I like how Universal cites artists like Ella Fitzgerald, Reba McIntyre, U2 and Nirvana as "examples" of their artists.
Unfortunately, half of those bands are dead and the other half aren't representative of Universal's normally dismal and talentless array of crap music by artists with names like: Boo & Gotti (with their hit single "Ain't In Man"), Big Tymers, Baby Bash "The Smokin' Nephew", Lil' Wayne, Playa, Thug City, Ric-a-che, and Mac 10.
I think it might be a better PR move if Universal announced they were going to start selling Courvoisier or enrolling their artists in a few English classes.
There are obviously bands out that allow taping of their shows and release royalty-free music. I'm curious if there are any web sites that specialize in distributing high-quality versions of songs that are free of the copyright issues?
I think a very effective backlash against the RIAA would be to support sites and artists who make their songs available without the restrictions. I firmly believe that free trade of music in many cases is more beneficial to the artists than otherwise. This is especially true in times such as now where big corporations own a lion's share of media.
If you look at a band like the Grateful Dead, who chose not to follow the path of rabid control over their publishing, that looks to be a major contributor to their success.
Most people are sympathetic to the artists, but not the corporate entities which end up getting most of the money and taking advantage of the artists.
If we all rally around sites, companies and artists who abandon the traditional extreme proprietary nature of their material, this would send a clear message to the RIAA that their acts will hurt them more than us, and we could care less about the next major-label-boy-band.
What is interesting is that if this site/membership list had any relation to Islamic terrorist organizations, the argument over whether people were guilty by association wouldn't even come up.
Ironically, I'd argue that more people are terrorized by spam.
There is a difference between civil and criminal violations. The P2P thing is a civil issue. Breaking into someone's computer is a criminal felony, and could even be interpreted under the USA Patriot Act as a capital crime, punishable by execution.
Do we really know they're experiencing a DOS attack? Maybe they're using an operating system that cannot handle the amount of traffic they're getting? Maybe they should switch to Linux of FreeBSD?
Let me ad one thing on this... In fairness, my feeling is that not enough money is provided to give the District Attorneys and other law enforcement agencies the resources they need to pursue these cases.
What's ironic is that nobody seems to doubt the potential of the Internet to be a major ground zero in terrorist attacks against the country's infrastructure, but why isn't there more funding being diverted to law enforcement resources in this area??
A friend of mine who runs an ISP filed a case with the FBI. He had all the evidence, he had $100,000+ worth of damage he could prove. The case was meticulously documented. The FBI felt it was a rock solid case. They presented it to the DAs in multiple juridictions and they refused to prosecute or pursue the case. He even had the perps home address and telephone number and enough evidence to link him to credit card fraud, attacks on major corporations and much more, and the authorities blew the case off and didn't take action.
People need to understand two reasons why they get spam and DDOS attacks:
1. The backbone providers make money based on bandwidth consumption. They don't care whether the traffic is legitimate or not. It's in their financial interest to not take action against DOS/DDOS attacks and they don't. Many top-level providers will not even intervene unless a lower-level ISP's pipes are completely saturated, even if they complain about a DOS attack.
It would be so easy for the backbone providers to implement temporary blocking of DDOS attacks. These types of attacks are identifiable and the whole procedure could be automated and authenticated, but the top-level ISPs make money off spam and illegal DOS/DDOS activity. People need to petition the backbones to start taking responsibility and implmenting measures to shut down networks that have rogue systems consuming illegitimate bandwidth.
2. The local and federal governments do not effectively (if at all) enforce the plethora of existing computer tampering/break in/attack laws that are already on the books. These attacks CAN be tracked. The law enforcement agencies are either ignorant, unmotivated or unwilling to take action.
No new laws are needed. There are plenty of existing laws on the books right now to justify criminal prosecution of these attackers, which don't merely attack relay blacklists, but every other network along the way, making everyone suffer, including systems that don't use blacklists.
We need to hold the proper people accountable for not using the existing legal system to stop this; we need to hold the top-level providers responsible for allowing a majority of the traffic they bill their clients for to be unauthorized and illegitimate.
Imagine if 70% of the time you picked up your telephone someone else was using it? This is what's happening with Internet bandwidth.
