If the government maintains seat belt and helmet laws for safety, it isn't working, the death toll on the roads keeps rising. The best the laws have done is to slow the rate of increase. Several studies I've read show conclusively that as vehicle safety systems improve, so does the reckless behavior of the driver. Did you know that Volvo "the boxy but safe car" had one of the highest collision rates? If safety is TRUELY the reason for the laws, then there should be a law that regulates the maximum rate of acceleration and top speed of all vehicles on the road.... maintain control of the vehicle in, shall we say, stressful situations. How does a seat belt help moderate my mental state or allow better physical control under mental duress? Seat belts are there for two reasons: to control the rate of deceleration of the human body such that the deceleration occurs over a longer period instead of more abruptly against the vehicle's internal surfaces; and to prevent ejection from the vehicle.... tends to cost the taxpayers a lot of money. How so? If an autopsy is required, that's the government's fault not the dead person's. Autopsy should only be indicated in cases where the cause of death is truly unknown. The fact is that seat belts cost more money than dead people. Seat belts cause more people to survive more serious collisions, this means more people need medical attention, and more involved medical procedures. In a serious collision if you die, you're dead, all that remains is to remove the body and dispose of it in a grave or via cremation. If you are a mangled wreck, you need all manner of medical attention and potentially thousands of dollars a day.
If you want to get rid of the law suits and massive rewards, lower the number of people that survive car collisions. Dead people don't sue.
Arizona also has no mandatory helmet law. Never has, likely never will. Not wearing a seat belt is a primary cause for a police stop, but there's no vehicle safety inspection to assure the seat belt works.
I fail to understand how repealing a mandatory helmet law (or seat belt law) for adults is dubious. It's my heath, my life and my head at risk, why should the government be able to dictate the risks I can take with my own life that don't affect anyone but myself.
The licensing of computer techs as TV/Radio repair people is just insane though.
But my point is that the "league" supporting those teams would be all but nullified by breaking the monopoly. Team match-ups and standings would be handled by a party that is removed from the day to day operations of the teams. The system now is closed, to own a professional team you must be "allowed" to do so by the league. To start a new team you must be authorized by the league and pay the league a hefty sum.
Without the controlling monopoly structure, existing teams would be financially motivated to play any other team. If they declined a game scheduled by the the controlling body, they would not get to play that week and get marked as a forfeit with the opposing team marked a a win. If you don't play you don't get a cut of television revenue or ticket sales.
The current professional sports structure has nothing to do with sports, it's about money: who controls it and who gets it. It makes sure that only multi billionaires join the club of team "ownership" and that they purchase the "right" people to play on their team.
Then again, I'm sort of old fashioned this way: The New York Yankees should be populated by people from New York, the L.A. Lakers should all be from L.A. . What's the point of city based teams when they all hire people from around the country and the world, U.S. citizens or not?
This could all end with one simple law. That law:eliminating the government protection of major league sports monopolies/cartels.
MLB, NFL, NHL, NBA, etc. You can't, for example, just form a team and start playing the Yankees, you need to pay MLB millions of dollars and get their okay for an "expansion team".
The Fed says if you want to play professional baseball, you have to play according to the MLB rules (which include censorship of local games to increase ticket sales).
I think if a city, county or state, or private group for that matter, wants to form a team and compete professionally, that they should. Sports should be an open an free market, not controlled by a few multi-billionaires and played by a few multi -millionaires .
You know... people always say that and it has no justification in fact.
I've been forcibly taxed for quite a number of years to pay for the Diamondback's stadium ($238M out of $354M or 2/3 of the cost). Bank One then supplied the project with something like$2.2M, about.5% of the cost of the building cost and got their names on the stadium for 30 years. The government then essentially gave the stadium to the team for free.
Since the stadium was opened, my tax bill had risen each year at the same rate as the years previous to the stadium. I don't see any more police, fire, or school personnel in my city. I don't see our unemployment rate being lower than metro areas without a stadium. I don't see the county or state debt decreasing any faster.
Why? Because the team owner gets the profits, not the government. The government only gets the sales tax from tickets and concessions. I guess some of the player's incomes also comes back to the state in the form of income taxes... but with the accountants they have who knows.
I'm wondering how much overtime the Quicktime team will be putting in to make a codec for all of the RM protected media files. Then QT could save them to disk, allow encoding, transcoding, etc. Apple then sells the encoder for a lower cost than Real, or just gives it away.
The QT team has created or written a tremendous number of codecs now, think: animation, video, cimepak, DV, Pixlet, etc. They have, or with $4.5B in the bank, can hire the best of the best in the fields to reverse engineer and recode. I'd say two weeks to a working internal prototype, one month until they have a rev 1.0 product.
