You're absolutely correct and that's merely one example of the drastically uneven hand used in this study. The criteria being applied to judge Google in this study can clearly be seen as different criteria than used on others, by any objective observer. This report amounts to little more than a sloppy attempt at character assassination, as far I can see.
I found the Kingdom of Loathing to be engrossing from the very beginning. When the content for low-level characters is both fun and interesting, start-up and achieving comfort in the new interface is far less of a grind. KoL accomplishes this by being funny and clever throughout the gameplay.
Sounds like looking forward is just like gazing into the past. The system they propose sounds strikingly similar to the now-dated system over at Everything2. This has worked pretty well for this non fact-oriented wiki, I suppose it could also work for a reference piece. How long until they want to start calling it "noding?"
Re:Earthlink Abuse Department Rejoices
on
Spam, Milord
·
· Score: 1
I always send my beer money to the real heroes of this fight, the ones who do it from the goodness of their hearts.
A few of my favorite examples are:
MyNetWatchman, firewall incident reporting service. Helps to defray spam by finding and reporting compromised hosts internet-wide.
TMDA, The GPL spamfilter that actually delivers on the zero spam, zero fasle positive promise.
SpamHaus, who does a great job keeping lists of both servers and spammers, and is very dedicated
Your Local Food Bank. courtesy of abuse.net who says: "If you feel that abuse.net has been useful to you, please make a contribution to your local food bank, which needs money a lot more than we ever will. Thanks."
Earthlink Abuse Department Rejoices
on
Spam, Milord
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
here is a photo of some of the people in the Earthlink Abuse Department responsible for the yearlong investigation that landed the Buffalo spammer in jail. Today is a great day for all of us!
The people pictured are from the Atlanta team, there's also a Pasadena team that is putting a picture together. From left to right they are: Tom Tatom, Kate Trower, Bobby Arnold, Beth, Milliken, Larry Fine, and Louis Rush. People in Atlanta not pictured include our team lead Erich Hablutzel, Brian Greer, and the departmental manager, Mary Youngblood. The Pasadena crew includes Laura Truchon, Kenn Wilson, Brad Patton, Brian Majeska, Jesse Kolbert, Kevin Phillips.
To be honest I don't know, I'm a geek and not a lawyer. We couldn't use evidence if it came from outside the American border, though. I think it has something to do with being able to subpeona or get a notorized statement from the relay administrator saying they confirm that they had been violated. I guess it's difficult or impossilbe to get such proof from foreign nations.
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 covers exploitation of open relays. My company tested this in court against spammer Khan Smith, and we trounced his ass. Using an open relay to send mail is illegal in the states, provided the relay is also in this country. This ex-cop most certainly broke the law.
I don't disagree with their posting of the information, but I am disappointed at the persepctive of the article. It seems to glamorize spammers, I would have liked more commentary from the antispammers, and it would have been nice if they hadn't screwed up their info, such as the link to SPAMHAUS.ORG, not freakin' spamhouse.org.
You might be surprised about how many of those 180 that are based in the US live closer to the poverty line than you might imagine. For example we estimate than Khan Smith had an annual income resultant from his online fraud of 32K. He may also have had a narcotics business, but most spammers do not.
Sorry, but in this case unfortunately the generalization is correct. That's pretty much how it's played out I'm afraid. There's only a couple spammers like Milette and he's more clever (and able to find scumbag salespeople at desperate bandwith providers) than many would like to admit.
I'm sorry, but I can't understand your hypothetical. If you could rephrase it, it would probably help.
As for a using losing mail for any period of time, every precaution has been taken against that possiblity. Even in the event of catastrophic server failure, multilple safeguards against mail loss exist. No system is perfect, but this one affords as much protection against fault as any out there.
There are general load protections for a single email addresses as well as for a mail server. There are reasonable daily limits to how many challenges a person or server will receive in a 24 hour period.
And it won't be long before spamers all spoof the source address of all e-mails as: dilbert@dilbert.com, or whatever their mailing list is...
Which is really why TMDA is such a spectacularly wonderful tool. When you subscribe to the mailing list, you use a tagged address. For instance, I could use:
datavortex+sender+9e0531@datavortex.net
to subscribe to the Dilbert mailing list. For the sake of discussion, let's pretend that it's a discussion instead of an announcement-only style list. I send emails to the mailing list and the from address is seen by all, and saved in web archives.
Thanks to TMDA, I'm still spam-free. The tagged address above is a sender style address. This means it's a one-to-one channel for communication. dilbert@dilbert.com is the only from address that's accepted to the unique addresses TMDA made for me (via a web interface that even a Windows user can use and love!). Even if that address gets harvested from the mailing list, no problem, it's useless to them. They would have to try and spoof the mailing list to my specific address (at which point I could easily kill that addy I made for the Dilbert list) - and when harvesting is that difficult it's no longer the path of least resistance, and not economically viable for spammers.
If the challenge response triggers a mail daemon reply, is it filtered or do you get flooded with those replies caused by all the spammers with forged addresses?
As you will find to be the case with most C/R systems, the challenge is sent with a null envelope.
If I mass email tons of earthlink addresses with a forge from address, would it mailbomb the fake address, or do they have flood protection to prevent this?
Yes. There are daily (and other) limits to how many challenges are sent to an address or server.
