Ah yes, the old "she must have asked for it because she wore sexy clothes"-type argument. That's really getting tired.
it's politically correct to entirely disconnect the two facts that a woman who wears "sexy" clothes (dresses like a whore) and then was assaulted, and i suppose the same would be pushed by the spam zealots in the case of a persons email address being available to many unsavory spam sources, and that person being spammed heavily. they ARE related, but one is not the cause of the other. a more accurate way to say it would be that a woman who dresses like a whore has a better probability of being raped, just as your email address all over the net has a better probability of being spammed.
I have my e-mail address in order to be reachable by the public and I have had the same one since July 1996. I refuse to change it or hide it because doing so would make me unreachable by the people I want to be reachable for. If I do that, I might as well give up on e-mail entirely.
and there's nothing wrong with that! just keep it out off the lists of spammers and you're fine. obfuscate it if you're posting to a mailing list, or better yet use another address for that kind of thing.
i'm not defending the act of spamming here. i'm simply calling for some personal "watching ones ass". reiterating my first paragraph, the fact that an address is available to spammers does not make it okay, just more likely!
Remember? There was a time when e-mail was used to communicate with the world, not just with intimate friends and family. It was exciting, fun. Spammers have killed that for the most part, and turned the Internet from an open community into a hostile spam sewer.
true, and i long for those days again. but the unwashed masses are all on the net now, armed with credit cards and limited restraint. the real solution in stopping spam is to make it unprofitable, and the only way to do that is to get people to stop buying crap from spammers and perpetuating the problem.
Maybe you would see it if you'd get a thousand a day like I do. (Yes, I use a good filter, dozens still get through.)
you're right. i probably would view it differently. maybe it's just that my email hygiene is better than yours. regardless, i still see very little spam.
Or if you'd be an ISP and have to deal with your mailservers dying under the load of millions of spams a day and having to shell out money to buy dedicated servers to deal with the crap (like my ISP), impacting all their tens of thousands of customers. Still think that's as "non-violent" as using some drugs?
haven't been in that position, but you must be more clear - is that spam coming thru the mailserver's open relay, or going to users. i'm going to assume it's going to the users. this is a real problem, and these are the people who should be suing spammers in civil courts, and raking in large monetary damages.
i will not ever defend the spammers. however, i will insist that they be civily prosecuted in federal courts, not state, as most US to US spam crosses state boundaries.
How about all the viruses spammers keep spreading so they have zombie networks to sell to bounce spam off of? This is where most spam comes from nowadays. How is this not the most criminal form of cracking, tresspass and theft of service?
thats bad, really bad, and if it can be proven that other computer laws were broken (like disrupting a network with a virus or worm), then many more levels of damages should result! seriously, wipe out their bank accounts, it's the only way. this is where criminal charges could come in. an analogy would be robbery (bad), and then armed robbery (real bad).
Spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail. If they signed up for it, it's not spam, by definition.
you're right, and i apologize for confusing this point. i think that the public really confuses this. when i refer to spam i am referring to the guys who do it without an
you forget one important factor: if you do not maintain the car, keep it clean, protect it from the elements, change its oil - it will wear out much quicker. the same applies to an email address - if you protect it, refrain from giving it out to every form on the web and keep it for your personal communications only, it will last much longer. herein lies the benefit of having a "real" email, and "junk" email.
i'd love a free ipod, but i'd never give them my day-to-day address, just some crap one that they can fill with spam for eternity for all i care.
maybe this is the cost of doing business on the internet - i don't know. i'm not defending spammers, i'm just trying to put it into perspective. when i look at it, i don't feel like spamming (annoying though it may be) is a very serious "crime".
