It seemed to me this comment was entirely unsupported by the remainder of the article. For instance, the Novell example discussed the fact that they have been phasing in desktop Linux over time, which seems like the most reasonable strategy to me. I thought the comment said more about the predilictions of the author and very little about the prospects for desktop Linux in businesses.
One of my clients is a manufacturing company whose key application is running on a CentOS 4.0 (a rebuild of RHEL 4) machine with Oracle. Our email/samba server runs Fedora.
They've chosen to pay me for support, not RedHat. I know their business and their systems; RH doesn't. My guess is this a pretty common arrangement for many small to medium-sized companies using Linux.
Another thing that hasn't really been happening with the parks lately is crosspromotion.
How about the recent week where Disney-owned ESPN was relocated to the Orlando park? The promos showed people like Peter Gammons talking baseball with Cinderella. I decided that was a week of ESPN that I could miss.
At least I could play Age of Empires on my 3-year-old laptop. I installed Rise of Nations recently on the same machine, and it is unplayable. The game demands a level of graphics performance that my laptop is unable to provide.
Of course, my laptop's graphics capabilities are certainly sufficient for the other 95% of what I use a computer for. Unlike other people who have contributed to this thread I have no desire to go out and purchase PC hardware just to play a game.
Some years ago I bought a Lego game for my daughter and tried playing it on our low-end PC. The game demanded an 8 meg video card, which was totally uncommon at the time on home-market computers; ours had 2 meg Intel video on the mother board. I wrote Lego and asked them why on earth they would release a game for children that demanded video performance far in excess of what most people had in their homes at the time. I received a response from a developer saying, in essence, because we decided that we needed 8 meg video to do what we wanted. I never bought another Lego game after that.
Is it really the case that the market for PC games is so driven by the high end? Why can't people make enjoyable, challenging games for the PC that run on low-end consumer PC's?
I fail to see how Apocalypse Now in either of its versions was "a war movie," by which I guess you mean a "pro-war" movie since you think the revised version is "anti-war". Believe me, when it was released in 1979, it was certainly thought of as "anti-war." How could you see it as anything other than an indictment of the entire enterprise of the Vietnamese war, as the application of enormous destructive power against an ancient people for no obvious strategic benefit? There is no military "progression" in this film, just a sequence of chaotic episodes the seem unjustified and irrelevant to the defense of the "Free World" against "Global Communism."
The other night I watched Control Room (it's currently in the free section of On Demand), the documentary about Al-Jazeera's coverage of the Iraq conflict. When the military relased the pack of cards with the pictures of its most-wanted list, I immediately flashed back to the scene where Robert Duvall's AIRCAV colonel tosses playing cards onto the corpses of some Viet Cong soldiers. There are scenes like this one scattered throughout Apocalypse Now that have lingered with me for nearly four decades now.
There was something distinctly American about the colonel's action, in the effort to transform the horror of death by violence into mere random chance. It recalls the Wild West of movies, an America of saloons, poker, and gunfighting, where violent death is a common occurrence and survival the result of being dealt the right cards.
In the assault on the Vietnamese village the Americans win by a devastating application of technology and get to deal the cards, while the VC are forced to play the losing hands they're dealt. The colonel knows, though, that both sides will play another game tomorrow, and in that games the tables may be turned.
There's also an implicit racism in his action that captured a significant strain of American attitudes toward "Charlie" (and all those "Japs" and "Gooks" and "towel-heads" and other peoples we've fought recently), that their lives are worth as little to us as common playing cards. Wasn't that also the message the Coalition military wanted to present about the members of the defeated Iraqi government by printing them on a deck of cards? I'm sure many Arabs saw this depiction of the former Iraqi leadership as a humiliation, regardless of their views on Saddam and his associates.
By the way, Control Room is definitely worth watching.
There are some interesting tidbits in H.R. 29 (I haven't read the other yet). For instance, the law is designed to exempt things like web server logs with the following:
"(2) EXCEPTION FOR SOFTWARE COLLECTING INFORMATION REGARDING WEB PAGES VISITED WITHIN A PARTICULAR WEB SITE- Computer software that otherwise would be considered an information collection program by reason of paragraph (1)(B) shall not be considered such a program if--
(A) the only information collected by the software regarding Web pages that are accessed using the computer is information regarding Web pages within a particular Web site;"
Does this mean that web server software can no longer collect a referer log, since that information doesn't pertain to "Web pages within a particular Web site" but to some third-party site? What about things like the browser's identification string? The remote user's IP address? How about GET URLs that include a session identifier? Can they be logged? How about a GET URL that includes an email address is the parameter string?
