99.9% of television is crap. You'd live a healthier life by stuffing food up your butt and trying to shit out your mouth. It's nice to know that Internet-savvy users are more aware of this than most of the moron populace.
I hate to say it but there's a lot of code out there that isn't so much badly written as it is badly documented. Why some programmers think it's k00l to write undocumented code is a testimonial to their egotism, insecurity and selfishness.
I also contend more rewrites have been done by the original developers because they were too lazy to remember and document what they were originally doing.
There's nothing wrong with rewrites. The whole goal of a rewrite is to learn from the first few iterations of an application and improve upon it. I'd also contend that it's just as easy to introduce more bugs by modifying existing code, so this argument is basically a rationalization to excuse poor programming skills.
I just began reporting to SpamCop to see how it would go and to try to increase the level of difficulty for spammers. It's SpamCop's reporting to ISPs and upstream providers that interests me since it may get spammers shut down in some cases, forcing them to keep moving, which increases their workload and costs. Even SpamCop advises that their block list should not be used to block email in any kind of production environment, though.
I've given up on reporting the ISPs hosting spamvertised web sites. These people know exactly what they're doing and have no intention of changing. However, reporting to uplink ISPs who are being exploited via SMTP is another matter.
The disclaimer on Spamcop's RBL is there to cover all the bases. It's an excellent RBL.. Even AOL uses it. But like any strategy for network security, you can't just set-it-and-forget-it and expect everything to work perfectly, which is why a good admin always monitors what's going on and constantly adapts.
I download spamvertised Websites to carry back a cost component to the beneficiaries of the spam I receive.
I wish I could say I thought that was a good idea, but I think it's doubly-wasteful. The bandwidth you might take from them is marginal at best, and the reality is that many spammers are stealing web hosting as well (they hack into AOL member pages, they set up temporary free web space, etc.) so all you end up doing is wasting your own bandwidth, and the bandwidth of other innocent parties.
There are only two effective approaches to solving the spam problem: 1. Get enforcement bodies to start enforcing the existing laws spammers break, and 2. Push the spammers into a corner so they cannot operate except in limited areas of cyberspace. The main issue with #2 is the source of the spam, not the source of the spamvertised web site. That's where the IP blocking becomes a very effective tactic.
The problem with pushing spammers into a corner is that you don't have many ISPs with much incentive to police the illegal/unethical activities of their users, and you have administrators who don't take the steps to stop their spamming customers even when the activities are in violation of their TOS. The solution: shut them all out and force the admins to get their act together.
A good example of this strategy and how effective it is can be demonstrated when you look back a few years at the proliferation of open relays and the automated testing system that forced tens of thousands of mail servers to be blacklisted because their relays were open. I was furious when this first happened, and it forced me to make changes to the way I handled clients in order to avoid being blacklisted. I hated it at first but it forced me to run a more secure network. Had I not been blacklisted, I wouldn't have made tightening this up a priority. Now 99.9% of all mail relays on the internet are closed systems. The main reason for this was blacklisting. It works. And it especially works when you start shutting people down on a quantum level if they can't manage their resources properly.
As for taking offense of innocent parties being "caught in the crossfire" of IP blocking, keep in mind that's part of the spammer's M.O. They're like terrorists, who mingle with regular people via forging headers and trying to appear legitimate. They create collateral damage by their very nature that is unavoidable until you can bring them out in the open. There's no way to get around that unless they can be pushed into a corner, and that process will always involve innocent people getting caught in the middle. However, one of the problems that makes this issue worse, is the apathy and ignorance of people caught in the middle, so sometimes something like IP blocking is a force for good, motivating people to act, to change their ISP or complain when they would normally blow it off and thus contribute to the problem.
It's no solution. It's a dangerous substance that is being tremendously over-prescribed. There are some people out there who can benefit from drug-therapy, but 99% of the people on this drug probably shouldn't be. It's a shame this guy had to find out that way.
But decent professional development needs integration into n-tier business applications which must be done with...
Well, obviously this is a troll, but it makes me cringe when I hear whiney arguments from people thinking that the only way to do anything "professional" is by using highly-bloated, high-level systems.
Yes, that's hard but you must admit that I have a point.
Yes, you have a point: You're "new school" that expects the available tools to compensate for your lack of initiative or ability to figure out how to be resourceful and efficient without the use of a mouse.
It's no wonder most new software is crap, and no surprise that the greatest software continues to be developed by individuals who don't spend 90% of their development time learning how to use a tool that is supposed to speed up the development process.
That's the real problem with blocking by IP ranges. I'm in 24.* because it's the only high-speed Internet I can get. It's not Comcast but I see tons of probes from infected machines local to me in my area of 24.*. But I'm not the only legitimate business living in a broadband network that contains tons of clueless residential subscribers. What would you have us do, get T1 lines and $3,500/mo ISP feeds? Go back to dialup? What's wrong with this picture?
We're not blocking all of 24.* right now because there are some people like you on that block, but if Comcast and other ISPs that are in that class A don't get their act together, you guys are likely to have problems, because I'm sure I'm not the only person that notices that net block is a never-ending source of problems.
