"Hackers are having a real hard time finding work in the U.S.," says Kittridge in explaining his decision to work for spammers. "Spamming is our last resort to pay rent," he says.
Sorry, you got that word wrong. It's not pronounced "HA-kurz", it's pronounced "LY-ing SO-sho-PA-thik THEEVZ". But no worries, it's an easy mistake to make.
but Hibernate's website is Slashdotted, and this review gives me no clue about what Hibernate might be.
Rather than sharing my theories about a top-secret-yet-LGPLd government project to develop object-oriented Java-based SQL/graphics library that will allow us to train secret UFO pilots to defeat an invasion of alien accountants, would someone care to fill me in? I would be forever in your debt.
Some readers, or so it would appear, have been dissatisfied with the endings of certain of my novels. These people often come to the reasonable-sounding but totally wrong hypothesis that I am trying, but failing, to write the sorts of endings that they would like to see.
This is not the case. In fact, I always write the endings that I want to, and am as satisfied with my endings as I am with any other aspect of my writing. I just have an opinion about what constitutes a good ending that is at variance with some of my readers.
I'd like to ask this question:
Okay, so you're satisfied with your endings...why? What about them appeals to you? What is it you're going for? What constitutes a good ending for you? What don't you like in an ending?
(And for the record, I like your books enough that I simply don't want them to end; I've never had the visceral reaction to your endings that some seem to have.)
...is if music playback paused automatically when you took them off, or flipped up the earpiece to take a call, then started playback again once you were done.
I listen to music at work on headphones; it would be great if I could come back to my desk, put them back on and have the same song playing that I interrupted when I left. I'm a bit surprised that Apple hasn't figured out how to do this yet....Hey Apple and Oakley -- you listening?
DNSBL + Caching DNS server -- Check. Once we got Sendmail to stop checking for IPv6 addresses, everything was fine. We were doing this long before we had SA.
As far as Perl and speed goes, from what I remember it wasn't much of an issue; we used the spamd c-based daemon to pass email to just-the-one copy of SpamAssassin, and it wasn't that bad. There was a bit of delay, but it was nothing like before when we were using Procmail. One bad entry in Procmail could bring the whole thing grinding to a halt.
We considered using SA as a milter (I'm pretty sure that option is/was available), but for reasons I can't remember decided against it. The sysadmin was a fan of Sendmail, so switching wasn't an option (though I hear qmail is being considered now).
One thing I wanted to do but didn't have the time for was to set up DCC; I think that would've helped significantly.
If you're using white/blacklists, moving your databases off to a remote server will also save you load on that server. -- We had nothing that sophisticated; the priority right then was to get spam filtering off our customer-facing mail server (and DNS, and POP, and radius...ugh). No whitelists beyond very simple SA stuff, and certainly no individual preferences for SA.
The result is that only negatives make it to the content analyzer, that being SA, which after relieving itself of all that processing time analyzing content becomes a much more trivial task. -- Absolutely. There's a lot that could have been done better, and no doubt that I made some bad choices (learning, always learning). But, though I bitch and moan, it was better than what we had before.
Thanks kindly for the compliment and the suggestions...it's always good to have a second opinion.
Genesis Communications -- Internet radio station that carries a lot of very paranoid people. Sometimes they've got a point, sometimes they're off the deep end (IMHO)
Alex Jones -- Gotta check him out. Listen to his show, and watch for the Darth Vader theme. Highly amusing; he sponsored a showing of They Live! a while back as an introduction to how They rule the world
David Icke -- British. Shape-shifting lizards rule the world and are performing rape and blood sacrifice behind closed doors. Absolutely incredible.
Texe Marrs -- Texas fundamentalist preacher (who, it just so happens, I interviewed a few years back) who believes that Satan pretty much owns the IRS, the UN, and every other government around
That's enough to get you started...if you're not gibbering on the floor when you finish reading, you'll be fine.:-)
But in the face of spam which should not exist in the first place, this attitude is comparable to rolling over and taking it right up the rectum rather than dealing with the source.
I used to work at a small ISP -- lets say 5000 customers. We were getting lots of complaints about spam, so we decided to put in better spam filtering. That required a bigger server. Then the mail server went down for half an hour because of the volume of incoming spam, and there was a suddenly a big rush on getting the new server up and running.
