I have RedHat installed on a system sitting on a shelf in my closet that I have no intention of using. I just havn't be sufficiently motivated to format it because I already have two Windows boxes doing everything I need.
It's very convienent to blame MS for Linux's failure on the desktop but I blame Linux. It's not MS's fault Linux is too overly complicated for a typical home user to handle.
Windows is a very benign operating system. I run open source and closed source applications on it. I have software from dozens of vendors on it.
Microsoft doesn't lock you in to anything. You're prefectly free to build a system from scratch and not play their vendor games. You're prefectly free to not use MS Office. You're perfectly free not to use MS media formats. You're perfectly free not to use any software included with Windows.
You can whine that the mass market isn't "educated" all you want but it's the Linux community's responsibility to advertise their products.
If that's what's important to you, allocate a budget for TV and radio ads. If you think Linux is ready for the desktop start advertising. IBM advertising Linux does nothing. Mass market sees those ads and goes "oh, it's a business thing."
I don't think it's ready. I've installed Linux twice now with the intent of doing something with it. But I get too annoyed, go back to Windows and ignore Linux for another year or two. The last time I tried it was about 3 years ago. I havn't missed it.
If you jump the gun on it, people will try it but they'll get a sour taste in their mouth and not bother when you try to convince them that this time it's "really" ready.
I use an intelligent method (mentioned in my post no less so feel free to learn how to read. It's even posted with source code at my web-site as indicated in the post) to filter spam that doesn't involve screwing legitimate businesses or invading anyone's privacy.
I think advocating suing blacklists who fuck over legitimate businesses is the only way to get them to start being more responsible.
We've allowed these idiots to do more damage than the spammers.
"I will use these filters."
I'm not talking about you numbnuts. I'm talking about the rampant irresponsible use of these braindead blacklists by major companies. You know, people who actually matter.
If you want to tear down a building you can use a nuclear weapon but some intelligently placed dynamite will do the job much better.
Morons like yourself can pretend that blocking IPs that spammers don't use is going to solve problems or you can start taking an intelligent approach to spam.
So yes, my new stance is that legitimate companies that become victims of blacklists should form a class action lawsuit and sue the people who own those lists.
Seeing how blindly defensive you are of such lists, it's obvious it's the only way. They've been given way too much power by the geek community.
To the point now that sacrificing privacy and hard earned money over spam sounds like a good idea.
I don't know what the College of Education computer lab at my Uni installed exactly but they're new flourescent bulbs. The place went from feeling like a warehouse to feeling like a hospital. No flicker and half the bulbs were required to light up the place. They actually put in all the bulbs to start but it was way too bright.
Normal flourescent bulbs suck as you describe but quite obviously not sucky versions exist. Flourescent also has the advantage of being more evenly distributed than regular bulbs.
As for this guy's LED lighting, it'd be great for a club for mood lighting. But for a house it's way over done.
Right now I use a NAT to route things around on my home network. However, I can't route port 25 to two different computers behind a NAT so I have to use one e-mail program on a single system to handle all the e-mail for every domain I have control of. Mercury Mail on my coloed server has no problem with this so I have no problem with this. My spam-can is just a catch all anyway running on my home connection. I have one router with NAT handling the server and one router at home handling the home network.
If I had an IP for each system I could use one firewall per system and forward external IPs to internal systems behind individual firewalls with specific ports open on each if I wanted to. I may just keep the current set up for simplicity and cost effectiveness. There's no point getting more than on IP and more than one NAT if you're not running multiple domains.
IPv6 doesn't remove NAT. It just makes it possible to use multiple NATs each with a unique external IP. This is possible now. I have a number of IPs accessible to me from my ISP but this would be more common.
So really, nothing in this area will change. It will just be more common that home users are running multiple differently configured firewalls to a number of different networks. One firewall capable router per IP. Same as always.
Only in a university have I found that having 1 IP per system is an excuse not to use a firewall. It really should be required that a router be added into the cost of buying a new system. The excuse of course is that faculty will mess with them or take them off or that it will cost too much for techs to set them up.
Even if I had only one system on my internet connection I'd be using a router. I don't trust Windows or any OS directly on the wire.
I wrote an Ogg Vorbis in DirectSound class which is for DX8 but with a few lines of code changed, it works in 7 as well making it compatible on old hardware. Prior to that I was using MP3s with DirectMedia which also works just fine. What got me to switch was the licensing costs.
Many new games comming out use Ogg as well and probably for the same reason. With programmers it's a simple issue of money.
But with mass market, it's *marketing.* My CD collection is ripped to MP3s because that's what I had. And that's what most people have because "MP3" is considered hip and there are no licensing fees. So the selling point for developers (the big selling point of Ogg) has zero relavence to the mass market. My sound system makes the onboard soundcard sound good. Getting a better sound card is going to happen long before I spend another several hours reripping my collection.
