Yeah, I have used Epocrates. It's a fantastic piece of software for managing the mess of drug information out there right now.
Most of the Palm software that I've seen works pretty well with only the Palm. I don't care too much about booting into 'Doze every few weeks to update the databases, really. I just don't want to have to pull a laptop out, boot the thing into 'Doze, deal with the braindeath that I never got used to in Windows (Yes, Linux has it too, but I'm used to that.:), etc.
I submitted this Ask Slashdot during a presentation this morning concerning Palm integration, and from what it looked like, there's a lot of PC-side stuff that needs to be done to sync schedules and everything else. Some of what's been suggested here so far looks to handle all that pretty well, and I'm rightly impressed.
Here's a clue: the default install of Fedora has zero open ports and an iptables firewall blocking all incoming TCP connections, as well as SELinux mandatory access control restrictions on most network-facing daemons.
About all I can say to that is "cool." And I mean it.
I'm not spreading FUD. If they were running Linux, there would typically be far less reason for them to install anything as root. Under Windows, there's a huge liability with MSIE and Outlook holes, which don't exist in the same way with Evolution and Firefox. (Firefox has its own problems, yes.) In one sense, some of the increased security is just due to the fact that there aren't as many targetted exploits out there for Linux compared to Windows, and that's because of market penetration.
Hell, I bought a HP machine that shipped with so much questionable shit installed that it even made my head spin. Most of it got uninstalled immediately.
Like I said, the catch is that under Windows, it compromises the entire machine. Under Linux, you don't tend to need to run as root to do user things or install software by default, and there are fewer big, honking security holes that everyone knows about.
Yes, if they ran as root, installed every piece of shitty software they could find, and if there was more malware out there that targetted Linux, it would be just as bad. I'm not arguing that, because it's absolute fact. But at least when family member A compromises herself, it doesn't affect family member B or trash the entire system.
And yes, Microsoft has made extraordinary strides in security from, say, Windows 95 to ME to 2000 to XP. It's so much better than it was before. It just still is in no way close to the point where I'd go stick, say, patient information on it (being a doctor) and expect to have any kind of security.
Which is nowhere near acceptable. The system should be designed such that, for the most part, I don't need to be scanning my system for viruses, spyware, malware, etc., on a continuous basis.
The problem with Microsoft software historically has been that you buy the OS, then have to buy third-party software to get basic functionality. Part of this is because of the anti-trust laws. Part of it is because they feel that they have a duty to their third party developers like Symantec.
I can pop in a Gentoo distribution CD and in a few hours have a system set up that does far more than a Microsoft system does, and it costs me nothing. Most of those few hours is just waiting for the system to compile. If I went with Debian or another binary-based distribution, it would be a lot faster.
The catch is that, generally, Linux isn't as easy to install and administrate for people who don't know anything about what they're doing. Then again, if you think about it, as it stands now most consumers seem to haul their machine into Best Buy or eqivelent place and get them to administrate their box anyway, so this may be less of a problem than you might think.
It depends. That seems to usually be the bottom line in this kind of thing.
Linux these days is generally more secure out of the box. But when you install it, you really need to do a 'netstat -ln' and see what's open. Then set up a reasonable firewall. Your average idiot out there can't do this. (I use Gentoo, so I have absolutely no clue how other distributions handle this stuff, and I don't know what kind of blackbox firewall setups are out there.)
Linux can be less secure than Windows. Usually that's accomplished by turning on all sorts of crap that you don't need, not securing it, and not updating it.
Windows, by default, is a typical blackbox. The thing is an absolute mess. Years after they first appeared, we still have Outlook viruses that pop up every day. Web browsing with MSIE is like playing Russian Roulette. At least with Linux you don't have to worry about that as much. With Linux, you set the system up, and it stays set up that way for the most part. So many packages (malicious and legitimate) change settings in Windows, that it's nearly impossible sometimes to have a good picture of what is going on with your system.
