These are dynamic IPs. Their reverse DNS will reflect that in some way (lots of digits, related to IP, and usually in sequence). Mail servers will learn (be coded) to just not accept those. If you want to send mail more reliably and consistently, use the ISP's smarthost mail forwarders, or get a static IP with your own domain in rDNS, or rent a server somewhere else.
You don't need to have every graduate of high school know all that math to find a few who do. If your company paid premium salaries, and had a reputation for that, you'd get premium people. It would then be "the company to work for" (like IBM used to be back in the 1960's through mid 1990's). Or maybe you should hire someone older than 28 years. Why not hire someone who already has experience in the field and has proven they know the foundations and can learn anything new on their own? I don't know the job situation in finance, because that's not my field. But I do know the IT field, and employers are simply ignoring "experience" anymore because it means "expensive".
To be honest, most skilled American IT employees are gainfully employed now (with some exceptions in some areas).
If you call flipping hamburgers, washing cars, and attending parking lots to be gainfully employed, then I suppose you are right. Many do have jobs in IT, but now days the pay is way low, between 35% and 50% less than what it used to be.
Americans should realize that they need to compete in this new world economy by either working for fewer wages and benefits, or by offering much higher skills and capabilities.
The lower pay is what drives employment decisions. I've talked to managers who have been required by upper executives to specifically hire lesser qualified people because they are cheaper. Many project managers hate this situation. But they either must do with smaller hiring budgets, or lose their own job.
As for America competing in a world economy, that isn't even possible without a dramatic fall in the value of the US dollar. The cost of a small apartment in most cities in the USA exceeds the entire take home pay of a programmer in India who is living in luxury there. A friend of mine in Mumbai rents a nice 3 bedroom apartment in a new (less than 10 years old) high rise for what translates back to about US$155 a month. If prices in America were to drop to what they are in India, then America can compete. Equalize the cost of living everywhere, and then it's fair. But you have to change the exchange rates and lower the value of the US dollar to somewhere around 1/4 to 1/6 of what it is now.
American corporations simply don't want to hire "family men" and other older workers in the US because they want to have salary levels on which they can (even with the spouse working, too) support a family and pay the mortgage on a decent house. "Competing" in the current climate means losing all that. Eventually it will happen if things continue the way they are, as there is already much downward pressure on the US dollar due to high rates of unemployment and underemployment in the US that is being hidden by government statistics that don't really measure this, but instead, measure only those actually getting government benefits (of which less than half qualify for). These corporations would rather rape the American workers and the American economy for their own profit and greed. And the current US President, and Congress, support this (the raping... not posturing for equalized competing).
Exactly. Jobs in which you have to work with your hands cannot be so easily telecommuted around the globe. But be ready for greater than five dollar a gallon gasoline since telecommuting jobs in the USA will all but disappear and everyone will have to drive around to get work.
Bummer... still no firewire support. I can still use Linux for this projects (digital video over firewire... dv1394), but I would have liked to have another OS option (and OpenBSD is otherwise a great system).
CSS is getting to be a must-have. I can live without Javascript (I do now, I leave it disabled, as well as Java and Flash). SSL may be needed, too (and it's not that much memory to add it). What's needed is one that satisfies the "web standards" fanatics (except for the ones that insist on Javascript).
Doing things "for" an employer "in secret" is a bad idea in general. Still, I can see how people might overlook documenting (assuming formal documenting procedures are even in place) things like an extra root account or an extra SSH port. But in principle, we clearly agree doing it intentionally in secret is a big no-no... as is coming back to hack in after being let go... unless you're now working for the Justice Department on an investigation of large scale bribery and corruption by that company's executives:-)
Let's hope it works now. Last time I tried Amaya, it was just majorly broken in everywhichway. I was told then, and as recently as a year ago, that it is a reference browser, not a production browser. But things can change, so I will download it and give it a try, again.
Last time I asked for a non-obese browser in lieu of Mozilla, I was pointed to Firebird, which became Firefox. Sadly, it was still the entire web portion of Mozilla. I do use it, but even I can see it uses a lot of memory (80 MB just to get started, and eventually 300 to 400 MB as it gets used for a week). People with smaller machines than mine will have a bad experience (mine is not all that great).
