For starters, this is a fluff piece about a company that has just applied for a patent on this "technology". Of course, it's in their best interest for this to be a problem.
Unfortunately, I don't see how this problem is going to affect me when my ATA only accepts directives from VoicePulse, Vonage, Broadvoice or whoever's switch to which I'm buying service. Worse, it sits behind a router so there's NFW the ATA is going to even see packets that are not "new, established or related" (iptable speak).
Perhaps the author hasn't effectively communicated how this technology works, or maybe the company isn't divulging how it works, or maybe the have a great solution looking for a problem.
As mentioned here many times before, "move along, nothing to see".
You're absolutely right, it's about in the same state it was in 1995. But only because the cost of broadband didn't make it feasible.
But now that broadband is cheap, it's starting to make a lot of sense, especially with companies that have large WANS full of bandwidth. The company I work for has 100 megabits of fiber connected between 8 locations through a company called Telco. They're paying $10,000 per month for the fiber and since the satellite offices need to call corporate a lot, VOIP on our own bandwidth saves thousands on phone bills per month.
Cheap broadband for the residential user makes VOIP a possibility too. I ditched my landline last month and ported the number to my wife's cell phone. The phone in the house is Voicepulse and it's been as reliable or better than the Verizon POTS. You can't tell the difference in call quality.
Six years ago, my local telephone bill was $22 per month with caller-id. My last POTS bill was close to $60. Really, all telcom reform has done for me is drive up my bill to outrageous amounts.
The incumbent telephone companies all have their own VOIP service. Problem is, they think that VOIP is reason enough to switch and they offer paltry savings on VOIP as compared to POTS; if there's any savings at ALL. Verizon's VOIP service was $40 per month and I was paying close to $60 with just caller-id. Somehow they think that phone service should guarantee them a fixed amount of revenue. VOIP offers the very real chance at local telephone competition without requiring new players to build their own networks or rent from the incumbents.
In fact, this has been the whole impediment to local phone competition. The incumbents have for years resisted renting out their networks to competitors. They've tried legislation and regulations to make it cost prohibitive and have pretty much succeeded while giving themselves a paltry profit line in interstate and intrastate access fees.
The gig is up; everyone stands to save money if they don't use the traditional telephone network.
This isn't necessarily true. There are still a number of small owners in very small markets that make a decent business out of serving the community. Granted, you're going to hear high school sports, and "trade-e-o", and community bulletin board and all that folksy stuff, but isn't that what serving the community of license is all about?
Your comments that small communities had stations all to themselves isn't on point either. None of the reallocations I've been involved with had nothing to do with the smaller community not requiring the services of the station and everything to do with the new big owner (Cumulus, Clear Channel et al) wanting to push it into the market and require advertisers to buy multiple advertising packages on all stations.
Let me tell you, you'll never hear high school sports scores or community bulletin board on a Cumulus station. You'll hear rap music being piped to farmers, but nothing of community interest.
Adjacent channel interferrence of any sort of concerning magnitude isn't going to be caused by WXXX's transmitter being too close to WYYY's. These days, many broadcasters share not only the same tower facility, but many dump their power into the same antenna.
Yes, if you drive your vehicle by a large community antenna site, you're likely to hear all sorts of hash on your receiver. But that's a rx desense problem, not one of adjacent channel interference.
Adjacent channel interference of an FM signal at 100% modulation (where all the energy is in the sidebands and not the carrier) is a result of the discriminator of an FM receiver. The sidebands of the adjacent station are spilling over into the passband of the receiver trying to tune another channel. The preferred method of keeping this under control is indeed distance; but it's a distance of 80-120 miles, not just a few blocks! That's why you'll see nearby markets having their channels "interleaved" (like Detroit and Toledo).
You're correct in that the FCC tightly controls the channel spacing between communities because adjacent channel interference is very hard to correct without directional antennas (which induce multipath) or power restrictions, or both.