Now lets consider the consent provisions in 3(c) for a moment. Although the legislation is obviously targeted at what we'd all call spyware, the definition of an "information collection program" in 3(b)(1) clearly includes web forms:
"...the term `information collection program' means computer software that... (i) collects personally identifiable information; and (ii)(I) sends such information to a person other than the owner or authorized user of the computer, or (II) uses such information to deliver advertising to, or display advertising on, the computer."
Now, of course, reason would suggest that if someone fills out a form online they have consented to the collection of the information. However the provisions in 3(c) indicate that the person must be informed by a notice that such information is being collected, that this notice is "clearly distinguishe[d]... from any other information visually presented contemporaneously on the computer," and that consent to the notice must be obtained. Strict compliance with this provision seems to require that I add something like a pop-up dialog box to every web form reminding people that their information is being collected and requesting their consent before proceeding.
I may sound nit-picky here, but these are exactly the types of problems that arise when well-intentioned but not technically-savvy legislators try to write laws to about technologically-complex issues. I actually think that, in general, this law is fairly well drafted, but reading the legislation as a site designer immediately raised these questions.
In at least a couple of cases I can recall, the information was obtained by stealing magnetic tapes with customers' data that were being transferred by air. For instance, this story http://www.montereyherald.com/mld/mcherald/2005/05/03/business/11551144.htm concerns "misplaced" computer tapes containing personal information on some 600,000 TimeWarner current and former employees. From the article:
"Iron Mountain [a secure records storage firm] last month issued a press release urging companies to use encryption software to scramble their backed-up data files. Data stored in this manner is almost impossible to decode without a special key.
But a recent survey by the Enterprise Strategy Group, a research firm in Milton, found that the majority of companies don't encrypt their backup files. Jon Oltsik, a senior analyst for the group, said recent data-security problems are causing many companies to begin taking encryption more seriously.
The latest security problem has made a believer of Time Warner. McKiernan said the company will begin installing a system to encrypt future backup tapes."
Stolen unencrypted tapes were also involved in the earlier disclosure of Bank of America records on over a million government workers.
I owned a Spyder 2000 for many years and loved it. I kept it under wraps in the winter (here in New England), but it was a joy to drive in the warmer months.
Unfortunately like you I suffered from the low oil pan problem. I hit a slick part of road surface and drove up over a traffic island. I doubt the thing I hit was over 6-8" in height, but it was enough to crack the pan. Once I discovered what it would cost to fix, I sold it to someone who would tow it out of my garage.
How about just including an Update entry somewhere in the menus? As far as I can tell, there's no menu item or icon that automatically takes you to an update site or checks to see if an update is available. My 1.0.3 version running on Windows didn't display the update icon this morning, so I eventually clicked on the circle icon to go to the Firefox home page. Guess what? No mention of an update there, or any link to the downloads page either.
Recently SBC bought out Southern New England Telephone, the Connecticut telco. A few weeks ago one of my clients suddenly could not forward his outbound mail to my relay server because they had blocked port 25. Did they tell him about this? No. I have no problem with ISPs blocking outbound port 25 if they announce it with lots of fanfare and provide an obvious means whereby legitimate customers can unblock it. Remember this happened on a business DSL connection, not a residential. Your experience shows the level of incompetence at many ISPs. The telcos seem especially clueless.
For instance, for a while I couldn't send out my clients' mail to addresses in verizon.net. Turns out my SMTP sending server was blacklisted by Verizon, part of their "blacklist the world" approach to spam defense http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/17/12 26237&tid=153&tid=17. (The server's IP address is not listed in any respected DNSBL.) I solved that problem by moving to another IP, but they also block messages that contain my domain in the SMTP "MAIL FROM:" field. Why? Well, I'd bet it has to do with the fact that my domain is joe-jobbed on a daily basis, and these guys apparently think that the From: address in an email actually means something. Can I do anything about this? Apparently not. There's no information on Verizon's website about how to report an inaccurate blacklisting. Apparently a Verizon customer could call them and ask to unblock an IP or domain, but how many of them would even know where to begin? Verizon's initial response to criticisms of their broad-brush blacklisting policy was to suggest using the telephone instead of email.