ISP's should probably do a better job at filtering spam, thus saving you the excess bandwidth use. ultimately, however, i feel that the final decision as to what to do with spam should be dealt with by the user.
at the risk of being the catalyst for another craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt posting, i'll say that the whole SMTP system is outdated and open for abuse. it needs to be overhauled, because in its current form, it encourages this type of activity. i'm not going to offer a solution, cuz i don't have one:).
also, i'm not sure what the market price of 1 MB of data transfer is, but i'm pretty certain it's miniscule (not 10c). regardless, it does add up. i'm sure spam does have a financial impact, but i doubt it's real impact is anywhere near the figures we hear about. you also mentioned jpegs in your email - images can only be sent as attachments, and most of the spam i have seen involves the loading of images from a webhost - turn off loading of images (gmail does this by default), and you're set.
this has gotten *way* out of control. a lot of us are the same people who rail on the courts and police for locking up nonviolent drug offenders so that there will be room for the fuckers who really need to be in jail (baby rapers, murderers, kidnappers, the very at-large terrorist element).
so why, oh why, are you upset that someone is NOT going to jail for commiting an utterly nonviolent offense? because you get some penis enlargement and get rich quick email? christ, use a filter. the place to hit these people is in the wallet, not the cornhole (as in pound-me-in-the-ass federal prison). if they're spamming, they're making untold millions of dollars - millions of dollars that can be snarfed up by the federal government.
it has really struck me as entirely ludicrous that the most vocal people in the IT world have been calling for throwing these dickheads in jail, when most spam "victims" get themselves into this mess on their own. i get next to ZERO spam, and i really have never seen what the whole fuss is about. i'm careful about where my email address ends up, and as a last resort i have a good spam filter. gmail does a really good job also. i have 50 invites, so whoever has managed to not get one (i really don't know how anyone couldn't have a gmail account by now), shoot me a message and i'll get one to you pronto.
really people, we have much much worse problems in the world than unsolicited email. the zealots over at spamhaus and spamcop and wherever else really make me chuckle, cuz the joke's on them. i'm glad this guy got off, and i hope they let every spammer that's in jail (i know there's a few) out so we can make room for more deserving scum.
i'll also add this, for you aol and yahoo users: i work for a company that occasionally (NOT hardly the primary business model) sends out what you would call spam, but really these retards signed up for the special offer emails on their own. your ISP's; aol, yahoo, earthlink actually BARGAIN with with some ISP relations person at my company about how much and when they will send the users email, and then they make sure it gets through. i'm sure this happens all the time.
the only person really responsible for keeping your inbox clean and crap-free is yourself.
it's wonderful that everyone is working on new linux products, but wouldn't it be nice if everyone could contribute to one or two *really* good distros, come up with a decent UI and blow everyone away?
i went to a load balancing seminar at HE's NOC in freemont a few years ago, but checking out the place and installing my box was pretty neat. especially on someone else's dime.
one of the reasons for all of the awful code and implementations in the world is because of languages like CF that make programming possible for people who don't know better.
has anyone read the short story collection, "The Last Man on Earth", edited by asimov? some of the best scifi short stories i've ever read.
by the title, you can tell what the stories concern, and after reading (many times), i'm sure that i don't want to live forever. maybe a 1000 years, but not *forever*.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah yes, the old "she must have asked for it because she wore sexy clothes"-type argument. That's really getting tired.
it's politically correct to entirely disconnect the two facts that a woman who wears "sexy" clothes (dresses like a whore) and then was assaulted, and i suppose the same would be pushed by the spam zealots in the case of a persons email address being available to many unsavory spam sources, and that person being spammed heavily. they ARE related, but one is not the cause of the other. a more accurate way to say it would be that a woman who dresses like a whore has a better probability of being raped, just as your email address all over the net has a better probability of being spammed.
I have my e-mail address in order to be reachable by the public and I have had the same one since July 1996. I refuse to change it or hide it because doing so would make me unreachable by the people I want to be reachable for. If I do that, I might as well give up on e-mail entirely.
and there's nothing wrong with that! just keep it out off the lists of spammers and you're fine. obfuscate it if you're posting to a mailing list, or better yet use another address for that kind of thing.
i'm not defending the act of spamming here. i'm simply calling for some personal "watching ones ass". reiterating my first paragraph, the fact that an address is available to spammers does not make it okay, just more likely!