If Real tried to sue, they and Apple could just come to a mutual agreement to stop cloning each other's technology. If not, Apple could certainly argue in court that Real themselves publicly stated that such actions were vital to the marketplace: case closed.
Real's primary (only) source of income is the Real encoder and the Real player. If Real really wants to play this "compatibility" and "open" game, they had best look under their feet to check what ground they are standing on before they walk too much farther down this path. Turnabout is fair play, and it would only be fair for Apple to put Real in their own position.
Yea... I think in this case Apple shouldn't use the courts, they should definitely fight fire with fire.
Yup.. and the Wright Brothers invented the airplane and were the first to fly.
This is not to say what the Wrights did with what they had was not amazing. To be accurate about it though, the Wright brothers were the first with manned, controlled flight of a heavier-than-air craft.
This tries to connect to the site curvet.co.kr with the user name www.earthlink.net
The "@" should not appear in most any legitimate URL. When it does you should recognize the part to the left as your username for the site and the portion to the right as the name of the site you are connecting to.
I'm torn also. I dislike that while I'm forced to sit in the MVD, that I also have to be subjected to advertisements on the overhead screens and banners. It will be interesting to see if the government ever gets sued for "suggesting" a particular company in this way.
But... I like the idea that perhaps my property taxes will not go up as fast, or *gasp* go down, if I (and others) click on these ads on a regular basis.
My problem with ads in government is that if the government forces me to a particular place, real or virtal, to complete a required task then they should not use that compulsion to sell me to advertisers. When this is the case, how much longer will it be before my driver's license carries a corporate logo and slogan on the back? How much longer before I take the Coca Cola Exit #42, or drive on the Pepsi Interchange?
They are the government. They have the unique ability to legally take any money they need. If you need corporate money to run the county, then raise the county income tax on corporations. There is zero reason to pander to these companies and exchange services to get revenue from them.
My argument to that is that no business with a web site should have email addresses published on the site. Initial contact with the public should be via web forms. Only after initial contact would you generate a unique email account for inbound mail from a customer/prospect.
With a dedicated IT department, this is not too much of a hassle.
SPAM is a social problem. You can't use market, technical or legislative processes to solve a social problem. Attempts to do so lead to more problems and don't solve the original problem ie: crime, poverty, drugs, all are social problems and none have ben eliminated by any of the above means despite decades of trying.
You need a social solution to the social problem of email spam, though some may call this a technical solution.
numerous aliases, one account.
You have one base email account the address/name of which you never reveal to anyone. No, not even people you trust. Too many worms harvest addresses from messages stored on infected systems.
You then have a web and/or email interface to the mail server with which you can create email addresses on the fly which all dump their mail in the one mail account. These are not "temporary" or "one-time-use" accounts, they are however mutable at will.
You make up an alias for your close family to use, one for your friends, one for each major company you receive email from, one for mailing lists, etc. Despite having many email addresses, all of your mail is delivered in to one mailbox and only one account needs to be checked for mail.
If you should ever start receiving spam on a particular alias, you simply change it alerting the one or few entities that use that address. The remainder of your addresses remain unaffected.
It's also really fun to tell the phone company that your email address is mci@my-domain.com. The look on the librarian's face was priceless when I told her my email address was library@emiaildomain.com.
Does this require work on the part of the email user? Yes. One time for initial setup of the account(s), and then again if spam is received on an address.
The up-side... you only receive spam once on an address, then you change the address. Spam is then stopped before the message is sent from the remote server. Anyone with their own mail server, or an ISP who supports this can start using it right now, it doesn't require any new protocols or changing of any existing ones. It doesn't place any additional burden on the network, and in fact alleviates server loads because sending back a "550 user unknown" after the "rcpt to:" takes up a lot less resources than receiving the entire message and then trying to filter it based on content.
Is it a a perfect solution? No. What are the flaws: 1. Setting up, remembering and maintaining the list of aliases. This is a problem with laziness of users, not with the idea itself. In the end it will require no more work than installing and training a learning filter.
2. Setting up your mail client to operate with multiple outgoing addresses and only one incoming address. Some mail clients (OS X Mail.app for one) require incoming mail server info for an account (even if it will never receive mail) and require that there be a unique server/username combo for each "account". But there are workarounds.
3. Still susceptible to brute force guessing of the main account or the aliases (which requires changing one or both). Most mail servers today have hardening against brute force attacks though. Even if your mail email address (the one you never give out) is guessed, you can have it changed and all of the aliases re-directed to the new address without having to tell anyone about it. All the aliases stay intact.
