Before this becomes a pedantic debate about H1-Bs or IT unions I think it is important to keep in mind the diversification within the IT industry in recent history.
Asking a generation x geek today if they will 'retire from IT' might in 30 years seem as inappropriate a question as saying, "well gosh, do you think you could spend your career in education?"
The obvious answer being that of course you can spend your lifetime in IT work. In it's current manifestation, it is a new field. One that will continue to branch out in ways currently not imagined.
It seems that England has been the source of a large percentage of the big brother news in the past couple years. Whether it be closed caption monitoring of its citizens or removing their means of self-protection. Granted, the England of today is not the England of King George and yet people continue to hold up some of their crazier notions and say, "well now, isn't this an enlightened society!"
Here's to you summing up how I feel about this whole "But England has gun control, blah blah blah" issue in 10 words.
Did anyone notice that the teleco dmarc piont is just offset from the end of Ralsky's driveway?
Check out some of the last photos (just before the one w/ the Jag). It is near the street with no pole to protect it, should someone ram it with their car.
That these users do not already own the material on the up and up?
The article says that they are billing by file name. This method has its own, shall we say, limitations. I would imagine it would be embarrasing to take the p2p users to court only to have them show up with recitps for the material the rightly own.
If you live in this area, then your local phone company, for one, is giving him at the least the "loop" portion of the T1 line to his house. I am surprised that the groups persuing this spammer have not taken this tack before (or perhaps they have and I just have not found out about it).
Consider that the spammer's tactic to avoide RBL-style blocking is to shift his services off shore aand then from ISP to ISP in China. This forces the rest of us (anti-UCE types) to play whack-a-mole with the spammer's email servers.
Why not take the game to his front door, quite literally? He pretends to be an ISP catering to customers (thereby excusing him for having 50 phone lines), so why not start a lobby with the state PUC (public utilities commission) against him as an abusive service provider?
Granted, the PUC moves slow (well, at least they do where I come from). It may take years for them to literally force the local telco to remove the lines to the spammers home. But that is exactly what they have the power to do. This guy has been at it for years; he says he won't quit, so let's sick the gov't at him in a way that we can.
If this guy was my neighbor, I'd be doing everything I could to give him the boot, and attacking his livlihood right smack at the telco box into his three-quarter million dollar home would be a good start.
The letter or the law is not the final arbiter of right and wrong, and this is a case where the law fails to stop predatory behavior.
That is exceedingly well said.
Like the parent post, I find the brazen disrespect found in most spammers to be their most eggregious violation. In my role as a net admin I find myself revolved by their collective behavior.
It is simply not enough that better than 99% of email users do not open their message; they are still justified in saying, "take my shit and fucking like it, bitch."
I agree with the parent poster, but I believe he as the wrong target.
The spammer does not have a right to open my living room windows and shout through a bull horn into my home.
If you are saying something that I do not like, or that I find offensive or that is intended to incense me, I can walk away from you. If you follow me and force me to pay attention to you, I can call the local police and have you dragged away
As for colors.. yes, that's an issue, and one that will affect graphic artists for sure... but only those who need to move color into the real world (film, print). Those doing computer only will have to put up with display mechanisms that use lcds anyway.. so it's moot.
That's a really good point about color. One of the areas where I have been buying flat screens like there's not tomorrow is for our CAD people. The fact that flat screens are geometrically correct makes all the difference in the world when you spend your day drafting on one. Color doesn't come into it (who cares what color your lines are in AutoCAD? you can specify the plot colors to be whatever you like!)
There is no detail about how this 'survey' was carried out.
Try this, ask 10 computer users (users, not geeks) these two questions:
1). Have you ever had a strange computer problem?
2). Think it could have been a virus?
I would lay money that you can find an 80% 'touched by a virus' rating on any group of people you like.
Anyone familar with the social sciences and / or statistics realizes that corrolation does not equal causation. However, if you're a gov't agencey (as one reader posted previously) in need of funding, corollation = causation is a very useful tool. Even more so when you engineer the corollation part.
I am surprised I have not read this suggestion before: rather than try to micro-manage this problem on a on-off basis (handle each red flag that comes up), why not force the soulution?
Want to run Win2k on the campus LAN, fine, you gotta become a member of the Dorm_1234_Whatever domain.
By taking this step and using win2k Active Directory, there are a number of steps the dorm administration can take to fix all of these issues.
1). Do not dole out (DHCP) an address unless the Win2K box is a domain member.
2). Drop Software Update Services (SUS) on a server and *FORCE* domain members to update those critical patches from MS.
