In 1997 I worked for a local ISP, and sometimes in the evening around 7pm (when no one of us was in the offices), some of the servers were unreachable for a few minutes and rebooted. We investigated for months! Unfortunately it didn't happen, when we stayed there afterhours - so we had no clue what went on.
Finally we discovered it was the cleaning lady, that unplugged one of the servers to plug in his vacuum cleaner...
Now the servers are locked up in a room, where only authorised personnel has access. And their uptime is several 100 days.
If the FFII wants to be taken seriously, they should start by face-lifting their website. A more serious layout with less pastel colors would give them a lot more credibility:
bourdeaux-title, which gets poison-green on a mouse-over
pink, sky-blue and cyan colored links on the left
hundreds of lines of text on the first page
page renders chaoticly when browser (MSIE) is less than 1024 pixels width (bad use of CSS?)
font-size: xx-large for the link "Unterstützen" (i refer to the german page)
Considering the amount of spam(*) coming(**) from open relays, zombies and whatever inside Comcast, it must have about 25% of the worlds internet users.
As of an estimate by NUA (dated September 2002!), there's a total of 606 million people online. Considernig we are in 2004, and the Internet popuplation hasn't decreased since, Comcast must have at least 150 million customers!
(*) about 45% comes from China and South Korea. Blocking all IP-classes from Comcast, Korea and China effectively reduces the spam in my Inbox by about 70%!!!
(**) "coming", not "originating" - my numbers refer to the distribution of open relays and zombies, which get abused for sending out spam. The real origin is usually inside the US (about 90% says spamhaus.org) and aimed at US-citizens, but sent undiscriminately to all e-mail adresses spread over our planet.
Lastly, in the Windows OTLP category HP servers were used by 7 of 10 organizations, and Microsoft SQL Server was the DBMS choice for seven respondents.
Neither WindowsNT, nor MS SQL are generally a choice for the top databases. In fact, to make the entry in this list, a Windows-Database was required to be only half as big as databases on other platforms:
In order to qualify for the TopTen program consideration, any commercial production database implementation was required to feature a minimum of 500 GB of data for Microsoft Corp.'s Windows and NT platforms and 1 TB of data for all other platforms
Swedish is similar to German. I know german and english, and this helps me a lot to understand most written swedish text - the other way may be true for you, if you know swedish and english. I know some swedes, and they usually speak rather well german.
However, if you don't understand german, there's hope for you: the swedisch version of the same text.
Sweden is a year late on putting the Anti-Spam EU-directive to law! Most other EU-countries have strong anti-spam laws for several months - and they work well!
See: http://shorl.com/fitreryninatu
(sorry, it's not english, but as a Swede you maybe understand german)
A few months ago (I think it was September) a new law was passed, and it got even better (or worse, from a spammers point of view):
Spammer now will be fined up to 90000 Euros and 3 years of jail
It's a pity, 95% of spammers are located in USA, so I living in Europe can neither collect, nor sue. It would be a nice income, as I get about 200 spam-mails a day!
Imagine, if each Internet citizen is sending me one single unsolicited e-mail...
I should opt out from each of them?
If it takes 5 seconds to scan a single message, identify it as unwanted, searching for the opt-out link and clicking on it, this would take me 833333 hours, or 190 years (assuming I sit 12 hours a day in front of my pc).
It took Microsoft 3 years to switch the front-end servers (running FreeBSD with Beo or Apache) to Windows2000 and IIS (they also tried to switch to WinNT4, but failed several times).
The back-end servers are still the same (running Solaris). There's no mention anywhere on Microsofts site that the back-end servers were migrated too, and neither is there written, *all* of Hotmail was migrated from Unix to Windows.
Even some front-end servers are still running FreeBSD with Apache. Those servers seem to serve ads and send the e-mail (running qmail?).
Other sources are becoming less each month that passes. You may find someting on the WayBackMachine, as Microsoft has revisioned or moved its documents about the Unix->Windows migration several times in the past. For example: there's no mention of Solaris anymore, only about "Unix"...
the mail Database is still running on Sun-boxes with Oracle
e-mail and ads are still handled by FreeBSD-boxes with Apache.
only the (most visible) front-end WebServers are now running Win2K (it took about 3 years to migrate them)
You can find detailed descriptions of how Microsoft migrated the front-end Webservers from FreeBDS to Win2K. The rest doing the horse-work was not migrated, and probably never will.
Unless you work in the UK for an American credit card company that routes all external email via its US mail servers.