I agree that undeliverable mail addresses have little effect on the behavior of spammers today, but I also think it will become an issue spammers will need to deal with.
There will come a point when there will be more ex-addresses than currently deliverable ones. Unless spammers find some revolutionary new way to get their messages out they have a finite amount of resources with which to send. With more and more undeliverable addresses, they will see their responses rates go from low to nearly non existent and they will be forced to cull undeliverable addresses to keep the response rate up and their profit flowing in.
If they get (numbers out of my ass) 1 response per 100,000 emails today, then they may see only 1 response in 300,000 as more addresses become undeliverable.
My argument that is if we could get enough "bogus" address on the lists, spammers would be forced to either give up, or maintain the lists via additional effort and cost. It's the old "bury them in what they asked for" stunt.
Will it work? I don't know for sure. I do know the alias idea works. Like you, I see lots of "user unknown" responses in my logs, but to me that's a good thing: one less message that got through.
Let me reply to the 11 or so people who missed the points of my post:
1. If you host 7 domains (as I do), paying $70 per year for external forwarding services becomes a significant fee. It's certainly unnecessary. My mail server is also my firewall (among other uses) and everyone should be running some sort of firewall.
2. Sure my mail can be read in transit with a sniffer, but this starts to become questionable practice. It also requires some effort. With messages stored on their server anyone with access can read my mail at any time. with a sniffer they need to intentionally grab the relevant data off the wire with a sniffer and reassemble the packets. Then they can read the email for the time they were capturing.
3. Most everyone missed the larger point. FILTERING isn't the answer to spam. Not allowing the messages to be sent from the remote server is the answer. Using many aliases is key do doing that. It stops your spam problem dead in it's tracks and saves a lot of bandwidth. SPAM will only go away when the vast majority of send attempts fail with "User not known" messages from server to server. That can only happen with mail aliasing or something similar.
4. Many people stated that they like this limit because "it's bad netiquette" to email large files, or there was no reason to do so. Perhaps since HTTP wasn't intended for large binary distribution, ISPs should also limit the size of images and binary data that are transferred over the protocol. Email wasn't intended to carry anything but text messages, perhaps ISPs should start rejecting any MIME encoded mail? NNTP wasn't designed for binary data, but as a discussion mechanism. should all the binaries groups be deleted/rejected/filtered? All are equally absurd arguments. Protocols should be used for what they can be used for until something better comes along.
5. Many noted that you can do this either with remote mail servers, or just have your email client contact your ISP's server and then do forwarding/notification. The first involves dragging the message unnecessarily across the Internet an extra time. The second involves repeated contacts with your ISP's server about every minute, or at least very frequently, thus increasing its work load. Neither seem as ideal a solution as running your own server. And WHY would you want to pay for a service that you can get for free and have more functionality to boot?
6. I do have a "decent" ISP service wise. I have a cable modem with 3.2Mb/640Kb bandwidth with a static IP and am two hops to the AT&T backbone with better than.1% downtime. I can run servers and have almost no political BS as with COX or other broadband providers I've used or read about. I get all that for less than $60/month after taxes. What I expect from my ISP is unfettered access to and from the Internet via TCP/IP protocols. I don't want email, I don't want weather reports, I don't want a proxy server or filtering or newgroups or help installing software.
And then "blacklisting". Nope, not blacklisted anywhere I've tried to send mail yet. At least not because of my IP address. There were two instances where mail didn't get through to the recipient, but that had to do with reverse lookups not matching the claimed hostname from my server, it was easily fixed. In fact, I get to blacklist entire TLDs for incoming mail that my ISP can't. I KNOW I'll never receive a legitimate email from Japan, Malaysia, Poland, Argentina, etc... so all of those TLDs are rejected before the message is sent.
It is the norm in the postal system that each recipient operates their own receiving receptacle (a mailbox or mail slot) for privacy and expediency. Why is it the norm with email that you allow/pay for someone else to operate your receptacle and you have to go get your mail or as someone else to send out a piece of mail for you?
In the end running your own server is the best thing you could do for the 'net. It saves bandwidth, reduces and nearly eliminates SPAM. As for the not knowing how? Most GNU/Linux distros come with sendmail or something similar installed and ready to operate with just about zero configuration.
There are several very good reasons to use your own email server instead of your ISPs:
1. You can use any domain name(s) you want so you don't every have to change your address as you change ISPs.
2. Your ISP (or anyone else) can't read your mail while it's sitting on your own server. They can read it when it sitting on their server.
