Schools may need your SSN to report taxable benefits, such as employee tuition reimbursement. My school switched to 9-digit ID numbers a few years back. Those 9-digit ID numbers will evenuatlly look like SSNs after they get out of the leading zeros (00xxxxxxx) which may take several decades. Why they didn't go with 9-character to allow alpha is beyond me. The cost of losing data resulting in a reporting incident is quite costly. Why did this faculty member have access to SSNs? Why did a RETIRED faculty member have access to any confidential information. Only the admissions office "needs" that.
The article is rather light on backing and employs weak logic to reach its conclusions. It also relies on some tired urban legends or scapegoating when it compares sloughy users to renters:
...akin to the difference between how renters feel about their apartments and home owners think of their homes.
These tired ownership society attitudes assume actions result from a lack of vested interest while discounting the training issues.
Other postings in this topic lament being on the receiving end of the blame game. Get used to life because there are many situations where others will shift responsibility to high-horse IT employees who, like most others, are not immune to accusations. A little dialog can go far in diffusing the following situation:
[BOSS] John couldn't get that package out to big client yesterday. Why was the printer down?
[IT] Equipment sometimes fails and we put in 110% to keep things running.
[BOSS] Yeah, we lost a million-dollar contract due to your incompetence.
[IT] I suppose it would be fair to ask why Marketing waited until 4:55 to make their print out?
[BOSS] Because they were putting in 14-hour days for the past week. The printer needs to be working during times of crisis.
[IT] If it was so critical, we would have posted someone to continually monitor the printer had Marketing given us the heads up of their deadline.
If you have an unreasonable boss, run fast. These blame throwing tirades are just that.
You want to blame the makers of CommuniGate Pro for enforcing the terms of their license? I take it that you believe customers should be entitled to infinite upgrades at no charge. CGP users are always able to use the version of CGP they purchased or their last upgrade before the license expiration for as long as they please.
This so called time bomb applies only to FORMER customers who upgrade without a current license. Sounds fair to me.
Suppose you are given a chance to build from scratch an email system that has to support around one million accounts. Some corporate, some personal, some free. POP, IMAP, webmail, etc are requirements. The system must scale perfectly, 99.9% uptime is expected... where would you start?
I just reread the parent after posting a long description of our configuration. Is this system in your basement? I ask because you mention personal and free accounts. You could put these special non-corporate accounts on a different system. Why burden a corporate system with non-corporate users?
If you must, CommuniGate Pro is great for this function because you can create multiple e-mail domains within a CGP cluster. CGP lets you delegate administrative functions for each e-mail domain. From our 40,000 user system, I would bet the farm that CGP easily scales to 1,000,000+ users on a fairly small cluster.
As others and I have emphasized, separate the functions on different systems. Install a front-end e-mail security appliance to handle blacklists, block zombies, LDAP attacks, antivirus, and antispam. Do NOT run these using MailScanner or SpamAssassin. Use a commercial appliance such as IronPort (major competitors are MiraPoint and MailFrontier).
Put your mailstore on a real NAS server such as a Network Appliance FAS-960 which can handle up to 32 terabytes and handle a large number of simultaneous transactions (NFS ops). Cheap RAID systems cannot support the load of 1,000,000 users. NetApp servers automatically generate instantaneous snapshots of the file system every hour thereby permitting easy restore of messages without going to backup tape or secondary storage.
Someone else mentioned installing a bunch of redundant fibre, etc. I would hope your e-mail system is installed in a data center with these features.
By dumping Exchange, you've already made an excellent start. As of a couple years ago, MS Hotmail was running on Sendmail and various ad-ons. Microsoft couldn't scale Exchange for their flagship e-mail portal. Does anyone know or will any Microsoft employee admit to what is being used for Hotmail?
My company employs a combination of several technologies which provide almost 100% uptime. Although no system will be perfect, I believe you can achive that 99.9% service level.
Our e-mail enterprise product is CommuniGate Pro (CGP) from an unfortunately-named company called Stalker Software. CGP is in use by many ISPs, scales very well, and is high performance. We're much smaller than 1 million users with around 40,000 accounts. CGP supports SMTP, IMAP, POP, Webmail, LDAP, and has plug-ins for antispam and antivirus. As these functions require a lot of I/O and CPU horsepower I would configure a separate e-mail security appliance. Our CGP servers have a Unix load factor of about 1.00 or less.
