A simlpe mirror (like the ones girls have in their hand-bags) is enough to filter out polarised light. Simply hold the mirror against the screen at an angle of about 45 degrees and view the screen through the mirror (use two mirrors, if you're unable to read backwards!): only light polarised vertically to the mirror will be reflcted and thus visible...
Hotmail still uses FreeBSD with Apache (recently upgraded to 1.3.26) on some of its servers. The Web-Frontend is entirely on W2K, but a lot of the hard work is still done by FreeBSD:
When I was in Mexico, I used some Internetcafes there too.
Back home (in Italy), I got lots of viruses from Mexico (obviously the PCs in the cafes got infected by Nimda, CodeRed, Klez and friends). A few months later I also noticed an increase in spam-mails from all over the world.
For me it's clear: viruses also spread your e-mail addresses a lot, and finally your address ends up in some spammers database.
Spammers obviously use *any conceivable method* to harvest addresses.
Otherwise you would know: there's not a single posting by some slashdot "editor" which does not have typing, spelling, grammar, syntax and/or even semantic errors.
Slashdot "editors" do not know about spellcheckers and never do proof-reading. They even don't read the articles they link to and put misleading titles, or don't read what the other "editors" published a few hours before, which result in duplicate postings.
Please don't flame me: I also happen to make errors when writing, but at least I don't call myself an "editor", and english is the 4th language I learned.
I too am firmly convinced, that anti-spam laws are the only way out. But polititians are known to wake up late...
In the meantime we could take countermeasures like putting up a link to some spammers homepage on slashdot's homepage with the title "spammer of the day", or even "spammer of the hour". Every slashdot reader is sollicited to click on that link and reload the page a few times... the server will instantly get slashdottet!
But first make sure, the advertised link in the spam is really the spammers webserver, to not harm innocent webmaster's business. Maybe we could get fresh addresses of spemvertised websites from databases like spamcop...
This way, the spammers webserver will soon be down, and further (interested) readers cannot see or buy the advertised product.
As a webmaster of one of the biggest e-commerce sites in Italy, I know, that it is only a (very) little effort to design pages perfectly compatible and viewable with *all* browsers. If you design your web-pages with standards in mind, it is no overhead at all...
But I know something much more important: Netscape users are 3 times more likely to buy goods online! I tried to find an answer for this:
Netscape users are often hard-core veterans and more accustomed o use the Net for business
Some users are online since 1996 or even longer, and at that time Netscape was the only real browser. They didn't *upgrade* to MSIE, but are still loyal to Netscape. Those same users have the money to buy online
Young, 14-year-old freaks got their PC last Christmas and are surfing a lot. They visit also our mall, they do show up in the browser-stats,... but they don't buy!
Here's the analysis of the buyer's browsers (as opposed to the visitor's browsers) for the month of June 2002: 86% MSIE and 13% Netscape
EU does not exist, neither as a TLD, nor a a country. Notice: Germany (DE) and Great Britain (GB is part of UK, which is the real TLD) are part of the EU, but show up separately. So China *is* number 6!
Steps towards UK membership (from the EC-UK website):
1961
Four years after the Treaty of Rome had been signed by the original six members, the United Kingdom applied to join. Ireland and Denmark also submitted applications, followed in 1962 by Norway.
1963
Negotiations went on until 1963 when President de Gaulle of France vetoed the United Kingdom application. This caused negotiations with all the applicants to be stopped.
1967
The four countries applied again but the French refused to allow negotiations.
1973
Following further successful negotiations the United Kingdom, Ireland and Denmark joined the Community on 1 January. Norway did not join because a majority of its people voted against it in a referendum.
1975
In 1975 a referendum was held in the United Kingdom which confirmed the membership.
Something related was already done about 6 years ago by Logos. It's not a network like Seti@Home, but it involves lots of people distributed all over the world. It still works - check it out!
One of the e-commerce companies I'm consulting, uses opt-in for their mailinglist. Their CEO often tried to buy some of those million-address-cds, but I was successful in convincing not to do so: "The ISP will cut your line, hackers will DoS your servers and You will be out of business in less than a week!" I told him. Well, it helped: they are still in business since 1997.
Using opt-in, you won't collect millions of e-mail adresses, but it is easy to collect a few thousand in a short period. A few thousand of interested people.