3. SPAM prevention. when you run your own server you can alias your account as many times as you wish, and are able to add/delete aliases instantly and at will. When you give a unique address to each entity. If you get spam on an address, you delete it and create a new one.
4. No limits on message content or size. Many ISPs limit the size of attachments. Granted, SMTP is not meant as a file transfer protocol, but that's not a reason to arbitrarily limit the size of messages.
5. Notification. When you own the server and new mail comes in you have have the server forward the mail to multiple places, or run scripts to notify you on a pager, via telephone, etc.
6. Reliability. At least with My ISP, my mail server has a higher availability than theirs. Because of the load on the server from SPAM, it goes down fairly regularly and is frequently backlogged. Sure this is just poor admin on their part, but with my own server it doesn't affect me.
Re:Submitter needs to RTFA - twice
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· Score: 1
I copied and pasted that paragraph from the linked article. Apparently someone figured out the paragraph as written made no sense and deleted the second sentence later.
Why the masthead is not showing a more recent update time stamp, I don't know. Perhaps we should write to CNET and ask them why they are misrepresenting the update time of their articles. I suspect it's because they are an untrustworthy news source covering their tracks.
Looking for other indications of the initial article's wording I notice that if you look at the comments at the bottom of the article's page you'll see that several other people pointed out and quoted the the same paragraph I did.
I grant you that since they changed the text of the article my posting has no context. I unfortunately can not force them to re-insert the second sentence of the 9th paragraph .
If you make some calls (local hospitals, ambulance companies, etc) you will likely find out that ambulances do not carry blood on board. At least that's what I think you were saying.
My experience with those call boxes is that they don't dial 911, but are a direct line to the campus security/police force.
Re:Submitter needs to RTFA - twice
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VoIP Questioned
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· Score: 1
During a power outage, a VoIP phone is only as good as any battery backups on hand, because delivering power through the broadband connection isn't possible on a wide commercial basis. An emerging alternative broadband-delivery technique, broadband over power line, will solve this problem, but wide deployment is years away.
The statements are poorly worded, vague and contradictory.
In the statement "... broadband over power line, will solve this problem..." which "this" is the sentence referring to? There are two problems stated earlier in the paragraph
"During a power outage, a VoIP phone is only as good as any battery backups on hand..." and "... delivering power through the broadband connection isn't possible on a wide commercial basis."
The last statement "... but wide deployment is years away." is a restatement of the latter problem implying that both methods share the same problem of... isn't possible on a wide commercial basis...", so that can't be the problem it is an alternative to.
Logic, or common sense, dictates that if VoIP can't work with cable modem or DSL during a power outage, that VoIP also can't work with broadband over power line if the power is out. If you have no power, you have no broadband over power either. When X delivers Y and X is broken, Y can not be delivered.
It turns out the author used a lot of words to make no point.
On the other hand, POTS two wire is just about everywhere and entirely dead cheap and simple for everyone to use.
This is just not true. POTS is only available wherever you pay to drag a line to it. There's no POTS service in my bathroom, in my backyard, in my garage, or on the about 1/4 mile trek to my mail box on on the trails through the Tonto National Forest behind my home.
The local cell tower covers all of these locations and more. With a handheld 600mw (milliwatt) mobile phone I can expect at least a 2 mile radius of service from the tower and 10-15 isn't uncommon.
Flat rate, unlimited local calling is becoming a more common service from mobile carriers and compares, price-wise, with hard line service.
Re:Not that FUD-dy.
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VoIP Questioned
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I'm sorry, but 911 service is not a small, inconsequential feature that VOIP-zealots make it out to be.
But you apparently didn't call 911 during the hurricane. When was the last time you called 911 for a true emergency: "endangered life or crime in progress"? If you're like the majority of people... never or a long time ago.
Calling 911 doesn't stop a person from dying and it doesn't stop a crime in progress and it doesn't bring help any faster: it will still take 5 to 15 minutes for responders to arrive depending on your area and the "emergency".
If it weren't for federal requirements to implement 911 service it would probably be optional and a pay-per-use service, and frankly it should be anyway. It should cost $100 to call 911, billed directly on the phone bill. If your call turns out to be an emergency your fee is refunded. If not, then you just paid for your stupidity.
No problem... I figured you were truly ignorant of SMTP operation and so provided a mini lesson.
SMTP is deceptively simply and immensely complex, at least "sendmail" is. You could implement the basics of an SMTP server with just a few dozen lines of perl code, but it takes tens of thousands of lines to completely do it "right".