"Ogg" is neither cute nor hip. Which rules out the female and male demographics. "Ogg" support is free except for production costs which some companies apparently feel is made up for by getting that extra geek dollar. But it's going to be a very long time before a player is sold on the idea it has Ogg outside its product details listing
At the very least the Ogg community needs to come up with an AKA for the format that's marketing friendly. And then it needs to be sold on the idea that it sounds better. So much better that it warrents dropping MP3 for it.
Japanese symbols and dragons are are pretty big craze. Pick a cool looking symbol with a nice meaning and a mascot to make it trademarkable (you don't want incompatible players sporting the logo) and then you've got a fashion item. The Napster logo is a very recognizable symbol. And you're not required to charge to use the trademark. You just sue if companies use it on players that aren't Ogg qualified.
You may not like the idea of "selling out" to get Ogg in the mass market but that's what it takes. It needs a catchy name and a catchy attractive logo.
No, they're not. Blacklists cost legitimate businesses and ISP customers money because blacklists are run by incompetent people that think they're in charge of the internet. There are better ways to block spam than by napalming an ISP. They're not solving anything. They're just making the problem worse by annoying and possibly destroying the businesses of more innocent people than spammers.
And nobody said I was blacklisted. But I stongly suggest that those who have been start a class action lawsuit. It would also be a good idea to avoid ISPs that make use of these idiotic blacklists. I'd rather be at an ISP that takes an intelligent stand on SPAM.
Maybe it will finally wake up the idiots in charge of the lists so they finally do something productive to stop spam. Blacklisting IPs of countless innocent people over an IP that the spammer is most likely not using anymore is idiotic and irresponsible.
If it invades my privacy, my pocket book, or napalms a village it's not a solution.
The people running programs that fingerprint spam are actual solutions. Why? Because the stop SPAM. Not spammers. Fuck the spammers. You can never stop them. But you can stop their messages by filtering intelligently. Trying to stop people from sending any and all e-mails is just dense.
I get virtually no spam simply by filtering the URLS spammers use. It's simple and if Joe Spammer suddenly gets a genuine interest in my site and wants to talk to me, he can. But if he sends spam advertising URLS I've filtered they don't get through. And it doesn't matter who Joe Spammer is. If an URL does get through, it's caught with the next update and countless spammers are taken care of. All without blocking a single IP.
Instead of trying to nikel and dime visitors I've just gone to low cost subscriptions which get you unlimited access for a time period set by the subscription you pay for. The lowest one can go using PayPal and still be worth it is $1.00. So for $1 I give 7 days unlimited access to the site.
It's simple to set up and with IPN and a couple scripts and a modified htpassword.exe it's mostly automated. I could fully automate it but that just invites hackers. When I first started someone tried various user names for something like 8 hours using a dictionary attack. I had a username that could be found in a dictionary. That was one name he didn't try. I reported him to his ISP and that problem went away.
The entire site is browsable so you know exactly what you're paying for. Some subscription sites have this idea they can hide content behind door number 1 and expect people to pay to see what's there.
If you're selling articles, have one or two opening paragraphs vistors can read. If you're selling pictures, use thumbnails of reasonable size. If you're selling comics, keep some strips for free. Maybe sell access to an archive of comics that are greater than X days (months, years) old.
As for PayPal being evil. Stop using them like a bank. They are not a bank. I move funds out every 20 bucks or so. I've never had a problem with them. They offer a money market deal. I use TD Waterhouse.
If you don't trust them on certain aspects it's very easy to avoid those dangerous waters. Every on-line commerce site has attempts by people to scam their users out of their username and password.
They've still failed to fix logging in the 2.x line. The "fix" is a third-party module and even that doesn't work properly. There was absolutly no reason for it ever to not work properly in a default install considering the 1.3.x line works fine. And it certainly shouldn't be up to 2.0.48 without being properly fixed.
Little things like that make Apache's programmers look incompetent and unconcerned about what their users need.
I have very little respect for Apache. I use 1.3.x because it works with everything I need and it's stable but I'm certainly not going to be advocating it for any reasons besides that it's free, secure and the alternative is IIS but I activly tell people not to use 2.x.
As another poster pointed out, 2.x has lots of things wrong with it. Just like MS, they're throwing out crap and losing marketshare to their own prior products. I only use XP because I got it free from the Uni. My OS of choice is 2K.
If you block a range of IPs that happens to have a legitimate user that relies on e-mails to conduct business I hope you get your house repossesed.
People subscribe to my web-site and I send them e-mails back to give them their account information with password. If you blacklist my IP you've just stolen money from me. I'll still get their notices since I can check my account for funds transfers. But there's no way to send them their passwords. So you just cost me money and I will sue you. I'm on a one year contract with the ISP so I can't very well move. Or maybe you'd also like to be sued for the costs of breaking the contract and for the cost of moving somewhere else.
These braindead blacklist runners (such as yourself who thinks dropping IP ranges is a good idea) have probably pissed off enough people by now to start a decent sized class action lawsuit.