The server was the cheap part: let's say $2000 (all figures Canadian) for the box, rackmount, hard drives, yadda blah. Thank God for Free software, because FreeBSD and SpamAssassin saved our asses. It took me, conservatively, three full days to set up and get it more or less right; I was doing a lot of learning on the job, and the regular sysadmin was away.
Now, don't forget that we were down for half an hour. This was from roughly 9am to 9:30am on that day, so that's a busy fucking time for us. There were tons of calls and only three people to handle them; fortunately, I was pressed into service trying to fix things, and wasn't on the phones. We probably lost a couple customers then, but most people were pretty understanding, especially when they were told it was fuckwad spammers who were causing the problem.
Complaints were a huge deal, both before and after the filtering was put in place; I was dealing with most of them, because I was doing abuse duties, and it wasn't fun. Complaints before the new server was installed went, "Why am I getting all this spam? Why can't you stop it?"
Complaints afterward went, "Why am I still getting all this spam? Why isn't your filtering working? What do you mean, I have to set up my mail program to do more work?" (We set the threshold rather high, thinking that customers could use filtering in their mail client to set their own tolerance level. Ha! It is to laugh. Ever tried filtering on random headers in Outlook Express 5.0?)
Plus, there was maintenance of the server and software; upgrades were never fun; false positives happened and were dealt with; and now, my sources tell me, they've graduated to buying dual-fucking-xeon processors in order to handle spam filtering. Fuck me!
But hey, we were after a dollar cost, and I did get sidetracked. We already said $2k for the server. Three days of my time, $400 (deal!). Half an hour when everything in the company came to a halt because no one could send mail or do anything but answer the phones: $500, and that's probably very conservative. Two customers' worth of lost revenue for a year: say another $500. Spam complaints before took, oh, probably a good five solid days of my time: $650. Afterward was probably the same, so another $650. I know of at least one customer we lost afterward when the spam filtering wasn't the magic bullet I kept trying to tell them didn't exist, so $250. Bandwidth for all the spam we were accepting but kept from reaching the customers: let's say $50, for a nice round total of $5000.
Now this is very, very rough back-of-the-envelope calculations for a small dialup ISP I no longer work at; the managers there could probably tell you more about lost good will and so on. More importantly, it doesn't tell you about ongoing costs; that's just a snapshot from when I worked there. But that was $5000 spent by an ISP that was going down the tubes (true story), just to keep up (barely) with a denial-of-service attack that was slowly grinding us into the floor. I can't even imagine what it's like for AOL or Hotmail. Nor will we ever know what that time and effort and money might have done if it wasn't being spent on spam.
...though it would be interesting to know the volume that comes out of willful spammers (as opposed to zombie pcs) operating from throwaway ISP accounts, as opposed to people with pink contracts and truckloads of bandwidth.
Incidentally, this bit:
...a judge...complained that a man with a criminal record who landed in his courtroom was sending malicious e-mail. The harasser was complaining to the judge about such minutia as the fringe on the American flag hanging in his courtroom.
was interesting to me. This sounds like the oft-repeated assertion that a US flag with a fringe in a courtroom means that you're under Admiralty law, not the law of the United States, and that anyone who appears before that court has lost most of their rights. Of course, They don't want you to know this...or that England still owns the US, or that there is a subtle yet vitally important difference between the United States and the United States of America that means you are 0wn3d by the government...
I tell you, there are worlds upon worlds of free entertainment out there on the Internet.
Interesting...the graph at my old job shows the same thing. Keep in mind, though, that could just as easily be spammers working around filters (at least in my case, and I assume yours).
Have a look at your firewall logs sometime. To a first approximation, it's all Windows stuff: UDP ports 137, 1026, 1027; TCP ports 135, 139, 445. It's almost a relief to find someone looking for a mail or an FTP server.
...on the Secrecy News Mailing List. It's absolutely fascinating, and (bonus for this Canuckistanian) not entirely about US government secrecy, though that plays a big part (and is gruesomely fascinating in itself). If you haven't subscribed yet, do so; it's an insider's view of things second only to ProMED-Mail (which isn't at all about secrecy but is just as fascinating).