That leads me to another gripe. Why can't ISPs use the reverse DNS to inform us whether a given IP address is business or residential? My inbound SMTP block list contains reverse entries for hundreds of DSL and cable IPs worldwide. Given that the telcos, in particular, make a residential vs. business distinction in their telephone services, why can't they use names like adsl-111-222-333-444.res.telco.net and adsl-111-222-333-444.biz.telco.net? I'd rewrite my SMTP rules to accept the latter and reject the former. Of course, many of those business machines are also infected, but since they are so few of them compared to residential users, I could fall back on SpamAssassin to handle the messages they send
I was looking at the charts for RHAT (http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=RHAT&t=1y) and am surprised by its precipitous fall last summer. The stock now trades at half its early-2004 levels. Did they miss their targets and get beaten up by financial analysts? Is this a response to Novell+SuSE? Can it be that analysts really think the SCO suits are going to be successful? I'd guess that, if anything, RHAT may well be victorious in its counter-suit.
Certainly as someone who follows the industry from the sidelines, I can't see anything in the competitive environment that has changed significantly enough in the past year to justify such a fall from grace.
Maybe Michael Dell just thinks RHAT is a good deal at current levels.
All FOSS, easy to install, and extremely effective. You could even keep your Exchange server; just put the scanning box between it and your inbound email firewall. (You do have an inbound email firewall, right?) I assume you also scan outbound email as well. For those, just set up Exchange to use the scanner box as a "smart host."
In political science, one of the primary considerations for choosing an Editor for The American Political Science Review has been the size of the Editor's department. Large departments with a substantial graduate student contingent provide much of the editorial staff for the journal.
I might also point out that, while journals might be able to charge submission fees in heavily-funded fields like biology or medicine, most researchers in the humanities and social sciences would be stopped dead in their tracks by submission fees.
In fact, a quick survey of Hostway's site this morning does not even list this study in an obvious place. There's a little note at the bottom of the home page directing people to a piece at news.com.com (identical I believe to the one cited here), but no copy of the press release itself, nor of the questionnaire used, nor of the sampling design used, nor of the actual results. Indeed we don't even know who conducted the survey on Hostway's behalf. For all we know, they used their own staff to conduct this study.
I've done professional survey research and polling off and on for twenty years. BS studies like this one do nothing to enhance our credibility with the public.
I honestly think that for the forseeable future, ISP's are going to have to go the AOL and beyond route. If you connect to the net, you ought to be given the chance to pay for a remote administration of the "internet" user account. So the ISP can manage the firewall, the antivirus, make sure the e-mail client works, etc.
As I've argued here before, I believe the much of the problem lies with the ISPs. Why should consumers have to worry about firewalls at all? Why aren't they built into the cable modem and managed remotely? Why doesn't Comcast, Verizon, et. al., install a firewall router in every single home where they deliver service? The fact is that the industry understands what the problems are, but the mindset is to push all these problems to the users. Why should we be surprised to discover that thousands, if not millions, of computers are now owned and spew out spam 24 hours a day?
Actually Arthur C. Clarke got there first in his extraordinarily insightful "The City and the Stars," published in 1955 or so. In this story humans live a physically-disconnected existence in their separate underground homes. Their collective experiences are limited to multiplayer online gaming. These virtual adventures fulfill the need for human interaction, without requiring any real physical contact.
Many people have a legitimate @domain.name address that doesn't resolve to an IP address. In fact, resolution only works if someone assigns an "A" record to the domain itself.
You really should be checking for an MX record. For instance, I use a PHP function in form processing to validate email addresses by running a "host -t mx domain.name" command.
Frankly, though, I doubt any of this would matter much if our experience with spam is any indication. Nearly all spam comes with forged From addresses that resolve to a legitimate domain; it's what's called a "Joe-Job" in the spam world.
Re:authorized downloads with ads inserted?
on
TV Piracy is Next
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· Score: 1
I've been wondering for a long time why they don't simply set up a well-working torrent tracker that serves torrents with real, paid ads inserted in the material. This should work great for TV-based media, which is mostly prepared for hosting ads anyway.
