Indeed.. those jackasses sold me a service that didn't work from my office in the centre of Montreal, sold me a defective phone that rebooted constantly despite being sent back for repairs twice. Couldn't be bothered to send me a bill (they demanded my credit card number) harassed me every two months for the money they didn't bill me for and then when that call failed thanks to a system error on their side disconnected my service.
After all that they not only refused to replace the phone but they demanded an "early termination fee" of $5 for each month left in the contract. Needless to say the fee was the lesser of the two evils.
The most common use of this by "Direct marketing firms" is not to open new transactions with it but to engage in a scam known as "Antitel".
The idea is that the scammer calls the target and claims to be working for the bank's security department and that you will refund the money but you need to confirm the bank details and that a recording is needed for security reasons.
Que recording of the target with the customer repeating the info the scammer just gave the target in the first place and agreeing to a draft of $399. It's all said too quickly for the customer to hear but if the customer objects the scammer abuses the target for messing up the computer system by not answering with "yes or no" and if needed specify that draft means "to deposit" (it really means to withdraw) and the recording gets restarted.
The account is then debited for the amount listed.
If the customer objects then they are told they must return the items they purchased before they can have a refund (all $15 worth). If the customer calls their bank they are shown the recording of them agreeing to a $399 draft (withdrawal).
Nice eh?
I got an earfull of this crap a year and a half ago when I did some IT work for a telemarketing place in Montreal. They wouldn't tell me what they were doing but after hearing the calls from start to finish a few times I figured it out in a hurry.
Or maybe your mail server is on one of the broken smtp blacklists for being an easy target for spammers to send backscatter spam.
If you are running unpatched qmail I beg you to stop for the good of everyone else on the internet.
You don't get to say "nothing needs fixing" and then right off say "here's plenty of add-ons and patches".
Those add-ons and patches are a nightmare to support and it's a major reason why I no longer use qmail.
Having to patch things so that qmail does something basic (and best practise) like refusing a bad email instead of sending a bounce does not exactly scream "well maintained".
Qmail hasn't been maintained in years and is essentially abandoned at this point. Public domain just makes that official so it's not as if the author needs to care what happens with the code.
I'll be curious to see whether someone manages to rekindle interest in it. The news might be good for people stuck with a large qmail setup they can't change easily but I'm guessing most new projects would be on postfix.
What about the "number of writes" property of magnetic disks. I can write to a drive hundreds of thousands nay millions of times whereas with a Flash you might get ten thousand if your very lucky. I've head of flash drives being used as boot disks for small media centres and they die after a month simply because the o/s writes to the drive very often.
Well that's why I put the logs on the 500gb drive.
Funny thing though.. my dad used to have Toshiba T2000 with a 4mb flash that the laptop used as ram(yes it was slow) 5 years later it still worked. Flash can't have gotten that much worse since than can it?
At the price flash drives are getting to it's tempting to get a SATA to CompactFlash adaptor and put the base system (where performance matters most) on that and keep the 500gb drive for logs and movies..
I personally feel that People use XP because its easily pirated and not a complete memory hog
I wouldn't say that. I got enough calls from (business and personal) clients complaining because their XP doesn't work anymore that I had to make it standard policy to ask them to show me the original media first thing as soon as I get there.
Sad thing is some of these businesses have lost more money in the time it took them to buy the media and have me come in and install a properly licenced version then it would have cost them to by a legit copy in the first place.
I don't pay a single cent of income tax on my winnings. Part because the online gambling sites have no mechanism for reporting gambling income to the governments. Although I'd still pay my fair share if Canada taxed gaming "income" - thankfully we do not.
This is not exactly true. Canada does not tax you if your winnings are "windfall". Somewhere there is a not very clear line where gambling will constitute income.
If you are making a good amount of money on gambling I would ask a tax expert about it just to make sure your on the right side of the line.
That's funny but seriously.. they had those in the place I was staying in Bulgaria last year and they were amazing. 4 guys in the apartment and even if I was last in line that morning and had to wait until after each one has a 45 minute shower and even if I spent a whole hour after that I still had hot water.
Meanwhile my tank gives me 30 to 40 minutes of hot water total before I have to let it reheat.
