I know this is setting me up for a'Floggin', but does it integrate with MS Exchange?
Nope. Right now the Mozilla Calendar Project and, hence, the standalone Mozilla Sunbird, only support open calendering protocols (CalDAV and ICS). While there is demand for Exchange support, noone has stepped up to offer it. I'd guess, as Sunbird and the Lightning Project mature (and if enough demand builds up), someone may release a pay component that handles Exchange connectivity first... followed by an open source one at some later date.
Have they/are they planning on integrating it in to thunderbird? It looks a lot like Outlook's calendar, I think integrating it with Thunderbird (and even Firefox? Maybe let you add items through Firefox?) would be their greatest 'next' step.
The Mozilla Calendar Project is actually a plugin for Firefox and Thunderbird that adds a calendar to either program. Mozilla Sunbird is the standalone version of this.
The calendar plugin doesn't really "integrate" into Thunderbird as most would like, though, which is why the Lightning project was begun (it was mentioned on Slashdot in December.) The Lightning project aims for "tight" integration with Thunderbird, so you get more of a seamless program to handle all your email, calendar, contact and task needs. Expect to see more about Lightning later this year.
We have to deal with this on an infrequent basis, where people actually do sign up for things, and then whine and snivel when mail comes.
Then stop creating webforms that automatically check the box saying that people want your spam.
Quite right. AND be sure you are confirming opt-ins (ie... send a confirmation email to the address with a unique URL which must be clicked to confirm subscription). Otherwise, anyone can signup anyone else... and there are some mailbomb programs out there that automate this for 100s of sites that don't confirm, forcing the victim to unsubscribe from every list.
Yes, but unfortunatly, even though firefox is superior software, eventually there will be spyware targeted to firefox. The spyware and malware writers aren't stupid, unfortunately, and they'll find any way to fool stupid users.
There have already been multiple spyware apps that target Firefox. XXXToolbar was one of the first. It would auto-launch an XPI install attempt when you visitted a webpage. So, Firefox did 3 things.:
1. They turned of launching XPIs from the onload event. (I think I remember this happening, but couldn't find a reference... anyone?) 2. They added a 3 second delay before the Install button would work when you click on an XPI on a webpage 3. They added a whitelist with only mozilla and mozdev enabled by default so NO websites except those 2 can install XPIs without the user manually going in and updating the whitelist.
And this was long before the 1.0 release that this occured. Basically, every time the scammers have tried to come up with a trick to auto-install (or mistakenly install as with some ActiveX components), Mozilla has come up with a way to cut them off at the knees.
Not sure what's going on with January's "3." useragent, but FWIW here's a few months of their browser stats for just Mozilla:
It's pretty safe to assume that the "3" is their new Firefox entry, just missing its name. Summarizing the data by renderer makes the numbers far more useful to web developers as well:
MSHTML-Modern (Internet Explorer 5/6) : 88.69% Gecko (Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape 6/7) : 6.67% Other (Safari, Konqueror, Unknown) : 2.25% MSHTML-Legacy (Internet Explorer 1-4) : 1.46% Opera (Kinda obvious which browser it is) : 0.78% Netscape (Netscape 1-4) : 0.16%
I wish they'd seperate out Konqueror and Opera. It would be nice to have a KHTML line in there...
Actually, there are quite a few models of domestic cars (mainly minivans) out durring the late 80s and early 90s that use only about five different key cuts and remote (door open) codes.
Growing up, my mom had a gray Chevy Celebrity wagon. While at the high school for a show, I went out to the car to drive out and pick something up. I walked up to the car, opened it up, sat in the driver's seat, looked in the rear view mirror and noticed... stuff... in the back seat. Random stuff that wasn't ours. Got back out, relocked the door and found our own car about 5 cars down the road.
Some of what it detects are definitely false positives. On my machine, it claimed to find registry traces of eDonkey and Grokster, which it says contain adware. But the keys it found were put there by Shareaza, a non-spyware open-source client.
Yeah, it wanted to kill off pieces of eMule, Shareaza and Unreal Tournament 2004 on my box.
Also, it's hard to keep people from clicking "yes".
You don't have to click YES or ACCEPT to get spyware in IE. All you have to do is visit a specific website... or a website that's been hacked... or a website that shows ads from a network that's been hacked... and it will auto-install it for you through one of IE's lovely unpatched exploits.
I just cleaned 12 off my sister's Win98 laptop and then promptly installed Firefox and Thunderbird.
