To give the end user full control also means that user is selecting what level of cost their ISP will incur. The technology to do it exists, but the implications of doing it are serious. Blocking spam is substantially a cost saving measure. Letting users turn it off re-incurs those costs. This really only works well when the users are on a pay-per-received-message basis.
Most of the cost of email, and of spam, is incurred in the receiving end. That's either paid for by the end user/customer, or the ISP, depending on how the service payment plan is arranged (examples being flat rate for all the email and spam you can eat, and pay-per-message). Of course in a pay-per-message case, you really must give the user control. But if the ISP is paying per message and charging the users a flat fee, it's the ISP that needs to be in control of costs.
Of course, none of this would be an issue if certain ISPs would stop hosting spammers once they know they are spammers.
I am equally tired of having spammers constantly pounding at my mail servers, and having ISPs totally ignore this theft of resources.
As for allowing customers to view blocked email, this is not going to happen on my network. Blocking it means not receiving it. That's the goal, to actually NOT receive the email DATA section (content). Of course a better goal is for my customers to make the choice. But to do that I also have to charge them money when they happen to make a choice that costs me more.
Let's make a counter list, shall we. This is what spammer hosting ISPs MUST do:
Within 1 hour of a spamming report, check the traffic and see if the customer is in fact spamming. If they are, disconnect them immediately (ask questions later).
Deploy tracking equipment to watch SMTP traffic and detect indications when spammers are spamming.
Respond within 24 hours with a personally written reply to everyone who complains about a spammer, indicating the steps taken against the spammer, and giving them the identity of the person or business that was spamming.
There is no arbitrary about it. If the ISP hosts spammers and refuses to take them offline, then that ISP gets to experience the "financial incentive". This is because they are using "financial incentive" to host spammers. Since spamming steals resources even when the spammer is blocked (all that spam checking still has to be done), the necessary solution is for the ISPs that host spammers to terminate their services. Anyone who pays money to an ISP that continues to host these spammers is part of the problem in an indirect way. If those people would leave that bad ISP and switch to a good ISP, eventually the ISPs that host spammers would either have only spammers as customers, or would go out of business, or would realize their huge mistake and take some action to get rid of the spammers.
And yes, I do have the entirety of CIHOST and a few other ISPs blocked at my own network.
If you pay money to an ISP that hosts spammers, you are indirectly supporting the spammers. Since spammers steal from others, including those who have already blocked the spammers themselves, something needs to be done to take the spammers entirely offline. If your ISP refuses to do so, then we give your ISP a financial incentive to get rid of the spammers. But if you keep on paying them money while they continue to host spammers, then you are giving them financial incentive to keep the status quo, that is, to keep the spammers spamming.
That is why you might be blocked. It isn't because you have directly sent spam. But it could be because you are part of what helps keep the spammers in peration.
The assumption that blocking only blocks actual spammers is wrong. Think of it as a boycott against the ISPs that host spammers.
Actually, unless he/she really is a spammer (which I doubt), he/she is just role playing. But the analysis has a very good point. Spam filters really do have the effect of helping spammers focus their mailings to those people who aren't going to complain, and especially might even buy something as a result of the spam. The trouble is that this help is paid for not by the spammer, but the victims of the spammer. I'll dismiss, for the moment, that the buyers of spamvertized products/services are victims. The rest of us incur costs as a result of spam, ranging from the time it takes to press delete, write complaints to whoever, use more disk space because the spam folder doesn't get cleaned out, process each message with the latest craze in content analysis, and just handle each incoming message, or connection, or SYN packet on our bandwidth. Spam filters don't decrease these costs; they just shift them around. They're doing nothing more than sweeping spam under the rug... for us. And they will help justify even more people and businesses becoming spammers. The oft heard argument is that if spammers have no market to sell to, they will quit and find something else to do. But that presumes 100% coverage of spam filters. It will never happen, and for the most part, the targets of the spammers won't be covered at all, while it will still be cheaper to not clean the lists.
All of these anti-spam tools depend on content. In addition, they actually increase the workload on the mail server, not decrease it. That's workload my mail server should never have to do, and would never have to do if only the spammers were prevented from accessing the same internet I've been using since 1986.
