Why can't ID10T lusers be simply backcharged for the costs of cleanup? Give them a stern lecture and one warning incident, then dock their pay. Put up an intranet page with all the approved anti-virus and spyware-sweeper packages and then hold the employees responsible for their own actions.
Oops... I said "responsible", didn't I? Well, so much for that idea.
Usually, I find the checklist humorous, but there's one point that needs to change.
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
Might as well take this off the list because it's never optional and is often orthogonal to the proposed solution. All those zombies are in place and speak the current flavor of SMTP. If a successful solution moves the greater net off of SMTP, the zombies are irrelevant. Solutions that stay with SMTP have to put up with the zombies just as email presently does. Zombies are to SMTP what atmospheric noise is to radio. A successful solution must be able to withstand noise because, to be frank, nothing under the sun can clean up the zombies. Not to mention that many (if not most) of the zombies are field-upgradable and will soon be attacking the new system.
Would-be spam solvers are also well advised to remember that securing the entry point to the system is both the most important point of preventing spam and the hardest problem to solve. Explaining why clients cannot be trusted is left as an exercise for the reader.
Proposals exist (Dr. Dan Bernstein's Internet Mail 2000 is one of several) to shift the burden of storage and processing from the receiver to the sender.
IM2000 is interesting on the surface, but the proposal is incomplete and it misses one essential point. Putting the storage burden on the sender is meaningless when the sender is sending millions of identical copies. There's also the point that under IM2000, the receiver must know to seek out and download notifications of waiting mail. This does well against unsolicited spam, at the expense of unsolicited non-spam. I suppose you could develop a network of trusted introducers to provide the thousands of maildrops you would now be required to periodically check, but then there would be the issue of how to extend trust. And if spammers are willing to forge every last bit of identifying data save for the essential sucker's URL in an email now, nothing suggests that they would be any more responsible about creating introducers.
The essential problem is that email is a push technology by necessity. A successful antispam technology protects the entry point to the system, but protecting the entry point is a Hard Problem.
Back in 1975, KWHL FM in Anchorage, Alaska had a regular feature every night at 9:00 pm where they would play a new album in its entirety with no breaks in a side, explicitly so listeners could record them. There would be a break between sides for a couple of commercials and so you could turn over your tape if necessary. They did a countdown to each side so you could get a clean start. I used to have big boxes full of 7" reels holding nearly all the current releases.
Around my office, we have a tradition as well. At 12:00:05, the MOHAA server comes up and we spend our lunch hour chomping sandwiches between rocket attacks. Great fun, and the looks on the faces of the unaware are priceless. "Going out for lunch? No, thanks. I'm going to kill some co-workers."
The review lists "dedicated software" as a minus for the iRiver iFP-390T. Wrong! Here is the UMS update. My 390T looks just like a disk drive to my Gentoo box.
There's a lot of noise in this thread (ya think?), but most is missing the essential point. The business model that's beginning to crumble is advertising as a revenue base. Like so many other outlets, terrestrial broadcast radio exists for one purpose: to get you to listen to the ads. Listener counts are used to set advertising rates, and advertising revenue is the largest portion of a broadcaster's income (bringing in even more than payola).
The NAB wants to protect their franchise to bombard you with ads.
When you think of it, XM and Sirius are the popup blockers of radio.
What do the channels do for us now that we have alternate means of distribution (internet, DVD) that we can pay for directly without ads?
BINGO! The a-la-carte TV argument is one and the same with the advertiser's WWW dilemma. Advertising absolutely relies on the ability to force its way into your attention stream. The exploding popularity of popup-blocking browser features and selective ad-removing accessories for web surfers makes the reality starkly clear. The "average person" despises advertisements. And just as virus scanners battle with virus writers, advertisers become more and more obnoxious and intrusive to counteract the victims' growing means of avoiding ads.
The real reason programming suppliers oppose unbundling is the slim chance that, while surfing around during the commercials in the program you want to watch, you'll be exposed to a commercial on one of the bundled channels (or at least, so they can make that case to their advertiser clients, who pay the programmers lots of money for that chance to be seen). Bundling increases ad revenue for the program suppliers.
And remember the tech of the time. Not too long before C&S pulled their stunt, the news admin at U of Minnesota (Hi, Danny!:) proudly told me he had procured a 1 GB drive for the news server. He said it would give the site 7 day retention on everything but the binaries groups (which would only have 3-day retention).
As for the comment spam being deleted, the spammers easily fly under the radar by focusing on older stories that no one (except Google's spiders) is looking at.
Except that modern blogging software notifies the admin when new comments are posted, so we can not only delete the crap as soon as it hits, we can also practice our SQL.
UPDATE posts SET comment_status = 'closed' WHERE (today - post_date > (7*day));
There's at least one of these in Cincinnati, and I think it's downright dangerous. Not content with a little motion and several ads, they programmed it to do these bizarre tear-away transitions between the ads. I've already seen a bunch of near-accidents when the ads changed.
Good point, but Apple has to be the one to say it, not me. And in the end, I don't think the Big 5 care one way or another whether Apple continues to sell music. But it would be interesting to watch Apple and the RIAA duke it out over iTunes.
Maybe they're not sending people back to filesharing, but they're certainly doing their best to see to it that online music sales tank big time. So when the online stores fail, the RIAA can say "nobody's buying music online, so they must be stealing it!"
In another article on this proposal, the foo.com.mail structure was explicitly mentioned. The plan seems to be similar to SPF or RMX, but using the.mail TLD instead of requiring additions to DNS entries. So when you get 'HELO example.com', you hit example.com.mail and get a list of IPs authorized to send mail from example.com. This does not mean that you will be sending your mail from example.com.mail.
