Can the money they make and/or "save" on this stuff ever possibly justify the expenses that must be going into research/development and other costs (including pissed off consumers) for this stuff?
The problem came when precinct workers tried to electronically send results from the 953 new machines to election headquarters,
unexpectedly overloading computer servers.
(Italics mine)
"Unexpectedly"?? What, the servers hadn't been set up with the expectation that they'd be receiving results from lots of new machines at the same time?
Just try tuning into any football (soccer) match on the BBC World Service. Fine, if you're able to tune in the old-fashioned way, using your shortwave radio (a lot harder to do now, though, for those of us in North America, since the BBC no longer specifically targets this part of the world via shortwave). Try listening to the webcast, and all you get (over and over) is:
"Due to restrictions imposed by the rights holders, BBC World Service is unable to offer the current program on the Internet."
Perhaps it's time to get college radio to be independent of RIAA and start playing actual college bands. Let regular radio broadcast the big dollar bands, and have college radio broadcast someone who's actually from their demographic.
As the law is now, not playing RIAA material is not enough to get "college radio" -- or other "independent" and "community" stations -- out of still having to give money to the RIAA in the form of statutory license fee.
Just how do you think controls the media in the U.S.? It's not the liberals.
This is actually another aspect of this whole electronic voting thing I don't understand. "Liberals" have actually shown an incomprehensible faith in electronic voting, even Diebold machines. E.g. the ACLU of Southern California.
On 14 October, The Independent ran summary story and an investigative report on this very same story. Nice to see Wired and various online outlets looking into this; why hasn't there been more coverage in the mainstream press, though?
Under its contracts with VeriSign ICANN can impose up to $100,000 in fines
or strip the company of its authority to operate the registries that handle dot-com and dot-net Internet addresses.
"The government has given itself sweeping powers to police Internet content and demonstrated it is willing to use them," said Somasekhar Sundaresan, a lawyer specialising in technology issues. "What makes it worse is that rather than acting with transparency and explaining why it was necessary, ISPs were ordered to block 'Kynhun' without being given facts or reasons. All of which creates fear of a police raj."
What has most alarmed freedom-of-speechniks is that this is not a random instance. Increasingly, Big Brother is turning his gaze from pornography to political debates and ideological differences.
Any false property right is a danger to societies security. Just look at how slavery led to the civil war.
How would you define a false property right? In your view, are there any property rights that are not false? If some property rights are false, and others true (or legitimate) what criteria are we to use to distinguish between the two? Clearly, there is no right to have slaves, so any claim of that as a right is a false claim; but what is it about copyright that is similar to slavery that makes it also a false property right -- especially if there is such thing as a true property right?
Seems there needs to be a significant penalty for making false accusations -- otherwise, what's to keep the RIAA from suing everyone and then withdrawing suits on a case by case basis after disrupting a lot of people's lives?
you can't help but wonder how much of this is in response to the RIAA's subpoenas
Having just downloaded three Yellow Dog Linux ISOs last night, I couldn't help but wonder if there's some anti-open source something going on here too. But then I remembered: Windows users should be regularly downloading updates, too, which must add up in terms of bandwidth. If "average users" aren't downloading critical updates, does that mean more responsible users won't be allowed to?
March said he found absentee ballot totals from 57 of 164 San Luis Obispo County precincts in an easily accessible File Transfer Protocol site operated by North Canton, Ohio-based Diebold. The votes were time-stamped at 3:31 p.m. on March 5, 2002 - more than four hours before polls closed.
Is it possible in this case, Jim March (love how it's the March 2002 incident, and his name is March, but I digress) doesn't know what he was looking at?
What does the time stamp mean? Is it necessarily the time it was uploaded to the server where he was looking at it, or could it just be the time the original file (or directory, or whatever it was exactly that was time-stamped) was created on the client machine, and the creation time was retained when it was transferred at some later time to the server where March found it?
Just to see what would happen, I just tried sending an e-mail to <testuser@slashdoct.com>. Would they bounce the message? If so what would the error message look like? If they didn't bounce it, would they just keep it? Read it? Inquring minds want to know!
Well it bounced:
The original message was received at Mon, 15 Sep 2003 21:06:55 -0500 (CDT)
from [myhost.mydomain] [xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx]
----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
<testuser@slashdoct.com>
(reason: 550 User domain does not exist.)
----- Transcript of session follows ----- ... while talking to slashdoct.com.:
>>> RCPT To:<testuser@slashdoct.com>
<<< 550 User domain does not exist.
550 5.1.1 <testuser@slashdoct.com>... User unknown
I'd say its a safe assumption that most of the blanks sold at Tower records wind up holding music.
This doesnt necessarily mean piracy, though, people are pretty into making their own 'mix' cds these days.
