I remember when people were only into programming because they had a passion for it. Getting paid to do it was just a fringe benefit. If you are in it for the money, then listen to everyone else who will give you insight into the standard salary for "production people". You're told what to do; you are part of a team; what you create has little or nothing to do with what generally interests you; get married, have kids, buy that new spiffy VW and watch football. The end.
Like any job, experience is what really counts. Coming out of college you'll be ripe for the picking by companies that want to "mold" you into their perfect little productive cog, and that's fine if that's your thing.
I can't speak for that. It's not my thing. But maybe I can offer you some alternate insight.
Think about what you're really passionate about. It doesn't matter if it's neural nets or fishing nets. Chances are your CompSci degree has a place in the industry, and work on exploiting your computer experience to become a "specialist" in that field. That way you come out with a higher-than-average salary and you have the added bonus of doing something that really interests you.
You sound just like my manager. Just because you personally don't want to talk to someone in Australasia doesn't mean other people your server is serving mail for don't. Whole Class A's and countries is far too coarse. The internet isn't just the United States!
I wouldn't normally recommend blocking class As, with the exception of 61.* and 218.* and 219.* - they have no legitimate purpose for 99.99% of North America with the exception of the small-penis demographic.
However, in some large IP block cases, it's better to block large areas and redirect people to a form where they can be specifically white-listed, rather than individually blacklist each of the gazillion IPs those goons can't seem to control.
Personally, I really think all of 24.* needs to be blacklisted since it's primarily controlled by a number of grossely irresponsible broadband ISPs who can't seem to control the spamming on their own network. All we'd need would be a few large systems to say "fuck off 24.*" and Comcast, SWBell and a bunch of other screwed up ISPs might get off their asses, or lose their corporate clientele.
I'm one of those users. If I don't get spam, I'm happy.
I can appreciate that. Your priorities change however, when you are paying for the servers and the bandwidth. Filtering at the client side unfortunately, while it might make you temporarily happy, does nothing to discourage spamming, so things get worse.
If only that were possible! I assume by this that you mean you block all traffic from RBL'd sites. That blocks all the spam they send, but it also blocks all the non-spam. If spammers were polite and didn't use systems used by non-spammers, that would be fine, but they aren't polite.
Your argument isn't that valid anymore. Most spammers are no longer hijacking legitimate mail relays. They are doing two things: exploiting DUL/broadband IP space that isn't normally a source of ANY legitimate SMTP traffic, and taking over similar space and network resources in countries like China and South Korea where 99.999999% of most users will NEVER receive a legitimate e-mail from in the first place. So RBLs are proving to be a LOT more effective with very little negative side-effects.
The truth of the matter, is as you've indicated, if it weren't for admins running RBLs, there'd be little or no incentive for the major ISPs to buckle down on their spammer-users. AOL, Comcast, Bellsouth, and many other ISPs are mainly getting off their lazy asses now because RBLs are pissing off their corporate customers. They never have and never will care about spam. All they care about is money, and the RBLs put pressure on the ISPs where it hurts.
Almost ten years ago, I ended up on a RBL and I was furious. But one thing is for sure. It FORCED me to close all my open relays and make things secure. The 0.0000001% that wine about RBLs are those that need to be prodded into taking responsibility for the integrity of their network resources. As a result, we are FINALLY seeing some improvement. Spammers are having a harder time, they're resorting to more dangerous tactics (viruses and worms) and running out of places to hide. Spam may be increasing, but the ways in which you can spam (and get away with it) are decreasing.
The issue here is by what measure to you identify the "spam problem?" Most users consider the spam problem to exclusively revolve around crap in their in-box. In reality, addressing that issue is like putting creme on a rash. It might temporarily make the rash feel better, but you have a rash because of something else, and the rash will return until you figure out the actual cause-and-effect dynamic.
With spam, the cause-and-effect dynamic is the exploitation and theft of third-party resources: bandwidth and client/server resources. This is the issue that needs to be addressed. Client side filtering is little more than a salve for the symptoms of a much larger problem that will continue to fester and grow in size if ignored.
My approach to addressing the issue is to stop the exploitation of resources. The side-effect of this will also curtail spam in users' inboxes, but also reduce my operational costs, bandwidth costs, equipment and other expenses and provide better, more secure and faster services for my clients. When you deploy client-side filtering you bloat already overloaded resources with more resources, none of which ultimately stop spam.. they just make you feel a little better temporarily.