For e-mail security, we use a pair of IronPort C60s as our border SMTP gateway. The C60s run Sophos antivirus and Symantec Brightmail. Brightmail has a false positive rate of 1 in 1,000,000 which is very important in large organizations. These C60 systems can each process several hundred thousand messages per hour, which is ideal for peak demands and are great for blocking zombie hosts. No system will block all spam or viruses. However, you can expect to catch roughly 98% of spam and 99.9% of viruses with no effort from the users. Power users can always emply additional spam filters with their e-mail client, such as, Thunderbird.
DO NOT skimp on hardware. Buy high-end Intel or "Unix" servers (Sun, HP, IBM, etc.) and install your favorite flavor of Unix/Linux. Did someone else mention hot-pluggable redundant systems? DO NOT store e-mail messages on your e-mail system. Get yourself a real NAS or SAN server, such as the Network Appliance FAS series. Don't skimp on low-cost imitations. Our NetApp servers have a record of 100.00% uptime for the past five years. Honest! Our only downtime on the NetApp servers was for UPS or power maintenance, or filesystem migration. We have not experienced any downtime. Can I say it again?
Experts will argue whether you should run iSCSI or NFS. NFS is just as fast as iSCSI and can be shared across multiple servers. I-SCSI and SAN volumes cannot be shared across multiple servers so scaling an iSCSI volume to 1,000,000 users is out of the question. Because CGP manages account and file sharing mitigation, you don't have to worry about silly and incompatible NFS file locking utilities.
Good luck with your "project" and please let us know upon what you decide to use.
Bring back the original KeyTronic Professional Series keyboards. Big "L" shaped RETURN key, injection-molded keys so the letters won't wear off, and DIP switch swappable CAPS LOCK and CONTROL keys and keycaps. Who uses the CAPS LOCK more than the CONTROL key?
The CONTROL key belongs adjacent to the A key.
The DEC VT52/VT101 keyboard got it right and IBM had to fsck it up with their Personal Computer (also a KeyTronic keyboard). As for keyboard feel, I had the pleasure of using an IBM 3200 (forgot exact model) keyboard a long time ago. The feel was awesome.
We evaluated on of those yellow Google search appliances (GSA) and experienced very mixed results. The appliance is very easy to set-up and launch an initial scan of our website.
The GSA will blindly search all web servers in your domain. When setting-up the GSA, you give it an initial page from which to start crawling and baseline domains. For example:
The leading dot on the first domain entry says to search all hosts in the domain.
Problem: GSA does not provide very good status of where or what it is searching. It only has a dashboard light to say it is crawling. No details.
Problem: We found that the GSA would get caught in an endless loop if it encountered a user website controlled by a database. It would endlessly follow the next and previous links to find every database entry.
Our university library subscribes to a number of electronic databases, such as, EBSCO PsychINFO, etc. The GSA indexed every possible look-up.
Our eval licenses was limited to 1.5 million pages. Some of these databases contain hundreds of thousands of pages. Solution: Those setting up their own web server must employ proper robots.txt files or risk having their entire server blocked from indexing.
Contrary to the article title, trustedsource isn't providing any reputation score whatsoever. Reputation scores are useful in determining whether someone has been sending spam, not whether they are a high-volume sender.
Senderbase has been providing this information for quite some time. Senderbase gives numerical scores for e-mail volume and makes it easy to see when an address or domain is on spam blacklists.
Folks with an IronPort e-mail security appliance are granted access to the actual reputation scores as opposed to just a volume score. The reputation scores control the flow of e-mail through IronPort security appliances. IPs with a negative score are either known spammers or have insufficient repuation history. IPs with a positive score have a good sending history.
The whole concept of reputation scores is to determine whether you will accept an e-mail message or SMTP connection. Basing that judgment merely on sending volume would block Comcast, Yahoo, and AOL gateways (I'm referring to the ISP's e-mail systems, not their customer DSL and dial-up connections). Dynamic reputation scores are most useful in restricting the flow of e-mail from the bad guys while letting trustworthy e-mail flow through quickly.