Definitely. Not only mix CDs, but a LOT of people are actually in bands or otherwise making music. A lot of these people buy CD-Rs for their own material. People shop their own material around on CD-Rs as demos to labels, venues, radio (especially community/college radio and local music shows), and even sell CD-Rs of their own material to people who like their music; if their customers have finite budgets (and at some point all do), this means these CD-Rs of original, non-RIAA-distributed music are -- to some extent -- in direct competition with RIAA-distributed music. This -- I'm convinced -- is the RIAA's real fear.
Overall, recorded music sales are down 31 percent since mid-2000, when the Napster online file-sharing phenomenon was in full bloom, said RIAA President Cary Sherman.
So, is it possible the full-bloom Napster phenomenon actually delayed a drop in recorded music sales? (Online music file-sharing exposed more people to more music than they were being exposed to by other media such as radio, and this could have been driving demand. More demands meant more sales.)
wouldn't they just learn to send the same spam several times at one hour intervals?
But it'd have to be the same "triplet" each time. Same sender, same recipient, and same mail server doing the sending. Having to do this would at least raise the cost for the spammers.
Looks to me to be an elegant, viable alternative to traditional black/white -listing, both of which require lists be maintained -- and well maintained. Sometimes very large, very centralized lists, which have ugly consequences when they fail.
The Greylisting method is very simple. It only looks at three pieces of information (which we will refer to as a "triplet" from now on) about any particular mail delivery attempt:
The IP address of the host attempting the delivery
The envelope sender address
The envelope recipient address
From this, we now have a unique triplet for identifying a mail "relationship". With this data, we simply follow a basic rule, which is:
If we have never seen this triplet before, then refuse this delivery and any others that may come within a certain period of time with a temporary failure.
Anybody know where we are as far as a working implementation of this idea goes?
Other co-workers with Eudora are less fortunate, since they spend better than an hour clearing out all those emails.
The Eudora users might want to consider Spamnix. (Or why not just filter on e-mail body contains "Please see the attached file for details"? For that matter, maybe AND any header contains "X-MS")
Better yet kill MS-executable attachments on the mail server -- before the mail client even sees them.
Looks like in addition to all the garbage we've been getting as a result of this virus propagating (the virus itself, attachment-free e-mailings by the virus, mis-directed automated notifications that "Your mail server sent us a virus", bounces to people whose addresses were spoofed by the virus, probably etc.), we can expect the infected computers to start being used as relays for the sending of "normal" spam -- with the corresponding spike in spam volume that would bring.
After examining two month's worth of junk e-mail earlier this year, New York City-based e-mail security company MessageLabs found that roughly 65 percent of spam originated from computers running proxy servers. More than 75 percent of those servers appeared to be installed on PCs that showed signs of being infected with Sobig and similar viruses.
Sobig.F can download arbitrary files to an infected computer and execute them. The author of the worm has used this functionality to steal confidential system information and to set up spam relay servers on infected computers.
The point though is this: even if your e-mail address is a "hidden" link on a web page, it is still part of that html file. So, when somebody surfs to your web site, odds are that page -- "hidden" link and all -- is getting saved as an html file to that user's local browser cache.
Let's say that user's computer gets infected with W32.Sobig.F@mm. Well, the worms starts sending
itself to all the email addresses it finds in the files that have the following extensions:
*.dbx
*.eml
*.hlp
*.htm
*.html
*.mht
*.wab
*.txt
Slashdot Mirror
Which they've been bouncing back since at least November. (Example of a spam complaint they returned to me.)
Can the money they make and/or "save" on this stuff ever possibly justify the expenses that must be going into research/development and other costs (including pissed off consumers) for this stuff?
"Unexpectedly"?? What, the servers hadn't been set up with the expectation that they'd be receiving results from lots of new machines at the same time?
Just try tuning into any football (soccer) match on the BBC World Service. Fine, if you're able to tune in the old-fashioned way, using your shortwave radio (a lot harder to do now, though, for those of us in North America, since the BBC no longer specifically targets this part of the world via shortwave). Try listening to the webcast, and all you get (over and over) is:
As the law is now, not playing RIAA material is not enough to get "college radio" -- or other "independent" and "community" stations -- out of still having to give money to the RIAA in the form of statutory license fee.
Nearly 300 Million ballots in India's elections are counted by hand. As are ballots in Russian elections.
On 14 October, The Independent ran summary story and an investigative report on this very same story. Nice to see Wired and various online outlets looking into this; why hasn't there been more coverage in the mainstream press, though?