What's the name of that employee-hostile financial services company? I'm starting a list of them. Maybe I'll even register employee-hostile-financial-services-companies.info and put it online.
If the primary admin account on the servers in your company get hosed, then you deserve to remain locked out and unable to access the machines... if you think having a backup emergency account is a bad idea.
There is nothing wrong with having such a backup account. The thing that would be wrong is for the admin geek to keep it secret. It should be known to the same people who are authorized to know the password to the primary admin account.
BTW, not only do I keep backup accounts on the servers I manage, but I also keep backup access processes running on backup ports. Kill the SSH daemon and I can still get in. None of this is a bad thing; it's documented internally.
I'm still waiting for a non-obese browser to come along that supports these standards so I will have a complete user base available to make use of them. Until then, I'm stuck with generating plain old HTML. Oh, and in case you were tempted to suggest Firefox, don't bother; it's still too big and too slow for 100% deployment. How about one that doesn't grow beyond 100 MB?
The guy who stays and wants to code is the one we want. It is perfectly normal, IMHO, that in a group of decent size only few actually can program. Our educational system should be designed in a way to identify those precious few and make sure they can go as high as they can.
It is equally important to have a base of good jobs available to encourage them to pursue these high goals, too. Right now, the USA is simply not doing that. There needs to be a balance; you don't want to have too many jobs wanting people, and you don't want to have too many people wanting jobs. But that balance can't be achieved if the jobs that want people only want people who will accept a level of pay that is substandard in our society.
That's the real problem: US corporations want to pay only substandard wages... they want people, but only those willing to accept substandard wages. They can get people for these substandard wages in places like India, because as dollars are exchanged for rupees, the result is a pay level that is premium in India. The catch is that they need to do this in order to be competitive in a world market. The real culprit is not that the USA is, or is not, better or smarter technologically... the real culprit is the exchange rate for the dollar is so slanted against the USA being competitive in the world. The extremely high trade deficit the USA has right now is proof of this. It's cheaper to buy from other countries (whether it is cheap plastic toys or application coding services) than from the USA.
It is silly to assume that Indian (Chinese, Russian, etc.) person in general is better programmer than an American one or that there are more programmers born there per 1000 population. It is simply those education systems were (for a while) better tuned to identify and pull up those selected ones.
It's all about the same. India has about 3.653 times the population of the United States. If they had as vast an eduational system, they could easily produce 3.653 times as many programmers. It will still be years, maybe even decades, before they get to that point. But in the mean time, the very best will be educated and available... cheap.
The ultimate solution for the USA is to work this economically. Instead of trying to keep the value of the dollar high, let it fall (it natually will as the trade deficit rises). This will be hard to do, though, because this also results in raising the cost of oil (since so much of it is imported). To lessen the impact of that, the USA needs to impose a much better energy policy that reduces the demand for oil, and allows shifting of domestic energy (such as coal) into areas where oil was used as much as can be done. One idea is to require all companies doing any business with the government to allow telecommuting for as many job functions as can be done, and give them all a tax incentive. That will reduce the vehicular traffic and its energy consumption. Many other things can be done as well.
We need to move beyond VoIP to something that escapes the legacy of the old dialed phone system. That something would be like VoIP, but instead of using phone numbers in the usual way, you use IP addresses and communicate directly. Of course we would not literally use IP addresses to "dial" who we want to speak to; we'd use domain names. You get a domain name, or subdomain name, or whatever. Get a registered domain name, or just a subdomain from some dynamic IP service. And of course it should have strong encryption by default with full support of authentication keys so you know you aren't speaking to the man in the middle instead (if you have the public key of who you want to speak to, or the public key of someone who has signed their key).
The process of finding someone would basically be DNS. By adding a way to get the port number through there as well, there would not need to be a specific port associated with this (just some way for DNS to know what you are getting the port number for).
Of course we'll need to find some ways to block VoIP spam.
