Like others here, I thought this would be more than "just another email client with shiny bits". I was vaguely hoping that Yahoo and IBM had decided to collabarate on the anti-spam procedures mentioned recently...
"As for the X server screwing up mozilla, I'm not sure I understand what you're talking about."
Whenever I get an email with (square-character) repeated a lot on the subject line, Mozilla just hangs. It will also just hang when I restart it. I'm assuming it's japanese (could be Chinese, Korean, whatever, I'm not capable of determining the difference). It looks 'far east' when viewed in Outlook.
I think it's the X server because no-one else has ever mentioned it, and I'm running on old (Matrox G400) video hardware with binary drivers. Sometimes the mouse freezes, sometimes the machine slows to a crawl. I'm thinking that Mozilla would have a harder time doing this to my machine than X.
Well, I dunno about that, not that I'm defending Outlook at all - virus-prone piece of sh1t that it is, but since I use POP, I get the same email (in the office) as I do at home.
What I like about Mozilla is the spam filter - fantastic. In the morning I spend 5 minutes filtering mail in outlook, only about 10 seconds in Mozilla. On average I get maybe 400 emails per day, of which about 300-350 are spam. That's because I'm the 'catchall' for the domains though...
If people didn't send me bloody word documents, I'd ditch windows immediately, but Open Office and abiword aren't up to standard yet, for documents that I get sent...
I don't seem to have much luck with mail clients recently - Mozilla (1.4) often barfs when I get japanese spam - really annoying because I have to delete my Inbox and my POP3 spool:-(, before that, an earlier version of Evolution took all my mail and made it unreadable:-((
Say it quietly, but through all my trials of mail on Linux, Outlook has just worked:-( It's bloody annoying, but there you go. Actually I think it may be the X server screwing up mozilla, so maybe the new version of Evolution will have the same problems. If so, it may be time to junk the venerable G400 and go for a newer card which can do dual display...
If you say that programming is the stepped solution to a problem, you could envisage it as a climb up a fitness landscape, with the goal of the program being the ultimate summit.
Fitness algorithms (people, in this case) mainly take small steps in the direction "most promising", but can easily be trapped into local maxima (in other words, the route that initially looks the best solution ends up with a non-optimal solution). A code-fork is the method OS uses to make a longj(u)mp (pun intended:-) onto a different hill, which they then iteratively climb, instead.
Sure, you have less resources per group, but you are now attacking two different problems, and forked projects can feed off each other (it's OPEN source, remember) so it's not as though you now have 50% attacking each summit, it's more like 75%... isn't that odd...
A client of ours was rootkitted before the wisdom of keeping the system up2date was finally received.
They have 100mbit of dedicated alloted bandwidth at a Co-Lo with a fibre connection back to the office, and the spam saturated that 100mbit up to about 70% capacity for about 12 hours. Eventually I noticed mrtg on the main router had a well-defined "hump" on the graph and we quickly shut it down.
Complete re-install of all their public machines (5 of them). No internet access (their gateway was a linux box) for a day or so for the company, and complete rebuilds of their public servers. Ouch. Suddenly, paying the up2date fees seemed an easy decision:-)
Any up-to-date comparisons between the 3 main journalling filesystems (ext3, xfs, reiserfs), for both speed and reliability ?
I like xfs on the SGI - it's never let me down yet. I have to admit I'll be sorely tempted to try out xfs now that it's passed the 'seal-of-approval' and made it into the kernel - surely the best benchmark of all:-)
If you put this on your site, and people complain about those 'let through' spams at the start, your entire netblock will be marked as a spammers paradise (and rightly so - how can the RBL's tell the difference?). Goodbye email.
Some RBL's do not allow changes to be made unless you pay a big fee, and you lose the fee if they consider the complaint genuine.
I can't believe there isn't some collusion between the retailers and the manufacturers over Xmas, which has an effect on the 'sale' price. Perhaps Apple said 'No'.
I don't think it's morally right to say that a product is 'on sale' unless there's been a reduction in price though - at least in the UK, there must have been an immediately preceding period at which the product was priced higher for it to be marketed as at a 'sale' price...
Yes, it's a real radio telescope - they're pretty simple beasts really. Big dish, tuned receiver at the right frequency (or a frequency-converter, and a normal radio receiver), and a computer at the other end.