Remember? There was a time when e-mail was used to communicate with the world, not just with intimate friends and family. It was exciting, fun. Spammers have killed that for the most part, and turned the Internet from an open community into a hostile spam sewer.
true, and i long for those days again. but the unwashed masses are all on the net now, armed with credit cards and limited restraint. the real solution in stopping spam is to make it unprofitable, and the only way to do that is to get people to stop buying crap from spammers and perpetuating the problem.
Maybe you would see it if you'd get a thousand a day like I do. (Yes, I use a good filter, dozens still get through.)
you're right. i probably would view it differently. maybe it's just that my email hygiene is better than yours. regardless, i still see very little spam.
Or if you'd be an ISP and have to deal with your mailservers dying under the load of millions of spams a day and having to shell out money to buy dedicated servers to deal with the crap (like my ISP), impacting all their tens of thousands of customers. Still think that's as "non-violent" as using some drugs?
haven't been in that position, but you must be more clear - is that spam coming thru the mailserver's open relay, or going to users. i'm going to assume it's going to the users. this is a real problem, and these are the people who should be suing spammers in civil courts, and raking in large monetary damages.
i will not ever defend the spammers. however, i will insist that they be civily prosecuted in federal courts, not state, as most US to US spam crosses state boundaries.
How about all the viruses spammers keep spreading so they have zombie networks to sell to bounce spam off of? This is where most spam comes from nowadays. How is this not the most criminal form of cracking, tresspass and theft of service?
thats bad, really bad, and if it can be proven that other computer laws were broken (like disrupting a network with a virus or worm), then many more levels of damages should result! seriously, wipe out their bank accounts, it's the only way. this is where criminal charges could come in. an analogy would be robbery (bad), and then armed robbery (real bad).
Spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail. If they signed up for it, it's not spam, by definition.
you're right, and i apologize for confusing this point. i think that the public really confuses this. when i refer to spam i am referring to the guys who do it without an
you forget one important factor: if you do not maintain the car, keep it clean, protect it from the elements, change its oil - it will wear out much quicker. the same applies to an email address - if you protect it, refrain from giving it out to every form on the web and keep it for your personal communications only, it will last much longer. herein lies the benefit of having a "real" email, and "junk" email.
i'd love a free ipod, but i'd never give them my day-to-day address, just some crap one that they can fill with spam for eternity for all i care.
maybe this is the cost of doing business on the internet - i don't know. i'm not defending spammers, i'm just trying to put it into perspective. when i look at it, i don't feel like spamming (annoying though it may be) is a very serious "crime".
:).
ISP's should probably do a better job at filtering spam, thus saving you the excess bandwidth use. ultimately, however, i feel that the final decision as to what to do with spam should be dealt with by the user.
at the risk of being the catalyst for another craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt posting, i'll say that the whole SMTP system is outdated and open for abuse. it needs to be overhauled, because in its current form, it encourages this type of activity. i'm not going to offer a solution, cuz i don't have one
also, i'm not sure what the market price of 1 MB of data transfer is, but i'm pretty certain it's miniscule (not 10c). regardless, it does add up. i'm sure spam does have a financial impact, but i doubt it's real impact is anywhere near the figures we hear about. you also mentioned jpegs in your email - images can only be sent as attachments, and most of the spam i have seen involves the loading of images from a webhost - turn off loading of images (gmail does this by default), and you're set.
okay lets sit back for a second...
this has gotten *way* out of control. a lot of us are the same people who rail on the courts and police for locking up nonviolent drug offenders so that there will be room for the fuckers who really need to be in jail (baby rapers, murderers, kidnappers, the very at-large terrorist element).
