Don't get me started on the munged addresses. Unfortunaly there are people who will subscribe to something then complain to spamcop instead of unsubscribing. The munged email addresses make it a total pain to find out who was responsable for a given complaint and remove them.
As soon as I get enough free time I'm going to rewrite our software to add a cookie to the headder so I can track who it was that way. I can easily imagine some spammers doing the same for less helpful reasons,
In Linux they fixed this by having the compilor flag the application in the ELF headders as being able to function with a read only stack. Apps compiled on an older version of GCC and apps wich need trampolines don't get this feature enabled.
I'm a bit supprised Microsoft hasn't done something similar.
Unless of course the author was just guessing that it breaks older apps without having actually check for himself.
None of my servers have a GUI installed. However both my home and desktop machines run Linux excusively and the added requirements have been noticeable.
Sadly, unless you're keeping tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in their bank, they are not likely to give a shit if you take your business elsewhere. At least with an American bank.
Who cares what the bank does after your gone? I'm ssaying find a bank you like and ignore the rest. If your getting good service there is no reason to worry about the other people who don't care enough to switch. BMO treats me properly.. I don't care who uses what lame bank that doesn't do the same.
That happened to me once because a teller made a mistake upgrading my account.. money that was supposed to be cleared wasn't.
After spending 15 minutes tracking down the error.. the bank refunded the NSF fee it charged me and asked me to present reciept for the fee charged by my landlord. The refunded my landlord's fee and provided a letter of appology stating that it was all their fault.
If your bank refused to do that then I suggest you find another bank.
When is the last time a system problem like this affected just one user?
Let me fill you in on something.. Tech support will tell you that you are the only person facing a certain problem even if all of their other customers are having the same problem. They will do that as long as they are sure you can't prove otherwise.
I've my ISP say that even though my whole block was down. I've had a cell phone provider (Rogers') say that even though they sold me a phone with a very high return rate. As well as countless other examples.
It's marketing.. they want to make the problem seem smaller thatn it is.
Actually strangely enough.. statistically the only way to reduce population growth is to lower the death rate.
Check it in the poulation stats.. the only country to achieve a negative population growth with a high death rate is China. In every other case a high death rate results in an even higher birth rate.
Low birth rates, on the other hand, make for low to negative population growth almost every time.
It's counterintuitive and supprised the heck out of me the first time I noticed that.
I'm willing to bet it will actually increase piracy by killing off a major source of bad quality product.
It's almost as if they want to make the problem worse.
Personally if I were the MPAA I would let these morons record all so they can flood the market with bad quality DVDs and making it such a bad case of hit or miss that the only way you can be sure of getting a good copy is to buy one.
A smarter move would be to finish hunting down the people in their own industry who are leaking production quality material before the movie even makes it to the theaters.
So many geeks I know walk around as if the world is out to get them.. the result. This probably attracts more bullies and muggers than anything else imaginable.
I don't know if carrying a gun will make a nervous person any more confident though. A scared person with a gun is still a scared person.
You don't neccesarily need to feel powerful.. feeling average should be enough.
I'm single and lazy so I cook in large batches and freeze the result.
A real example:
I spend an hour cooking 20 days worth of curry chicken. That meal plus rice comes down to $1.90 CDN per serving and I'm full for this amount. Then I spend 15 minutes cleaning the kitchen.
Or I can spend $4.00 CDN on the cheapest frozen dinner and still not be full!
Of course I don't eat that every day but I can rotate what batch of food I eat that day.
I find that since I got into cooking for myself the quality of my meals has gone up and I've even managed to drop a little weight.
I'd settle for forcing VOIP companies to provide the same reliability.
This all reminds me of a Grou Telecom outage a couple years ago. They lost a core IP router. Guess what happened to all of their VOIP stuff? That's right.. all down.. We had to contact our sales rep by her cell phone because their helpdesk was dead.
Right now I'm not seeing VOIP as anything more than a way to cut down on my long distace bills.
This all sounds good until you realise that MSSQL's problem isn't that people sniff the data while it's in transit. It's problem is that people keep breaking into the thing.
Once someone forwarded a link to a bunch of people in our office.. it went to a kiddy porn site.. wich opened another 10 sites wich all opened another 10.. the windows machines had to be rebooted.. and the linux machines had have a "killall -9 netscape" (this was before mozilla)
Those people really are souless. I fixed all 4 computers doing it then went for the washrooms to finish feeling sick.