I took a Windows system down ony my home network because after one of my family used the thing for a few months I threw a traffic and systems analyzer on the thing and saw so much spyware and so many viruses on it that I couldn't justify letting the thing stay on my network. This was with Norton Antivirus running on it, mind you. As it is, any Windows installation I have is sectioned from the rest of the network for just that reason. They sit on their own subnet, can't talk to each other, can't talk to the LAN, and can only route out to the Internet.
That isn't what Tor is designed to do and you know it.
Changing your IP address under the same ISP still leaves a trail with that ISP. It stops some idiot from doing simple IP address correlation, sure, but it doesn't fix the problem. Similarly, it doesn't do a thing for you if every time you go somewhere you get nailed by scans and attacks.
Tor is designed to provide anonymous web browsing. That means that unless I do something stupid, the target site has no idea where I'm actually coming from. This stops simple content filtration (but of course doesn't stop them from filtering Tor itself), while at the same time preventing the site I hit from being able to tell where I am.
If you think this kind of concern is overblown, consider this: There are plenty of people who post on or read forums that nothing is wrong with, but would suffer political ramifications in their personal lives if someone were able to correlate that. This is what Tor is designed to prevent.
So no, Slashdot doesn't qualify, and it's something that could be bypassed by setting your proxy to not Tor-route connections to Slashdot. On the other hand, Slashdot lauding the software package while banning it is hypocritical, stupid, and short-sighted.
I complained about this, and the support monkey who responded said "Are you the administrator of Tor Network?" Then I explained it, and never got a response back.
If Slashdot wants to be a bunch of dicks about it, then they should stop lauding the software.
So why arent Apples dominating the personal computer gaming industry?
Two reasons. Price, and market penetrance. I have five computers at home. One of them is an old 500MHz Athlon that I use as a mail server, router, DNS server, web server, etc. One is a Athlon 2800+ running Linux that's in the game room for the family to use. One is a P4 laptop that dual boots Linux and Windows (for games). One is a Athlon 3000+ with 1GB RAM and an ATI X700 Pro graphics card that I use to offload tasks onto, use as a secured (encrypted) fileserver, and boot into Windows to play more of the "high power" games. The other is an old Pentium 133MHz machine that I use for very low power stuff that for various reasons I don't want sitting on the router machine but want to always be up (e.g., patient records; I'm a doctor.)
Between all of these machines, I have close to a terabyte of HD space. I confess it isn't organized very well. That's on my TODO list.
If I were going to set something like this up with Macs, I could, but I'd spend more, mostly for the HDDs. On the Windows (i.e., gaming) side I'd also have less selection. These two factors keep Windows machines in the gaming market as opposed to Macs, because most people don't buy a PC to only play games, but they want a good selection of games when they do.
As Noah Wyle playing Steve Jobs said in the TNT movie "Pirates of Silicon Valley," "We have... we have better stuff, [Bill Gates]." But it costs more, and it costs too much for a lot of people. Sure, SCSI rocks, but it's a HELL of a lot more expensive than IDE too.
(If Macs are now running IDE drives, pick something else.)
Unless of course there is more to the story like the guy was a total jerk... and really did'nt appreciate her, mistreated her...
Yeah, there was, and I left that out. When I pawed through the guy's address book, there was also a folder in his "My Documents" directory that had a book with dates and ratings. The guy was cheating on her hardcore. I did her a favor, which is why I did it.
Yeah. I distinctly remember one boring night while watching "Deep Space Nine" I was browsing a SMB share on a machine in a dorm room at UNC. To make a long story short, the idiot had taken videos of his (really cute, mind you) girlfriend posing in her high school cheerleading uniform and frigging herself.
So of course, like any geek, I promptly downloaded the videos.
Then I kept browsing, and came across his address book and email, which had the girlfriend's email address in it.
So, like any geek, what did I do? Snapshooted jpegs off of them and emailed them back to the girl with "greetings from California." Not only was he a bastard to globally post the things in the first place, he was a bastard to not appreciate a hot girlfriend.
Poor Melissa. Then again, I doubt their relationship lasted much longer either.:)
No, no, no.
Slashdot blocks the exit-point routers of the Tor network. This has been mentioned to them and they don't care. As a result, if you're going to use Tor, you can't use Slashdot, because they randomly IP restrict your exit point.
