One of my domains seems to be commonly used for dummy addresses. I can see that people would connect "ham" with "spam" when trying to think up a dummy one:-) Anyway, there was one particularly interesting one that came through once, so I googled for it. I found not only where it had been entered on a web site posting, but also figured out who actually did it (including their real email address). So did I just forward all their junk mail to them (it gets a lot)? Of course not. Instead, it's being used as a spamtrap (after a few months of SMTP 550 errors).
There will, of course, be a lot of people that can't learn by doing, most likely because they just don't have an interest in the doing. I consider myself a techie, but in a few cases I've had to do some work in law assisting lawyers in dealing with how technology affected their work in various ways. I found I could learn what they were doing very well. I doubt I could make it through law school, but I suspect if I spent three years doing what lawyers do, I'd probably know more about it than the average law school graduate.
I think a better teacher would be one who inspires people become interested in something... anything... and just want to learn more about it and do things with it, whatever it is. Then such people can learn on their own, if given the opportunity.
So the keywords are inspiration and opportunity (needed to make inquiry work). The classroom should be reserved for the boring foundations that many things still need (like finite math for computer programmers).
There are lots of people around who simply do terrible in school. They cannot really learn in a classroom or even by reading a book. But put them to work doing those certain things they can learn, and they learn more, and faster, than they would in school. I know I am one of these people, and I learned on the job far more than in school. I look back on my days in college as a total waste of time; I'd have learned more in the right job, which of course I'd never have gotten because the eystem doesn't allow for that. I believe there are a lot of people like this. I've met many, and it isn't just in science, engineering, or technology; I've even met business people and sales people like this. And don't forget that even Bill Gates dropped out of college to be a successful (from a financial perspective) business person.
Unless they arranged to get protected frequencies from the appropriate government agency (FCC in the USA), then it is up to the manufacturers of the cars and/or the products being incorporated into the cars, to see to it that the signals operate on frequencies where they won't be subject to the kind of interference that causes them to fail to operate. Of course they are also subject to the power limitations for unlicensed transmitters which ensures that they are very weak. It would be easy for someone to set up a radio transmitter that did jam those frequencies, and it wouldn't take much power at all to overcome the few milliwatts used for car door locks. A watt or two would wipe out an entire mall. So even if the car manufacturers got their own frequency, it would be hard to prevent jamming (not impossible, but very expensive).
You and I, and I am sure Tom Adelstein, all know that SCO's case is meritless. But the real problem is that some companies still get sued by a dying company. Executives don't want their company to have to be the one that has to pay a lawyer to bring the BSDi facts into a courtroom. Indemnification will help for those companies where the decision to go with Linux is being held back due to the legal risk (not of losing, but of having to defend).
While the CTO would be the person to move forward on decisions like using Linux (and a good CTO would well understand the lack of merit in SCO's case), a CEO might well be involved in addressing the legal issue. If anything, the CTO should be the one doing the printing of it and putting it on the CEO's desk.
If you're not the company CTO or Director of IT, it probably is best to pass it up the pecking order. But it should be intended for the CEO... or maybe even the CFO... as that is where legal risks could be made into a show stopper.
Definitely a farse, for sure. But to business executives, it is also a legal reality that cannot be ignored. And the fear is not that SCO might ever win anything, but that they might be expected to have to defend against such an attempt. And the counter-suit to recover legal defense costs might well get nothing because of the financial problems at SCO. So it isn't a matter of knowing that SCO will lose. The risk is getting struck by its dying attacks.
Well, that's the whole point. "Decent sized" is that size where you can get ARIN space and announce your own BGP routes, and dual-home. Even though you might get space at the/20 or even/21 level, it can still be a/19 announcement as ARIN will reserve the/19 for a period of time to allow expansion (they don't want to have you asking for a 2nd space which just increases the number of routes).
Phone numbers are now portable (mostly) because of changes in the architecture of how phone switches work. Long ago this was not the case. Today, there are physical routing codes that are different from the number itself; looking up a portable cell number in a database gets the code that identifies where it goes (and tracks where the cell phone has roamed to). Todays phone numbers are more like domain names on the internet.