They need to bring back the death penalty for the people who rape children producing this stuff.
In some ways, the biggest problem is Microsoft Windows itself. Windows has holes that can allow a hacker to install almost anything on a computer that lacks a protective program or device called a firewall. Users' vulnerability can be compounded if they have not installed the latest patches from Microsoft.
This makes it sound like all you have to do is plug a windows machine into the net and your in trouble. As much as I can't stand working with windows I find this to be over the top.
Speaking as someone with a few Nigerian friends.. They do it from Nigeria because they can get away with it.
If you look through your inbox you will notice that pretty much all of the 419 scams ask you to assist in something you know will be illegial(tax evasion, identity fraud, outright embezzelment) in return for a large share of the loot.
When the Nigerian police get the call for help they simply regard it as one crook ripping off another and don't consider it worth their while.
So it's all pretty much a low risk proposition for them.
Why americans? Americans tend to have an international reputation for being easy marks when it comes to sales pitches.
Not really.. at the moment all your prevented from doing is preforming deep magic with the system internals.
It's important to note that Linuxant's stated reason for doing this was to avoid worrying the users with a "loading tainted module" warning on startup. There was not even the attempt at a technical arguement.
Putting MODULE_LICENSE("GPL") is not requred to make the module load. All it does is enable access to a small amount of GPL only helpers and keep crash reports from flagging the system as "tainted".
PICO is the enemy of anyone used to the wordstar command set (joe users). In the standard wordstar command set all key combos start with K and in pico that cuts the current line.
Not long ago there was a spam friendly hosting provider plugged into an international telecom provider. The telco just didn't care.. until the blackholes started to bite. They were forced to change their spam policy on a national level thanks to the blackholes.
AOL and MSN were also both noted as having changed their spam policies as a result of being listed on the RBL.
What were seeing now is the spammers moving offshore and we get to start the whole process from scratch in each country and that's going to take time.
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Don't get me started on the munged addresses. Unfortunaly there are people who will subscribe to something then complain to spamcop instead of unsubscribing. The munged email addresses make it a total pain to find out who was responsable for a given complaint and remove them.
As soon as I get enough free time I'm going to rewrite our software to add a cookie to the headder so I can track who it was that way. I can easily imagine some spammers doing the same for less helpful reasons,
Taking it to court would take longer than their current promise of december.
When is the election in the US finished?
"the whole area of how you actually bring together a team and get them to successfully deliver a project on time"
When was the last time Microsoft actually delivered a product on time?
In Linux they fixed this by having the compilor flag the application in the ELF headders as being able to function with a read only stack. Apps compiled on an older version of GCC and apps wich need trampolines don't get this feature enabled.
I'm a bit supprised Microsoft hasn't done something similar.
Unless of course the author was just guessing that it breaks older apps without having actually check for himself.
Must be all that fast food it's eating.
None of my servers have a GUI installed. However both my home and desktop machines run Linux excusively and the added requirements have been noticeable.
Sadly, unless you're keeping tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in their bank, they are not likely to give a shit if you take your business elsewhere. At least with an American bank.
.. I don't care who uses what lame bank that doesn't do the same.
Who cares what the bank does after your gone? I'm ssaying find a bank you like and ignore the rest. If your getting good service there is no reason to worry about the other people who don't care enough to switch. BMO treats me properly
That happened to me once because a teller made a mistake upgrading my account.. money that was supposed to be cleared wasn't.
After spending 15 minutes tracking down the error.. the bank refunded the NSF fee it charged me and asked me to present reciept for the fee charged by my landlord. The refunded my landlord's fee and provided a letter of appology stating that it was all their fault.
If your bank refused to do that then I suggest you find another bank.
I have 50 GB of web accessable email storage on my account.
Mind you I run the server.
When is the last time a system problem like this affected just one user?
Let me fill you in on something.. Tech support will tell you that you are the only person facing a certain problem even if all of their other customers are having the same problem. They will do that as long as they are sure you can't prove otherwise.
I've my ISP say that even though my whole block was down. I've had a cell phone provider (Rogers') say that even though they sold me a phone with a very high return rate. As well as countless other examples.
It's marketing.. they want to make the problem seem smaller thatn it is.
Actually strangely enough .. statistically the only way to reduce population growth is to lower the death rate.
.. the only country to achieve a negative population growth with a high death rate is China. In every other case a high death rate results in an even higher birth rate.