The instance of where having WXXX's transmitter location many city blocks away from WYYY's is in intermodulation product mitigation. But even then the perferred method is inserting notch filters to keep the mixing products out of the PA cavity of the transmitter.
Ironically, the installations I've seen and worked on that have the least amount of intermod problems are the ones dumping as many as 4 stations into a single antenna. The hybrid-combiner systems all use bandpass filtering that pretty much kill anything but the desired signal going in the desired direction. But again, these are intermod problems, not adjacent channel interference problems.
The problem is the standards bodies haven't done a whole lot to curb the problems with SMTP. The implicit trust it conveys is the WHOLE problem with pam and it's time to toss it out and come up with an alternative.
Hopefully whatever the alternative is, it'll allow administrators to verify the sending party or at least the relaying party and convey some level of trust and authenticity. With billions and billions of junk messages per day, email is well on the way to becoming just too much trouble to use.
This isn't as bad as it seems. First off, television has always been a license to print money and while the revenue growth slows, it's not going to be crimped off. There isn't going to be rampant adoption of Tivo in most households; if there were, it would have happened already.
More importantly, the move to a 16:9 format will allow for even WORSE methods of advertising. We've all become accustomed to seeing 'bugs' in the lower quadrant of a screen, now they'll just have advertising on a panel somewhere on the screen.
I like the concept of this unified technology, but let's face it, using Part-15 concepts just are not going to cut the mustard.
For starters, do you actually think the likes of Verizon and SBC will sit idle while the world creates virtually free mobile telephone service? I think not. They'll flood the world with free cordless telephones that, without coincidence, will be right smack-dab in the middle of the 802.11 bands. I'm thinking they'll literally give these things away with the intent of making these frequencies quite unusable.
That's the typical mindset of these corporations. If that doesn't do it, they'll flood the world with wireless access points so they can control the spectrum that way.
I'd love to see the marriage of these technologies, I just think the corporate oligopoly will break out the bag of dirty tricks to stop it dead in its tracks.
Unless, you can win favor of the FCC and make Mr. Powell good on his promises to create frequency allocations for entrepreneurs and fast moving technologies.
Re:why aren't we using the Russian Shuttle now?
on
The Return of Apollo?
·
· Score: 1, Informative
The Russian shuttle is on display in a park somewhere. It never flew in space, its heat tiles are untested and it's as much of a relic as the US shuttle.
I doubt the tiles are space worthy, even when they were new.
...sits on its side inside a pavillion at the KSC visitor's center.
Werner Von Braun must be up to about 3,000 rpm about now as NASA struggles with internal problems and trying to figure out how to get people and materials up into space cheaply.
You are absolutely correct, corporations not only have the right to make money, they have the duty to their shareholders to do so. However, they do not have the right to market to me using a method of which I'm responsible for nearly all of the cost.
Traditional advertising, such as radio, television and print has a quid pro quo relationship. I trade my time spent dealing with the advertisements. This doesn't exist. Telemarketers shift the costs to me because they are using my phone line, of which I have to pay to maintain. Not only that, they're stealing minutes of my time without any sort of quid pro quo.
There are no rights here, including free speech. Free speech doesn't mean you can beat down my door and intrude upon my home to spout your speech.
Microsoft is afraid of an operating system born out of the same commodization of PC/computer expertise and talent that allows Microsoft to outsource programming chores overseas?
I ran this through the anti-spin machine and it spit out "I want to find out who we can bump off their frequency allocations so we can re-assign those frequencies via auction to raise revenues. And for those that can't be moved, I want to figure out how we can tax them."
The government has not done a good job of encouraging free enterprise and entrepreneurial spirit when it comes to RF spectrum. Each and every time they have a spectrum auction, the telcos seem to walk away the winners each and every time regardless of whether or not they actually plan to deploy services on those frequencies.
