The only cross-platform development tool I am aware of is Lazarus/FPC, a Delphi clone, and I can say it has come a long way from what it was 10 years ago. I highly recommend it to those wanting to write code once and compile it "everywhere".
This line triggered some things to come together from reading this thread. I have seen the Lazarus product mentioned on slashdot before in a Delphi thread or two, but wasn't thinking about it as I read this thread.
I have a suggestion with some potential for enterprising Linux developers interested in this thread of dearth of vertical industry apps for Linux, but first where I'm coming from on this.
I'm a longtime corporate business software developer, but never got farther than installing Linux for my own software development. I was a Delphi developer in late 90's and bought (pre-ordered even) first release of Kylix (yes, the $1000 version), which I never got around to installing on my Linux partition which I never got around to using very much.
Not only do I still have the relatively unscathed Kylix box of software, big enough to double as a boat anchor, but I ran across a copy of SAMS Kylix Developers Guide for version 2 in a pile of grossly marked down books last year and bought it out of sheer orneriness, which nearly doubled the size of my boat anchor and made me wish I had waited and done the same thing with Kylix.:)
Now on to the suggestion. I am somewhat familiar with the Colmbusoft company and product Delphi for Accounting, having done some development for them when they started back in the early 80's and bought some of their modules and customization for a corporate project about 10 years ago (which by the way was very successful, filling a unique cross platform requirement for client software at a large Chicago company which at the time needed the software to work on Win95, Win 3.1, and OS/2 -[Win 3.1 support], with all clients having dialup and/or internet access to our AS/400).
I haven't talked to them in the last 10 years or so, being in Florida now, but I did check their website and they still have developer licensing deals, etc. They sell their product with source code, and promote developer bundling with vertical industry apps and end user customization.
Probably would be a good opportunity for Delphi/Lazarus types to cut a deal to port Delphi for Accounting to Linux (was easy for me to say, wasn't it) and distribute and support for Linux. If you google Columbusoft or Accounting for Delphi you can get their contact info.
It just so happens that for other development reasons I am getting a Centos 5 server for development, was going to do it earlier this week but had to wait till this weekend to get to it, and I will definitely check into the Lazarus product later. I know I had it written down in my notes from a slashdot thread a year or two ago to do that anyway.
Hopefully I'll be hearing about Delphi for Accounting on Linux soon. (Delphi Accounting for Linux? Lazarus for Accounting? Accounting for Linux?)
Or maybe it's next to impossible unless the code was written to that Delphi 6 / Kylix spec. I don't know. But seems like there's enough opportunity to make it worth checking into.
Just throwing money at "someone" to develop the apps often isn't enough.
Perhaps IBM should start writing these apps themselves instead.
IBM spent more than a billion dollars (no, really) paying Java developers to write a business infrastructure for vertical industry apps. It was called San Francisco. Never heard of anything that ever came of it.
Not sure how much they sunk into it before they pulled the plug. Somebody else at IBM apparently got tired of waiting too.
idobi wrote I think many people missed the point of the California problem. It wasn't limited to lowering everyone's earnings to minimum wage. The main problem was that after the budget was approved, everyone's wages needed to be adjusted again AND those people need to have back wages paid for the period that they we being paid less. That's a complex problem that most programs, even modern ones, probably are not designed to consider.
well, if that was the problem then the solution is to run normal payroll without making any modifications, don't cut the checks, and issue a standard minimum wage check to all employees.
When the budget is approved, add up uncut paychecks and subtract issued minimum wage checks.
No changes to code at all. Could be done with a spreadsheet.
If people can't accept the idea of AI (strong AI, that is... human-like intelligence), they'll point to every advance and say "But, that's not really AI."
when something innovatively unexpected happens, they won't say that.
Next question is: why did all that research fail? Might not be one good answer.
I'd say the majority of the answer is that we don't understand ourselves well enough and how the brain, memory, and learning works to be successful emulating it.
For example, it is often given in slashdot AI threads that we have emulated flight even though we didn't do it the same way as nature. But we at least understood what we were emulating.
Also, the fact of the matter is that it is going to take really tremendously great programming to create software that can extend itself with new programming logic to adapt to its learning, but that's the only way you'll have artificial intelligence.
Otherwise it's just a software program like any other program except it emulates human activity.