I use a WinRadio (despite the name, it's a universal box:-) external receiver tuned to the Water Hole frequencies (the gap between the OH line and the H2 line in the radio spectrum, at around 1420 MHz - pretty typical for radio astronomy, it's a relatively quiet part of the spectrum.
Err, yes. The idea was to look at the most-promising ones myself (maybe the top-10), not the entire dataset.... That's a matter of pointing and recording, trivial really.
I'd love to give it a go with my very own personal radio telescope (dish.jpg). Sure it'd be hard to point, and maybe not possible to receive anything at all, but I'd like to try:-)
I was sort of assuming there'd be another record-type added to the DNS protocol, so look up MXS rather than MX for example...
I'm still not really convinced about the CPU argument. Anyone to whom it would apply is almost certainly an ISP or large company, and they can just throw slave machines at it, even as basic as using round-robin DNS for mx.mycompany.com.
That's assuming the receiving daemon does the check, of course (which would be best, I reckon). You could always devolve the processing to the mail client I guess - MS gets another upgrade round for Outlook, and the rest of us download Mozilla again:-)
The text of the article has to be wrong - they say the private key is delivered as a message header! Hmm, not very private...
I'm assuming that what is sent out is an encypted token for which the public key can be used to decrpyt, so:
Alice wants to send an email to Bob.
Alice encrypts the MD5 checksum of the mail body content (or some other representative text, probably longer than 32 bytes!) using her private key, and embeds the resulting encoded string into a mail header
Bob receives the mail, and looks up Alice's public key to decrypt the token
Bob compares the decrypted token with the same representative text to see if they match.
Match => Read. No match => Put into 'Junk' folder
So, the token to be encoded will change from mail to mail, thus making replay techniques pretty much impossible, I think. At least, that's the way I'd do it, and I'm pretty sure I've seen it presented before as well...
On the other hand, I ain't a security expert, so there's probably a gaping hole in the above:-)
SpamCon's Barrett cautioned "It's a good approach for those that are willing to use it," he said. "Any kind of cryptographic solution is going to involve some computing overhead, and that's not cheap."
Whereas the latter completely true, I think the weakness of the argument is a testament to the idea being an excellent one. CPU horsepower is very very cheap. If Yahoo think they can do it, then who exactly will have a problem ?
Just as long as I can incorporate it into my server, I'll be a happy bunny - all the other proposals put forward so far seem to limit the mail providers to the big boys... Simon.
I think a better strapline could have been thought of - this was the same as NASA's, yes ? At least sufficiently similar to attract attention, and then it all went pear-shaped...
Consipiracy theorists will no doubt don tin hats and say it's all a front to associate Open Source with bad karma:-)
Mmm. It was more a comment on the/. headline than the story per se. Wasn't really interested in the story, 'cos we don't use snow-ploughs. I'm sure we have them, and I'm sure the Welsh and Scots use them, but it's not really a London thing, old bean:-)
... for me to realise y'all meant snow-ploughs. Haven't seen one for over a decade, and initially thought there was some farmer ploughing his neighbours fields without permission...
there was a case a few years ago where Dame Shirley Porter was convicted of ~40 million pounds worth of gerrymandering in a votes for homes scandal. Of course she's actually paid very very little of it back (less than a few hundred thousand pounds, if I remember the Private Eye story correctly)...
What goes around, comes around, unless you can pay enough money to the right people....
There's someone on here (can't remember who) who's tagline goes something like 'Never ascribe to malice what can be satisfactorily explained by incompetence'. I doubt this is really a 'policy' by AT&T...
It seems to me that the number of market sectors may be the ultimate decider here, rather than the actual technology:-(
Intel simply have larger resources - they can push money at blue-skies research, and non-profitable lines, whereas AMD (although successful) have to "bet the company" on every major decision...
In a way, I think it's because AMD is such an underdog, that I like the company - although the fact that their chips are damn good helps a lot:-)
Okay, having just got back online, I guess it's probably too late to point this out, but just in case
I DO NOT CONDONE THIS BEHAVIOUR
I run a business (a partnership, actually) and we as a group do not behave like this - almost all our clients are long-term ones. I was pointing out the logic, that's all.
This shouldn't really be a surprise unless you still believe in the essential goodness of humankind (!)
It's a simple-enough risk calculation - how much will I gain by people not noticing or not bothering for $xxx, how much will I lose by annoying customers. If that comes out positive, it's a good business (and only business) decision to do it. You'd need to re-analyse the figures periodically, and figure in public opinion when news breaks like this, but essentially it's money for nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
Like others here, I thought this would be more than "just another email client with shiny bits". I was vaguely hoping that Yahoo and IBM had decided to collabarate on the anti-spam procedures mentioned recently...