Where's the problem? If, say MX for visa.com has an IP-address in ARIN, and SMTP-servers used to send mail with from-address someone@visa.com use also IPs from ARIN, you may be anywhere in the world.
Obviously you should authenticate when connecting to the SMTP-server to send your e-mails. Otherwise the SMTP-server would be an open relay.
Or you're on holiday abroad...
Say you're on holiday in South Africa - do you connect to an african SMTP-server to send your mail, or do you have a standard SMTP-server with authentication configured in your laptop?
...it got there via Amsterdam, New York and Washington
An e-mail may pass a lot of hops. Important is the SMTP-servers IP-address is in the same region as the MX-servers IP-address associated to the sending domain.
But usually your home is in the same continent, or even inside the same country and city as your working place.
Preventing an e-mail from a domain registered in the USA (ip-address from ARIN) to be routed through a server in Asia (which has an ip-address from APNIC) would stop all spam abusing open relays in Korea an China. And for us Europeans, limitations of mail sent with domain+mailserver addresses inside RIPE would effectively cut all spam from USA and Asia (which is over 90%!).
Such a check limiting sender and domain inside the same regional registry could be implemented now without any extensions to protocols...
Sendmail "handles an estimated 75 percent of the Internet's email traffic."
Assuming each e-mail passes on average 3 MTAs, and sendmail is used on 50% of those servers, that gives:
.50 (probability first server rung sendmail)
.50*.50 = 0.25 (probability second server runs sendmail, if first didn't)
.50*.50*.50 = 0.125 (probability third server runs sendmail if first two didn't)
Summarizing: in 87,5% of cases, the e-mail was handled (= routed through) by at least one MTA running sendmail.
If sendmail is deployed on 40% of the servers, the same reasoning gives a total of 62,4%. So the newspaper talking about "routing" and not about the percentage of servers running sendmail, may be correct.
People are more cautious about opening random mail because SoBig is on the lose
This wouldn't change the amount of spam in my inbox...
Inboxes are stuff full of viruses and anti-virus autoresponder messages, so that there's no room left for spam
This too wouldn't change the amount of spam in my inbox...
Spammer's machine keeps mysteriously rebooting
Very close! Supposedly there are only a handful of real spammers on our globe, and shutting down any single of them should have a notable positive impact.
BTW: most spammers reside in the US - the spammer from NZ is an exception. But due to over-broad interpretation of the first amendment or commercial interests, it seems, US-lawyers don't want to shut down spammers.
The backend is not visible from the Internet, but it is known running on a pool of Sun Enterprise Servers (E4500). Microsoft itself never stated, they migrated Hotmail "fully" to Windows - they simlpy migrated most of the most-visible front-end Webservers (which is also clear by reading their migration-papers).
our investment in the consumer space is now focused around Hotmail and MSN
Does this imply, Microsoft will finally switch Hotmail fully to WindowsXX, migrating the backend database from Oracle-Solaris and the rest of the webservers from Apache-FreeBSD to a MS-Win2K/MS-IIS/MS-SQL solution?
For those who don't know: Hotmail is still running on FreeBSD with Apache for Webserving and Oracle on Sun-boxen for the database. Have a look here for prove!
In the EU, privacy laws protect people's privacy by forbidding to use personal information (e-mail address included) about persons which didn't give explicit written consent to do so, or which do not already have a business-relationship with you. The privacy-laws were not written to protect against spam, but they work perfectly in stopping spam.
If only those other countries outside Europe would also enact similar laws, spammers would all be fined into oblivion and the Internet would be a better place. But as long as countries like the US spit on peoples privacy, there's no hope.
ms
--
*) there's a simple definition of spam (= unsolicited and bulk), I agree with: http://www.spamhaus.org/definition.html
... the original ran on freeBSD, and even the coders in Redmond had a hell of a time getting it to work on NT/2000 based servers!
Hotmail is still running on freeBSD with Apache for Webserving. Have a look here
for prove!
And I suspect, the database on the backside is also still running Oracle on Sun boxen. Only the front-WebServers were substituted by Win2K after a long period of trial-and-error. As most people only query www.hotmail.com, they wouldn't notice the truth about Hotmail, and Microsoft won't tell you either. In fact Microsoft never announced, they successfully migrated Hotmail to Win2K, but they silently want us to believe this happened.