A chess game program used to be AI. There's nothing remotely AI about it. It's a program of algorithms. Same with OCR recognitin algorithms, and on and on.
Personally, I'm skeptical about the idea of malware that secretly downloads and hides kiddie porn--why would the malware developer do that? I really can't fault the employer for not considering such an idea and investigating it.
Your skepticism appears to be based on the intent of the malware to be doing this for the user of the computer, therefore if "hidden" (or rather, not obvious to the user and probably literally using the Windows hidden file attribute) then that would not be of any financial benefit to the porn source. In other words, makes no sense to set up malware to do that.
There are a few factors which need to be known for it make sense.
One is that child porn distribution can't be done from a web server account in one's name, otherwise as soon as its location is determined the account owner is arrested.
Sort of like having drugs smuggled by unsuspecting people, placing illegal content on someone else's computer gets the computer owner any trouble, example this guy.
How does a computer get chosen for this? When it becomes part of a botnet. How does it become part of a botnet? Well, for example, a recent SQL Server exploit alone infected half a million web pages over a weekend with malware which attempts to make the computer part of a botnet. Unknown how many computers were protected enough to keep from succumbing, but botnets grow into the millions of PC's with exploits like that.
I get automated attempts at registration on my website night and day from botnet PC's. Believe me, they run the gamut of home PC's on cable internet, schools, business, government, everything you can imagine everywhere. And more are added every day, all over the world. People have no clue what their PC's are doing.
Another factor little known and understood is that once the PC is taken over, communications is by sockets from the malware to their bot network controllers. It has nothing to do with what a person is doing with their browser, other than the malware logging keystrokes and sending off to the botnet owners to be analyzed for account logins, say to your bank, or credit card payments, etc. Not to mention logins to other networks which they now are able to compromise using the account authorities, say the government, research institutions, financial institutions, defense facilities, etc.
Sockets transmission is used to do whatever they want. How about using the computer as a child porn server?
Technology accelerates exponentially, it's very risky to extrapolate from the past. We cannot work backwards and expect to get any reasonable predictions for the future.
no, backwards from 20 years from now to today. what kind of steps would be needed over the next 20 years to get to "reasoning like a human", and when is all this acceleration going to take place, because there sure isn't anything taking place now.
in other words, there is no basis for a 20 year projection, the same ones given over and over through the decades, other than it is a vaguely long amount of time which seems like something will happen by then, and always has since this all began.
...but given enough hardware, developing the software is a matter of time.
but guaranteed that time is more than 20 years. I've already lived through multiple 20 year "it must be possible by then" projections.
it's like the ubiquitous 6 month projection to get a large project to a usable state. This goes all the way back too. No one has a clue, but it just seems like 6 months ought to be long enough to do it.
to give you an idea of how empty the proverbial 20 year projection is, put "reasoning like a human" at the 20 year mark and then, devoid of any thought of what technology might need to be developed, start working backwards with bemchmarks of achievement that approach "reasoning like a human".
what is the smallest software achievement (not hardware, that is always the only thing achieved) that could constitute a milestone towards "reasoning like a human"? what exists today that could do it if it had enough hardware?
for that matter, what hardware could someone possibly be imagining that couldn't be put together today as thousands of multi-Ghz CPU's, high speed memory, and Gigabits of IO connections?
in general, no one has a clue, but everyone thinks someone will have one given some vaguely long enough projection, 20 years seemingly the magic number for the nearly impossible.
continuous 6 months sliding windows for the merely improbable.
from TFA: OOR users, tasked with creating a computer program for manufacturing machines, for example, would be able to search multiple computer languages and formats for the unambiguous words and action commands.
from my experience, the ambiguous words is the documentation, followed closely by the comments.
"unambiguous words and action commands"? Is this what "experts in words" call a computer language syntax? now we're going from "you don't need to be no stinkin' programmer, all you need to do is point and click and connect the dots" to "it will create programs by searching computer languages for action commands".
wow. good luck with that. just what we need, another good AI boondoggle.
Or are these people just Luddites who mourned the demise of the telegraph and have also never used a telephone?"
No, they use a telephone and mail. What percentage of people used a telegraph in it's time? There was no mourning its demise except from people in the industry that operated it.