And about the other story: WOW. I would love the chance to send up a four-inch cube into space. God alone knows what the hell I would do with it -- I'm no electronics guy -- but the possibilities are simply too cool to be believed. I'd be tempted to go back to university and get an engineering degree just to be able to be part of a project like that.
But hey, who says that's necessary? $40K for a launch, even U$, isn't that much if you get a bunch of people together. There's people that chip in to buy an airplane -- how long 'til we see people (besides the good folks running OSCAR, that is) getting together to build and launch their own cubesat? God knows I'd be there in a heartbeat...
What about the rest of you? What links do you check out, and what am I missing?
Re:One of the unfortunate things about Apache...
on
Hardening Apache
·
· Score: 1
you'll also have a gimpy, crapped-up config file that other admins have to wade through after you get fired.
C'mon, surely you know the difference between "learning exercise" and "what I leave behind for my successors"!
Re:One of the unfortunate things about Apache...
on
Hardening Apache
·
· Score: 1
That's a really good idea. I've got to do that at some point.
Actually, that'd be a really good way to approach any complex piece of software: BIND, MySQL, SSH...sure, a lot of it would depend on how good the logging is, but boy, would you ever learn it from the ground up.
Huh...I have loved everything I've read by NS: Snow Crash, Diamond Age (though the ending did leave me going "WTF?"), Cryptonomicon, Quicksilver and The Confusion.
Just wanted to throw in my two cents after seeing a bunch of pans of The Baroque Cycle. I will be getting The System of the World as soon as I possibly can.
Limiting the OS to three running processes helps things IMMENSELY. For example: recently my dad asked for help installing Linux on his laptop. I got a copy of Mandrake Linux and customized the kernel thusly:
struct ps { [ the usual stuff here...] } [3];
Remake the package, remake the CD and off it went. Now, when he boots his laptop, here's what runs:
init
getty (one instance)
login (which execs into bash)
And boy, was it worth it: I no longer have to answer any questions about GNOME, mounting a USB pen drive, modem drivers. why KOffice messes up the PowerPoint presentation he's trying to read, why he can't run those funky.pif email attachments from his friends, or any of that crap.
But hey, I know he's going to learn, and will eventually outgrow StarterLinux(tm). I've let him know that once he's got the hang of this he can $$upgrade$$ to Full-On-Whiz-Bang Linux. In fact, if he wants to send the money to me I'll even order it for him.
But...it is an awful lot of fun to use the lines in everyday conversations. For example: yesterday, someone came up to me and asked if I could tell them how to retrieve a file from backups.
My reply: "A man animal learning how to retreive a file from backups?!? Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!" And then I swished around my dreadlocks, put my six-fingered hands on my hips, stood proudly in my three-foot stilts^Walien boots, threw my head back and laughed some more.
I'm looking for suggestions on what to do next. In the meantime, whatever you do, do not run this command:
while [ true ] ; do wget http://www.emailsupply.net/sample.txt -O/dev/null ; done
That's a 4MB sample of the lists the gentleman has for sale, and surely the Slashdot effect runs the risk of using up all his bandwidth. Don't do it, I beg you!
This is the same company that lost my trust by screwing their customers. They've done nothing since to earn that trust back. (And no, removing their stupid adware, when it shouldn't have been there in the first place, doesn't count toward earning my trust back.)
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, you got that word wrong. It's not pronounced "HA-kurz", it's pronounced "LY-ing SO-sho-PA-thik THEEVZ". But no worries, it's an easy mistake to make.
Rather than sharing my theories about a top-secret-yet-LGPLd government project to develop object-oriented Java-based SQL/graphics library that will allow us to train secret UFO pilots to defeat an invasion of alien accountants, would someone care to fill me in? I would be forever in your debt.
I'd like to ask this question:
Okay, so you're satisfied with your endings...why? What about them appeals to you? What is it you're going for? What constitutes a good ending for you? What don't you like in an ending?
(And for the record, I like your books enough that I simply don't want them to end; I've never had the visceral reaction to your endings that some seem to have.)