Comparing phone numbers to IP addresses is wrong. Just because both are numbers is apparently what misleads you. A phone number is analogous to a domain name (the internet can use letters more than phones can because of the keyboards involved... but many companies do use letters are part of their phone number promotions... for example 1-800-HOSTING). The IP address is analogous to the switch routing codes used to connect a call to the proper switch where it is located. Portable phone numbers are looked up in a database to get those location codes just like domain names are looked up in the DNS system to get IP addresses. The internet, and the domain name system, just wasn't limited by the legacy of the past like the PSTN is.
Fast forward 20 years...
IPv6 is deployed everywhere. The old PSTN is dead. All voice communication is by direct end-to-end VoIP. You speak the identity of the party to "call" and it first looks up your private name list, and then the public name list (a form of DNS probably expanded to identify every individual). It's translated internally in the software to an IPv6 address, and a connection attempt is made. Over that connection you communicate. Behind the scenes routers will dyanamically route as needed. And IPv6 is even easier to renumber; just unplug from one network and plug in to another. The phone will (using a securely authenticated means) communicate its new location to the place where your identity maps to your IPv6 address.
IPv4 isn't as good as IPv6 in this regard, but it is by no means the identity you should use. If you were to promote your IP address as the way to reach you, you would be stupid (but I'm not saying you're doing that).
And check out my sig (as of when this is posted) for an example of how bad an IP address could be. But actually, you can do that in DNS.
If you have IP space from your upstream, I would not call that "decent sized". As soon as you are big enough to get your own space from ARIN, RIPE, APNIC, or whatever (depending on where you are), then you can call yourself "decent sized", and then you have your portable space.
And in between those two phases of life, you will have to renumber. I have done exactly that (renumbered a whole ISP from about 6 little pieces from 2 different upstreams into a single ARIN/19), and it does not mean a week of craziness. First of all, you do have more than a week to do it; several months if you are staying with your current ISP for a while. Get your own servers on the new IPs first. Colo customers will be the hardest to renumber, but sell them on the dual-homing advantages. Customers connected via a router with NAT can cheat and renumber by NAT if they want. If they do renumber, they would be wise to renumber to private addresses behind the scenes, but don't tell them that since it makes it easier for them to leave you. Offer to send people over to do the renumbering for them some day.
Is that legitimate RED book audio? If so, then it should be playable with ANY software, on ANY operating system, that supports RED book audio via the CDROM device being used.
But none of this matters. Audio still has the big gaping "analog hole", and music can be ripped through that hole with better quality (nearly bit-perfect if you do it right, which isn't exactly trivial, but only needs to be done once) than is typically traded on the internet.
My first suggestion is to subscribe to the SPAM-L mailing list.
My next suggestion is to front-end Exchange with something stronger on security, especially if the machine running Exchange stores any confidential data (such as mail). For example, you can run a Postfix server on OpenBSD or Linux and configure it to accept mail for all your domains and pass them to Exchange. Put Exchange on a private IP address so it isn't reachable by the public. That will cover you between the times when exploits are revealed and you can get them installed. And this will let you build up some experience in this software, too.
And finally, help advise us on how better to get the word out to those mail admins that don't yet know. For example, what could we have done to help ensure you had become aware of these things a lot sooner? Is there some course you took that we should clue-in the teacher for? Is there some book you read that we should clue-in the author of?
Now be sure it is run in AUTH-only mode on port 587. That port is NOT for unauthorized users.
If you were an active participant in mailing lists dealing with your MTA software and/or spam issues, you'd have known about port 587 years ago. And you call yourself a mail administrator? You may be one, but you aren't putting yourself in a position to keep up to date with all the things going on. Get with the program.
Of course the numbers are a stretch. But they represent the ceiling on the problem if we don't keep up the fight. We need to do more than "just delete" spam in order to avoid approaching numbers like that. But the real point should be that unlike other forms of advertising, unsolicited email is a form of theft since bulk email is effectively a "recipient pays" system due to the efficiencies of bulk sending programs.
