If you actually read the article, it appears that they've added the same exceptions as in the U.S.. And complaining about "prior business relationships" is a bit lame. What, I send someone a request for info, but they aren't allowed to call me back because I'm on do-not-call? The summary here on slashdot, and the initial sentences of the article, make it sound like the bill was gutted. What am I missing?
They call it a mail server server, but it includes web, calendar, ftp, radius, pop3, imap, wap, smtp and just about every other relevant RFC you can think of. It includes Outlook compatibility (calendaring as well) and runs on just about anything. And, more importantly for what you want, it scales very well, supporting large volumes of incoming email, millions of users, and multi-machine clustering.
I've used it for many years on somewhere.com. Not many accounts, but it handily bounced (and spamtrapped) as many as a million messages a day.
I have two daughters. We got a dedicated machine for my older daughter when she hit middle school, since the homework schedule meant she needed to use it every night. We'll get a second for the younger one this fall (flat-panel iMacs).
Laptops are a bit harder to assess. The only times she's needed a laptop in middle school have been for occasional presentations. (She's fairly rabid anti-PC. As she said of the middle school's mandatory PC traning, "You'd think they'd realize that if they have to spend a semester teaching you how to use it, there's something wrong.") I think a hand-me-down laptop will be fine through middle school for both kids. Whether she needs one in high school will depend on how much work she does at home, and how much she does elsewhere.
This all sounds remarkably elitist of course. But then, all the kids in the 7th grade language classes had an assignment to make a five minute movie in the language they were studying. Sure, you could check-out a movie camera from the library and shoot it straight through with no editing. But the A+ grade was my daughter's iMovie/iDVD cooking show presentation. Complete with soundtrack, time-lapsed cooking, commercials with special effects, and out-takes. (And the only thing I did was burn the DVD for her.) So you do what you can to keep them on the bleeding edge.
Yes and no. Those problems come from people abusing thousands of different fake addresses at somewhere.com. Using a single email address publicly is not going to generate that kind of traffic. That said, the only sensible place to do spam blocking is on the server. That's the only place you can do out and out rejections, and it's the only way to keep your slower end-user connection from being tied up. I get about 500 legit messages a day on my primary mail account. The spam filter blocks another 900. That doesn't count the messages blocked because they are known to come from compromised machines or spammer sites. So we're probably talking a 2 to 3x increase in email volume if you block on the client. And that's with an email address I've been using unprotected (2000 hits on Google) for close to nine years. Your mileage may vary, but I seriously doubt it will be worse.
I registered somewhere.com in 1995 (hey, it was free:-). After I sold my first consulting company, I named the next one after the domain. Somewhere.Com, LLC.
Spam didn't exist at the time. The first warning signs were when we'd occasionally get email bounces. Some versions of 'mail' on Unix, when unable to figure out who to return a bounce to, would send it to somewhere!name-of-the-user. Sendmail would helpfully turn that into somewhere.com, and we'd get the email.
When spam started, we started getting bounce backs. Spammers were using it as a "fake" domain. In those days somewhere's mail system was a Mac 8500 on a cable modem. Life would get very interesting when all of AOL's mail servers started throwing bounces at me as fast as they could. I had originally been bouncing messages back with messages asking people to stop--that had to change to straight rejections.
As a result of the time I was spending handling somewhere's email problems, I got into the anti-spam business. Initially writing tools to track spammers (http://www.spamwatcher.com/ is still up, although I don't know how well the spam analysis stuff is working). Later I co-founded Messagefire, an end-user anti-spam service.
In the meantime somewhere's email flow continued to climb. It's doubled every year. Hoaxes like the one about "wormalert@somewhere.com" (put it in your address book, and the fact that it's fake will cause viruses to die) didn't help. Nor did Microsoft FrontPage shipping with webmaster@somewhere.com as the default address in its templates. Axis shipped an internet enabled video camera that that (if you turned on the email feature) defaulted to sending all your security pictures to somewhere.com. (They've fixed it, but there are still cameras out there sending us a picture every 5-10 seconds.). Viruses that picked up all the references to somewhere.com off of people's address book and web caches started to account for more than a third of the email. People signing up for things with "fake" addresses accounted for a lot as well. (Why anyone would use an email address at a domain and not check to see if the domain existed first, I have no clue. Neither, apparently, do a lot of people who enter fake email addresses.) By last year we were rejecting 100,000 messages a day, of which close to 40,000 were going to someone@somewhere.com. I upgraded my DSL line to 768k just to handle the flow, and I had to limit my mail server to 100 simultaneous connections at a time.