3). Using the group policy, force complex passwords on the domain (yes, this will generate support calls, but then again, so will owned boxes).
4). Again with the group policy, force a local admin password (I'm 90% sure you can do this, but I cannot seem to find colaborating evidence -- anyhow, if it turns out I'm hallucinating on this one, there are a number of apps you can have the user run at login that force the entry of an admin password).
5). Use HFNetChk or it's GUI upgrade, MBSA to check those dorm boxes periodically (like, daily) for things like IIS.
6). For God's sake, bandwidth throttle the p2p stuff.
There's a lot more you can do with this scenario. Sure, it's more management, but the payoff is just that You Can Manage It -- rather than just react to broken box scenarios. All things considered, I think the arguement that says, "let's just band XYZ operating system" is very short-sighted. Essentially, we are saying let's ban a popular tool in favor of an unpopular one because not as many people spend time cracking the unpopular one. Sounds like a slippery slope towards a riveting game of Musical OS. And where will we all be when the record stops? Probably right back where we started.
I am sure that a great number (maybe not all, but probably close) of us have at one time or another "permenantly borrowed" a piece of commercial software from a friend / school / employer.
What, do you feel, is the moral difference between what you have been convicted of doing and what everyone else here has probably done at one point or another?
On a personal note, 33 months of your life is a horrendous price to pay. Good luck, man.
You know, I registered at NYT about 18 months ago using an aliased address (similar to MyName--NYTStuff@mydomain.com). I have yet to get one spam at this address though it continues to be valid.
Furthermore, I do not even get NYT type spam at this address ("sign up for our premium content" and so forth).
Rather than idle accusations, does anyone have any proof of this accusation I hear so many peddling?
An excellent point. Sure, you can press your case with a DA if you are lucky enough to
A) Live in a state with decent anti-spamming laws.
- AND -
B) Find a DA with the time to piss away prosecuting a spammer... I mean, heh, there are dangers to our society out there smoking that mari-ju-wanna, you know?
I have a better idea; one more Shakespearean in nature ('the first thing we must do, is kill all the lawyers'). I say, waste 'em.
Seriously.
Every day these parasites collectively consume greater than the equivolent of several human lifetimes in aggrivated and wasted time that it takes you, me and everyone to filter their crapflood.
They knowingly and maliciously violate the code of civilized society in the name of 'my right to make a buck.'
The good Mr. Jay's comment is typical of the spammer:
"I put them in the same category as people who scream when someone wears a fur coat or eats veal"
A complete dodge from the obvious truth that Mr. Jay is stealing from you. He is stealing your time and abusing a service you pay for. Email was not created to be a snake-oil salesman's bull horn in your ear. Mr. Jay and those like him are thieves who contend time and time again that their theft is legal; it is their right to steal from you.
Shut up, you consumer fuck.
Shut up and take it.
I say no more. Let's turn ROSKO into American's most wanted.
You're right on. This is simply more slimy marketing tactics from companies with bombing market shares.
I cannot even count the number of bogus faxes / emails I have received telling me one of my domains (or some clever spelling thereof) is about to expire.
Gee, marketing people are creepy slimeballs. I'm stunned. No. Really.
Can you imagine how livid agents of the DEA and CIA would be if this was common knowledge amongst them? I'm not suggesting that it isn't, but who better can you think of to keep this kind of knowledge from -- "yeah, yeah, we're sending you on assignment to fight the Cali cartel, oh, and by the way, they've been tracing your hotel phone calls for 3 months")
Security is a process, not a check box option,
- RLJ
I understand where you're coming from; the landscape is changing. My point is that yes, the landscape is changing, shouldn't we gague the new terrain (how devices will share personal ID info, what kind of info will be extracted - like demographics from bars or people/route mapping from your example) before talking about who owns the info?
Western societies have used the signature as a mark of personal acceptance or identification on legal documents for centuries. I see today's discussion of biometric information ownership akin to discussing the ownership of the signature before establishing the fact that the signature is legally binding. Cart before horse, if you will.
Color me jaded, but aren't we getting ahead of ourselves here?
Fact:
- Most of us leave finger prints all over the dishes each and every time we dine out.
- I'll bet almost every US citizen here had their fingerprints taken as grade schoolers as part of some Community Enrolement program under the auspices of "help us find your child if they're ever lost or kidnapped."
- Until there is some standard for data exchange between biometric devices, does it matter all that much who "owns" the data?