Having looked at commercial and OSS systems, I reccomend TMDA over any other existing system. It has a great web interface for your n00bs, and way more features and temporary addressing tricks than anyone else. It's light years ahead.
And if you're blocking by IP address, I reccomend the following range that I have found rather effective: 167.107.0.0/16.
May Experian rot in every single blackhole list on the planet for ever and ever, amen.
By failing to blackhole traffic that causes network problems, especially on the mail systems, I can guarantee real downtime for the end users. ISPs are left with little choice but to filter bad connections, and it is what 99.9% of the users out there demand of us in the first place.
There was one evening some months ago where I made a CVS error which resulted in Earthlink's MX servers accepting connections from every single IP attempting to connect. Two servers (of many) died instantly and the previous version of the blockfile had to be reinstated just to get sendmail accepting connections again. The rest of the servers slowed to a crawl. Mail that was in the spool at the time was delayed up to an hour and a half. And that was missing the denyfile that we use for... I'd say 7 minutes.
... especially if you have a home network that includes a workstation with an ATI television card in it, as I do. An add-on for the GATOS project to allow a PC to appear to be a replay box, and then display the video would allow all sorts of niftyness. In my case, I could watch a recorded program in a window on my PC, while someone else watches live television in the next room. Now if I can just get a definitive answer to whether or not it is possible to buy the low-end model, and replace the hard drive myself...
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.kingdomofloathing.com/ Who needs colors? BAH!
You're absolutely correct and that's merely one example of the drastically uneven hand used in this study. The criteria being applied to judge Google in this study can clearly be seen as different criteria than used on others, by any objective observer. This report amounts to little more than a sloppy attempt at character assassination, as far I can see.
More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_electric_hy brid_vehicle#CNW_Marketing_Reports
I found the Kingdom of Loathing to be engrossing from the very beginning. When the content for low-level characters is both fun and interesting, start-up and achieving comfort in the new interface is far less of a grind. KoL accomplishes this by being funny and clever throughout the gameplay.
Sounds like looking forward is just like gazing into the past. The system they propose sounds strikingly similar to the now-dated system over at Everything2. This has worked pretty well for this non fact-oriented wiki, I suppose it could also work for a reference piece. How long until they want to start calling it "noding?"
A few of my favorite examples are:
The people pictured are from the Atlanta team, there's also a Pasadena team that is putting a picture together. From left to right they are: Tom Tatom, Kate Trower, Bobby Arnold, Beth, Milliken, Larry Fine, and Louis Rush. People in Atlanta not pictured include our team lead Erich Hablutzel, Brian Greer, and the departmental manager, Mary Youngblood. The Pasadena crew includes Laura Truchon, Kenn Wilson, Brad Patton, Brian Majeska, Jesse Kolbert, Kevin Phillips.
Today is a good day for all anti-spam activists!
To be honest I don't know, I'm a geek and not a lawyer. We couldn't use evidence if it came from outside the American border, though. I think it has something to do with being able to subpeona or get a notorized statement from the relay administrator saying they confirm that they had been violated. I guess it's difficult or impossilbe to get such proof from foreign nations.
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 covers exploitation of open relays. My company tested this in court against spammer Khan Smith, and we trounced his ass. Using an open relay to send mail is illegal in the states, provided the relay is also in this country. This ex-cop most certainly broke the law.
Of course! Whitelisting (or SMTP2000) is the future, baby.
I don't disagree with their posting of the information, but I am disappointed at the persepctive of the article. It seems to glamorize spammers, I would have liked more commentary from the antispammers, and it would have been nice if they hadn't screwed up their info, such as the link to SPAMHAUS.ORG, not freakin' spamhouse.org.
I think the /. readers control enough of the world's bandwith to make their presense felt, if you know what I mean.
You might be surprised about how many of those 180 that are based in the US live closer to the poverty line than you might imagine. For example we estimate than Khan Smith had an annual income resultant from his online fraud of 32K. He may also have had a narcotics business, but most spammers do not.
Sorry, but in this case unfortunately the generalization is correct. That's pretty much how it's played out I'm afraid. There's only a couple spammers like Milette and he's more clever (and able to find scumbag salespeople at desperate bandwith providers) than many would like to admit.
As for a using losing mail for any period of time, every precaution has been taken against that possiblity. Even in the event of catastrophic server failure, multilple safeguards against mail loss exist. No system is perfect, but this one affords as much protection against fault as any out there.
There are general load protections for a single email addresses as well as for a mail server. There are reasonable daily limits to how many challenges a person or server will receive in a 24 hour period.
Having looked at commercial and OSS systems, I reccomend TMDA over any other existing system. It has a great web interface for your n00bs, and way more features and temporary addressing tricks than anyone else. It's light years ahead.
Then, if you added a dozen more equally clever features, and a nifty web interface availible, you would have TMDA
:)
There was one evening some months ago where I made a CVS error which resulted in Earthlink's MX servers accepting connections from every single IP attempting to connect. Two servers (of many) died instantly and the previous version of the blockfile had to be reinstated just to get sendmail accepting connections again. The rest of the servers slowed to a crawl. Mail that was in the spool at the time was delayed up to an hour and a half. And that was missing the denyfile that we use for... I'd say 7 minutes.
That's just nifty.
That's all.