Would someone please remind the federal government that DOS attacks are illegal? Anyone want to encourage them to take action against these people? Can they stop playing golf long enough to do their job?
Isn't the whole idea of going with a mac to get away from windoze? This is like saying the next product from Trojan will be a condom coated with sperm. Oh no, it was vaporware? Whoa is me.
Yes you're right. I am sorry for not responding sooner. I was overwhelmed by the stampede of corporate head hunters coming after me because of my l33t Ada skilz.
Colleges have always been the battleground for special interests, often at the expense of the education they offer.
When I was in college, midway into the program, the CS department made a deal with the government to supply them with shiny new PCs. All they had to do was convert their CS program from C/Pascal over to ADA. The government touted ADA as the future of all programming. The school immediately did so and I found myself having to audit low-level ADA classes in order to pick up the remaining credits I needed to graduate. Totally bunk, and I had no desire to design missile guidance systems when I graduated so the whole program was a waste of time, but hey, the school got a bunch of new PCs, and now I can talk tech with the waiter/CS grad at the local O'Henry's. So everything turned out happily ever after.
Dear MIT, please consider the following projects
on
MIT Robot Walks On Water
·
· Score: 3, Funny
* Playah Robot
This automaton goes out to the clubs and picks up women and brings them back to your place. The Playah Robot never complains about getting stuck with the fat chick.
* Voicemail Robot
This robot will save you from wasting time in voicemail hell with your local utility company, diligently pressing 1 for English, 7 for other, 3 for other, and 0 to speak to a human, and after an hour and a half will notify you that a human has answered the phone and is ready to speak to you.
* Alibi Robot
This robot corroborates your story to your girlfriend that you were busy studying last Saturday night.
I firmly believe that it's a fallacy that spammers really make that much money. There may be a few, but by and large, most don't. One look at the stupid crap that fills peoples' in boxes should be testament to that. Yes, they may get a few bucks here and there from some dingy affilliate thing but I wouldn't trust the affilliate companies to not rip off the freelancers promoting them in the first place so even that revenue source is questionable.
One thing we can do is dispell the myth that spammers are actually making money spamming. THEY ARE NOT. At best, their main revenue source is derived from fooling stupid people into paying them thinking that their mass marketing techniques will pay (and that's basic salesmanship that could be better served in other fields of business).
Of course, any interviewed spammer is going to brag that he's making money. Enron did the same thing right up until they imploded. It's a basic tenet of business that you lie about how successful you are, and whenever someone starts mouthing off about how rich they are, that's a sure sign they're trying to BS you. Real successful people don't run around bragging about how much money they have.
Spammers do not make money. They may see some cash flow now and then when they find an idiot who thinks their services will actually work, but ultimately they fail and go broke.
I run a very conservative mail server for about 340 accounts. I'm running 2-3 RBLs with no content filtering. We have a virtually non-existent rate of blocking legit mail.
Mail stats in the last 24 hours:
Rejected mail: 5,629 Accepted mail: 2,082
Because of our conservative blacklisting, the RBLs are probably only about 80% effective at best, we still hovered around our usual 28% legitimate mail traffic, verses 72% spam. (This also doesn't include worm messages which wouldn't have been relay-blacklisted so it's likely even worst.) Nothing seems to have changed, or it's not enough to be noticeable.
Everything they say about spam clogging the Internet is true. Based on my own stats, for a server that is generally below the radar running very legitimate web and e-commerce operations and a few select POP3 mailboxes, a vast majority of the bandwidth we use is undesireable crap. Imagine the improved performance of the net if we could actually make a dent in stopping the spamming sleazebags from clogging our pipes!
We agree there are problems, but this IMO has little to do with the development language. C was designed to be low-level. If you don't like it, don't use it, but there have always been alternatives for programmers who aren't obsessive about quality and control...
You can write crappy programs in any language, and there are crappy libraries in every OS. At least with C if you want to re-invent the wheel you're doing in on a level that affords you the minimal performance and flexibility penalty.
This is yet more evidence that the virus originates from the spam tech community as opposed to the P2P or computer programmer/utility community. It's main level of sophistication primarily involves rapid distribution, and has a very SPAM-like pathology of directing traffic to fixed points on the Internet. This is exactly what UCE does.