There also appears to be another problem with Slashdot when the IP of a user changes, which is also causing problems with peoples' multihomed proxy setups, but that's a (slightly) different issue.
This is where networks like Tor become valuable. Unfortunately, so many sites (including Slashdot to my surprise) have deliberately broken the Tor network that it's becoming too much of a pain the ass to use.
You know, what I found most amusing about "Enterprise" was that in the last four episodes or so, all of a sudden Hoshi started acting like a real character. That would indicate to me that the actress wasn't a problem at all, it was the horribly bad acting.
Then again, maybe I was just fixated on the character's sudden expression of emotion and the actress's suddenly visible and rather attractive body.:)
You can always run your own smarthose with a static IP and submit on port 587, as a good internet user does.
No, I can't. That's the point. My choices are either to deal with an ISP's screwed over mail servers, or run my own. As I said, mail is submitted over my LAN, goes to my SMTP server, and my SMTP server handles it.
Submitting on port 587 does wonders if you're a guy who is trying to hand messages off to a corporate SMTP server somewhere. It does nothing for the end-point which has to submit the mail anyway. That end-point has to submit on port 25. So, again, the choice for the end-point is to deal with the ISP's broken mail servers, or do it itself. This proposal is designed to prevent that.
Earthlink/Mindspring already pull this shit. They block all outgoing traffic on port 25 to all servers except their own SMTP servers which they've blessed. The catch is that then email sits on their lame SMTP server for x number of hours if it doesn't go out, instead of the immediate notification I get from my own server. Then there are problems with the mail servers of the ISP going to shit -- I don't care why.
Roadrunner, by contrast, doesn't do this. This is why I subscribe to their service now and dropped Mindspring.
Email I send goes over my LAN to my SMTP server, which then handles sending it out. 99% of the time I don't have a problem. When I do, it's usually for some shit like AOL or sending mail _to_ Earthlink or Mindspring, at which point they get a complaint email (whcih they of course ignore), and then a bunch of enraged calls from their customers (who don't understand the entire thing) saying that the ISP's email reception is broken (which it _is_). This wastes their time dealing with their enraged customers. If they don't like it, they can fix their fucking systems.
Of course, I could set a smart host to my ISP's mail server, which solves the problem, but grants me the problem I pointed out in the first paragraph.
If ISPs are going to block outgoing port 25 and effectively break the net that way, then they need to FIX THEIR FUCKING SMTP SERVERS FIRST. If they would do that, then I wouldn't give a rat's ass what the fuck they do aside from the principle of the thing.
All of this evades solving the real problem. The real solution is to filter spam using something like Spamassassin and, because that's a drain on resources, block the originating SMTP host automatically (and send an email to the technical contact) when X number of spams are received from the same IP address. When Y number of spams are received from an ISP, block that entire ISP. The IP mappings are available or, at least, could be made available. Then the ISP's resources are only tapped up to X (or Y) number of spams. This blocks zombies, but is a stopgap solution. The real solution lies with the originating ISP, which needs to map that back to an account and cut that account off. After that, the originating ISP which was used can send a bill back to the user and turn them into the FTC for violating anti-spam legislation. All this, of course, with forced banning of ISPs running zombies.
This, in turn, puts pressure on Micro$hit to fix their fucking operating system, and on users to keep their systems up to date.
Now the simplest solution? Wait for it, it's mind-numbingly simple. If you're going to block port 25, ALL ISPs should allow opening of port 25 with a no-questions-asked phone call with the understanding that if it's caught sending spam then, after a human review, the account will be cut off.
Now, how many of us did that because it seemed like a good idea at the time (probably for this very reason) but never consciously thought of it? *raises hand*
The BitKeeper issue is different entirely; it was a commercial product being offered for free, with the possibility that it could be yanked out from under them at any time.
Bitkeeper was never free. They provided a free "single-user" license that, among other things, required that you "check-in" your source to their servers.