Spam is about conSent, not conTent.
In fact I actually receive what some might consider to be spam, because I want it and have let the senders of it know that I want it. How is some heuristic going to know the relationship between the owner of one mailbox and the sender of some email that recipient actually wants and others might consider to be spam?
What good is having a separate spam folder if you keep having to look in there to find missing mail, or mail that you think might be missing but hasn't even been sent? Spammers know you'll eventually look, so they keep it full.
Spam chews up my 28.8k bandwidth to home. The only viable solutions are to prevent the spam traffic from even being sent in the first place. Letting the message body be sent during the SMTP session defeats the purpose. Stopping everything before the DATA phase is essential.
Stopping the SYN packet in the first place would be the ultimate goal. Those spamming operations that are clearly scraping addresses and in some cases even making them up. Spammers have sent email to hundreds of different email addresses on my mail server for which no mailbox or user has ever even existed (so how could they have ever consented). Their ISPs need to drop them out of their network. Certain extreme abuser ISPs have even been blocked entirely from my network as well as hundreds of others.
So excuse me if I see no point in content-based anti-spam tools. It just doesn't do the job for me at all. My metric is not about false positives or false negatives; it's about reducing costs.
Spyware will now know just what great discount offers really excite you, and can report those back so you then get spammed with more such offers (until you finally have a heart attack).
Isn't Linux supposed to be GPL? Make copies for each system. Oh, but Redhat could be adding in special non-GPL applications (it's not a violation of the GPL to run a non-GPL application on a GPL OS). And I presume they are adding in support. Do you really need that support? Why not download Debian or Slackware, install a system and configure it as you like, and then duplicate it to all your servers. Then if you need a special non-GPL application, buy it for just the servers you need it. Of course if you need that application on every server, you're probably in for a lot of cost, anyway.
Better yet, make sure these downloadable files (which should mostly have.zip extensions and be in PKZIP format, which the bots probably focus on) contain stuff that tells people that "downloading/sharing copyrighted material is wrong". Then if someone acuses you of poisoning their bots, you can counter "but, I'm one of the good guys who is trying to get the downloaders to stop stealing".
That would be a great idea. In fact I know someone who already does that. But I happen to have a different sound: dididah didahdahdit (pause) dahdahdah dahdidah. It's especially nice on headless servers.
Sure, there are plenty of stupid users out there. But there also plenty of stupid techs, and a bounty of totally stupid managers running the tech support departments.
My favorite was years ago when calling my first internet provider, Netcom. The problem I was reporting was a ring-no-answer on one of their modem banks. After waiting 25 minutes for someone to talk to, they insisted that I first reboot my computer. I was running Linux, so I had no need to do that, of course. But even if I were to have been running Windows, I would have had no need to reboot, since I manually dialed the phone and verified I was reaching the correct number and that it was not answering. But the tech refused to do anything about the problem since I was unwilling to reboot my computer. I should have played the dumb users, and pretended to be rebooting Windows.
But, I've also done the other side of things, too, where rebooting Windows really does make a difference in so many cases (and in some, re-formatting before re-installing is required). And among the stupid users I've dealt with while in a tech support role were several MCSEs. I also dealt with someone who held a CCIE, but he was not one of the stupid ones.
It's time for Lycoris to proceed to their next release, which needs to be based on something other than Caldera OpenLinux, or anything else in any way related to SCO/Caldera. And the sooner they announce this step (the actual release would not need to be made immediately), the more they can avoid people in the community writing them off. Then they need to follow through with that new release, and drop all support for the Caldera OpenLinux version within 90 days. If they do this, they can clear themselves in my mind (and, I hope, in the mind of others, too).
Just make the content be delivered on the first HTTP request. Please don't make my browser have to fetch another page. That's just stupidity. And it's lousy web design. And dump the Javascript, too.
Making Windows and Linux play together has been way too one-sided.
Of course, a business migrating to Linux will have to do that unless it wants to take the deep plunge and go to Linux all the way all at once.