I am also of the believe that many of these large blocks are DULs. If you have legitimate permission from your ISP to run your own servers, I'd hope they would separate you in the IP space from the DUL RBLs. If not, that's an issue your ISP should consider.
I don't have much sympathy for Comcast however. They are proving to be THE worst American ISP in terms of controlling spam.
Let me also say something.. the 2+ tier backbone providers in most cases don't have the performance of someone like Worldcom (as much as I'd like to not admit it). You can get by with less bandwidth on a higher-performing network that doesn't go through a bunch of goofy networks that don't have their act together. Shop around if you find yourself serviced by an ISP that is indescriminate about who they do business with. There are always options.
just how would a sender of legitimate email from China to a user in your network let you know that you are blocking their email?
All relay-blacklisted e-mail is returned to the sender with an error message that redirects them to a web page with an e-mail form they can use to contact us. The only downside to this is that we have to expire the deferred mail cache more quickly than we would normally prefer, but since the server in question is just for inbound and not outbound relaying, it's not a problem.
Spamcop-RBL'd mail similarly echos an error message to the user with a URL they can click on to actually show the spam history of the smtp relay in question. It works very well, and best of all, it dramatically cuts down on the bandwidth that spammers consume.
Thanks for reporting to Spamcop. I really like their service too. The problem is, there are so many Asia-pacific and Comcast IPs, Spamcop isn't as effective when spammers have such a diverse array of IPs to hijack, so we've had to resort to some additional block blacklisting. It has proven to be very effective and we never leave legitimate users in the dark. If you had a mail relay in the block and tried to send me mail, you'd get a message and a quick way to contact me to have yourself authorized.
The key here is how you use the domain name. IF your use is non-exploitive of the entity, specifically if it's someone famous, you can potentially hold it. I.e. If someone named James Hendrix had his personal web page on jimihendrix.com, he'd have a good case to fend off the Hendrix estate, as opposed to pointing the domain to some site clearly attempting to capitalize on the famous Jimi Hendrix.
A friend of mine actually had the domain AMERICAONLINE.COM for many years. He offered to sell it to AOL and they blew him off and expressed no interest. His problem was the domain was not in use and when he decided to put up a web page, it said, "This domain for sale". Within days of the site going up, he received a threatening letter from AOL's lawyers. I am not sure, but I think they scared him into giving them the domain. He screwed up by not having a legitimate web site that wasn't exploitive of AOL then he might have had a case to fight. But in this circumstance the guy basically snatched the name because it was available, so he was trying to take advantage of AOL's famous name. If he had a web site on that domain for example, that was a messageboard for "American's online" or something not exploitive of AOL's identity, he probably could have fought off AOL, or at least forced them to settle with him.
Generally speaking, the law has been pretty reasonable in dealing with these cases. There are probably exceptions though.
As another poster pointed out, this is basically the NNTP protocol, used for newsgroups.
The problem you have is that running a server of this nature requires many more resources than a standard mail server. And you have to "expire" the data very rapidly. Very few news servers can afford to maintain more than 14+ days of a full usenet feed. If mail were delivered this way, you'd have a simliar problem of deleting unread mail if it wasn't picked up fast enough.
It's a neat idea though, to contemplate addressing these issues through implementing *outbound* mail quotas (/cue demonic laugh) Imagine how many of your overzealous mail-forwarding bonehead friends would be limited in the crap they can send out until the recipients picked it up.
Instead of sending the whole email content - and with it the ability to falsify email header information, why not just send the email header only - and require the originating server to hold the email content?
Neat idea... in theory. There are a few problems with it:
1. It would reduce overall bandwidth being burned on the Internet and cost the very influential backbone ISPs lots of money that they're charging smaller providers for bandwidth, so they'll hate the idea and lobby against it.
2. The flow of information on the Internet would heavily tilt more towards prime time, creating additional bottleneck issues. Users would be downloading expentially more data during business hours and much less in the off time. Server resources would need to be beefed up and there is no guarantee that the requested mail could be retrieved upon request (an e-mail based "slashdot effect")
3. If you think e-mail headers are misleading now, under such a system things would be a lot worse. You'd be lost in a sea of misleading e-mail you could only verify by exposing yourself to the spammer.
4. When you went to retrieve the e-mail message, you would expose your personal IP address. It would be the equivalent of having a web-page bot allowing spammers and other systems to associate a fixed location in cyberspace with your identity, email and any other info in the e-mail. Serious privacy invasion issues abound.
This is just a stop-gap attempt to migrate closer to what is ultimately the only way to control spam: trusted hosts (also known as whitelisting).
We might as well just admit it. SMTP relays need to be licensed and regulated. This would stop spam. Implementing customized protocol-based front ends just slow things down and aren't horizontal in their implementation. And the idea of some handshake mechanism that denotes an acceptable SMTP source has to have spamming hackers salivating. They'll crack it within a week.
And who decides who gets on the whitelist? You? The government? People with lots of cash? Microsoft? AOL? Will an ISP in an axis-of-evil country be allowed to be on the whitelist? ISPs already write pink contracts to allow spammers to use their bandwidth, what makes you think cash won't change hands to get the spammers whitelisted?