Simon.
"As for the X server screwing up mozilla, I'm not sure I understand what you're talking about."
Whenever I get an email with (square-character) repeated a lot on the subject line, Mozilla just hangs. It will also just hang when I restart it. I'm assuming it's japanese (could be Chinese, Korean, whatever, I'm not capable of determining the difference). It looks 'far east' when viewed in Outlook.
I think it's the X server because no-one else has ever mentioned it, and I'm running on old (Matrox G400) video hardware with binary drivers. Sometimes the mouse freezes, sometimes the machine slows to a crawl. I'm thinking that Mozilla would have a harder time doing this to my machine than X.
Simon.
Well, I dunno about that, not that I'm defending Outlook at all - virus-prone piece of sh1t that it is, but since I use POP, I get the same email (in the office) as I do at home.
What I like about Mozilla is the spam filter - fantastic. In the morning I spend 5 minutes filtering mail in outlook, only about 10 seconds in Mozilla. On average I get maybe 400 emails per day, of which about 300-350 are spam. That's because I'm the 'catchall' for the domains though...
If people didn't send me bloody word documents, I'd ditch windows immediately, but Open Office and abiword aren't up to standard yet, for documents that I get sent...
Simon
I don't seem to have much luck with mail clients recently - Mozilla (1.4) often barfs when I get japanese spam - really annoying because I have to delete my Inbox and my POP3 spool :-(, before that, an earlier version of Evolution took all my mail and made it unreadable :-((
:-( It's bloody annoying, but there you go. Actually I think it may be the X server screwing up mozilla, so maybe the new version of Evolution will have the same problems. If so, it may be time to junk the venerable G400 and go for a newer card which can do dual display...
:-)
Say it quietly, but through all my trials of mail on Linux, Outlook has just worked
Any excuse
Simon
If you say that programming is the stepped solution to a problem, you could envisage it as a climb up a fitness landscape, with the goal of the program being the ultimate summit.
:-) onto a different hill, which they then iteratively climb, instead.
... isn't that odd...
Fitness algorithms (people, in this case) mainly take small steps in the direction "most promising", but can easily be trapped into local maxima (in other words, the route that initially looks the best solution ends up with a non-optimal solution). A code-fork is the method OS uses to make a longj(u)mp (pun intended
Sure, you have less resources per group, but you are now attacking two different problems, and forked projects can feed off each other (it's OPEN source, remember) so it's not as though you now have 50% attacking each summit, it's more like 75%
Simon.
Cheers guys :-)
Simon
A client of ours was rootkitted before the wisdom of keeping the system up2date was finally received.
:-)
They have 100mbit of dedicated alloted bandwidth at a Co-Lo with a fibre connection back to the office, and the spam saturated that 100mbit up to about 70% capacity for about 12 hours. Eventually I noticed mrtg on the main router had a well-defined "hump" on the graph and we quickly shut it down.
Complete re-install of all their public machines (5 of them). No internet access (their gateway was a linux box) for a day or so for the company, and complete rebuilds of their public servers. Ouch. Suddenly, paying the up2date fees seemed an easy decision
Simon
Any up-to-date comparisons between the 3 main journalling filesystems (ext3, xfs, reiserfs), for both speed and reliability ?
:-)
I like xfs on the SGI - it's never let me down yet. I have to admit I'll be sorely tempted to try out xfs now that it's passed the 'seal-of-approval' and made it into the kernel - surely the best benchmark of all
Simon
If you put this on your site, and people complain about those 'let through' spams at the start, your entire netblock will be marked as a spammers paradise (and rightly so - how can the RBL's tell the difference?). Goodbye email.
...
Some RBL's do not allow changes to be made unless you pay a big fee, and you lose the fee if they consider the complaint genuine.
This sounds real risky to me
Simon.
I can't believe there isn't some collusion between the retailers and the manufacturers over Xmas, which has an effect on the 'sale' price. Perhaps Apple said 'No'.
I don't think it's morally right to say that a product is 'on sale' unless there's been a reduction in price though - at least in the UK, there must have been an immediately preceding period at which the product was priced higher for it to be marketed as at a 'sale' price...
Simon.
Yes, it's a real radio telescope - they're pretty simple beasts really. Big dish, tuned receiver at the right frequency (or a frequency-converter, and a normal radio receiver), and a computer at the other end.