What this means is that Linux is being expected to do something even greater than what Windows is ever being expected to do, and that is to play well with its competition.
Windows gets to trash the Linux partition, or screw up the partition table, or otherwise make Linux not work (in dual-boot scenarios).
Similar issues exist in networking.
Then business people expect Linux to deal with it and make it work, and place no expectations on Windows to do anything.
Overcoming this imbalance of expectation is what will be hard for Linux.
Either Linux will have to outperform Windows by a significant margin in some way, such as always working with Windows despite how bad Windows tries (not) to work with Linux, or some other benefit to using Linux will have to prevail so much as to overcome this limitation.
Just keep in mind that Linux is being expected to do what Windows is not being expected to do.
Public institutions like Indiana University have to be sensitive to the First Amendment rights of the spammers.
What kind of BS is that? No they do not.
IU and other public institutions are NOT lawmakers, nor are they free public resources.
Now if individual students are doing the spamming, there may be some complexities to deal with, especially if other students are the targets of the spam.
But public schools are not a resource that anyone may just freely use.
If the school does make certain facilities open for public use, then they do have to do so fairly.
That means, for example, if a facility like a stadium is used for a convention by members of the public (and usually these are done on a basis of school use has first priority, student use second priority, and public use last and usually paid), then spammers would probably have to be given equal access as members of the public.
So you might see a spammer's convention meeting there.
The real issues are:
Students spamming students (and we might include faculty here, too) using school computing and/or network facilities.
Students spamming the internet from school facilities.
Spammers spamming students (ingress use of school facilities).
Does Kinkos have a right to post signs anywhere on school property to advertise their copying services to students? No! They must follow specific rules.
There might be places designated for signs to be posted.
The school newspaper might be advertising supported and Kinkos could buy ad space there.
The school might even sell naming rights to the gymnasium to Kinkos (if they want to buy that).
But there exists no free right for anyone, not even students or faculty, to come and commandeer any resource they wish for their own purposes.
Certainly this rules out students spamming the internet, and I would argue it also gives no one in the public any particular right to communicate with a student on the school's network, even if the student grants that permission by signing up for advertising.
The school owns the property and it is generally well considered to not be public use property.
The school is definitely not preventing people from using their own personal property/resources when that school restricts the ways the school's property/resources are used to be limited to what the mission of the school is.
It might be a whole different matter if a government entity were setting up a network, such as an open WiFi node, for anyone in the public to make use of.
That is not what public institutions of higher learning do.
SCO's defense with regard to GPL provisions applying to their distribution is the Linux community's defense.
SCO is claiming that there is a distinction between merely distributing a copy of Linux versus actually incorporating their own code into it.
In theory, I presume, this means they were unaware that code they claim is their intellectual property was already in the Linux kernel.
So, by being unaware of it, they were not actually performing the act of contribution.
If it can be shown that they were aware, that argument could vaporize.
But left to stand, it could be valid (presuming it is also proven that code in Linux is in fact their property).
By basing their defense on being unaware of the existance of (supposedly their own) property in the Linux source, they are also handing the Linux community the same defense.
If in fact there is SCO property in Linux, then everyone who was unaware of it can also claim like innocence on that same basis.
Only those who knowingly or negligently placed any SCO property in Linux (if this did in fact happen) would be unable to use SCO's own defense.
To whatever extent SCO claims that anyone who was unaware of the existance of the property they claim is in Linux is liable, then SCO itself is liable for the GPL provisions despite their own lack of awareness.
So watch the cards they play and follow suit.
Actually, what we need are more port numbers. Limiting port numbers to 16 bits limits use to less than 65536 different classes of applications. Go try to register a well known service to get a port number for your remote toothbrush loading protocol. You might have a somewhat easier time registering the remote coffee heatup protocol.
Now, should we go with 32 bits for port numbers? Or do we face a looming port number exhaustion crisis in a couple decades and need to go with 64 bits?