Folks with an IronPort e-mail security appliance also get actual reputation scores as opposed to just a sending volume rating. IPs with a negative score are either known spammers or have insufficient repuation. IPs with a positive score have a good sending history.
Those newspapers are not the proper place to publish peer-reviewed emperical studies. I will withhold judgment until after the research is published and criticized as is customary for all new scientific studies.
According to a recent NPR interview, the average time for consciousness on a plane that just decompressed is only 8-10 seconds. That's why those safety lessons insist putting on your own mask before a child's. Black-out quickly ensues with loss of pressure at 35,000 feet. With only 8-10 seconds, I'm not sure I want to put on my mask only to survive until the plane crashes. People who are sleeping will never get their mask put on in time.
My University is proceeding with ambitious plans to purchase some hugh multimillion dollar robot. Initially, rare and infrequently circulated books will be housed in this contraption and students will lose the ability to peruse the stacks of books contained in the beast. I've located numerous articles and sources by readings books and journals adjacent to my original destination. What a loss when we can't touch the books. I'm sure many SlashDot readers recall the Star Trek episode "Court Martial" where Kirk's attorney insists on using law books -- gasp -- instead of the computer database.
A very large percentage of BMWs and VWs on the road exhibit some electrical problem. These are visible to other drivers as blown out lights. I rarely see burnt out lights on Honda and Toyota vehicles but see them all the time on BMWs (Mercedes is a totally different class of vehicle). My American-made Honda has more American content than a typical vehicle from Detroit. The US parts content of my Accord is 75%. Many American cars are 65% North-American (not just US). So I guess that makes me more patriotic since I'm doing more to support the U.S. labor force than those true blue (I mean red) die hards who only by vehicles from Detroit.
I'd like to see a vehicle option to install cameras and a video recorder to prove who's at fault in an accident.
This is nowhere close to IBM WebAdapt2Me which zooms the entire page, not just fonts and not a separate graphics zoom tool. Their WebAdapt2Me tool has several cool features which let you adjust fonts with different sizes, contrast, or weight. You can quickly change the text from black on white to white on black, as well as adjustments for kerning (space between letters) and leading (space between lines). These are all important for accommodation of various visual, motor, and learning impairments.
WebAdapt2me also provides text-to-speach synthesis. Show me a web browser that does all this today. Adaptive software and hardware are quite a bit more complicated that many Slashdot readers realize.
Damn, IBM just sold our campus their WebAdapt2Me product which provides assistive technology for visually and motor impaired web surfers. It works only with MSIE.
The basic features of IBM WebAdapt2Me are: font size adjustment, web page magnification (125%, 150%, 175%, etc.) which magnifies the entire page, font selection (bold, inverse bold, font style), kerning (spacing between letters), leading (spacing between lines). These features go way beyond the MS magnifier functions. If true, this is fantastic news that IBM is dontaing the technology to Mozilla.
If we proceed to militarize space with weapons, not just spy satellites, we will doom future mankind to a life only on planet Earth. Space debris will prevent future rockets from leaving earth. Unless some science fiction space shield can be developed, debris as small as an old bolt would destroy any ship with which it comes in contact.
gas would cost about $0.50 without tax right now, but it's the taxes that make it cost the $2.499 that it does now. but you don't gas your car often, do you.
Let me guess: your father is a supply sider? Federal gas tax is around 18.4 cents per gallon. Gas taxes vary by state but average 5-10 cents per gallon. With sales tax, the total tax on gasonline is less than 50 cents per gallon. So without taxes, gasonline could be priced at around $2.00 per gallon.
Fact checking left to the reader as a trivial exercise.
If you really want to encourage energy conservation, raise the price of gasoline to $10 per gallon. That will get people to make serious behavioral changes. With gasoline prices still lower than the 1970s, when adjusted for inflation, and higher personal incomes, many people don't care about the fuel efficiency of their vehicles. Raising gasoline prices will impact the bottom 80% but does little to those who can afford gas at any price. What about rationing?
Nobody made you buy that fancy house far from your work. Try living closer or risk having your home destroyed to make way for the hyperspace bypass.
In Southern California, we pay nearly double the national average or about 15 cents per kilowatt. It was all because of former Governor Pete Wilson's bid for presidency by deregulation and from term limits which resulted in state politicians with no expertise.