If we don't keep up the fight against spam, then that notion that spam is "anti-advertising" won't be well known. More businesses will adopt spamming if we don't keep up the fight.
"I urge everyone who is involved in the commercial bulk e-mail business to cease all operations unless and until they are completely compliant with the requirements of the new United States anti-spam laws. There is no substitute for complete compliance," he said.
This is a bunch of crock. Compliance with that bogus law (the U-CAN-SPAM law) doesn't mean it isn't theft. This guy is obviously still thinking like a spammer.
"It is critical that every person be given an opportunity to opt-out of receiving e-mail correspondence promoting commercial products."
No one should ever have to opt-out of anything they never opted-in to in the first place.
There are 28+ million businesses (from largest to smallest) in the US (and plenty more outside the US). If just 1 million of these businesses decided to send you just one mailing (that you didn't ask for) per year (and you don't even need to opt-out because they won't send another for a whole year), and assuming they send them evenly spread throughout the year, then you will be getting one every 31.556952 seconds on average (depending on what year it is). More likely, those mailings will come in bunches. Since you won't have to opt-out, you can just press "delete" over 2737 times a day, every day. That would be over 83 thousand pieces of mail a month (imagine what that would do to the typical $9.95 a month dialup internet account).
Now imagine if they all were giving you an opportunity to opt-out via their web site.
If we allow spamming to become the norm, then every business will end up having to do it to just keep an equivalent advantage. That could mean that 150 million internet users would each get spammed from 20 million businesses. That would be 3 quadrillion (that's 3000 trillion) pieces of useless mail overloading the internet mail server infrastructure.
You are one of the exceptions; why I used the word "most".
What you call pointers in Java and Javascript are really references. You do not have methods available to increment or decrement that pointer. You can only either use it, or ignore it. To be a true pointer you have to be able to modify it, including doing things like masking it to move it to certain storage boundaries.
I'm fully in favor that most programmers should learn some assembly. But learning how to do efficient code is not the reason for learning assembly. Assembly should be learned thoroughly by systems programmers (who write operating systems, core libraries, compilers, etc) and certain embedded programmers because they might actually need to use that skill directly. Other programmers should learn some to the extent that it teaches them what's really going on inside the machine, but they should not dwell on it (unless they find it fun). Efficiency should focus on choosing (or developing) the proper algorithms for the application being developed.
If one is going to do programming where pointers would be used (systems programming and lower level applications programming, such as in C), then I suggest learning assembly as the first language. Two or more decades ago, that advice worked because most people didn't learn to program until they took a class in it or such. Now days, people destined to be programmers are learning some programming by around age 10 (usually in whatever language is easiest to get started in, which is generally not always the best to develop larger applications in). By the time they've done a lot of programming, they either "get it" with regard to pointers, or don't, and are set that way for life. This is unfortunate (and results in much insecure programming).
ISPs are a major part of the problem. They either know, or can know, that they have spammers and other criminals on board. Yet many do nothing about this because they would rather have the money spammers pay them. We need to stop peering with bad ISPs in every way we can.
Those who whine about their mail not getting through because they are using one of these bad ISPs are also part of the problem. They need to stop encouraging their ISP to continue, and force the ISP to decide between good and evil. If there's another ISP, switch. If there's only one and it's because the government gives them a monopoly, then the government is the problem and they need to fix that. If there's only one and it's not a monopoly, then they need to start their own ISP (and not allow spammers, lest they also be cast into the deep pink cyber oblivion).
I monitor the system all the time. The CPU is solidly busy. Sure, a few instances can cause it not to be, such as a big program causing seti to swap out, or seti finishing a work unit and waiting for the next one to download. But I would not characterize these periods as "plenty" of idle cycles. Unless I am doing other things to take CPU away from seti, it's 99.9%, and when I do take cycles away, other things are using them, anyway. I think it is fair to say my system has less than 0.1% idle time.