I do not dispute that the author has a point; I do dispute the question that is asked. In my mind the "who owns the data" discussion should be prefaced by a discussion of how biometric devices will interoperate between the users (you and I) and the Real World (gas pumps, VISA card readers and the like). It just doesn't make a lot of sense to discuss ownership issues utnil we have some idea the scope of the playing field.
After all, I'm not going to waltz down to the local Italian eatery and demand they wipe my finger residue off the glass before they clear the table as a means of respecting my "Biometric Personally Identifiable Property," now am I?
Yes, almost every shipping resource kit for NT 4.0 through win2k contains the SHUTDOWN.EXE program (which is normally run as GUI but can be passed command line parameters... shutdown/?).
Slashdot Mirror
Asking a generation x geek today if they will 'retire from IT' might in 30 years seem as inappropriate a question as saying, "well gosh, do you think you could spend your career in education?"
The obvious answer being that of course you can spend your lifetime in IT work. In it's current manifestation, it is a new field. One that will continue to branch out in ways currently not imagined.
Cheers,
-- RLJ
It seems that England has been the source of a large percentage of the big brother news in the past couple years. Whether it be closed caption monitoring of its citizens or removing their means of self-protection. Granted, the England of today is not the England of King George and yet people continue to hold up some of their crazier notions and say, "well now, isn't this an enlightened society!"
Here's to you summing up how I feel about this whole "But England has gun control, blah blah blah" issue in 10 words.
Thanks!
- RLJ
Check out some of the last photos (just before the one w/ the Jag). It is near the street with no pole to protect it, should someone ram it with their car.
Cheers,
-- RLJ
The article says that they are billing by file name. This method has its own, shall we say, limitations. I would imagine it would be embarrasing to take the p2p users to court only to have them show up with recitps for the material the rightly own.
Cheers,
-- RLJ
Consider that the spammer's tactic to avoide RBL-style blocking is to shift his services off shore aand then from ISP to ISP in China. This forces the rest of us (anti-UCE types) to play whack-a-mole with the spammer's email servers.
Why not take the game to his front door, quite literally? He pretends to be an ISP catering to customers (thereby excusing him for having 50 phone lines), so why not start a lobby with the state PUC (public utilities commission) against him as an abusive service provider?
Granted, the PUC moves slow (well, at least they do where I come from). It may take years for them to literally force the local telco to remove the lines to the spammers home. But that is exactly what they have the power to do. This guy has been at it for years; he says he won't quit, so let's sick the gov't at him in a way that we can.
If this guy was my neighbor, I'd be doing everything I could to give him the boot, and attacking his livlihood right smack at the telco box into his three-quarter million dollar home would be a good start.
Cheers,
-- RLJ
That is exceedingly well said.
Like the parent post, I find the brazen disrespect found in most spammers to be their most eggregious violation. In my role as a net admin I find myself revolved by their collective behavior.
It is simply not enough that better than 99% of email users do not open their message; they are still justified in saying, "take my shit and fucking like it, bitch."
I agree with the parent poster, but I believe he as the wrong target.
Cheers,
- RLJ
The spammer does not have a right to open my living room windows and shout through a bull horn into my home.
If you are saying something that I do not like, or that I find offensive or that is intended to incense me, I can walk away from you. If you follow me and force me to pay attention to you, I can call the local police and have you dragged away
Cheers,
-- RLJ
Kindly collect your inbreed clan and fuck off, lest you should render /. an even less tollerable place to hold a discussion than it currently is.
-- RLJ
Cheers,
-- RLJ
Maybe we should go back to reporting sales statistics after they actually happen rather than the reverse?
Cheers,
-- RLJ
-- Cheers,
-- RLJ
Try this, ask 10 computer users (users, not geeks) these two questions:
1). Have you ever had a strange computer problem?
2). Think it could have been a virus?
I would lay money that you can find an 80% 'touched by a virus' rating on any group of people you like.
Anyone familar with the social sciences and / or statistics realizes that corrolation does not equal causation. However, if you're a gov't agencey (as one reader posted previously) in need of funding, corollation = causation is a very useful tool. Even more so when you engineer the corollation part.
This article is a waste of time.
Cheers,
-- RLJ
Want to run Win2k on the campus LAN, fine, you gotta become a member of the Dorm_1234_Whatever domain.
By taking this step and using win2k Active Directory, there are a number of steps the dorm administration can take to fix all of these issues.
1). Do not dole out (DHCP) an address unless the Win2K box is a domain member.
2). Drop Software Update Services (SUS) on a server and *FORCE* domain members to update those critical patches from MS.
3). Using the group policy, force complex passwords on the domain (yes, this will generate support calls, but then again, so will owned boxes).
