One more quick followup. You bring up circumstances. Such as, maybe the telemarketer is doing this job because they have no other choice.
So where is the line drawn? What if I said the same about a spammer? Well, he can't find any job that pays the bills, so he took up spamming.
What about the guy who steals food from the store because he can't afford to feed his family? Maybe he had no other choice. You might say this is okay.
So what about the guy who robs the 7-11 at gunpoint? Maybe he just couldn't make it any other way, he had no choice (the call center wasn't hiring, nor was the 7-11). He needs to pay his rent, buy food for his children, etc. Should we excuse that as well?
Now, I'm not saying telemarketers are as bad as a theif -- but I am saying, the line has to be drawn as to what normally unacceptable behavior we will accept due to the poor circumstances that person may be in. Note that "unacceptable" doesn't necessarily mean "illegal". Just because it's legal doesn't make it okay. Likewise, just because I don't know you doesn't mean I have to be courteous if you call my home.
It's not like the guy sitting in a giant call center making $7.50/hour as a second job in the evenings really wants to be doing this any more than you want him to be disturbing you. But you want to make his life more miserable, thinking that somehow the supply of single moms, kids who never quite went to college or people trying to earn some extra money because there aren't other jobs out there will magically dry up?
You are right. I don't have anything against the particular person making the call. But they are calling on behalf of the company. Which means they are representing that company.
They don't have to be a telemarketer. They chose to be. They chose that job, which indicates that they aren't particularly against disturbing people to sell products. They are no different from spammers, or anyone who helps to enable spammers, in my book. And I tell them to fuck themselves. Just to be a jerk. Damn, I'm such a jerk -- but you know what? I don't care. They interrupted me, I tell them where to stick it.
The voice on the other end of the phone is not Jane Doe, wife and mother, she's Acme, Inc., seller of cheap wares. She is representative of the company ***BY CHOICE***. Maybe it was the only job she could find, and if that's the case, I feel for Jane Doe. But I do not feel for Acme, Inc. or anyone calling on their behalf.
Oh, and I hate the McDonald's workers for who they are, not for the company. That's entirely different. The corporation doesn't ask them to cough into their hand just prior to handling your food or change (and to look around and make sure noone saw before wiping their hand on their pants). No, it's the person behind the counter I'm mad at.
Summary: You can quickly get a telemarketer off the phone without being a jerk.
But where's the fun in that? Again, while my post was really just trying to be humorous, I do feel that we should not help enable these people, this industry, by being courteous to them. I wouldn't be nice to anyone who helps enable spam, child porn, or anything else I'm against, for whatever reason. I don't care what circumstances caused them to be in that position, they are there now and I am going to be an ass to them.
For the record, btw, I have worked at a McDonald's (and two Burger Kings) in my day. I have nothing against that kind of job. I have NEVER been a telemarketer, and never would. I'd sooner go back to flipping burgers (though these days there is no real "flipping", it's pretty automated at both places)...
Also for the record, I'm pretty much an asshole anyway; these people (telemarketers, spammers, etc) just bring out the worst of it.
Not that I'm saying you should quit doing this, but they do know its not a cellphone.
Yeah, but I don't really care. I suspect in at least some cases, they'll remove the number anyway. The amount of research (however fast that might be) to figure it out, vs the amount of risk if it did turn out to be a cell number...
Besides, I tell them all kinds of crap when I'm bored. Things like, cutting them off mid sentance and saying "Oh shit, hang on..." and mumbling "shit, I think he's dead! We have to get rid of..."; back to the telemarketer: "hey, this really isn't a good time..." CLICK
Or: "Uh, you realize this is a fax number?" and starting to screech at the top of my lungs into the phone -- very much obviously fake, but makes them think I'm completely nuts.
Or, after obviously saying "Hello?" in clear English, saying "No habla Englais". Of course this does often backfire, as they like to hire bilingual telemarketers... but then you say "Je ne parle pas Espanol!" -- usually by this point they hang up.
Or pretending to be a very old, very deaf person, asking them to speak up and repeat things constantly. Repeat stuff back to them, with substituted words, etc ("you want me to play with my what now?"). If you play it well, they really can't hang up on you, they have to (painfully) finish their pitch. Otherwise they just hung up on a poor old man...
Or... I could go on all day, though admittedly it's much easier to come up with these things now, than when they interrupt you. I really hate the phone (I say this out loud just before I answer it every time), but of course that's beside the point here...
Make their job more difficult, a telemarketer just might quit. Make enough people quit, the industry becomes harder to run. Make it harder to run, it might just go away. Make an industry go away, we might just have a higher unempl.... hm, too far...
So telling them it's a cell phone is nothing, and just something I use when I'm not feeling especially creative (or again when I'm interrupted and just want to say something and hang up, and am not feeling particularly vulgar).
You do realize that this is a ce..... hello? Can you hear me now? Wha- huh?
If I get a telemarketer (phone company, political or other wise) I explain that this is a cell phone, and I pay by the min for incomming and out going calls and as such is it illegal for them to call this number. I also ask for the company name, address and the referance number of this call that I may send them a bill for the charges of this call, which they are now legaly responsible.
I do this anyway. With the land-line. They have no way of knowing that it's not a cell, and it still scares them. It's cut the calls down quite a bit since I started doing this a few months back.
I suppose if my local phone comany calls directly, they'd be able to figure out that it's obviously not a cell number. Anyone else likely doesn't even know where their database of numbers comes from (I'm under the impression it's a lot like the SPAM "business" in that regard)...
Hm, this got a LOT of replies. Rather than reply to them all, I'll just sum up a couple things.
I think I replied hastily and didn't really think it through. I never realized that for some, porn can become a real addiction. I've never considered it more than something I occasionally look at, so I didn't realize this was a real problem for some.
Regarding my last paragraph, I was getting a little bit carried away, and that was meant as (poor) sarcasm. Maybe I'm just a bit irritable today...
But a few people have pointed out the possible merits of such a system, and I'm sorry for the harsh remarks; I didn't mean to offend anyone for whom this is a real problem.
First, the whole "my religion doesn't allow me to look at porn" argument is just nuts. If you truly believe this, you won't need your big brother (or whomever) to watch you.
Second, what about self control? Okay, you don't want to look at porn. So the only way you can stop is to have your PC report which sites you visit to Grandma?
Finally, if you want to look at porn, look at porn. If your religion forbids it, well, that sucks... but otherwise, who the hell cares if you look at porn? I enjoy it, am not ashamed of it, and I certainly don't need anyone else (or any religion) scrutinizing what sites I visit.
