, etc etc etc. So he bitches about Paypal sucking... This is one example I watched in action, kid was 15, was selling web templates, logos etc and getting paid via paypal, well to OPEN that account he used mommy's credit card, and her bank account, without mommy's knowledge. Well he had a couple complaints after he did some slow work, Paypal asks for supporting evidence that he is really (he isn't, he's junior) and he doesn't want mommy to know what he'd been up to, plus Paypal has a rule about under 18 account holders. So he went on to post about how paypal sucked, etc. Never mentioning the whole story.
I was also somewhat like this as a kid, unkempt, ratty clothes, more comfortable with a PC than another person.
I learned most of my social skills working in fast food (my family was on the "poor side" and if I wanted a car, or decent clothes, as in not thrift store crap, I had to buy it myself). Working the registers and drive thru I learned how to interact with people, a sorely needed trait. By the time I got out of college (ok I quit as a junior) and had been working fast food and driving for dominos nearly 6 years, I could interact with people, talk to women, etc. I was no "Don Juan" but I'd grown up. In the work force I even made a halfway decent salesman except I couldn't lie or stretch the truth about a product or offering if I were ordered to.
The only real solution I guess is just getting "out there" and having to deal with the assholes, villains, and other players life has for you.
if there were few complaints, did I read that right, the volume of more than $12.2 billion last year, yowza, if they didn't have some people out there screaming bloody murder about something, I'd be suspicious.
I've seen several "horror stories" with Paypal first hand. EVERY single time, every one, the person screaming was partly (if not nearly fully) at fault. They sent stuff to people who had shady looking order details, etc, or they ordered things "too cheap to be true".
And before you mark me off as someone who doesn't know let me fill in a few blanks.
I have used Paypal since hell I can't even remember, 1998? 99? 00 at the latest. My paypal rating is over 1100 and I recieve "in the neighborhood" of a dozen payments via paypal per day (yes day). I use my Paypal debit card constantly, for nearly everything "day to day" related, buying dinner, groceries, gas, movie tickets, you name it, anything that's not a business expense (use my business credit card for that so I have an unquestionable paper trail for my accountant).
And let me tell you a story about Friday, I went out to eat, got done and went to pay, "do not honor" card denied (paypal debit card), called card services "oh we tried to call you today and verify some purchases but we got no answer" (well suspending my card is one way to get an answer). I verified some personal information, verfied a few purchases, and then handed the waiter my card back, and all was well. I wasn't mad, or pissed, I was damn glad that Paypal saw a big old $430 charge for something "kinda odd" for me to buy and took action to make sure I wasn't getting drained by some carder.
I've had a couple chargebacks, they debited the amount from my balance, life went on, I've had a couple disputed charges, paypal asked me for info, I gave it, they asked the buyer for info, I assume they gave it, and in the end paypal either refunded them their money, or told them "tough noogies" and left the transaction as it was.
I don't doubt Paypal has fucked up royally on a few occasions, but EVERY time I've seen a problem, either my own or someone I knew, Paypal handled it and typically quickly and without too much aggravation.
You don't process BILLIONS a year and have millions of customers without pissing a few of them off.
I was recently invited to Houston for the EV1 Houston Bowl by Robert Marsh and spent 4 nights in the Sheraton on his dime and had a chance to tour the data center.
EV1 currently has over 18,000 dedicated servers, MOST are linux based. MOST not some, not a few, MOST.
I have no clue why Robert would do this, but if I were to venture a guess SCO more or less gave them the IP license for a nominal sum, in order to release this press release.
A Fortune 1000 company? EV1 is big but are they that big? Hmmmmm....
They're just tracking sales and supply chain and that sort of thing. How do they know YOU bought beer if you paid in cash? Or really even via credit card it's not like the card swiper the clerk uses is hooked into "BudNet" to give them your information. They're just tracking sales not individuals.
/. gets worked up over pretty innocuous things).
This is the worst case of chicken little-ism I've seen on slashdot in a while (and that's saying something sometimes
I see absolutely NOTHING here to concern me, this is more of a tech issue "how are they doing it?" "what are they using to do it?" "is it running on Linux?" that sort of thing, not an OH MY GOD THEY'RE TRACKING MY BEER BUYING type thing.
Calm down, take off the foil hats and take a real look at what you're crying about here, it's nothing no one else does to try and track what they're selling, when they're selling it, and how can they sell more.
Wow some interesting reading here... Like I said, way more to this story than the jackbooted thugs yanking the poor innocent foonet's servers.
After several hours.. (etc)
Let the fbi show up at my door with a search warrant for a customer's data and they'll be given a choice of how they want the data handed to them, and then they'll have it, in as much time as it takes me to open the case and hand them the secondary harddrive of the system (break the raid) or if they have a minute I can burn 'em a CD rom of the customer's data in as much time as it takes to tar and scp the data to the machine with the burner in it. Time required would be measured in minutes, and no toes required to count them.