Television broadcast networks in the US must negotiate among a variety of consituencies. In particular the "major" networks, CBS, NBC, ABC, and Fox, distribute their programming via affiliated local broadcast stations. It shouldn't take much thought to realize those stations would be appalled at the notion that network programming would be available via a distribution channel that took them out of the loop.
Cable programming services have a similar problem. If it were possible to obtain original programming from, say, USA Network via the Internet, the value of that channel to cable operators would decline. For decades cable operators have touted their ability to provide access to programming available only to cable subscribers. Internet distribution of such programming would not go over well with the Comcast's of the world.
Since many Slashdotters were still in elementary school when the commercialization of the Internet took place, I often find there's a lack of historical perspective here. So perhaps my comments came across as a bit harsh.
However, I don't see AOL as part of "the internet's history" at all. AOL was a glorified BBS that had to accomodate itself to the Internet or lose. The ARPANET, in contrast, was the Internet for much of its history.
AOL and similar services (Compuserve) were built around a model of access designed to take advantage of a new, emerging technology; ie dial-up internet for us ordinary folk. In the early 90's, they were the cutting edge; they made it easy for the ordinary person to get online, plain and simple.
No, both Compuserve and AOL predate the commercial Internet by as much as a decade. What they really offered initially was a well-structured BBS service, especially Compuserve. CS offered a number of hardware and software support forums, many of which were managed by the manufacturers of the products being offered. For instance, if I had a question about WordPerfect 5.1 in 1990, I dialed up my CS account and asked it on the WP forum. There was no other reliable source of do-it-yourself support.
AOL viewed that CS was too "techy" for ordinary folks and designed a service that was much simpler to use, with content like recipes and the like targeted at consumers. CS was largely a text-based service, while from the start AOL built a graphical client that worked with MS Windows and Macs.
When the commercial Internet arrived ca. 1993-94, both companies scrambled to interconnect their subscribers with the Internet, in particular, with Internet email. AOL's largely less-technical customer base stayed with them through the expansion of the Internet, while CS's subscribers were often clueful enough to migrate directly to PPP dialup and direct IP.
Most ordinary people would be hopelessly lost on the internet without something like AOL.
Many of those "ordinary people" use the Internet every day in their workplace without any assistance from AOL. After a while, they probably discover they can do the same thing with a cable/DSL/PPP connection from home.
1) Apparently if you're not a "PowerLink" customer you're not permitted to browse information about PL products and services.
2) What kind of firewall are we talking about? Is it a self-contained router like a Linksys or Netgear? Built into the cable modem? Or is it some piece of software that's installed on Windows which the user can turn off at will? According to http://www.adelphia.com/high_speed_internet/faqs.c fm#hardwaresoftware, they only provide a cable modem and won't provide any additional hardware if you intend to install it yourself.
I would love to see some evidence that major consumer ISPs are doing something to provide additional security to their subscribers. (See my prior comments about this at http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=118246&cid=999 3061.) I know from experience that Comcast's approach is to connect your PC to the cable modem, toss a CD at you, and walk out the door.
Even more problematic are these comments in that same thread from Slashdotter michael_cain: "When I worked for a large cable company, those of us in the technology organization wanted to make it policy to recommend to subscribers that they have a firewall. The legal department [argued] that we exposed ourselves to liability lawsuits if we said, in effect, that the Internet was a dangerous place and you should take steps to protect yourselves. So the company did not give users warnings, and the network became one of the world's larger sources of various attacks..."
Apparently from your comments Adelphia doesn't believe that telling its subscribers that the Internet is a dangerous place will open up a possible source of liability. If true, that's a breath of fresh air.
Uematsu is listed as the sole artist for about half the works in the four-disc FFX CD set and a collaborator on many of the remaining tracks. So I don't think it's fair to say, "He didn't do much for FFX."
In the US, you can copyright any document simply by putting the phrase "Copyright, [year], name of author" on it. However, you cannot sue for infringement in Federal court unless you have "registered" the work in question which includes depositing copies of the work in the Library of Congress. See 17 USC 411 (http://assembler.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/usco de17/usc_sec_17_00000411----000-.html) for details.