This year we sold Messagefire to a Seattle company called MessageGate, and I now work for them. We use somewhere.com to stress test our enterprise anti-spam and compliance software. That happened only just in time; my router was starting to fail frequently under the load. Now the mail's on a high-bandwidth connection with multiple machines to handle the load--I just pick up the legitimate addresses after the spam has been filtered out.
I haven't looked in on it in several months, but we did let the email run unthrottled once early this year. After a few hours we were looking at enough bandwidth saturate several T1's, and volume of at least one million messages a day.
A couple things in summary.
1. Don't use fake email addresses. If you don't trust the site you are giving your email address too, then why are you doing business with them? If you're afraid of spam because you're posting your address publicly; then buy some anti-spam software. If I can manage to use legitimate email accounts on somewhere.com and not worry about spam, then obviously there's some out there that works well. I've been posting on usenet and the web using nazgul@somewhere.com for the past 9 years. The spammers definitely have my address. So what?
2. If you're going to make up a domain name, then *check* first to see if it's real! Better yet, don't. Just because it's not real now doesn't mean it won't be later. Use example.{com,net,org} if you must.
It says you have free license to create a licensed implementation (by which they refer only to the actual code to implement the specific caller-id protocol) if you give them free license to distribute it.
Now nobody is going to run around asking to distribute a few hundred lines of code scattered throughout your mail server, so that's not a serious issue. But, it does mean, if I'm reading this right, that you are not allowed to implement it in GPL'd code.
Am I reading too much into this?
Microsoft and its Affiliates hereby grant you ("Licensee") a fully paid, royalty-free, non-exclusive, worldwide license under Microsoft's Necessary Claims to make, use, sell, offer to sell, import, and otherwise distribute Licensed Implementations, provided, Licensee, on behalf of itself and its Affiliates, hereby grants Microsoft and all other Specification Licensees, a reciprocal fully paid, royalty-free, non-exclusive, worldwide, nontransferable, non-sublicenseable, license under Necessary Claims of Licensee to make, use, sell, offer to sell, import, and otherwise distribute Licensed Implementations.
Ritalin (and Strattera, which I also take) do *not* remove any of the positives of ADD. The hyper-focus, the creativity, that's all still there. They remove the negatives. If you want to go through your life unable to complete things, unable to work to the potential that you know you can, unable to do more than one project at a time, and continually berating yourself for not doing things that you know you should have been able to do... that's fine. For myself (and my 11yr old daughter), I can state quite positively that the last six months with meds have been *way* better than the previous years of our lives.
Yes, I'm concerned about giving a stimulant, even one as focused as Ritalin (or Concerta in this case), to my daughter. I'm especially concerned about the impact this early in her development. And I'm concerned about the long term effects (although Ritalin has been in use for kids for at least 20 years--but more for boys than girls). On the other hand... well let me provide an anecdote.
Pre-ritalin, math homework used to invariably take 2-3 hours and result in tears of frustration. Every night. A simple multiplication problem might end up screwed up because by the time she got to the end she'd gotten distracted and started adding the numbers instead of multiplying them. There was no problem with the concepts--just implementing them. Math is repetitive--getting distracted is trivial.
Post-ritalin, she sat down to do three pages of homework while my wife was working on something with our younger daughter. Five minutes later she popped in and said, "I'm done!" A quick check showed that everything was done and correct. Said our younger daughter (who's a math whiz herself), "Can *I* have one of those pills?"
I don't mean to imply that you just take this stuff to be able to be good in school. It's changed everything. And once she got used to it, she (like myself) can tell exactly when it's started to wear off. (We use Concerta, a 12-hour time-release version of the drug--the pills are this amazing little osmotic pump machine). It lets me take five minutes to wash the dishes instead of feeling incredibly pressured to go finish some work project. It lets me sit down and spend some time with my wife, instead of hovering in the kitchen torn between work and relaxation.
Any behavioral difference between people is just a variation on normal. And society draws the line on what variations are diseases and what are not. Some societies thought someone with schizophrenia was blessed and should be listened to and followed. Some thought anyone who spoke against the government was insane. Go read "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat". What is considered a disease, sickness, or something treatable varies from society to society and changes over time. Is ADD something that *has* to be treated? Depends on the severity. I made it 40 years without treating it. On the other hand, if I have a headache, I take aspirin. Sure, I could just lie down and rest, but we have treatments for headaches, so we use them. Taking drugs for ADD is no different, just more long term. Like a headache ADD interferes with how well I can function. As my life has gotten more complex (kids are a good part of that) it has interfered more. If that's something I can fix, I'll jump at it in a second. And how my wife put up with my behavior all these years I'll never know.