If Bush is serious about this and it's just not another revenue grab for the government or a gift for big corporations, he's going to have to gut the FCC and give them serious instruction on who really should be the benefactor of any frequency allocations.
If the airwaves really do belong to the public, the government has done an incredibly bad job of stewardship.
Mr. Ballmer should have sent a wake-up call to his business and legal departments, not his technology people.
The changes in licensing and rapant abuse of their customer base, forced upgrades and incredible arroagance of Microsoft has done what only the phone company has done in the past -- alienate their customer base.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and this one is no different. While I applaud the intent, the implementation is disasterous.
For starters, the broadcasters have claimed for years that attrition due to cable TV and DBS broadcasters was eating into revenues. True.
They also claimed that this was likely to hurt smaller-market and independent broadcasters the most. True.
What the broadcasters *didn't* tell you is that they own many of the cable channels that are hurting them. So at best, the claim that over-the-air broadcasting is in trouble is only a half-truth. It is in trouble, but they are the ones who have made it so.
The intent of the FCC is to hopefully be able to allow smaller-market and independent stations continued operations because they'll be part of a larger group ownership. This will ostensibly allow the smaller station lower operating and programming costs. True.
Unfortunately, what they don't tell you is that this requires that the independent and local programming be replaced with mass-produced content or full-network programming. It'll also mean loss of jobs as production and operations staff is moved to primary stations.
Worse, this does nothing to solve the original problem. Michael Powell stated in a recent interview that he was concerned that in many markets, you don't get to watch local sports teams without ponying-up $60 for basic cable services. Well Mr. Chairman, I hold the FCC responsible for this problem. First, the Commission let cable companies like Comcast, or mostly-cable outlets like Fox Sports, bid on the rights to sports broadcasts. Not to mention that the FCC simply refuses to reign-in the outrageous costs of cable and DBS services, claiming a free-market will solve the problem.
So instead of fixing what's really wrong, the FCC applies a giant band-aid and sticks head in sand.
Articles like this may seem cutesy, but the sad fact is that corporate leaders see this and assume all IT workers are/can or will do this. This furthers the mistrust some corporate types have of IT managers and workers.
Worse, it'll make it easy for corporate leaders to rationalize moving *YOUR* IT job to India. The article doesn't seem too funny now, does it.
A black hole? In a way, I guess you are correct, but it's a black hole that's configured by the receiving system. Any blame for missed messages lies solely upon the shoulders of the receiving system.
All I'd really want is a way to accurately determine the true originator of the mail I'm receiving. With that established, I can filter based upon who and am willing and unwilling to accept mail.
RFC-821 Re-Write Will Make It Manageable
on
Spam Meeting Wrap-up
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Back when the Internet was a nicer place, it made sense to allow anyone to send anyone mail through any system. Now that Internet access is much more common and the propensity of abuse on open systems, it's time to either bury RFC-821 or make it significantly more modern.
No, the deluge of unsolicited garbage will continue regardless of what is done legislatively and with technology. I'm glad to see that people are finally waking-up to the fact that more laws won't fix the spam problem. But technology can be used to make it harder for spammers to hide in their anonymous cloak.
The processing of sending email needs an overhaul that gives system administrators the ability to determine the source of incoming mail and impart a "trust" level of the message. Messages coming from systems that have a high trust are tagged in the headers while those coming from systems that seem dubious or lack any sort of real credentials are tagged accordingly.
No, it won't stop spam, but it'll allow people to simply deny access to systems and users that are a continued problem, forge credentials or email addresses.
Re:available bandwidth?
on
Hamvention
·
· Score: 1
ITU convention/treaty has it that any amateur operating below 50 mHz must pass a minimal code test.
It's not a baseless attack, it's my personal opinion. And I'm sorry to say, it's been formulated after dealing with Microsoft employees!
I'm sure many Microsoft employees are ambivalent to contractors and indeed do show up for work, do their jobs and go home without employing such sophomoric tactics. But having worked in other IT shops, I can assure you that it doesn't take much to start a situation where contractors are viewed as common trash.