:-) external receiver tuned to the Water Hole frequencies (the gap between the OH line and the H2 line in the radio spectrum, at around 1420 MHz - pretty typical for radio astronomy, it's a relatively quiet part of the spectrum.
I use a WinRadio (despite the name, it's a universal box
Simon
Err, yes. The idea was to look at the most-promising ones myself (maybe the top-10), not the entire dataset.... That's a matter of pointing and recording, trivial really.
Simon.
I'd love to give it a go with my very own personal radio telescope (dish.jpg). Sure it'd be hard to point, and maybe not possible to receive anything at all, but I'd like to try :-)
Simon.
I was sort of assuming there'd be another record-type added to the DNS protocol, so look up MXS rather than MX for example...
:-)
I'm still not really convinced about the CPU argument. Anyone to whom it would apply is almost certainly an ISP or large company, and they can just throw slave machines at it, even as basic as using round-robin DNS for mx.mycompany.com.
That's assuming the receiving daemon does the check, of course (which would be best, I reckon). You could always devolve the processing to the mail client I guess - MS gets another upgrade round for Outlook, and the rest of us download Mozilla again
Simon
I'm assuming that what is sent out is an encypted token for which the public key can be used to decrpyt, so:
So, the token to be encoded will change from mail to mail, thus making replay techniques pretty much impossible, I think. At least, that's the way I'd do it, and I'm pretty sure I've seen it presented before as well...
On the other hand, I ain't a security expert, so there's probably a gaping hole in the above
Simon
SpamCon's Barrett cautioned "It's a good approach for those that are willing to use it," he said. "Any kind of cryptographic solution is going to involve some computing overhead, and that's not cheap."
...
Whereas the latter completely true, I think the weakness of the argument is a testament to the idea being an excellent one. CPU horsepower is very very cheap. If Yahoo think they can do it, then who exactly will have a problem ?
Just as long as I can incorporate it into my server, I'll be a happy bunny - all the other proposals put forward so far seem to limit the mail providers to the big boys
Simon.
I think a better strapline could have been thought of - this was the same as NASA's, yes ? At least sufficiently similar to attract attention, and then it all went pear-shaped...
:-)
Consipiracy theorists will no doubt don tin hats and say it's all a front to associate Open Source with bad karma
Simon
Mmm. It was more a comment on the /. headline than the story per se. Wasn't really interested in the story, 'cos we don't use snow-ploughs. I'm sure we have them, and I'm sure the Welsh and Scots use them, but it's not really a London thing, old bean :-)
Simon.
... for me to realise y'all meant snow-ploughs. Haven't seen one for over a decade, and initially thought there was some farmer ploughing his neighbours fields without permission...
Simon
there was a case a few years ago where Dame Shirley Porter was convicted of ~40 million pounds worth of gerrymandering in a votes for homes scandal. Of course she's actually paid very very little of it back (less than a few hundred thousand pounds, if I remember the Private Eye story correctly)...
What goes around, comes around, unless you can pay enough money to the right people....
Simon
There's someone on here (can't remember who) who's tagline goes something like 'Never ascribe to malice what can be satisfactorily explained by incompetence'. I doubt this is really a 'policy' by AT&T ...
Simon
It seems to me that the number of market sectors may be the ultimate decider here, rather than the actual technology :-(
:-)
Intel simply have larger resources - they can push money at blue-skies research, and non-profitable lines, whereas AMD (although successful) have to "bet the company" on every major decision...
In a way, I think it's because AMD is such an underdog, that I like the company - although the fact that their chips are damn good helps a lot
Simon
They *do* sell prints. There's a part of the FAQ all about how you can use them for wallpaper, and, er, that's it.
:-)
Not that I have anything against that - they're very pretty, and they're entitled to sell them as much as they want
Simon
I run a business (a partnership, actually) and we as a group do not behave like this - almost all our clients are long-term ones. I was pointing out the logic, that's all.
Jeez.
Simon.
This shouldn't really be a surprise unless you still believe in the essential goodness of humankind (!)
It's a simple-enough risk calculation - how much will I gain by people not noticing or not bothering for $xxx, how much will I lose by annoying customers. If that comes out positive, it's a good business (and only business) decision to do it. You'd need to re-analyse the figures periodically, and figure in public opinion when news breaks like this, but essentially it's money for nothing.
So, why are we surprised ?
Simon.