Slashdot Mirror
In 1997 I worked for a local ISP, and sometimes in the evening around 7pm (when no one of us was in the offices), some of the servers were unreachable for a few minutes and rebooted. We investigated for months! Unfortunately it didn't happen, when we stayed there afterhours - so we had no clue what went on.
Finally we discovered it was the cleaning lady, that unplugged one of the servers to plug in his vacuum cleaner...
Now the servers are locked up in a room, where only authorised personnel has access. And their uptime is several 100 days.
ms
There's a notable drop in reports on 28 april 2004. The exact day two US-spammers were arrested. (see eweek.com)
A handful other spammers in jail, and the spam-rate will drop to below 5% of todays volume.
On the other hand Italy has a law (since September 2003), which seeks up to 3 years in jail and fines up to 90.000 Euros!
Guess, which law I find better? Jail-time would be payed by us, the innocent citizen, while fines weight on the offenders pocket!
Have a look at the following graph showing the statistic of spam per day during the last year (thanks to Spamcop).
Clearly the CAN-Spam act did in no way reduce the amount of spam.
- they knew the cable-lift was there (its on all maps)
- they knew they were flying low
- it wasn't the first time they did it
- they filmed it, to brag about it
- afterwards they intentionally destroyed the film
But unfortunetely the flew too high and thus touched and cut the cable!I'm selling mine for 4999,- Euro - is that fair? The nick is also not bad: "MS" (those are my initials btw. - nothing Microsoft related!)
As of an estimate by NUA (dated September 2002!), there's a total of 606 million people online. Considernig we are in 2004, and the Internet popuplation hasn't decreased since, Comcast must have at least 150 million customers!
(*) about 45% comes from China and South Korea. Blocking all IP-classes from Comcast, Korea and China effectively reduces the spam in my Inbox by about 70%!!!
(**) "coming", not "originating" - my numbers refer to the distribution of open relays and zombies, which get abused for sending out spam. The real origin is usually inside the US (about 90% says spamhaus.org) and aimed at US-citizens, but sent undiscriminately to all e-mail adresses spread over our planet.
That should be:
However the default should be not to send any automated notice at all! Don't we already have too much mails clogging our poor servers?
ms
Lastly, in the Windows OTLP category HP servers were used by 7 of 10 organizations, and Microsoft SQL Server was the DBMS choice for seven respondents.
Neither WindowsNT, nor MS SQL are generally a choice for the top databases. In fact, to make the entry in this list, a Windows-Database was required to be only half as big as databases on other platforms:
In order to qualify for the TopTen program consideration, any commercial production database implementation was required to feature a minimum of 500 GB of data for Microsoft Corp.'s Windows and NT platforms and 1 TB of data for all other platforms
ms
Sorry, if I'm wrong.
Swedish is similar to German. I know german and english, and this helps me a lot to understand most written swedish text - the other way may be true for you, if you know swedish and english. I know some swedes, and they usually speak rather well german.
However, if you don't understand german, there's hope for you: the swedisch version of the same text.
Sweden is a year late on putting the Anti-Spam EU-directive to law! Most other EU-countries have strong anti-spam laws for several months - and they work well!
See: http://shorl.com/fitreryninatu (sorry, it's not english, but as a Swede you maybe understand german)
Spammer now will be fined up to 90000 Euros and 3 years of jail
It's a pity, 95% of spammers are located in USA, so I living in Europe can neither collect, nor sue. It would be a nice income, as I get about 200 spam-mails a day!
I should opt out from each of them?
If it takes 5 seconds to scan a single message, identify it as unwanted, searching for the opt-out link and clicking on it, this would take me 833333 hours, or 190 years (assuming I sit 12 hours a day in front of my pc).
Tuscany/Italy? Perfect! In Italy spammers are fined with 90.000 Euro and 3 years jail.
The back-end servers are still the same (running Solaris). There's no mention anywhere on Microsofts site that the back-end servers were migrated too, and neither is there written, *all* of Hotmail was migrated from Unix to Windows.
Even some front-end servers are still running FreeBSD with Apache. Those servers seem to serve ads and send the e-mail (running qmail?).
Here's the proof:
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=ad.law10 .hotmail.com
Other sources are becoming less each month that passes. You may find someting on the WayBackMachine, as Microsoft has revisioned or moved its documents about the Unix->Windows migration several times in the past. For example: there's no mention of Solaris anymore, only about "Unix"...
ms
- the mail Database is still running on Sun-boxes with Oracle
- e-mail and ads are still handled by FreeBSD-boxes with Apache.