Doesn't matter to an end user, which is what you all can't get through your heads.
That's why people would rather pay $200 bucks to have it be Microsoft's responsibility than to have to constantly monitor and upgrade every component on the system.
How did Java get on my machine? Firefox automatically installed it for me. Firefox automatically downloaded and installed an unsafe JVM with a critical security hole.
When Java is exploited on an IE machine, you betcha it's Microsoft's fault, right?
You do have a bit of a point there. Of course, IE is completely vulnerable on your machine as well as it is probably also using the exploitable Sun JVM you have installed.
But, the vulnerability is within Sun's Java VM which does have an updater packaged with it that should run on Windows start. It just doesn't work right. Should Firefox be responsible for updating when there is an exploit in Java, Flash, Shockwave or some other plugin? IE isn't, except for their OWN outdated Java VM. But they won't go and update Shockwave or Flash or the Sun Java VM.
Why is he counting sales and rentals of movies? Does the auto industry count sales and rentals in their figures? I think just sales would be a better measure of the industry. Afterall, aren't the folks who buy the movies (or cars) and then rent them out a seperate industry from the ones who produce what they are renting?
They vary widely. The ones I mentioned earlier are the ones I've seen used the most. Maybe add in NJABL and SORBS to that, too. I recently did a statistical analysis of the spam I get. Here are the DNSBLs I use and the percentage of the spam I receive that they have the sending server blacklisted:
As to false positives, it depends on the DNSBL again. ORDB only lists open relays, which are much fewer and further between these days, so, technically, it can't be a false positive. That said, I've never had a legit piece of mail that would have been blocked by it.
The Spamhaus SBL blocked bulk senders of spam, namely the 200 worst offenders in the world who have been thrown off 3 ISPs in a row and are now at an ISP that won't remove them. It's pretty good, but you will get an occasional false positive for places like Topica that send both legitimate newsletters and spam. I think I saw a false positive sent through sina.com or another horribly spammy ISP once before as well. Overall, though, it will be VERY low on false positives.
The Spamhaus XBL (which is really the CBL) is an excellent DNSBL. It lists compromised boxes that are zombies or open-proxied. I've never seen a false positive on the XBL.
The Spamcop BL varies according to who has reported what spam at Spamcop's site. As such, if a real mail server is used for a spam run, it may wind up listed temporarily. I recommend weighting spam based on the Spamcop BL, not blocking. I've seen about a dozen false-positives in the last 12 months with Spamcop's BL.
The antispam software at my previous workplace had a DNSBL feature (SpamCop?). When it was on, it was flagging _entire_ network ranges (whole ISPs), so it blocked email from legitimate companies - customers, partners etc.
It may have been Spamcop's BL. It used to be quite bad, actually, but has stabilized a bit. Even THEY don't recommend blocking mail based on it. Weighting is fine, though.
I see so many users using DNSBLs and they're so happy about the spam reduction... They probably don't correspond with anyone from the blacklisted ISPs, but even if I don't either, I am not going to rely on antispam tech that blocks entire ranges of IPs just because of spam from a few IPs.
Some people don't bother to research them well enough first to understand what the different lists do. Some DNSBLs make a point to say that they do block legitimate mail servers next to spammers on certain networks. It's called collateral damage. Of course, it is their right to list whatever they want... as long as they're clear about it. Some admins are perfectly happy with that as it puts pressure on ISPs to dump their spammers to keep their legit clients happy. I prefer just catching the spam for myself and my clients.
I have partial blocks in 202. because some of those IPs are in Australia and New Zealand and not spammy.
Quite right, which is one great reason not to use wholesale blocks without understanding them. I'm more of a fan of using some of the blackholes.us country-based lists to block China, etc than full IP blocks is someone wants to block certain countries.
Any other stats? Like what percentage of spam comes via the USA?
Quite a bit. I don't recommend blocking the US, though. Nor do I recommend blocking Asia... or even China. Much of the US spam I don't see as the CBL blocks most of it. (Nearly all of US spam is sent from zombied PCs whereas lots of Chinese spam is sent from real mail servers)
For US users with no contacts in Asia, though, it is quite tempting to just block Asia off, as I was attempting to illustrate. And also to make a counterpoint to the article which makes it seem like most spam isn't sent from Asia even though a large amount of it is. For Asian users who only do business within their own countries, blocking the US might be tempting for the same reasons, especially if they aren't using any DNSBLs.