I was fortunately able to work entirely without C for the last 10 years or so
Please note that some of us do not consider getting your VCR to reliably capture every episode of Star Trek to be "programming."
Yes, let's program in a higher level language so we can inherent all the crappy code libraries of the OS. Let's spend half our lives doing tech support for erroneous systems that we're dependent upon.
C/C++ can be more portable than any other language. If you're having trouble making it portable, don't blame the language.
If you haven't had a need to use C before, that's good for you. You're probably not developing applications that need this low level language so don't compare apples to oranges and go back to diddling your non-normalized corporate database.
Another idea: Have windows update rotate this Outlook address book entry on a regular basis. WHAM, you have a system in place to immediately track the source of these things...
Think Microsoft would do this? It sounds way too efficient doesn't it?
One thing that could really expedite the trapping of the vires/worms is to get Microsoft to add a specific entry to the address book of all new installations of Outlook. Normally the e-mail wouldn't be used or even visible, but would be accessible to worm programs that seek Outlook's address book for propagation sources. I'm sure theres a way of obfusicating the entry to thwart smarter worms that avoid using the honey pot e-mail entry.
I have some ideas on how we might be able to track down the source of these things..
* E-mail honey pots
You set up a vast array of e-mail boxes with their addresses well publicized in various forms. You collect data on the vires/worm propagation.
Encourage people to donate old domains to the honey pot project. Publish instructions on remapping the MX record for domains that are no longer used. Direct them to various nodes in the honey pot array.
* Collect information on earliest occurances of the vires/worms in order to track the source. Publish a web site which lists the earliest known date/time of the worm propagation to encourage others to beat it with their own submissions. Offer some incentive to whoever provides the evidence that leads to the author.
The thing is, this type of service should not be managed by any company in the virus/worm removal industry. Companies like Mcaffee and Symantec, while being in the ideal position to collect details, have an inherent conflict of interest due to the fact that the more the vires/worms spread, the more money they make.
Slashdot Mirror
I like how Universal cites artists like Ella Fitzgerald, Reba McIntyre, U2 and Nirvana as "examples" of their artists.
Unfortunately, half of those bands are dead and the other half aren't representative of Universal's normally dismal and talentless array of crap music by artists with names like: Boo & Gotti (with their hit single "Ain't In Man"), Big Tymers, Baby Bash "The Smokin' Nephew", Lil' Wayne, Playa, Thug City, Ric-a-che, and Mac 10.
I think it might be a better PR move if Universal announced they were going to start selling Courvoisier or enrolling their artists in a few English classes.
There are obviously bands out that allow taping of their shows and release royalty-free music. I'm curious if there are any web sites that specialize in distributing high-quality versions of songs that are free of the copyright issues?
I think a very effective backlash against the RIAA would be to support sites and artists who make their songs available without the restrictions. I firmly believe that free trade of music in many cases is more beneficial to the artists than otherwise. This is especially true in times such as now where big corporations own a lion's share of media.
If you look at a band like the Grateful Dead, who chose not to follow the path of rabid control over their publishing, that looks to be a major contributor to their success.
Most people are sympathetic to the artists, but not the corporate entities which end up getting most of the money and taking advantage of the artists.
If we all rally around sites, companies and artists who abandon the traditional extreme proprietary nature of their material, this would send a clear message to the RIAA that their acts will hurt them more than us, and we could care less about the next major-label-boy-band.
What is interesting is that if this site/membership list had any relation to Islamic terrorist organizations, the argument over whether people were guilty by association wouldn't even come up.
Ironically, I'd argue that more people are terrorized by spam.
There is a difference between civil and criminal violations. The P2P thing is a civil issue. Breaking into someone's computer is a criminal felony, and could even be interpreted under the USA Patriot Act as a capital crime, punishable by execution.
Do we really know they're experiencing a DOS attack? Maybe they're using an operating system that cannot handle the amount of traffic they're getting? Maybe they should switch to Linux of FreeBSD?
Let me ad one thing on this... In fairness, my feeling is that not enough money is provided to give the District Attorneys and other law enforcement agencies the resources they need to pursue these cases.
What's ironic is that nobody seems to doubt the potential of the Internet to be a major ground zero in terrorist attacks against the country's infrastructure, but why isn't there more funding being diverted to law enforcement resources in this area??