It doesn't work. It's counterproductive. And you're inviting lawsuits from your "collateral damage" and frankly I'd like to see some go to court.
ISPs don't need to answer to blacklists. They do not define the law. ISP's who happen to get a spammer on board have committed no criminal act. If you blacklist them, they have every legal right to sue you for everything you own.
If your method of dealing with spam invades my privacy or my pocketbook it's wrong. Use your brain and come up with something better.
Because if they complied current big name filters would stop being idiotic and counterproductive and actually block spammers at a reasonable level of accuracy.
Stop being stupid and blocking IPs. It's counterproductive. You're throwing napalm on an ant hill and most of the time, the ant you're going after has already moved somewhere else.
It should be a punishable offense for such idiots who block legitimate IP from sending e-mails. If a company is using an ISP that happened to get a spammer onboard and the company ends up being blacklisted and losing business, the makers of the blacklist should rightfully be sued for lost business and denial of services. Imaine if a citizen set up a road block on a highway just because they heard criminals used it. When cops break into the wrong house, they get sued. So should blacklist runners.
It is not YOUR job to deny ME the ability to send e-mail just because someone on my IP range sent spam.
I've found simply filtering out links that spams contain is perfectly fine at getting rid of spam. And if spammers want to e-mail me, they still can. I only block their advertisments. That's the idea. You block the spam, not the person or legitimate e-mail.
I'd like to see lawsuits start being brought against blacklist runners and won. Their method is in many cases as reported on slashdot but not called as such, criminal.
A simple means to block spam Countless spammers link to the same URLs so block the URLs and you block countless spammers. Block 1 IP and you maybe block a spammer, and most likely piss off a legitimate user who's now using that IP.
Charging for e-mails is going to work just as well charging for instant messaging. Fuck you if you think you're getting my credit card number just so I can send an e-mail. I'm sure the kids who can't get credit cards are going to just love this idiotic little plan.
"Information wants to be free"
Unless it's an e-mail. And why? Because old grandpa asshat decided it was "the price to pay to fight spam."
I'm down to maybe one or two spams a day and all I do is update my filters, which takes all of a few minutes, and I'm free of all like spam. I block dozens of spams a day.
Here's a crazy idea, stick to the ideas that don't invade my privacy and my pocket book.
When I go on vacation I bring my laptop and digital camera. The laptop is for storing the pictures. You can visit Slashdot, play games, whatever at home. The laptop has no games aside from the default games installed with Win98 and no modem. It's an old 133mhz.
The idea of going camping, going on vacation, is to get away from the everyday. If it's not helping you explore or survive, don't bring it.
If you want to play shoot-em up buy some paint-ball guns. If you want to play some racing games, rent some ATVs.
Any excuse to get away from computers is a good excuse.
Slashdot will still be here when you get back. The idea is to enjoy new things. Not to enjoy the same old same old in a different setting.
If you pay for a business line, ports don't get blocked. I have my server colocated at one ISP which means no port blocking and a home connection that blocks outgoing port 25. So, I have RinetD running on my coloed server that redirects an alternate port to port 25 so that I can send e-mails from home without going through my home ISP.
Blocking port 25 on dynamic IPs is perfectly reasonable. If you're running a legitimate mail server you can easily get to it without making your ISP that blocks port 25 liable for spam should you be so inclined to send it.
However, if you're paying for a static IP then it's no longer reasonable to block ports.
This SPF solution sounds reasonable. Although it's going to create a market for "rogue" servers that value privacy and allow their domain to be forged.
I think it's more for ISPs than casual mail server runners. It's been years since anyone took the sending domain seriously. For domains that choose not to threaten the ability to be anonymous on e-mail it should be part of the RFC that if a domain elects not to use SPF, a simple footer is added, by the client that cares about SPF, to e-mails sent with the domain as the sender that the e-mail may or may not really be from that server.
I'll add SPF if I can set certain IPs to "definitly validated by the server" and all others to "could have been validated by the server." The definites must then go through while the client can choose to let "maybe's" slide.
I don't like the idea of tracable e-mail. The big idea of the internet is that you can say what you want anonymously if you so choose. Killing privacy in the name of blocking ads is pretty silly.
Since the dawn of time people have been aware of this fact but suddenly Joe Blow Environmentalist notices and now suggests that somebody needs to turn down the oven.
"The analogy I have used in the past is what do you do if you notice that you are starting to gain weight?"
Nobody knows what the "ideal weight" of planet earth is. For all we know you're just some crazed dieter that thinks a full grown male gorrilla should weigh 120lbs.
Or maybe you think grizzly bears shouldn't gorge themselves before winter. After all, all that excess fat is "bad."
The only rational argument is that we need to clean up. All this other BS is irrelavent. You don't need to lie to someone and tell them God kills a kitten every day they don't take a shower. Just tell them they smell funny.
Stop lying. It's that simple. Stick to the undeniable facts. We smell funny. And that's a good enough reason.
stop lying to us when sufficiently rational reasons exist to bring about change.