Here some stats out of my experience:
we sent no more than 2 e-mails a month
2,6% of the subscribers use unworking e-mail adresses - we mark them as invalid
8,3% of the subscribers have unsubscribed
after sending news about some promotion to our subscribers, orders triple for about 2 days
if the promotion lasts for a week, most will order on the last day
My advice: use opt-in if you want to make real money.
The rest of the world (= non-us) accounts for about 67% of all internet users, and is growing more rapidly, as there is more room for new users. The US is reaching saturation.
Despite more than 2/3 of the Internet-users beeing non-us-citizens, 90% of all spam originates in the US. This is most likely due to permissive legislature in the US. In Italy for example collecting (e-mail)addresses and other personal data is illegal, unless you have written permission from the user, or you have a business realationship (italian law #675/96, aka privacy law).
IMHO, stopping the increasing number of spam-mails is only possible with legislature forcing opt-in methods for advertisers and huge fines for those who don't conform.
Badtrans is hitting my mailbox multiple times harder than Sircam, MTX and CodeRainbow combined. And it's only around since 24th November.
Quite "every" Outlook user I know of got infected with it.
But then maybe this virus is hitting only Europe, so US-citizens haven't noticed it, yet.
Needless to say, I'm happy to read my e-mail on a *nix box.:-)
You cannot build new streets, dig for an underground or add a garage to your home without risking to hit some ancient remains. There comes an archaeologist: "stop digging! we have to carefully analyze that and to preserve it for the future, for the science"...
And what about us? Our own life and our children? Should we not have the right to use an undergroud to drive to the inner city? See, our streets are exploding with traffic, and I don't find a parking lot in a one-mile radius...!
Italy is so full of archaelological remains, a big part of it goes "undiscovered": "hey, acqua-in-bocca, don't tell anyone about the bronze statue I found in our back-garden. I want my swimming pool to be finished before summer!".
There's no need for new TLDs, and the "correct" use of existing ones like orginally intended would solve all problems and shortcomings. "Hierarchical" use of domainnames like in UK, Austria and Australia would also serve to take the load of DNS-servers, resulting in sleeker infrastructures and faster overall "Internet-response-times".
Moreover the prices for a domain should be double of what they are now, if registrars really are concerned about surviving.
Recently I migrated a mid-sized server from FreeBSD to Linux... it took me about a month: in this process I also changed database software, rewrote many programs (written in C, PHP and Shellscripts) and had to test lots of functions...
Usually it is quite simple to migrate between Unices and Linux, but its quite a challenge to switch from a Microsoft platform to some *nix/Apache platform, if the server serves more than simple static pages.
I believe, the process to migrate from WinXXXX/IIS to *nix/Apache will take a few months, not weeks, for management decision (big corporations are not able to produce decisions in a few hours, but will take weeks - till the next "meeting" or so), reprogramming, data-migration, testing etc.
That's the reason, why Netcraft itself stated:
Switching from a Microsoft to Unix platform will usually involve some significant effort for a site with any significant investment in dynamic content.
So give us time, and lets analyse the stats again in a few months.
The frontend of www.ebay.com is a cluster of servers running Microsoft WindowsNT (see netcraft). You know, the server-licenses for all those boxes may cost a lot of money, unless you have a good contract with Microsoft... ...and Microsoft will not renew this good contract, when you don't agree to its dictat!
Maybe its time for Ebay to switch to Linux (as Amazon, Altavista and others did) to be finally free.
BTW: in Italy like in Germany (and maybe all EU) it is perfectly legal to resell software - I did it several times.
The only thing stopping it these days is
Linux's smaller marketshare
If I recall correctly, Linux' marketshare among webservers is around 40% (Apache has 61%), while Windows' is around 25%. Considering that worms spread among servers, and that among the top webservers there are lots of Linux but barely Windows, worms "should" spread much easier under Linux/Apache than under NT/IIS.
Several studies from Netcraft to Securityspace show you, that neither IIS as webserver nor NT as OS is the most popular among InternetServers.
nslookup 209.3.150.130 gives mail.worcestercs.org, but the domain worcestercs.org is no more in use and Networksolutions tells me it is available...
ARIN on the other hand assigns the IP-address 209.3.150.130 to: Qwest Communications, WORCESTER COUNTY SCHOOL (they have a block of 128 addresses)
209.3.150.130 seems now to be a dialup address of
IConNet.NET
Slashdot Mirror
You don't need 3-d glasses or polarised glasses!
:-)
A simlpe mirror (like the ones girls have in their hand-bags) is enough to filter out polarised light. Simply hold the mirror against the screen at an angle of about 45 degrees and view the screen through the mirror (use two mirrors, if you're unable to read backwards!): only light polarised vertically to the mirror will be reflcted and thus visible...