Slashdot Mirror
digital ... you use your digits (fingers) to pick the lock, hence it's a digital bypass of an effective means of securing content. :)
If the government maintains seat belt and helmet laws for safety, it isn't working, the death toll on the roads keeps rising. The best the laws have done is to slow the rate of increase. Several studies I've read show conclusively that as vehicle safety systems improve, so does the reckless behavior of the driver. ... maintain control of the vehicle in, shall we say, stressful situations. ... tends to cost the taxpayers a lot of money.
Did you know that Volvo "the boxy but safe car" had one of the highest collision rates?
If safety is TRUELY the reason for the laws, then there should be a law that regulates the maximum rate of acceleration and top speed of all vehicles on the road.
How does a seat belt help moderate my mental state or allow better physical control under mental duress? Seat belts are there for two reasons: to control the rate of deceleration of the human body such that the deceleration occurs over a longer period instead of more abruptly against the vehicle's internal surfaces; and to prevent ejection from the vehicle.
How so? If an autopsy is required, that's the government's fault not the dead person's. Autopsy should only be indicated in cases where the cause of death is truly unknown. The fact is that seat belts cost more money than dead people. Seat belts cause more people to survive more serious collisions, this means more people need medical attention, and more involved medical procedures.
In a serious collision if you die, you're dead, all that remains is to remove the body and dispose of it in a grave or via cremation. If you are a mangled wreck, you need all manner of medical attention and potentially thousands of dollars a day.
If you want to get rid of the law suits and massive rewards, lower the number of people that survive car collisions. Dead people don't sue.
Arizona also has no mandatory helmet law. Never has, likely never will.
Not wearing a seat belt is a primary cause for a police stop, but there's no vehicle safety inspection to assure the seat belt works.
I fail to understand how repealing a mandatory helmet law (or seat belt law) for adults is dubious.
It's my heath, my life and my head at risk, why should the government be able to dictate the risks I can take with my own life that don't affect anyone but myself.
The licensing of computer techs as TV/Radio repair people is just insane though.
But my point is that the "league" supporting those teams would be all but nullified by breaking the monopoly.
Team match-ups and standings would be handled by a party that is removed from the day to day operations of the teams. The system now is closed, to own a professional team you must be "allowed" to do so by the league. To start a new team you must be authorized by the league and pay the league a hefty sum.
Without the controlling monopoly structure, existing teams would be financially motivated to play any other team. If they declined a game scheduled by the the controlling body, they would not get to play that week and get marked as a forfeit with the opposing team marked a a win. If you don't play you don't get a cut of television revenue or ticket sales.
The current professional sports structure has nothing to do with sports, it's about money: who controls it and who gets it. It makes sure that only multi billionaires join the club of team "ownership" and that they purchase the "right" people to play on their team.
Then again, I'm sort of old fashioned this way: The New York Yankees should be populated by people from New York, the L.A. Lakers should all be from L.A. . What's the point of city based teams when they all hire people from around the country and the world, U.S. citizens or not?
This could all end with one simple law. That law:eliminating the government protection of major league sports monopolies/cartels.
MLB, NFL, NHL, NBA, etc. You can't, for example, just form a team and start playing the Yankees, you need to pay MLB millions of dollars and get their okay for an "expansion team".
The Fed says if you want to play professional baseball, you have to play according to the MLB rules (which include censorship of local games to increase ticket sales).
I think if a city, county or state, or private group for that matter, wants to form a team and compete professionally, that they should. Sports should be an open an free market, not controlled by a few multi-billionaires and played by a few multi -millionaires .
You know... people always say that and it has no justification in fact.
.5% of the cost of the building cost and got their names on the stadium for 30 years. The government then essentially gave the stadium to the team for free.
I've been forcibly taxed for quite a number of years to pay for the Diamondback's stadium ($238M out of $354M or 2/3 of the cost). Bank One then supplied the project with something like$2.2M, about
Since the stadium was opened, my tax bill had risen each year at the same rate as the years previous to the stadium. I don't see any more police, fire, or school personnel in my city. I don't see our unemployment rate being lower than metro areas without a stadium. I don't see the county or state debt decreasing any faster.
Why? Because the team owner gets the profits, not the government. The government only gets the sales tax from tickets and concessions. I guess some of the player's incomes also comes back to the state in the form of income taxes... but with the accountants they have who knows.
I'm wondering how much overtime the Quicktime team will be putting in to make a codec for all of the RM protected media files. Then QT could save them to disk, allow encoding, transcoding, etc. Apple then sells the encoder for a lower cost than Real, or just gives it away.
The QT team has created or written a tremendous number of codecs now, think: animation, video, cimepak, DV, Pixlet, etc. They have, or with $4.5B in the bank, can hire the best of the best in the fields to reverse engineer and recode. I'd say two weeks to a working internal prototype, one month until they have a rev 1.0 product.