A friend of mine who runs an ISP filed a case with the FBI. He had all the evidence, he had $100,000+ worth of damage he could prove. The case was meticulously documented. The FBI felt it was a rock solid case. They presented it to the DAs in multiple juridictions and they refused to prosecute or pursue the case. He even had the perps home address and telephone number and enough evidence to link him to credit card fraud, attacks on major corporations and much more, and the authorities blew the case off and didn't take action.
People need to understand two reasons why they get spam and DDOS attacks:
1. The backbone providers make money based on bandwidth consumption. They don't care whether the traffic is legitimate or not. It's in their financial interest to not take action against DOS/DDOS attacks and they don't. Many top-level providers will not even intervene unless a lower-level ISP's pipes are completely saturated, even if they complain about a DOS attack.
It would be so easy for the backbone providers to implement temporary blocking of DDOS attacks. These types of attacks are identifiable and the whole procedure could be automated and authenticated, but the top-level ISPs make money off spam and illegal DOS/DDOS activity. People need to petition the backbones to start taking responsibility and implmenting measures to shut down networks that have rogue systems consuming illegitimate bandwidth.
2. The local and federal governments do not effectively (if at all) enforce the plethora of existing computer tampering/break in/attack laws that are already on the books. These attacks CAN be tracked. The law enforcement agencies are either ignorant, unmotivated or unwilling to take action.
No new laws are needed. There are plenty of existing laws on the books right now to justify criminal prosecution of these attackers, which don't merely attack relay blacklists, but every other network along the way, making everyone suffer, including systems that don't use blacklists.
We need to hold the proper people accountable for not using the existing legal system to stop this; we need to hold the top-level providers responsible for allowing a majority of the traffic they bill their clients for to be unauthorized and illegitimate.
Imagine if 70% of the time you picked up your telephone someone else was using it? This is what's happening with Internet bandwidth.
Would someone please remind the federal government that DOS attacks are illegal? Anyone want to encourage them to take action against these people? Can they stop playing golf long enough to do their job?
Isn't the whole idea of going with a mac to get away from windoze? This is like saying the next product from Trojan will be a condom coated with sperm. Oh no, it was vaporware? Whoa is me.
Yes you're right. I am sorry for not responding sooner. I was overwhelmed by the stampede of corporate head hunters coming after me because of my l33t Ada skilz.
Colleges have always been the battleground for special interests, often at the expense of the education they offer.
When I was in college, midway into the program, the CS department made a deal with the government to supply them with shiny new PCs. All they had to do was convert their CS program from C/Pascal over to ADA. The government touted ADA as the future of all programming. The school immediately did so and I found myself having to audit low-level ADA classes in order to pick up the remaining credits I needed to graduate. Totally bunk, and I had no desire to design missile guidance systems when I graduated so the whole program was a waste of time, but hey, the school got a bunch of new PCs, and now I can talk tech with the waiter/CS grad at the local O'Henry's. So everything turned out happily ever after.
* Playah Robot
This automaton goes out to the clubs and picks up women and brings them back to your place. The Playah Robot never complains about getting stuck with the fat chick.
* Voicemail Robot
This robot will save you from wasting time in voicemail hell with your local utility company, diligently pressing 1 for English, 7 for other, 3 for other, and 0 to speak to a human, and after an hour and a half will notify you that a human has answered the phone and is ready to speak to you.
* Alibi Robot
This robot corroborates your story to your girlfriend that you were busy studying last Saturday night.
* Beer Run Robot
With alternate "Mountain Dew" plugin available.
I firmly believe that it's a fallacy that spammers really make that much money. There may be a few, but by and large, most don't. One look at the stupid crap that fills peoples' in boxes should be testament to that. Yes, they may get a few bucks here and there from some dingy affilliate thing but I wouldn't trust the affilliate companies to not rip off the freelancers promoting them in the first place so even that revenue source is questionable.
One thing we can do is dispell the myth that spammers are actually making money spamming. THEY ARE NOT. At best, their main revenue source is derived from fooling stupid people into paying them thinking that their mass marketing techniques will pay (and that's basic salesmanship that could be better served in other fields of business).