Personally, I use a combination of DNSBLs (Spamhaus SBL, Spamhaus XBL/CBL, SpamCop and ORDB) along with bayesian filtering to handle the ~250 spam messages a day I get sent to my personal email account.
I'm looking for a way to blackhole the entirety of China.
Every single hacking attempt on my server originates from a Chinese IP. This is also true of every single spam connection attempt as well.
Now there are probably some of you reading this saying "But where do you draw the line? Oh the slipperly slope!" If you are one of these people I have this to say: give me a break.
Without getting into the "slippery slope" argument, blackholes.us maintains a pretty detailed list of Chinese IP space. They also have other country IP lists for origination points of high amounts hacking and fraud like Nigeria, Russia and Brazil.
Even though most spam is sent through zombied networks in the US and Europe, a lot of spam still originates within Asia. Here's a list of the top IP netblock spam sources I see from APNIC along with the percentage of spam they represent:
This means fully 1/3 of the spam received at my mail servers originates within APNIC. Of course, we can't forget our friends in that other big spammy IP block on LACNIC (Brazil, another huge identity theft/phishing locale):
200.x.x.x (Latin America): 3.6%
Now, if you're a local company or running a personal mail server for contact with only your known contacts, blocking most of that address space becomes quite tempting. If you're a national or international or have any possibility of communicating with folks in those areas of the world, blocking would be a bad idea. Still, there are many mail admins that have taken just this step with many of the above-mentioned IP blocks.
Maybe I'm not following you, but even if you reject at the MTA level won't the exploited mail relay bounce the message to the forged originator anyway? The only difference is who is doing the bouncing. Either way, the rejected message is bounced, assuming that a 3rd party relay (and not custom spam software) is doing the sending.
Most spam is coming from an exploited box directly. If it gets a 5xx Denied message, it just fails to send that message and generates no bounce. Legit mail from a real mail server will drop a bounce message in the sender's mailbox.
It's still a worthy project though, sorry if I seemed like I played it down, it did find a place on my MP3 player;)
Not at all. I'd actually been meaning to mention the Windows-only nature on the page. It's well-known in the mozillaZine forums, but most people are finding the project through other sources now-a-days.
Also, the eventual goal is to have Windows, Mac and Linux versions of Firefox installed on the portable drive with specialized launchers all running the same profile.
I would like to see this done for many different apps (browser, email, IM, blah blah), basically anything that requires user preferences... package a small binary and the preferences together such that they can run off the USB drive. With more and more people owning/working with multiple machines, this would be really useful.
Why did I have to read half the page to figure out what version of FireFox/ThunderBird he had packaged though ?? (of course it's windows, I wonder why I even wondered, duh)
Sorry bout that. I've updated the page to mention it by the download up top.
OTOH I suppose it's easier to find a random Windows PC than a real computer nowadays... (gratuitious flaimbait, I know)
Yes, it is. And you can copy your bookmarks, cookies, etc directly into a copy of Portable Firefox/Thunderbird on a USB key from within Mac OSX or Linux and then use it anywhere one of said Windows PCs is.
In the MozillaZine Forum, many discussed putting the win32 and linux binaries on a single stick & having them share profiles. Might as well throw in the Mac binaries too & then you'd have something really useful!
Well, I guess the cat is fully out of the bag now anyway. I was planning on mentioning this on Slashdot once I got everything over on MozDev finally (my server went over my bandwidth limit last month just from all the blog and tech site mentions... first time that's happened since I released Portable Firefox back in June).
In the past couple days, I've added launchers and instructions for Portable NVU and Portable Sunbird. Ready-to-use, fully-compressed packages will be forthcoming over the next week.
The releases are Windows-only for now. The launcher uses the Nullsoft Scriptable Installer System at the moment, which isn't compatible with Mac OSX.
I'm currently working on automating the full build process and switching to 7-zip for compression. Once done, I'll be releasing Portable Firefox and Portable Thunderbird in all localized languages supported by Firefox and Thunderbird.
Future plans include: - Sync utility, running from the portable install, to copy bookmarks, extensions, cookies, etc back and forth - Multi-OS install on the portable media, so the applications will run from every computer you use. - Support for Enigmail/GPG out-of-the-box (Another developer has repackaged Portable Thunderbird with these included. I'll be updating my launchers to support this by default) - Single, combined launcher for all products - Full theme support - Lots more?