I think any attempt to create a centralized regulatory agency to authorize SMTP licenses would be better than we have currently. The key to its value (and inability to be exploited) would lie in how it was administered. There will always be special interests trying to manipulate things, but if you publish a clear-cut, definitive outline of the rules for participating, it would avoid these sorts of issues.
Let's be realistic and not conspiratorial. The TLD management system works very well. A similar central registry could easily be implemented. The whitelist would be completely voluntary, but with a published list of rules in which participating systems would have to adhere to. Not all forms of regulation are totally devoid of usefulness or overwhelmed with corruption.
Centralized whitelists are too broad. Companies that might be on your whitelist are not necessarily those that I want on my whitelist. (In other words, I don't trust the people who adminster whitelist X.)
There could be several types of SMTP licenses. Just like there are more or less-conservative RBLs.
The rules for prohibiting unethical UCE are really not that grey. This is a technical issue that isn't all that subjective.
Under IPv4, rogue relay blacklisting creates a substantially more-restrictive environment in which spammers can operate, as their available IP space continues to shrink. As more systems become more restrictive, they run out of places to hide. You can see light at the end of that tunnel. There is no light at the end of the tunnel with Bayesian or other content-based filtering.
There are likely exponentially less combinations of rogue source IP space than there are keywords in message content that can be controlled.
Content-filtering is a battle that loses over time; RBL blocking is a battle that wins over time. The only thing that would change that fact would be the additional IP space that IPv6 would introduce, which would be a complete nightmare.
I have had my main e-mail published and unchanged since 1995. It's probably on 99% of all spam mailing lists. One of my servers handles about 600 POP3 accounts. My stats currently indicate that now more than 80% of our SMTP traffic is confirmed spam.
I don't believe in content-based filtering. We have a strict policy of not examining in any way, shape, or form, the content of any e-mail on our network.
We deal with spam by implementing an array of fully-tested, fairly conservative relay blacklists which block the inbound SMTP connection before the junk mail is even transmitted.
In more than two years of operation, we've only confirmed about six legitimate e-mails that were blocked, and we handle tremendous mail volume. It's an easy matter to "whitelist" anyone who might end up getting RBL'd to make sure the client can communicate with who they want. In EVERY case where a legitimate source was blacklisted, it was shown their ISP was irresponsible and the listing was valid.
In addition to using RBLs, we also have an array of hard-coded IP blocks that our server will not accept mail from. This covers a good bit of the rogue Asia-pacific ISPs that are the largest source of open relays. Something as simple as blocking major portions of 61.* have shown to reduce spam by 30+%. Anyone legitimately in China that needs to communicate with our network can be quickly whitelisted. Ironically, most of the ISP SMTP relays are not near the same broadband IP ranges - they obviously know how effective this technique is.
With RBLs and hard-coded spamming in effect, instead of 200 spams a day, I might get 3-5. As soon as I get new spam, I report it to Spamcop, and I notice a quick reduction in future spam of that nature immediately.
We're now getting near the point of blacklisting the entire 24.* IP block as well - which encompasses, among other things, a large portion of Comcast IP blocks that Comcast can't or won't control.
I'd like to see more ISPs simply refuse to accept mail from rogue networks. Then these networks would have to be more responsible.
Let me preface all this by saying our policy is to whitelist anyone who complains they have legitimate mail being blocked. For some strange reason, we don't hear any spammers making these requests. That's a shame because I'd be happy to visit them personally to make sure their situation is resolved in a mutually-deserving manner.
1. Wow? Spammers subvert content-based filters? Say it isn't so???? Get real!
Client-side filtering is a band-aid on a malignant tumor growing out of control. It will NEVER work, EVER. It requires constant updating and monitoring to avoid blocking legitimate e-mail and is a black hole of resources, time and money. Because of the ROI, spammers have more incentive to crack the filter than filter companies do to block the spammer.
If you're using client-side (or even server-side), content-based spam filtering, you're only hurting yourself. It's better to get a few spam messages than miss a critical communique, which can cost you a lot more. But feel free to piss in the wind - it seems to be in style anyway.
RBLs, and specifically Spamcop's Relay Blacklist are much more effective than content-based filtering.
2. Spammers break into systems, STEAL bandwidth and network resources. Almost all of them break various laws in virtually every region they operate.
3. The authorities are too busy detaining little old ladies at airports for posessing a fingernail clipper, suing 13-year olds downloading Bobby McFerrin, and raiding Tommy Chong's house to care.
4. Spam will disappear when the major network providers endorse a centralized SMTP whitelist. The reason why nobody talks about it, is that it's a cure for the spamedemic and there are a lot of companies out there, including all the ISPs that profit from spam.
That presumes that IBM will let them. IMB is currently in the process of dropping Microsoft operating systems. They have a lot invested in Linux, including the future of their company. Any kind of settlement will only substitute SCO for Microsoft as their lords and masters.
I wouldn't be so sure. Not by a long shot.
It's much more practical that IBM has various interests, not unlike SCO, and it using the lawsuit as leverage to force a settlement which gives them something they want.