Existing VoIP would be used for access to those who only have legacy phone service. But the idea is to phase that out.
When an ISP does turn around and stop hosting spammers, whether the result of SPEWS or not, that does reduce the spam somewhat. There are 2 mechanisms at play with this. A few small time spammers may give up, or at least be inactive for a while as they search for a new ISP. That's less spam. And the other mechanism is that the spammers that remain active are bunched tighter into less address space, increasing the spam to legitimate email ratio enough that a few more networks may be able to block the ISPs hosting those spammers. That helps, too.
Neither of us really knows just how much spam we would have today had SPEWS never come into existance, or had shut down sometime in the recent past. But I speculate that in the short term there is some advantage to having SPEWS as described above, and in the long term, as the number of spammers concentrated into specific address spaces reaches a "critical mass", those addresses can be blocked at border routers. At some point the spammers will find other addresses, but as this cycle repeats, more and more ISPs learn not to become the hosts of these exploding spammers.
The quality of a list like SPEWS depends on its history. SPEWS has a history of blocking ISPs, but it also has a history of doing so when there is a genuine problem at those ISPs.
SPEWS works for me. But I also do whitelisting. I could go to the extreme and block the entire internet and allow email in only as whitelisted. Using SPEWS in place of blocking the entire internet is certainly better. Whitelisting in addition to using SPEWS does work for me.
So what would you suggest as a means to at least work equally well as SPEWS, without using SPEWS? I also use some other blacklists. But I do not filter based on content for two reasons. One, it has resulted in far more false positives than SPEWS ever has. And two, it is just philosophically wrong. The definition of spam has absolutely nothing to do with content; it's all about the behaviour of the sender in selecting (or more specifically not applying any selection process at all) the addresses to send to. One person's spam could be another person's great opportunity. I get marketing messages from several companies that I have asked for and want.
As to an ISP's other customers, the problem I see is that as long as they keep paying the ISP, the ISP won't have any incentive to remove spammers aside from the bandwidth wasted on their end. Were it not for blacklisting, zombie spam (at least at the level we have today) would not be something that ISPs hosting infected customers would care about. The bandwidth on their networks from it is not that big. But if they weren't faced with these blacklistings, fewer of them would be trying clean up the problem. The customers of an ISP are in a lot better position to influence the ISP policy than the peers on the internet. They do have more control (as little as there might be).
It was still her resposibility. If she said she fixed it, and in fact she had not fixed the wireless router (her ignorance is probably why she didn't think it was the point of the problem), then she told an untruth (maybe not intentionally so). But Road Runner was in the right to immediately cut her back off and require more definitive proof. I'm glad you knew to check the router.
Maybe Verizon is blocking outbound port 25 that goes to other than their own smarthost MTAs. That would stop a lot of zombie spam until the spammers shift their paradigm to having the zombies do smarthost relaying. They are already using the zombies to do mass and distributed signups of new users at Hotmail, Yahoo, etc, so they have ready accounts to do spamming from over there, too. That's hard for the free mail providers to detect as a spammer activity.
It's a useless service that is in no way forthcoming about its purpose, and has no accountability.
Actually, it doesn't matter. Some people do find it to be useful. I find it to be useful. They don't need to state what their service does, as this can be determined through their very consistent actions. Words don't matter; actions do. And SPEWS has carried out some very effective actions.
As for accountability, that belongs with whoever uses it. If it isn't doing what YOU want, then don't use it.
The admins who run it are jumped up petty control freaks who think the internet should be run according to their whims, and they seem totally unable to decide whether it's there to stop spam, or punish spam hosters.
Why do you think it has to be just one of those? I'm quite happy with it being both at the same time, which is what their actions show to be taking place.
When challenged, they make all sorts of excuses and justifications without any ability to back their aguments up.
They who? I bet YOU have NEVER spoken with the people that run SPEWS. If you have, say who they are to back up your statement.
They have made no impact on spam at all, and their service reduces the functionality of the internet more than SPAM does.
This is entirely false. I have seen numerous ISPs stop hosting spammers and turn around and clean up their act as a result. In fact I have actually helped 3 of them do that.