I listen to music at work on headphones; it would be great if I could come back to my desk, put them back on and have the same song playing that I interrupted when I left. I'm a bit surprised that Apple hasn't figured out how to do this yet....Hey Apple and Oakley -- you listening?
As far as Perl and speed goes, from what I remember it wasn't much of an issue; we used the spamd c-based daemon to pass email to just-the-one copy of SpamAssassin, and it wasn't that bad. There was a bit of delay, but it was nothing like before when we were using Procmail. One bad entry in Procmail could bring the whole thing grinding to a halt.
We considered using SA as a milter (I'm pretty sure that option is/was available), but for reasons I can't remember decided against it. The sysadmin was a fan of Sendmail, so switching wasn't an option (though I hear qmail is being considered now).
One thing I wanted to do but didn't have the time for was to set up DCC; I think that would've helped significantly.
If you're using white/blacklists, moving your databases off to a remote server will also save you load on that server. -- We had nothing that sophisticated; the priority right then was to get spam filtering off our customer-facing mail server (and DNS, and POP, and radius...ugh). No whitelists beyond very simple SA stuff, and certainly no individual preferences for SA.
The result is that only negatives make it to the content analyzer, that being SA, which after relieving itself of all that processing time analyzing content becomes a much more trivial task. -- Absolutely. There's a lot that could have been done better, and no doubt that I made some bad choices (learning, always learning). But, though I bitch and moan, it was better than what we had before.
Thanks kindly for the compliment and the suggestions...it's always good to have a second opinion.
That's enough to get you started...if you're not gibbering on the floor when you finish reading, you'll be fine. :-)
Forfeiture -- absolutely. I've read a little bit about that, and good gog a'mighty, there's some really scary stuff going on down there.br.
Brother! TESTIFY! Woo! :-) With you 100%.
I used to work at a small ISP -- lets say 5000 customers. We were getting lots of complaints about spam, so we decided to put in better spam filtering. That required a bigger server. Then the mail server went down for half an hour because of the volume of incoming spam, and there was a suddenly a big rush on getting the new server up and running.
The server was the cheap part: let's say $2000 (all figures Canadian) for the box, rackmount, hard drives, yadda blah. Thank God for Free software, because FreeBSD and SpamAssassin saved our asses. It took me, conservatively, three full days to set up and get it more or less right; I was doing a lot of learning on the job, and the regular sysadmin was away.
Now, don't forget that we were down for half an hour. This was from roughly 9am to 9:30am on that day, so that's a busy fucking time for us. There were tons of calls and only three people to handle them; fortunately, I was pressed into service trying to fix things, and wasn't on the phones. We probably lost a couple customers then, but most people were pretty understanding, especially when they were told it was fuckwad spammers who were causing the problem.
Complaints were a huge deal, both before and after the filtering was put in place; I was dealing with most of them, because I was doing abuse duties, and it wasn't fun. Complaints before the new server was installed went, "Why am I getting all this spam? Why can't you stop it?" Complaints afterward went, "Why am I still getting all this spam? Why isn't your filtering working? What do you mean, I have to set up my mail program to do more work?" (We set the threshold rather high, thinking that customers could use filtering in their mail client to set their own tolerance level. Ha! It is to laugh. Ever tried filtering on random headers in Outlook Express 5.0?)
Plus, there was maintenance of the server and software; upgrades were never fun; false positives happened and were dealt with; and now, my sources tell me, they've graduated to buying dual-fucking-xeon processors in order to handle spam filtering. Fuck me!
But hey, we were after a dollar cost, and I did get sidetracked. We already said $2k for the server. Three days of my time, $400 (deal!). Half an hour when everything in the company came to a halt because no one could send mail or do anything but answer the phones: $500, and that's probably very conservative. Two customers' worth of lost revenue for a year: say another $500. Spam complaints before took, oh, probably a good five solid days of my time: $650. Afterward was probably the same, so another $650. I know of at least one customer we lost afterward when the spam filtering wasn't the magic bullet I kept trying to tell them didn't exist, so $250. Bandwidth for all the spam we were accepting but kept from reaching the customers: let's say $50, for a nice round total of $5000.