Check it in the poulation stats
Low birth rates, on the other hand, make for low to negative population growth almost every time.
It's counterintuitive and supprised the heck out of me the first time I noticed that.
For the life of me I can't imagine why..
It seems to me that living forever would really suck.
No it's not... that's $13M in shares at $13.00 per share.. that's $4.9M at current stock value.
Baystar just got reamed.
I'm willing to bet it will actually increase piracy by killing off a major source of bad quality product.
It's almost as if they want to make the problem worse.
Personally if I were the MPAA I would let these morons record all so they can flood the market with bad quality DVDs and making it such a bad case of hit or miss that the only way you can be sure of getting a good copy is to buy one.
A smarter move would be to finish hunting down the people in their own industry who are leaking production quality material before the movie even makes it to the theaters.
So many geeks I know walk around as if the world is out to get them.. the result. This probably attracts more bullies and muggers than anything else imaginable.
I don't know if carrying a gun will make a nervous person any more confident though. A scared person with a gun is still a scared person.
You don't neccesarily need to feel powerful.. feeling average should be enough.
Lets do some math..
I'm single and lazy so I cook in large batches and freeze the result.
A real example:
I spend an hour cooking 20 days worth of curry chicken. That meal plus rice comes down to $1.90 CDN per serving and I'm full for this amount. Then I spend 15 minutes cleaning the kitchen.
Or I can spend $4.00 CDN on the cheapest frozen dinner and still not be full!
Of course I don't eat that every day but I can rotate what batch of food I eat that day.
I find that since I got into cooking for myself the quality of my meals has gone up and I've even managed to drop a little weight.
I'd settle for forcing VOIP companies to provide the same reliability.
This all reminds me of a Grou Telecom outage a couple years ago. They lost a core IP router. Guess what happened to all of their VOIP stuff? That's right.. all down.. We had to contact our sales rep by her cell phone because their helpdesk was dead.
Right now I'm not seeing VOIP as anything more than a way to cut down on my long distace bills.
This all sounds good until you realise that MSSQL's problem isn't that people sniff the data while it's in transit. It's problem is that people keep breaking into the thing.
Encryption won't help with that at all.
Once someone forwarded a link to a bunch of people in our office.. it went to a kiddy porn site.. wich opened another 10 sites wich all opened another 10.. the windows machines had to be rebooted.. and the linux machines had have a "killall -9 netscape" (this was before mozilla)
Those people really are souless. I fixed all 4 computers doing it then went for the washrooms to finish feeling sick.
They need to bring back the death penalty for the people who rape children producing this stuff.
No kidding.
In some ways, the biggest problem is Microsoft Windows itself. Windows has holes that can allow a hacker to install almost anything on a computer that lacks a protective program or device called a firewall. Users' vulnerability can be compounded if they have not installed the latest patches from Microsoft.
This makes it sound like all you have to do is plug a windows machine into the net and your in trouble. As much as I can't stand working with windows I find this to be over the top.
Speaking as someone with a few Nigerian friends..
They do it from Nigeria because they can get away with it.
If you look through your inbox you will notice that pretty much all of the 419 scams ask you to assist in something you know will be illegial(tax evasion, identity fraud, outright embezzelment) in return for a large share of the loot.
When the Nigerian police get the call for help they simply regard it as one crook ripping off another and don't consider it worth their while.
So it's all pretty much a low risk proposition for them.
Why americans? Americans tend to have an international reputation for being easy marks when it comes to sales pitches.
Not really.. at the moment all your prevented from doing is preforming deep magic with the system internals.
It's important to note that Linuxant's stated reason for doing this was to avoid worrying the users with a "loading tainted module" warning on startup. There was not even the attempt at a technical arguement.
Putting MODULE_LICENSE("GPL") is not requred to make the module load. All it does is enable access to a small amount of GPL only helpers and keep crash reports from flagging the system as "tainted".
PICO is the enemy of anyone used to the wordstar command set (joe users). In the standard wordstar command set all key combos start with K and in pico that cuts the current line.
It does work.
Not long ago there was a spam friendly hosting provider plugged into an international telecom provider. The telco just didn't care.. until the blackholes started to bite. They were forced to change their spam policy on a national level thanks to the blackholes.
AOL and MSN were also both noted as having changed their spam policies as a result of being listed on the RBL.
What were seeing now is the spammers moving offshore and we get to start the whole process from scratch in each country and that's going to take time.