IBM does not have a history of being the champion of open source. IBM has generally been a big, corporate institution. The company has made mistakes in the past which have helped create new industries... granted, but it was never intentional. So why would anyone think things are any different now?
Imagine this scenario: After the SCO attack creates enough FUD in the industry, SCO settles with IBM, allowing IBM freedom from IP restrictions relative to SCO, but ONLY IBM. This would effectively make IBM the only "legitimate" distributor of Linux and put them in the position of being able to control a larger share of the corporate market, something they lost, that they'd undoubtedly love to get back. It would be a brilliant plan for IBM, and not outside the boundaries of typical corporate behavior of taking other peoples' ideas and controlling distribution. The only way to take control of Linux is to rise above the FUD, but the FUD for everyone else still needs to be present or else this court case really doesn't play into the scheme that would best benefit IBM (and this is from a corporate-thinking standpoint, not a common sense/fairness standpoint).
We need to get over this foolish notion that most corporations have much idealism in these scenarios. IBM is in this for money and shareholder value. It's entirely possible a settlement of the lawsuit would be in IBM's better interests. This is taking into account that the resulting damage to the open source community is of little concern to IBM, which isn't outside the realm of possibility.
While searching on the net, I came across this report (PDF form) by Dr. Stephen Lesavich, entitled, "Patent Enforcement: Extortion, Shakedown, Blackmail or the American Way?" It's a pretty interesting report. It outlines what the author calls the standard "Patent Enforcement Business Model" which seems to be what SCO is engaging in now, and cites other entities such as PanIP and Techsearch LLC who have also engaged in this kind of activity.
The author is an IP attorney, so you can imagine that the report ultimately has the lawyeresque resolution of, "Don't ignore any request - speak to an attorney" but it still reveals a lot of insight and info into the dynamic at play here.
What I find most troubling about this are some of the figures cited in the report:
From 1991 to 2000 there was a 48% increase in patent suits. I'd estimate that there were probably as much in the most recent three-year period as in the previous nine.
Average cost to prepare an answer to a suit is $250,000.
83% of these cases never come to trial.
Many people may not realize that it's much more likely that SCO will settle and this case may never come to trial, in which case SCO will have accomplished its objective of putting a dark cloud over Linux and continuing to extort unproven licensing fees from various users.
I don't know if there is, but there should be A CONDITION placed upon the donations and use of this fund so that UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES CAN THE MONEY BE USED IN A SETTLEMENT. We need to push for this trial to go all the way and not wuss out near the end, which would be a victory for SCO.
My experience has been that with Microsoft products in many applications, the OS puts the demands on the hardware configuration more than the applications themselves. So if you're using Win98 and it does what you need it to do, there is no motivation for upgrading. When I cannot get a Windows machine to perform adequately and its hardware isn't up to spec to run the latest, heavily-bloated version of Windows, that's the day the machine becomes a Unix box and has new life as a backup, firewall, syslogd, mail, DNS, web, ftp server or other workstation.
I suspect I'm not alone. Microsoft's desire to try to force users to upgrade will only backfire on them in this respect. The more useless older hardware becomes to their newer OS versions, the larger the market will be for the Unix and open-source community.
It's a completely different story with any NON-US entity, since every MS-product sold also directly benefits the US-economy and directly harms this entity's own IT-industry.
Oh yea, and these US companies aren't outsourcing work overseas?
These days, you'd have to look real long and hard to find ANY product which doesn't have at least some foreign-outsourced component within.
The problem with this argument is that the examples of "environmentalists" are portrayed in an unrealistic, extreme faction in many areas of the media.
It never ceases to amaze me that so many people feel that the whole environmental issue requires they take one side or the other, like it's some kind of sports game that requires unblinding loyalty.
When the topic of Christianity comes up, I don't use John Wayne Gacy as a standard by which all Christians should be compared. It's equally ignorant to employ the same ridiculous standards to characterize "environmentalists." In doing so, you do little more than show your illogical prejudice and ignorance.
I think this is the beginning of the signs we're going to see for his re-election strategy..
With all the soft PAC money restrictions annulled, Bush will play "good cop" trying to get Americans excited about the future and his leadership, with goofball pie-in-the-sky claims he has no intention of fulfilling, but after all the fear and awe his administration has laid on the people, they'll buy into the crap, while his corporate cronies unleash all the fear and mud-slinging at his opponents. The American people will be stunned like deer in the headlights of the GOP media-blitz.
Obviously what the environmentalists need to get the public's attention is some sort of color-coded warning scale. Maybe an "orange environmental alert", or maybe a "global warming tourist advisory". Stick a few people in tie-dyed shirts on FOX talking about how the climate is going to totally nerf the upcoming Maui Wowie crop and maybe people will start listening?
Slashdot Mirror
99.9% of television is crap. You'd live a healthier life by stuffing food up your butt and trying to shit out your mouth. It's nice to know that Internet-savvy users are more aware of this than most of the moron populace.
I hate to say it but there's a lot of code out there that isn't so much badly written as it is badly documented. Why some programmers think it's k00l to write undocumented code is a testimonial to their egotism, insecurity and selfishness.