Most of the major ISPs do this. It cuts down on the amount of filtering they need to do, and avoids false positive problems. However that doesn't mean it lasts. You can call AOL, give them some info and a contact address that they can verify, and they'll let your bulk mail through... but if they start getting complaints they'll block your IPs. So it's possible that when he started he actually did make such agreements, but I seriously doubt they lasted long.
Fetches mail from your POP server, removes the spam, let's you pickup the rest. Gives you a summary of what was filtered out. No voting. No software on your PC/Mac/*ix box. No content filters. Aimed at being usable by your relatives--not just techies.
http://www.messagefire.com/, you can use the "Trial" link to test it against the first 20 messages in your inbox.
Obligatory bias notice--I'm a partner in the company.
Why are we wasting all this time on a criminal?
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Ask Kevin Mitnick
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Sure, he's served his time. That doesn't mean he suddenly needs to be treated like a hero now that he's out. I know somebody who recently got out of prison after being convicted of pedophillia. He's done his time, but he's still screwed because nobody trusts him. But does that mean we should parade him around as a hero too?
Problems: 1. A good deal of the legitimate email you receive comes from people you never sent email to. Mailing lists of course are the first thing you have to deal with. Then all the web sites where you signed up for information, or bought something. They would all have to deal with this solution, so it would need to be globally standardized before you could use it. And of course--if they can automate the reply, so can the spammer. They'll just find a spam-friendly ISP out of the country, and reply from there. 2. Frankly, the average user isn't going to get it. Either they'll say know because they didn't realize that foxylady@aol.com was Aunt Marge, or they'll just get in the habit of saying yes without paying attention.
Any solution that makes it difficult to get email from people you don't know is going to greatly reduce the usefulness of email.
My notes on the conference can be found at http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/2003/Technology. Notes.from.th.html. The really quick summary--everyone's got content-filtering fever, and I think they are nuts. You're trying to filter something that is NP-complete (Javascript email) and then do natural language understanding on it? I don't think so. Just as an example, consider the following three spams I've received recently.
A message that said, "Please subscribing me to your mailing list." The only clue that it was spam (other than a careful header examination)--the.sig pointed to a soft-porn site and contained a photo of a come-hither 20-something.
A message claiming to be reporting a message as spam from my system. The clue (again, other than the headers)? I got the same message at multiple unrelated email addresses.
A message containing nothing but an image with a text message in the image. (What, we're going to do OCR too?)
Content filtering is doomed.
Oh yes, about blocking port 25. This is always followed by "and then your sysadmin can run SMTP on a different port so that you can connect to it via that." And if this becomes common, how long do you think until the spammers start scanning for alternate SMTP ports and doing direct delivery? In any case, it's moot. 90% of your spam isn't being sent from this country anyway. You're not going to persuade those remote sysadmins to block outbound port 25 any more than we've managed to get them to close their open relays. This is big business and big bucks.
Noise alarms are just annoying and don't really help, much like car alarms. When's the last time you ran towards an alarm.
I use a motion alarm on my laptop in environments where it makes sense. Libraries, cafes. Places where the laptop is unlikely to be jiggled, and where I'm within earshot of the laptop. Anywhere else I use a locking cable.
BTW. Motion alarms can also double as an alarm for your bicycle:-).
While it's certainly true that much spam from China is relayed, they generate huge amounts in Chinese too. At least half of the 20-30 pieces I get every day is in Chinese, most of it coming from ISP's like 163.net. In fact I ended up simply blocking all numeric-only domains in my spam rules.
I don't know why this is so hard for people to understand. Let's say that every company in the world obeys the DMA and provides an easy mechanism to opt-out. And every company who buys an email list first sends mail to it asking you if you want to opt-out, before they send their ads--just the way the DMA asks.
Now how many opt-out messages do you think you'll get every day? Each one of them with different instructions of course, some requiring you go to a web site and enter your email address, some requring that you reply with a particular subject, some requiring that you send mail to some other address. And if you don't follow the instructions??? You get the spam.
So, how many of those do you want to have to deal with every day? 5? 10? 100? And how will you tell them from the illegal spammers who forge their instructions and whose "opt-out" url is actually an advertisement?
Get it through your heads. Opt-out doesn't work. Ever. If they want permission to send random email to random people, OR EVEN TO EMAIL ADDRESSES ENTERED ON THEIR WEB SITE, they *have* to use verification. If I don't reply with a "YES"--I never get email from them again. Very simple. Anything else is going to be a disaster.