So next we'll be CCing our Visa bill to someone, to curb excessive spending; faxing the grocery list/receipt to help with over-eating; and so on. Do these people actually need a babysitter? If so, what are they doing living on their own, let alone surfing the 'Net without supervision?
I don't think anybody's thinking that, or at least I wasn't, given the enormous size of Mozilla. It would be a challenge to fit Gecko into the tiny amounts of RAM in most embedded devices. It was never designed for them, anyway.
I was thinking more along the lines of "web terminal" applications -- like an I-Opener type of device, and things like that. I wasn't thinking PDAs or cell phones, and I guess "embedded devices" was not the most appropriate term.
My point was only this: Optimization does not equal innovation.
Agreed.
Besides, I think most computer scientists and engineers (and myself) would say that correctness and portability should take priority over speed.
Yes, but there are many developers, each with his or her own motivations and priorities. While I agree that, in general, correctness and portability are more important, at least some of Mozilla's developers would consider rendering speed to be the biggest issue. Whether right or wrong, if that's what they want to work on, then I don't want to discourage it (perhaps that's something they excel at, or they are not interested in other development areas).
Overall I think we agree. However, I for one consider speed enough of an issue to justify at least some core development work going in that direction. If you'd used the very early Mozilla builds (the first "milestones"), you'd see that it has come a *long* way in terms of speed (and memory leaks).
With that in mind, any new innovations will likely need serious speed improvements from the first implementations, thus warranting on-going optimisation work.
Currently for my needs it's "fast enough", and I agree that the majority of the development effort should be spent elsewhere at this point.
On modern systems, page rendering seems plenty fast to me. A cable modem is hooked up to my 800 MHz laptop with 256 MB of RAM (not exactly a powerhouse machine), and surfing is very fast. If it's slow for you, then I suggest upgrading to Mozilla 1.3b. The team seems to have made some noticeable speed improvements in this latest release.
So the latest version, on what I consider a decently fast machine, gave you noticable improvements. So why not focus on improving this further?
Think embedded devices. If I fire up Mozilla on my I-Opener running RedHat 7.2, I see plenty of room for rendering speed improvements. Sure, PCs are generally "fast enough" these days, but there will always be other devices.
Not to mention, my desktop (PIII @ ~920 MHz, 384 MB) sometimes slows to a crawl rendering a large Slashdot page (I browse in Flat mode). Get into some more advanced CSS or DHTML and you really start to see room for improvement -- even on smaller pages.
Optimisation should *always* be a priority. The fact that computers are fast shouldn't take away from that. As new things come out that are even harder to render than CSS/DHTML/whatever, these little optimisations show themselves even more.
Of course, web pages can be buggy, too, and if web designers followed standards more carefully, our browsers would be both faster and less buggy.
And that is a big part of it. The more "alternative" browsers are in use, the more standards-compliant the web will be forced to become. That's part of the point of the article.
And, backward-compatibility is part of the rendering slowdown as well.
I do. I respect the hell out of ID software, releasing source to their older versions of Doom and Quake. Not to mention supporting Linux far more than many others. As a result, I have some bit of loyalty toward them. I'll be purchasing Doom III the minute it is released. Partly because it looks to be a really cool game, and partly because I trust ID software to where I don't even feel the need to snag the demo first. I know it will be first rate.
If I can get to the server, I'll snag GTA. Perhaps it will prompt me to finally pick up a copy of GTA III, which I've been tempted to do... perhaps it wouldn't be "brand loyalty" per se, but I do have a bit of respect for them for having done this, and that will influence future purchasing decisions. If that's what they were going for, then great -- mission accomplished.
Hate to tell you but thats the default behaviour with WinNT based systems.
That's simply not true if the DLL is already loaded into memory. Here's a scenerio I've run into:
- Application A loads up "oleaut32.dll", using the default library in the system directory. - Application B has an updated version (and requires it) in its own program location. App B tries to load "oleaut32.dll", but since it's already in memory, it uses the old version, which fails.
This is under Windows 2000. Reading the docs for the LoadLibrary() function, it specifies the search order starting with the application directory, but *only* if it does not first find a module with that name in memory.
LoadLibraryEx() offers some additional functions -- like specifying that future calls should first look in the DLL's directory rather than the current application directory -- but it still checks for any already-loaded DLL by that name first. An extra flag for LoadLibraryEx() could easily be offered to change this behavior for new applications (ALWAYS_LOAD_FILE or something like that).
In the case of VB runtimes, of course, you don't get to specify a path or any flags to the call, because VB does this by itself. The VB app never gets a chance to say "use my runtimes", even if it were possible...
After checking the more recent docs, I see that they've potentially made this worse:
Windows Server 2003, Windows XP SP1: The default value of HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\SafeDllSearchMode is 1 (current directory is searched after the system and Windows directories).
So, by default it checks the system ones first, making it even more difficult to use private versions of DLLs (noting that this only applies when a full path isn't specified, but in general it's hard to specify a full path as the call is usually created at design-time, and there's no guarantee as to where the program will be installed).
As a windows developer you should know this.
I know that I struggled for a while with this. I was trying dearly to make my installer not require a reboot under any circumstances, and this simply wasn't possible with the Windows Common Controls library under Win98. The update was required, and a reboot absolutely necessary, if they had the stock version.
If an app installer is so badly written that it messes up your installation then the software can't be much good either.
I don't think that's so much the issue. One thing I *hate* is a seeminly simple installation that then requires a reboot.
But, as a bit of a Windows programmer myself, I understand it. If a program happens to require a newer version of some DLL, that is currently in use, it can't replace it. And with Windows' current system, you can't just use a local copy of it either.
When a program loads up a DLL, you can't specify a full path, just the filename. Windows has a specific search order, and the first place it checks is memory. "someapp.dll" is already loaded, so it uses that code -- even if you have a newer version in your own program directory.
I've always wondered why the hell they went with this approach. You have to watch for name conflicts between private DLLs (my program may happen to have "mp3.dll", which is completely unrelated to some other program's "mp3.dll"). And of course if an application uses a newer version of a system DLL (common controls library is a commonly-upgraded one), replacing the system-wide DLL is required, and naturally a reboot is required. And there's always some chance this upgrade may break an older application...
You can also forget about renaming a copy for private use, too; many of the system DLLs reference eachother by name. It works if you hex-edit them to reference the new names (I did this only as a proof-of-concept with VB runtimes)...
In my opinion, the best/easiest solution for developers would be to chnage the search order to start in the application directory -- or better yet, only do this if some registry flag is set, so older apps can have the current default behavior...