Simple optics one-o-one.
ms
Or even worse: cloned!
Never trust too much un New Technology!
ms
--
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=ad.law10 .hotmail.com
Same for ad.pav0.hotmail.com, law2-ad.hotmail.com, and many others.
Don't fix, what ain't broken - maybe Microsoft understood this rule.
Back home (in Italy), I got lots of viruses from Mexico (obviously the PCs in the cafes got infected by Nimda, CodeRed, Klez and friends). A few months later I also noticed an increase in spam-mails from all over the world.
For me it's clear: viruses also spread your e-mail addresses a lot, and finally your address ends up in some spammers database.
Spammers obviously use *any conceivable method* to harvest addresses.
Sorry, to tell you Norway is not part of the European Union.
Otherwise you would know: there's not a single posting by some slashdot "editor" which does not have typing, spelling, grammar, syntax and/or even semantic errors.
Slashdot "editors" do not know about spellcheckers and never do proof-reading. They even don't read the articles they link to and put misleading titles, or don't read what the other "editors" published a few hours before, which result in duplicate postings.
Please don't flame me: I also happen to make errors when writing, but at least I don't call myself an "editor", and english is the 4th language I learned.
ms
The first three months of last year (jan - mar 2001) were even more interesting:
- visitors: 71% MSIE, 23% Netscape
- buyers: 49% MSIE, 51% Netscape
So again: Netscape users are 3 times more likely to buy something, than a visitor which uses MSIE.For the same period of 2001 we analyzed also the visitors for different sections of our mall:
- Fashion, T-Shirts: 80% MSIE
- Coffe-related products: 56% MSIE
- Wine: 44% MSIE
- Gourmet products: 40% MSIE
We hardly sold any t-shirts, but the mall is selling lots of wines to lots of returning customers.The numbers have now obviously shifted towards MSIE, but still Netscape is *very* important for anyone doing e-business.
Markus Senoner
In the meantime we could take countermeasures like putting up a link to some spammers homepage on slashdot's homepage with the title "spammer of the day", or even "spammer of the hour". Every slashdot reader is sollicited to click on that link and reload the page a few times... the server will instantly get slashdottet!
But first make sure, the advertised link in the spam is really the spammers webserver, to not harm innocent webmaster's business. Maybe we could get fresh addresses of spemvertised websites from databases like spamcop...
This way, the spammers webserver will soon be down, and further (interested) readers cannot see or buy the advertised product.
Make the spammers loose their business!
ms
But I know something much more important: Netscape users are 3 times more likely to buy goods online!
I tried to find an answer for this:
- Netscape users are often hard-core veterans and more accustomed o use the Net for business
- Some users are online since 1996 or even longer, and at that time Netscape was the only real browser. They didn't *upgrade* to MSIE, but are still loyal to Netscape. Those same users have the money to buy online
- Young, 14-year-old freaks got their PC last Christmas and are surfing a lot. They visit also our mall, they do show up in the browser-stats,
... but they don't buy!
Here's the analysis of the buyer's browsers (as opposed to the visitor's browsers) for the month of June 2002: 86% MSIE and 13% NetscapeI wonder, how this list was calculated. Anyone?
Steps towards UK membership (from the EC-UK website):
ms
Using opt-in, you won't collect millions of e-mail adresses, but it is easy to collect a few thousand in a short period. A few thousand of interested people.
Here some stats out of my experience:
- we sent no more than 2 e-mails a month
- 2,6% of the subscribers use unworking e-mail adresses - we mark them as invalid
- 8,3% of the subscribers have unsubscribed
- after sending news about some promotion to our subscribers, orders triple for about 2 days
- if the promotion lasts for a week, most will order on the last day
My advice: use opt-in if you want to make real money.ms
- Every program has at least one bug
- and can be shortened by one instruction
which induces that the "optimised" program will have no instructions, and obviously won't work.ms
ms
--
Despite more than 2/3 of the Internet-users beeing non-us-citizens, 90% of all spam originates in the US. This is most likely due to permissive legislature in the US. In Italy for example collecting (e-mail)addresses and other personal data is illegal, unless you have written permission from the user, or you have a business realationship (italian law #675/96, aka privacy law).
IMHO, stopping the increasing number of spam-mails is only possible with legislature forcing opt-in methods for advertisers and huge fines for those who don't conform.