1. 1 in 10 are using wireless to share with their neighbors? Get real. 1 in 1000 if you are lucky. But let's grant that it could be a problem.
2. NAT has other purposes than just sharing bandwidth. My cable company offers multiple IPs. I use NAT instead. Am I stealing bandwidth? No, there's only one of me on the net at a time. I don't *want* multiple IPs. I want a firewall, and NAT makes a very good firewall. The last thing I want is to have to make all of my machines internet-safe. Forcing customers to do so would create a huge security problem. Never mind your machines, what about your printer? You want that on the internet too?
3. Security. CAT will let your cable company peek behind your firewall--and who else?
One thing to be concerned about. Implementing CAT doesn't prevent people from using NAT. Therefore implementing CAT is not going to be sufficient, they'll have to force you to use CAT. And the only way they can do that is to put software on your machine (after all, you could always put NAT behind CAT). And we all know what platform that software will (and won't) run on.
Fortunately it's probably too late for this solution. They should just do bandwidth monitoring and leave it at that.
Sure, you can go out and learn a career for the next 10 years. But then what. Look at the state of computer science 10 years ago and look at it now.
What you describe as a general education I don't even consider general enough. Where's the history, anthropology and psychology? Just who are you designing computer systems for anyway? I majored in anthropology with a minor in psych. I've spent 20 years moving one career to career in computers. I've started companies, I've done consulting, I've worked on big projects at big companies, and little projects on my own. Most of the CS majors I know are still stuck in one field, and suffering as the industry moves out from under them.
Use college as a way to learn how to learn. Let the rest come through experience out in the real world.
An excellent job of cyberpunk style set in the pas
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Zeitgeist
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Cyberpunk tends to have that full-speed-ahead, throw-the-random-facts-at-you, technique that you either love or hate. But when it's set in the future, it's a lot easier, because you get to make up the facts.
In Zeitgeist you keep wondering--is this really true? Is that what Turkish Cypriot is like? What's real, what isn't? And then every once in a while you come across yet another obscure and fascinating view of something that you happen to know about it, and damned if he didn't get it right. I read my (Iranian) wife the section on the Las Irangeles pop scene and we both cracked up, because it was dead on. And likewise, the descriptions of Hawaii, where I just vacationed.
When someone sets a story in the recent past, full of so much fascinating stuff that you can't tell the fact from the fiction, you know they've got their writing act together, and this book definitely has got it.
Great. They get our DNA, figure out how to build bio-weapons, buzz by the planet dropping the payload. Come back in a year and explain that if we don't do what they say, they'll release the trigger.
Actually, it amazes me how little attention science fiction seems to have paid to the potential ease with which alien races could probably destroy each other using biological weapons.
We'd have our server brought to its knees by AOL bouncing messages to us. Court fights are too expensive, about all you can do is do your best to go after the spammers as hard as you can and try and shut them down. Now most of Somewhere.Com's problems are idiots who subscribe to sites using somewhere.com as an address. Not to mention the 1000 or so somewhere.com postings to Usenet made every day. I just got 200+ email messages in a few hours, all due to some idiot using webmaster@somewhere.com at an FFA site. Not pleasant. But on the bright side, he won't have an ISP account or a web site for much longer. Nonetheless, I see forged somewhere.com addresses in spam messages about once a month.
The SpamCop newsgroups are good resources for this kind of thing. They also provide pointers for decoding JavaScript encoded HTML. My own site, SpamWatcher, will have a builtin JavaScript interpreter in its spam decoder shortly.
You completely missed the point. Macromedia's mail server and web server were separate. Their mail server was blocked for alleged spam, OK, fine. But their web server, on a totally different IP number, was deliberately targeted for blocking anyway.
I think you are unclear on just what MAPS is for. MAPS plays no significant role in blocking spam. MAPS is a deterrent to spam. MAPS is what keeps big providers and companies from deciding that spam is worthwhile. To work, they have to make it very painful for a company to spam. That means blocking the company. Not just the mail servers.
In April some idiot signed up for The Edge at Macromedia's web site using webmaster@somewhere.com. It took me a month and a half and repeated complaints to get off the list. If MAPS has forced changes so that won't happen again--more power to them.
The internet is not a democracy. It's a battleground between competing interests. MAPS and ORBS both have major problems with the personalities involved, and they've both stepped over the line at times, although MAPS is far more conservative. If you think you can do a better job, then step up to the plate. If you think they've gone too far, then say so. But don't bite the hand that's protecting you.
