Citing the the ZDNET article: "On Sunday morning Sony started packing up its 27 PS2s. The show, in Hannover, Germany, officially finishes on Wednesday." This is very misleading if you read it sloppy. Sony did not leave the show. They removed the PS2s, no more no less. The entire Sony booth is 2000 square meters, only 100 square meters where dedicated to the PS2. The rest is still there. This article by German magazine c't explains the situation in much more detail. Use the fish translation if you don't understand German.
The key is to combine several anti-spam measures: What you (and many others) are doing works well for situations where you give your email address to someone you "know". It requires activity on your end, before someone can send you mail, and therefore it doesn't work if you need to be contacted by strangers.
Let's mix some of the ideas:
a positive sender list always allows friends' mails
a positive recipient list allows mails to untainted "registration" addresses
a negative recipient list rejects mails to leaked "registration" addresses
a reply-check (TMDA-style) allows mails from strangers who reply to the on-hold message
There's one type of mail address which I see no direct solution for though: Sometimes you have to give out an email address which in turn is published (making it a "stranger class" address), but you can't wait for the reply-reply cycle (or risk that it fails in a legitmate situation) because it's an "emergency" address. That may be the kind of address which is best protected by the costly-sending approach, but for that to work, such a system would have to be widely deployed.
You are not identifying the sender. You are just checking that the same person who sent the mail can be reached by email, which of course should be enough to stop most spam.
I like the way you approach the problem though: You take a look at the situation, evaluate options and what is most important, you think in terms of attributes which can be found in spammers, spam-mails, legitimate senders and legitimate mail. This is much more of a scientific way than trying to deal with the problem by introducing new laws.
You chose the attribute "reply bounces or isn't read". There are other attributes of a typical spammer: They send millions of mails in a short time. But that is also true for mailinglist servers, which is why the often heard "make senders pay or do something time consuming" fails to distinguish between spammers and legitimate senders.
Analyzing the situation and finding ways to automatically tell spammers from legitimate senders either by looking at already existing attributes or by creating easy and cheap new attributes (like in the one-email-address-per-contact approach) is definitely a much more promising way than counting on lawyers. Although the current mail system has served us well and will continue to do so for some time, I think that more research needs to be done in the field of mail systems and ways of transitioning between them.
Where is the log going without filesystems mounted or daemons running? Do you trust a firewall that much that you don't want to see if maybe some "interesting" patterns in traffic occur?
There are more energy-hogs in a laptop than just the cpu. Display, harddisk and recently the graphics accelerators need a good share of the battery life. Decreasing the power consumption of the cpu alone won't get us very much closer to the one-day-per-charge laptop, although it's certainly a step in the right direction. Other interesting applications of less wasteful processors are clusters and servers, which otherwise need expensive cooling.
No matter how good the documentation is, understanding a complex system well enough to customize it is more than many users and companies want to waste their time on. The beauty of programming and computers is that you have to understand things and then just do them right once. Repetition is a computer's job. In consequence, the only reasonable jobs in this field are the non-repetitive tasks: Consulting, administration, custom development and if you can find sponsoring: adding to the free pool of software and documentation.
I gathered similar projects into a single comment. I know that this is redundant, strictly speaking, but I'll post anyway. It's much more accessible this way. I'm knocking on the karma cap anyway, so no, this isn't whoring, just risking to get modded down for redundancy. Enough blabber, here we go:
Be sure to check out Blinkenpaint. While other projects like this have turned houses into displays before, this one is much more interactive. You can create animations of your own and they will be added to the rotation, if the ccc-folks like them. Or you can have them added to a "loveletter" database from which you can invoke the animation by a telephone call.
Same here, down to 49 for correcting you. 2 moderators thought it was informative, then another one came along and thought +4 was a little much for pointing out the "obvious"... What the hell, it's only karma.
Now to make this remotely on topic: One can run 2 full-duplex 100 MBit ethernet connections over one 8-wire cat5 cable. Depending on distance covered and personal luck this can work flawlessly. (Does for me, but do some testing and watch the frame error counter.) That may be an option for someone who needs another ethernet socket but can't easily pull another cable because (shudder) there are no cable conduits. This will however not work with gigabit ethernet and using the spare pairs as phone lines will also most likely lock cheapskates out of gigabit heaven - don't do it. There's nothing wrong with using an extra cat5 cable for phones though. Then you'll have extra pairs for remote controls, intercom, etc.
100BaseT4 can not provide 100MBit/s in both directions simultaneously since it was designed to use Cat3 cabling, which is limited to 25MHz bandwith. It uses one pair for sending, one for receiving, and the other two pairs either transmit or receive data as needed. VG(VoiceGrade)-AnyLAN has similar limitations. This stuff is completely outdated and bringing it up here is only adding to the confusion, if you want to hear my opinion.