After reading about this story in a few places I said from the first I heard of it "there's more to this". They host an irc network, bastions of warez and mp3s (hey I like IRC too, and have my own server but I know what happens on them if they're not policed heavily). They are (accused) of being carder/hacker friendly and their "ddos proof" hosting and irc services definitely sounds like something a hacker would like... It's sounding like they slept with the pigs and are covered in mud.
Another choice comment: The seizure isn't standard procedure, and there's no way to know exactly what prompted it.
That sounds to me like a thinly veiled attempt at insinuating foonet might not be as innocent as they'd like to be seen, "isn't standard procedure" "no way to know exactly what prompted it".
Call me a chicken or even (gasp) a Republican but if a lowly sheriff's deputy shows up with a warrant he's gonna get 100% cooperation and anything he wants ASAP from me, let the FBI show up? Shit that's when I get out my shoeshine kit...
Whoa this dude is my hero and he sounds just like my old buddy John haha great times.
The funniest was this lady who insisted whoever helped her was rude, usually while they were loading her PC FOR HER into her car. She came back several times with a "bad pc" we could find nothing wrong with it. She told my assistant that the owner was rude to her (our owner was nothing but sugar and honey to customers, sometimes it made me sick he'd tell them WHATEVER they wanted to hear regardless of the facts, but you couldn't have made him get rude if you smacked him then pissed on him). Then she told John I was rude, then she told the owner Chris was rude, typically shedding some tears in the process (really creepy).
We finally gave her a new machine, took hers, reformatted it and sold it as new to someone else (ugh some of the crap we did under orders). She never had a problem with the new one, and the guy who bought her old one never had a problem either.
She brought me a big plate of homemade peanut butter fudge for Xmas, everyone else was too scared to eat it, I half expected it to be laced with something, I ate it anyway. I survived.
So someone used a combination "giver" and "formatter" technique on you?
Give the harddrive, which requires the format. Customer happy, problem solved.
Our "Ken" was named John, and this was at a small mom&pop local PC store I worked in the late 90's.
His mantra was "educate the customer" but he should have added "whether they like it or not" he'd sometimes spend hours with a customer teaching them why their system screwed up and what they did to screw it up, whether they wanted to hear the lecture or not, I've even heard him say (something like) "look I can't help you if you won't listen to what I'm telling you else this will just happen again".
Haha no mod points but this is definitely +1 Funny because I loaded the image again and laughed.
I have a kid, he fucks up DVD's and CD's regularly, I make sure he never gets his grubby fingers on an original. $1 dvd-r vs $19.99 original, not a hard call for me to make. He's 3, I don't even expect him to take great care of a CD yet, however for a 3 year old he's damn good at not ruining them. Even if he were 16 and had his own car I'd have him put burns in his car, because little bastards where he'd work or go to school would and probably will steal cd's out of his car (when that time comes) and I'd much rather have a $1 blank stolen as opposed to 10 or 12 purchased CD's.
I own over 300 dvds of various sorts, and hell I don't even know how many CD's 500-1000 I guess. I ripped all my CD's to mp3 LONG ago and I burn cd's to use in my car and stereo, and most of my CD's have been played exactly once, when they were ripped. Same for my DVD's, I buy 'em, rip 'em, and put 'em up, if my kid scratches one, drops one, whatever, I just load the image off my harddrive and burn a new one.
I also built a computer just to hold the images of all the DVD's I've ripped (I haven't ripped ALL my dvd's yet, just the popular ones). It has 4x160 harddrives in a raid stripe, and a 4x DVD-/+RW. Every cd I own and a good bit of the DVD's are on there and ready to reburn when necessary. I can also play the images straight from the computer in my home theatre.
DO I think DVD-X copy is mainly used for piracy? Sure probably is. Does that mean EVERYONE uses it for such? Fuck no. However I personally don't use DVDXCopy, I use DVD Shrink + CopyToDVD but that's just preference in software, still does the same thing.
So yes I do DISPUTE your claim. And this has nothing to do with cost, it has to do with convenience, and keeping what I bought safe so I can use it for years to come.
Ok if I were a terrorist about to do something "nasty" what's the first thing I'd make damn sure I had? Why yes, a valid looking ID. Heck it's not like they're HARD to get, everybody I knew in high school had at least 1 fake ID to get into bars and nightclubs, and most of us had spares "just in case".
So a LACK of ID is like nearly a sure giveaway whoever is lacking ID is probably not up to anything serious.
As for social security numbers, my wife, when I met her, did not have a SSN, I met her a week before her 17th birthday. My family and I helped her get the SSN. I still don't know how the heck her dad filed taxes claiming a kid without a SSN on his taxes.
This man did a few things wrong, he got a little confrontational, he kept shuffling around, and several other things that would put me on guard if I were a cop. He should have stood still, remained calm and done what several other people have mentioned.