Slashdot Mirror
It seemed to me this comment was entirely unsupported by the remainder of the article. For instance, the Novell example discussed the fact that they have been phasing in desktop Linux over time, which seems like the most reasonable strategy to me. I thought the comment said more about the predilictions of the author and very little about the prospects for desktop Linux in businesses.
One of my clients is a manufacturing company whose key application is running on a CentOS 4.0 (a rebuild of RHEL 4) machine with Oracle. Our email/samba server runs Fedora.
They've chosen to pay me for support, not RedHat. I know their business and their systems; RH doesn't. My guess is this a pretty common arrangement for many small to medium-sized companies using Linux.
Another thing that hasn't really been happening with the parks lately is crosspromotion.
How about the recent week where Disney-owned ESPN was relocated to the Orlando park? The promos showed people like Peter Gammons talking baseball with Cinderella. I decided that was a week of ESPN that I could miss.
At least I could play Age of Empires on my 3-year-old laptop. I installed Rise of Nations recently on the same machine, and it is unplayable. The game demands a level of graphics performance that my laptop is unable to provide.
Of course, my laptop's graphics capabilities are certainly sufficient for the other 95% of what I use a computer for. Unlike other people who have contributed to this thread I have no desire to go out and purchase PC hardware just to play a game.
Some years ago I bought a Lego game for my daughter and tried playing it on our low-end PC. The game demanded an 8 meg video card, which was totally uncommon at the time on home-market computers; ours had 2 meg Intel video on the mother board. I wrote Lego and asked them why on earth they would release a game for children that demanded video performance far in excess of what most people had in their homes at the time. I received a response from a developer saying, in essence, because we decided that we needed 8 meg video to do what we wanted. I never bought another Lego game after that.
Is it really the case that the market for PC games is so driven by the high end? Why can't people make enjoyable, challenging games for the PC that run on low-end consumer PC's?
I fail to see how Apocalypse Now in either of its versions was "a war movie," by which I guess you mean a "pro-war" movie since you think the revised version is "anti-war". Believe me, when it was released in 1979, it was certainly thought of as "anti-war." How could you see it as anything other than an indictment of the entire enterprise of the Vietnamese war, as the application of enormous destructive power against an ancient people for no obvious strategic benefit? There is no military "progression" in this film, just a sequence of chaotic episodes the seem unjustified and irrelevant to the defense of the "Free World" against "Global Communism."
The other night I watched Control Room (it's currently in the free section of On Demand), the documentary about Al-Jazeera's coverage of the Iraq conflict. When the military relased the pack of cards with the pictures of its most-wanted list, I immediately flashed back to the scene where Robert Duvall's AIRCAV colonel tosses playing cards onto the corpses of some Viet Cong soldiers. There are scenes like this one scattered throughout Apocalypse Now that have lingered with me for nearly four decades now.
There was something distinctly American about the colonel's action, in the effort to transform the horror of death by violence into mere random chance. It recalls the Wild West of movies, an America of saloons, poker, and gunfighting, where violent death is a common occurrence and survival the result of being dealt the right cards.
In the assault on the Vietnamese village the Americans win by a devastating application of technology and get to deal the cards, while the VC are forced to play the losing hands they're dealt. The colonel knows, though, that both sides will play another game tomorrow, and in that games the tables may be turned.
There's also an implicit racism in his action that captured a significant strain of American attitudes toward "Charlie" (and all those "Japs" and "Gooks" and "towel-heads" and other peoples we've fought recently), that their lives are worth as little to us as common playing cards. Wasn't that also the message the Coalition military wanted to present about the members of the defeated Iraqi government by printing them on a deck of cards? I'm sure many Arabs saw this depiction of the former Iraqi leadership as a humiliation, regardless of their views on Saddam and his associates.
By the way, Control Room is definitely worth watching.
There are some interesting tidbits in H.R. 29 (I haven't read the other yet). For instance, the law is designed to exempt things like web server logs with the following:
...
... from any other information visually presented contemporaneously on the computer," and that consent to the notice must be obtained. Strict compliance with this provision seems to require that I add something like a pop-up dialog box to every web form reminding people that their information is being collected and requesting their consent before proceeding.