If Real tried to sue, they and Apple could just come to a mutual agreement to stop cloning each other's technology. If not, Apple could certainly argue in court that Real themselves publicly stated that such actions were vital to the marketplace: case closed.
Real's primary (only) source of income is the Real encoder and the Real player. If Real really wants to play this "compatibility" and "open" game, they had best look under their feet to check what ground they are standing on before they walk too much farther down this path. Turnabout is fair play, and it would only be fair for Apple to put Real in their own position.
Yea... I think in this case Apple shouldn't use the courts, they should definitely fight fire with fire.
Yup.. and the Wright Brothers invented the airplane and were the first to fly.
This is not to say what the Wrights did with what they had was not amazing. To be accurate about it though, the Wright brothers were the first with manned, controlled flight of a heavier-than-air craft.
The link in the earthlink message was:
http://www.earthlink.net @ curvet.co.kr/curvetdb/images/CVS/
This tries to connect to the site curvet.co.kr with the user name www.earthlink.net
The "@" should not appear in most any legitimate URL. When it does you should recognize the part to the left as your username for the site and the portion to the right as the name of the site you are connecting to.
I'm torn also.
I dislike that while I'm forced to sit in the MVD, that I also have to be subjected to advertisements on the overhead screens and banners. It will be interesting to see if the government ever gets sued for "suggesting" a particular company in this way.
But... I like the idea that perhaps my property taxes will not go up as fast, or *gasp* go down, if I (and others) click on these ads on a regular basis.
My problem with ads in government is that if the government forces me to a particular place, real or virtal, to complete a required task then they should not use that compulsion to sell me to advertisers. When this is the case, how much longer will it be before my driver's license carries a corporate logo and slogan on the back? How much longer before I take the Coca Cola Exit #42, or drive on the Pepsi Interchange?
They are the government. They have the unique ability to legally take any money they need. If you need corporate money to run the county, then raise the county income tax on corporations. There is zero reason to pander to these companies and exchange services to get revenue from them.
My argument to that is that no business with a web site should have email addresses published on the site.
Initial contact with the public should be via web forms. Only after initial contact would you generate a unique email account for inbound mail from a customer/prospect.
With a dedicated IT department, this is not too much of a hassle.
SPAM is a social problem. You can't use market, technical or legislative processes to solve a social problem. Attempts to do so lead to more problems and don't solve the original problem ie: crime, poverty, drugs, all are social problems and none have ben eliminated by any of the above means despite decades of trying.
You need a social solution to the social problem of email spam, though some may call this a technical solution.
numerous aliases, one account.
You have one base email account the address/name of which you never reveal to anyone. No, not even people you trust. Too many worms harvest addresses from messages stored on infected systems.
You then have a web and/or email interface to the mail server with which you can create email addresses on the fly which all dump their mail in the one mail account. These are not "temporary" or "one-time-use" accounts, they are however mutable at will.
You make up an alias for your close family to use, one for your friends, one for each major company you receive email from, one for mailing lists, etc. Despite having many email addresses, all of your mail is delivered in to one mailbox and only one account needs to be checked for mail.
If you should ever start receiving spam on a particular alias, you simply change it alerting the one or few entities that use that address. The remainder of your addresses remain unaffected.
It's also really fun to tell the phone company that your email address is mci@my-domain.com. The look on the librarian's face was priceless when I told her my email address was library@emiaildomain.com.
Does this require work on the part of the email user? Yes. One time for initial setup of the account(s), and then again if spam is received on an address.
The up-side... you only receive spam once on an address, then you change the address. Spam is then stopped before the message is sent from the remote server. Anyone with their own mail server, or an ISP who supports this can start using it right now, it doesn't require any new protocols or changing of any existing ones. It doesn't place any additional burden on the network, and in fact alleviates server loads because sending back a "550 user unknown" after the "rcpt to:" takes up a lot less resources than receiving the entire message and then trying to filter it based on content.
Is it a a perfect solution? No.
What are the flaws:
1. Setting up, remembering and maintaining the list of aliases. This is a problem with laziness of users, not with the idea itself. In the end it will require no more work than installing and training a learning filter.
2. Setting up your mail client to operate with multiple outgoing addresses and only one incoming address. Some mail clients (OS X Mail.app for one) require incoming mail server info for an account (even if it will never receive mail) and require that there be a unique server/username combo for each "account". But there are workarounds.