Screw the global warming angle. We haven't been keeping accurate measurments of temperature for very long. We don't know how temperature fluctuates with time or how it affects life. It's all hypothetical BS. And it's irrelavent.
We don't need to stop polluting because some animal has a 1 in a million chance of dying out if we don't. We need to stop polluting because it grosses up the planet. Whinning about poor little cute animals dying is like whinning that somebody should stop hording garbage in their house because the cat might die.
You should stop hording trash in your house because it's disgusting and one of the side effects of cleaning up besides not living in filth is that the cat will be more likely to live longer.
"You know, what really perturbs me is that now we're hearing that all the oil is going to be running out soon."
They make oil in labs. And it doesn't take millions of years to do. They used to claim diamonds take millions of years to make as well but by simulating the way diamonds are made, we find out they're created in weeks. We only think oil and diamonds are scare is because of companies like De Beers and because we have the idiotic notion that everything takes millions of years to occur naturally.
It's recently come to light that we may not be fueling our cars with grandma. It may be the result of bacterial waste or something. In other words: an unlimited resource. Diamonds are certainly in no short supply. Nobody even knows how much oil the earth contains. We only know how much is left of the oil we know about and even that's questionable. We're like little children fighting over the "last" brownie when there's a whole other batch cooking in the oven and another one waiting to go in.
But so what if it's unlimited? It's dirtying up our house. It's time to grow up and start picking up our trash and looking for cleaner more efficient ways to get things done.
Lying to us to about running out of things and animals going extinct is just ruining any chance to get people to change. It's all a lie and we're not fooled by it. Animals go extinct often. It's part of natural selection. I find it ironic that people who believe in evolution have such a hard time accepting that the world changes and not always for what we consider the better. Maybe you're not better off without the DooDoo bird but nature voted it off the island. Get over it.
If you'd shut up with the speculation and lies and just shove our noses in our shit, I think there's a good chance we might get house broken.
I'd almost feel sorry for the guy if he didn't post that rediculous SearchKing lawsuit as though it boosted his case.
Search for "driver library" with or without quotes and I'm number 4.
I certainly didn't pay for that. And I don't have friends in high places.
Google didn't put him out of business. He put himself out of business by apparently not being good enough to get word of mouth advertising and by apparently not buying advertising for his company.
If his company was really that spectacular, his customers wouldn't have flocked to the competition. The reason he failed was because his company was just not good enough when put under stiff competition.
And as for "lying" about how to get a high rank. No kidding. Google doesn't publicize that information for good reason: people like Spam (er search)King abuse the system and then people like him whine when the system they took advantage of is no longer there.
And last I checked people are allowed to give favors to friends. It costs lots of money to run a web-site as popular as Google. Google is not surprisingly doing a balancing act between favors for money and fairness.
Make your site and just be happy with what you get and stop trying to inflate your rating with little tricks.
Why would MS open up the source code so that it forks out into incompatible versions? If you want to make an operating system and make it open source that's your choice. If MS wants to keep it closed that's their business model. Keeping it closed isn't all about money no matter how much you'd like to think you have some kind of argument. Windows 98 has nothing left to fix. If it hasn't been discovered in 6 years there's no point wasting money on waiting for something to show up.
Windows 98's only problem is that it doesn't support the latest and greatest. It would require massive rewritting of code to get that support. And MS conviently provides such a rewrite: WindowsXP and 2000.
So why in the world would they open source something that's finished just so other people can add support to compete with newer products?
Think about it. They're not opening up 3.x why would they open up 98? They've got a team of lawyers that could name lots of reasons. Many of which don't have to do with money and more to do with our friend "liability."
Spammers can't get away with e-mailing millions of messages if they're too large.
It would take 10 months or more to e-mail a message with a 20KB image 25 million times on a typical high speed connection. By referencing images off of hosts they can send the same number of messages in a week and the hosts can serve up the bandwidth required in half the time it takes to send the e-mails.
Slashdot Mirror
is Linux.
I have RedHat installed on a system sitting on a shelf in my closet that I have no intention of using. I just havn't be sufficiently motivated to format it because I already have two Windows boxes doing everything I need.
It's very convienent to blame MS for Linux's failure on the desktop but I blame Linux. It's not MS's fault Linux is too overly complicated for a typical home user to handle.
Windows is a very benign operating system. I run open source and closed source applications on it. I have software from dozens of vendors on it.
Microsoft doesn't lock you in to anything. You're prefectly free to build a system from scratch and not play their vendor games. You're prefectly free to not use MS Office. You're perfectly free not to use MS media formats. You're perfectly free not to use any software included with Windows.
You can whine that the mass market isn't "educated" all you want but it's the Linux community's responsibility to advertise their products.
If that's what's important to you, allocate a budget for TV and radio ads. If you think Linux is ready for the desktop start advertising. IBM advertising Linux does nothing. Mass market sees those ads and goes "oh, it's a business thing."