I'm wondering if this issue will be used to further push IPv6? I assume this vulnerability isn't a problem with v6, but I continue to believe that until we control the spam problem, the additional IP space available under IPv6 will make the spam issue a zillion times worse.
In any case, you know how most of the agencies in the states deal with these problems. They ignore the warnings, wait for a "blackout", then award a multimillion dollar feasibility study to Halliburton. I can hardly wait.
For a few hundred bucks you can repurpose an old Pentium box with Unix and drop it on their network as a mail server. It doesn't matter if they're running Windows or not.
Then again, if you make your money by the hour for support, I understand your decision to keep your clients using MS products.
I just noticed you want a solution for "Windows 2000". My solution is that you dump that OS and install Linux and run a unix-based mail program. (see my other reply) There may be a sendmail for Windows - I don't know because I turned off my last Windows server about six months ago and life has been a lot simpler ever since.
Can anyone suggest a decent, doesn't have to be perfect, server side anti-spam filter?
Don't waste your time implementing a content-based filter. The best solution is to incorporate a real-time spam relay blacklist. I recommend bl.spamcop.net. It's very effective and accurate with an extremely low legit mail blocking rate.
RBLs are great because they refuse spammer connections before the mail even gets delivered, so you don't waste bandwidth and system resources downloading spam crap and trying to interpret the contents. RBLs respect the sanctity of the e-mail message as a private communication medium and penalize those ISPs which allow spammers to operate.
If you're using Sendmail, you can also hard-code some of the IP regions where tons of spam is originating (signal-to-noise ratio for most people on the Chinese IP blocks is 0% so why allow them to hit your server in the first place? A few lines in your/etc/access file such as: "connect:218 REJECT" will knock off about 200-5000 spams per day utilizing minimal system resources).
Personally, if you want to get aggressive, block the following Class As: 61,80,81,82,83,142,164,193,194,195,196,200,201,202,210,211,213,217,218,219,220,221 and you'll stop a TON of spam from a lot of foreign countries you likely never communicate with.
Set up a web-based e-mail form and put a link to it in your Sendmail access configuration so that if any legit mail gets bounced, they can redirect to a web page to contact you in the [unlikely] event they were inappropriately blocked.
I have to assume IDC based its studies on mail filtering reports and technologies using servers that at some point, started deferring SMTP traffic and didn't actually compile complete stats on spam. There's NO WAY the spam-to-legit ratio is 33%. It's more like 85%, especially for any boxes hosting e-mail addresses which may be on file with domain records.
That study is flat-out inaccurate. When they use those lame content-based filtering systems, their mail system slows down so much, they cannot handle all the inbound connections so they never really know how much SMTP traffic they actually get. Spammers hit their lame servers, get deferred, and don't come back. I guess this might be one reason why you might want to use MS Exchange: it's so slow it can't actually process all the spam sent to it, and then you get incomplete figures on mail traffic and spam.
IDC estimates that each worker would spend an average of 10 minutes a day dealing with spam.
That seems a bit low to me. Maybe with content-based filtering in effect. But they should also ask IT managers how much time is wasted per-employee looking for legitimate messages that have been held up by the inbound mail filtering/flagging systems that erroneously trap legitimate mail. I bet that figure is much higher.
RBLs work. Content-based filtering doesn't. This whole study is basically a shill for promoting more ineffective "strip-searching" of e-mail content as a "solution" [sic] to the spam problem.
Based on these figures, ~ 67% of SMTP transactions are SPAM. This means AT LEAST 67% of the e-mail is bogus. But this involves RBL blacklisting of connections to the SMTP server, so when you take into account a single SMTP connection typically delivers 1-10+ spams, the figure gets astronomically high in terms of spam-to-legit mail ratio. In addition to this, about 10-20% of spam messages minimum get past the RBLs so in reality, based on our server traffic, it's closer to 85% of all mail traffic is spam.
There is a universal morality. It's called, "The Golden Rule" and it has existed in every culture and philosophy. Everything beyond that enters the realm of manipulation with less-than-honorable intent.