We are unable to change our ISP because they "own" the building but the real problem is further up line - again it cannot be changed by us or our ISP. Up-line they are presumably too busy running spam for US based spammers to care.
Perhaps it would be far more savvy of you to contract with a Good(TM) company on a clean network to run a mail server for you. It wouldn't matter who your ISP was.
I know it's been mentioned, but I figured I'd give it a full post myself. Portable Firefox has been updated to 1.0 Final. Portable Firefox is a fully functional package of Firefox optimized for use on a USB key drive. It has some specially-selected optimizations to make it perform faster and extend the life of your USB key as well as a specialized launcher that will allow most of your favorite extensions to work as you switch computers. It will also work from a CDRW drive (in packet mode), ZIP drives, external hard drives, some MP3 players, flash RAM cards and more. Many users carry it with them for use on friends' computers. Others use it between home and work. Still others use it so they aren't stuck using IE at work or school (which doesn't have Firefox installed and won't let users install applications).
The modifications made to a standard ZIP of Firefox are as follows:
Extension-Friendly Launcher - Portable Firefox Launcher v0.0.3 is now included by default. It will alter the paths to any extensions you install to work relatively. Just be sure to download the XPI to your PC and then open it with a FILE - OPEN, followed by a browser close/restart before switching PCs. I still have the.bat launcher included for those who like it.
EXEs and DLLs Compressed - All EXEs and DLLs were recompressed using UPX. This gets our installed size down to one that works on 16Mb drives. Additionally, it will speed up use of Firefox when you're running over USB 1.1. The options used were: --best --compress-icons=0 --nrv2d --crp-ms=999999 -k
JARs re-compressed - The JAR files in the chrome have been recompressed at the maximum level, getting our package down to 7.8Mb. (For the curious, JAR files are just ZIP files with a different extension)
Default Profile - A default profile exists within the firefox directory.
No Default Browser Check - Firefox won't check to see if it is the default browser on startup.
Download Prompt - Firefox will ask where to save downloads.
Download History Cleared - Download history is cleared on exit.
Browser History Disabled - The history has been disabled to decrease disk size and the number of writes to the disk, increasing disk life.
Form Info Saving Disabled - Information from forms is not saved.
No Disk Cache - The browser disk cache has been disabled to decrease disk size and the number of writes to the disk, increasing disk life.
No permanent cookies - Cookies are only saved for the current session. None are written to the disk.
Am I the only one who wants to be able to plug a camera directly into a mp3 player and transfer photos without needed a 3rd party (belkin) widget?
Nope. You should check out the Gmini 220. It has a built-in Compact Flash reader so you can drop your photos to the 20G hard drive on the road. It's greyscale, so you can review photos, but it isn't made for showing them off. It is really small and light (6 oz). A colleague has one and loves it.
Slashdot Mirror
I know this is setting me up for a'Floggin', but does it integrate with MS Exchange?
Nope. Right now the Mozilla Calendar Project and, hence, the standalone Mozilla Sunbird, only support open calendering protocols (CalDAV and ICS). While there is demand for Exchange support, noone has stepped up to offer it. I'd guess, as Sunbird and the Lightning Project mature (and if enough demand builds up), someone may release a pay component that handles Exchange connectivity first... followed by an open source one at some later date.
Head to the Calendar:Protocol/Storage_Providers section of the Mozilla Wiki for more info.
Have they/are they planning on integrating it in to thunderbird? It looks a lot like Outlook's calendar, I think integrating it with Thunderbird (and even Firefox? Maybe let you add items through Firefox?) would be their greatest 'next' step.
The Mozilla Calendar Project is actually a plugin for Firefox and Thunderbird that adds a calendar to either program. Mozilla Sunbird is the standalone version of this.
The calendar plugin doesn't really "integrate" into Thunderbird as most would like, though, which is why the Lightning project was begun (it was mentioned on Slashdot in December.) The Lightning project aims for "tight" integration with Thunderbird, so you get more of a seamless program to handle all your email, calendar, contact and task needs. Expect to see more about Lightning later this year.
Quite right. AND be sure you are confirming opt-ins (ie... send a confirmation email to the address with a unique URL which must be clicked to confirm subscription). Otherwise, anyone can signup anyone else... and there are some mailbomb programs out there that automate this for 100s of sites that don't confirm, forcing the victim to unsubscribe from every list.