However, anything to aleviate this would be nice...
How many viri have you heard of that affect the windows platform compared to *nix? Dont you think this fact points to more ethical/social reasons for crackers, rather than inherited "baddness"?
I think the number of viruses and worms has much more to do with the popularity of the system than anything else. It's the same reason more shareware is available for Windows than Linux: there are more Windows users.
Why release a virus that can only affect a small percentage of users, when you can target the one OS that the vast majority use?
I do feel that *nix is, in general, more secure and less prone to the types of attacks that viruses and worms target; however, I also feel that *nix has too small a user-base, and (in general) a more intelligent user-base, to where these attacks are simply not worth implementing on a *nix platform.
If you transferred all the idiots to Linux -- take away their XP boxes and just sit them in front of a RedHat 8.0 box -- we'd have many more problems. These people aren't going to log in as a non-privileged user, and take other precautions -- and will be targetted for attack.
Until then, these people use Windows, run effectively as "root", and do dangerous things like execute unknown binaries from unknown sources, and thus will be the primary target for such attacks.
Not that I don't think *nix security in general is better, rather, I think other factors contribute to the virus/worm issue. More importantly, the typical Windows user doesn't care nearly as much about security as the typical *nix user, by nature. Note that I consider "Windows IIS/SQL Admin" who couldn't be bothered to patch a known hold (Code Red/Nimda/Slammer) in the months before it was exploited as a "typical Windows user"...
However, I find it hard to imagine a cracker reading through thousands of lines of code looking for exploitable bugs. Surely it's less trouble and equally effective to try the same techniques used for cracking closed source software?
But there's nothing stopping the cracker from using the same closed-source techniques on open source software. Of course it doesn't work the other way around.
So basically open source does provide the cracker a second avenue that they can optionally try. Whether it takes more time/patience is irrelevant, they still have the same options they have with closed-source.
Now, OTOH, I do think in most cases (any public project like Linux or Apache) the "many eyes" theory works wonders. Things that are very easily over-looked by specific programming teams in closed-source development may be caught in open-source development. Even if the number of actual, contributing developers is relativley low, many of the end users will be looking at the code.
I haven't contributed a line of code to Linux, Apache, MPlayer, or anything else. But I have looked at tons of code, and have reported bugs or potential exploits for all of them. Remember, many eyes can easily be users, not necessarily contributing developers.
So, while a cracker may be able to look at the code, you have to consider:
- The "non-patient" cracker can of course use whatever methods he wants on closed source code as he can on open source code. This of course doesn't work in the reverse.
- The "many eyes" approach is still great, because a) the developers KNOW other people will see the source, and are less likely to be lax in certain areas, or "I'll fix that potential security problem later" and b) even if they do, someone, somewhere (not necessarily an OSS contributor) will point out the potential vulnerability.
Many end-users, especially of things like Linux and Apache, are coders, but not necessarily OSS coders. They instead rely on these systems, and if ever there is a question we go to the source. And if a problem is found, we report it. And in most (99% or higher) cases, it is quickly addressed.
For unexpected use, of course you can't demand a freebie, since it is understood that the fountain is for public use. However, suppose someone presses the button on the fountain and holds it for several hours without drinking anything. This seems like theft, to me.
Agreed, it is theft, or at minimum an abuse of the service you (the site owner) are offering.
If someone is DOSing me, and I have no authority or technical capacity to stop their attack, then why should I pay for someone else's criminal behavior?
Why should the ISP pay for someone else's criminal behavior?
If I immediately pull the plug on my network, call up the ISP to inform them, yet the packets still come cascading in... I have acted in good faith to do everything possible.
It's still hard to justify passing those costs on to the ISP. Someone, somewhere, has to eat those costs. From the ISPs point of view, you, the site owner, either provoked the abuse, or at least made it possible. Either way, the ISP shouldn't have to eat the cost of someone else's criminal behavior.
And, keep in mind, in most cases it's not criminal behavior, rather unexpected popularity (Slashdot posting for example).
The current situation is like being able to watch the guy pressing the button on the fountain, and paying for the water, yet not being able to do anything to stop it. How can that be *my* fault?
Then you should negotiate that situation with your ISP before-hand. Why are you renting a fountain with unlimited water-flow, yet no controls or options to disable/throttle the flow when it gets out of hand? You knew, upon signing up with the water company, that it was entirely possible (given the maximum flow rate, and lack of limitations) that someone could rack up a serious water bill -- yet you did nothing to negotiate a plan for such a situation.
Having worked for a web host, we ran into this a lot. Eventually we came up with a system where, upon signup, you choose what happens if you go over your bandwidth. Either we cut your site off, or we bill you for the over-usage, it was your choice and decided upon signup.
But in most cases, it's implied that you're allowed to burst up to x megabits per second, and are charged y for any over-usage above your plan. It is, in my opinion, the site owner's responsibility.
As for the cost, the ISP doesn't just pass on the cost, they pass on the cost plus a tidy 70% profit margin.
I can't speak for most providers, but many do not have that kind of profit margine. If you count ONLY bandwidth -- and ignore manpower to configure and maintain servers, building leases, and the other overhead involved in providing hosting services -- then possibly, on bandwidth alone, there's some markup.
But ISPs aren't raking in millions of dollars by over-charging for bandwidth. There are a LOT of other costs involved that make the bandwidth fee seem almost negligable in comparison.
You want just bandwidth, with no supplied hardware, expertise, location, support, etc? You can probably then save 70% or more. Oh, but you want hardware, disk space, staff to maintain servers at five-nine's uptime, people to respond to emails at 2AM? Well, we need to increase the cost of service.
Unfortunately, this isn't something I could do. My primary email is run off my website and hosting company, and it's transfer counts towards my monthly bandwidth bill. So if I hit my limit, say, halfway through the money, I get NO email for the rest of that month, and I can't have that happen. I'm sure there are others around here with similar situations... if not, well, then I guess my hosting company sucks.
Well then you should look into one of two possibilities:
a) Find a provider who better suits your needs, or
b) Work toward fixing the problem yourself. Like, says, disabling your own site if you see that you've nearly used up your budget in bandwidth, and would like some left for email.
The fact is, you pay for a certain service. If you use more than you paid for, you will need to pay for that.
If you use more minutes that are included in your cell phone plan, you pay for them -- or you ask them to shut you off. If this means you miss a phone call, then you should have budgeted better, or cut people off when they chose to talk your ear off on your dime.
That is precisely what the ISP in question is doing wrong. They are not taking action against the culprits, only the victims.