I don't think it's ready. I've installed Linux twice now with the intent of doing something with it. But I get too annoyed, go back to Windows and ignore Linux for another year or two. The last time I tried it was about 3 years ago. I havn't missed it.
If you jump the gun on it, people will try it but they'll get a sour taste in their mouth and not bother when you try to convince them that this time it's "really" ready.
Ben
I use an intelligent method (mentioned in my post no less so feel free to learn how to read. It's even posted with source code at my web-site as indicated in the post) to filter spam that doesn't involve screwing legitimate businesses or invading anyone's privacy.
I think advocating suing blacklists who fuck over legitimate businesses is the only way to get them to start being more responsible.
We've allowed these idiots to do more damage than the spammers.
"I will use these filters."
I'm not talking about you numbnuts. I'm talking about the rampant irresponsible use of these braindead blacklists by major companies. You know, people who actually matter.
If you want to tear down a building you can use a nuclear weapon but some intelligently placed dynamite will do the job much better.
Morons like yourself can pretend that blocking IPs that spammers don't use is going to solve problems or you can start taking an intelligent approach to spam.
So yes, my new stance is that legitimate companies that become victims of blacklists should form a class action lawsuit and sue the people who own those lists.
Seeing how blindly defensive you are of such lists, it's obvious it's the only way. They've been given way too much power by the geek community.
To the point now that sacrificing privacy and hard earned money over spam sounds like a good idea.
It's braindead.
Ben
I don't know what the College of Education computer lab at my Uni installed exactly but they're new flourescent bulbs. The place went from feeling like a warehouse to feeling like a hospital. No flicker and half the bulbs were required to light up the place. They actually put in all the bulbs to start but it was way too bright.
Normal flourescent bulbs suck as you describe but quite obviously not sucky versions exist. Flourescent also has the advantage of being more evenly distributed than regular bulbs.
As for this guy's LED lighting, it'd be great for a club for mood lighting. But for a house it's way over done.
Ben
Right now I use a NAT to route things around on my home network. However, I can't route port 25 to two different computers behind a NAT so I have to use one e-mail program on a single system to handle all the e-mail for every domain I have control of. Mercury Mail on my coloed server has no problem with this so I have no problem with this. My spam-can is just a catch all anyway running on my home connection. I have one router with NAT handling the server and one router at home handling the home network.
If I had an IP for each system I could use one firewall per system and forward external IPs to internal systems behind individual firewalls with specific ports open on each if I wanted to. I may just keep the current set up for simplicity and cost effectiveness. There's no point getting more than on IP and more than one NAT if you're not running multiple domains.
IPv6 doesn't remove NAT. It just makes it possible to use multiple NATs each with a unique external IP. This is possible now. I have a number of IPs accessible to me from my ISP but this would be more common.
So really, nothing in this area will change. It will just be more common that home users are running multiple differently configured firewalls to a number of different networks. One firewall capable router per IP. Same as always.
Only in a university have I found that having 1 IP per system is an excuse not to use a firewall. It really should be required that a router be added into the cost of buying a new system. The excuse of course is that faculty will mess with them or take them off or that it will cost too much for techs to set them up.
Even if I had only one system on my internet connection I'd be using a router. I don't trust Windows or any OS directly on the wire.
Ben
"Ogg" sounds like the name of a caveman.
I wrote an Ogg Vorbis in DirectSound class which is for DX8 but with a few lines of code changed, it works in 7 as well making it compatible on old hardware. Prior to that I was using MP3s with DirectMedia which also works just fine. What got me to switch was the licensing costs.
Many new games comming out use Ogg as well and probably for the same reason. With programmers it's a simple issue of money.
But with mass market, it's *marketing.* My CD collection is ripped to MP3s because that's what I had. And that's what most people have because "MP3" is considered hip and there are no licensing fees. So the selling point for developers (the big selling point of Ogg) has zero relavence to the mass market. My sound system makes the onboard soundcard sound good. Getting a better sound card is going to happen long before I spend another several hours reripping my collection.
"Ogg" is neither cute nor hip. Which rules out the female and male demographics. "Ogg" support is free except for production costs which some companies apparently feel is made up for by getting that extra geek dollar. But it's going to be a very long time before a player is sold on the idea it has Ogg outside its product details listing
At the very least the Ogg community needs to come up with an AKA for the format that's marketing friendly. And then it needs to be sold on the idea that it sounds better. So much better that it warrents dropping MP3 for it.
Japanese symbols and dragons are are pretty big craze. Pick a cool looking symbol with a nice meaning and a mascot to make it trademarkable (you don't want incompatible players sporting the logo) and then you've got a fashion item. The Napster logo is a very recognizable symbol. And you're not required to charge to use the trademark. You just sue if companies use it on players that aren't Ogg qualified.
You may not like the idea of "selling out" to get Ogg in the mass market but that's what it takes. It needs a catchy name and a catchy attractive logo.