Yes, but unfortunatly, even though firefox is superior software, eventually there will be spyware targeted to firefox. The spyware and malware writers aren't stupid, unfortunately, and they'll find any way to fool stupid users.
There have already been multiple spyware apps that target Firefox. XXXToolbar was one of the first. It would auto-launch an XPI install attempt when you visitted a webpage. So, Firefox did 3 things.:
1. They turned of launching XPIs from the onload event. (I think I remember this happening, but couldn't find a reference... anyone?)
2. They added a 3 second delay before the Install button would work when you click on an XPI on a webpage
3. They added a whitelist with only mozilla and mozdev enabled by default so NO websites except those 2 can install XPIs without the user manually going in and updating the whitelist.
And this was long before the 1.0 release that this occured. Basically, every time the scammers have tried to come up with a trick to auto-install (or mistakenly install as with some ActiveX components), Mozilla has come up with a way to cut them off at the knees.
Not sure what's going on with January's "3." useragent, but FWIW here's a few months of their browser stats for just Mozilla:
It's pretty safe to assume that the "3" is their new Firefox entry, just missing its name. Summarizing the data by renderer makes the numbers far more useful to web developers as well:
MSHTML-Modern (Internet Explorer 5/6) : 88.69%
Gecko (Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape 6/7) : 6.67%
Other (Safari, Konqueror, Unknown) : 2.25%
MSHTML-Legacy (Internet Explorer 1-4) : 1.46%
Opera (Kinda obvious which browser it is) : 0.78%
Netscape (Netscape 1-4) : 0.16%
I wish they'd seperate out Konqueror and Opera. It would be nice to have a KHTML line in there...
Actually, there are quite a few models of domestic cars (mainly minivans) out durring the late 80s and early 90s that use only about five different key cuts and remote (door open) codes.
Growing up, my mom had a gray Chevy Celebrity wagon. While at the high school for a show, I went out to the car to drive out and pick something up. I walked up to the car, opened it up, sat in the driver's seat, looked in the rear view mirror and noticed... stuff... in the back seat. Random stuff that wasn't ours. Got back out, relocked the door and found our own car about 5 cars down the road.
Some of what it detects are definitely false positives. On my machine, it claimed to find registry traces of eDonkey and Grokster, which it says contain adware. But the keys it found were put there by Shareaza, a non-spyware open-source client.
Yeah, it wanted to kill off pieces of eMule, Shareaza and Unreal Tournament 2004 on my box.
Also, it's hard to keep people from clicking "yes".
You don't have to click YES or ACCEPT to get spyware in IE. All you have to do is visit a specific website... or a website that's been hacked... or a website that shows ads from a network that's been hacked... and it will auto-install it for you through one of IE's lovely unpatched exploits.
I just cleaned 12 off my sister's Win98 laptop and then promptly installed Firefox and Thunderbird.
Doesn't matter to an end user, which is what you all can't get through your heads.
That's why people would rather pay $200 bucks to have it be Microsoft's responsibility than to have to constantly monitor and upgrade every component on the system.
How did Java get on my machine? Firefox automatically installed it for me. Firefox automatically downloaded and installed an unsafe JVM with a critical security hole.
When Java is exploited on an IE machine, you betcha it's Microsoft's fault, right?
You do have a bit of a point there. Of course, IE is completely vulnerable on your machine as well as it is probably also using the exploitable Sun JVM you have installed.
But, the vulnerability is within Sun's Java VM which does have an updater packaged with it that should run on Windows start. It just doesn't work right. Should Firefox be responsible for updating when there is an exploit in Java, Flash, Shockwave or some other plugin? IE isn't, except for their OWN outdated Java VM. But they won't go and update Shockwave or Flash or the Sun Java VM.
Why is he counting sales and rentals of movies? Does the auto industry count sales and rentals in their figures? I think just sales would be a better measure of the industry. Afterall, aren't the folks who buy the movies (or cars) and then rent them out a seperate industry from the ones who produce what they are renting?
How good are the DNSBLs? "false positive" rates?
They vary widely. The ones I mentioned earlier are the ones I've seen used the most. Maybe add in NJABL and SORBS to that, too. I recently did a statistical analysis of the spam I get. Here are the DNSBLs I use and the percentage of the spam I receive that they have the sending server blacklisted:
ORDB: 0% (recent occurence, was ~1%)
Spamhaus SBL: 12.4%
Spamhaus XBL (aka CBL): 66.3%
Spamcop: 72.0%
As to false positives, it depends on the DNSBL again. ORDB only lists open relays, which are much fewer and further between these days, so, technically, it can't be a false positive. That said, I've never had a legit piece of mail that would have been blocked by it.
