The experience I've had with Pac Bell is horrible, namely because their tech support is horrible. I administer the system
suespammers.org, which sits on one of their DSL lines, and 45 minute waits are the norm when calling their tech support line.
A few weeks ago, we were having severe (>9000 ms delay) latency problems, and upon our first call to them, they told us things like "clear your cache". Morons. After about 2 days, and them finally sending someone over to the place where the DSL line is installed, we finally determined that the problem was on our LAN. Had Pac Bell bothered to do something so trivial such as to ping the DSL modem from their location, and see that ping times were normal, they could have avoided having to come out in the first place. (Yes, I should have pinged the modem myself, but I missed that step in my troubleshooting..)
The full story about our experience with Pac Bell can be found
here.
Virginia has tried to educate students about the
copyright issues surrounding Napster rather than block
the program, a tactic that many campus administrators
say clashes with the freedom-of-inquiry ethos of a
university environment. They also say they doubt
blocking it will work anyway in the long run. "My
biggest personal concern is whether [blocks] will be
effective for the goal that they are trying to accomplish,"
Mr. German said.
I'm glad to see that *someone* at one of the universities is actually thinking, rather than buying into the knee-jerk reaction of just trying to shut down Napster...
In my case, I did horrible in high school (1.8 GPA), didn't think I could handle college, so I chose the middle road, of attending a local
business school to study computer networking instead. I went there for two years, got an Associate Degree in Network Technology (with a 3.75 GPA!), then went out into the real world. 6 months later, I found an entry level developer job, got hired, and learned all the languages used in the Real World like Perl, Javascript, PHP, SQL, etc.
Compare this to my high school friends who just graudated college a few months ago with a BS in Computer Science, and know C++ and Java. They can't do much in the way of web development, since they don't know PHP, Javascript, or SQL, they know essentially nothing about UNIX/Linux, and they don't have the two years of experience that I've had.
Personally, I'm happy where I am, because I got a two year jump on college people, and got to learn useful things (took classes in salesmanship and management, for example) when I was in school as well.
Ultimately, it's each person's choice, just be sure you are fully aware of the consequences of your choice.
I say we all give him a phone call and send him an e-mail. No threats or anything like that, of course, just to let him know what we think of scum like him who try to patent ideas which have been around for years...
I tried searching
Google
for "DE Technologies LLC", and didn't get a single match. Looks like this Ed Pool doesn't even have a website for his "company". What a loser.
Other than testing systems you own for security purposes, I can think of no legitimate reason to engage in portscanning against systems which are not yours.
Everytime I get portscanned, I report it, and in one case, I received a very nice thankyou note from the site's admin, saying that the machine which did the scan had been compromised.
If you start allowing portscanns from your network, you can expect complaints from me. If it happens too many times, then I'll complain to your ISP. I don't mean to sound threatoning, but as an admin who has lots of other legitimate work that I could be doing, I hate having my time wasted by some script kiddie.
...was that of actually talking with cracker via IRC. From what I read in the series, about the only thing it did was to give the cracker a power trip and stressed out the poor sysadmins who had to deal with him.
It's just like I tell people who are being stalked online, NEVER talk to the person, just ignore them. If you ignore them, they don't know what effect their actions are having on you, and whether they are succeeding in pushing your buttons or not.
This isn't a substitute for securing your own systems, of course.
I hate to bitch, but I really wish people (namely the media) would get the terminology right when writing about these things. This isn't a virus, it's a worm.
Viruses infect other executables, such that the original functionality is still there, but the viral code is executed when the program is first run, which gives it a chance to spread to other executables and/or become resident in memory.
Worms, on the other paw, are self-contained programs which contain nothing but the worm itself.
The definitions of these things are hardly new, they have been around for YEARS. I suggest reading section B2 of the comp.virus FAQ for more information.
Yes, I sit on CAUCE's Board of Directors, BTW, and it irritates us to no end when people like you jump to conclusions without bothering to ask us our side of the story.