I look at the issue of censorship and morality, and their various catalysts such as "cultural identity", "security" and "happiness" as a farce.
This reminds me of a true story. I have a dog. My neighbor has a dog. The difference between our pets is that I let my dog out. I make sure the dog is aware of the danger of the traffic on the street and I've taken care to make sure she understands the dynamics of her world. The neighbors on the other hand, never let their dog out his fenced-in yard. They don't walk him around the area; they "protect" the dog from the street by keeping him sheltered.
About a week ago the dog got out of the yard and was hit by a car and killed.
There is no security when you shelter people from the real world.
I've noticed lately that Google seems to be filling up with websites wanting to sell you stuff
This is the inevitable entropy that all search engines are subject to. In the beginning they have to be content-heavy because they can't make money; once they get the market share, they become more commercial. This shouldn't be a surprise.
Google isn't perfect, but in comparison to every other search engine out there, I'm of the opinion that Google is one service that hasn't sold out to the degree of its counterparts. I cannot imagine any competition not getting worse if they had Google's market share.
Some versions of Norton change the POP3 hostname to be altered with the user's name and POP3 host prepended to an agent that Norton's installs. In some cases this might be localized, but I think it also may travel over the Internet. Even in the localized POP3 redirection server scenario, this would mean that all someone needs to do is update the HOSTS.SAM file in Windows and Intercept all the user's e-mail and their POP3 password. It's pretty scary.
Users first notice the problem when they try to retrieve e-mail. They are greeted with an error message instead: "The connection to the server has failed." The server is identified as "127.0.0.1" or "pop3.norton.antivirus." Obviously, that's not the name of a normal ISP's POP3 mail server.
Norton AV 2002 installs a layer which intercepts all POP3 and SMTP communications and filters it for virus infection before proceeding. In practice, both incoming and outgoing mail is scanned before being saved and sent for solid security. The new approach means you can use any POP3 mail client, and no additional configuration of your mail server addresses and suchlike is needed, unlike the 2001 version.
is that much of this "spyware" is being marketed as anti-virus utilities... *cough* Symantec *cough*
Symantec's Norton Antivirus actually has the audacity to reconfigure a user's e-mail program to route mail through their network first. This is unbelievable. You think you're checking your mailbox, but you're really sending your id and password to Symantec, they're going through your mail and then sending it to you. An amazing breach of trust and privacy.
For those that participate and manage to deprive themselves of their precious idiot box programming, let me bring you up to speed on what you'll be missing:
* Soaps: Wife secretly sleeps with husband's brother who's being blackmailed by their chauffer who is actually a... DID YOU KNOW NORTHERN BATH TISSUE IS THE SOFTEST?
* Talk Shows: All this week: Crack Whore Makeovers on Jenny Jones, plus a special appearance by... AMAZING NEW WEIGHT LOSS PILL!
* Survivor: This week contestants swim through shark-infested waters with dead fish in their mouths; winner receives one sock and... TRY NEW CREST CHEESECAKE-FLAVORED TOOTHPASTE!
* Saturday Night Live: Woman with nice boobs hosts; cast members create skits so they can cop a feel; musical guest... THE NEW NISSAN XTERRA HAS A V8 AND FIVE (YES FIVE) CUPHOLDERS!
* News: War going bad; war going good; one guy says other guy will tax everyone into poor house; some dude in Peoria is suing Wal-Mart for $5B for... ISN'T IT TIME YOU TRIED VIAGRA?
* American Chopper: Paul Sr. continues to abuse Paul Jr.; Mikey explodes after all-night twinkie binge; OCC scapes the bottom of the barrel looking for politically-correct bike themes with their new chopper commemmorating the lawyers who set up the 911 Red Cross fund. Special appearance by... HALLIBURTON.. SUPPORTING OUR TROOPS.
* Monster House: Team of dysfunctional contractors install a 12' bong and jacuzzi filled with Patchoulli in new "Hippie House"; owners are stunned when they peek in and discover... CHEVY, AMERICA'S TRUCK
* Talk Shows: Jay Leno's special guest: Billy Bob Thorton; tonite on Conan: Billy Bob Thorton; tonite on Late Night: Billy Bob Thorton. Check out Billy Bob's new movie about... HIENEKEN BEER - IT'S ALL ABOUT THE BEER
The best thing that could ever happen to the PC industry would be breaking MS into pieces. Separate the OS from the application division. That would be wonderful.