3. Still susceptible to brute force guessing of the main account or the aliases (which requires changing one or both). Most mail servers today have hardening against brute force attacks though. Even if your mail email address (the one you never give out) is guessed, you can have it changed and all of the aliases re-directed to the new address without having to tell anyone about it. All the aliases stay intact.
The problem is that the USPS was not involved in the transaction so technically there is no mail fraud for the inspectors to pursue.
Funny, hen I read that line I initially perceived it as "I'll fling my own stuff against you".
Which was really much more an amusing thing.
I agree that undeliverable mail addresses have little effect on the behavior of spammers today, but I also think it will become an issue spammers will need to deal with.
There will come a point when there will be more ex-addresses than currently deliverable ones.
Unless spammers find some revolutionary new way to get their messages out they have a finite amount of resources with which to send. With more and more undeliverable addresses, they will see their responses rates go from low to nearly non existent and they will be forced to cull undeliverable addresses to keep the response rate up and their profit flowing in.
If they get (numbers out of my ass) 1 response per 100,000 emails today, then they may see only 1 response in 300,000 as more addresses become undeliverable.
My argument that is if we could get enough "bogus" address on the lists, spammers would be forced to either give up, or maintain the lists via additional effort and cost. It's the old "bury them in what they asked for" stunt.
Will it work? I don't know for sure. I do know the alias idea works. Like you, I see lots of "user unknown" responses in my logs, but to me that's a good thing: one less message that got through.
Let me reply to the 11 or so people who missed the points of my post:
.1% downtime. I can run servers and have almost no political BS as with COX or other broadband providers I've used or read about. I get all that for less than $60/month after taxes. What I expect from my ISP is unfettered access to and from the Internet via TCP/IP protocols. I don't want email, I don't want weather reports, I don't want a proxy server or filtering or newgroups or help installing software.
1. If you host 7 domains (as I do), paying $70 per year for external forwarding services becomes a significant fee. It's certainly unnecessary. My mail server is also my firewall (among other uses) and everyone should be running some sort of firewall.
2. Sure my mail can be read in transit with a sniffer, but this starts to become questionable practice. It also requires some effort. With messages stored on their server anyone with access can read my mail at any time. with a sniffer they need to intentionally grab the relevant data off the wire with a sniffer and reassemble the packets. Then they can read the email for the time they were capturing.
3. Most everyone missed the larger point. FILTERING isn't the answer to spam. Not allowing the messages to be sent from the remote server is the answer. Using many aliases is key do doing that. It stops your spam problem dead in it's tracks and saves a lot of bandwidth. SPAM will only go away when the vast majority of send attempts fail with "User not known" messages from server to server. That can only happen with mail aliasing or something similar.
4. Many people stated that they like this limit because "it's bad netiquette" to email large files, or there was no reason to do so. Perhaps since HTTP wasn't intended for large binary distribution, ISPs should also limit the size of images and binary data that are transferred over the protocol. Email wasn't intended to carry anything but text messages, perhaps ISPs should start rejecting any MIME encoded mail? NNTP wasn't designed for binary data, but as a discussion mechanism. should all the binaries groups be deleted/rejected/filtered? All are equally absurd arguments. Protocols should be used for what they can be used for until something better comes along.
5. Many noted that you can do this either with remote mail servers, or just have your email client contact your ISP's server and then do forwarding/notification. The first involves dragging the message unnecessarily across the Internet an extra time. The second involves repeated contacts with your ISP's server about every minute, or at least very frequently, thus increasing its work load. Neither seem as ideal a solution as running your own server. And WHY would you want to pay for a service that you can get for free and have more functionality to boot?
6. I do have a "decent" ISP service wise. I have a cable modem with 3.2Mb/640Kb bandwidth with a static IP and am two hops to the AT&T backbone with better than
And then "blacklisting". Nope, not blacklisted anywhere I've tried to send mail yet. At least not because of my IP address. There were two instances where mail didn't get through to the recipient, but that had to do with reverse lookups not matching the claimed hostname from my server, it was easily fixed. In fact, I get to blacklist entire TLDs for incoming mail that my ISP can't. I KNOW I'll never receive a legitimate email from Japan, Malaysia, Poland, Argentina, etc... so all of those TLDs are rejected before the message is sent.
It is the norm in the postal system that each recipient operates their own receiving receptacle (a mailbox or mail slot) for privacy and expediency. Why is it the norm with email that you allow/pay for someone else to operate your receptacle and you have to go get your mail or as someone else to send out a piece of mail for you?
In the end running your own server is the best thing you could do for the 'net. It saves bandwidth, reduces and nearly eliminates SPAM. As for the not knowing how? Most GNU/Linux distros come with sendmail or something similar installed and ready to operate with just about zero configuration.