I also contend more rewrites have been done by the original developers because they were too lazy to remember and document what they were originally doing.
There's nothing wrong with rewrites. The whole goal of a rewrite is to learn from the first few iterations of an application and improve upon it. I'd also contend that it's just as easy to introduce more bugs by modifying existing code, so this argument is basically a rationalization to excuse poor programming skills.
I just began reporting to SpamCop to see how it would go and to try to increase the level of difficulty for spammers. It's SpamCop's reporting to ISPs and upstream providers that interests me since it may get spammers shut down in some cases, forcing them to keep moving, which increases their workload and costs. Even SpamCop advises that their block list should not be used to block email in any kind of production environment, though.
I've given up on reporting the ISPs hosting spamvertised web sites. These people know exactly what they're doing and have no intention of changing. However, reporting to uplink ISPs who are being exploited via SMTP is another matter.
The disclaimer on Spamcop's RBL is there to cover all the bases. It's an excellent RBL.. Even AOL uses it. But like any strategy for network security, you can't just set-it-and-forget-it and expect everything to work perfectly, which is why a good admin always monitors what's going on and constantly adapts.
I download spamvertised Websites to carry back a cost component to the beneficiaries of the spam I receive.
I wish I could say I thought that was a good idea, but I think it's doubly-wasteful. The bandwidth you might take from them is marginal at best, and the reality is that many spammers are stealing web hosting as well (they hack into AOL member pages, they set up temporary free web space, etc.) so all you end up doing is wasting your own bandwidth, and the bandwidth of other innocent parties.
There are only two effective approaches to solving the spam problem: 1. Get enforcement bodies to start enforcing the existing laws spammers break, and 2. Push the spammers into a corner so they cannot operate except in limited areas of cyberspace. The main issue with #2 is the source of the spam, not the source of the spamvertised web site. That's where the IP blocking becomes a very effective tactic.
The problem with pushing spammers into a corner is that you don't have many ISPs with much incentive to police the illegal/unethical activities of their users, and you have administrators who don't take the steps to stop their spamming customers even when the activities are in violation of their TOS. The solution: shut them all out and force the admins to get their act together.
A good example of this strategy and how effective it is can be demonstrated when you look back a few years at the proliferation of open relays and the automated testing system that forced tens of thousands of mail servers to be blacklisted because their relays were open. I was furious when this first happened, and it forced me to make changes to the way I handled clients in order to avoid being blacklisted. I hated it at first but it forced me to run a more secure network. Had I not been blacklisted, I wouldn't have made tightening this up a priority. Now 99.9% of all mail relays on the internet are closed systems. The main reason for this was blacklisting. It works. And it especially works when you start shutting people down on a quantum level if they can't manage their resources properly.
As for taking offense of innocent parties being "caught in the crossfire" of IP blocking, keep in mind that's part of the spammer's M.O. They're like terrorists, who mingle with regular people via forging headers and trying to appear legitimate. They create collateral damage by their very nature that is unavoidable until you can bring them out in the open. There's no way to get around that unless they can be pushed into a corner, and that process will always involve innocent people getting caught in the middle. However, one of the problems that makes this issue worse, is the apathy and ignorance of people caught in the middle, so sometimes something like IP blocking is a force for good, motivating people to act, to change their ISP or complain when they would normally blow it off and thus contribute to the problem.
Ritalin is basically cocaine.
It's no solution. It's a dangerous substance that is being tremendously over-prescribed. There are some people out there who can benefit from drug-therapy, but 99% of the people on this drug probably shouldn't be. It's a shame this guy had to find out that way.
But decent professional development needs integration into n-tier business applications which must be done with ...
Well, obviously this is a troll, but it makes me cringe when I hear whiney arguments from people thinking that the only way to do anything "professional" is by using highly-bloated, high-level systems.
Yes, that's hard but you must admit that I have a point.
Yes, you have a point: You're "new school" that expects the available tools to compensate for your lack of initiative or ability to figure out how to be resourceful and efficient without the use of a mouse.
It's no wonder most new software is crap, and no surprise that the greatest software continues to be developed by individuals who don't spend 90% of their development time learning how to use a tool that is supposed to speed up the development process.
Turn your televison off!
That's the real problem with blocking by IP ranges. I'm in 24.* because it's the only high-speed Internet I can get. It's not Comcast but I see tons of probes from infected machines local to me in my area of 24.*. But I'm not the only legitimate business living in a broadband network that contains tons of clueless residential subscribers. What would you have us do, get T1 lines and $3,500/mo ISP feeds? Go back to dialup? What's wrong with this picture?
We're not blocking all of 24.* right now because there are some people like you on that block, but if Comcast and other ISPs that are in that class A don't get their act together, you guys are likely to have problems, because I'm sure I'm not the only person that notices that net block is a never-ending source of problems.
I am also of the believe that many of these large blocks are DULs. If you have legitimate permission from your ISP to run your own servers, I'd hope they would separate you in the IP space from the DUL RBLs. If not, that's an issue your ISP should consider.
I don't have much sympathy for Comcast however. They are proving to be THE worst American ISP in terms of controlling spam.