- only the (most visible) front-end WebServers are now running Win2K (it took about 3 years to migrate them)
You can find detailed descriptions of how Microsoft migrated the front-end Webservers from FreeBDS to Win2K. The rest doing the horse-work was not migrated, and probably never will.My 2c.
Where's the problem? If, say MX for visa.com has an IP-address in ARIN, and SMTP-servers used to send mail with from-address someone@visa.com use also IPs from ARIN, you may be anywhere in the world.
Obviously you should authenticate when connecting to the SMTP-server to send your e-mails. Otherwise the SMTP-server would be an open relay.
Or you're on holiday abroad...
Say you're on holiday in South Africa - do you connect to an african SMTP-server to send your mail, or do you have a standard SMTP-server with authentication configured in your laptop?
An e-mail may pass a lot of hops. Important is the SMTP-servers IP-address is in the same region as the MX-servers IP-address associated to the sending domain.
Do I miss something?
But usually your home is in the same continent, or even inside the same country and city as your working place.
Preventing an e-mail from a domain registered in the USA (ip-address from ARIN) to be routed through a server in Asia (which has an ip-address from APNIC) would stop all spam abusing open relays in Korea an China. And for us Europeans, limitations of mail sent with domain+mailserver addresses inside RIPE would effectively cut all spam from USA and Asia (which is over 90%!).
Such a check limiting sender and domain inside the same regional registry could be implemented now without any extensions to protocols...
ms
Assuming each e-mail passes on average 3 MTAs, and sendmail is used on 50% of those servers, that gives:
- .50 (probability first server rung sendmail)
- .50*.50 = 0.25 (probability second server runs sendmail, if first didn't)
- .50*.50*.50 = 0.125 (probability third server runs sendmail if first two didn't)
Summarizing: in 87,5% of cases, the e-mail was handled (= routed through) by at least one MTA running sendmail.If sendmail is deployed on 40% of the servers, the same reasoning gives a total of 62,4%. So the newspaper talking about "routing" and not about the percentage of servers running sendmail, may be correct.
My 2c.
- People are more cautious about opening random mail because SoBig is on the lose
This wouldn't change the amount of spam in my inbox...- Inboxes are stuff full of viruses and anti-virus autoresponder messages, so that there's no room left for spam
This too wouldn't change the amount of spam in my inbox...- Spammer's machine keeps mysteriously rebooting
Very close! Supposedly there are only a handful of real spammers on our globe, and shutting down any single of them should have a notable positive impact.BTW: most spammers reside in the US - the spammer from NZ is an exception. But due to over-broad interpretation of the first amendment or commercial interests, it seems, US-lawyers don't want to shut down spammers.
My 2c
ad.law11.hotmail.com
ad.law14.hotmail.com
The backend is not visible from the Internet, but it is known running on a pool of Sun Enterprise Servers (E4500). Microsoft itself never stated, they migrated Hotmail "fully" to Windows - they simlpy migrated most of the most-visible front-end Webservers (which is also clear by reading their migration-papers).
ms
Does this imply, Microsoft will finally switch Hotmail fully to WindowsXX, migrating the backend database from Oracle-Solaris and the rest of the webservers from Apache-FreeBSD to a MS-Win2K/MS-IIS/MS-SQL solution?
For those who don't know: Hotmail is still running on FreeBSD with Apache for Webserving and Oracle on Sun-boxen for the database. Have a look here for prove!
ms
In the EU, privacy laws protect people's privacy by forbidding to use personal information (e-mail address included) about persons which didn't give explicit written consent to do so, or which do not already have a business-relationship with you. The privacy-laws were not written to protect against spam, but they work perfectly in stopping spam.
If only those other countries outside Europe would also enact similar laws, spammers would all be fined into oblivion and the Internet would be a better place. But as long as countries like the US spit on peoples privacy, there's no hope.
ms
--
*) there's a simple definition of spam (= unsolicited and bulk), I agree with: http://www.spamhaus.org/definition.html
Hotmail is still running on freeBSD with Apache for Webserving. Have a look here for prove!
And I suspect, the database on the backside is also still running Oracle on Sun boxen. Only the front-WebServers were substituted by Win2K after a long period of trial-and-error. As most people only query www.hotmail.com, they wouldn't notice the truth about Hotmail, and Microsoft won't tell you either. In fact Microsoft never announced, they successfully migrated Hotmail to Win2K, but they silently want us to believe this happened.
ms