In a way, this reminds me of CSS vs DeCSS. It started out as an innocent effort by someone to just be able to play the CSS encoded media they had legally bought and paid for... no theft would have been involved. But, by having created the necessary software, and now it's in source form, others can do with it as they please, and many would please to steal. Had the big media businesses simply made a binary distributed player, that scenario would not have taken place, and maybe CSS might never have been cracked because of the lack of need to do so.
While WiFi hardware isn't the same scenario, there are some similarities. Had the manufacturers produced a binary-only driver module that could be loaded into the Linux kernel (and supported it properly, something essential when you release something in binary-only form), there would be virtually no need for anyone to go create a source form version. Only those wanting to actually hack on the card might. But with the binary drivers not being released, that forces the open source community, which has way more intellectual resources than companies like Texas Instruments, to create their own drivers, and it is open source.
What they feared most, and what motivated their misguided decisions, will now serve to bring about exactly what they did not want, which is hackers reprogramming the cards to operate off-frequency, or use wider channels (maybe I can get 50 Mbps out of this thing while trashing the UHF band of my neighbor's TV), and FCC pressure to make chips without software frequency/modulation agility (and thus increasing the costs due to the need to do hardware programming and design in specific market commitments for each manufacturing production run).
And even if it wasn't a dictionary attack, and the spammer got all those addresses from some place else, lots of spamware does know how to bunch the same domains together so it can deliver the spam even faster by sending that mail once to one server with as many as 255 addresses on it. While I do believe Telstra is a crap ISP for many other reasons, and might well have sold the customer list (a disgruntled employee could have, and I'm sure they've had lots of those), the mere bunching of a lot of addresses with the same domain doesn't prove anything besides maybe a slightly smarter spammer.
Where is the SETI network? I didn't see it listed. I would think it qualifies as a supercomputer. As SUN has said in the past, "the network is the computer". You can see how many teraflops it averages on the total statistics page.
Software from India is inherintly going to be better, not because programmers in India are any smarter than programmers anywhere else (in reality there are great programmers everywhere), but because in India, there is sufficient focus on technology these days, and because businesses are being started up by tech people from IIT rather than MBAs from Harvard, that they are going to do the software right, rather than what some PHB thinks he can sell.
What fitting timing. I just deployed a replacement for BIND called NSD for all my authoritative name servers. Now I need to choose a good resolving server. Maybe tinydns.
Slashdot Mirror
To give the end user full control also means that user is selecting what level of cost their ISP will incur. The technology to do it exists, but the implications of doing it are serious. Blocking spam is substantially a cost saving measure. Letting users turn it off re-incurs those costs. This really only works well when the users are on a pay-per-received-message basis.
Most of the cost of email, and of spam, is incurred in the receiving end. That's either paid for by the end user/customer, or the ISP, depending on how the service payment plan is arranged (examples being flat rate for all the email and spam you can eat, and pay-per-message). Of course in a pay-per-message case, you really must give the user control. But if the ISP is paying per message and charging the users a flat fee, it's the ISP that needs to be in control of costs.
Of course, none of this would be an issue if certain ISPs would stop hosting spammers once they know they are spammers.
I am equally tired of having spammers constantly pounding at my mail servers, and having ISPs totally ignore this theft of resources.
As for allowing customers to view blocked email, this is not going to happen on my network. Blocking it means not receiving it. That's the goal, to actually NOT receive the email DATA section (content). Of course a better goal is for my customers to make the choice. But to do that I also have to charge them money when they happen to make a choice that costs me more.
Let's make a counter list, shall we. This is what spammer hosting ISPs MUST do:
ISPs that allow spammers are part of the problem.
There is no arbitrary about it. If the ISP hosts spammers and refuses to take them offline, then that ISP gets to experience the "financial incentive". This is because they are using "financial incentive" to host spammers. Since spamming steals resources even when the spammer is blocked (all that spam checking still has to be done), the necessary solution is for the ISPs that host spammers to terminate their services. Anyone who pays money to an ISP that continues to host these spammers is part of the problem in an indirect way. If those people would leave that bad ISP and switch to a good ISP, eventually the ISPs that host spammers would either have only spammers as customers, or would go out of business, or would realize their huge mistake and take some action to get rid of the spammers.