I just ran Windows Update and now my CD Burning software no longer runs reliably. I have no idea why, but I'm pretty sure that if I was running Microsoft-brand CD burning software, I wouldn't have this problem.
It's sickening to have to constantly update non-Microsoft applications because changes to the OS wreak havoc with all non-Microsoft applications. I have to assume the software companies aren't whining that much either, as they get residual income by selling updates and upgrades because of Microsoft's ever-changing environment, but for the rest of us, it's the pits.
Re:Why are spammers doing this?
on
Paid To Spam
·
· Score: 1
Oh please! RBLs are a joke. They're far from accurate, have no real appeals process (they just *pretend* to have one) and the 'downfall' of a few of them a few months back proves that clearly.
You don't know what you're talking about. Maybe you're used to dealing with RBLs that are run by BOFHs, but systems like Maps and Spamcop are very well run and regulated.
See what you get when you pay $8 for a domain registration. Try to transfer the domain to another registrar; try to see if you don't get a redirect from one of those sleaze sites; watch them hold your domain hostage like hostway does. You get what you pay for.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember when people were only into programming because they had a passion for it. Getting paid to do it was just a fringe benefit. If you are in it for the money, then listen to everyone else who will give you insight into the standard salary for "production people". You're told what to do; you are part of a team; what you create has little or nothing to do with what generally interests you; get married, have kids, buy that new spiffy VW and watch football. The end.
Like any job, experience is what really counts. Coming out of college you'll be ripe for the picking by companies that want to "mold" you into their perfect little productive cog, and that's fine if that's your thing.
I can't speak for that. It's not my thing. But maybe I can offer you some alternate insight.
Think about what you're really passionate about. It doesn't matter if it's neural nets or fishing nets. Chances are your CompSci degree has a place in the industry, and work on exploiting your computer experience to become a "specialist" in that field. That way you come out with a higher-than-average salary and you have the added bonus of doing something that really interests you.
You sound just like my manager. Just because you personally don't want to talk to someone in Australasia doesn't mean other people your server is serving mail for don't. Whole Class A's and countries is far too coarse. The internet isn't just the United States!
I wouldn't normally recommend blocking class As, with the exception of 61.* and 218.* and 219.* - they have no legitimate purpose for 99.99% of North America with the exception of the small-penis demographic.
However, in some large IP block cases, it's better to block large areas and redirect people to a form where they can be specifically white-listed, rather than individually blacklist each of the gazillion IPs those goons can't seem to control.
Personally, I really think all of 24.* needs to be blacklisted since it's primarily controlled by a number of grossely irresponsible broadband ISPs who can't seem to control the spamming on their own network. All we'd need would be a few large systems to say "fuck off 24.*" and Comcast, SWBell and a bunch of other screwed up ISPs might get off their asses, or lose their corporate clientele.
Gah, I despise people that let their dogs roam free.
I never said I let my dog "roam free". I don't. I never let the dog loose around the neighborhood. That's not any better than locking it up.
Did you hear that sound? It was the point of my diatribe going over your head.
I'm one of those users. If I don't get spam, I'm happy.
I can appreciate that. Your priorities change however, when you are paying for the servers and the bandwidth. Filtering at the client side unfortunately, while it might make you temporarily happy, does nothing to discourage spamming, so things get worse.
If only that were possible! I assume by this that you mean you block all traffic from RBL'd sites. That blocks all the spam they send, but it also blocks all the non-spam. If spammers were polite and didn't use systems used by non-spammers, that would be fine, but they aren't polite.
Your argument isn't that valid anymore. Most spammers are no longer hijacking legitimate mail relays. They are doing two things: exploiting DUL/broadband IP space that isn't normally a source of ANY legitimate SMTP traffic, and taking over similar space and network resources in countries like China and South Korea where 99.999999% of most users will NEVER receive a legitimate e-mail from in the first place. So RBLs are proving to be a LOT more effective with very little negative side-effects.