Ben
"THEY are the ones that are costing you money"
No, they're not. Blacklists cost legitimate businesses and ISP customers money because blacklists are run by incompetent people that think they're in charge of the internet. There are better ways to block spam than by napalming an ISP. They're not solving anything. They're just making the problem worse by annoying and possibly destroying the businesses of more innocent people than spammers.
And nobody said I was blacklisted. But I stongly suggest that those who have been start a class action lawsuit. It would also be a good idea to avoid ISPs that make use of these idiotic blacklists. I'd rather be at an ISP that takes an intelligent stand on SPAM.
Maybe it will finally wake up the idiots in charge of the lists so they finally do something productive to stop spam. Blacklisting IPs of countless innocent people over an IP that the spammer is most likely not using anymore is idiotic and irresponsible.
If it invades my privacy, my pocket book, or napalms a village it's not a solution.
The people running programs that fingerprint spam are actual solutions. Why? Because the stop SPAM. Not spammers. Fuck the spammers. You can never stop them. But you can stop their messages by filtering intelligently. Trying to stop people from sending any and all e-mails is just dense.
I get virtually no spam simply by filtering the URLS spammers use. It's simple and if Joe Spammer suddenly gets a genuine interest in my site and wants to talk to me, he can. But if he sends spam advertising URLS I've filtered they don't get through. And it doesn't matter who Joe Spammer is. If an URL does get through, it's caught with the next update and countless spammers are taken care of. All without blocking a single IP.
More Info Here
Ben
Instead of trying to nikel and dime visitors I've just gone to low cost subscriptions which get you unlimited access for a time period set by the subscription you pay for. The lowest one can go using PayPal and still be worth it is $1.00. So for $1 I give 7 days unlimited access to the site.
It's simple to set up and with IPN and a couple scripts and a modified htpassword.exe it's mostly automated. I could fully automate it but that just invites hackers. When I first started someone tried various user names for something like 8 hours using a dictionary attack. I had a username that could be found in a dictionary. That was one name he didn't try. I reported him to his ISP and that problem went away.
The entire site is browsable so you know exactly what you're paying for. Some subscription sites have this idea they can hide content behind door number 1 and expect people to pay to see what's there.
If you're selling articles, have one or two opening paragraphs vistors can read. If you're selling pictures, use thumbnails of reasonable size. If you're selling comics, keep some strips for free. Maybe sell access to an archive of comics that are greater than X days (months, years) old.
As for PayPal being evil. Stop using them like a bank. They are not a bank. I move funds out every 20 bucks or so. I've never had a problem with them. They offer a money market deal. I use TD Waterhouse.
If you don't trust them on certain aspects it's very easy to avoid those dangerous waters. Every on-line commerce site has attempts by people to scam their users out of their username and password.
Ben
They've still failed to fix logging in the 2.x line. The "fix" is a third-party module and even that doesn't work properly. There was absolutly no reason for it ever to not work properly in a default install considering the 1.3.x line works fine. And it certainly shouldn't be up to 2.0.48 without being properly fixed.
Little things like that make Apache's programmers look incompetent and unconcerned about what their users need.
I have very little respect for Apache. I use 1.3.x because it works with everything I need and it's stable but I'm certainly not going to be advocating it for any reasons besides that it's free, secure and the alternative is IIS but I activly tell people not to use 2.x.
As another poster pointed out, 2.x has lots of things wrong with it. Just like MS, they're throwing out crap and losing marketshare to their own prior products. I only use XP because I got it free from the Uni. My OS of choice is 2K.
Ben
If you block a range of IPs that happens to have a legitimate user that relies on e-mails to conduct business I hope you get your house repossesed.
People subscribe to my web-site and I send them e-mails back to give them their account information with password. If you blacklist my IP you've just stolen money from me. I'll still get their notices since I can check my account for funds transfers. But there's no way to send them their passwords. So you just cost me money and I will sue you. I'm on a one year contract with the ISP so I can't very well move. Or maybe you'd also like to be sued for the costs of breaking the contract and for the cost of moving somewhere else.
These braindead blacklist runners (such as yourself who thinks dropping IP ranges is a good idea) have probably pissed off enough people by now to start a decent sized class action lawsuit.
It doesn't work. It's counterproductive. And you're inviting lawsuits from your "collateral damage" and frankly I'd like to see some go to court.
ISPs don't need to answer to blacklists. They do not define the law. ISP's who happen to get a spammer on board have committed no criminal act. If you blacklist them, they have every legal right to sue you for everything you own.
If your method of dealing with spam invades my privacy or my pocketbook it's wrong. Use your brain and come up with something better.
Ben
why aren't they complying?
Because if they complied current big name filters would stop being idiotic and counterproductive and actually block spammers at a reasonable level of accuracy.
Stop being stupid and blocking IPs. It's counterproductive. You're throwing napalm on an ant hill and most of the time, the ant you're going after has already moved somewhere else.