The reason you only get 20 pieces a day is because right now sending spam gets your ISP accounts closed, and web sites shut down. The reason that happens, is because organizations like MAPS and ORBS work very hard to make it difficult for anyone to get into the spam business.
Legalize opt-out mail and you won't be getting 20 pieces of spam a day, you'll be getting 200 pieces of spam a day--if you're lucky.
*Think* about scalability. *Think* about economies in which the entire cost of dealing with the problem lies with the consumer. You're right--right now spam is not a real problem. But it will be.
Slashdot Mirror
If you actually read the article, it appears that they've added the same exceptions as in the U.S.. And complaining about "prior business relationships" is a bit lame. What, I send someone a request for info, but they aren't allowed to call me back because I'm on do-not-call? The summary here on slashdot, and the initial sentences of the article, make it sound like the bill was gutted. What am I missing?
They call it a mail server server, but it includes web, calendar, ftp, radius, pop3, imap, wap, smtp and just about every other relevant RFC you can think of. It includes Outlook compatibility (calendaring as well) and runs on just about anything. And, more importantly for what you want, it scales very well, supporting large volumes of incoming email, millions of users, and multi-machine clustering.
I've used it for many years on somewhere.com. Not many accounts, but it handily bounced (and spamtrapped) as many as a million messages a day.
I have two daughters. We got a dedicated machine for my older daughter when she hit middle school, since the homework schedule meant she needed to use it every night. We'll get a second for the younger one this fall (flat-panel iMacs).
Laptops are a bit harder to assess. The only times she's needed a laptop in middle school have been for occasional presentations. (She's fairly rabid anti-PC. As she said of the middle school's mandatory PC traning, "You'd think they'd realize that if they have to spend a semester teaching you how to use it, there's something wrong.") I think a hand-me-down laptop will be fine through middle school for both kids. Whether she needs one in high school will depend on how much work she does at home, and how much she does elsewhere.
This all sounds remarkably elitist of course. But then, all the kids in the 7th grade language classes had an assignment to make a five minute movie in the language they were studying. Sure, you could check-out a movie camera from the library and shoot it straight through with no editing. But the A+ grade was my daughter's iMovie/iDVD cooking show presentation. Complete with soundtrack, time-lapsed cooking, commercials with special effects, and out-takes. (And the only thing I did was burn the DVD for her.) So you do what you can to keep them on the bleeding edge.
Yes and no. Those problems come from people abusing thousands of different fake addresses at somewhere.com. Using a single email address publicly is not going to generate that kind of traffic. That said, the only sensible place to do spam blocking is on the server. That's the only place you can do out and out rejections, and it's the only way to keep your slower end-user connection from being tied up. I get about 500 legit messages a day on my primary mail account. The spam filter blocks another 900. That doesn't count the messages blocked because they are known to come from compromised machines or spammer sites. So we're probably talking a 2 to 3x increase in email volume if you block on the client. And that's with an email address I've been using unprotected (2000 hits on Google) for close to nine years. Your mileage may vary, but I seriously doubt it will be worse.
I registered somewhere.com in 1995 (hey, it was free :-). After I sold my first consulting company, I named the next one after the domain. Somewhere.Com, LLC.
Spam didn't exist at the time. The first warning signs were when we'd occasionally get email bounces. Some versions of 'mail' on Unix, when unable to figure out who to return a bounce to, would send it to somewhere!name-of-the-user. Sendmail would helpfully turn that into somewhere.com, and we'd get the email.
When spam started, we started getting bounce backs. Spammers were using it as a "fake" domain. In those days somewhere's mail system was a Mac 8500 on a cable modem. Life would get very interesting when all of AOL's mail servers started throwing bounces at me as fast as they could. I had originally been bouncing messages back with messages asking people to stop--that had to change to straight rejections.
As a result of the time I was spending handling somewhere's email problems, I got into the anti-spam business. Initially writing tools to track spammers (http://www.spamwatcher.com/ is still up, although I don't know how well the spam analysis stuff is working). Later I co-founded Messagefire, an end-user anti-spam service.