If you can show me a contract that says the provider will take such action (be it capping, throttling, whatever), then I'm on your side completely. If instead you show me a contract saying that they offer you burstable bandwidth at x dollars per y units of data transfer used, then I'm sorry, but you agreed to those terms.
Sure, this is fine. But it's up to the *site owner*, not the provider of services TO the site owner, to take action. The web site was attacked (so to speak), not the provider. The provider just did their job -- provided the connectivity.
And what if it's a simple case of being Slashdotted? Do you go after Slashdot? Or the individuals who all at the same time decided to read your content?
It's the the provider's fault your site somehow consumed tons of bandwidth. That's your problem. You do something about it -- pay the bill, go after the offenders, whatever. The ISP just provided you with the available connectivity and other services, that someone else abused.
Why should the provider eat those costs? Your site obviously did something wrong (or right) that caused the problem in the first place; the provider didn't invite those people over.
In the case of a shared account it's a little harder to setup. With a dedicated server you can simply turn off the port of the server, but with a shared account you can't just turn it off because it would effect so many customers.
Sure you can. If you know what you're doing, with Apache (or even other web servers) you can very easily add bandwidth throttling, limiting, or even capping, without affecting other sites. We did it, and we had some 30 sites per IP address.
It's a matter of competency. It can be done, there is no technical reason it could not. Going further, Apache easily allows for this via several available mods, and even without them one could write a Perl script to do the job (monitor logs, calculate bandwidth, Deny from All the offending site...)
I want a way to say, once I'm at my limit shut me down for the month, unless I explicitly come in and say go ahead...
Then decide on that before you sign up. If your contract states that you pay x dollars per y unit of data transferred, you're stuck. If there were no provisions in the contract for setting a bandwidth cap, and you agreed to it, it's your problem.
I worked for a hosting provider for a couple years, and we ran into this all the time. Some site gets Slashdotted (CampChaos -- aka "Napster Bad!" was one we had to ask to find another provider) and racks up bandwidth charges.
In many cases the biggest problem we had was not being able to contact the site owner. Certainly *we* were going to pay for that bandwidth either way, and in many cases the site owner was nowhere to be found. Do we shut you off, or keep adding to your next invoice?
Eventually we added a provision to decide this at sign-up time. You tell us what you would want in that situation, so we know, in advance, what to do.
As a site owner it IS your responsibility to make these details clear from the beginning. Like the examples above (humorous as they were), if you spring a water leak or allow anyone to utilize your phone or electrical services, *you* are the one who signed a contract and *you* are the one who pays for the usage, regardless of who may have abused the priviledge.
NFS does not seem to get much attention on Linux. Most Linux admins I know use Samba for network file shares.
I thought I was the only one. NFS just plain sucks. Let the clocks get out of sync by too much between client and server, or reboot a machine, or lose the switch for a few minutes...
I haven't had any issues like that with Samba. Granted, I do think it's the client implementation more than the server or protocol, but for my home network, samba rules. Plus of course there's the added benefit of letting Windows boxes connection...
...governments should continue the crackdown on these perpertrators, and their foolish victims. Yes the victims; what ever happened to aiding and abbetting a crime?
Well, technically they didn't assist in an actual crime. The "crime" didn't actually exist.
Certainly the "victims" intended to assist a criminal activity, but in the end didn't commit an actual crime. I personally think that, given the circumstances, those who were scammed got what they deserved, and have no right to complain.
I also have to wonder about the statistics. If I were stupid enough to fall for a scam like this, I certainly wouldn't tell anyone about it. I'd just cut my losses, kick myself in the ass a few times, and try to forget that it ever happened. I suspect more people may have fallen for the scam (possibly with smaller amounts of money) that aren't reflected in these stats, for fear of being though a criminal for one (the fact that they did intend to assist in illegally obtaining money), and for being seen as an idiot...
I just checked: the `more' command on my Linux and Solaris boxen seems to pass escape sequences through, so you really do want `less' (or alias less=more, if you're used to typing `some_command|more'), not to mention `more' has no equivalent to `less +F' or `tail -f'.
Actually that should be:
alias more=less
But otherwise, very helpful. I'd always been in the habit of using 'tail -f', even as root -- and personally I'll be using 'less +F' from now on.
Something like this happened to me. I had a Compaq computer where pin 1 was labled wrong on the motherboard (I didn't know it at the time) and I only had a non keyed IDE cable, so I plugged it in and turned on the computer. Well, the hard drive started pouring smoke and there was a small fire on it (there was some melted stuff on the PCB on the underside of the HD).
Hm, an IDE cable, are you sure? I've connected IDE cables backward numerous times. IDE cables do not carry power (like SCSI), only low-level signals.
Seriously, smoke? Come on...
I immediately got a Keyed IDE cable and found out that Compaq did pin 1 backward.
Compaq decided to label a different pin as pin 1? Why do I doubt that?
Anways, the Hard Drive still worked for 2 years after that. It wouldn't work as a boot drive for some reason though, but worked great as a slave.
Okay, barring the above, if the drive poured smoke it's even harder to believe that it would then function...
I did once connect 12VDC to the 5V line on a hard drive (I was experimenting with a mobile MP3 player idea, using a UPS battery. Black/Red wires == Ground/12VDC. Except of course in a PC, red is the 5V line... oops!) Smoke didn't "pour out" in that case either, the drive just stopped working.
IDE cables are pretty mundane as far as potential dammage. I've hot swapped IDE cables with the PC on and power cables connected (had to mount a TiVo drive in a Linux box, back when hot-swapping it was the only way anyone knew how).
...if you claim, under penalty of perjury, that you know something to be true, and it's actually not...
IANAL, but I don't think perjury applies just because you say it does. Eg, I could easily say, under penalty of perjury, cross my heart and hope to die, that I am actually a monkey. Did I just commit perjury? Well, no, but that's because I am actually a monkey.
But either way, just saying "under penalty of perjury" in an email (or letter) doesn't make it so.
Unlike a DMCA notice FROM the copyright holder, where they asser that the have reasonable cause to believe something is true...
I think that if someone has been contracted for this purpose, they can in fact act "on behalf of" the copyright holder. Microsoft's lawyers act on behalf of Microsoft -- and the BSA has been contracted for this specific reason....this is a case where someone signed off, sight unseen (apparently) to a legal document. It most certainly should be actionable in one way or another.
And I agree, this was negligence on the part of whoever approved the mailing. But, it wasn't intentional, eg, the letter wasn't sent with malicious intent; it was just sent out of failure to verify the information. I don't think that's criminal, as long as it doesn't become regular practice, and (as you said) they take steps to fix the script, and better verify the results.