By the way, nice AC moniker. Kudos to your intestinal fortitude.
It's truly unfortunate that the Microsoft employees started this "caste" system. While the corporate management could do more to eliminate this nonsense, the truth of the matter is that the Microsoft employees are mostly responsible.
You only need to look at the moniker "dash trash" to see how a full-time Microsoft employee feels about a contractor. But why should this surprise anyone, Microsoft is one of the most arrogant and self-righteous companies on the face of the planet (superceding SGI at its peak).
What's truly unfortunate is that Microsoft employees employ this "caste" system, yet they are largely a benefactor of contractors themselves. It's well established that Microsoft likes to compensate employees with Microsoft money (stocks, stock options). You do not need to be a Wall Street analyst to know that the biggest attraction of using contractors is reduced employee costs, which translates into more profit and better stock prices.
Of course, the full-time Microsoft employees know this. They know *everything*.
The article talks about handheld, consumer and embedded applications tied to WindowsCE. Of COURSE it'll outsell PCs, a PC is a single device whereas handheld and consumer devices cover a huge spectrum of goods. And when they quote a 250% increase in sales of hand held computers, notice they fail to tell you the exact number of sales to date.
Does it spell the death of the PC? No, wishful thinking at best, preemptive marketing at worst. This piece is spouting someone's paid marketing drivel, and it wouldn't surprise me if the path leads to Redmond.
Even if that is the case, it again shows that the people in Redmond learned from big old bad tobacco. Diversify! They knew long ago the gravy train from personal computers couldn't go on forever, and they also knew that consumer electronics would be thristy for more powerful embedded operating systems.
WindowsCE isn't all that bad, but certainly Microsoft is fooling itself if it thinks it's a one-stop-shop for an OS for embedded devices.
What Mr. Lasser seems to miss is the fact that security holes are caused by programmer error. Whether an application was written in C or Perl, the developer can still make fatal errors in anticipating input into the program leading to security problems.
For example, he cites a very good example that a POP/IMAP server does not need to be written in a low-level language. I tend to agree, but the bug problems certainly won't stop there. Sure it'll be harder to create a buffer overflow (provided the Perl/Python/Java/Flim-flam interpreter is secure (since it's probably written in a low-level language), but it does NOTHING if there's a security problem access the user's mailbox, or directory access or a syntax error in interpreting IMAP commands.
Mr. Lasser also mentions the "macho" factor. Mostly nonsense. I program in whatever gets the job done the quickest, and I'm sure most of the programmers do the same. The errors Lasser complains about are the same problems found in other lines of business -- it's work performed by humans. For whatever reason, an error is made.
A large percentage of "junk mail" depends upon some fashion of deceit. Either it's by masking the true identity of the sender, a spam-haus using domain after domain and ISP after ISP in order to avoid the blacklists or simply by lying and saying that "you really indeed did ask for this".
The answer to the spam problem is to find technical answers that start peeling away at the ways spammers use deceit.
I've said this before and I'll say it again, the first place is to rewrite RFC-821 and require valid reverse-name lookups before accepting mail. Also permit as an authentication scheme that allows the administrator of the accepting mail system to set permissable trust levels. Example, mail that's verified (through an SSL certificate might be one way) as coming from gm.com is accepted, but mail coming from slashdot.org is set to a lower trust level (because they don't want to spend the money for a certificate). Mail from getyerviagra.com is immediately tossed into a review folder, trashed or denied because they don't reverse properly and they have a forged or self-signed certificate or simply don't have one.
The LAST thing anyone here wants is ANY government telling us how to manage electronic mail. In the US, it'll be frought with hooks and back-doors so the feds can snoop your mail.
Let's get it together and fix the problem on our own.
Slashdot Mirror
For starters, this is a fluff piece about a company that has just applied for a patent on this "technology". Of course, it's in their best interest for this to be a problem.