The local government is willing to take the necessary steps, no matter how stupid and counterproductive they may seem. Providers are forced to block sites
Re:Great Virus Game!!!
on
Binary Watch
·
· Score: 1
One would have to add some sex related feature to make it attractive to non-geeks. Or one could make it mandatory for sex-ed that kids wear these gadgets so they can learn about how STDs spread. Add an "infected" led that only lights up after some time has passed since the infection. Either way, sex is the key to success. I'm sorry if this comment made anyone feel uncomfortable.
Re:Great Virus Game!!!
on
Binary Watch
·
· Score: 1
That would indeed be an interesting device, if only for learning and teaching about viral infection patterns. It could involve some sort of core wars style selection mechanism. Geek dreams...
I think id should have provided some sort of cryptographic signature to give people, who are downloading the file from mirrors, the option to check whether their file has been tampered with. An executable which will be installed on so many servers certainly is a great vehicle if someone wanted to distribute a backdoor.
Here's another update: ISIS has reestablished the DNS redirection. One of their nameservers is issv0099.isis.de. Check it yourself: www.rotten.com should be 216.218.248.174, but right now their server returns 195.158.131.132, which really is virtual.isis.de.
"ISIS" hatte negative Reaktionen per E-Mail auf die Sperrung mit einem Link auf die Bezirksregierung Düsseldorf umgeleitet. Die Bezirksregierung geht davon aus, dass es sich nach den Inhalten zahlreicher E-Mails , die sie heute erhalten hat, um die Nutzer rechtsextremistischer Angebote im Internet handelt.
This clearly indicates that our local government believes that a great deal of messages had been sent by users of the blocked sites, which is clearly not the case, judging by what is going on in a number of discussion forums.
Northrhine-Westphalian Internet Provider's attempt to block radical right wing Internet-content [was] successful at first
Attempt by "ISIS" regrettably cancelled, 12 providers keep up the ban
A successful attempt to block radical right wing Internet-content as an access provider has been stopped today by the Duesseldorfian
company "ISIS" after it had been successful at first. Like 12 other access providers "ISIS" had blocked radical right wing Internet
content at short notice, after the Bezirksregierung Duesseldorf [local government] in their function as responsible supervision
authority in the sense of the Mediendienste-Staatsvertrag [mediaservices-statecontract, law] had threatened to start administration
proceedings in order to have the content blocked and impose fines up to 1 million german marks [about 450000 US-$].
This noon however the ban of radical right wing Internet content had been revoked by the company "ISIS". "ISIS" had redirected
negative email-feedback concerning the blocking with a link to the Bezirksregierung Duesseldorf [local government]. The
Bezirksregierung assumes that according to the content of numerous emails, which have been received today, many of those came
from users of radical right wing sites. This is particularly derived from the the fact that employees of the Bezirksregierung
have been threatened for their anti radical right wing activity by these email-senders.
The Bezirksregierung Duesseldorf explicitly welcomes the blocking attempt by "ISIS" as well as the still ongoing blocking
of radical right wing Internet content by twelve other access providers. These measures by "ISIS", which had been successful over
the course of several days, prove that blocking is easily technically possible and effective. The reaction of the presumed users
shows that they had been successfully stopped from accessing these sites.
The Bezirksregierung Duesseldorf explicitly welcomes that access providers have acted in a self-regulatory manner, because
this way government interference would become unnecessary. It is regrettable that under pressure by users who apparently
conciously use radical right wing sites on the Internet, company "ISIS" in Duesseldorf has foregone self regulatory measures.
The update needs an update: the blocking continues, just not ISIS but other providers, ISIS does not seem to be very open about what has really happened and according to our local government almost all who protested are are probably nazis.
Apparently, that is now what happened. Several other providers are still blocking the sites and the local government claims that ISIS just gave in to pressure from racists.
Slashdot Mirror
Citing the the ZDNET article: "On Sunday morning Sony started packing up its 27 PS2s. The show, in Hannover, Germany, officially finishes on Wednesday." This is very misleading if you read it sloppy. Sony did not leave the show. They removed the PS2s, no more no less. The entire Sony booth is 2000 square meters, only 100 square meters where dedicated to the PS2. The rest is still there. This article by German magazine c't explains the situation in much more detail. Use the fish translation if you don't understand German.
The key is to combine several anti-spam measures: What you (and many others) are doing works well for situations where you give your email address to someone you "know". It requires activity on your end, before someone can send you mail, and therefore it doesn't work if you need to be contacted by strangers.
Let's mix some of the ideas:
There's one type of mail address which I see no direct solution for though: Sometimes you have to give out an email address which in turn is published (making it a "stranger class" address), but you can't wait for the reply-reply cycle (or risk that it fails in a legitmate situation) because it's an "emergency" address. That may be the kind of address which is best protected by the costly-sending approach, but for that to work, such a system would have to be widely deployed.