The volunteers protested but the sourceforge staff didn't care to reply
I think that's the biggest mistake of the SourceForge team right there. First, they screwed up. Now that's ok, no one's perfect, and we ALL screw up from time to time. I certainly have.:-)
But, the problem is when people who are volunteering their time complain, and theu didn't even have the decency to reply to their posts/e-mails and address the situation. I tend to agree with what CmdrTaco said, in that it's a lot more work than you think. But, I don't see why the SourceForge staff couldn't have taken a few minutes to reply to the e-mails or posts and explain their side of the story.
Let this be a learning experience to the rest of us in the value of addressing peoples' comments in a timely manner.:-)
(For added effect, it handed the names over on 60,000 pages of paper instead of simply using a few floppy disks)
Now that's just plain stupid, what possibile justification could there be for wasting 60,000 pieces of paper like that? For one thing, how the hell can you grep through 60,000 pieces of paper anyway?
There's also the mention in the article that this "company" has been around since "last year", and yet they don't even have a freakin' website? What kind of joke is this?
This might be a legitimate company, but IMHO a company that doesn't even have a website up and running, ESPECIALLY a company that performs services such as tracking Napster users over the Internet, suffers from an extreme lack of cluefulness and should be avoided at all costs.
One thing I didn't like about Postgres, was that there was no concept of users and passwords in it. Am I going to let X users share my machine in an environment where everyone can see everyone else's tables? I think not.
First, everyone should go read this article on Wired about the incident. Done that? Good.
Now, note the part that says:
After investigating, Prodigy canceled the accounts, but was unable to identify the impostor.
Maybe I'm on drugs here, but this sounds like a pretty serious problem to me, when an ISP cannot figure out who is using their own service! Based on the facts as I know them, I think Prodigy should have been held liable for this, since they obviously didn't have some way to verify the identities of their users.
Couldn't they have at least provided the credit card number that was used to open the account to investigators or something? Geez...
Re:John Markoff is at it again...
on
Sim Plague
·
· Score: 1
Oh yeah, Kevin Mitnick was a saint! I'm sooo sorry John Markoff wrote articles that made the criminal get treated badly. Boo hoo.
When the articles are filled with lies and misrepresentations, that's a serious issue, regardless of WHOM is being written about. I'm not condining what Kevin did, but that's no excuse to blow things out of propotion and print outright falsehoods, then have the gall to call it "journalism".
John Markoff is at it again...
on
Sim Plague
·
· Score: 5
Why can't they just tell the story, and not try to inflame the public with these false potentialities?
Well, if you look at the author of the article, it's none other than John Markoff! If the name doesn't ring a bell, he's the same guy who wrote sensational articles about Kevin Mitnick many years ago which ultimately resulted in Kevin getting treated so badly by "the system". You can read more at http://www.freekevin.com/.
Markoff wouldn't know good journalism if it bit him on the ass. Why the New York Times continues to employ someone as irresponsible as him is beyond me.
Actually, your state attorney general handles things like this on a daily basis
I was under the impression that the FTC handles cases of fraud across state lines, since I've read many stories about them whacking MLM schemes and spammers. Any lawyerly types out there who could clarify?
IANAL, but since they charged you for something you never received, that sounds like a case of fraud. Why not file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission and see what happens? I think most businesses will tend to fear the government more than other businesses.:-)
From what I know of Esther, this is perfectly normal for her. She's obviously an intelligent woman, but she doesn't seem to recognize the limits of her expertise, and ends up getting into situations where she ends up doing more harm than good.
Case in point, back in 1997, Dyson, who has NO experience in the anti-spam community, shot her mouth off about the spam problem and proposed a "solution" to it. Had she actually spent more than two seconds thinking about her "solution", or actually posting it to one or more anti-spam forums and asking for comments, she would have found that it's something that most anti-spammers don't see as being viable. But nooo, she didn't do that, she evidentally thought she knew more than everyone else, including those of us who have been dealing with spam for years, and the media blindly quoted her as though she were some anti-spam guru, which she's not.