Unfortunately, I don't see how this problem is going to affect me when my ATA only accepts directives from VoicePulse, Vonage, Broadvoice or whoever's switch to which I'm buying service. Worse, it sits behind a router so there's NFW the ATA is going to even see packets that are not "new, established or related" (iptable speak).
Perhaps the author hasn't effectively communicated how this technology works, or maybe the company isn't divulging how it works, or maybe the have a great solution looking for a problem.
As mentioned here many times before, "move along, nothing to see".
You're absolutely right, it's about in the same state it was in 1995. But only because the cost of broadband didn't make it feasible.
But now that broadband is cheap, it's starting to make a lot of sense, especially with companies that have large WANS full of bandwidth. The company I work for has 100 megabits of fiber connected between 8 locations through a company called Telco. They're paying $10,000 per month for the fiber and since the satellite offices need to call corporate a lot, VOIP on our own bandwidth saves thousands on phone bills per month.
Cheap broadband for the residential user makes VOIP a possibility too. I ditched my landline last month and ported the number to my wife's cell phone. The phone in the house is Voicepulse and it's been as reliable or better than the Verizon POTS. You can't tell the difference in call quality.
Six years ago, my local telephone bill was $22 per month with caller-id. My last POTS bill was close to $60. Really, all telcom reform has done for me is drive up my bill to outrageous amounts.
The incumbent telephone companies all have their own VOIP service. Problem is, they think that VOIP is reason enough to switch and they offer paltry savings on VOIP as compared to POTS; if there's any savings at ALL. Verizon's VOIP service was $40 per month and I was paying close to $60 with just caller-id. Somehow they think that phone service should guarantee them a fixed amount of revenue. VOIP offers the very real chance at local telephone competition without requiring new players to build their own networks or rent from the incumbents.
In fact, this has been the whole impediment to local phone competition. The incumbents have for years resisted renting out their networks to competitors. They've tried legislation and regulations to make it cost prohibitive and have pretty much succeeded while giving themselves a paltry profit line in interstate and intrastate access fees.
The gig is up; everyone stands to save money if they don't use the traditional telephone network.
This may surprise you, but a great number of computer users, Windows, Linux, Mac or otherwise, don't focus their computing time on playing games.
They do their work, read their email and go about their business and when finished, turn the PC off and live life offline.
For those that get stuck with this problem, there's always a PS2 or Xbox.
Excuse my lack of understanding of the patent system, but I thought that in order to patent a process, you had to actually have a working system.
In reviewing this patent, it doesn't appear they had much of a working system.
This isn't necessarily true. There are still a number of small owners in very small markets that make a decent business out of serving the community. Granted, you're going to hear high school sports, and "trade-e-o", and community bulletin board and all that folksy stuff, but isn't that what serving the community of license is all about?
Your comments that small communities had stations all to themselves isn't on point either. None of the reallocations I've been involved with had nothing to do with the smaller community not requiring the services of the station and everything to do with the new big owner (Cumulus, Clear Channel et al) wanting to push it into the market and require advertisers to buy multiple advertising packages on all stations.
Let me tell you, you'll never hear high school sports scores or community bulletin board on a Cumulus station. You'll hear rap music being piped to farmers, but nothing of community interest.
Adjacent channel interferrence of any sort of concerning magnitude isn't going to be caused by WXXX's transmitter being too close to WYYY's. These days, many broadcasters share not only the same tower facility, but many dump their power into the same antenna.
Yes, if you drive your vehicle by a large community antenna site, you're likely to hear all sorts of hash on your receiver. But that's a rx desense problem, not one of adjacent channel interference.
Adjacent channel interference of an FM signal at 100% modulation (where all the energy is in the sidebands and not the carrier) is a result of the discriminator of an FM receiver. The sidebands of the adjacent station are spilling over into the passband of the receiver trying to tune another channel. The preferred method of keeping this under control is indeed distance; but it's a distance of 80-120 miles, not just a few blocks! That's why you'll see nearby markets having their channels "interleaved" (like Detroit and Toledo).