You are not identifying the sender. You are just checking that the same person who sent the mail can be reached by email, which of course should be enough to stop most spam.
I like the way you approach the problem though: You take a look at the situation, evaluate options and what is most important, you think in terms of attributes which can be found in spammers, spam-mails, legitimate senders and legitimate mail. This is much more of a scientific way than trying to deal with the problem by introducing new laws.
You chose the attribute "reply bounces or isn't read". There are other attributes of a typical spammer: They send millions of mails in a short time. But that is also true for mailinglist servers, which is why the often heard "make senders pay or do something time consuming" fails to distinguish between spammers and legitimate senders.
Analyzing the situation and finding ways to automatically tell spammers from legitimate senders either by looking at already existing attributes or by creating easy and cheap new attributes (like in the one-email-address-per-contact approach) is definitely a much more promising way than counting on lawyers. Although the current mail system has served us well and will continue to do so for some time, I think that more research needs to be done in the field of mail systems and ways of transitioning between them.
Where is the log going without filesystems mounted or daemons running? Do you trust a firewall that much that you don't want to see if maybe some "interesting" patterns in traffic occur?
There are more energy-hogs in a laptop than just the cpu. Display, harddisk and recently the graphics accelerators need a good share of the battery life. Decreasing the power consumption of the cpu alone won't get us very much closer to the one-day-per-charge laptop, although it's certainly a step in the right direction. Other interesting applications of less wasteful processors are clusters and servers, which otherwise need expensive cooling.
No matter how good the documentation is, understanding a complex system well enough to customize it is more than many users and companies want to waste their time on. The beauty of programming and computers is that you have to understand things and then just do them right once. Repetition is a computer's job. In consequence, the only reasonable jobs in this field are the non-repetitive tasks: Consulting, administration, custom development and if you can find sponsoring: adding to the free pool of software and documentation.
I gathered similar projects into a single comment. I know that this is redundant, strictly speaking, but I'll post anyway. It's much more accessible this way. I'm knocking on the karma cap anyway, so no, this isn't whoring, just risking to get modded down for redundancy. Enough blabber, here we go:
Chaos Computer Club Blinkenlights, Berlin, Germany
18 x 8 matrix of white lights
Links:
http://www.blinkenlights.de/
KPN Building, Rotterdam, Netherlandsh tml g s/kpn.html
22 x 44 matrix of green lights
Links:
http://home.wanadoo.nl/makiueda/climbman/index-e.
http://www.blezer2.myweb.nl/rotterdam2000/buildin
La Bastille: A Tech House Installation, Providence, Rhode Island, USAm l
10 x 10 matrix of white lights
Links:
http://bastilleweb.techhouse.org/
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/04/16/2148245.sht
Marnix 2001, Brussels, Belgium
52 x 7 matrix of RGB lights
Links:
http://marnix2001.bbl.be/
TU-Delft Electro Technology SMS-Display, Delft, Netherlandst .php
264 lights (unknown configuration), displayed mobile phone short messages
Links:
http://etv.its.tudelft.nl/commissies/lustrum/stun
TU-Delft Electro Technology Tetris, Delft, Netherlandsg lish.html
10 x 15 matrix of white lights
Links:
http://etv.et.tudelft.nl/commissies/lustrum/90/en
MIT's Green Building Sound (VU) Meter, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USAg _vu_meter/green_bldg_vu_meter.html
9 x 1 matrix of red lights
Links:
http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/by_year/1993/green_bld
Clickscape 98, Linz, Austria
13 x 8 matrix of white lights
Links:
http://www.servus.at/clickscape98/
Poli-uni students dorm, Warsaw, Poland
14 x 16 matrix of white lights
Links:
http://www.astercity.net/~kvas/riviera.jpg
Tetris for big-thinking people:
La Bastille: A Tech House Art Installation
That installation was up only a few days, though.
Be sure to check out Blinkenpaint. While other projects like this have turned houses into displays before, this one is much more interactive. You can create animations of your own and they will be added to the rotation, if the ccc-folks like them. Or you can have them added to a "loveletter" database from which you can invoke the animation by a telephone call.
Same here, down to 49 for correcting you. 2 moderators thought it was informative, then another one came along and thought +4 was a little much for pointing out the "obvious"... What the hell, it's only karma.
Now to make this remotely on topic: One can run 2 full-duplex 100 MBit ethernet connections over one 8-wire cat5 cable. Depending on distance covered and personal luck this can work flawlessly. (Does for me, but do some testing and watch the frame error counter.) That may be an option for someone who needs another ethernet socket but can't easily pull another cable because (shudder) there are no cable conduits. This will however not work with gigabit ethernet and using the spare pairs as phone lines will also most likely lock cheapskates out of gigabit heaven - don't do it. There's nothing wrong with using an extra cat5 cable for phones though. Then you'll have extra pairs for remote controls, intercom, etc.