And yes, I do have the entirety of CIHOST and a few other ISPs blocked at my own network.
If you pay money to an ISP that hosts spammers, you are indirectly supporting the spammers. Since spammers steal from others, including those who have already blocked the spammers themselves, something needs to be done to take the spammers entirely offline. If your ISP refuses to do so, then we give your ISP a financial incentive to get rid of the spammers. But if you keep on paying them money while they continue to host spammers, then you are giving them financial incentive to keep the status quo, that is, to keep the spammers spamming.
That is why you might be blocked. It isn't because you have directly sent spam. But it could be because you are part of what helps keep the spammers in peration.
The assumption that blocking only blocks actual spammers is wrong. Think of it as a boycott against the ISPs that host spammers.
Actually, unless he/she really is a spammer (which I doubt), he/she is just role playing. But the analysis has a very good point. Spam filters really do have the effect of helping spammers focus their mailings to those people who aren't going to complain, and especially might even buy something as a result of the spam. The trouble is that this help is paid for not by the spammer, but the victims of the spammer. I'll dismiss, for the moment, that the buyers of spamvertized products/services are victims. The rest of us incur costs as a result of spam, ranging from the time it takes to press delete, write complaints to whoever, use more disk space because the spam folder doesn't get cleaned out, process each message with the latest craze in content analysis, and just handle each incoming message, or connection, or SYN packet on our bandwidth. Spam filters don't decrease these costs; they just shift them around. They're doing nothing more than sweeping spam under the rug ... for us. And they will help justify even more people and businesses becoming spammers. The oft heard argument is that if spammers have no market to sell to, they will quit and find something else to do. But that presumes 100% coverage of spam filters. It will never happen, and for the most part, the targets of the spammers won't be covered at all, while it will still be cheaper to not clean the lists.
All of these anti-spam tools depend on content. In addition, they actually increase the workload on the mail server, not decrease it. That's workload my mail server should never have to do, and would never have to do if only the spammers were prevented from accessing the same internet I've been using since 1986.
Spam is about conSent, not conTent.
In fact I actually receive what some might consider to be spam, because I want it and have let the senders of it know that I want it. How is some heuristic going to know the relationship between the owner of one mailbox and the sender of some email that recipient actually wants and others might consider to be spam?
What good is having a separate spam folder if you keep having to look in there to find missing mail, or mail that you think might be missing but hasn't even been sent? Spammers know you'll eventually look, so they keep it full.
Spam chews up my 28.8k bandwidth to home. The only viable solutions are to prevent the spam traffic from even being sent in the first place. Letting the message body be sent during the SMTP session defeats the purpose. Stopping everything before the DATA phase is essential.
Stopping the SYN packet in the first place would be the ultimate goal. Those spamming operations that are clearly scraping addresses and in some cases even making them up. Spammers have sent email to hundreds of different email addresses on my mail server for which no mailbox or user has ever even existed (so how could they have ever consented). Their ISPs need to drop them out of their network. Certain extreme abuser ISPs have even been blocked entirely from my network as well as hundreds of others.
So excuse me if I see no point in content-based anti-spam tools. It just doesn't do the job for me at all. My metric is not about false positives or false negatives; it's about reducing costs.
Spyware will now know just what great discount offers really excite you, and can report those back so you then get spammed with more such offers (until you finally have a heart attack).
Isn't Linux supposed to be GPL? Make copies for each system. Oh, but Redhat could be adding in special non-GPL applications (it's not a violation of the GPL to run a non-GPL application on a GPL OS). And I presume they are adding in support. Do you really need that support? Why not download Debian or Slackware, install a system and configure it as you like, and then duplicate it to all your servers. Then if you need a special non-GPL application, buy it for just the servers you need it. Of course if you need that application on every server, you're probably in for a lot of cost, anyway.
Better yet, make sure these downloadable files (which should mostly have .zip extensions and be in PKZIP format, which the bots probably focus on) contain stuff that tells people that "downloading/sharing copyrighted material is wrong". Then if someone acuses you of poisoning their bots, you can counter "but, I'm one of the good guys who is trying to get the downloaders to stop stealing".