The Spamhaus SBL blocked bulk senders of spam, namely the 200 worst offenders in the world who have been thrown off 3 ISPs in a row and are now at an ISP that won't remove them. It's pretty good, but you will get an occasional false positive for places like Topica that send both legitimate newsletters and spam. I think I saw a false positive sent through sina.com or another horribly spammy ISP once before as well. Overall, though, it will be VERY low on false positives.
The Spamhaus XBL (which is really the CBL) is an excellent DNSBL. It lists compromised boxes that are zombies or open-proxied. I've never seen a false positive on the XBL.
The Spamcop BL varies according to who has reported what spam at Spamcop's site. As such, if a real mail server is used for a spam run, it may wind up listed temporarily. I recommend weighting spam based on the Spamcop BL, not blocking. I've seen about a dozen false-positives in the last 12 months with Spamcop's BL.
The antispam software at my previous workplace had a DNSBL feature (SpamCop?). When it was on, it was flagging _entire_ network ranges (whole ISPs), so it blocked email from legitimate companies - customers, partners etc.
It may have been Spamcop's BL. It used to be quite bad, actually, but has stabilized a bit. Even THEY don't recommend blocking mail based on it. Weighting is fine, though.
I see so many users using DNSBLs and they're so happy about the spam reduction... They probably don't correspond with anyone from the blacklisted ISPs, but even if I don't either, I am not going to rely on antispam tech that blocks entire ranges of IPs just because of spam from a few IPs.
Some people don't bother to research them well enough first to understand what the different lists do. Some DNSBLs make a point to say that they do block legitimate mail servers next to spammers on certain networks. It's called collateral damage. Of course, it is their right to list whatever they want... as long as they're clear about it. Some admins are perfectly happy with that as it puts pressure on ISPs to dump their spammers to keep their legit clients happy. I prefer just catching the spam for myself and my clients.
I have partial blocks in 202. because some of those IPs are in Australia and New Zealand and not spammy.
Quite right, which is one great reason not to use wholesale blocks without understanding them. I'm more of a fan of using some of the blackholes.us country-based lists to block China, etc than full IP blocks is someone wants to block certain countries.
Any other stats? Like what percentage of spam comes via the USA?
Quite a bit. I don't recommend blocking the US, though. Nor do I recommend blocking Asia... or even China. Much of the US spam I don't see as the CBL blocks most of it. (Nearly all of US spam is sent from zombied PCs whereas lots of Chinese spam is sent from real mail servers)
For US users with no contacts in Asia, though, it is quite tempting to just block Asia off, as I was attempting to illustrate. And also to make a counterpoint to the article which makes it seem like most spam isn't sent from Asia even though a large amount of it is. For Asian users who only do business within their own countries, blocking the US might be tempting for the same reasons, especially if they aren't using any DNSBLs.
Personally, I use a combination of DNSBLs (Spamhaus SBL, Spamhaus XBL/CBL, SpamCop and ORDB) along with bayesian filtering to handle the ~250 spam messages a day I get sent to my personal email account.
I'm looking for a way to blackhole the entirety of China.
Every single hacking attempt on my server originates from a Chinese IP. This is also true of every single spam connection attempt as well.
Now there are probably some of you reading this saying "But where do you draw the line? Oh the slipperly slope!" If you are one of these people I have this to say: give me a break.
Without getting into the "slippery slope" argument, blackholes.us maintains a pretty detailed list of Chinese IP space. They also have other country IP lists for origination points of high amounts hacking and fraud like Nigeria, Russia and Brazil.
Even though most spam is sent through zombied networks in the US and Europe, a lot of spam still originates within Asia. Here's a list of the top IP netblock spam sources I see from APNIC along with the percentage of spam they represent:
211.x.x.x (Asia-Pacific): 8.0%
61.x.x.x (Asia-Pacific): 6.0%
218.x.x.x (Asia-Pacific): 4.2%
221.x.x.x (Asia-Pacific): 4.1%
219.x.x.x (Asia-Pacific): 3.7%
220.x.x.x (Asia-Pacific): 3.0%
210.x.x.x (Asia-Pacific): 1.9%
203.x.x.x (Asia-Pacific): 1.1%
202.x.x.x (Asia-Pacific): 1.0%
This means fully 1/3 of the spam received at my mail servers originates within APNIC. Of course, we can't forget our friends in that other big spammy IP block on LACNIC (Brazil, another huge identity theft/phishing locale):
200.x.x.x (Latin America): 3.6%
Now, if you're a local company or running a personal mail server for contact with only your known contacts, blocking most of that address space becomes quite tempting. If you're a national or international or have any possibility of communicating with folks in those areas of the world, blocking would be a bad idea. Still, there are many mail admins that have taken just this step with many of the above-mentioned IP blocks.