100BaseT4 can not provide 100MBit/s in both directions simultaneously since it was designed to use Cat3 cabling, which is limited to 25MHz bandwith. It uses one pair for sending, one for receiving, and the other two pairs either transmit or receive data as needed. VG(VoiceGrade)-AnyLAN has similar limitations. This stuff is completely outdated and bringing it up here is only adding to the confusion, if you want to hear my opinion.
Both half and full duplex ethernet in the 10mbit and 100mbit variety use 2 pairs, one for sending, one for receiving.
The local government is willing to take the necessary steps, no matter how stupid and counterproductive they may seem. Providers are forced to block sites
One would have to add some sex related feature to make it attractive to non-geeks. Or one could make it mandatory for sex-ed that kids wear these gadgets so they can learn about how STDs spread. Add an "infected" led that only lights up after some time has passed since the infection. Either way, sex is the key to success. I'm sorry if this comment made anyone feel uncomfortable.
That would indeed be an interesting device, if only for learning and teaching about viral infection patterns. It could involve some sort of core wars style selection mechanism. Geek dreams...
For all your blinkenlight needs go to:
http://www.blinkenlights.de/
Looks like they also forgot about the ML. That page is a mess in Mozilla.
I think id should have provided some sort of cryptographic signature to give people, who are downloading the file from mirrors, the option to check whether their file has been tampered with. An executable which will be installed on so many servers certainly is a great vehicle if someone wanted to distribute a backdoor.
Here's another update: ISIS has reestablished the DNS redirection. One of their nameservers is issv0099.isis.de. Check it yourself: www.rotten.com should be 216.218.248.174, but right now their server returns 195.158.131.132, which really is virtual.isis.de.
The relevant part of the press statement is:
"ISIS" hatte negative Reaktionen per E-Mail auf die Sperrung mit einem Link auf die Bezirksregierung Düsseldorf umgeleitet. Die Bezirksregierung geht davon aus, dass es sich nach den Inhalten zahlreicher E-Mails , die sie heute erhalten hat, um die Nutzer rechtsextremistischer Angebote im Internet handelt.
This clearly indicates that our local government believes that a great deal of messages had been sent by users of the blocked sites, which is clearly not the case, judging by what is going on in a number of discussion forums.
Here is a translation of the press statement:
Northrhine-Westphalian Internet Provider's attempt to block radical right wing Internet-content [was] successful at first
Attempt by "ISIS" regrettably cancelled, 12 providers keep up the ban
A successful attempt to block radical right wing Internet-content as an access provider has been stopped today by the Duesseldorfian company "ISIS" after it had been successful at first. Like 12 other access providers "ISIS" had blocked radical right wing Internet content at short notice, after the Bezirksregierung Duesseldorf [local government] in their function as responsible supervision authority in the sense of the Mediendienste-Staatsvertrag [mediaservices-statecontract, law] had threatened to start administration proceedings in order to have the content blocked and impose fines up to 1 million german marks [about 450000 US-$].
This noon however the ban of radical right wing Internet content had been revoked by the company "ISIS". "ISIS" had redirected negative email-feedback concerning the blocking with a link to the Bezirksregierung Duesseldorf [local government]. The Bezirksregierung assumes that according to the content of numerous emails, which have been received today, many of those came from users of radical right wing sites. This is particularly derived from the the fact that employees of the Bezirksregierung have been threatened for their anti radical right wing activity by these email-senders.
The Bezirksregierung Duesseldorf explicitly welcomes the blocking attempt by "ISIS" as well as the still ongoing blocking of radical right wing Internet content by twelve other access providers. These measures by "ISIS", which had been successful over the course of several days, prove that blocking is easily technically possible and effective. The reaction of the presumed users shows that they had been successfully stopped from accessing these sites.
The Bezirksregierung Duesseldorf explicitly welcomes that access providers have acted in a self-regulatory manner, because this way government interference would become unnecessary. It is regrettable that under pressure by users who apparently conciously use radical right wing sites on the Internet, company "ISIS" in Duesseldorf has foregone self regulatory measures.
The update needs an update: the blocking continues, just not ISIS but other providers, ISIS does not seem to be very open about what has really happened and according to our local government almost all who protested are are probably nazis.
"that is NOT what happened". Damn, some typos are really dangerous.
Apparently, that is now what happened. Several other providers are still blocking the sites and the local government claims that ISIS just gave in to pressure from racists.
Several other providers, including at least one university, still block the sites. Some have more effective blocking than DNS redirection in place.