You're correct in that the FCC tightly controls the channel spacing between communities because adjacent channel interference is very hard to correct without directional antennas (which induce multipath) or power restrictions, or both.
The instance of where having WXXX's transmitter location many city blocks away from WYYY's is in intermodulation product mitigation. But even then the perferred method is inserting notch filters to keep the mixing products out of the PA cavity of the transmitter.
Ironically, the installations I've seen and worked on that have the least amount of intermod problems are the ones dumping as many as 4 stations into a single antenna. The hybrid-combiner systems all use bandpass filtering that pretty much kill anything but the desired signal going in the desired direction. But again, these are intermod problems, not adjacent channel interference problems.
The problem is the standards bodies haven't done a whole lot to curb the problems with SMTP. The implicit trust it conveys is the WHOLE problem with pam and it's time to toss it out and come up with an alternative.
Hopefully whatever the alternative is, it'll allow administrators to verify the sending party or at least the relaying party and convey some level of trust and authenticity. With billions and billions of junk messages per day, email is well on the way to becoming just too much trouble to use.
This isn't as bad as it seems. First off, television has always been a license to print money and while the revenue growth slows, it's not going to be crimped off. There isn't going to be rampant adoption of Tivo in most households; if there were, it would have happened already.
More importantly, the move to a 16:9 format will allow for even WORSE methods of advertising. We've all become accustomed to seeing 'bugs' in the lower quadrant of a screen, now they'll just have advertising on a panel somewhere on the screen.
I like the concept of this unified technology, but let's face it, using Part-15 concepts just are not going to cut the mustard.
For starters, do you actually think the likes of Verizon and SBC will sit idle while the world creates virtually free mobile telephone service? I think not. They'll flood the world with free cordless telephones that, without coincidence, will be right smack-dab in the middle of the 802.11 bands. I'm thinking they'll literally give these things away with the intent of making these frequencies quite unusable.
That's the typical mindset of these corporations. If that doesn't do it, they'll flood the world with wireless access points so they can control the spectrum that way.
I'd love to see the marriage of these technologies, I just think the corporate oligopoly will break out the bag of dirty tricks to stop it dead in its tracks.
Unless, you can win favor of the FCC and make Mr. Powell good on his promises to create frequency allocations for entrepreneurs and fast moving technologies.
The Russian shuttle is on display in a park somewhere. It never flew in space, its heat tiles are untested and it's as much of a relic as the US shuttle.
I doubt the tiles are space worthy, even when they were new.
...sits on its side inside a pavillion at the KSC visitor's center.
Werner Von Braun must be up to about 3,000 rpm about now as NASA struggles with internal problems and trying to figure out how to get people and materials up into space cheaply.
You are absolutely correct, corporations not only have the right to make money, they have the duty to their shareholders to do so.
However, they do not have the right to market to me using a method of which I'm responsible for nearly all of the cost.
Traditional advertising, such as radio, television and print has a quid pro quo relationship. I trade my time spent dealing with the advertisements. This doesn't exist. Telemarketers shift the costs to me because they are using my phone line, of which I have to pay to maintain. Not only that, they're stealing minutes of my time without any sort of quid pro quo.
There are no rights here, including free speech. Free speech doesn't mean you can beat down my door and intrude upon my home to spout your speech.
Microsoft is afraid of an operating system born out of the same commodization of PC/computer expertise and talent that allows Microsoft to outsource programming chores overseas?
Simply stellar! I hope they enjoy it.
I ran this through the anti-spin machine and it spit out "I want to find out who we can bump off their frequency allocations so we can re-assign those frequencies via auction to raise revenues. And for those that can't be moved, I want to figure out how we can tax them."