There are several very good reasons to use your own email server instead of your ISPs:
1. You can use any domain name(s) you want so you don't every have to change your address as you change ISPs.
2. Your ISP (or anyone else) can't read your mail while it's sitting on your own server. They can read it when it sitting on their server.
3. SPAM prevention. when you run your own server you can alias your account as many times as you wish, and are able to add/delete aliases instantly and at will. When you give a unique address to each entity. If you get spam on an address, you delete it and create a new one.
4. No limits on message content or size. Many ISPs limit the size of attachments. Granted, SMTP is not meant as a file transfer protocol, but that's not a reason to arbitrarily limit the size of messages.
5. Notification. When you own the server and new mail comes in you have have the server forward the mail to multiple places, or run scripts to notify you on a pager, via telephone, etc.
6. Reliability. At least with My ISP, my mail server has a higher availability than theirs. Because of the load on the server from SPAM, it goes down fairly regularly and is frequently backlogged. Sure this is just poor admin on their part, but with my own server it doesn't affect me.
I copied and pasted that paragraph from the linked article. Apparently someone figured out the paragraph as written made no sense and deleted the second sentence later.
Why the masthead is not showing a more recent update time stamp, I don't know. Perhaps we should write to CNET and ask them why they are misrepresenting the update time of their articles. I suspect it's because they are an untrustworthy news source covering their tracks.
Looking for other indications of the initial article's wording I notice that if you look at the comments at the bottom of the article's page you'll see that several other people pointed out and quoted the the same paragraph I did.
I grant you that since they changed the text of the article my posting has no context. I unfortunately can not force them to re-insert the second sentence of the 9th paragraph .
If you make some calls (local hospitals, ambulance companies, etc) you will likely find out that ambulances do not carry blood on board. At least that's what I think you were saying.
My experience with those call boxes is that they don't dial 911, but are a direct line to the campus security/police force.
During a power outage, a VoIP phone is only as good as any battery backups on hand, because delivering power through the broadband connection isn't possible on a wide commercial basis. An emerging alternative broadband-delivery technique, broadband over power line, will solve this problem, but wide deployment is years away.
..." which "this" is the sentence referring to? There are two problems stated earlier in the paragraph
... isn't possible on a wide commercial basis ...", so that can't be the problem it is an alternative to.
The statements are poorly worded, vague and contradictory.
In the statement "... broadband over power line, will solve this problem
"During a power outage, a VoIP phone is only as good as any battery backups on hand..."
and
"... delivering power through the broadband connection isn't possible on a wide commercial basis."
The last statement "... but wide deployment is years away." is a restatement of the latter problem implying that both methods share the same problem of
Logic, or common sense, dictates that if VoIP can't work with cable modem or DSL during a power outage, that VoIP also can't work with broadband over power line if the power is out. If you have no power, you have no broadband over power either. When X delivers Y and X is broken, Y can not be delivered.
It turns out the author used a lot of words to make no point.
On the other hand, POTS two wire is just about everywhere and entirely dead cheap and simple for everyone to use.
This is just not true. POTS is only available wherever you pay to drag a line to it. There's no POTS service in my bathroom, in my backyard, in my garage, or on the about 1/4 mile trek to my mail box on on the trails through the Tonto National Forest behind my home.
The local cell tower covers all of these locations and more. With a handheld 600mw (milliwatt) mobile phone I can expect at least a 2 mile radius of service from the tower and 10-15 isn't uncommon.
Flat rate, unlimited local calling is becoming a more common service from mobile carriers and compares, price-wise, with hard line service.
I'm sorry, but 911 service is not a small, inconsequential feature that VOIP-zealots make it out to be.
But you apparently didn't call 911 during the hurricane. When was the last time you called 911 for a true emergency: "endangered life or crime in progress"? If you're like the majority of people... never or a long time ago.
Calling 911 doesn't stop a person from dying and it doesn't stop a crime in progress and it doesn't bring help any faster: it will still take 5 to 15 minutes for responders to arrive depending on your area and the "emergency".
If it weren't for federal requirements to implement 911 service it would probably be optional and a pay-per-use service, and frankly it should be anyway. It should cost $100 to call 911, billed directly on the phone bill. If your call turns out to be an emergency your fee is refunded. If not, then you just paid for your stupidity.
No problem... I figured you were truly ignorant of SMTP operation and so provided a mini lesson.
SMTP is deceptively simply and immensely complex, at least "sendmail" is. You could implement the basics of an SMTP server with just a few dozen lines of perl code, but it takes tens of thousands of lines to completely do it "right".