Slashdot Mirror
One more quick followup. You bring up circumstances. Such as, maybe the telemarketer is doing this job because they have no other choice.
So where is the line drawn? What if I said the same about a spammer? Well, he can't find any job that pays the bills, so he took up spamming.
What about the guy who steals food from the store because he can't afford to feed his family? Maybe he had no other choice. You might say this is okay.
So what about the guy who robs the 7-11 at gunpoint? Maybe he just couldn't make it any other way, he had no choice (the call center wasn't hiring, nor was the 7-11). He needs to pay his rent, buy food for his children, etc. Should we excuse that as well?
Now, I'm not saying telemarketers are as bad as a theif -- but I am saying, the line has to be drawn as to what normally unacceptable behavior we will accept due to the poor circumstances that person may be in. Note that "unacceptable" doesn't necessarily mean "illegal". Just because it's legal doesn't make it okay. Likewise, just because I don't know you doesn't mean I have to be courteous if you call my home.
It's not like the guy sitting in a giant call center making $7.50/hour as a second job in the evenings really wants to be doing this any more than you want him to be disturbing you. But you want to make his life more miserable, thinking that somehow the supply of single moms, kids who never quite went to college or people trying to earn some extra money because there aren't other jobs out there will magically dry up?
You are right. I don't have anything against the particular person making the call. But they are calling on behalf of the company. Which means they are representing that company.
They don't have to be a telemarketer. They chose to be. They chose that job, which indicates that they aren't particularly against disturbing people to sell products. They are no different from spammers, or anyone who helps to enable spammers, in my book. And I tell them to fuck themselves. Just to be a jerk. Damn, I'm such a jerk -- but you know what? I don't care. They interrupted me, I tell them where to stick it.
The voice on the other end of the phone is not Jane Doe, wife and mother, she's Acme, Inc., seller of cheap wares. She is representative of the company ***BY CHOICE***. Maybe it was the only job she could find, and if that's the case, I feel for Jane Doe. But I do not feel for Acme, Inc. or anyone calling on their behalf.
Oh, and I hate the McDonald's workers for who they are, not for the company. That's entirely different. The corporation doesn't ask them to cough into their hand just prior to handling your food or change (and to look around and make sure noone saw before wiping their hand on their pants). No, it's the person behind the counter I'm mad at.
Summary: You can quickly get a telemarketer off the phone without being a jerk.
But where's the fun in that? Again, while my post was really just trying to be humorous, I do feel that we should not help enable these people, this industry, by being courteous to them. I wouldn't be nice to anyone who helps enable spam, child porn, or anything else I'm against, for whatever reason. I don't care what circumstances caused them to be in that position, they are there now and I am going to be an ass to them.
For the record, btw, I have worked at a McDonald's (and two Burger Kings) in my day. I have nothing against that kind of job. I have NEVER been a telemarketer, and never would. I'd sooner go back to flipping burgers (though these days there is no real "flipping", it's pretty automated at both places)...
Also for the record, I'm pretty much an asshole anyway; these people (telemarketers, spammers, etc) just bring out the worst of it.
Not that I'm saying you should quit doing this, but they do know its not a cellphone.
Yeah, but I don't really care. I suspect in at least some cases, they'll remove the number anyway. The amount of research (however fast that might be) to figure it out, vs the amount of risk if it did turn out to be a cell number...
Besides, I tell them all kinds of crap when I'm bored. Things like, cutting them off mid sentance and saying "Oh shit, hang on..." and mumbling "shit, I think he's dead! We have to get rid of..."; back to the telemarketer: "hey, this really isn't a good time..." CLICK
Or: "Uh, you realize this is a fax number?" and starting to screech at the top of my lungs into the phone -- very much obviously fake, but makes them think I'm completely nuts.
Or, after obviously saying "Hello?" in clear English, saying "No habla Englais". Of course this does often backfire, as they like to hire bilingual telemarketers... but then you say "Je ne parle pas Espanol!" -- usually by this point they hang up.
Or pretending to be a very old, very deaf person, asking them to speak up and repeat things constantly. Repeat stuff back to them, with substituted words, etc ("you want me to play with my what now?"). If you play it well, they really can't hang up on you, they have to (painfully) finish their pitch. Otherwise they just hung up on a poor old man...
Or... I could go on all day, though admittedly it's much easier to come up with these things now, than when they interrupt you. I really hate the phone (I say this out loud just before I answer it every time), but of course that's beside the point here...
Make their job more difficult, a telemarketer just might quit. Make enough people quit, the industry becomes harder to run. Make it harder to run, it might just go away. Make an industry go away, we might just have a higher unempl.... hm, too far...
So telling them it's a cell phone is nothing, and just something I use when I'm not feeling especially creative (or again when I'm interrupted and just want to say something and hang up, and am not feeling particularly vulgar).
You do realize that this is a ce..... hello? Can you hear me now? Wha- huh?
If I get a telemarketer (phone company, political or other wise) I explain that this is a cell phone, and I pay by the min for incomming and out going calls and as such is it illegal for them to call this number. I also ask for the company name, address and the referance number of this call that I may send them a bill for the charges of this call, which they are now legaly responsible.
I do this anyway. With the land-line. They have no way of knowing that it's not a cell, and it still scares them. It's cut the calls down quite a bit since I started doing this a few months back.
I suppose if my local phone comany calls directly, they'd be able to figure out that it's obviously not a cell number. Anyone else likely doesn't even know where their database of numbers comes from (I'm under the impression it's a lot like the SPAM "business" in that regard)...
Hm, this got a LOT of replies. Rather than reply to them all, I'll just sum up a couple things.
I think I replied hastily and didn't really think it through. I never realized that for some, porn can become a real addiction. I've never considered it more than something I occasionally look at, so I didn't realize this was a real problem for some.
Regarding my last paragraph, I was getting a little bit carried away, and that was meant as (poor) sarcasm. Maybe I'm just a bit irritable today...
But a few people have pointed out the possible merits of such a system, and I'm sorry for the harsh remarks; I didn't mean to offend anyone for whom this is a real problem.
...for many reasons.
First, the whole "my religion doesn't allow me to look at porn" argument is just nuts. If you truly believe this, you won't need your big brother (or whomever) to watch you.
Second, what about self control? Okay, you don't want to look at porn. So the only way you can stop is to have your PC report which sites you visit to Grandma?
Finally, if you want to look at porn, look at porn. If your religion forbids it, well, that sucks... but otherwise, who the hell cares if you look at porn? I enjoy it, am not ashamed of it, and I certainly don't need anyone else (or any religion) scrutinizing what sites I visit.