The spam problem would be worse than it is now without SPEWS. I do have my own private blacklists that catch a substantial amount of spam. If I were to turn off my private lists, SPEWS would end up blocking about 80% of the incoming spam. I call that effective. And considering my spam volume is on the order of 700 pieces a day, it makes a huge difference in functionality as well.
Maybe about 10 pieces of email per year that I actually wanted get lost as a result. It's easier to deal with than to deal with the onslaught of spam. Maybe your email box just doesn't get enough for you to realize the scope of the problem.
The SPEWS list is worthless as anything other than an indicator of potential spam. Any admin who takes blocks all of SPEWS doesn't deserve his job.
Different administrators have to deal with different dynamics of their user/customer base. The decision to use, or not use, SPEWS varies based on these factors. I have advised many of my clients to NOT use SPEWS, and have advised many others to go ahead and use it. Some in the middle I have suggested to try it and see.
But my guess is you are most likely pissed off about SPEWS because SPEWS has listed your home email server. Because you want to use cheap services, and not make any effort to make your own email server stand out above the crowd the the ghetto in an obvious way, you want to find someone else to blame.
Long ago when I took the tests, everything was multiple choice. I do pretty well with those. Now days they include an essay or two, so I have heard. I know I would do very poorly with that. The reason is when I am to write something like an essay, I have to have a feeling of unlimited time to accomplish it, and quite possibly actually sleep on it. The test does not give you that opportunity, though real life usually does. Some exceptions exist, such as journalism, where definite deadlines exist. Some people really can work well under time pressure. Others cannot, but can work just as well, if not better, without the pressure. But the college entrance tests don't measure this. If you can't complete the essay during the testing session, you simply score zero on that part of the test. Someone evaluating you won't know that you could have written an excellent essay with no time pressure. I feel sorry for those others who can't do multiple choice or other things under time pressure.
Some colleges used to (may still) mail out an essay requirement to applicants. They then had a month to complete it (usually requiring some significant research, too). That's definitely something the SATs can't measure.
Everyone is different. But one thing that too many people do have in common is a tendency want to force others to become like them.
It's not the same as being retarded. It's more like not seeing red, but seeing UV instead. It's changes the world, but you can still be functional, but you can't always be functional in the ways other people establish, such as being able recognize that a traffic light is red. But you can see some things other people cannot see.
The idea of the name "wrong planet" for the site of the article fits this well. If all the people who could see UV and not red were all born on a separate planet of their own instead, things would work better. Traffic lights would have different colors.
Many people with Autism or Asperger's cannot stand the flickering of fluorescent lights. The better solution is to remove them from that environment, rather than try to force them to adjust to what is effectively extraneous stimulation. People can simply adjust by not trying to depend on using their facial experessions to convey feelings. When communicating with someone on the spectrum, express yourself clearly and with little or no symbolism. Most of us see the world in a very literal realistic way.
Asperger's isn't something like cancer, or a broken bone, or a missing arm. It's more of a personality, or a set of personality traits. It's not unlike many of the characteristic differences in people like being tall or short, having black hair or red hair. Sometimes these things are an advantage and sometimes they are a disadvantage. As personality traits, though, the effects are very often in how people deal with other people, in addition to how we deal with the world around us (and computers, etc). Not all Aspies and not all Auties are alike, either. I've met many who are quite different.
In a way, it's more about personality than it is about illness or disease. It's a disorder perhaps to those who don't understand it. It can cause some problems for those of us who have it... but more because we have to deal with those who don't than because of what we have. It's a set of traits, many of which just aren't in sync with what the majority are.
There are some people who are geeks, in their own way, that do not have Aspergers. Mark Cuban is one of those. I believe the various sets of interests and other cerebral "features" are all orthogonal, and certain ones are identified as geeky, and various people have varying numbers of them. Some people can have a lot of the geeky ones and still also have the social abilities that an Aspie lacks. Maybe the term "ubergeek" might be better for those who having nothing but geekiness to live for. I consider myself a geek, and an Aspie, but I don't have all those interests. I'm not into gaming/RPG (tried it, but got bored), minimally into SciFi (I usually see most of the big SciFi movies, but I don't rush to them, and I don't read the books first). But I am definitely into computers, networks, hacking (not cracking anymore), ham radio (there's quite a different crowd of geeks for you, many of which are Aspies, and some even Auties), photography, astronomy, etc (if it has technical challenges, I find it fun). Everything comes in degrees and combinations; that makes us all different (and that's a damned good thing, too).