The truth of the matter, is as you've indicated, if it weren't for admins running RBLs, there'd be little or no incentive for the major ISPs to buckle down on their spammer-users. AOL, Comcast, Bellsouth, and many other ISPs are mainly getting off their lazy asses now because RBLs are pissing off their corporate customers. They never have and never will care about spam. All they care about is money, and the RBLs put pressure on the ISPs where it hurts.
Almost ten years ago, I ended up on a RBL and I was furious. But one thing is for sure. It FORCED me to close all my open relays and make things secure. The 0.0000001% that wine about RBLs are those that need to be prodded into taking responsibility for the integrity of their network resources. As a result, we are FINALLY seeing some improvement. Spammers are having a harder time, they're resorting to more dangerous tactics (viruses and worms) and running out of places to hide. Spam may be increasing, but the ways in which you can spam (and get away with it) are decreasing.
The issue here is by what measure to you identify the "spam problem?" Most users consider the spam problem to exclusively revolve around crap in their in-box. In reality, addressing that issue is like putting creme on a rash. It might temporarily make the rash feel better, but you have a rash because of something else, and the rash will return until you figure out the actual cause-and-effect dynamic.
With spam, the cause-and-effect dynamic is the exploitation and theft of third-party resources: bandwidth and client/server resources. This is the issue that needs to be addressed. Client side filtering is little more than a salve for the symptoms of a much larger problem that will continue to fester and grow in size if ignored.
My approach to addressing the issue is to stop the exploitation of resources. The side-effect of this will also curtail spam in users' inboxes, but also reduce my operational costs, bandwidth costs, equipment and other expenses and provide better, more secure and faster services for my clients. When you deploy client-side filtering you bloat already overloaded resources with more resources, none of which ultimately stop spam.. they just make you feel a little better temporarily.
Treat the cause; not the symptom.
I'm wondering if this issue will be used to further push IPv6? I assume this vulnerability isn't a problem with v6, but I continue to believe that until we control the spam problem, the additional IP space available under IPv6 will make the spam issue a zillion times worse.
In any case, you know how most of the agencies in the states deal with these problems. They ignore the warnings, wait for a "blackout", then award a multimillion dollar feasibility study to Halliburton. I can hardly wait.
For a few hundred bucks you can repurpose an old Pentium box with Unix and drop it on their network as a mail server. It doesn't matter if they're running Windows or not.
Then again, if you make your money by the hour for support, I understand your decision to keep your clients using MS products.
I just noticed you want a solution for "Windows 2000". My solution is that you dump that OS and install Linux and run a unix-based mail program. (see my other reply) There may be a sendmail for Windows - I don't know because I turned off my last Windows server about six months ago and life has been a lot simpler ever since.
Can anyone suggest a decent, doesn't have to be perfect, server side anti-spam filter?
/etc/access file such as: "connect:218 REJECT" will knock off about 200-5000 spams per day utilizing minimal system resources).
2 ,210,211,213,217,218,219,220,221 and you'll stop a TON of spam from a lot of foreign countries you likely never communicate with.
Don't waste your time implementing a content-based filter. The best solution is to incorporate a real-time spam relay blacklist. I recommend bl.spamcop.net. It's very effective and accurate with an extremely low legit mail blocking rate.
RBLs are great because they refuse spammer connections before the mail even gets delivered, so you don't waste bandwidth and system resources downloading spam crap and trying to interpret the contents. RBLs respect the sanctity of the e-mail message as a private communication medium and penalize those ISPs which allow spammers to operate.
If you're using Sendmail, you can also hard-code some of the IP regions where tons of spam is originating (signal-to-noise ratio for most people on the Chinese IP blocks is 0% so why allow them to hit your server in the first place? A few lines in your
Personally, if you want to get aggressive, block the following Class As: 61,80,81,82,83,142,164,193,194,195,196,200,201,20
Set up a web-based e-mail form and put a link to it in your Sendmail access configuration so that if any legit mail gets bounced, they can redirect to a web page to contact you in the [unlikely] event they were inappropriately blocked.
I have to assume IDC based its studies on mail filtering reports and technologies using servers that at some point, started deferring SMTP traffic and didn't actually compile complete stats on spam. There's NO WAY the spam-to-legit ratio is 33%. It's more like 85%, especially for any boxes hosting e-mail addresses which may be on file with domain records.