so why, oh why, are you upset that someone is NOT going to jail for commiting an utterly nonviolent offense? because you get some penis enlargement and get rich quick email? christ, use a filter. the place to hit these people is in the wallet, not the cornhole (as in pound-me-in-the-ass federal prison). if they're spamming, they're making untold millions of dollars - millions of dollars that can be snarfed up by the federal government.
it has really struck me as entirely ludicrous that the most vocal people in the IT world have been calling for throwing these dickheads in jail, when most spam "victims" get themselves into this mess on their own. i get next to ZERO spam, and i really have never seen what the whole fuss is about. i'm careful about where my email address ends up, and as a last resort i have a good spam filter. gmail does a really good job also. i have 50 invites, so whoever has managed to not get one (i really don't know how anyone couldn't have a gmail account by now), shoot me a message and i'll get one to you pronto.
really people, we have much much worse problems in the world than unsolicited email. the zealots over at spamhaus and spamcop and wherever else really make me chuckle, cuz the joke's on them. i'm glad this guy got off, and i hope they let every spammer that's in jail (i know there's a few) out so we can make room for more deserving scum.
i'll also add this, for you aol and yahoo users: i work for a company that occasionally (NOT hardly the primary business model) sends out what you would call spam, but really these retards signed up for the special offer emails on their own. your ISP's; aol, yahoo, earthlink actually BARGAIN with with some ISP relations person at my company about how much and when they will send the users email, and then they make sure it gets through. i'm sure this happens all the time.
the only person really responsible for keeping your inbox clean and crap-free is yourself.
just my 2c
really....hmmm. monitor size bothers me kinda. i like em big.
i'm buying myself some hardware for my bday this weekend. what should i get?
1) ipod photo
2) imac g5
3) ibook
4) mac mini and maybe an ipod
i can't decide! i really need an everyday desktop machine tho.
this is a good idea! i'm a cyclops, and i like neat pictures too.
Areo chairs
my ass is planted in one now!
Fooseball
they let us play air hockey and throw frisbees
free lunch
sometimes, and they're talkin about catering it
and all the pop u can drink
subsidized soda here!
80K a year??
almost!
no thanks, i'd still rather type and think that point and drool.
you're definitely a part of the problem. miscegenation is *not* good for humanity, imho.
okay, now call me a big racist, you know you want to.
perfect, mod parent up.
it's a messed up way to say it, but maybe this is a metaphor for the current state of NASA
i used to work at that newspaper.
fine then, i guess the One True Unix-like Desktop will have to be OS X.
it's wonderful that everyone is working on new linux products, but wouldn't it be nice if everyone could contribute to one or two *really* good distros, come up with a decent UI and blow everyone away?
here in my office, with our aeron chairs and air hockey, it almost feels like 1999....except for the not turning a profit part.
if their faces are blurry they'll die in 7 days!
i went to a load balancing seminar at HE's NOC in freemont a few years ago, but checking out the place and installing my box was pretty neat. especially on someone else's dime.
pretty good service...
whoa whoa, we need to talk. i left wv cuz i couldn't find a decent job.
not to be trusted with your privacy, period.
and a much lower cost of living than somewhere like New York or California.
although there is no state income tax in FL, you obviously have no idea what you are talking about, if you're referring to south florida.
what's a "linux support tech"? i live and work here as a developer and salaries for skilled IT people are not "the lowest in the country".
"non-technical programmers"
one of the reasons for all of the awful code and implementations in the world is because of languages like CF that make programming possible for people who don't know better.
99.9% of IRC is silence. nada. idling.
or in my case, a handful of friends (i talk to the same people on irc i did 10 years ago).
are you guys still reading story submissions, or just picking them at random?
one of these, maybe?
has anyone read the short story collection, "The Last Man on Earth", edited by asimov? some of the best scifi short stories i've ever read.
by the title, you can tell what the stories concern, and after reading (many times), i'm sure that i don't want to live forever. maybe a 1000 years, but not *forever*.