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These are dynamic IPs. Their reverse DNS will reflect that in some way (lots of digits, related to IP, and usually in sequence). Mail servers will learn (be coded) to just not accept those. If you want to send mail more reliably and consistently, use the ISP's smarthost mail forwarders, or get a static IP with your own domain in rDNS, or rent a server somewhere else.
You don't need to have every graduate of high school know all that math to find a few who do. If your company paid premium salaries, and had a reputation for that, you'd get premium people. It would then be "the company to work for" (like IBM used to be back in the 1960's through mid 1990's). Or maybe you should hire someone older than 28 years. Why not hire someone who already has experience in the field and has proven they know the foundations and can learn anything new on their own? I don't know the job situation in finance, because that's not my field. But I do know the IT field, and employers are simply ignoring "experience" anymore because it means "expensive".
If you call flipping hamburgers, washing cars, and attending parking lots to be gainfully employed, then I suppose you are right. Many do have jobs in IT, but now days the pay is way low, between 35% and 50% less than what it used to be.
The lower pay is what drives employment decisions. I've talked to managers who have been required by upper executives to specifically hire lesser qualified people because they are cheaper. Many project managers hate this situation. But they either must do with smaller hiring budgets, or lose their own job.
As for America competing in a world economy, that isn't even possible without a dramatic fall in the value of the US dollar. The cost of a small apartment in most cities in the USA exceeds the entire take home pay of a programmer in India who is living in luxury there. A friend of mine in Mumbai rents a nice 3 bedroom apartment in a new (less than 10 years old) high rise for what translates back to about US$155 a month. If prices in America were to drop to what they are in India, then America can compete. Equalize the cost of living everywhere, and then it's fair. But you have to change the exchange rates and lower the value of the US dollar to somewhere around 1/4 to 1/6 of what it is now.
American corporations simply don't want to hire "family men" and other older workers in the US because they want to have salary levels on which they can (even with the spouse working, too) support a family and pay the mortgage on a decent house. "Competing" in the current climate means losing all that. Eventually it will happen if things continue the way they are, as there is already much downward pressure on the US dollar due to high rates of unemployment and underemployment in the US that is being hidden by government statistics that don't really measure this, but instead, measure only those actually getting government benefits (of which less than half qualify for). These corporations would rather rape the American workers and the American economy for their own profit and greed. And the current US President, and Congress, support this (the raping ... not posturing for equalized competing).
Exactly. Jobs in which you have to work with your hands cannot be so easily telecommuted around the globe. But be ready for greater than five dollar a gallon gasoline since telecommuting jobs in the USA will all but disappear and everyone will have to drive around to get work.
Bummer ... still no firewire support. I can still use Linux for this projects (digital video over firewire ... dv1394), but I would have liked to have another OS option (and OpenBSD is otherwise a great system).
CSS is getting to be a must-have. I can live without Javascript (I do now, I leave it disabled, as well as Java and Flash). SSL may be needed, too (and it's not that much memory to add it). What's needed is one that satisfies the "web standards" fanatics (except for the ones that insist on Javascript).
Doing things "for" an employer "in secret" is a bad idea in general. Still, I can see how people might overlook documenting (assuming formal documenting procedures are even in place) things like an extra root account or an extra SSH port. But in principle, we clearly agree doing it intentionally in secret is a big no-no ... as is coming back to hack in after being let go ... unless you're now working for the Justice Department on an investigation of large scale bribery and corruption by that company's executives :-)
Let's hope it works now. Last time I tried Amaya, it was just majorly broken in everywhichway. I was told then, and as recently as a year ago, that it is a reference browser, not a production browser. But things can change, so I will download it and give it a try, again.