I don't know what planet you're from where everything else in your house is so efficient that 15W is an "amazing" amount of power. According to this site run by Ames, IA [ames.ia.us] (the first link Google found), an electric water heater draws 3800 W of power and runs 118±20 hours per month in a typical household of 4. Thus, it consumes 450±75 kWh of energy over the course of a month. Your wasteful computer uses about 10 kWh over a 720-hour (30-day) month. That's a lot more than it should, certainly, but a tiny drop in the bucket compared to all the kilowatt-hours that leak right through your water heater's thin insulation, ones that you could've conserved by simply heating water on demand.
Exactly. I've been on a "save myself electricity" kick lately. At my last apartment I swapped every bulb in the house except the chandelier in the living room with compact fluorescents almost no difference on my bill. I shut off my sparc server and raid array.. no noticeable difference in my bill I turn my hot water tank (house heat and hot water) two notches down (still scalding hot) and saved $40 a month in gas.
My current place has my landlord paying the heating so most of my money is going to hot water and the ancient fridge in the kitchen Nothing I do here seems to shave more than $1 a month off my bill. I'm sure at some point that $1 will be important but right now I have $40 being taken by hot water tank and large appliances.
What bothers me is they are worried about all these half watt drains and meanwhile most of the electricity used in a house goes into heating, appliances, hot water and lights.
The big offenders need nailing first so they should be banning hot water tanks (instant on hot water uses 50% less energy) before they start regulating standby mode.
What Sentry21 says is true.. last year when I was in the emergency room and got an xray of my foot I could view it on Linux with no trouble. It's possible to request a copy of any xrays on CD up here.
On a fun note the machines that handled the storage and transmission of the images were maintained by the company sentry21 used to do support for... that's how I knew to ask.
I would never set my mail server to just drop incoming email since then no one knows something went wrong and bad assumptions get made when legit emails don't get replied to.
I hate it all the more since a few years ago I ended up on a broken MTA blacklist (thanks Qmail) thanks to the constant backscatter and several providers just accepted and then dropped everything coming from my mail server with no error.
Took me forever to figure out what was going wrong.
What you've described as an open relay really isn't: it's a "Joe Job", a forgery pretending to be from somewhere else, exactly what SPF was designed to block. Now, *throttling* such connections seems completely reasonable, but as someone who's run SMTP servers, I submit to you that discarding the messages silently is not.
How many SMTP servers could you have possibly run if you didn't know that it's possible for the server to refuse the email in the first place and let the SENDING mail server handle the bounce message?
Refusing the email during the SMTP handshake results in a faster bounce for the user and less CPU and network time wasted between the mail servers.
And don't get me started on how Barracuda spam filters depend on an immediate refusal to detect address guessing and how that whole feature is made useless by Qmail not doing things properly.
Not even close to true. Postfix Admin does everything vpopmail does and more. I used to run qmail+qmail for years several years before I switched over and I can tell you Postfix Admin does a better job.
The lack of SPF should be no excuse to allow for a broken mail server implementation. When I set up a server the ability for a user to gain a shell on the system is only one of the forms of security I look at. I also need to consider if any of the resources on my machine can be used by an outside to inflict harm on other servers. I need to make sure that my name servers can't be used for a reflector attack, my CGI scripts can't be used to send email to other people and my email server can't be used to relay.
Unpatched Qmail is a form of an open relay. A couple years after running it for the first time someone started bouncing email off it and eventually it got so bad that I had thousands of emails in my queue at any given moment. This has been the case for every customer I've run into that is using Qmail.
People need to stop referring to Qmail as "secure." It just isn't.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds more like Sneakers the TV series.
What's easy is to create 2 files with the same MD5. What's still hard is to create a file with the same MD5 as an existing file.
Or more to the point hard to create a file with the same MD5 and still manages to contain functional code
You can do anything you want with random characters but uploading that would have been pointless.
Indeed.. those jackasses sold me a service that didn't work from my office in the centre of Montreal, sold me a defective phone that rebooted constantly despite being sent back for repairs twice. Couldn't be bothered to send me a bill (they demanded my credit card number) harassed me every two months for the money they didn't bill me for and then when that call failed thanks to a system error on their side disconnected my service.