"(2) EXCEPTION FOR SOFTWARE COLLECTING INFORMATION REGARDING WEB PAGES VISITED WITHIN A PARTICULAR WEB SITE- Computer software that otherwise would be considered an information collection program by reason of paragraph (1)(B) shall not be considered such a program if--
(A) the only information collected by the software regarding Web pages that are accessed using the computer is information regarding Web pages within a particular Web site;"
Does this mean that web server software can no longer collect a referer log, since that information doesn't pertain to "Web pages within a particular Web site" but to some third-party site? What about things like the browser's identification string? The remote user's IP address? How about GET URLs that include a session identifier? Can they be logged? How about a GET URL that includes an email address is the parameter string?
Now lets consider the consent provisions in 3(c) for a moment. Although the legislation is obviously targeted at what we'd all call spyware, the definition of an "information collection program" in 3(b)(1) clearly includes web forms:
"...the term `information collection program' means computer software that
(i) collects personally identifiable information; and
(ii)(I) sends such information to a person other than the owner or authorized user of the computer, or
(II) uses such information to deliver advertising to, or display advertising on, the computer."
Now, of course, reason would suggest that if someone fills out a form online they have consented to the collection of the information. However the provisions in 3(c) indicate that the person must be informed by a notice that such information is being collected, that this notice is "clearly distinguishe[d]
I may sound nit-picky here, but these are exactly the types of problems that arise when well-intentioned but not technically-savvy legislators try to write laws to about technologically-complex issues. I actually think that, in general, this law is fairly well drafted, but reading the legislation as a site designer immediately raised these questions.
In at least a couple of cases I can recall, the information was obtained by stealing magnetic tapes with customers' data that were being transferred by air. For instance, this story5 /03/business/11551144.htm
http://www.montereyherald.com/mld/mcherald/2005/0
concerns "misplaced" computer tapes containing personal information on some 600,000 TimeWarner current and former employees. From the article:
"Iron Mountain [a secure records storage firm] last month issued a press release urging companies to use encryption software to scramble their backed-up data files. Data stored in this manner is almost impossible to decode without a special key.
But a recent survey by the Enterprise Strategy Group, a research firm in Milton, found that the majority of companies don't encrypt their backup files. Jon Oltsik, a senior analyst for the group, said recent data-security problems are causing many companies to begin taking encryption more seriously.
The latest security problem has made a believer of Time Warner. McKiernan said the company will begin installing a system to encrypt future backup tapes."
Stolen unencrypted tapes were also involved in the earlier disclosure of Bank of America records on over a million government workers.
I owned a Spyder 2000 for many years and loved it. I kept it under wraps in the winter (here in New England), but it was a joy to drive in the warmer months.
Unfortunately like you I suffered from the low oil pan problem. I hit a slick part of road surface and drove up over a traffic island. I doubt the thing I hit was over 6-8" in height, but it was enough to crack the pan. Once I discovered what it would cost to fix, I sold it to someone who would tow it out of my garage.
How about just including an Update entry somewhere in the menus? As far as I can tell, there's no menu item or icon that automatically takes you to an update site or checks to see if an update is available. My 1.0.3 version running on Windows didn't display the update icon this morning, so I eventually clicked on the circle icon to go to the Firefox home page. Guess what? No mention of an update there, or any link to the downloads page either.
Recently SBC bought out Southern New England Telephone, the Connecticut telco. A few weeks ago one of my clients suddenly could not forward his outbound mail to my relay server because they had blocked port 25. Did they tell him about this? No. I have no problem with ISPs blocking outbound port 25 if they announce it with lots of fanfare and provide an obvious means whereby legitimate customers can unblock it. Remember this happened on a business DSL connection, not a residential. Your experience shows the level of incompetence at many ISPs. The telcos seem especially clueless.
2 26237&tid=153&tid=17. (The server's IP address is not listed in any respected DNSBL.) I solved that problem by moving to another IP, but they also block messages that contain my domain in the SMTP "MAIL FROM:" field. Why? Well, I'd bet it has to do with the fact that my domain is joe-jobbed on a daily basis, and these guys apparently think that the From: address in an email actually means something. Can I do anything about this? Apparently not. There's no information on Verizon's website about how to report an inaccurate blacklisting. Apparently a Verizon customer could call them and ask to unblock an IP or domain, but how many of them would even know where to begin? Verizon's initial response to criticisms of their broad-brush blacklisting policy was to suggest using the telephone instead of email.