Last time I asked for a non-obese browser in lieu of Mozilla, I was pointed to Firebird, which became Firefox. Sadly, it was still the entire web portion of Mozilla. I do use it, but even I can see it uses a lot of memory (80 MB just to get started, and eventually 300 to 400 MB as it gets used for a week). People with smaller machines than mine will have a bad experience (mine is not all that great).
What's the name of that employee-hostile financial services company? I'm starting a list of them. Maybe I'll even register employee-hostile-financial-services-companies.info and put it online.
If the primary admin account on the servers in your company get hosed, then you deserve to remain locked out and unable to access the machines ... if you think having a backup emergency account is a bad idea.
There is nothing wrong with having such a backup account. The thing that would be wrong is for the admin geek to keep it secret. It should be known to the same people who are authorized to know the password to the primary admin account.
BTW, not only do I keep backup accounts on the servers I manage, but I also keep backup access processes running on backup ports. Kill the SSH daemon and I can still get in. None of this is a bad thing; it's documented internally.
I'm still waiting for a non-obese browser to come along that supports these standards so I will have a complete user base available to make use of them. Until then, I'm stuck with generating plain old HTML. Oh, and in case you were tempted to suggest Firefox, don't bother; it's still too big and too slow for 100% deployment. How about one that doesn't grow beyond 100 MB?
Maybe support staff isn't free, but it's dirt cheap in India.
No doubt telemarketers are already using VoIP technology.
So what is your IM domain name? Part of the need is to be sure identity is an open structure like DNS is.
It is equally important to have a base of good jobs available to encourage them to pursue these high goals, too. Right now, the USA is simply not doing that. There needs to be a balance; you don't want to have too many jobs wanting people, and you don't want to have too many people wanting jobs. But that balance can't be achieved if the jobs that want people only want people who will accept a level of pay that is substandard in our society.
That's the real problem: US corporations want to pay only substandard wages ... they want people, but only those willing to accept substandard wages. They can get people for these substandard wages in places like India, because as dollars are exchanged for rupees, the result is a pay level that is premium in India. The catch is that they need to do this in order to be competitive in a world market. The real culprit is not that the USA is, or is not, better or smarter technologically ... the real culprit is the exchange rate for the dollar is so slanted against the USA being competitive in the world. The extremely high trade deficit the USA has right now is proof of this. It's cheaper to buy from other countries (whether it is cheap plastic toys or application coding services) than from the USA.
It's all about the same. India has about 3.653 times the population of the United States. If they had as vast an eduational system, they could easily produce 3.653 times as many programmers. It will still be years, maybe even decades, before they get to that point. But in the mean time, the very best will be educated and available ... cheap.
The ultimate solution for the USA is to work this economically. Instead of trying to keep the value of the dollar high, let it fall (it natually will as the trade deficit rises). This will be hard to do, though, because this also results in raising the cost of oil (since so much of it is imported). To lessen the impact of that, the USA needs to impose a much better energy policy that reduces the demand for oil, and allows shifting of domestic energy (such as coal) into areas where oil was used as much as can be done. One idea is to require all companies doing any business with the government to allow telecommuting for as many job functions as can be done, and give them all a tax incentive. That will reduce the vehicular traffic and its energy consumption. Many other things can be done as well.
We need to move beyond VoIP to something that escapes the legacy of the old dialed phone system. That something would be like VoIP, but instead of using phone numbers in the usual way, you use IP addresses and communicate directly. Of course we would not literally use IP addresses to "dial" who we want to speak to; we'd use domain names. You get a domain name, or subdomain name, or whatever. Get a registered domain name, or just a subdomain from some dynamic IP service. And of course it should have strong encryption by default with full support of authentication keys so you know you aren't speaking to the man in the middle instead (if you have the public key of who you want to speak to, or the public key of someone who has signed their key).
The process of finding someone would basically be DNS. By adding a way to get the port number through there as well, there would not need to be a specific port associated with this (just some way for DNS to know what you are getting the port number for).
Of course we'll need to find some ways to block VoIP spam.