Obviously, this is also a percentage of people that don't have a home computer on the internet. For many people there is no need for it. If for example there is no need for a computer, then there is no need to come to slashdot to read people's comments on not using computers.
This is the most incoherent TFA I've ever seen linked by slashdot. We just went through CAPTCHA breaking a few days ago and here we go again with the dancing images and worse suggestions.
Sheesh, there's this underlying assumption that the CAPTCHA image is automatically being broken by spambots using OCR, but all it takes is CAPTCHA images where the letters are not cleanly separated to keep all but some as yet univented world class OCR from identifying the characters. Anyway, no one has presented a case for automatic OCR breaking anyway.
It'd be nice to see some more basic examinations of the technologies involved in attack and defend of websites. We deal with this in adminning our websites day in and day out so this is an important subject.
This may be so obvious no one has commented on it, but this appears to me the person used a three hole paper punch on perhaps a copier/laser paper page, and carried it in a notebook. The edges of the holes have stress on them.
All the straight lines in the markings were done with a guide or stencil of some sort. The markings above the 3 are too well done 45 degrees to be freehand and are almost exactly the same size.
The first part of binary (if you will) marks line up all eight rows down. However, starting at the tenth column in from the right side, the columns strat slanting from right to left on down. They still neatly line up, but you have to follow the slant down.
As someone pointed out earlier, the top and bottom marks are both eight rows, and the eight row is shortened in both. The bottom is raggiedier as if he was getting tired by that point, but still looks columnar to me. The gaps are zeros, I think, not gaps between groups of marks.
I count 57 bits across the top. Many of the gaps are two zeros. When I divvy up the top line into bytes, the ASCII decimal values are:
230 mu 230 mu 115 s 156 British pound sign 228 sigma 147 o circumflex 93 right bracket extra bit, stop bit perhaps
231 zeta 57 9 156 British pound sign 156 British pound sign 217 right angle (same as the E sign in the hex portion) 51 3 186 norm
Given the symbol theme with the hex values, this looks like straight binary ASCII to make some kind of symbolic statement (no pun intended:)
1 Billion is one hell of a domestic eavesdropping operation, which is essentially what the goons are bound and determined to do.
If they have to say it's to find child porn whatever electronic device it may be on, who can say no to stopping child porn?
If they have any difficulty with funding Iraq for the rest of the year, they may resort to calling it stopping child porn in Iraq. Probably would work.
For the record, Google purchased Postini in the not to distant past.
I did not know Google had purchased Postini. I use it as an individual for my ISP mail account, and also handles my web site email whcih I forward to my ISP email account, and it does the job perfectly. Intercepts hundreds of spams a day and lets through very few of them to me.
That includes doing a very good job on bouncebacks when my web site domain is used for mass mailings by spammers. Postini deals successfully with thousands of those not deliverable meesages in those cases.
I pay a very small fee per month for it, included as part of my ISP account.
he's not wanting just registration, he's after complete identification of the person, so that you can't just keep registering new names...
actually, just enough identification to keep from posting under multiple names, which is a higher bar to cross than strictly necessary for posting in Washington Post blogs. I am registered there and have been posting frequently until lately when it became so bad no one could possibly be trying to read the huge cut and pastes of garbage dumped in there. So I understand the source of his frustration.
They already have registration and login, so the posts are not anonymous. The registration requires an email address. However, I don't recall the "confirm registration with a number we send you in an email, or a link if you want to, to confirm registration", which most sites with a modicum of control do.
I think the following would more than suffice for a public forum like the Washington Post:
- Require a "paid for" email address for registration by banning free email domains.
- Require a confirmation from info received at the email address given with registration.
- Display some lower portion of the IP address and location with each post.
- Disable the account of anyone you ban. The email address is still in use and cannot be used again to re-register after being banned. This is easier than adding the email address to a ban list for an admin situation like the Washington Post has.
Even when Joe Blow registers with his 5 cable internet email addresses, it is clearly apparent when the posts from supposedly different people are coming from the same place. On the other hand, there could be 5 different people posting from the same place, and that's fine too. It just stops the maliciousness of posing as regular posters or other contrived dialogues when the source location is clear.
In addition, when the posting can be pinpointed back to a specific internet acount, the poster is all of a sudden not so anonymous and whose bad behavior will have consequences, at least in accessing the Washington Post with that email address as a login.