That study is flat-out inaccurate. When they use those lame content-based filtering systems, their mail system slows down so much, they cannot handle all the inbound connections so they never really know how much SMTP traffic they actually get. Spammers hit their lame servers, get deferred, and don't come back. I guess this might be one reason why you might want to use MS Exchange: it's so slow it can't actually process all the spam sent to it, and then you get incomplete figures on mail traffic and spam.
IDC estimates that each worker would spend an average of 10 minutes a day dealing with spam.
That seems a bit low to me. Maybe with content-based filtering in effect. But they should also ask IT managers how much time is wasted per-employee looking for legitimate messages that have been held up by the inbound mail filtering/flagging systems that erroneously trap legitimate mail. I bet that figure is much higher.
RBLs work. Content-based filtering doesn't. This whole study is basically a shill for promoting more ineffective "strip-searching" of e-mail content as a "solution" [sic] to the spam problem.
One third of e-mail is spam? It's more like one third of all e-mail is legitimate. Here are my stats for the last 10 days from one of my servers:
24-hr period, Accepted e-mail, RBL rejects:
----------
Apr 10, 4589, 16876
Apr 11, 4837, 15997
Apr 12, 9393, 17438
Apr 13, 8569, 15755
Apr 14, 8583, 15996
Apr 15, 8211, 18496
Apr 16, 6293, 19224
Apr 17, 3685, 18054
Apr 18, 3769, 17929
Apr 19, 7372, 17939
Based on these figures, ~ 67% of SMTP transactions are SPAM. This means AT LEAST 67% of the e-mail is bogus. But this involves RBL blacklisting of connections to the SMTP server, so when you take into account a single SMTP connection typically delivers 1-10+ spams, the figure gets astronomically high in terms of spam-to-legit mail ratio. In addition to this, about 10-20% of spam messages minimum get past the RBLs so in reality, based on our server traffic, it's closer to 85% of all mail traffic is spam.
There is a universal morality. It's called, "The Golden Rule" and it has existed in every culture and philosophy. Everything beyond that enters the realm of manipulation with less-than-honorable intent.
I look at the issue of censorship and morality, and their various catalysts such as "cultural identity", "security" and "happiness" as a farce.
This reminds me of a true story. I have a dog. My neighbor has a dog. The difference between our pets is that I let my dog out. I make sure the dog is aware of the danger of the traffic on the street and I've taken care to make sure she understands the dynamics of her world. The neighbors on the other hand, never let their dog out his fenced-in yard. They don't walk him around the area; they "protect" the dog from the street by keeping him sheltered.
About a week ago the dog got out of the yard and was hit by a car and killed.
There is no security when you shelter people from the real world.
I've noticed lately that Google seems to be filling up with websites wanting to sell you stuff
This is the inevitable entropy that all search engines are subject to. In the beginning they have to be content-heavy because they can't make money; once they get the market share, they become more commercial. This shouldn't be a surprise.
Google isn't perfect, but in comparison to every other search engine out there, I'm of the opinion that Google is one service that hasn't sold out to the degree of its counterparts. I cannot imagine any competition not getting worse if they had Google's market share.
This looks like an aggressive effort to get people to start developing .NET apps since a major part of the free download includes support for .NET.
One has to assume MS is worried they're losing their development community to run a scheme like this.
Some versions of Norton change the POP3 hostname to be altered with the user's name and POP3 host prepended to an agent that Norton's installs. In some cases this might be localized, but I think it also may travel over the Internet. Even in the localized POP3 redirection server scenario, this would mean that all someone needs to do is update the HOSTS.SAM file in Windows and Intercept all the user's e-mail and their POP3 password. It's pretty scary.
http://www.bugnet.com/alerts/bugalert_010208.html
http://www.pcplus.co.uk/reviews/default.asp?subse
* Microsoft complains to the FTC about the Real Player
* AT&T files a complaint with the FCC claiming that Verizon promotes confusing cell phone plans
* Conservatives complain about liberal media taking over television and radio
* Hummvee company complains that the Toyota Prius is "too gay" to be allowed on highways
* Republicans cry "foul" over moveon.org PAC
* Spammers decry latest anti-spam legislation
* MTV files complaint against cartoon network citing inappropriate programming for young people
* Sony files suit against the makers of pong saying it infringes on a patent they hold relative to Everquest
* DMCA seeks to expands its powers to incorporate people thinking about movies as being a violation of copyright.