After all that they not only refused to replace the phone but they demanded an "early termination fee" of $5 for each month left in the contract. Needless to say the fee was the lesser of the two evils.
The most common use of this by "Direct marketing firms" is not to open new transactions with it but to engage in a scam known as "Antitel".
The idea is that the scammer calls the target and claims to be working for the bank's security department and that you will refund the money but you need to confirm the bank details and that a recording is needed for security reasons.
Que recording of the target with the customer repeating the info the scammer just gave the target in the first place and agreeing to a draft of $399. It's all said too quickly for the customer to hear but if the customer objects the scammer abuses the target for messing up the computer system by not answering with "yes or no" and if needed specify that draft means "to deposit" (it really means to withdraw) and the recording gets restarted.
The account is then debited for the amount listed.
If the customer objects then they are told they must return the items they purchased before they can have a refund (all $15 worth). If the customer calls their bank they are shown the recording of them agreeing to a $399 draft (withdrawal).
Nice eh?
I got an earfull of this crap a year and a half ago when I did some IT work for a telemarketing place in Montreal. They wouldn't tell me what they were doing but after hearing the calls from start to finish a few times I figured it out in a hurry.
Or maybe your mail server is on one of the broken smtp blacklists for being an easy target for spammers to send backscatter spam. If you are running unpatched qmail I beg you to stop for the good of everyone else on the internet.
You don't get to say "nothing needs fixing" and then right off say "here's plenty of add-ons and patches".
Those add-ons and patches are a nightmare to support and it's a major reason why I no longer use qmail.
Having to patch things so that qmail does something basic (and best practise) like refusing a bad email instead of sending a bounce does not exactly scream "well maintained".
Qmail hasn't been maintained in years and is essentially abandoned at this point. Public domain just makes that official so it's not as if the author needs to care what happens with the code.
I'll be curious to see whether someone manages to rekindle interest in it. The news might be good for people stuck with a large qmail setup they can't change easily but I'm guessing most new projects would be on postfix.
What about the "number of writes" property of magnetic disks. I can write to a drive hundreds of thousands nay millions of times whereas with a Flash you might get ten thousand if your very lucky. I've head of flash drives being used as boot disks for small media centres and they die after a month simply because the o/s writes to the drive very often.
Well that's why I put the logs on the 500gb drive.
Funny thing though.. my dad used to have Toshiba T2000 with a 4mb flash that the laptop used as ram(yes it was slow) 5 years later it still worked. Flash can't have gotten that much worse since than can it?
At the price flash drives are getting to it's tempting to get a SATA to CompactFlash adaptor and put the base system (where performance matters most) on that and keep the 500gb drive for logs and movies..
So they may not be entirely different markets.
Some of the less reputable ad networks have already moved to random subdomains to get around this. To fix them I created a that can be matched against multiple domains.
I use a flash blocker so I use this zone file on sites where the ads annoy me in spite of me not seeing flash.
And then I can just add each domain I want to block like this.
I personally feel that People use XP because its easily pirated and not a complete memory hog
I wouldn't say that. I got enough calls from (business and personal) clients complaining because their XP doesn't work anymore that I had to make it standard policy to ask them to show me the original media first thing as soon as I get there.
Sad thing is some of these businesses have lost more money in the time it took them to buy the media and have me come in and install a properly licenced version then it would have cost them to by a legit copy in the first place.
I suspect that the result of this law will be that more laptop thefts are covered up and not reported.
This means the police will be less likely to recover the laptop before the data gets discovered and sold.
I don't pay a single cent of income tax on my winnings. Part because the online gambling sites have no mechanism for reporting gambling income to the governments. Although I'd still pay my fair share if Canada taxed gaming "income" - thankfully we do not.
This is not exactly true. Canada does not tax you if your winnings are "windfall". Somewhere there is a not very clear line where gambling will constitute income.
If you are making a good amount of money on gambling I would ask a tax expert about it just to make sure your on the right side of the line.
Funny thing about that: the US govt has shut down pretty much every means of payment for online gambling that does not involve credit cards.