Of course, any interviewed spammer is going to brag that he's making money. Enron did the same thing right up until they imploded. It's a basic tenet of business that you lie about how successful you are, and whenever someone starts mouthing off about how rich they are, that's a sure sign they're trying to BS you. Real successful people don't run around bragging about how much money they have.
Spammers do not make money. They may see some cash flow now and then when they find an idiot who thinks their services will actually work, but ultimately they fail and go broke.
I run a very conservative mail server for about 340 accounts. I'm running 2-3 RBLs with no content filtering. We have a virtually non-existent rate of blocking legit mail.
Mail stats in the last 24 hours:
Rejected mail: 5,629
Accepted mail: 2,082
Because of our conservative blacklisting, the RBLs are probably only about 80% effective at best, we still hovered around our usual 28% legitimate mail traffic, verses 72% spam. (This also doesn't include worm messages which wouldn't have been relay-blacklisted so it's likely even worst.) Nothing seems to have changed, or it's not enough to be noticeable.
Everything they say about spam clogging the Internet is true. Based on my own stats, for a server that is generally below the radar running very legitimate web and e-commerce operations and a few select POP3 mailboxes, a vast majority of the bandwidth we use is undesireable crap. Imagine the improved performance of the net if we could actually make a dent in stopping the spamming sleazebags from clogging our pipes!
My general rule of thumb: If AT&T is in favor of anything, that's a real bad sign for consumers.
Deregulation = BEND OVER this won't hurt a bit. Trust me, you'll like it.
We agree there are problems, but this IMO has little to do with the development language. C was designed to be low-level. If you don't like it, don't use it, but there have always been alternatives for programmers who aren't obsessive about quality and control...
You can write crappy programs in any language, and there are crappy libraries in every OS. At least with C if you want to re-invent the wheel you're doing in on a level that affords you the minimal performance and flexibility penalty.
This is yet more evidence that the virus originates from the spam tech community as opposed to the P2P or computer programmer/utility community. It's main level of sophistication primarily involves rapid distribution, and has a very SPAM-like pathology of directing traffic to fixed points on the Internet. This is exactly what UCE does.
It's no coincedence that spammers are the most technologically advanced when it comes to propagating unwanted data across the Internet.
I figure some time around 2014 the authorities will identify this connection.
Knowing the feds and the media, "stolen credit card" translates to 4444444444444448.
Please note that some of us do not consider getting your VCR to reliably capture every episode of Star Trek to be "programming."
Yes, let's program in a higher level language so we can inherent all the crappy code libraries of the OS. Let's spend half our lives doing tech support for erroneous systems that we're dependent upon.
C/C++ can be more portable than any other language. If you're having trouble making it portable, don't blame the language.
If you haven't had a need to use C before, that's good for you. You're probably not developing applications that need this low level language so don't compare apples to oranges and go back to diddling your non-normalized corporate database.
Another idea: Have windows update rotate this Outlook address book entry on a regular basis. WHAM, you have a system in place to immediately track the source of these things...
Think Microsoft would do this? It sounds way too efficient doesn't it?
One thing that could really expedite the trapping of the vires/worms is to get Microsoft to add a specific entry to the address book of all new installations of Outlook. Normally the e-mail wouldn't be used or even visible, but would be accessible to worm programs that seek Outlook's address book for propagation sources. I'm sure theres a way of obfusicating the entry to thwart smarter worms that avoid using the honey pot e-mail entry.
I have some ideas on how we might be able to track down the source of these things..
* E-mail honey pots
You set up a vast array of e-mail boxes with their addresses well publicized in various forms. You collect data on the vires/worm propagation.
Encourage people to donate old domains to the honey pot project. Publish instructions on remapping the MX record for domains that are no longer used. Direct them to various nodes in the honey pot array.
* Collect information on earliest occurances of the vires/worms in order to track the source. Publish a web site which lists the earliest known date/time of the worm propagation to encourage others to beat it with their own submissions. Offer some incentive to whoever provides the evidence that leads to the author.
The thing is, this type of service should not be managed by any company in the virus/worm removal industry. Companies like Mcaffee and Symantec, while being in the ideal position to collect details, have an inherent conflict of interest due to the fact that the more the vires/worms spread, the more money they make.