That would be a great idea. In fact I know someone who already does that. But I happen to have a different sound: dididah didahdahdit (pause) dahdahdah dahdidah. It's especially nice on headless servers.
Sure, there are plenty of stupid users out there. But there also plenty of stupid techs, and a bounty of totally stupid managers running the tech support departments.
My favorite was years ago when calling my first internet provider, Netcom. The problem I was reporting was a ring-no-answer on one of their modem banks. After waiting 25 minutes for someone to talk to, they insisted that I first reboot my computer. I was running Linux, so I had no need to do that, of course. But even if I were to have been running Windows, I would have had no need to reboot, since I manually dialed the phone and verified I was reaching the correct number and that it was not answering. But the tech refused to do anything about the problem since I was unwilling to reboot my computer. I should have played the dumb users, and pretended to be rebooting Windows.
But, I've also done the other side of things, too, where rebooting Windows really does make a difference in so many cases (and in some, re-formatting before re-installing is required). And among the stupid users I've dealt with while in a tech support role were several MCSEs. I also dealt with someone who held a CCIE, but he was not one of the stupid ones.
It's time for Lycoris to proceed to their next release, which needs to be based on something other than Caldera OpenLinux, or anything else in any way related to SCO/Caldera. And the sooner they announce this step (the actual release would not need to be made immediately), the more they can avoid people in the community writing them off. Then they need to follow through with that new release, and drop all support for the Caldera OpenLinux version within 90 days. If they do this, they can clear themselves in my mind (and, I hope, in the mind of others, too).
They have dumb web designers:
Just make the content be delivered on the first HTTP request. Please don't make my browser have to fetch another page. That's just stupidity. And it's lousy web design. And dump the Javascript, too.
Back to Google News for me.
Making Windows and Linux play together has been way too one-sided. Of course, a business migrating to Linux will have to do that unless it wants to take the deep plunge and go to Linux all the way all at once. What this means is that Linux is being expected to do something even greater than what Windows is ever being expected to do, and that is to play well with its competition. Windows gets to trash the Linux partition, or screw up the partition table, or otherwise make Linux not work (in dual-boot scenarios). Similar issues exist in networking. Then business people expect Linux to deal with it and make it work, and place no expectations on Windows to do anything. Overcoming this imbalance of expectation is what will be hard for Linux. Either Linux will have to outperform Windows by a significant margin in some way, such as always working with Windows despite how bad Windows tries (not) to work with Linux, or some other benefit to using Linux will have to prevail so much as to overcome this limitation.
Just keep in mind that Linux is being expected to do what Windows is not being expected to do.
What kind of BS is that? No they do not.
IU and other public institutions are NOT lawmakers, nor are they free public resources. Now if individual students are doing the spamming, there may be some complexities to deal with, especially if other students are the targets of the spam. But public schools are not a resource that anyone may just freely use.
If the school does make certain facilities open for public use, then they do have to do so fairly. That means, for example, if a facility like a stadium is used for a convention by members of the public (and usually these are done on a basis of school use has first priority, student use second priority, and public use last and usually paid), then spammers would probably have to be given equal access as members of the public. So you might see a spammer's convention meeting there.
The real issues are:
Does Kinkos have a right to post signs anywhere on school property to advertise their copying services to students? No! They must follow specific rules. There might be places designated for signs to be posted. The school newspaper might be advertising supported and Kinkos could buy ad space there. The school might even sell naming rights to the gymnasium to Kinkos (if they want to buy that). But there exists no free right for anyone, not even students or faculty, to come and commandeer any resource they wish for their own purposes.
Certainly this rules out students spamming the internet, and I would argue it also gives no one in the public any particular right to communicate with a student on the school's network, even if the student grants that permission by signing up for advertising. The school owns the property and it is generally well considered to not be public use property. The school is definitely not preventing people from using their own personal property/resources when that school restricts the ways the school's property/resources are used to be limited to what the mission of the school is.
It might be a whole different matter if a government entity were setting up a network, such as an open WiFi node, for anyone in the public to make use of. That is not what public institutions of higher learning do.