In the meantime somewhere's email flow continued to climb. It's doubled every year. Hoaxes like the one about "wormalert@somewhere.com" (put it in your address book, and the fact that it's fake will cause viruses to die) didn't help. Nor did Microsoft FrontPage shipping with webmaster@somewhere.com as the default address in its templates. Axis shipped an internet enabled video camera that that (if you turned on the email feature) defaulted to sending all your security pictures to somewhere.com. (They've fixed it, but there are still cameras out there sending us a picture every 5-10 seconds.). Viruses that picked up all the references to somewhere.com off of people's address book and web caches started to account for more than a third of the email. People signing up for things with "fake" addresses accounted for a lot as well. (Why anyone would use an email address at a domain and not check to see if the domain existed first, I have no clue. Neither, apparently, do a lot of people who enter fake email addresses.) By last year we were rejecting 100,000 messages a day, of which close to 40,000 were going to someone@somewhere.com. I upgraded my DSL line to 768k just to handle the flow, and I had to limit my mail server to 100 simultaneous connections at a time.
This year we sold Messagefire to a Seattle company called MessageGate, and I now work for them. We use somewhere.com to stress test our enterprise anti-spam and compliance software. That happened only just in time; my router was starting to fail frequently under the load. Now the mail's on a high-bandwidth connection with multiple machines to handle the load--I just pick up the legitimate addresses after the spam has been filtered out.
I haven't looked in on it in several months, but we did let the email run unthrottled once early this year. After a few hours we were looking at enough bandwidth saturate several T1's, and volume of at least one million messages a day.
A couple things in summary.
1. Don't use fake email addresses. If you don't trust the site you are giving your email address too, then why are you doing business with them? If you're afraid of spam because you're posting your address publicly; then buy some anti-spam software. If I can manage to use legitimate email accounts on somewhere.com and not worry about spam, then obviously there's some out there that works well. I've been posting on usenet and the web using nazgul@somewhere.com for the past 9 years. The spammers definitely have my address. So what?
2. If you're going to make up a domain name, then *check* first to see if it's real! Better yet, don't. Just because it's not real now doesn't mean it won't be later. Use example.{com,net,org} if you must.
3. I see a number of people here s
Look at the licensing doc at Microsoft's anti-spam site (specifically the Word file licensing doc).
It says you have free license to create a licensed implementation (by which they refer only to the actual code to implement the specific caller-id protocol) if you give them free license to distribute it.
Now nobody is going to run around asking to distribute a few hundred lines of code scattered throughout your mail server, so that's not a serious issue. But, it does mean, if I'm reading this right, that you are not allowed to implement it in GPL'd code.
Am I reading too much into this?
Ritalin (and Strattera, which I also take) do *not* remove any of the positives of ADD. The hyper-focus, the creativity, that's all still there. They remove the negatives. If you want to go through your life unable to complete things, unable to work to the potential that you know you can, unable to do more than one project at a time, and continually berating yourself for not doing things that you know you should have been able to do... that's fine. For myself (and my 11yr old daughter), I can state quite positively that the last six months with meds have been *way* better than the previous years of our lives.
Yes, I'm concerned about giving a stimulant, even one as focused as Ritalin (or Concerta in this case), to my daughter. I'm especially concerned about the impact this early in her development. And I'm concerned about the long term effects (although Ritalin has been in use for kids for at least 20 years--but more for boys than girls). On the other hand... well let me provide an anecdote.
Pre-ritalin, math homework used to invariably take 2-3 hours and result in tears of frustration. Every night. A simple multiplication problem might end up screwed up because by the time she got to the end she'd gotten distracted and started adding the numbers instead of multiplying them. There was no problem with the concepts--just implementing them. Math is repetitive--getting distracted is trivial.
Post-ritalin, she sat down to do three pages of homework while my wife was working on something with our younger daughter. Five minutes later she popped in and said, "I'm done!" A quick check showed that everything was done and correct. Said our younger daughter (who's a math whiz herself), "Can *I* have one of those pills?"
I don't mean to imply that you just take this stuff to be able to be good in school. It's changed everything. And once she got used to it, she (like myself) can tell exactly when it's started to wear off. (We use Concerta, a 12-hour time-release version of the drug--the pills are this amazing little osmotic pump machine). It lets me take five minutes to wash the dishes instead of feeling incredibly pressured to go finish some work project. It lets me sit down and spend some time with my wife, instead of hovering in the kitchen torn between work and relaxation.
Any behavioral difference between people is just a variation on normal. And society draws the line on what variations are diseases and what are not. Some societies thought someone with schizophrenia was blessed and should be listened to and followed. Some thought anyone who spoke against the government was insane. Go read "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat". What is considered a disease, sickness, or something treatable varies from society to society and changes over time. Is ADD something that *has* to be treated? Depends on the severity. I made it 40 years without treating it. On the other hand, if I have a headache, I take aspirin. Sure, I could just lie down and rest, but we have treatments for headaches, so we use them. Taking drugs for ADD is no different, just more long term. Like a headache ADD interferes with how well I can function. As my life has gotten more complex (kids are a good part of that) it has interfered more. If that's something I can fix, I'll jump at it in a second. And how my wife put up with my behavior all these years I'll never know.