If you're going to smoke around your equipment, like a laptop, smoke OUTSIDE, and don't blow smoke at the equipment. The last one sounds silly, I know, but you'd be surprised how easy that is to do without thinking about it.
I smoke cigars and haven't had any problems, but that's because the only place I smoke is outside, where I'll have my laptop, with a breeze blowing, and the intakes of the laptop are far blow the level at which the smoke ever blows.
[quote]
So you don't believe in property taxes, or what? The police are *still* protecting the money, every year, so it makes sense that they should get paid every year to do so.
[/quote]
Funny. I live in one of the most affluent areas of my city. We have ONE cop to cover about 20 square miles or more. I called a cop for some disturbance about a hundred yards for my house in a construction area, and it took him almost an hour to get around to it. Compare that to the inner city, where very little is paid in the way of either income taxes or property taxes, where they have something like 20 cops for that same area.
Re:Read the fine print for your savings and checki
on
Tracking Your Taxes
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· Score: 1
Set up your own DNS server and bounce the requests off the root. This is what I do, and very, very rarely do I have a DNS problem.
(For the purists out there who complain that I'm abusing the root DNS servers, shove it.)
Depending on how you look at it, an offender that is just as bad as MAPS is whatever group of dumbshits run the "dynamic IP" lists. For those who don't know, these are supposed to be lists of IP addresses that are dynamically allocated by ISPs, intended for people to use to block incoming traffic to their SMTP servers from those addresses.
Now I understand the concept, but install SpamAssassin or something, you retards! Don't bounce my email that's going to your user, doesn't fit a spam profile, and is the first such email your server has ever seen (by hash or however the hell you want to do it) back to me with some stupid fucking error message that I need to relay it through some other server that isn't on whatever you consider to be a dynamic IP address, particularly when that server DOESN'T GIVE A RAT'S ASS IF I'M ROUTING SPAM THROUGH IT OR NOT!
Hint: If I route spam through some ISP's SMTP server, it will continue until the ISP figures it out and blocks me. If I send it myself, it will continue until the ISP figures it out and blocks me. About the only thing "positive" it does for spam is speeding up the spam propogation if the spammer is on a low-speed dialup line.
Sheesh.
This is nothing new. I'm a doctor, and hell, I get no respect and neither do my collegues. Not from the nurses, the staff, and sure as hell not the patients.
Computer techs? Even less, if that's possible.
Lawyers? Well, maybe a little because people are scared of them.
We have a culture that shows no respect for anyone, least of all by profession.
The problem of UCE is bad enough, when you receive a bunch of incoherent gibberish, ads for bank loans, five thousand penis enlargement scams, and worse.
What's worse, at least philosophically, is when "legitimate" sites spam the living fuck out of your addresses. Most of the time, this is because the guy who had the address before you signed up for all this crap, or because someone signed you up maliciously, or because someone typoed their address.
The Cypherpunks list, may it rest in peace, was a good example. Over the course of a year or so, the entire list went to a signal to noise ratio that was negligable, because malicious parties signed the list addresses up for every bullshit mailing list they could find.
I'm continuously spammed by davidbowie.com (I hate that no-talent shithead), a bunch of stock sites, and a bunch of "legitimate" Internet dating service sites.
Of course, because they're "legitimate" sites, nobody places them under any obligation what so ever to remove my address from their lists, and they're free to spam me with impunity because it was supposedly requested. Complaints to their webmasters, postmasters, administration, and anyone else I can find always go without response, or I get some form letter telling me to use my userID and password to "opt-out." (The fact that they have a form letter should be a big clue here.) So why don't I just go to the website and remove myself? Do you honestly think I have the userID and password that Joe Numbnut used to sign me up for this shit?
Unfortunately, email has become something that is destined to become useless. Even if we could control the spammers, such as by dragging them behind an 18-wheeler on I95 going 70 for, say, the entire trip up the coast, we'd still have to content with the mental midgets who run web sites that insist on badgering their users with mail on a continuous basis, and who won't honor complaints about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the Palm software that I've seen works pretty well with only the Palm. I don't care too much about booting into 'Doze every few weeks to update the databases, really. I just don't want to have to pull a laptop out, boot the thing into 'Doze, deal with the braindeath that I never got used to in Windows (Yes, Linux has it too, but I'm used to that. :), etc.