So next we'll be CCing our Visa bill to someone, to curb excessive spending; faxing the grocery list/receipt to help with over-eating; and so on. Do these people actually need a babysitter? If so, what are they doing living on their own, let alone surfing the 'Net without supervision?
I don't think anybody's thinking that, or at least I wasn't, given the enormous size of Mozilla. It would be a challenge to fit Gecko into the tiny amounts of RAM in most embedded devices. It was never designed for them, anyway.
I was thinking more along the lines of "web terminal" applications -- like an I-Opener type of device, and things like that. I wasn't thinking PDAs or cell phones, and I guess "embedded devices" was not the most appropriate term.
My point was only this: Optimization does not equal innovation.
Agreed.
Besides, I think most computer scientists and engineers (and myself) would say that correctness and portability should take priority over speed.
Yes, but there are many developers, each with his or her own motivations and priorities. While I agree that, in general, correctness and portability are more important, at least some of Mozilla's developers would consider rendering speed to be the biggest issue. Whether right or wrong, if that's what they want to work on, then I don't want to discourage it (perhaps that's something they excel at, or they are not interested in other development areas).
Overall I think we agree. However, I for one consider speed enough of an issue to justify at least some core development work going in that direction. If you'd used the very early Mozilla builds (the first "milestones"), you'd see that it has come a *long* way in terms of speed (and memory leaks).
With that in mind, any new innovations will likely need serious speed improvements from the first implementations, thus warranting on-going optimisation work.
Currently for my needs it's "fast enough", and I agree that the majority of the development effort should be spent elsewhere at this point.
On modern systems, page rendering seems plenty fast to me. A cable modem is hooked up to my 800 MHz laptop with 256 MB of RAM (not exactly a powerhouse machine), and surfing is very fast. If it's slow for you, then I suggest upgrading to Mozilla 1.3b. The team seems to have made some noticeable speed improvements in this latest release.
So the latest version, on what I consider a decently fast machine, gave you noticable improvements. So why not focus on improving this further?
Think embedded devices. If I fire up Mozilla on my I-Opener running RedHat 7.2, I see plenty of room for rendering speed improvements. Sure, PCs are generally "fast enough" these days, but there will always be other devices.
Not to mention, my desktop (PIII @ ~920 MHz, 384 MB) sometimes slows to a crawl rendering a large Slashdot page (I browse in Flat mode). Get into some more advanced CSS or DHTML and you really start to see room for improvement -- even on smaller pages.
Optimisation should *always* be a priority. The fact that computers are fast shouldn't take away from that. As new things come out that are even harder to render than CSS/DHTML/whatever, these little optimisations show themselves even more.
Of course, web pages can be buggy, too, and if web designers followed standards more carefully, our browsers would be both faster and less buggy.
And that is a big part of it. The more "alternative" browsers are in use, the more standards-compliant the web will be forced to become. That's part of the point of the article.
And, backward-compatibility is part of the rendering slowdown as well.
You're suggesting that gamers have brand loyalty.
I do. I respect the hell out of ID software, releasing source to their older versions of Doom and Quake. Not to mention supporting Linux far more than many others. As a result, I have some bit of loyalty toward them. I'll be purchasing Doom III the minute it is released. Partly because it looks to be a really cool game, and partly because I trust ID software to where I don't even feel the need to snag the demo first. I know it will be first rate.
If I can get to the server, I'll snag GTA. Perhaps it will prompt me to finally pick up a copy of GTA III, which I've been tempted to do... perhaps it wouldn't be "brand loyalty" per se, but I do have a bit of respect for them for having done this, and that will influence future purchasing decisions. If that's what they were going for, then great -- mission accomplished.
That's simply not true if the DLL is already loaded into memory. Here's a scenerio I've run into:
- Application A loads up "oleaut32.dll", using the default library in the system directory.
- Application B has an updated version (and requires it) in its own program location. App B tries to load "oleaut32.dll", but since it's already in memory, it uses the old version, which fails.
This is under Windows 2000. Reading the docs for the LoadLibrary() function, it specifies the search order starting with the application directory, but *only* if it does not first find a module with that name in memory.
LoadLibraryEx() offers some additional functions -- like specifying that future calls should first look in the DLL's directory rather than the current application directory -- but it still checks for any already-loaded DLL by that name first. An extra flag for LoadLibraryEx() could easily be offered to change this behavior for new applications (ALWAYS_LOAD_FILE or something like that).
In the case of VB runtimes, of course, you don't get to specify a path or any flags to the call, because VB does this by itself. The VB app never gets a chance to say "use my runtimes", even if it were possible...
After checking the more recent docs, I see that they've potentially made this worse:
So, by default it checks the system ones first, making it even more difficult to use private versions of DLLs (noting that this only applies when a full path isn't specified, but in general it's hard to specify a full path as the call is usually created at design-time, and there's no guarantee as to where the program will be installed).
As a windows developer you should know this.
I know that I struggled for a while with this. I was trying dearly to make my installer not require a reboot under any circumstances, and this simply wasn't possible with the Windows Common Controls library under Win98. The update was required, and a reboot absolutely necessary, if they had the stock version.
If an app installer is so badly written that it messes up your installation then the software can't be much good either.
I don't think that's so much the issue. One thing I *hate* is a seeminly simple installation that then requires a reboot.
But, as a bit of a Windows programmer myself, I understand it. If a program happens to require a newer version of some DLL, that is currently in use, it can't replace it. And with Windows' current system, you can't just use a local copy of it either.
When a program loads up a DLL, you can't specify a full path, just the filename. Windows has a specific search order, and the first place it checks is memory. "someapp.dll" is already loaded, so it uses that code -- even if you have a newer version in your own program directory.
I've always wondered why the hell they went with this approach. You have to watch for name conflicts between private DLLs (my program may happen to have "mp3.dll", which is completely unrelated to some other program's "mp3.dll"). And of course if an application uses a newer version of a system DLL (common controls library is a commonly-upgraded one), replacing the system-wide DLL is required, and naturally a reboot is required. And there's always some chance this upgrade may break an older application...
You can also forget about renaming a copy for private use, too; many of the system DLLs reference eachother by name. It works if you hex-edit them to reference the new names (I did this only as a proof-of-concept with VB runtimes)...
In my opinion, the best/easiest solution for developers would be to chnage the search order to start in the application directory -- or better yet, only do this if some registry flag is set, so older apps can have the current default behavior...
However, anything to aleviate this would be nice...