Ciao,
ms
Badtrans is hitting my mailbox multiple times harder than Sircam, MTX and CodeRainbow combined. And it's only around since 24th November. Quite "every" Outlook user I know of got infected with it.
But then maybe this virus is hitting only Europe, so US-citizens haven't noticed it, yet.
Needless to say, I'm happy to read my e-mail on a *nix box. :-)
ms
You cannot build new streets, dig for an underground or add a garage to your home without risking to hit some ancient remains. There comes an archaeologist: "stop digging! we have to carefully analyze that and to preserve it for the future, for the science"...
And what about us? Our own life and our children? Should we not have the right to use an undergroud to drive to the inner city? See, our streets are exploding with traffic, and I don't find a parking lot in a one-mile radius...!
Italy is so full of archaelological remains, a big part of it goes "undiscovered": "hey, acqua-in-bocca, don't tell anyone about the bronze statue I found in our back-garden. I want my swimming pool to be finished before summer!".
Yeah, that's Italy.
ms
- sending spam via SMS to cellular phones is illegal (strange: the sender aka spammer will pay the bill)
- sending spam via e-mail is legal (here the innocent receiver has to pay the BIG part of the bandwith involved)
- persistent cookies are illegal (only session cookies are allowed)
- nothing about spyware (as if it were less intrusive than cookies!!!)
More here: Heise Onlinelong live our clueless politicians!
ms
There's no need for new TLDs, and the "correct" use of existing ones like orginally intended would solve all problems and shortcomings.
"Hierarchical" use of domainnames like in UK, Austria and Australia would also serve to take the load of DNS-servers, resulting in sleeker infrastructures and faster overall "Internet-response-times".
Moreover the prices for a domain should be double of what they are now, if registrars really are concerned about surviving.
Usually it is quite simple to migrate between Unices and Linux, but its quite a challenge to switch from a Microsoft platform to some *nix/Apache platform, if the server serves more than simple static pages.
I believe, the process to migrate from WinXXXX/IIS to *nix/Apache will take a few months, not weeks, for management decision (big corporations are not able to produce decisions in a few hours, but will take weeks - till the next "meeting" or so), reprogramming, data-migration, testing etc.
That's the reason, why Netcraft itself stated:
So give us time, and lets analyse the stats again in a few months.ms ms
You know, the server-licenses for all those boxes may cost a lot of money, unless you have a good contract with Microsoft...
Maybe its time for Ebay to switch to Linux (as Amazon, Altavista and others did) to be finally free.
BTW: in Italy like in Germany (and maybe all EU) it is perfectly legal to resell software - I did it several times.
Just my 2c.
ms
If I recall correctly, Linux' marketshare among webservers is around 40% (Apache has 61%), while Windows' is around 25%. Considering that worms spread among servers, and that among the top webservers there are lots of Linux but barely Windows, worms "should" spread much easier under Linux/Apache than under NT/IIS.
Several studies from Netcraft to Securityspace show you, that neither IIS as webserver nor NT as OS is the most popular among InternetServers.
ms
Thu Jul 12 03:39 [209.3.150.130/mail.worcestercs.org] 3 probesr ] 4 probes
Thu Jul 26 23:05 [216.93.104.34/grex.cyberspace.org] 2 probes
Sat Jul 28 12:43 [200.193.215.2/?] 3 probes
Thu Aug 09 15:06 [195.223.214.3/?] 3 probes
Sat Aug 11 04:04 [200.177.196.124/dl-tnt4-C8B1C47C.sao.terra.com.b
Sat Aug 11 19:45 [195.231.103.194/?] 3 probes
Thu Aug 30 15:18 [213.64.199.226/h226n2fls34o1115.telia.com] 67 probes
Wed Sep 05 15:16 [195.161.214.7/dialup7.mari-el.ru] 5 probes
Sun Sep 09 15:40 [195.22.191.60/?] 2 probes
Fri Sep 14 18:36 [202.95.156.6/semar.yogya.pesat.net.id] 1 probes
Well, the origins of those probes are quite well sparsed - it will be difficult to trace it back...
ms
nslookup 209.3.150.130 gives mail.worcestercs.org, but the domain worcestercs.org is no more in use and Networksolutions tells me it is available...
ARIN on the other hand assigns the IP-address 209.3.150.130 to: Qwest Communications, WORCESTER COUNTY SCHOOL (they have a block of 128 addresses)
209.3.150.130 seems now to be a dialup address of IConNet.NET
ms