I submitted this Ask Slashdot during a presentation this morning concerning Palm integration, and from what it looked like, there's a lot of PC-side stuff that needs to be done to sync schedules and everything else. Some of what's been suggested here so far looks to handle all that pretty well, and I'm rightly impressed.
Thanks, Slashdot.
Hell, I bought a HP machine that shipped with so much questionable shit installed that it even made my head spin. Most of it got uninstalled immediately.
Like I said, the catch is that under Windows, it compromises the entire machine. Under Linux, you don't tend to need to run as root to do user things or install software by default, and there are fewer big, honking security holes that everyone knows about.
Yes, if they ran as root, installed every piece of shitty software they could find, and if there was more malware out there that targetted Linux, it would be just as bad. I'm not arguing that, because it's absolute fact. But at least when family member A compromises herself, it doesn't affect family member B or trash the entire system.
And yes, Microsoft has made extraordinary strides in security from, say, Windows 95 to ME to 2000 to XP. It's so much better than it was before. It just still is in no way close to the point where I'd go stick, say, patient information on it (being a doctor) and expect to have any kind of security.
Which is nowhere near acceptable. The system should be designed such that, for the most part, I don't need to be scanning my system for viruses, spyware, malware, etc., on a continuous basis.
I can pop in a Gentoo distribution CD and in a few hours have a system set up that does far more than a Microsoft system does, and it costs me nothing. Most of those few hours is just waiting for the system to compile. If I went with Debian or another binary-based distribution, it would be a lot faster.
The catch is that, generally, Linux isn't as easy to install and administrate for people who don't know anything about what they're doing. Then again, if you think about it, as it stands now most consumers seem to haul their machine into Best Buy or eqivelent place and get them to administrate their box anyway, so this may be less of a problem than you might think.
Linux these days is generally more secure out of the box. But when you install it, you really need to do a 'netstat -ln' and see what's open. Then set up a reasonable firewall. Your average idiot out there can't do this. (I use Gentoo, so I have absolutely no clue how other distributions handle this stuff, and I don't know what kind of blackbox firewall setups are out there.)
Linux can be less secure than Windows. Usually that's accomplished by turning on all sorts of crap that you don't need, not securing it, and not updating it.
Windows, by default, is a typical blackbox. The thing is an absolute mess. Years after they first appeared, we still have Outlook viruses that pop up every day. Web browsing with MSIE is like playing Russian Roulette. At least with Linux you don't have to worry about that as much. With Linux, you set the system up, and it stays set up that way for the most part. So many packages (malicious and legitimate) change settings in Windows, that it's nearly impossible sometimes to have a good picture of what is going on with your system.
I took a Windows system down ony my home network because after one of my family used the thing for a few months I threw a traffic and systems analyzer on the thing and saw so much spyware and so many viruses on it that I couldn't justify letting the thing stay on my network. This was with Norton Antivirus running on it, mind you. As it is, any Windows installation I have is sectioned from the rest of the network for just that reason. They sit on their own subnet, can't talk to each other, can't talk to the LAN, and can only route out to the Internet.
Changing your IP address under the same ISP still leaves a trail with that ISP. It stops some idiot from doing simple IP address correlation, sure, but it doesn't fix the problem. Similarly, it doesn't do a thing for you if every time you go somewhere you get nailed by scans and attacks.
Tor is designed to provide anonymous web browsing. That means that unless I do something stupid, the target site has no idea where I'm actually coming from. This stops simple content filtration (but of course doesn't stop them from filtering Tor itself), while at the same time preventing the site I hit from being able to tell where I am.
If you think this kind of concern is overblown, consider this: There are plenty of people who post on or read forums that nothing is wrong with, but would suffer political ramifications in their personal lives if someone were able to correlate that. This is what Tor is designed to prevent.
So no, Slashdot doesn't qualify, and it's something that could be bypassed by setting your proxy to not Tor-route connections to Slashdot. On the other hand, Slashdot lauding the software package while banning it is hypocritical, stupid, and short-sighted.