I apologize for sounding bitter and turning this post into a rant, but dammit, it annoys me to no end when people don't think, and their short-sighted actions set back the efforts of an entire community. Dyson is in serious need of a clue.
Yeah right, so first it says that high level scripts may be a source of viruses, but then when you have source code (in e.g. Makefiles, highlevel), viruses are all of a sudden less likely. I am still afraid that I come into a Makefile someday that holds the line:
install: rm -rf /
Is this not a virus? If not, why is it a virus if a similar line is contained in some malicious Word macro?
That's not a virus, that's a trojan horse. Viruses replicate. Trojan horses are nasty programs disguised as legitimate ones and do NOT replicate.
Please take the time to learn the terminology before posting things like that. If it's of any help, I have a collection of many anti-virus FAQs here.
My experience with the IT industry, being only 23, mind you, is that the reason why most people are in it is because they see the dollar signs. Period. They don't necessarily have the talent, or even the desire to actually learn anything else other than the pre-packaged crap that we were taught at the business school where I went.
And, the funny thing was that they actually made fun of me for knowing UNIX as well as I did at the time. Well, it's about a year and a half after I finished up my schooling, and out of 30-some people who started the class, only six of us got our degrees, and I, the UNIX geek, was the one with the highest GPA. Gee, I wonder why?:-)
Slashdot Mirror
A few weeks ago, we were having severe (>9000 ms delay) latency problems, and upon our first call to them, they told us things like "clear your cache". Morons. After about 2 days, and them finally sending someone over to the place where the DSL line is installed, we finally determined that the problem was on our LAN. Had Pac Bell bothered to do something so trivial such as to ping the DSL modem from their location, and see that ping times were normal, they could have avoided having to come out in the first place. (Yes, I should have pinged the modem myself, but I missed that step in my troubleshooting..)
The full story about our experience with Pac Bell can be found here.
Compare this to my high school friends who just graudated college a few months ago with a BS in Computer Science, and know C++ and Java. They can't do much in the way of web development, since they don't know PHP, Javascript, or SQL, they know essentially nothing about UNIX/Linux, and they don't have the two years of experience that I've had.
Personally, I'm happy where I am, because I got a two year jump on college people, and got to learn useful things (took classes in salesmanship and management, for example) when I was in school as well.
Ultimately, it's each person's choice, just be sure you are fully aware of the consequences of your choice.
Thanks. Leave it to me to miss the obvious... :-)
Edward Pool
Phone: (540) 576-3555
DE Technologies
12110 Old Franklin Turnpike
Union Hall, VA 24176
Email: info@detechnologies.com
I say we all give him a phone call and send him an e-mail. No threats or anything like that, of course, just to let him know what we think of scum like him who try to patent ideas which have been around for years...
(Yes, that really is me, just last week, actually. If anyone wants the full exaplanation, feel free to write me for one.)
Everytime I get portscanned, I report it, and in one case, I received a very nice thankyou note from the site's admin, saying that the machine which did the scan had been compromised.
If you start allowing portscanns from your network, you can expect complaints from me. If it happens too many times, then I'll complain to your ISP. I don't mean to sound threatoning, but as an admin who has lots of other legitimate work that I could be doing, I hate having my time wasted by some script kiddie.
It's just like I tell people who are being stalked online, NEVER talk to the person, just ignore them. If you ignore them, they don't know what effect their actions are having on you, and whether they are succeeding in pushing your buttons or not.
This isn't a substitute for securing your own systems, of course.
Viruses infect other executables, such that the original functionality is still there, but the viral code is executed when the program is first run, which gives it a chance to spread to other executables and/or become resident in memory.