How many viri have you heard of that affect the windows platform compared to *nix? Dont you think this fact points to more ethical/social reasons for crackers, rather than inherited "baddness"?
I think the number of viruses and worms has much more to do with the popularity of the system than anything else. It's the same reason more shareware is available for Windows than Linux: there are more Windows users.
Why release a virus that can only affect a small percentage of users, when you can target the one OS that the vast majority use?
I do feel that *nix is, in general, more secure and less prone to the types of attacks that viruses and worms target; however, I also feel that *nix has too small a user-base, and (in general) a more intelligent user-base, to where these attacks are simply not worth implementing on a *nix platform.
If you transferred all the idiots to Linux -- take away their XP boxes and just sit them in front of a RedHat 8.0 box -- we'd have many more problems. These people aren't going to log in as a non-privileged user, and take other precautions -- and will be targetted for attack.
Until then, these people use Windows, run effectively as "root", and do dangerous things like execute unknown binaries from unknown sources, and thus will be the primary target for such attacks.
Not that I don't think *nix security in general is better, rather, I think other factors contribute to the virus/worm issue. More importantly, the typical Windows user doesn't care nearly as much about security as the typical *nix user, by nature. Note that I consider "Windows IIS/SQL Admin" who couldn't be bothered to patch a known hold (Code Red/Nimda/Slammer) in the months before it was exploited as a "typical Windows user"...
However, I find it hard to imagine a cracker reading through thousands of lines of code looking for exploitable bugs. Surely it's less trouble and equally effective to try the same techniques used for cracking closed source software?
But there's nothing stopping the cracker from using the same closed-source techniques on open source software. Of course it doesn't work the other way around.
So basically open source does provide the cracker a second avenue that they can optionally try. Whether it takes more time/patience is irrelevant, they still have the same options they have with closed-source.
Now, OTOH, I do think in most cases (any public project like Linux or Apache) the "many eyes" theory works wonders. Things that are very easily over-looked by specific programming teams in closed-source development may be caught in open-source development. Even if the number of actual, contributing developers is relativley low, many of the end users will be looking at the code.
I haven't contributed a line of code to Linux, Apache, MPlayer, or anything else. But I have looked at tons of code, and have reported bugs or potential exploits for all of them. Remember, many eyes can easily be users, not necessarily contributing developers.
So, while a cracker may be able to look at the code, you have to consider:
- The "non-patient" cracker can of course use whatever methods he wants on closed source code as he can on open source code. This of course doesn't work in the reverse.
- The "many eyes" approach is still great, because a) the developers KNOW other people will see the source, and are less likely to be lax in certain areas, or "I'll fix that potential security problem later" and b) even if they do, someone, somewhere (not necessarily an OSS contributor) will point out the potential vulnerability.
Many end-users, especially of things like Linux and Apache, are coders, but not necessarily OSS coders. They instead rely on these systems, and if ever there is a question we go to the source. And if a problem is found, we report it. And in most (99% or higher) cases, it is quickly addressed.
For unexpected use, of course you can't demand a freebie, since it is understood that the fountain is for public use. However, suppose someone presses the button on the fountain and holds it for several hours without drinking anything. This seems like theft, to me.
Agreed, it is theft, or at minimum an abuse of the service you (the site owner) are offering.
If someone is DOSing me, and I have no authority or technical capacity to stop their attack, then why should I pay for someone else's criminal behavior?
Why should the ISP pay for someone else's criminal behavior?
If I immediately pull the plug on my network, call up the ISP to inform them, yet the packets still come cascading in... I have acted in good faith to do everything possible.
It's still hard to justify passing those costs on to the ISP. Someone, somewhere, has to eat those costs. From the ISPs point of view, you, the site owner, either provoked the abuse, or at least made it possible. Either way, the ISP shouldn't have to eat the cost of someone else's criminal behavior.
And, keep in mind, in most cases it's not criminal behavior, rather unexpected popularity (Slashdot posting for example).
The current situation is like being able to watch the guy pressing the button on the fountain, and paying for the water, yet not being able to do anything to stop it. How can that be *my* fault?
Then you should negotiate that situation with your ISP before-hand. Why are you renting a fountain with unlimited water-flow, yet no controls or options to disable/throttle the flow when it gets out of hand? You knew, upon signing up with the water company, that it was entirely possible (given the maximum flow rate, and lack of limitations) that someone could rack up a serious water bill -- yet you did nothing to negotiate a plan for such a situation.
Having worked for a web host, we ran into this a lot. Eventually we came up with a system where, upon signup, you choose what happens if you go over your bandwidth. Either we cut your site off, or we bill you for the over-usage, it was your choice and decided upon signup.
But in most cases, it's implied that you're allowed to burst up to x megabits per second, and are charged y for any over-usage above your plan. It is, in my opinion, the site owner's responsibility.
As for the cost, the ISP doesn't just pass on the cost, they pass on the cost plus a tidy 70% profit margin.
I can't speak for most providers, but many do not have that kind of profit margine. If you count ONLY bandwidth -- and ignore manpower to configure and maintain servers, building leases, and the other overhead involved in providing hosting services -- then possibly, on bandwidth alone, there's some markup.
But ISPs aren't raking in millions of dollars by over-charging for bandwidth. There are a LOT of other costs involved that make the bandwidth fee seem almost negligable in comparison.
You want just bandwidth, with no supplied hardware, expertise, location, support, etc? You can probably then save 70% or more. Oh, but you want hardware, disk space, staff to maintain servers at five-nine's uptime, people to respond to emails at 2AM? Well, we need to increase the cost of service.
Unfortunately, this isn't something I could do. My primary email is run off my website and hosting company, and it's transfer counts towards my monthly bandwidth bill. So if I hit my limit, say, halfway through the money, I get NO email for the rest of that month, and I can't have that happen. I'm sure there are others around here with similar situations... if not, well, then I guess my hosting company sucks.
Well then you should look into one of two possibilities:
a) Find a provider who better suits your needs, or
b) Work toward fixing the problem yourself. Like, says, disabling your own site if you see that you've nearly used up your budget in bandwidth, and would like some left for email.
The fact is, you pay for a certain service. If you use more than you paid for, you will need to pay for that.
If you use more minutes that are included in your cell phone plan, you pay for them -- or you ask them to shut you off. If this means you miss a phone call, then you should have budgeted better, or cut people off when they chose to talk your ear off on your dime.
This isn't any different.
That is precisely what the ISP in question is doing wrong. They are not taking action against the culprits, only the victims.
If you can show me a contract that says the provider will take such action (be it capping, throttling, whatever), then I'm on your side completely. If instead you show me a contract saying that they offer you burstable bandwidth at x dollars per y units of data transfer used, then I'm sorry, but you agreed to those terms.