I complained about this, and the support monkey who responded said "Are you the administrator of Tor Network?" Then I explained it, and never got a response back.
If Slashdot wants to be a bunch of dicks about it, then they should stop lauding the software.
Yeah, there was, and I left that out. When I pawed through the guy's address book, there was also a folder in his "My Documents" directory that had a book with dates and ratings. The guy was cheating on her hardcore. I did her a favor, which is why I did it.
Yeah. I distinctly remember one boring night while watching "Deep Space Nine" I was browsing a SMB share on a machine in a dorm room at UNC. To make a long story short, the idiot had taken videos of his (really cute, mind you) girlfriend posing in her high school cheerleading uniform and frigging herself. So of course, like any geek, I promptly downloaded the videos. Then I kept browsing, and came across his address book and email, which had the girlfriend's email address in it. So, like any geek, what did I do? Snapshooted jpegs off of them and emailed them back to the girl with "greetings from California." Not only was he a bastard to globally post the things in the first place, he was a bastard to not appreciate a hot girlfriend. Poor Melissa. Then again, I doubt their relationship lasted much longer either. :)
No, no, no. Slashdot blocks the exit-point routers of the Tor network. This has been mentioned to them and they don't care. As a result, if you're going to use Tor, you can't use Slashdot, because they randomly IP restrict your exit point. There also appears to be another problem with Slashdot when the IP of a user changes, which is also causing problems with peoples' multihomed proxy setups, but that's a (slightly) different issue.
This is where networks like Tor become valuable. Unfortunately, so many sites (including Slashdot to my surprise) have deliberately broken the Tor network that it's becoming too much of a pain the ass to use.
You know, what I found most amusing about "Enterprise" was that in the last four episodes or so, all of a sudden Hoshi started acting like a real character. That would indicate to me that the actress wasn't a problem at all, it was the horribly bad acting. Then again, maybe I was just fixated on the character's sudden expression of emotion and the actress's suddenly visible and rather attractive body. :)
Roadrunner, by contrast, doesn't do this. This is why I subscribe to their service now and dropped Mindspring.
Email I send goes over my LAN to my SMTP server, which then handles sending it out. 99% of the time I don't have a problem. When I do, it's usually for some shit like AOL or sending mail _to_ Earthlink or Mindspring, at which point they get a complaint email (whcih they of course ignore), and then a bunch of enraged calls from their customers (who don't understand the entire thing) saying that the ISP's email reception is broken (which it _is_). This wastes their time dealing with their enraged customers. If they don't like it, they can fix their fucking systems.
Of course, I could set a smart host to my ISP's mail server, which solves the problem, but grants me the problem I pointed out in the first paragraph.
If ISPs are going to block outgoing port 25 and effectively break the net that way, then they need to FIX THEIR FUCKING SMTP SERVERS FIRST. If they would do that, then I wouldn't give a rat's ass what the fuck they do aside from the principle of the thing.
All of this evades solving the real problem. The real solution is to filter spam using something like Spamassassin and, because that's a drain on resources, block the originating SMTP host automatically (and send an email to the technical contact) when X number of spams are received from the same IP address. When Y number of spams are received from an ISP, block that entire ISP. The IP mappings are available or, at least, could be made available. Then the ISP's resources are only tapped up to X (or Y) number of spams. This blocks zombies, but is a stopgap solution. The real solution lies with the originating ISP, which needs to map that back to an account and cut that account off. After that, the originating ISP which was used can send a bill back to the user and turn them into the FTC for violating anti-spam legislation. All this, of course, with forced banning of ISPs running zombies.
This, in turn, puts pressure on Micro$hit to fix their fucking operating system, and on users to keep their systems up to date.
Now the simplest solution? Wait for it, it's mind-numbingly simple. If you're going to block port 25, ALL ISPs should allow opening of port 25 with a no-questions-asked phone call with the understanding that if it's caught sending spam then, after a human review, the account will be cut off.