IANAL ... whee ... so this is my own opinion, only.
SCO's defense with regard to GPL provisions applying to their distribution is the Linux community's defense. SCO is claiming that there is a distinction between merely distributing a copy of Linux versus actually incorporating their own code into it. In theory, I presume, this means they were unaware that code they claim is their intellectual property was already in the Linux kernel. So, by being unaware of it, they were not actually performing the act of contribution. If it can be shown that they were aware, that argument could vaporize. But left to stand, it could be valid (presuming it is also proven that code in Linux is in fact their property).
By basing their defense on being unaware of the existance of (supposedly their own) property in the Linux source, they are also handing the Linux community the same defense. If in fact there is SCO property in Linux, then everyone who was unaware of it can also claim like innocence on that same basis. Only those who knowingly or negligently placed any SCO property in Linux (if this did in fact happen) would be unable to use SCO's own defense.
To whatever extent SCO claims that anyone who was unaware of the existance of the property they claim is in Linux is liable, then SCO itself is liable for the GPL provisions despite their own lack of awareness. So watch the cards they play and follow suit.
Based on a previous Slashdot story I'm going to need a 36-42 volt version soon.
Actually, what we need are more port numbers. Limiting port numbers to 16 bits limits use to less than 65536 different classes of applications. Go try to register a well known service to get a port number for your remote toothbrush loading protocol. You might have a somewhat easier time registering the remote coffee heatup protocol.
Now, should we go with 32 bits for port numbers? Or do we face a looming port number exhaustion crisis in a couple decades and need to go with 64 bits?
In a way, this reminds me of CSS vs DeCSS. It started out as an innocent effort by someone to just be able to play the CSS encoded media they had legally bought and paid for ... no theft would have been involved. But, by having created the necessary software, and now it's in source form, others can do with it as they please, and many would please to steal. Had the big media businesses simply made a binary distributed player, that scenario would not have taken place, and maybe CSS might never have been cracked because of the lack of need to do so.
While WiFi hardware isn't the same scenario, there are some similarities. Had the manufacturers produced a binary-only driver module that could be loaded into the Linux kernel (and supported it properly, something essential when you release something in binary-only form), there would be virtually no need for anyone to go create a source form version. Only those wanting to actually hack on the card might. But with the binary drivers not being released, that forces the open source community, which has way more intellectual resources than companies like Texas Instruments, to create their own drivers, and it is open source.
What they feared most, and what motivated their misguided decisions, will now serve to bring about exactly what they did not want, which is hackers reprogramming the cards to operate off-frequency, or use wider channels (maybe I can get 50 Mbps out of this thing while trashing the UHF band of my neighbor's TV), and FCC pressure to make chips without software frequency/modulation agility (and thus increasing the costs due to the need to do hardware programming and design in specific market commitments for each manufacturing production run).
In addition to NetBSD and OpenBSD, even FreeBSD will soon be runnable on the PPC.
Maybe you are looking for mind commons.
And even if it wasn't a dictionary attack, and the spammer got all those addresses from some place else, lots of spamware does know how to bunch the same domains together so it can deliver the spam even faster by sending that mail once to one server with as many as 255 addresses on it. While I do believe Telstra is a crap ISP for many other reasons, and might well have sold the customer list (a disgruntled employee could have, and I'm sure they've had lots of those), the mere bunching of a lot of addresses with the same domain doesn't prove anything besides maybe a slightly smarter spammer.
Where is the SETI network? I didn't see it listed. I would think it qualifies as a supercomputer. As SUN has said in the past, "the network is the computer". You can see how many teraflops it averages on the total statistics page.
Software from India is inherintly going to be better, not because programmers in India are any smarter than programmers anywhere else (in reality there are great programmers everywhere), but because in India, there is sufficient focus on technology these days, and because businesses are being started up by tech people from IIT rather than MBAs from Harvard, that they are going to do the software right, rather than what some PHB thinks he can sell.
What fitting timing. I just deployed a replacement for BIND called NSD for all my authoritative name servers. Now I need to choose a good resolving server. Maybe tinydns.