* Comcast sues ESPN, citing that the cable channel is "too appealing" to some consumers and detracts from their 14 cubic zirconia shopping channels.
* Bush holds a press conference
You could put up a web page that says in H1 type, "click here to erase your hard drive" and some people would click it. What do you expect?
Sometimes I think some of these people collect system tray icons like they were Elvis collector plates from the Franklin Mint.
is that much of this "spyware" is being marketed as anti-virus utilities... *cough* Symantec *cough*
Symantec's Norton Antivirus actually has the audacity to reconfigure a user's e-mail program to route mail through their network first. This is unbelievable. You think you're checking your mailbox, but you're really sending your id and password to Symantec, they're going through your mail and then sending it to you. An amazing breach of trust and privacy.
American Cheese?
I'm not sure whether it's American. I think the second battle is American "ham" though.
If these idiots think I'm going to miss Iron Chef America: Battle of the Masters for their little protest, they've got another thing coming.
I don't mean to be a spoiler but I heard the theme ingredient for the battle is "cheese."
For those that participate and manage to deprive themselves of their precious idiot box programming, let me bring you up to speed on what you'll be missing:
... DID YOU KNOW NORTHERN BATH TISSUE IS THE SOFTEST?
* Soaps: Wife secretly sleeps with husband's brother who's being blackmailed by their chauffer who is actually a
* Talk Shows: All this week: Crack Whore Makeovers on Jenny Jones, plus a special appearance by... AMAZING NEW WEIGHT LOSS PILL!
* Survivor: This week contestants swim through shark-infested waters with dead fish in their mouths; winner receives one sock and... TRY NEW CREST CHEESECAKE-FLAVORED TOOTHPASTE!
* Saturday Night Live: Woman with nice boobs hosts; cast members create skits so they can cop a feel; musical guest... THE NEW NISSAN XTERRA HAS A V8 AND FIVE (YES FIVE) CUPHOLDERS!
* News: War going bad; war going good; one guy says other guy will tax everyone into poor house; some dude in Peoria is suing Wal-Mart for $5B for... ISN'T IT TIME YOU TRIED VIAGRA?
* American Chopper: Paul Sr. continues to abuse Paul Jr.; Mikey explodes after all-night twinkie binge; OCC scapes the bottom of the barrel looking for politically-correct bike themes with their new chopper commemmorating the lawyers who set up the 911 Red Cross fund. Special appearance by... HALLIBURTON.. SUPPORTING OUR TROOPS.
* Monster House: Team of dysfunctional contractors install a 12' bong and jacuzzi filled with Patchoulli in new "Hippie House"; owners are stunned when they peek in and discover... CHEVY, AMERICA'S TRUCK
* Talk Shows: Jay Leno's special guest: Billy Bob Thorton; tonite on Conan: Billy Bob Thorton; tonite on Late Night: Billy Bob Thorton. Check out Billy Bob's new movie about... HIENEKEN BEER - IT'S ALL ABOUT THE BEER
National TV Turn Off decade?
The best thing that could ever happen to the PC industry would be breaking MS into pieces. Separate the OS from the application division. That would be wonderful.
I just ran Windows Update and now my CD Burning software no longer runs reliably. I have no idea why, but I'm pretty sure that if I was running Microsoft-brand CD burning software, I wouldn't have this problem.
It's sickening to have to constantly update non-Microsoft applications because changes to the OS wreak havoc with all non-Microsoft applications. I have to assume the software companies aren't whining that much either, as they get residual income by selling updates and upgrades because of Microsoft's ever-changing environment, but for the rest of us, it's the pits.
Oh please! RBLs are a joke. They're far from accurate, have no real appeals process (they just *pretend* to have one) and the 'downfall' of a few of them a few months back proves that clearly.
You don't know what you're talking about. Maybe you're used to dealing with RBLs that are run by BOFHs, but systems like Maps and Spamcop are very well run and regulated.
I'd bet good money you're a spammer posting AC.
See what you get when you pay $8 for a domain registration. Try to transfer the domain to another registrar; try to see if you don't get a redirect from one of those sleaze sites; watch them hold your domain hostage like hostway does. You get what you pay for.