Small windmills won't solve our energy problems and individually produce minimal power. I'm sure it would be unpleasant living next door to people who installed one or more in their yard. In the city here, we don't get much wind.
As TFA states, it's easy to prevent much of the problem by tracking receipts. Large retailers like Nordstrom, Macy's, Home Depot, Lowe's, and Target all put code numbers on their receipts to prevent an item from being returned multiple times. I'm not sure how you prevent someone from substituting similar but inferior products on returns.
Slashdot Mirror
Schools may need your SSN to report taxable benefits, such as employee tuition reimbursement. My school switched to 9-digit ID numbers a few years back. Those 9-digit ID numbers will evenuatlly look like SSNs after they get out of the leading zeros (00xxxxxxx) which may take several decades. Why they didn't go with 9-character to allow alpha is beyond me. The cost of losing data resulting in a reporting incident is quite costly. Why did this faculty member have access to SSNs? Why did a RETIRED faculty member have access to any confidential information. Only the admissions office "needs" that.
These tired ownership society attitudes assume actions result from a lack of vested interest while discounting the training issues.
Other postings in this topic lament being on the receiving end of the blame game. Get used to life because there are many situations where others will shift responsibility to high-horse IT employees who, like most others, are not immune to accusations. A little dialog can go far in diffusing the following situation:
[BOSS] John couldn't get that package out to big client yesterday. Why was the printer down?
[IT] Equipment sometimes fails and we put in 110% to keep things running.
[BOSS] Yeah, we lost a million-dollar contract due to your incompetence.
[IT] I suppose it would be fair to ask why Marketing waited until 4:55 to make their print out?
[BOSS] Because they were putting in 14-hour days for the past week. The printer needs to be working during times of crisis.
[IT] If it was so critical, we would have posted someone to continually monitor the printer had Marketing given us the heads up of their deadline.
If you have an unreasonable boss, run fast. These blame throwing tirades are just that.
So IIIR claims that it created webmail back in 2002. Very funny. We were using Netscape webmail from 1997 to 2004. Netscape should claim prior art.
You want to blame the makers of CommuniGate Pro for enforcing the terms of their license? I take it that you believe customers should be entitled to infinite upgrades at no charge. CGP users are always able to use the version of CGP they purchased or their last upgrade before the license expiration for as long as they please.
This so called time bomb applies only to FORMER customers who upgrade without a current license. Sounds fair to me.
I just reread the parent after posting a long description of our configuration. Is this system in your basement? I ask because you mention personal and free accounts. You could put these special non-corporate accounts on a different system. Why burden a corporate system with non-corporate users?
If you must, CommuniGate Pro is great for this function because you can create multiple e-mail domains within a CGP cluster. CGP lets you delegate administrative functions for each e-mail domain. From our 40,000 user system, I would bet the farm that CGP easily scales to 1,000,000+ users on a fairly small cluster.
As others and I have emphasized, separate the functions on different systems. Install a front-end e-mail security appliance to handle blacklists, block zombies, LDAP attacks, antivirus, and antispam. Do NOT run these using MailScanner or SpamAssassin. Use a commercial appliance such as IronPort (major competitors are MiraPoint and MailFrontier).
Put your mailstore on a real NAS server such as a Network Appliance FAS-960 which can handle up to 32 terabytes and handle a large number of simultaneous transactions (NFS ops). Cheap RAID systems cannot support the load of 1,000,000 users. NetApp servers automatically generate instantaneous snapshots of the file system every hour thereby permitting easy restore of messages without going to backup tape or secondary storage.
Someone else mentioned installing a bunch of redundant fibre, etc. I would hope your e-mail system is installed in a data center with these features.
My company employs a combination of several technologies which provide almost 100% uptime. Although no system will be perfect, I believe you can achive that 99.9% service level.
Our e-mail enterprise product is CommuniGate Pro (CGP) from an unfortunately-named company called Stalker Software. CGP is in use by many ISPs, scales very well, and is high performance. We're much smaller than 1 million users with around 40,000 accounts. CGP supports SMTP, IMAP, POP, Webmail, LDAP, and has plug-ins for antispam and antivirus. As these functions require a lot of I/O and CPU horsepower I would configure a separate e-mail security appliance. Our CGP servers have a Unix load factor of about 1.00 or less.