Let me also say something.. the 2+ tier backbone providers in most cases don't have the performance of someone like Worldcom (as much as I'd like to not admit it). You can get by with less bandwidth on a higher-performing network that doesn't go through a bunch of goofy networks that don't have their act together. Shop around if you find yourself serviced by an ISP that is indescriminate about who they do business with. There are always options.
just how would a sender of legitimate email from China to a user in your network let you know that you are blocking their email?
All relay-blacklisted e-mail is returned to the sender with an error message that redirects them to a web page with an e-mail form they can use to contact us. The only downside to this is that we have to expire the deferred mail cache more quickly than we would normally prefer, but since the server in question is just for inbound and not outbound relaying, it's not a problem.
Spamcop-RBL'd mail similarly echos an error message to the user with a URL they can click on to actually show the spam history of the smtp relay in question. It works very well, and best of all, it dramatically cuts down on the bandwidth that spammers consume.
Thanks for reporting to Spamcop. I really like their service too. The problem is, there are so many Asia-pacific and Comcast IPs, Spamcop isn't as effective when spammers have such a diverse array of IPs to hijack, so we've had to resort to some additional block blacklisting. It has proven to be very effective and we never leave legitimate users in the dark. If you had a mail relay in the block and tried to send me mail, you'd get a message and a quick way to contact me to have yourself authorized.
The key here is how you use the domain name. IF your use is non-exploitive of the entity, specifically if it's someone famous, you can potentially hold it. I.e. If someone named James Hendrix had his personal web page on jimihendrix.com, he'd have a good case to fend off the Hendrix estate, as opposed to pointing the domain to some site clearly attempting to capitalize on the famous Jimi Hendrix.
A friend of mine actually had the domain AMERICAONLINE.COM for many years. He offered to sell it to AOL and they blew him off and expressed no interest. His problem was the domain was not in use and when he decided to put up a web page, it said, "This domain for sale". Within days of the site going up, he received a threatening letter from AOL's lawyers. I am not sure, but I think they scared him into giving them the domain. He screwed up by not having a legitimate web site that wasn't exploitive of AOL then he might have had a case to fight. But in this circumstance the guy basically snatched the name because it was available, so he was trying to take advantage of AOL's famous name. If he had a web site on that domain for example, that was a messageboard for "American's online" or something not exploitive of AOL's identity, he probably could have fought off AOL, or at least forced them to settle with him.
Generally speaking, the law has been pretty reasonable in dealing with these cases. There are probably exceptions though.
As another poster pointed out, this is basically the NNTP protocol, used for newsgroups.
The problem you have is that running a server of this nature requires many more resources than a standard mail server. And you have to "expire" the data very rapidly. Very few news servers can afford to maintain more than 14+ days of a full usenet feed. If mail were delivered this way, you'd have a simliar problem of deleting unread mail if it wasn't picked up fast enough.
It's a neat idea though, to contemplate addressing these issues through implementing *outbound* mail quotas (/cue demonic laugh) Imagine how many of your overzealous mail-forwarding bonehead friends would be limited in the crap they can send out until the recipients picked it up.
Instead of sending the whole email content - and with it the ability to falsify email header information, why not just send the email header only - and require the originating server to hold the email content?
Neat idea... in theory. There are a few problems with it:
1. It would reduce overall bandwidth being burned on the Internet and cost the very influential backbone ISPs lots of money that they're charging smaller providers for bandwidth, so they'll hate the idea and lobby against it.
2. The flow of information on the Internet would heavily tilt more towards prime time, creating additional bottleneck issues. Users would be downloading expentially more data during business hours and much less in the off time. Server resources would need to be beefed up and there is no guarantee that the requested mail could be retrieved upon request (an e-mail based "slashdot effect")
3. If you think e-mail headers are misleading now, under such a system things would be a lot worse. You'd be lost in a sea of misleading e-mail you could only verify by exposing yourself to the spammer.
4. When you went to retrieve the e-mail message, you would expose your personal IP address. It would be the equivalent of having a web-page bot allowing spammers and other systems to associate a fixed location in cyberspace with your identity, email and any other info in the e-mail. Serious privacy invasion issues abound.
This is just a stop-gap attempt to migrate closer to what is ultimately the only way to control spam: trusted hosts (also known as whitelisting).
We might as well just admit it. SMTP relays need to be licensed and regulated. This would stop spam. Implementing customized protocol-based front ends just slow things down and aren't horizontal in their implementation. And the idea of some handshake mechanism that denotes an acceptable SMTP source has to have spamming hackers salivating. They'll crack it within a week.
And who decides who gets on the whitelist? You? The government? People with lots of cash? Microsoft? AOL? Will an ISP in an axis-of-evil country be allowed to be on the whitelist? ISPs already write pink contracts to allow spammers to use their bandwidth, what makes you think cash won't change hands to get the spammers whitelisted?
I think any attempt to create a centralized regulatory agency to authorize SMTP licenses would be better than we have currently. The key to its value (and inability to be exploited) would lie in how it was administered. There will always be special interests trying to manipulate things, but if you publish a clear-cut, definitive outline of the rules for participating, it would avoid these sorts of issues.