The government has not done a good job of encouraging free enterprise and entrepreneurial spirit when it comes to RF spectrum. Each and every time they have a spectrum auction, the telcos seem to walk away the winners each and every time regardless of whether or not they actually plan to deploy services on those frequencies.
If Bush is serious about this and it's just not another revenue grab for the government or a gift for big corporations, he's going to have to gut the FCC and give them serious instruction on who really should be the benefactor of any frequency allocations.
If the airwaves really do belong to the public, the government has done an incredibly bad job of stewardship.
Mr. Ballmer should have sent a wake-up call to his business and legal departments, not his technology people.
The changes in licensing and rapant abuse of their customer base, forced upgrades and incredible arroagance of Microsoft has done what only the phone company has done in the past -- alienate their customer base.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and this one is no different. While I applaud the intent, the implementation is disasterous.
For starters, the broadcasters have claimed for years that attrition due to cable TV and DBS broadcasters was eating into revenues. True.
They also claimed that this was likely to hurt smaller-market and independent broadcasters the most. True.
What the broadcasters *didn't* tell you is that they own many of the cable channels that are hurting them. So at best, the claim that over-the-air broadcasting is in trouble is only a half-truth. It is in trouble, but they are the ones who have made it so.
The intent of the FCC is to hopefully be able to allow smaller-market and independent stations continued operations because they'll be part of a larger group ownership. This will ostensibly allow the smaller station lower operating and programming costs. True.
Unfortunately, what they don't tell you is that this requires that the independent and local programming be replaced with mass-produced content or full-network programming. It'll also mean loss of jobs as production and operations staff is moved to primary stations.
Worse, this does nothing to solve the original problem. Michael Powell stated in a recent interview that he was concerned that in many markets, you don't get to watch local sports teams without ponying-up $60 for basic cable services. Well Mr. Chairman, I hold the FCC responsible for this problem. First, the Commission let cable companies like Comcast, or mostly-cable outlets like Fox Sports, bid on the rights to sports broadcasts. Not to mention that the FCC simply refuses to reign-in the outrageous costs of cable and DBS services, claiming a free-market will solve the problem.
So instead of fixing what's really wrong, the FCC applies a giant band-aid and sticks head in sand.
Articles like this may seem cutesy, but the sad fact is that corporate leaders see this and assume all IT workers are/can or will do this. This furthers the mistrust some corporate types have of IT managers and workers.
Worse, it'll make it easy for corporate leaders to rationalize moving *YOUR* IT job to India. The article doesn't seem too funny now, does it.
A black hole? In a way, I guess you are correct, but it's a black hole that's configured by the receiving system. Any blame for missed messages lies solely upon the shoulders of the receiving system.
All I'd really want is a way to accurately determine the true originator of the mail I'm receiving. With that established, I can filter based upon who and am willing and unwilling to accept mail.
Back when the Internet was a nicer place, it made sense to allow anyone to send anyone mail through any system. Now that Internet access is much more common and the propensity of abuse on open systems, it's time to either bury RFC-821 or make it significantly more modern.
No, the deluge of unsolicited garbage will continue regardless of what is done legislatively and with technology. I'm glad to see that people are finally waking-up to the fact that more laws won't fix the spam problem. But technology can be used to make it harder for spammers to hide in their anonymous cloak.
The processing of sending email needs an overhaul that gives system administrators the ability to determine the source of incoming mail and impart a "trust" level of the message. Messages coming from systems that have a high trust are tagged in the headers while those coming from systems that seem dubious or lack any sort of real credentials are tagged accordingly.
No, it won't stop spam, but it'll allow people to simply deny access to systems and users that are a continued problem, forge credentials or email addresses.
ITU convention/treaty has it that any amateur operating below 50 mHz must pass a minimal code test.
It's not a baseless attack, it's my personal opinion. And I'm sorry to say, it's been formulated after dealing with Microsoft employees!