For e-mail security, we use a pair of IronPort C60s as our border SMTP gateway. The C60s run Sophos antivirus and Symantec Brightmail. Brightmail has a false positive rate of 1 in 1,000,000 which is very important in large organizations. These C60 systems can each process several hundred thousand messages per hour, which is ideal for peak demands and are great for blocking zombie hosts. No system will block all spam or viruses. However, you can expect to catch roughly 98% of spam and 99.9% of viruses with no effort from the users. Power users can always emply additional spam filters with their e-mail client, such as, Thunderbird.
DO NOT skimp on hardware. Buy high-end Intel or "Unix" servers (Sun, HP, IBM, etc.) and install your favorite flavor of Unix/Linux. Did someone else mention hot-pluggable redundant systems? DO NOT store e-mail messages on your e-mail system. Get yourself a real NAS or SAN server, such as the Network Appliance FAS series. Don't skimp on low-cost imitations. Our NetApp servers have a record of 100.00% uptime for the past five years. Honest! Our only downtime on the NetApp servers was for UPS or power maintenance, or filesystem migration. We have not experienced any downtime. Can I say it again?
Experts will argue whether you should run iSCSI or NFS. NFS is just as fast as iSCSI and can be shared across multiple servers. I-SCSI and SAN volumes cannot be shared across multiple servers so scaling an iSCSI volume to 1,000,000 users is out of the question. Because CGP manages account and file sharing mitigation, you don't have to worry about silly and incompatible NFS file locking utilities.
Good luck with your "project" and please let us know upon what you decide to use.
Bring back the original KeyTronic Professional Series keyboards. Big "L" shaped RETURN key, injection-molded keys so the letters won't wear off, and DIP switch swappable CAPS LOCK and CONTROL keys and keycaps. Who uses the CAPS LOCK more than the CONTROL key? The CONTROL key belongs adjacent to the A key. The DEC VT52/VT101 keyboard got it right and IBM had to fsck it up with their Personal Computer (also a KeyTronic keyboard). As for keyboard feel, I had the pleasure of using an IBM 3200 (forgot exact model) keyboard a long time ago. The feel was awesome.
Oops. I mean, Back-to-School Fools!
We evaluated on of those yellow Google search appliances (GSA) and experienced very mixed results. The appliance is very easy to set-up and launch an initial scan of our website.
.slashdot.org,slashdot.org
The GSA will blindly search all web servers in your domain. When setting-up the GSA, you give it an initial page from which to start crawling and baseline domains. For example:
Inital page: http://www.slashdot.org/
Domain(s):
The leading dot on the first domain entry says to search all hosts in the domain.
Problem: GSA does not provide very good status of where or what it is searching. It only has a dashboard light to say it is crawling. No details.
Problem: We found that the GSA would get caught in an endless loop if it encountered a user website controlled by a database. It would endlessly follow the next and previous links to find every database entry.
Our university library subscribes to a number of electronic databases, such as, EBSCO PsychINFO, etc. The GSA indexed every possible look-up.
Our eval licenses was limited to 1.5 million pages. Some of these databases contain hundreds of thousands of pages. Solution: Those setting up their own web server must employ proper robots.txt files or risk having their entire server blocked from indexing.
Senderbase has been providing this information for quite some time. Senderbase gives numerical scores for e-mail volume and makes it easy to see when an address or domain is on spam blacklists.
Folks with an IronPort e-mail security appliance are granted access to the actual reputation scores as opposed to just a volume score. The reputation scores control the flow of e-mail through IronPort security appliances. IPs with a negative score are either known spammers or have insufficient repuation history. IPs with a positive score have a good sending history.
The whole concept of reputation scores is to determine whether you will accept an e-mail message or SMTP connection. Basing that judgment merely on sending volume would block Comcast, Yahoo, and AOL gateways (I'm referring to the ISP's e-mail systems, not their customer DSL and dial-up connections). Dynamic reputation scores are most useful in restricting the flow of e-mail from the bad guys while letting trustworthy e-mail flow through quickly. Folks with an IronPort e-mail security appliance also get actual reputation scores as opposed to just a sending volume rating. IPs with a negative score are either known spammers or have insufficient repuation. IPs with a positive score have a good sending history.