So hold whoever LAUNCHES an attack responsible..
Sure, this is fine. But it's up to the *site owner*, not the provider of services TO the site owner, to take action. The web site was attacked (so to speak), not the provider. The provider just did their job -- provided the connectivity.
And what if it's a simple case of being Slashdotted? Do you go after Slashdot? Or the individuals who all at the same time decided to read your content?
It's the the provider's fault your site somehow consumed tons of bandwidth. That's your problem. You do something about it -- pay the bill, go after the offenders, whatever. The ISP just provided you with the available connectivity and other services, that someone else abused.
Why should the provider eat those costs? Your site obviously did something wrong (or right) that caused the problem in the first place; the provider didn't invite those people over.
In the case of a shared account it's a little harder to setup. With a dedicated server you can simply turn off the port of the server, but with a shared account you can't just turn it off because it would effect so many customers.
Sure you can. If you know what you're doing, with Apache (or even other web servers) you can very easily add bandwidth throttling, limiting, or even capping, without affecting other sites. We did it, and we had some 30 sites per IP address.
It's a matter of competency. It can be done, there is no technical reason it could not. Going further, Apache easily allows for this via several available mods, and even without them one could write a Perl script to do the job (monitor logs, calculate bandwidth, Deny from All the offending site...)
I want a way to say, once I'm at my limit shut me down for the month, unless I explicitly come in and say go ahead...
Then decide on that before you sign up. If your contract states that you pay x dollars per y unit of data transferred, you're stuck. If there were no provisions in the contract for setting a bandwidth cap, and you agreed to it, it's your problem.
I worked for a hosting provider for a couple years, and we ran into this all the time. Some site gets Slashdotted (CampChaos -- aka "Napster Bad!" was one we had to ask to find another provider) and racks up bandwidth charges.
In many cases the biggest problem we had was not being able to contact the site owner. Certainly *we* were going to pay for that bandwidth either way, and in many cases the site owner was nowhere to be found. Do we shut you off, or keep adding to your next invoice?
Eventually we added a provision to decide this at sign-up time. You tell us what you would want in that situation, so we know, in advance, what to do.
As a site owner it IS your responsibility to make these details clear from the beginning. Like the examples above (humorous as they were), if you spring a water leak or allow anyone to utilize your phone or electrical services, *you* are the one who signed a contract and *you* are the one who pays for the usage, regardless of who may have abused the priviledge.
NFS does not seem to get much attention on Linux. Most Linux admins I know use Samba for network file shares.
I thought I was the only one. NFS just plain sucks. Let the clocks get out of sync by too much between client and server, or reboot a machine, or lose the switch for a few minutes...
I haven't had any issues like that with Samba. Granted, I do think it's the client implementation more than the server or protocol, but for my home network, samba rules. Plus of course there's the added benefit of letting Windows boxes connection...
...governments should continue the crackdown on these perpertrators, and their foolish victims. Yes the victims; what ever happened to aiding and abbetting a crime?
Well, technically they didn't assist in an actual crime. The "crime" didn't actually exist.
Certainly the "victims" intended to assist a criminal activity, but in the end didn't commit an actual crime. I personally think that, given the circumstances, those who were scammed got what they deserved, and have no right to complain.
I also have to wonder about the statistics. If I were stupid enough to fall for a scam like this, I certainly wouldn't tell anyone about it. I'd just cut my losses, kick myself in the ass a few times, and try to forget that it ever happened. I suspect more people may have fallen for the scam (possibly with smaller amounts of money) that aren't reflected in these stats, for fear of being though a criminal for one (the fact that they did intend to assist in illegally obtaining money), and for being seen as an idiot...
I just checked: the `more' command on my Linux and Solaris boxen seems to pass escape sequences through, so you really do want `less' (or alias less=more, if you're used to typing `some_command|more'), not to mention `more' has no equivalent to `less +F' or `tail -f'.
Actually that should be:
alias more=less
But otherwise, very helpful. I'd always been in the habit of using 'tail -f', even as root -- and personally I'll be using 'less +F' from now on.
Something like this happened to me. I had a Compaq computer where pin 1 was labled wrong on the motherboard (I didn't know it at the time) and I only had a non keyed IDE cable, so I plugged it in and turned on the computer. Well, the hard drive started pouring smoke and there was a small fire on it (there was some melted stuff on the PCB on the underside of the HD).
Hm, an IDE cable, are you sure? I've connected IDE cables backward numerous times. IDE cables do not carry power (like SCSI), only low-level signals.
Seriously, smoke? Come on...
I immediately got a Keyed IDE cable and found out that Compaq did pin 1 backward.
Compaq decided to label a different pin as pin 1? Why do I doubt that?
Anways, the Hard Drive still worked for 2 years after that. It wouldn't work as a boot drive for some reason though, but worked great as a slave.
Okay, barring the above, if the drive poured smoke it's even harder to believe that it would then function...
I did once connect 12VDC to the 5V line on a hard drive (I was experimenting with a mobile MP3 player idea, using a UPS battery. Black/Red wires == Ground/12VDC. Except of course in a PC, red is the 5V line... oops!) Smoke didn't "pour out" in that case either, the drive just stopped working.
IDE cables are pretty mundane as far as potential dammage. I've hot swapped IDE cables with the PC on and power cables connected (had to mount a TiVo drive in a Linux box, back when hot-swapping it was the only way anyone knew how).
...if you claim, under penalty of perjury, that you know something to be true, and it's actually not ...
...this is a case where someone signed off, sight unseen (apparently) to a legal document. It most certainly should be actionable in one way or another.
IANAL, but I don't think perjury applies just because you say it does. Eg, I could easily say, under penalty of perjury, cross my heart and hope to die, that I am actually a monkey. Did I just commit perjury? Well, no, but that's because I am actually a monkey.
But either way, just saying "under penalty of perjury" in an email (or letter) doesn't make it so.
Unlike a DMCA notice FROM the copyright holder, where they asser that the have reasonable cause to believe something is true...
I think that if someone has been contracted for this purpose, they can in fact act "on behalf of" the copyright holder. Microsoft's lawyers act on behalf of Microsoft -- and the BSA has been contracted for this specific reason.
And I agree, this was negligence on the part of whoever approved the mailing. But, it wasn't intentional, eg, the letter wasn't sent with malicious intent; it was just sent out of failure to verify the information. I don't think that's criminal, as long as it doesn't become regular practice, and (as you said) they take steps to fix the script, and better verify the results.