Slashdot Mirror
One of my domains seems to be commonly used for dummy addresses. I can see that people would connect "ham" with "spam" when trying to think up a dummy one :-) Anyway, there was one particularly interesting one that came through once, so I googled for it. I found not only where it had been entered on a web site posting, but also figured out who actually did it (including their real email address). So did I just forward all their junk mail to them (it gets a lot)? Of course not. Instead, it's being used as a spamtrap (after a few months of SMTP 550 errors).
There will, of course, be a lot of people that can't learn by doing, most likely because they just don't have an interest in the doing. I consider myself a techie, but in a few cases I've had to do some work in law assisting lawyers in dealing with how technology affected their work in various ways. I found I could learn what they were doing very well. I doubt I could make it through law school, but I suspect if I spent three years doing what lawyers do, I'd probably know more about it than the average law school graduate.
I think a better teacher would be one who inspires people become interested in something ... anything ... and just want to learn more about it and do things with it, whatever it is. Then such people can learn on their own, if given the opportunity.
So the keywords are inspiration and opportunity (needed to make inquiry work). The classroom should be reserved for the boring foundations that many things still need (like finite math for computer programmers).
There are lots of people around who simply do terrible in school. They cannot really learn in a classroom or even by reading a book. But put them to work doing those certain things they can learn, and they learn more, and faster, than they would in school. I know I am one of these people, and I learned on the job far more than in school. I look back on my days in college as a total waste of time; I'd have learned more in the right job, which of course I'd never have gotten because the eystem doesn't allow for that. I believe there are a lot of people like this. I've met many, and it isn't just in science, engineering, or technology; I've even met business people and sales people like this. And don't forget that even Bill Gates dropped out of college to be a successful (from a financial perspective) business person.
Unless they arranged to get protected frequencies from the appropriate government agency (FCC in the USA), then it is up to the manufacturers of the cars and/or the products being incorporated into the cars, to see to it that the signals operate on frequencies where they won't be subject to the kind of interference that causes them to fail to operate. Of course they are also subject to the power limitations for unlicensed transmitters which ensures that they are very weak. It would be easy for someone to set up a radio transmitter that did jam those frequencies, and it wouldn't take much power at all to overcome the few milliwatts used for car door locks. A watt or two would wipe out an entire mall. So even if the car manufacturers got their own frequency, it would be hard to prevent jamming (not impossible, but very expensive).
You and I, and I am sure Tom Adelstein, all know that SCO's case is meritless. But the real problem is that some companies still get sued by a dying company. Executives don't want their company to have to be the one that has to pay a lawyer to bring the BSDi facts into a courtroom. Indemnification will help for those companies where the decision to go with Linux is being held back due to the legal risk (not of losing, but of having to defend).
While the CTO would be the person to move forward on decisions like using Linux (and a good CTO would well understand the lack of merit in SCO's case), a CEO might well be involved in addressing the legal issue. If anything, the CTO should be the one doing the printing of it and putting it on the CEO's desk.
If you're not the company CTO or Director of IT, it probably is best to pass it up the pecking order. But it should be intended for the CEO ... or maybe even the CFO ... as that is where legal risks could be made into a show stopper.
Definitely a farse, for sure. But to business executives, it is also a legal reality that cannot be ignored. And the fear is not that SCO might ever win anything, but that they might be expected to have to defend against such an attempt. And the counter-suit to recover legal defense costs might well get nothing because of the financial problems at SCO. So it isn't a matter of knowing that SCO will lose. The risk is getting struck by its dying attacks.
Well, that's the whole point. "Decent sized" is that size where you can get ARIN space and announce your own BGP routes, and dual-home. Even though you might get space at the /20 or even /21 level, it can still be a /19 announcement as ARIN will reserve the /19 for a period of time to allow expansion (they don't want to have you asking for a 2nd space which just increases the number of routes).
But that's the size where you can get your own ARIN allocation.