Existing VoIP would be used for access to those who only have legacy phone service. But the idea is to phase that out.
When an ISP does turn around and stop hosting spammers, whether the result of SPEWS or not, that does reduce the spam somewhat. There are 2 mechanisms at play with this. A few small time spammers may give up, or at least be inactive for a while as they search for a new ISP. That's less spam. And the other mechanism is that the spammers that remain active are bunched tighter into less address space, increasing the spam to legitimate email ratio enough that a few more networks may be able to block the ISPs hosting those spammers. That helps, too.
Neither of us really knows just how much spam we would have today had SPEWS never come into existance, or had shut down sometime in the recent past. But I speculate that in the short term there is some advantage to having SPEWS as described above, and in the long term, as the number of spammers concentrated into specific address spaces reaches a "critical mass", those addresses can be blocked at border routers. At some point the spammers will find other addresses, but as this cycle repeats, more and more ISPs learn not to become the hosts of these exploding spammers.
The quality of a list like SPEWS depends on its history. SPEWS has a history of blocking ISPs, but it also has a history of doing so when there is a genuine problem at those ISPs.
SPEWS works for me. But I also do whitelisting. I could go to the extreme and block the entire internet and allow email in only as whitelisted. Using SPEWS in place of blocking the entire internet is certainly better. Whitelisting in addition to using SPEWS does work for me.
So what would you suggest as a means to at least work equally well as SPEWS, without using SPEWS? I also use some other blacklists. But I do not filter based on content for two reasons. One, it has resulted in far more false positives than SPEWS ever has. And two, it is just philosophically wrong. The definition of spam has absolutely nothing to do with content; it's all about the behaviour of the sender in selecting (or more specifically not applying any selection process at all) the addresses to send to. One person's spam could be another person's great opportunity. I get marketing messages from several companies that I have asked for and want.
As to an ISP's other customers, the problem I see is that as long as they keep paying the ISP, the ISP won't have any incentive to remove spammers aside from the bandwidth wasted on their end. Were it not for blacklisting, zombie spam (at least at the level we have today) would not be something that ISPs hosting infected customers would care about. The bandwidth on their networks from it is not that big. But if they weren't faced with these blacklistings, fewer of them would be trying clean up the problem. The customers of an ISP are in a lot better position to influence the ISP policy than the peers on the internet. They do have more control (as little as there might be).
... I owe you a beer. I owe you many beers. Great job!
It was still her resposibility. If she said she fixed it, and in fact she had not fixed the wireless router (her ignorance is probably why she didn't think it was the point of the problem), then she told an untruth (maybe not intentionally so). But Road Runner was in the right to immediately cut her back off and require more definitive proof. I'm glad you knew to check the router.
Maybe Verizon is blocking outbound port 25 that goes to other than their own smarthost MTAs. That would stop a lot of zombie spam until the spammers shift their paradigm to having the zombies do smarthost relaying. They are already using the zombies to do mass and distributed signups of new users at Hotmail, Yahoo, etc, so they have ready accounts to do spamming from over there, too. That's hard for the free mail providers to detect as a spammer activity.
Actually, it doesn't matter. Some people do find it to be useful. I find it to be useful. They don't need to state what their service does, as this can be determined through their very consistent actions. Words don't matter; actions do. And SPEWS has carried out some very effective actions.
As for accountability, that belongs with whoever uses it. If it isn't doing what YOU want, then don't use it.
Why do you think it has to be just one of those? I'm quite happy with it being both at the same time, which is what their actions show to be taking place.
They who? I bet YOU have NEVER spoken with the people that run SPEWS. If you have, say who they are to back up your statement.
This is entirely false. I have seen numerous ISPs stop hosting spammers and turn around and clean up their act as a result. In fact I have actually helped 3 of them do that.
The spam problem would be worse than it is now without SPEWS. I do have my own private blacklists that catch a substantial amount of spam. If I were to turn off my private lists, SPEWS would end up blocking about 80% of the incoming spam. I call that effective. And considering my spam volume is on the order of 700 pieces a day, it makes a huge difference in functionality as well.