I'm sure many Microsoft employees are ambivalent to contractors and indeed do show up for work, do their jobs and go home without employing such sophomoric tactics. But having worked in other IT shops, I can assure you that it doesn't take much to start a situation where contractors are viewed as common trash.
By the way, nice AC moniker. Kudos to your intestinal fortitude.
It's truly unfortunate that the Microsoft employees started this "caste" system. While the corporate management could do more to eliminate this nonsense, the truth of the matter is that the Microsoft employees are mostly responsible.
You only need to look at the moniker "dash trash" to see how a full-time Microsoft employee feels about a contractor. But why should this surprise anyone, Microsoft is one of the most arrogant and self-righteous companies on the face of the planet (superceding SGI at its peak).
What's truly unfortunate is that Microsoft employees employ this "caste" system, yet they are largely a benefactor of contractors themselves. It's well established that Microsoft likes to compensate employees with Microsoft money (stocks, stock options). You do not need to be a Wall Street analyst to know that the biggest attraction of using contractors is reduced employee costs, which translates into more profit and better stock prices.
Of course, the full-time Microsoft employees know this. They know *everything*.
The article talks about handheld, consumer and embedded applications tied to WindowsCE. Of COURSE it'll outsell PCs, a PC is a single device whereas handheld and consumer devices cover a huge spectrum of goods. And when they quote a 250% increase in sales of hand held computers, notice they fail to tell you the exact number of sales to date.
Does it spell the death of the PC? No, wishful thinking at best, preemptive marketing at worst. This piece is spouting someone's paid marketing drivel, and it wouldn't surprise me if the path leads to Redmond.
Even if that is the case, it again shows that the people in Redmond learned from big old bad tobacco. Diversify! They knew long ago the gravy train from personal computers couldn't go on forever, and they also knew that consumer electronics would be thristy for more powerful embedded operating systems.
WindowsCE isn't all that bad, but certainly Microsoft is fooling itself if it thinks it's a one-stop-shop for an OS for embedded devices.
What Mr. Lasser seems to miss is the fact that security holes are caused by programmer error. Whether an application was written in C or Perl, the developer can still make fatal errors in anticipating input into the program leading to security problems.
For example, he cites a very good example that a POP/IMAP server does not need to be written in a low-level language. I tend to agree, but the bug problems certainly won't stop there. Sure it'll be harder to create a buffer overflow (provided the Perl/Python/Java/Flim-flam interpreter is secure (since it's probably written in a low-level language), but it does NOTHING if there's a security problem access the user's mailbox, or directory access or a syntax error in interpreting IMAP commands.
Mr. Lasser also mentions the "macho" factor. Mostly nonsense. I program in whatever gets the job done the quickest, and I'm sure most of the programmers do the same. The errors Lasser complains about are the same problems found in other lines of business -- it's work performed by humans. For whatever reason, an error is made.
A large percentage of "junk mail" depends upon some fashion of deceit. Either it's by masking the true identity of the sender, a spam-haus using domain after domain and ISP after ISP in order to avoid the blacklists or simply by lying and saying that "you really indeed did ask for this".
The answer to the spam problem is to find technical answers that start peeling away at the ways spammers use deceit.
I've said this before and I'll say it again, the first place is to rewrite RFC-821 and require valid reverse-name lookups before accepting mail. Also permit as an authentication scheme that allows the administrator of the accepting mail system to set permissable trust levels. Example, mail that's verified (through an SSL certificate might be one way) as coming from gm.com is accepted, but mail coming from slashdot.org is set to a lower trust level (because they don't want to spend the money for a certificate). Mail from getyerviagra.com is immediately tossed into a review folder, trashed or denied because they don't reverse properly and they have a forged or self-signed certificate or simply don't have one.
The LAST thing anyone here wants is ANY government telling us how to manage electronic mail. In the US, it'll be frought with hooks and back-doors so the feds can snoop your mail.
Let's get it together and fix the problem on our own.