These are all simple steps, and require no extra work on the Washington Post admin's part, in fact would cut way down on the complaints they would get.
I have my own domain and email server and I do not see anything like this.
Right, I rarely see it. Just so happens I was on the receiving end the last two days, over with now. (One came in even as I typed that.:)
By no means do I have a high traffic site. However it does have a high ranking in Google search results and well known software to spammers (phpBB), so I am visited around the clock by attempted spammers and occasionally my domain is used as a bogus from address for spamming, but they switch around quite a bit because once you're used your domain makes blacklists (as many of the spam refused message in the bounceback indicates).
If spammers for the most part are able to register on your site they will register and leave the malware links every so often. If they get blocked you end up being used as a from domain for a huge spam attack, I am quite sure partly to mostly out of revenge, as if, maybe next time you'll know better than to block us.
Slashdot Mirror
The only cross-platform development tool I am aware of is Lazarus/FPC, a Delphi clone, and I can say it has come a long way from what it was 10 years ago. I highly recommend it to those wanting to write code once and compile it "everywhere".
This line triggered some things to come together from reading this thread. I have seen the Lazarus product mentioned on slashdot before in a Delphi thread or two, but wasn't thinking about it as I read this thread.
I have a suggestion with some potential for enterprising Linux developers interested in this thread of dearth of vertical industry apps for Linux, but first where I'm coming from on this.
I'm a longtime corporate business software developer, but never got farther than installing Linux for my own software development. I was a Delphi developer in late 90's and bought (pre-ordered even) first release of Kylix (yes, the $1000 version), which I never got around to installing on my Linux partition which I never got around to using very much.
Not only do I still have the relatively unscathed Kylix box of software, big enough to double as a boat anchor, but I ran across a copy of SAMS Kylix Developers Guide for version 2 in a pile of grossly marked down books last year and bought it out of sheer orneriness, which nearly doubled the size of my boat anchor and made me wish I had waited and done the same thing with Kylix. :)
Now on to the suggestion. I am somewhat familiar with the Colmbusoft company and product Delphi for Accounting, having done some development for them when they started back in the early 80's and bought some of their modules and customization for a corporate project about 10 years ago (which by the way was very successful, filling a unique cross platform requirement for client software at a large Chicago company which at the time needed the software to work on Win95, Win 3.1, and OS/2 -[Win 3.1 support], with all clients having dialup and/or internet access to our AS/400).
I haven't talked to them in the last 10 years or so, being in Florida now, but I did check their website and they still have developer licensing deals, etc. They sell their product with source code, and promote developer bundling with vertical industry apps and end user customization.
Probably would be a good opportunity for Delphi/Lazarus types to cut a deal to port Delphi for Accounting to Linux (was easy for me to say, wasn't it) and distribute and support for Linux. If you google Columbusoft or Accounting for Delphi you can get their contact info.
It just so happens that for other development reasons I am getting a Centos 5 server for development, was going to do it earlier this week but had to wait till this weekend to get to it, and I will definitely check into the Lazarus product later. I know I had it written down in my notes from a slashdot thread a year or two ago to do that anyway.
Hopefully I'll be hearing about Delphi for Accounting on Linux soon. (Delphi Accounting for Linux? Lazarus for Accounting? Accounting for Linux?)
Or maybe it's next to impossible unless the code was written to that Delphi 6 / Kylix spec. I don't know. But seems like there's enough opportunity to make it worth checking into.
rd
Just throwing money at "someone" to develop the apps often isn't enough.
Perhaps IBM should start writing these apps themselves instead.
IBM spent more than a billion dollars (no, really) paying Java developers to write a business infrastructure for vertical industry apps. It was called San Francisco. Never heard of anything that ever came of it.
Not sure how much they sunk into it before they pulled the plug. Somebody else at IBM apparently got tired of waiting too.
rd
idobi wrote I think many people missed the point of the California problem. It wasn't limited to lowering everyone's earnings to minimum wage. The main problem was that after the budget was approved, everyone's wages needed to be adjusted again AND those people need to have back wages paid for the period that they we being paid less. That's a complex problem that most programs, even modern ones, probably are not designed to consider.
well, if that was the problem then the solution is to run normal payroll without making any modifications, don't cut the checks, and issue a standard minimum wage check to all employees.
When the budget is approved, add up uncut paychecks and subtract issued minimum wage checks.