4). Again with the group policy, force a local admin password (I'm 90% sure you can do this, but I cannot seem to find colaborating evidence -- anyhow, if it turns out I'm hallucinating on this one, there are a number of apps you can have the user run at login that force the entry of an admin password).
5). Use HFNetChk or it's GUI upgrade, MBSA to check those dorm boxes periodically (like, daily) for things like IIS.
6). For God's sake, bandwidth throttle the p2p stuff.
There's a lot more you can do with this scenario. Sure, it's more management, but the payoff is just that You Can Manage It -- rather than just react to broken box scenarios. All things considered, I think the arguement that says, "let's just band XYZ operating system" is very short-sighted. Essentially, we are saying let's ban a popular tool in favor of an unpopular one because not as many people spend time cracking the unpopular one. Sounds like a slippery slope towards a riveting game of Musical OS. And where will we all be when the record stops? Probably right back where we started.
Cheers,
-- RLJ
What, do you feel, is the moral difference between what you have been convicted of doing and what everyone else here has probably done at one point or another?
On a personal note, 33 months of your life is a horrendous price to pay. Good luck, man.
Cheers,
-- RLJ
-- RLJ
Furthermore, I do not even get NYT type spam at this address ("sign up for our premium content" and so forth).
Rather than idle accusations, does anyone have any proof of this accusation I hear so many peddling?
Cheers,
-- RLJ
A) Live in a state with decent anti-spamming laws.
- AND -
B) Find a DA with the time to piss away prosecuting a spammer ... I mean, heh, there are dangers to our society out there smoking that mari-ju-wanna, you know?
I have a better idea; one more Shakespearean in nature ('the first thing we must do, is kill all the lawyers'). I say, waste 'em.
Seriously.
Every day these parasites collectively consume greater than the equivolent of several human lifetimes in aggrivated and wasted time that it takes you, me and everyone to filter their crapflood.
They knowingly and maliciously violate the code of civilized society in the name of 'my right to make a buck.'
The good Mr. Jay's comment is typical of the spammer:
A complete dodge from the obvious truth that Mr. Jay is stealing from you. He is stealing your time and abusing a service you pay for. Email was not created to be a snake-oil salesman's bull horn in your ear. Mr. Jay and those like him are thieves who contend time and time again that their theft is legal; it is their right to steal from you.
Shut up, you consumer fuck.
Shut up and take it.
I say no more. Let's turn ROSKO into American's most wanted.
Cheers,
-- RLJ
Cheers,
-- RLJ
So Mr. Coward worked for VeriSign? This explains the penis bird and the goat trolling.
- RLJ
I cannot even count the number of bogus faxes / emails I have received telling me one of my domains (or some clever spelling thereof) is about to expire.
Gee, marketing people are creepy slimeballs. I'm stunned. No. Really.
Cheers,
-- RLJ
Can you imagine how livid agents of the DEA and CIA would be if this was common knowledge amongst them? I'm not suggesting that it isn't, but who better can you think of to keep this kind of knowledge from -- "yeah, yeah, we're sending you on assignment to fight the Cali cartel, oh, and by the way, they've been tracing your hotel phone calls for 3 months")
Security is a process, not a check box option,
- RLJ
Western societies have used the signature as a mark of personal acceptance or identification on legal documents for centuries. I see today's discussion of biometric information ownership akin to discussing the ownership of the signature before establishing the fact that the signature is legally binding. Cart before horse, if you will.
Cheers,
-- RLJ
Fact:
- Most of us leave finger prints all over the dishes each and every time we dine out.
- I'll bet almost every US citizen here had their fingerprints taken as grade schoolers as part of some Community Enrolement program under the auspices of "help us find your child if they're ever lost or kidnapped."
- Until there is some standard for data exchange between biometric devices, does it matter all that much who "owns" the data?
I do not dispute that the author has a point; I do dispute the question that is asked. In my mind the "who owns the data" discussion should be prefaced by a discussion of how biometric devices will interoperate between the users (you and I) and the Real World (gas pumps, VISA card readers and the like). It just doesn't make a lot of sense to discuss ownership issues utnil we have some idea the scope of the playing field.
After all, I'm not going to waltz down to the local Italian eatery and demand they wipe my finger residue off the glass before they clear the table as a means of respecting my "Biometric Personally Identifiable Property," now am I?
Cheers,
-- RLJ
Hey! You! Blam! Blam! Blam! STOP! Blam! Blam! Blam!
Cheers,
-- RLJ
Cheers,
-- RLJ