Most of the major ISPs do this. It cuts down on the amount of filtering they need to do, and avoids false positive problems. However that doesn't mean it lasts. You can call AOL, give them some info and a contact address that they can verify, and they'll let your bulk mail through... but if they start getting complaints they'll block your IPs. So it's possible that when he started he actually did make such agreements, but I seriously doubt they lasted long.
If you read the article, you'll see that all the arguments boil down to one thing. It doesn't support Microsoft's proprietary audio format.
Fetches mail from your POP server, removes the spam, let's you pickup the rest. Gives you a summary of what was filtered out. No voting. No software on your PC/Mac/*ix box. No content filters. Aimed at being usable by your relatives--not just techies.
http://www.messagefire.com/, you can use the "Trial" link to test it against the first 20 messages in your inbox.
Obligatory bias notice--I'm a partner in the company.
Sure, he's served his time. That doesn't mean he suddenly needs to be treated like a hero now that he's out. I know somebody who recently got out of prison after being convicted of pedophillia. He's done his time, but he's still screwed because nobody trusts him. But does that mean we should parade him around as a hero too?
Problems:
1. A good deal of the legitimate email you receive comes from people you never sent email to. Mailing lists of course are the first thing you have to deal with. Then all the web sites where you signed up for information, or bought something. They would all have to deal with this solution, so it would need to be globally standardized before you could use it. And of course--if they can automate the reply, so can the spammer. They'll just find a spam-friendly ISP out of the country, and reply from there.
2. Frankly, the average user isn't going to get it. Either they'll say know because they didn't realize that foxylady@aol.com was Aunt Marge, or they'll just get in the habit of saying yes without paying attention.
Any solution that makes it difficult to get email from people you don't know is going to greatly reduce the usefulness of email.
My notes on the conference can be found at http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/2003/Technology. Notes.from.th.html. The really quick summary--everyone's got content-filtering fever, and I think they are nuts. You're trying to filter something that is NP-complete (Javascript email) and then do natural language understanding on it? I don't think so. Just as an example, consider the following three spams I've received recently.
Content filtering is doomed.
Oh yes, about blocking port 25. This is always followed by "and then your sysadmin can run SMTP on a different port so that you can connect to it via that." And if this becomes common, how long do you think until the spammers start scanning for alternate SMTP ports and doing direct delivery? In any case, it's moot. 90% of your spam isn't being sent from this country anyway. You're not going to persuade those remote sysadmins to block outbound port 25 any more than we've managed to get them to close their open relays. This is big business and big bucks.
I gave my daughter a pink Newton a couple years back (she asked for pink... I made it pink). She's been quite happy with that.
I use a motion alarm on my laptop in environments where it makes sense. Libraries, cafes. Places where the laptop is unlikely to be jiggled, and where I'm within earshot of the laptop. Anywhere else I use a locking cable.
BTW. Motion alarms can also double as an alarm for your bicycle :-).
While it's certainly true that much spam from China is relayed, they generate huge amounts in Chinese too. At least half of the 20-30 pieces I get every day is in Chinese, most of it coming from ISP's like 163.net. In fact I ended up simply blocking all numeric-only domains in my spam rules.
I don't know why this is so hard for people to understand. Let's say that every company in the world obeys the DMA and provides an easy mechanism to opt-out. And every company who buys an email list first sends mail to it asking you if you want to opt-out, before they send their ads--just the way the DMA asks.
Now how many opt-out messages do you think you'll get every day? Each one of them with different instructions of course, some requiring you go to a web site and enter your email address, some requring that you reply with a particular subject, some requiring that you send mail to some other address. And if you don't follow the instructions??? You get the spam.
So, how many of those do you want to have to deal with every day? 5? 10? 100? And how will you tell them from the illegal spammers who forge their instructions and whose "opt-out" url is actually an advertisement?
Get it through your heads. Opt-out doesn't work. Ever. If they want permission to send random email to random people, OR EVEN TO EMAIL ADDRESSES ENTERED ON THEIR WEB SITE, they *have* to use verification. If I don't reply with a "YES"--I never get email from them again. Very simple. Anything else is going to be a disaster.
Yes, there's a huge amount of stuff missing. Net.Singles is very sparse as well.