Domains can be had for less than $15 a year, and in any case, that's not much to pay to help insure that your email is accepted. (.mail... it's everywhere you want to be) People who choose not to participate may have problems sending mail in the future. What do you want to bet that registrars will be offering.mail domains bundled with the conventional TLD?
And this plan does not hinge on convincing your ISP to enable reverse DNS. It doesn't even require a DNS entry for the MX. But it would make a healthy dent in the ability to forge mail origins from offshore servers. (granted, this doesn't do anything against zombies, but that's a different kettle of fish)
Re:Bruce Sterlings previous work has been weak
on
The Zenith Angle
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
William Gibson has written one really weak book, The Difference Engine and this was co-authored with Sterling.
Gibson wrote one weak book all by himself, too. IMHO, 'Mona Lisa Overdrive', the third book in the Sprawl trilogy, suffered from the fact that it was the first experience Gibson actually had with a computer. His previous works, including 'Neuromancer' and 'Count Zero', were created with an old-fashioned manual typewriter and one of the hallmarks of both novels is the magical aspect to computers. He never goes deeply into the tech, but he imbues the "deck" with a talismanic characteristic. But reading MLO, you can actually see his vision of computer as magical metaphor drain away as he gains experience in the mundanities of actual tech. (I read somewhere that Gibson said of his first experiences, "I never knew they were so noisy.") By the end of MLO, computers are little more than scenery.
Actually, 'weak' isn't a fair characterization, as MLO is still a strong finish to the trilogy. But the change of attitude is really obvious and I think it does diminish the work a bit.
I'll take a dozen. Oh, and throw a case of TCP frames in that order, too, OK?
</sarcasm>
Curiously, when you put two drivers inside the same can and seal it over a single ear, there is no opportunity to perform phase analysis. Not saying 4-channel 'phones don't exist (though Google doesn't seem to know of any)... nope, just saying the market is probably limited to people that buy penis enlargement pills from spamvertisments.
Slashdot Mirror
A question for the audience: where did HTML email originate? A Google search on 'origin html email' and 'first appearance html email' came up empty.
Oops... I said "responsible", didn't I? Well, so much for that idea.
Would-be spam solvers are also well advised to remember that securing the entry point to the system is both the most important point of preventing spam and the hardest problem to solve. Explaining why clients cannot be trusted is left as an exercise for the reader.
The essential problem is that email is a push technology by necessity. A successful antispam technology protects the entry point to the system, but protecting the entry point is a Hard Problem.
Back in 1975, KWHL FM in Anchorage, Alaska had a regular feature every night at 9:00 pm where they would play a new album in its entirety with no breaks in a side, explicitly so listeners could record them. There would be a break between sides for a couple of commercials and so you could turn over your tape if necessary. They did a countdown to each side so you could get a clean start. I used to have big boxes full of 7" reels holding nearly all the current releases.
Around my office, we have a tradition as well. At 12:00:05, the MOHAA server comes up and we spend our lunch hour chomping sandwiches between rocket attacks. Great fun, and the looks on the faces of the unaware are priceless. "Going out for lunch? No, thanks. I'm going to kill some co-workers."
The review lists "dedicated software" as a minus for the iRiver iFP-390T. Wrong! Here is the UMS update. My 390T looks just like a disk drive to my Gentoo box.
When you think of it, XM and Sirius are the popup blockers of radio.
The real reason programming suppliers oppose unbundling is the slim chance that, while surfing around during the commercials in the program you want to watch, you'll be exposed to a commercial on one of the bundled channels (or at least, so they can make that case to their advertiser clients, who pay the programmers lots of money for that chance to be seen). Bundling increases ad revenue for the program suppliers.
Someone beat you to it back in the 80's.
And remember the tech of the time. Not too long before C&S pulled their stunt, the news admin at U of Minnesota (Hi, Danny! :) proudly told me he had procured a 1 GB drive for the news server. He said it would give the site 7 day retention on everything but the binaries groups (which would only have 3-day retention).
UPDATE posts SET comment_status = 'closed' WHERE (today - post_date > (7*day));
There's at least one of these in Cincinnati, and I think it's downright dangerous. Not content with a little motion and several ads, they programmed it to do these bizarre tear-away transitions between the ads. I've already seen a bunch of near-accidents when the ads changed.
Good point, but Apple has to be the one to say it, not me. And in the end, I don't think the Big 5 care one way or another whether Apple continues to sell music. But it would be interesting to watch Apple and the RIAA duke it out over iTunes.
Maybe they're not sending people back to filesharing, but they're certainly doing their best to see to it that online music sales tank big time. So when the online stores fail, the RIAA can say "nobody's buying music online, so they must be stealing it!"
Ogg support currently uses oggdec by default, though you can easily use any decoder that can write to stdout.
Domains can be had for less than $15 a year, and in any case, that's not much to pay to help insure that your email is accepted. (.mail... it's everywhere you want to be) People who choose not to participate may have problems sending mail in the future. What do you want to bet that registrars will be offering .mail domains bundled with the conventional TLD?
And this plan does not hinge on convincing your ISP to enable reverse DNS. It doesn't even require a DNS entry for the MX. But it would make a healthy dent in the ability to forge mail origins from offshore servers. (granted, this doesn't do anything against zombies, but that's a different kettle of fish)
Actually, 'weak' isn't a fair characterization, as MLO is still a strong finish to the trilogy. But the change of attitude is really obvious and I think it does diminish the work a bit.
</sarcasm>
Curiously, when you put two drivers inside the same can and seal it over a single ear, there is no opportunity to perform phase analysis. Not saying 4-channel 'phones don't exist (though Google doesn't seem to know of any)... nope, just saying the market is probably limited to people that buy penis enlargement pills from spamvertisments.