Worms, on the other paw, are self-contained programs which contain nothing but the worm itself.
The definitions of these things are hardly new, they have been around for YEARS. I suggest reading section B2 of the comp.virus FAQ for more information.
Yes, I sit on CAUCE's Board of Directors, BTW, and it irritates us to no end when people like you jump to conclusions without bothering to ask us our side of the story.
I think that's the biggest mistake of the SourceForge team right there. First, they screwed up. Now that's ok, no one's perfect, and we ALL screw up from time to time. I certainly have. :-)
But, the problem is when people who are volunteering their time complain, and theu didn't even have the decency to reply to their posts/e-mails and address the situation. I tend to agree with what CmdrTaco said, in that it's a lot more work than you think. But, I don't see why the SourceForge staff couldn't have taken a few minutes to reply to the e-mails or posts and explain their side of the story.
Let this be a learning experience to the rest of us in the value of addressing peoples' comments in a timely manner. :-)
There's also the mention in the article that this "company" has been around since "last year", and yet they don't even have a freakin' website? What kind of joke is this?
This might be a legitimate company, but IMHO a company that doesn't even have a website up and running, ESPECIALLY a company that performs services such as tracking Napster users over the Internet, suffers from an extreme lack of cluefulness and should be avoided at all costs.
One thing I didn't like about Postgres, was that there was no concept of users and passwords in it. Am I going to let X users share my machine in an environment where everyone can see everyone else's tables? I think not.
Now, note the part that says:
Maybe I'm on drugs here, but this sounds like a pretty serious problem to me, when an ISP cannot figure out who is using their own service! Based on the facts as I know them, I think Prodigy should have been held liable for this, since they obviously didn't have some way to verify the identities of their users.Couldn't they have at least provided the credit card number that was used to open the account to investigators or something? Geez...
When the articles are filled with lies and misrepresentations, that's a serious issue, regardless of WHOM is being written about. I'm not condining what Kevin did, but that's no excuse to blow things out of propotion and print outright falsehoods, then have the gall to call it "journalism".
Well, if you look at the author of the article, it's none other than John Markoff! If the name doesn't ring a bell, he's the same guy who wrote sensational articles about Kevin Mitnick many years ago which ultimately resulted in Kevin getting treated so badly by "the system". You can read more at http://www.freekevin.com/.
Markoff wouldn't know good journalism if it bit him on the ass. Why the New York Times continues to employ someone as irresponsible as him is beyond me.
Share and enjoy.
I was under the impression that the FTC handles cases of fraud across state lines, since I've read many stories about them whacking MLM schemes and spammers. Any lawyerly types out there who could clarify?
IANAL, but since they charged you for something you never received, that sounds like a case of fraud. Why not file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission and see what happens? I think most businesses will tend to fear the government more than other businesses. :-)
Case in point, back in 1997, Dyson, who has NO experience in the anti-spam community, shot her mouth off about the spam problem and proposed a "solution" to it. Had she actually spent more than two seconds thinking about her "solution", or actually posting it to one or more anti-spam forums and asking for comments, she would have found that it's something that most anti-spammers don't see as being viable. But nooo, she didn't do that, she evidentally thought she knew more than everyone else, including those of us who have been dealing with spam for years, and the media blindly quoted her as though she were some anti-spam guru, which she's not.
I apologize for sounding bitter and turning this post into a rant, but dammit, it annoys me to no end when people don't think, and their short-sighted actions set back the efforts of an entire community. Dyson is in serious need of a clue.
<gets off his soapbox>
Please take the time to learn the terminology before posting things like that. If it's of any help, I have a collection of many anti-virus FAQs here.
And, the funny thing was that they actually made fun of me for knowing UNIX as well as I did at the time. Well, it's about a year and a half after I finished up my schooling, and out of 30-some people who started the class, only six of us got our degrees, and I, the UNIX geek, was the one with the highest GPA. Gee, I wonder why? :-)