The Times of India has an article, "Big Brother turns gaze on debates," about this (dated Saturday). From the article:
How would you define a false property right? In your view, are there any property rights that are not false? If some property rights are false, and others true (or legitimate) what criteria are we to use to distinguish between the two? Clearly, there is no right to have slaves, so any claim of that as a right is a false claim; but what is it about copyright that is similar to slavery that makes it also a false property right -- especially if there is such thing as a true property right?
Seems there needs to be a significant penalty for making false accusations -- otherwise, what's to keep the RIAA from suing everyone and then withdrawing suits on a case by case basis after disrupting a lot of people's lives?
Having just downloaded three Yellow Dog Linux ISOs last night, I couldn't help but wonder if there's some anti-open source something going on here too. But then I remembered: Windows users should be regularly downloading updates, too, which must add up in terms of bandwidth. If "average users" aren't downloading critical updates, does that mean more responsible users won't be allowed to?
Is it possible in this case, Jim March (love how it's the March 2002 incident, and his name is March, but I digress) doesn't know what he was looking at?
What does the time stamp mean? Is it necessarily the time it was uploaded to the server where he was looking at it, or could it just be the time the original file (or directory, or whatever it was exactly that was time-stamped) was created on the client machine, and the creation time was retained when it was transferred at some later time to the server where March found it?
Just to see what would happen, I just tried sending an e-mail to <testuser@slashdoct.com>. Would they bounce the message? If so what would the error message look like? If they didn't bounce it, would they just keep it? Read it? Inquring minds want to know!
Well it bounced:
The original message was received at Mon, 15 Sep 2003 21:06:55 -0500 (CDT)
... while talking to slashdoct.com.:
from [myhost.mydomain] [xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx]
----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
<testuser@slashdoct.com>
(reason: 550 User domain does not exist.)
----- Transcript of session follows -----
>>> RCPT To:<testuser@slashdoct.com>
<<< 550 User domain does not exist.
550 5.1.1 <testuser@slashdoct.com>... User unknown
Reporting-MTA: dns; [myhost.mydomain]
Received-From-MTA: DNS; [myhost.mydomain]
Arrival-Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2003 21:06:55 -0500 (CDT)
Final-Recipient: RFC822; testuser@slashdoct.com
Action: failed
Status: 5.1.1
Remote-MTA: DNS; slashdoct.com
Diagnostic-Code: SMTP; 550 User domain does not exist.
Last-Attempt-Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2003 21:06:56 -0500 (CDT)
And: >telnet www.slashdoct.com 25
Trying 64.94.110.11...
Connected to www.slashdoct.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 snubby3-wceast Snubby Mail Rejector Daemon v1.3 ready
quit
221 snubby3-wceast Snubby Mail Rejector Daemon v1.3 closing transmission channel
221 snubby3-wceast Snubby Mail Rejector Daemon v1.3 closing transmission channel
Connection closed by foreign host.
>
Snubby Mail Rejector???
All ten of the reasons give suggest a need only for programs which never leave low-earth orbit.
From the SFGate story:
So, is it possible the full-bloom Napster phenomenon actually delayed a drop in recorded music sales? (Online music file-sharing exposed more people to more music than they were being exposed to by other media such as radio, and this could have been driving demand. More demands meant more sales.)
Time again to discuss greylisting?
Looks to me to be an elegant, viable alternative to traditional black/white -listing, both of which require lists be maintained -- and well maintained. Sometimes very large, very centralized lists, which have ugly consequences when they fail.
From the Greylisting Web site (with bolding from me):
The Greylisting method is very simple. It only looks at three pieces of information (which we will refer to as a "triplet" from now on) about any particular mail delivery attempt:
From this, we now have a unique triplet for identifying a mail "relationship". With this data, we simply follow a basic rule, which is:
If we have never seen this triplet before, then refuse this delivery and any others that may come within a certain period of time with a temporary failure.
Anybody know where we are as far as a working implementation of this idea goes?
Found link: Canada's National Post weighed in on Saturday with the article, "A reasonable discussion hijacked".
The Eudora users might want to consider Spamnix. (Or why not just filter on e-mail body contains "Please see the attached file for details"? For that matter, maybe AND any header contains "X-MS")
Better yet kill MS-executable attachments on the mail server -- before the mail client even sees them.
Looks like in addition to all the garbage we've been getting as a result of this virus propagating (the virus itself, attachment-free e-mailings by the virus, mis-directed automated notifications that "Your mail server sent us a virus", bounces to people whose addresses were spoofed by the virus, probably etc.), we can expect the infected computers to start being used as relays for the sending of "normal" spam -- with the corresponding spike in spam volume that would bring.
According to this article:
And Symantec:
Let's say that user's computer gets infected with W32.Sobig.F@mm. Well, the worms starts sending
(See Symantec description.)
It's reading your "hidden" address from browser caches on infected machines of people who've visited your web pages.