It should be a punishable offense for such idiots who block legitimate IP from sending e-mails. If a company is using an ISP that happened to get a spammer onboard and the company ends up being blacklisted and losing business, the makers of the blacklist should rightfully be sued for lost business and denial of services. Imaine if a citizen set up a road block on a highway just because they heard criminals used it. When cops break into the wrong house, they get sued. So should blacklist runners.
It is not YOUR job to deny ME the ability to send e-mail just because someone on my IP range sent spam.
I've found simply filtering out links that spams contain is perfectly fine at getting rid of spam. And if spammers want to e-mail me, they still can. I only block their advertisments. That's the idea. You block the spam, not the person or legitimate e-mail.
I'd like to see lawsuits start being brought against blacklist runners and won. Their method is in many cases as reported on slashdot but not called as such, criminal.
A simple means to block spam Countless spammers link to the same URLs so block the URLs and you block countless spammers. Block 1 IP and you maybe block a spammer, and most likely piss off a legitimate user who's now using that IP.
Ben
They thought charging to send e-mails is
a) new
b) a good idea
Charging for e-mails is going to work just as well charging for instant messaging. Fuck you if you think you're getting my credit card number just so I can send an e-mail. I'm sure the kids who can't get credit cards are going to just love this idiotic little plan.
"Information wants to be free"
Unless it's an e-mail. And why? Because old grandpa asshat decided it was "the price to pay to fight spam."
I'll stick to filtering links.
I'm down to maybe one or two spams a day and all I do is update my filters, which takes all of a few minutes, and I'm free of all like spam. I block dozens of spams a day.
Here's a crazy idea, stick to the ideas that don't invade my privacy and my pocket book.
Ben
When I go on vacation I bring my laptop and digital camera. The laptop is for storing the pictures. You can visit Slashdot, play games, whatever at home. The laptop has no games aside from the default games installed with Win98 and no modem. It's an old 133mhz.
The idea of going camping, going on vacation, is to get away from the everyday. If it's not helping you explore or survive, don't bring it.
If you want to play shoot-em up buy some paint-ball guns. If you want to play some racing games, rent some ATVs.
Any excuse to get away from computers is a good excuse.
Slashdot will still be here when you get back. The idea is to enjoy new things. Not to enjoy the same old same old in a different setting.
Ben
If you pay for a business line, ports don't get blocked. I have my server colocated at one ISP which means no port blocking and a home connection that blocks outgoing port 25. So, I have RinetD running on my coloed server that redirects an alternate port to port 25 so that I can send e-mails from home without going through my home ISP.
Blocking port 25 on dynamic IPs is perfectly reasonable. If you're running a legitimate mail server you can easily get to it without making your ISP that blocks port 25 liable for spam should you be so inclined to send it.
However, if you're paying for a static IP then it's no longer reasonable to block ports.
This SPF solution sounds reasonable. Although it's going to create a market for "rogue" servers that value privacy and allow their domain to be forged.
I think it's more for ISPs than casual mail server runners. It's been years since anyone took the sending domain seriously. For domains that choose not to threaten the ability to be anonymous on e-mail it should be part of the RFC that if a domain elects not to use SPF, a simple footer is added, by the client that cares about SPF, to e-mails sent with the domain as the sender that the e-mail may or may not really be from that server.
I'll add SPF if I can set certain IPs to "definitly validated by the server" and all others to "could have been validated by the server." The definites must then go through while the client can choose to let "maybe's" slide.
I don't like the idea of tracable e-mail. The big idea of the internet is that you can say what you want anonymously if you so choose. Killing privacy in the name of blocking ads is pretty silly.
Ben
Nerds don't go out into the sun.
Ben
the oven is hot.
Since the dawn of time people have been aware of this fact but suddenly Joe Blow Environmentalist notices and now suggests that somebody needs to turn down the oven.
"The analogy I have used in the past is what do you do if you notice that you are starting to gain weight?"
Nobody knows what the "ideal weight" of planet earth is. For all we know you're just some crazed dieter that thinks a full grown male gorrilla should weigh 120lbs.
Or maybe you think grizzly bears shouldn't gorge themselves before winter. After all, all that excess fat is "bad."
The only rational argument is that we need to clean up. All this other BS is irrelavent. You don't need to lie to someone and tell them God kills a kitten every day they don't take a shower. Just tell them they smell funny.
Stop lying. It's that simple. Stick to the undeniable facts. We smell funny. And that's a good enough reason.
Ben
stop lying to us when sufficiently rational reasons exist to bring about change.
Screw the global warming angle. We haven't been keeping accurate measurments of temperature for very long. We don't know how temperature fluctuates with time or how it affects life. It's all hypothetical BS. And it's irrelavent.
We don't need to stop polluting because some animal has a 1 in a million chance of dying out if we don't. We need to stop polluting because it grosses up the planet. Whinning about poor little cute animals dying is like whinning that somebody should stop hording garbage in their house because the cat might die.