For instance, for a while I couldn't send out my clients' mail to addresses in verizon.net. Turns out my SMTP sending server was blacklisted by Verizon, part of their "blacklist the world" approach to spam defense http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/17/1
That leads me to another gripe. Why can't ISPs use the reverse DNS to inform us whether a given IP address is business or residential? My inbound SMTP block list contains reverse entries for hundreds of DSL and cable IPs worldwide. Given that the telcos, in particular, make a residential vs. business distinction in their telephone services, why can't they use names like adsl-111-222-333-444.res.telco.net and adsl-111-222-333-444.biz.telco.net? I'd rewrite my SMTP rules to accept the latter and reject the former. Of course, many of those business machines are also infected, but since they are so few of them compared to residential users, I could fall back on SpamAssassin to handle the messages they send
I was looking at the charts for RHAT (http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=RHAT&t=1y) and am surprised by its precipitous fall last summer. The stock now trades at half its early-2004 levels. Did they miss their targets and get beaten up by financial analysts? Is this a response to Novell+SuSE? Can it be that analysts really think the SCO suits are going to be successful? I'd guess that, if anything, RHAT may well be victorious in its counter-suit.
Certainly as someone who follows the industry from the sidelines, I can't see anything in the competitive environment that has changed significantly enough in the past year to justify such a fall from grace.
Maybe Michael Dell just thinks RHAT is a good deal at current levels.
How about a combination of MailScanner, ClamAntivirus, and,SpamAssassin.
All FOSS, easy to install, and extremely effective. You could even keep your Exchange server; just put the scanning box between it and your inbound email firewall. (You do have an inbound email firewall, right?) I assume you also scan outbound email as well. For those, just set up Exchange to use the scanner box as a "smart host."
In political science, one of the primary considerations for choosing an Editor for The American Political Science Review has been the size of the Editor's department. Large departments with a substantial graduate student contingent provide much of the editorial staff for the journal.
I might also point out that, while journals might be able to charge submission fees in heavily-funded fields like biology or medicine, most researchers in the humanities and social sciences would be stopped dead in their tracks by submission fees.
In fact, a quick survey of Hostway's site this morning does not even list this study in an obvious place. There's a little note at the bottom of the home page directing people to a piece at news.com.com (identical I believe to the one cited here), but no copy of the press release itself, nor of the questionnaire used, nor of the sampling design used, nor of the actual results. Indeed we don't even know who conducted the survey on Hostway's behalf. For all we know, they used their own staff to conduct this study.
I've done professional survey research and polling off and on for twenty years. BS studies like this one do nothing to enhance our credibility with the public.
I honestly think that for the forseeable future, ISP's are going to have to go the AOL and beyond route. If you connect to the net, you ought to be given the chance to pay for a remote administration of the "internet" user account. So the ISP can manage the firewall, the antivirus, make sure the e-mail client works, etc.
As I've argued here before, I believe the much of the problem lies with the ISPs. Why should consumers have to worry about firewalls at all? Why aren't they built into the cable modem and managed remotely? Why doesn't Comcast, Verizon, et. al., install a firewall router in every single home where they deliver service? The fact is that the industry understands what the problems are, but the mindset is to push all these problems to the users. Why should we be surprised to discover that thousands, if not millions, of computers are now owned and spew out spam 24 hours a day?
Actually Arthur C. Clarke got there first in his extraordinarily insightful "The City and the Stars," published in 1955 or so. In this story humans live a physically-disconnected existence in their separate underground homes. Their collective experiences are limited to multiplayer online gaming. These virtual adventures fulfill the need for human interaction, without requiring any real physical contact.
unless(gethostbyname($email[1]))
Many people have a legitimate @domain.name address that doesn't resolve to an IP address. In fact, resolution only works if someone assigns an "A" record to the domain itself.
You really should be checking for an MX record. For instance, I use a PHP function in form processing to validate email addresses by running a "host -t mx domain.name" command.
Frankly, though, I doubt any of this would matter much if our experience with spam is any indication. Nearly all spam comes with forged From addresses that resolve to a legitimate domain; it's what's called a "Joe-Job" in the spam world.