1. 1 in 10 are using wireless to share with their neighbors? Get real. 1 in 1000 if you are lucky. But let's grant that it could be a problem.
2. NAT has other purposes than just sharing bandwidth. My cable company offers multiple IPs. I use NAT instead. Am I stealing bandwidth? No, there's only one of me on the net at a time. I don't *want* multiple IPs. I want a firewall, and NAT makes a very good firewall. The last thing I want is to have to make all of my machines internet-safe. Forcing customers to do so would create a huge security problem. Never mind your machines, what about your printer? You want that on the internet too?
3. Security. CAT will let your cable company peek behind your firewall--and who else?
One thing to be concerned about. Implementing CAT doesn't prevent people from using NAT. Therefore implementing CAT is not going to be sufficient, they'll have to force you to use CAT. And the only way they can do that is to put software on your machine (after all, you could always put NAT behind CAT). And we all know what platform that software will (and won't) run on.
Fortunately it's probably too late for this solution. They should just do bandwidth monitoring and leave it at that.
Sure, you can go out and learn a career for the next 10 years. But then what. Look at the state of computer science 10 years ago and look at it now.
What you describe as a general education I don't even consider general enough. Where's the history, anthropology and psychology? Just who are you designing computer systems for anyway? I majored in anthropology with a minor in psych. I've spent 20 years moving one career to career in computers. I've started companies, I've done consulting, I've worked on big projects at big companies, and little projects on my own. Most of the CS majors I know are still stuck in one field, and suffering as the industry moves out from under them.
Use college as a way to learn how to learn. Let the rest come through experience out in the real world.
Cyberpunk tends to have that full-speed-ahead, throw-the-random-facts-at-you, technique that you either love or hate. But when it's set in the future, it's a lot easier, because you get to make up the facts.
In Zeitgeist you keep wondering--is this really true? Is that what Turkish Cypriot is like? What's real, what isn't? And then every once in a while you come across yet another obscure and fascinating view of something that you happen to know about it, and damned if he didn't get it right. I read my (Iranian) wife the section on the Las Irangeles pop scene and we both cracked up, because it was dead on. And likewise, the descriptions of Hawaii, where I just vacationed.
When someone sets a story in the recent past, full of so much fascinating stuff that you can't tell the fact from the fiction, you know they've got their writing act together, and this book definitely has got it.
Actually, it amazes me how little attention science fiction seems to have paid to the potential ease with which alien races could probably destroy each other using biological weapons.
We'd have our server brought to its knees by AOL bouncing messages to us. Court fights are too expensive, about all you can do is do your best to go after the spammers as hard as you can and try and shut them down. Now most of Somewhere.Com's problems are idiots who subscribe to sites using somewhere.com as an address. Not to mention the 1000 or so somewhere.com postings to Usenet made every day. I just got 200+ email messages in a few hours, all due to some idiot using webmaster@somewhere.com at an FFA site. Not pleasant. But on the bright side, he won't have an ISP account or a web site for much longer. Nonetheless, I see forged somewhere.com addresses in spam messages about once a month.
The SpamCop newsgroups are good resources for this kind of thing. They also provide pointers for decoding JavaScript encoded HTML. My own site, SpamWatcher, will have a builtin JavaScript interpreter in its spam decoder shortly.
I think you are unclear on just what MAPS is for. MAPS plays no significant role in blocking spam. MAPS is a deterrent to spam. MAPS is what keeps big providers and companies from deciding that spam is worthwhile. To work, they have to make it very painful for a company to spam. That means blocking the company. Not just the mail servers.
In April some idiot signed up for The Edge at Macromedia's web site using webmaster@somewhere.com. It took me a month and a half and repeated complaints to get off the list. If MAPS has forced changes so that won't happen again--more power to them.
The internet is not a democracy. It's a battleground between competing interests. MAPS and ORBS both have major problems with the personalities involved, and they've both stepped over the line at times, although MAPS is far more conservative. If you think you can do a better job, then step up to the plate. If you think they've gone too far, then say so. But don't bite the hand that's protecting you.
The reason you only get 20 pieces a day is because right now sending spam gets your ISP accounts closed, and web sites shut down. The reason that happens, is because organizations like MAPS and ORBS work very hard to make it difficult for anyone to get into the spam business.
Legalize opt-out mail and you won't be getting 20 pieces of spam a day, you'll be getting 200 pieces of spam a day--if you're lucky.
*Think* about scalability. *Think* about economies in which the entire cost of dealing with the problem lies with the consumer. You're right--right now spam is not a real problem. But it will be.