Now this is very, very rough back-of-the-envelope calculations for a small dialup ISP I no longer work at; the managers there could probably tell you more about lost good will and so on. More importantly, it doesn't tell you about ongoing costs; that's just a snapshot from when I worked there. But that was $5000 spent by an ISP that was going down the tubes (true story), just to keep up (barely) with a denial-of-service attack that was slowly grinding us into the floor. I can't even imagine what it's like for AOL or Hotmail. Nor will we ever know what that time and effort and money might have done if it wasn't being spent on spam.
Goddamn fuckwad spammers piss me off.
Incidentally, this bit:
was interesting to me. This sounds like the oft-repeated assertion that a US flag with a fringe in a courtroom means that you're under Admiralty law, not the law of the United States, and that anyone who appears before that court has lost most of their rights. Of course, They don't want you to know this...or that England still owns the US, or that there is a subtle yet vitally important difference between the United States and the United States of America that means you are 0wn3d by the government...
I tell you, there are worlds upon worlds of free entertainment out there on the Internet.
Interesting...the graph at my old job shows the same thing. Keep in mind, though, that could just as easily be spammers working around filters (at least in my case, and I assume yours).
Have a look at your firewall logs sometime. To a first approximation, it's all Windows stuff: UDP ports 137, 1026, 1027; TCP ports 135, 139, 445. It's almost a relief to find someone looking for a mail or an FTP server.
And about the other story: WOW. I would love the chance to send up a four-inch cube into space. God alone knows what the hell I would do with it -- I'm no electronics guy -- but the possibilities are simply too cool to be believed. I'd be tempted to go back to university and get an engineering degree just to be able to be part of a project like that.
But hey, who says that's necessary? $40K for a launch, even U$, isn't that much if you get a bunch of people together. There's people that chip in to buy an airplane -- how long 'til we see people (besides the good folks running OSCAR, that is) getting together to build and launch their own cubesat? God knows I'd be there in a heartbeat...
What about the rest of you? What links do you check out, and what am I missing?
C'mon, surely you know the difference between "learning exercise" and "what I leave behind for my successors"!
Actually, that'd be a really good way to approach any complex piece of software: BIND, MySQL, SSH...sure, a lot of it would depend on how good the logging is, but boy, would you ever learn it from the ground up.
Just wanted to throw in my two cents after seeing a bunch of pans of The Baroque Cycle. I will be getting The System of the World as soon as I possibly can.
by the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program called "Low-Light Imaging of the Earth at Night". It can be found at http://dmsp.ngdc.noaa.gov/pres/low_light_120701/in dex.html/.
And they're sponsored by our old friends, The Bulk Club. Can't we spread a rumour that Osama is actively funding spammers or something?
- init
- getty (one instance)
- login (which execs into bash)
And boy, was it worth it: I no longer have to answer any questions about GNOME, mounting a USB pen drive, modem drivers. why KOffice messes up the PowerPoint presentation he's trying to read, why he can't run those funkyBut hey, I know he's going to learn, and will eventually outgrow StarterLinux(tm). I've let him know that once he's got the hang of this he can $$upgrade$$ to Full-On-Whiz-Bang Linux. In fact, if he wants to send the money to me I'll even order it for him.
But...it is an awful lot of fun to use the lines in everyday conversations. For example: yesterday, someone came up to me and asked if I could tell them how to retrieve a file from backups.
My reply: "A man animal learning how to retreive a file from backups?!? Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!" And then I swished around my dreadlocks, put my six-fingered hands on my hips, stood proudly in my three-foot stilts^Walien boots, threw my head back and laughed some more.
Hours of entertainment, I tells ya...
What happens when it becomes self-aware?
You're right! Listen to gptelemann, everyone, and DO NOT do that!
I'm looking for suggestions on what to do next. In the meantime, whatever you do, do not run this command:
That's a 4MB sample of the lists the gentleman has for sale, and surely the Slashdot effect runs the risk of using up all his bandwidth. Don't do it, I beg you!This is the same company that lost my trust by screwing their customers. They've done nothing since to earn that trust back. (And no, removing their stupid adware, when it shouldn't have been there in the first place, doesn't count toward earning my trust back.)