You should stop hording trash in your house because it's disgusting and one of the side effects of cleaning up besides not living in filth is that the cat will be more likely to live longer.
"You know, what really perturbs me is that now we're hearing that all the oil is going to be running out soon."
They make oil in labs. And it doesn't take millions of years to do. They used to claim diamonds take millions of years to make as well but by simulating the way diamonds are made, we find out they're created in weeks. We only think oil and diamonds are scare is because of companies like De Beers and because we have the idiotic notion that everything takes millions of years to occur naturally.
It's recently come to light that we may not be fueling our cars with grandma. It may be the result of bacterial waste or something. In other words: an unlimited resource. Diamonds are certainly in no short supply. Nobody even knows how much oil the earth contains. We only know how much is left of the oil we know about and even that's questionable. We're like little children fighting over the "last" brownie when there's a whole other batch cooking in the oven and another one waiting to go in.
But so what if it's unlimited? It's dirtying up our house. It's time to grow up and start picking up our trash and looking for cleaner more efficient ways to get things done.
Lying to us to about running out of things and animals going extinct is just ruining any chance to get people to change. It's all a lie and we're not fooled by it. Animals go extinct often. It's part of natural selection. I find it ironic that people who believe in evolution have such a hard time accepting that the world changes and not always for what we consider the better. Maybe you're not better off without the DooDoo bird but nature voted it off the island. Get over it.
If you'd shut up with the speculation and lies and just shove our noses in our shit, I think there's a good chance we might get house broken.
Ben
I can just use a dead drop sub-domain that goes to home home connection which is hosting a spam can.
I use it to bait spam so that I can preemptivly filter it on my real server where bandwidth costs money.
anything@spam.icarusindie.com is the current sub-domain. Feel free to sign it up for crap. I'll kill the sub domain if it gets too bloated.
So far I havn't gotten anything to my slashdot@spam.icarusindie.com address in my sig.
You can get the EXE and Visual Basic source code for the catch-all I'm using.
http://therabbithole.icarusindie.com/spam
Ben
Have they finally put a circle around the brush pointer to tell you how big the brush is and where exactly it's drawing at?
And have they finally removed that rediculous brush size limit?
Both of which should have been done from the start.
Ben
The name.
It's not memorable and difficult to spell. "Google" is catchy and easy to spell.
Other than that it's pretty slick.
Ben
I'd almost feel sorry for the guy if he didn't post that rediculous SearchKing lawsuit as though it boosted his case.
Search for "driver library" with or without quotes and I'm number 4.
I certainly didn't pay for that. And I don't have friends in high places.
Google didn't put him out of business. He put himself out of business by apparently not being good enough to get word of mouth advertising and by apparently not buying advertising for his company.
If his company was really that spectacular, his customers wouldn't have flocked to the competition. The reason he failed was because his company was just not good enough when put under stiff competition.
And as for "lying" about how to get a high rank. No kidding. Google doesn't publicize that information for good reason: people like Spam (er search)King abuse the system and then people like him whine when the system they took advantage of is no longer there.
And last I checked people are allowed to give favors to friends. It costs lots of money to run a web-site as popular as Google. Google is not surprisingly doing a balancing act between favors for money and fairness.
Make your site and just be happy with what you get and stop trying to inflate your rating with little tricks.
Ben
and the Last Crusade is said to not work on newer hardware.
That's not true. I popped a 120MB drive with Win3.11 installed into my 700Mhz Duron and it played just fine.
I've never seen Windows load so fast.
Ben
Why would MS open up the source code so that it forks out into incompatible versions? If you want to make an operating system and make it open source that's your choice. If MS wants to keep it closed that's their business model. Keeping it closed isn't all about money no matter how much you'd like to think you have some kind of argument. Windows 98 has nothing left to fix. If it hasn't been discovered in 6 years there's no point wasting money on waiting for something to show up.
Windows 98's only problem is that it doesn't support the latest and greatest. It would require massive rewritting of code to get that support. And MS conviently provides such a rewrite: WindowsXP and 2000.
So why in the world would they open source something that's finished just so other people can add support to compete with newer products?
Think about it. They're not opening up 3.x why would they open up 98? They've got a team of lawyers that could name lots of reasons. Many of which don't have to do with money and more to do with our friend "liability."
Ben
that we should repeal the 14th and 20th amendments, deny women the right to vote and enslave them.
I wonder if I could win an election using that platform...
Ben
It doesn't block "http://"
It searches for "http://" to gather links.
Which domains end up actually being filtered out is handled manually.
How often do you send friends links to domains dedicated to spam?
And baysian filtering picks up all the words. It's sloppy, inefficient and error prone.
Ben
Spammers can't get away with e-mailing millions of messages if they're too large.
It would take 10 months or more to e-mail a message with a 20KB image 25 million times on a typical high speed connection. By referencing images off of hosts they can send the same number of messages in a week and the hosts can serve up the bandwidth required in half the time it takes to send the e-mails.
Ben