First a short bit of introduction, I own a web hosting company, we host over 13,000 web sites across over 50 web servers, so SPAM is part of my life.
CAN-SPAM is a dismal failure, I would call it a joke, but it is far, far from funny.
Now not only do I have to deal with the usual spammers, and open formmail scripts getting us aggravated by the anti spam groups (will people EVER learn to install formmail.php|pl|cgi securely?) But now I have a new aggravation, people who want to spam citing CAN-SPAM because they are using it to legitimize their spam "But we're following ALL of the rules in CAN-SPAM we are NOT breaking any laws!!!" I'm hearing this quite a bit, and it's pissing me off.
I just point to the part of our AUP that says "no bulk email, period" and send them on their way. But now not only do I have to worry about shutting down spammers and open scripts and dealing with spews and spamcop (et al) about the spam, I have to worry that some damned spammer is gonna sic his lawyers on us because we won't let him spam yet he's staying within the CAN-SPAM guidelines.
Somedays I am tempted to enroll in some junior college and learn how to be a mechanic, or welding, welding is cool, take two pieces of metal, and make them into one! haha
Absolutely, my wife, bless her heart, cannot hope to get me the right gift because if it's clothes, getting the right size is hard, and she always underestimates. If it's a "geek" gift it'll be the wrong one, or type, or model. If it's a non geek gift ditto. For Xmas she got me a gas grill, which she knew I was looking into getting a new one. But I'd already shopped and knew the one I wanted, stainless, 4 burners, NO side burner (god these are impossible to find) and built in rotisserie, well she got me one with a side burner (making half the shelf space less usable) and no rotisserie meaning I have to add one myself, and it costed $100 more than the perfect grill I'd already found at Lowes (was waiting for after Xmas sales in the hopes that it'd get put on clearance).
You wanna get him something? Take that $100 and get a hotel room away from the computer, and boff his socks off and order in pizza and beer to the room.
The first thing I check is the access_log for referrers and somewhere along the way it wasn't showing a referrer in the logs. It was looking as if it were raw hits straight to the url, no referrer listed in apache logs so I then figured it was a DDOS until I saw the link here.
Now that the site's on a differnt server it's no big deal, the pipe ain't the problem, it's slashdotting a site on a shared server with 300 other small sites on there with it ;)
Though I'm sure the customer will appreciate it, since he'll probably wake up in the morning wondering how in the heck he owes $XX in overages and it's only the 3rd day of the month! haha
Suspended sites NORMALLY redirect to the control panel but suspending this site didn't help the server recover so I removed the control panel redirect which resulted into a redirect to www.8-95.com (still not sure where I managed to set that at) which then resulted in www.8-95.com getting hammered.
Now that I know this isn't a ddos (which is what I thought it was at first) I've put the content on a new server that should be able to handle this traffic.
DNS is also pointing to the new server.
In case you didn't figure it out I host this web site and have spent the last 30 minutes fighting what I THOUGHT was a DDOS and now that I check slashdot and see the link to this customer's site right on the top of the page, I KNOW what's happening and have done what I can to relieve the load.
Then after I suspend the site thinking it's being DDOS'd I come refresh slashdot and what do I see?
Folks that site is on a small shared server, their hosting plan is like a 3 gig per MONTH plan (and they've never used much over 2.5 gigs in a month) so that server croaked FAST.
Now that I know it isn't a DDOS I'll see if I can get them on something that can handle it.
(I host this site and just suspended it due to the traffic killing the server).
They're on an empty server and DNS is updated, with some redirects going on, hopefully that'll help now.
Reading through all of these replies, it's the same tired arguments, both for and against spews that I've heard at least 2 dozen times before in other forums (mostly hosting related).
/19 with spammer (yes /19 my humble /26 was within the /19 they blocked). The listing was removed within a week after I crawled all over the data center to solve the problem or ELSE (and else meant losing my business and more). Oh and the complaint against the data center? Do you think spam was being sent? No, there was a DNS server resolving some ips that were part of a spammers domain. Yeah DNS, golly. The DNS servers were null routed, the newsgroup for spews notified and within 4 days the block was gone.
Spews hurt innocent businesses - fact
Spews is a shadow organization and cannot be held accountable for their actions - fact
Spews pisses me off - fact
Spews works - fact
Spews pisses me the hell off, hardcore, they block innocent bystanders and hurt the business of people who have no affiliation whatsoever to spam, other than having the bad luck to be using a connectivity provider listed in spews.
I have yet to find any major data center that does NOT have a few ips listed in Spews - ev1, nac, gnax, xo, he, and a few others I've checked in just the last few -days-.
But, begrudgingly I have to admit those spews blocks work, the last time I was splattered with the spews dirt thanks to sharing a
So, as much as they piss me off, Spews' tactics do seem to work.