Phone numbers are now portable (mostly) because of changes in the architecture of how phone switches work. Long ago this was not the case. Today, there are physical routing codes that are different from the number itself; looking up a portable cell number in a database gets the code that identifies where it goes (and tracks where the cell phone has roamed to). Todays phone numbers are more like domain names on the internet.
Comparing phone numbers to IP addresses is wrong. Just because both are numbers is apparently what misleads you. A phone number is analogous to a domain name (the internet can use letters more than phones can because of the keyboards involved ... but many companies do use letters are part of their phone number promotions ... for example 1-800-HOSTING). The IP address is analogous to the switch routing codes used to connect a call to the proper switch where it is located. Portable phone numbers are looked up in a database to get those location codes just like domain names are looked up in the DNS system to get IP addresses. The internet, and the domain name system, just wasn't limited by the legacy of the past like the PSTN is.
Fast forward 20 years ...
IPv6 is deployed everywhere. The old PSTN is dead. All voice communication is by direct end-to-end VoIP. You speak the identity of the party to "call" and it first looks up your private name list, and then the public name list (a form of DNS probably expanded to identify every individual). It's translated internally in the software to an IPv6 address, and a connection attempt is made. Over that connection you communicate. Behind the scenes routers will dyanamically route as needed. And IPv6 is even easier to renumber; just unplug from one network and plug in to another. The phone will (using a securely authenticated means) communicate its new location to the place where your identity maps to your IPv6 address.
IPv4 isn't as good as IPv6 in this regard, but it is by no means the identity you should use. If you were to promote your IP address as the way to reach you, you would be stupid (but I'm not saying you're doing that).
And check out my sig (as of when this is posted) for an example of how bad an IP address could be. But actually, you can do that in DNS.
If you have IP space from your upstream, I would not call that "decent sized". As soon as you are big enough to get your own space from ARIN, RIPE, APNIC, or whatever (depending on where you are), then you can call yourself "decent sized", and then you have your portable space.
And in between those two phases of life, you will have to renumber. I have done exactly that (renumbered a whole ISP from about 6 little pieces from 2 different upstreams into a single ARIN /19), and it does not mean a week of craziness. First of all, you do have more than a week to do it; several months if you are staying with your current ISP for a while. Get your own servers on the new IPs first. Colo customers will be the hardest to renumber, but sell them on the dual-homing advantages. Customers connected via a router with NAT can cheat and renumber by NAT if they want. If they do renumber, they would be wise to renumber to private addresses behind the scenes, but don't tell them that since it makes it easier for them to leave you. Offer to send people over to do the renumbering for them some day.
How often do you see bit-perfect rips traded online?
Is that legitimate RED book audio? If so, then it should be playable with ANY software, on ANY operating system, that supports RED book audio via the CDROM device being used.
But none of this matters. Audio still has the big gaping "analog hole", and music can be ripped through that hole with better quality (nearly bit-perfect if you do it right, which isn't exactly trivial, but only needs to be done once) than is typically traded on the internet.
Anyone have their IP addresses? I might as well add them to my blocked server list now to prevent future spam.
It figures that his age across the year 2000 would end up being miscalculated by someone ... or something.
My first suggestion is to subscribe to the SPAM-L mailing list.
My next suggestion is to front-end Exchange with something stronger on security, especially if the machine running Exchange stores any confidential data (such as mail). For example, you can run a Postfix server on OpenBSD or Linux and configure it to accept mail for all your domains and pass them to Exchange. Put Exchange on a private IP address so it isn't reachable by the public. That will cover you between the times when exploits are revealed and you can get them installed. And this will let you build up some experience in this software, too.
And finally, help advise us on how better to get the word out to those mail admins that don't yet know. For example, what could we have done to help ensure you had become aware of these things a lot sooner? Is there some course you took that we should clue-in the teacher for? Is there some book you read that we should clue-in the author of?
Now be sure it is run in AUTH-only mode on port 587. That port is NOT for unauthorized users.
If you were an active participant in mailing lists dealing with your MTA software and/or spam issues, you'd have known about port 587 years ago. And you call yourself a mail administrator? You may be one, but you aren't putting yourself in a position to keep up to date with all the things going on. Get with the program.