That's funny but seriously.. they had those in the place I was staying in Bulgaria last year and they were amazing. 4 guys in the apartment and even if I was last in line that morning and had to wait until after each one has a 45 minute shower and even if I spent a whole hour after that I still had hot water.
Meanwhile my tank gives me 30 to 40 minutes of hot water total before I have to let it reheat.
and there I am appologising for a post that wasn't even mine.. sleep is needed I suspect.
Compact Fluorescent .. heh.
That's what I get for posting on slashdot while shopping for something to go into my SATA Compact Flash adaptor.
I don't know what planet you're from where everything else in your house is so efficient that 15W is an "amazing" amount of power. According to this site run by Ames, IA [ames.ia.us] (the first link Google found), an electric water heater draws 3800 W of power and runs 118±20 hours per month in a typical household of 4. Thus, it consumes 450±75 kWh of energy over the course of a month. Your wasteful computer uses about 10 kWh over a 720-hour (30-day) month. That's a lot more than it should, certainly, but a tiny drop in the bucket compared to all the kilowatt-hours that leak right through your water heater's thin insulation, ones that you could've conserved by simply heating water on demand.
Exactly. I've been on a "save myself electricity" kick lately. At my last apartment I swapped every bulb in the house except the chandelier in the living room with compact fluorescents almost no difference on my bill. I shut off my sparc server and raid array.. no noticeable difference in my bill I turn my hot water tank (house heat and hot water) two notches down (still scalding hot) and saved $40 a month in gas.
My current place has my landlord paying the heating so most of my money is going to hot water and the ancient fridge in the kitchen Nothing I do here seems to shave more than $1 a month off my bill. I'm sure at some point that $1 will be important but right now I have $40 being taken by hot water tank and large appliances.
What bothers me is they are worried about all these half watt drains and meanwhile most of the electricity used in a house goes into heating, appliances, hot water and lights.
The big offenders need nailing first so they should be banning hot water tanks (instant on hot water uses 50% less energy) before they start regulating standby mode.
I didn't use electrical tape.. I opened up my power supply and cut the wires going to the leds.
Blasted things lit up the wall on the computer side of my bedroom.
What Sentry21 says is true.. last year when I was in the emergency room and got an xray of my foot I could view it on Linux with no trouble. It's possible to request a copy of any xrays on CD up here.
On a fun note the machines that handled the storage and transmission of the images were maintained by the company sentry21 used to do support for... that's how I knew to ask.
I would never set my mail server to just drop incoming email since then no one knows something went wrong and bad assumptions get made when legit emails don't get replied to.
I hate it all the more since a few years ago I ended up on a broken MTA blacklist (thanks Qmail) thanks to the constant backscatter and several providers just accepted and then dropped everything coming from my mail server with no error.
Took me forever to figure out what was going wrong.
What you've described as an open relay really isn't: it's a "Joe Job", a forgery pretending to be from somewhere else, exactly what SPF was designed to block. Now, *throttling* such connections seems completely reasonable, but as someone who's run SMTP servers, I submit to you that discarding the messages silently is not.
How many SMTP servers could you have possibly run if you didn't know that it's possible for the server to refuse the email in the first place and let the SENDING mail server handle the bounce message?
Refusing the email during the SMTP handshake results in a faster bounce for the user and less CPU and network time wasted between the mail servers.
And don't get me started on how Barracuda spam filters depend on an immediate refusal to detect address guessing and how that whole feature is made useless by Qmail not doing things properly.
Not even close to true. Postfix Admin does everything vpopmail does and more. I used to run qmail+qmail for years several years before I switched over and I can tell you Postfix Admin does a better job.
The lack of SPF should be no excuse to allow for a broken mail server implementation. When I set up a server the ability for a user to gain a shell on the system is only one of the forms of security I look at. I also need to consider if any of the resources on my machine can be used by an outside to inflict harm on other servers. I need to make sure that my name servers can't be used for a reflector attack, my CGI scripts can't be used to send email to other people and my email server can't be used to relay.
Unpatched Qmail is a form of an open relay. A couple years after running it for the first time someone started bouncing email off it and eventually it got so bad that I had thousands of emails in my queue at any given moment. This has been the case for every customer I've run into that is using Qmail.
People need to stop referring to Qmail as "secure." It just isn't.