Maybe about 10 pieces of email per year that I actually wanted get lost as a result. It's easier to deal with than to deal with the onslaught of spam. Maybe your email box just doesn't get enough for you to realize the scope of the problem.
Different administrators have to deal with different dynamics of their user/customer base. The decision to use, or not use, SPEWS varies based on these factors. I have advised many of my clients to NOT use SPEWS, and have advised many others to go ahead and use it. Some in the middle I have suggested to try it and see.
But my guess is you are most likely pissed off about SPEWS because SPEWS has listed your home email server. Because you want to use cheap services, and not make any effort to make your own email server stand out above the crowd the the ghetto in an obvious way, you want to find someone else to blame.
Long ago when I took the tests, everything was multiple choice. I do pretty well with those. Now days they include an essay or two, so I have heard. I know I would do very poorly with that. The reason is when I am to write something like an essay, I have to have a feeling of unlimited time to accomplish it, and quite possibly actually sleep on it. The test does not give you that opportunity, though real life usually does. Some exceptions exist, such as journalism, where definite deadlines exist. Some people really can work well under time pressure. Others cannot, but can work just as well, if not better, without the pressure. But the college entrance tests don't measure this. If you can't complete the essay during the testing session, you simply score zero on that part of the test. Someone evaluating you won't know that you could have written an excellent essay with no time pressure. I feel sorry for those others who can't do multiple choice or other things under time pressure.
Some colleges used to (may still) mail out an essay requirement to applicants. They then had a month to complete it (usually requiring some significant research, too). That's definitely something the SATs can't measure.
Everyone is different. But one thing that too many people do have in common is a tendency want to force others to become like them.
It's not the same as being retarded. It's more like not seeing red, but seeing UV instead. It's changes the world, but you can still be functional, but you can't always be functional in the ways other people establish, such as being able recognize that a traffic light is red. But you can see some things other people cannot see.
The idea of the name "wrong planet" for the site of the article fits this well. If all the people who could see UV and not red were all born on a separate planet of their own instead, things would work better. Traffic lights would have different colors.
Many people with Autism or Asperger's cannot stand the flickering of fluorescent lights. The better solution is to remove them from that environment, rather than try to force them to adjust to what is effectively extraneous stimulation. People can simply adjust by not trying to depend on using their facial experessions to convey feelings. When communicating with someone on the spectrum, express yourself clearly and with little or no symbolism. Most of us see the world in a very literal realistic way.
Asperger's isn't something like cancer, or a broken bone, or a missing arm. It's more of a personality, or a set of personality traits. It's not unlike many of the characteristic differences in people like being tall or short, having black hair or red hair. Sometimes these things are an advantage and sometimes they are a disadvantage. As personality traits, though, the effects are very often in how people deal with other people, in addition to how we deal with the world around us (and computers, etc). Not all Aspies and not all Auties are alike, either. I've met many who are quite different.
In a way, it's more about personality than it is about illness or disease. It's a disorder perhaps to those who don't understand it. It can cause some problems for those of us who have it ... but more because we have to deal with those who don't than because of what we have. It's a set of traits, many of which just aren't in sync with what the majority are.
There are some people who are geeks, in their own way, that do not have Aspergers. Mark Cuban is one of those. I believe the various sets of interests and other cerebral "features" are all orthogonal, and certain ones are identified as geeky, and various people have varying numbers of them. Some people can have a lot of the geeky ones and still also have the social abilities that an Aspie lacks. Maybe the term "ubergeek" might be better for those who having nothing but geekiness to live for. I consider myself a geek, and an Aspie, but I don't have all those interests. I'm not into gaming/RPG (tried it, but got bored), minimally into SciFi (I usually see most of the big SciFi movies, but I don't rush to them, and I don't read the books first). But I am definitely into computers, networks, hacking (not cracking anymore), ham radio (there's quite a different crowd of geeks for you, many of which are Aspies, and some even Auties), photography, astronomy, etc (if it has technical challenges, I find it fun). Everything comes in degrees and combinations; that makes us all different (and that's a damned good thing, too).