Lots of people live very near power lines. So it will affect lots of people.
Of course the numbers are a stretch. But they represent the ceiling on the problem if we don't keep up the fight. We need to do more than "just delete" spam in order to avoid approaching numbers like that. But the real point should be that unlike other forms of advertising, unsolicited email is a form of theft since bulk email is effectively a "recipient pays" system due to the efficiencies of bulk sending programs.
If we don't keep up the fight against spam, then that notion that spam is "anti-advertising" won't be well known. More businesses will adopt spamming if we don't keep up the fight.
This is a bunch of crock. Compliance with that bogus law (the U-CAN-SPAM law) doesn't mean it isn't theft. This guy is obviously still thinking like a spammer.
No one should ever have to opt-out of anything they never opted-in to in the first place.
There are 28+ million businesses (from largest to smallest) in the US (and plenty more outside the US). If just 1 million of these businesses decided to send you just one mailing (that you didn't ask for) per year (and you don't even need to opt-out because they won't send another for a whole year), and assuming they send them evenly spread throughout the year, then you will be getting one every 31.556952 seconds on average (depending on what year it is). More likely, those mailings will come in bunches. Since you won't have to opt-out, you can just press "delete" over 2737 times a day, every day. That would be over 83 thousand pieces of mail a month (imagine what that would do to the typical $9.95 a month dialup internet account).
Now imagine if they all were giving you an opportunity to opt-out via their web site.
If we allow spamming to become the norm, then every business will end up having to do it to just keep an equivalent advantage. That could mean that 150 million internet users would each get spammed from 20 million businesses. That would be 3 quadrillion (that's 3000 trillion) pieces of useless mail overloading the internet mail server infrastructure.
You are one of the exceptions; why I used the word "most".
What you call pointers in Java and Javascript are really references. You do not have methods available to increment or decrement that pointer. You can only either use it, or ignore it. To be a true pointer you have to be able to modify it, including doing things like masking it to move it to certain storage boundaries.
I'm fully in favor that most programmers should learn some assembly. But learning how to do efficient code is not the reason for learning assembly. Assembly should be learned thoroughly by systems programmers (who write operating systems, core libraries, compilers, etc) and certain embedded programmers because they might actually need to use that skill directly. Other programmers should learn some to the extent that it teaches them what's really going on inside the machine, but they should not dwell on it (unless they find it fun). Efficiency should focus on choosing (or developing) the proper algorithms for the application being developed.
If one is going to do programming where pointers would be used (systems programming and lower level applications programming, such as in C), then I suggest learning assembly as the first language. Two or more decades ago, that advice worked because most people didn't learn to program until they took a class in it or such. Now days, people destined to be programmers are learning some programming by around age 10 (usually in whatever language is easiest to get started in, which is generally not always the best to develop larger applications in). By the time they've done a lot of programming, they either "get it" with regard to pointers, or don't, and are set that way for life. This is unfortunate (and results in much insecure programming).
ISPs are a major part of the problem. They either know, or can know, that they have spammers and other criminals on board. Yet many do nothing about this because they would rather have the money spammers pay them. We need to stop peering with bad ISPs in every way we can.
Those who whine about their mail not getting through because they are using one of these bad ISPs are also part of the problem. They need to stop encouraging their ISP to continue, and force the ISP to decide between good and evil. If there's another ISP, switch. If there's only one and it's because the government gives them a monopoly, then the government is the problem and they need to fix that. If there's only one and it's not a monopoly, then they need to start their own ISP (and not allow spammers, lest they also be cast into the deep pink cyber oblivion).
I monitor the system all the time. The CPU is solidly busy. Sure, a few instances can cause it not to be, such as a big program causing seti to swap out, or seti finishing a work unit and waiting for the next one to download. But I would not characterize these periods as "plenty" of idle cycles. Unless I am doing other things to take CPU away from seti, it's 99.9%, and when I do take cycles away, other things are using them, anyway. I think it is fair to say my system has less than 0.1% idle time.