Those newspapers are not the proper place to publish peer-reviewed emperical studies. I will withhold judgment until after the research is published and criticized as is customary for all new scientific studies.
According to a recent NPR interview, the average time for consciousness on a plane that just decompressed is only 8-10 seconds. That's why those safety lessons insist putting on your own mask before a child's. Black-out quickly ensues with loss of pressure at 35,000 feet. With only 8-10 seconds, I'm not sure I want to put on my mask only to survive until the plane crashes. People who are sleeping will never get their mask put on in time.
My University is proceeding with ambitious plans to purchase some hugh multimillion dollar robot. Initially, rare and infrequently circulated books will be housed in this contraption and students will lose the ability to peruse the stacks of books contained in the beast. I've located numerous articles and sources by readings books and journals adjacent to my original destination. What a loss when we can't touch the books. I'm sure many SlashDot readers recall the Star Trek episode "Court Martial" where Kirk's attorney insists on using law books -- gasp -- instead of the computer database.
nothing to read here.
Still waiting for the trailer to download.
A very large percentage of BMWs and VWs on the road exhibit some electrical problem. These are visible to other drivers as blown out lights. I rarely see burnt out lights on Honda and Toyota vehicles but see them all the time on BMWs (Mercedes is a totally different class of vehicle). My American-made Honda has more American content than a typical vehicle from Detroit. The US parts content of my Accord is 75%. Many American cars are 65% North-American (not just US). So I guess that makes me more patriotic since I'm doing more to support the U.S. labor force than those true blue (I mean red) die hards who only by vehicles from Detroit.
I'd like to see a vehicle option to install cameras and a video recorder to prove who's at fault in an accident.
This article was referenced on Yahoo! Finance about two months ago. What took so long for SlashDot editors to publish the story?
This is nowhere close to IBM WebAdapt2Me which zooms the entire page, not just fonts and not a separate graphics zoom tool. Their WebAdapt2Me tool has several cool features which let you adjust fonts with different sizes, contrast, or weight. You can quickly change the text from black on white to white on black, as well as adjustments for kerning (space between letters) and leading (space between lines). These are all important for accommodation of various visual, motor, and learning impairments.
WebAdapt2me also provides text-to-speach synthesis. Show me a web browser that does all this today. Adaptive software and hardware are quite a bit more complicated that many Slashdot readers realize.
Damn, IBM just sold our campus their WebAdapt2Me product which provides assistive technology for visually and motor impaired web surfers. It works only with MSIE.
The basic features of IBM WebAdapt2Me are: font size adjustment, web page magnification (125%, 150%, 175%, etc.) which magnifies the entire page, font selection (bold, inverse bold, font style), kerning (spacing between letters), leading (spacing between lines). These features go way beyond the MS magnifier functions. If true, this is fantastic news that IBM is dontaing the technology to Mozilla.
If we proceed to militarize space with weapons, not just spy satellites, we will doom future mankind to a life only on planet Earth. Space debris will prevent future rockets from leaving earth. Unless some science fiction space shield can be developed, debris as small as an old bolt would destroy any ship with which it comes in contact.
Let me guess: your father is a supply sider? Federal gas tax is around 18.4 cents per gallon. Gas taxes vary by state but average 5-10 cents per gallon. With sales tax, the total tax on gasonline is less than 50 cents per gallon. So without taxes, gasonline could be priced at around $2.00 per gallon.
Fact checking left to the reader as a trivial exercise.
Nobody made you buy that fancy house far from your work. Try living closer or risk having your home destroyed to make way for the hyperspace bypass.
In Southern California, we pay nearly double the national average or about 15 cents per kilowatt. It was all because of former Governor Pete Wilson's bid for presidency by deregulation and from term limits which resulted in state politicians with no expertise.
Small windmills won't solve our energy problems and individually produce minimal power. I'm sure it would be unpleasant living next door to people who installed one or more in their yard. In the city here, we don't get much wind.
Did you read TFA? The point is that the fireplace doesn't need venting and no mess or smell.
As TFA states, it's easy to prevent much of the problem by tracking receipts. Large retailers like Nordstrom, Macy's, Home Depot, Lowe's, and Target all put code numbers on their receipts to prevent an item from being returned multiple times. I'm not sure how you prevent someone from substituting similar but inferior products on returns.