Let's be realistic and not conspiratorial. The TLD management system works very well. A similar central registry could easily be implemented. The whitelist would be completely voluntary, but with a published list of rules in which participating systems would have to adhere to. Not all forms of regulation are totally devoid of usefulness or overwhelmed with corruption.
Centralized whitelists are too broad. Companies that might be on your whitelist are not necessarily those that I want on my whitelist. (In other words, I don't trust the people who adminster whitelist X.)
There could be several types of SMTP licenses. Just like there are more or less-conservative RBLs.
The rules for prohibiting unethical UCE are really not that grey. This is a technical issue that isn't all that subjective.
Under IPv4, rogue relay blacklisting creates a substantially more-restrictive environment in which spammers can operate, as their available IP space continues to shrink. As more systems become more restrictive, they run out of places to hide. You can see light at the end of that tunnel. There is no light at the end of the tunnel with Bayesian or other content-based filtering.
There are likely exponentially less combinations of rogue source IP space than there are keywords in message content that can be controlled.
Content-filtering is a battle that loses over time; RBL blocking is a battle that wins over time. The only thing that would change that fact would be the additional IP space that IPv6 would introduce, which would be a complete nightmare.
I have had my main e-mail published and unchanged since 1995. It's probably on 99% of all spam mailing lists. One of my servers handles about 600 POP3 accounts. My stats currently indicate that now more than 80% of our SMTP traffic is confirmed spam.
I don't believe in content-based filtering. We have a strict policy of not examining in any way, shape, or form, the content of any e-mail on our network.
We deal with spam by implementing an array of fully-tested, fairly conservative relay blacklists which block the inbound SMTP connection before the junk mail is even transmitted.
In more than two years of operation, we've only confirmed about six legitimate e-mails that were blocked, and we handle tremendous mail volume. It's an easy matter to "whitelist" anyone who might end up getting RBL'd to make sure the client can communicate with who they want. In EVERY case where a legitimate source was blacklisted, it was shown their ISP was irresponsible and the listing was valid.
In addition to using RBLs, we also have an array of hard-coded IP blocks that our server will not accept mail from. This covers a good bit of the rogue Asia-pacific ISPs that are the largest source of open relays. Something as simple as blocking major portions of 61.* have shown to reduce spam by 30+%. Anyone legitimately in China that needs to communicate with our network can be quickly whitelisted. Ironically, most of the ISP SMTP relays are not near the same broadband IP ranges - they obviously know how effective this technique is.
With RBLs and hard-coded spamming in effect, instead of 200 spams a day, I might get 3-5. As soon as I get new spam, I report it to Spamcop, and I notice a quick reduction in future spam of that nature immediately.
We're now getting near the point of blacklisting the entire 24.* IP block as well - which encompasses, among other things, a large portion of Comcast IP blocks that Comcast can't or won't control.
I'd like to see more ISPs simply refuse to accept mail from rogue networks. Then these networks would have to be more responsible.
Let me preface all this by saying our policy is to whitelist anyone who complains they have legitimate mail being blocked. For some strange reason, we don't hear any spammers making these requests. That's a shame because I'd be happy to visit them personally to make sure their situation is resolved in a mutually-deserving manner.
Congratulations!
Because spam wastes so much of your time, you're forced to waste additional time to update your computer constantly to battle this scourge.
Your time would be better spent sending a letter to your local attorney general asking him to get off his butt and start prosecuting these criminals.
1. Wow? Spammers subvert content-based filters? Say it isn't so???? Get real!
Client-side filtering is a band-aid on a malignant tumor growing out of control. It will NEVER work, EVER. It requires constant updating and monitoring to avoid blocking legitimate e-mail and is a black hole of resources, time and money. Because of the ROI, spammers have more incentive to crack the filter than filter companies do to block the spammer.
If you're using client-side (or even server-side), content-based spam filtering, you're only hurting yourself. It's better to get a few spam messages than miss a critical communique, which can cost you a lot more. But feel free to piss in the wind - it seems to be in style anyway.
RBLs, and specifically Spamcop's Relay Blacklist are much more effective than content-based filtering.
2. Spammers break into systems, STEAL bandwidth and network resources. Almost all of them break various laws in virtually every region they operate.
3. The authorities are too busy detaining little old ladies at airports for posessing a fingernail clipper, suing 13-year olds downloading Bobby McFerrin, and raiding Tommy Chong's house to care.
4. Spam will disappear when the major network providers endorse a centralized SMTP whitelist. The reason why nobody talks about it, is that it's a cure for the spamedemic and there are a lot of companies out there, including all the ISPs that profit from spam.
That presumes that IBM will let them. IMB is currently in the process of dropping Microsoft operating systems. They have a lot invested in Linux, including the future of their company. Any kind of settlement will only substitute SCO for Microsoft as their lords and masters.
I wouldn't be so sure. Not by a long shot.
It's much more practical that IBM has various interests, not unlike SCO, and it using the lawsuit as leverage to force a settlement which gives them something they want.