I've been wondering for a long time why they don't simply set up a well-working torrent tracker that serves torrents with real, paid ads inserted in the material. This should work great for TV-based media, which is mostly prepared for hosting ads anyway.
Television broadcast networks in the US must negotiate among a variety of consituencies. In particular the "major" networks, CBS, NBC, ABC, and Fox, distribute their programming via affiliated local broadcast stations. It shouldn't take much thought to realize those stations would be appalled at the notion that network programming would be available via a distribution channel that took them out of the loop.
Cable programming services have a similar problem. If it were possible to obtain original programming from, say, USA Network via the Internet, the value of that channel to cable operators would decline. For decades cable operators have touted their ability to provide access to programming available only to cable subscribers. Internet distribution of such programming would not go over well with the Comcast's of the world.
Since many Slashdotters were still in elementary school when the commercialization of the Internet took place, I often find there's a lack of historical perspective here. So perhaps my comments came across as a bit harsh.
However, I don't see AOL as part of "the internet's history" at all. AOL was a glorified BBS that had to accomodate itself to the Internet or lose. The ARPANET, in contrast, was the Internet for much of its history.
AOL and similar services (Compuserve) were built around a model of access designed to take advantage of a new, emerging technology; ie dial-up internet for us ordinary folk. In the early 90's, they were the cutting edge; they made it easy for the ordinary person to get online, plain and simple.
No, both Compuserve and AOL predate the commercial Internet by as much as a decade. What they really offered initially was a well-structured BBS service, especially Compuserve. CS offered a number of hardware and software support forums, many of which were managed by the manufacturers of the products being offered. For instance, if I had a question about WordPerfect 5.1 in 1990, I dialed up my CS account and asked it on the WP forum. There was no other reliable source of do-it-yourself support.
AOL viewed that CS was too "techy" for ordinary folks and designed a service that was much simpler to use, with content like recipes and the like targeted at consumers. CS was largely a text-based service, while from the start AOL built a graphical client that worked with MS Windows and Macs.
When the commercial Internet arrived ca. 1993-94, both companies scrambled to interconnect their subscribers with the Internet, in particular, with Internet email. AOL's largely less-technical customer base stayed with them through the expansion of the Internet, while CS's subscribers were often clueful enough to migrate directly to PPP dialup and direct IP.
Most ordinary people would be hopelessly lost on the internet without something like AOL.
Many of those "ordinary people" use the Internet every day in their workplace without any assistance from AOL. After a while, they probably discover they can do the same thing with a cable/DSL/PPP connection from home.
1) Apparently if you're not a "PowerLink" customer you're not permitted to browse information about PL products and services.
c fm#hardwaresoftware, they only provide a cable modem and won't provide any additional hardware if you intend to install it yourself.
9 3061.) I know from experience that Comcast's approach is to connect your PC to the cable modem, toss a CD at you, and walk out the door.
2) What kind of firewall are we talking about? Is it a self-contained router like a Linksys or Netgear? Built into the cable modem? Or is it some piece of software that's installed on Windows which the user can turn off at will? According to http://www.adelphia.com/high_speed_internet/faqs.
I would love to see some evidence that major consumer ISPs are doing something to provide additional security to their subscribers. (See my prior comments about this at http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=118246&cid=99
Even more problematic are these comments in that same thread from Slashdotter michael_cain:
"When I worked for a large cable company, those of us in the technology organization wanted to make it policy to recommend to subscribers that they have a firewall. The legal department [argued] that we exposed ourselves to liability lawsuits if we said, in effect, that the Internet was a dangerous place and you should take steps to protect yourselves. So the company did not give users warnings, and the network became one of the world's larger sources of various attacks..."
Apparently from your comments Adelphia doesn't believe that telling its subscribers that the Internet is a dangerous place will open up a possible source of liability. If true, that's a breath of fresh air.
Uematsu is listed as the sole artist for about half the works in the four-disc FFX CD set and a collaborator on many of the remaining tracks. So I don't think it's fair to say, "He didn't do much for FFX."
In the US, you can copyright any document simply by putting the phrase "Copyright, [year], name of author" on it. However, you cannot sue for infringement in Federal court unless you have "registered" the work in question which includes depositing copies of the work in the Library of Congress. See 17 USC 411 (http://assembler.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/usco de17/usc_sec_17_00000411----000-.html)
for details.