Maybe I'm not following you, but even if you reject at the MTA level won't the exploited mail relay bounce the message to the forged originator anyway? The only difference is who is doing the bouncing. Either way, the rejected message is bounced, assuming that a 3rd party relay (and not custom spam software) is doing the sending.
Most spam is coming from an exploited box directly. If it gets a 5xx Denied message, it just fails to send that message and generates no bounce. Legit mail from a real mail server will drop a bounce message in the sender's mailbox.
It's still a worthy project though, sorry if I seemed like I played it down, it did find a place on my MP3 player ;)
Not at all. I'd actually been meaning to mention the Windows-only nature on the page. It's well-known in the mozillaZine forums, but most people are finding the project through other sources now-a-days.
Also, the eventual goal is to have Windows, Mac and Linux versions of Firefox installed on the portable drive with specialized launchers all running the same profile.
Well, I've got you part of the way already:
- Portable Firefox - Web browser
- Portable Thunderbird - Email client
- Portable Sunbird - Calendar application
- Portable NVU - HTML Editor
To that, you can add:More will be forthcoming, I'm sure.
Why did I have to read half the page to figure out what version of FireFox/ThunderBird he had packaged though ?? (of course it's windows, I wonder why I even wondered, duh)
Sorry bout that. I've updated the page to mention it by the download up top.
OTOH I suppose it's easier to find a random Windows PC than a real computer nowadays... (gratuitious flaimbait, I know)
Yes, it is. And you can copy your bookmarks, cookies, etc directly into a copy of Portable Firefox/Thunderbird on a USB key from within Mac OSX or Linux and then use it anywhere one of said Windows PCs is.
In the MozillaZine Forum, many discussed putting the win32 and linux binaries on a single stick & having them share profiles. Might as well throw in the Mac binaries too & then you'd have something really useful!
It's on the ToDo list. That's the eventual goal.
Well, I guess the cat is fully out of the bag now anyway. I was planning on mentioning this on Slashdot once I got everything over on MozDev finally (my server went over my bandwidth limit last month just from all the blog and tech site mentions... first time that's happened since I released Portable Firefox back in June).
In the past couple days, I've added launchers and instructions for Portable NVU and Portable Sunbird. Ready-to-use, fully-compressed packages will be forthcoming over the next week.
The releases are Windows-only for now. The launcher uses the Nullsoft Scriptable Installer System at the moment, which isn't compatible with Mac OSX.
I'm currently working on automating the full build process and switching to 7-zip for compression. Once done, I'll be releasing Portable Firefox and Portable Thunderbird in all localized languages supported by Firefox and Thunderbird.
Future plans include:
- Sync utility, running from the portable install, to copy bookmarks, extensions, cookies, etc back and forth
- Multi-OS install on the portable media, so the applications will run from every computer you use.
- Support for Enigmail/GPG out-of-the-box (Another developer has repackaged Portable Thunderbird with these included. I'll be updating my launchers to support this by default)
- Single, combined launcher for all products
- Full theme support
- Lots more?
We are unable to change our ISP because they "own" the building but the real problem is further up line - again it cannot be changed by us or our ISP. Up-line they are presumably too busy running spam for US based spammers to care.
Perhaps it would be far more savvy of you to contract with a Good(TM) company on a clean network to run a mail server for you. It wouldn't matter who your ISP was.
The website won't work with most popup-blockers enabled, so here's a direct link.
The modifications made to a standard ZIP of Firefox are as follows:
Am I the only one who wants to be able to plug a camera directly into a mp3 player and transfer photos without needed a 3rd party (belkin) widget?
Nope. You should check out the Gmini 220. It has a built-in Compact Flash reader so you can drop your photos to the 20G hard drive on the road. It's greyscale, so you can review photos, but it isn't made for showing them off. It is really small and light (6 oz). A colleague has one and loves it.