IBM does not have a history of being the champion of open source. IBM has generally been a big, corporate institution. The company has made mistakes in the past which have helped create new industries... granted, but it was never intentional. So why would anyone think things are any different now?
Imagine this scenario: After the SCO attack creates enough FUD in the industry, SCO settles with IBM, allowing IBM freedom from IP restrictions relative to SCO, but ONLY IBM. This would effectively make IBM the only "legitimate" distributor of Linux and put them in the position of being able to control a larger share of the corporate market, something they lost, that they'd undoubtedly love to get back. It would be a brilliant plan for IBM, and not outside the boundaries of typical corporate behavior of taking other peoples' ideas and controlling distribution. The only way to take control of Linux is to rise above the FUD, but the FUD for everyone else still needs to be present or else this court case really doesn't play into the scheme that would best benefit IBM (and this is from a corporate-thinking standpoint, not a common sense/fairness standpoint).
We need to get over this foolish notion that most corporations have much idealism in these scenarios. IBM is in this for money and shareholder value. It's entirely possible a settlement of the lawsuit would be in IBM's better interests. This is taking into account that the resulting damage to the open source community is of little concern to IBM, which isn't outside the realm of possibility.
While searching on the net, I came across this report (PDF form) by Dr. Stephen Lesavich, entitled, "Patent Enforcement: Extortion, Shakedown, Blackmail or the American Way?" It's a pretty interesting report. It outlines what the author calls the standard "Patent Enforcement Business Model" which seems to be what SCO is engaging in now, and cites other entities such as PanIP and Techsearch LLC who have also engaged in this kind of activity.
The author is an IP attorney, so you can imagine that the report ultimately has the lawyeresque resolution of, "Don't ignore any request - speak to an attorney" but it still reveals a lot of insight and info into the dynamic at play here.
What I find most troubling about this are some of the figures cited in the report:
From 1991 to 2000 there was a 48% increase in patent suits. I'd estimate that there were probably as much in the most recent three-year period as in the previous nine.
Average cost to prepare an answer to a suit is $250,000.
83% of these cases never come to trial.
Many people may not realize that it's much more likely that SCO will settle and this case may never come to trial, in which case SCO will have accomplished its objective of putting a dark cloud over Linux and continuing to extort unproven licensing fees from various users.
I don't know if there is, but there should be A CONDITION placed upon the donations and use of this fund so that UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES CAN THE MONEY BE USED IN A SETTLEMENT. We need to push for this trial to go all the way and not wuss out near the end, which would be a victory for SCO.
A careful search of my source libraries revealed this:
/* (c) SCO/AT&T */ ...
/* _POSIX_SOURCE */
#ifndef _SYS_ERRNO_H_
#define _SYS_ERRNO_H_
#ifndef KERNEL
#include
__BEGIN_DECLS
int * __error __P((void));
__END_DECLS
#define errno (* __error())
#endif
#define EBULLSHIT 666
#endif
My experience has been that with Microsoft products in many applications, the OS puts the demands on the hardware configuration more than the applications themselves. So if you're using Win98 and it does what you need it to do, there is no motivation for upgrading. When I cannot get a Windows machine to perform adequately and its hardware isn't up to spec to run the latest, heavily-bloated version of Windows, that's the day the machine becomes a Unix box and has new life as a backup, firewall, syslogd, mail, DNS, web, ftp server or other workstation.
I suspect I'm not alone. Microsoft's desire to try to force users to upgrade will only backfire on them in this respect. The more useless older hardware becomes to their newer OS versions, the larger the market will be for the Unix and open-source community.
It's a completely different story with any NON-US entity, since every MS-product sold also directly benefits the US-economy and directly harms this entity's own IT-industry.
Oh yea, and these US companies aren't outsourcing work overseas?
These days, you'd have to look real long and hard to find ANY product which doesn't have at least some foreign-outsourced component within.
The problem with this argument is that the examples of "environmentalists" are portrayed in an unrealistic, extreme faction in many areas of the media.
It never ceases to amaze me that so many people feel that the whole environmental issue requires they take one side or the other, like it's some kind of sports game that requires unblinding loyalty.
When the topic of Christianity comes up, I don't use John Wayne Gacy as a standard by which all Christians should be compared. It's equally ignorant to employ the same ridiculous standards to characterize "environmentalists." In doing so, you do little more than show your illogical prejudice and ignorance.
I think this is the beginning of the signs we're going to see for his re-election strategy..
With all the soft PAC money restrictions annulled, Bush will play "good cop" trying to get Americans excited about the future and his leadership, with goofball pie-in-the-sky claims he has no intention of fulfilling, but after all the fear and awe his administration has laid on the people, they'll buy into the crap, while his corporate cronies unleash all the fear and mud-slinging at his opponents. The American people will be stunned like deer in the headlights of the GOP media-blitz.
Halliburton has just started a new manned-space-exploration division.
Obviously what the environmentalists need to get the public's attention is some sort of color-coded warning scale. Maybe an "orange environmental alert", or maybe a "global warming tourist advisory". Stick a few people in tie-dyed shirts on FOX talking about how the climate is going to totally nerf the upcoming Maui Wowie crop and maybe people will start listening?