Now, how many of us did that because it seemed like a good idea at the time (probably for this very reason) but never consciously thought of it?
*raises hand*
If you're going to smoke around your equipment, like a laptop, smoke OUTSIDE, and don't blow smoke at the equipment. The last one sounds silly, I know, but you'd be surprised how easy that is to do without thinking about it. I smoke cigars and haven't had any problems, but that's because the only place I smoke is outside, where I'll have my laptop, with a breeze blowing, and the intakes of the laptop are far blow the level at which the smoke ever blows.
[quote] So you don't believe in property taxes, or what? The police are *still* protecting the money, every year, so it makes sense that they should get paid every year to do so. [/quote] Funny. I live in one of the most affluent areas of my city. We have ONE cop to cover about 20 square miles or more. I called a cop for some disturbance about a hundred yards for my house in a construction area, and it took him almost an hour to get around to it. Compare that to the inner city, where very little is paid in the way of either income taxes or property taxes, where they have something like 20 cops for that same area.
Set up your own DNS server and bounce the requests off the root. This is what I do, and very, very rarely do I have a DNS problem. (For the purists out there who complain that I'm abusing the root DNS servers, shove it.)
Depending on how you look at it, an offender that is just as bad as MAPS is whatever group of dumbshits run the "dynamic IP" lists. For those who don't know, these are supposed to be lists of IP addresses that are dynamically allocated by ISPs, intended for people to use to block incoming traffic to their SMTP servers from those addresses. Now I understand the concept, but install SpamAssassin or something, you retards! Don't bounce my email that's going to your user, doesn't fit a spam profile, and is the first such email your server has ever seen (by hash or however the hell you want to do it) back to me with some stupid fucking error message that I need to relay it through some other server that isn't on whatever you consider to be a dynamic IP address, particularly when that server DOESN'T GIVE A RAT'S ASS IF I'M ROUTING SPAM THROUGH IT OR NOT! Hint: If I route spam through some ISP's SMTP server, it will continue until the ISP figures it out and blocks me. If I send it myself, it will continue until the ISP figures it out and blocks me. About the only thing "positive" it does for spam is speeding up the spam propogation if the spammer is on a low-speed dialup line. Sheesh.
This is nothing new. I'm a doctor, and hell, I get no respect and neither do my collegues. Not from the nurses, the staff, and sure as hell not the patients. Computer techs? Even less, if that's possible. Lawyers? Well, maybe a little because people are scared of them. We have a culture that shows no respect for anyone, least of all by profession.
I worked on their little tax calculator presuming I were in Dyer County. My taxes would INCREASE over 4% under their "fairer" tax system.
The problem of UCE is bad enough, when you receive a bunch of incoherent gibberish, ads for bank loans, five thousand penis enlargement scams, and worse. What's worse, at least philosophically, is when "legitimate" sites spam the living fuck out of your addresses. Most of the time, this is because the guy who had the address before you signed up for all this crap, or because someone signed you up maliciously, or because someone typoed their address. The Cypherpunks list, may it rest in peace, was a good example. Over the course of a year or so, the entire list went to a signal to noise ratio that was negligable, because malicious parties signed the list addresses up for every bullshit mailing list they could find. I'm continuously spammed by davidbowie.com (I hate that no-talent shithead), a bunch of stock sites, and a bunch of "legitimate" Internet dating service sites. Of course, because they're "legitimate" sites, nobody places them under any obligation what so ever to remove my address from their lists, and they're free to spam me with impunity because it was supposedly requested. Complaints to their webmasters, postmasters, administration, and anyone else I can find always go without response, or I get some form letter telling me to use my userID and password to "opt-out." (The fact that they have a form letter should be a big clue here.) So why don't I just go to the website and remove myself? Do you honestly think I have the userID and password that Joe Numbnut used to sign me up for this shit? Unfortunately, email has become something that is destined to become useless. Even if we could control the spammers, such as by dragging them behind an 18-wheeler on I95 going 70 for, say, the entire trip up the coast, we'd still have to content with the mental midgets who run web sites that insist on badgering their users with mail on a continuous basis, and who won't honor complaints about it.