No changes to code at all. Could be done with a spreadsheet.
rd
If you pay all 200,000 people minimum wage, you only need to calculate one paycheck and print 200,000 of them.
You can skip the tax withholding. No one is going to be paying much in taxes out of that.
If people can't accept the idea of AI (strong AI, that is... human-like intelligence), they'll point to every advance and say "But, that's not really AI."
when something innovatively unexpected happens, they won't say that.
rd
They expect reaching that point to take many years.
Slashdot style modding would take care of it.
Seriously.
rd
Next question is: why did all that research fail? Might not be one good answer.
I'd say the majority of the answer is that we don't understand ourselves well enough and how the brain, memory, and learning works to be successful emulating it.
For example, it is often given in slashdot AI threads that we have emulated flight even though we didn't do it the same way as nature. But we at least understood what we were emulating.
Also, the fact of the matter is that it is going to take really tremendously great programming to create software that can extend itself with new programming logic to adapt to its learning, but that's the only way you'll have artificial intelligence.
Otherwise it's just a software program like any other program except it emulates human activity.
A chess game program used to be AI. There's nothing remotely AI about it. It's a program of algorithms. Same with OCR recognitin algorithms, and on and on.
rd
People often lose sight of how far we really have come from the early days of AI.
I haven't so much lost sight of it as I've never seen it.
rd
I usually describe Machine Learning as a branch of computer science that is similar to AI, but less ambitious.
I appreciate the difference, but even with the less ambitious Machine Learning there is no learning in OCR or other recognition algorithms.
rd
Personally, I'm skeptical about the idea of malware that secretly downloads and hides kiddie porn--why would the malware developer do that? I really can't fault the employer for not considering such an idea and investigating it.
Your skepticism appears to be based on the intent of the malware to be doing this for the user of the computer, therefore if "hidden" (or rather, not obvious to the user and probably literally using the Windows hidden file attribute) then that would not be of any financial benefit to the porn source. In other words, makes no sense to set up malware to do that.
There are a few factors which need to be known for it make sense.
One is that child porn distribution can't be done from a web server account in one's name, otherwise as soon as its location is determined the account owner is arrested.
Sort of like having drugs smuggled by unsuspecting people, placing illegal content on someone else's computer gets the computer owner any trouble, example this guy.
How does a computer get chosen for this? When it becomes part of a botnet. How does it become part of a botnet? Well, for example, a recent SQL Server exploit alone infected half a million web pages over a weekend with malware which attempts to make the computer part of a botnet. Unknown how many computers were protected enough to keep from succumbing, but botnets grow into the millions of PC's with exploits like that.
I get automated attempts at registration on my website night and day from botnet PC's. Believe me, they run the gamut of home PC's on cable internet, schools, business, government, everything you can imagine everywhere. And more are added every day, all over the world. People have no clue what their PC's are doing.
Another factor little known and understood is that once the PC is taken over, communications is by sockets from the malware to their bot network controllers. It has nothing to do with what a person is doing with their browser, other than the malware logging keystrokes and sending off to the botnet owners to be analyzed for account logins, say to your bank, or credit card payments, etc. Not to mention logins to other networks which they now are able to compromise using the account authorities, say the government, research institutions, financial institutions, defense facilities, etc.
Sockets transmission is used to do whatever they want. How about using the computer as a child porn server?
Bingo. Problem now understood, but not solved.
rd
well, one way to synch the data is restart the reactor.
sort of a primitive way to do it though.
Technology accelerates exponentially, it's very risky to extrapolate from the past. We cannot work backwards and expect to get any reasonable predictions for the future.
no, backwards from 20 years from now to today. what kind of steps would be needed over the next 20 years to get to "reasoning like a human", and when is all this acceleration going to take place, because there sure isn't anything taking place now.
in other words, there is no basis for a 20 year projection, the same ones given over and over through the decades, other than it is a vaguely long amount of time which seems like something will happen by then, and always has since this all began.
rd
Did anyone get those hex numbers in the middle to come out to 5 Meg?
...but given enough hardware, developing the software is a matter of time.
but guaranteed that time is more than 20 years. I've already lived through multiple 20 year "it must be possible by then" projections.
it's like the ubiquitous 6 month projection to get a large project to a usable state. This goes all the way back too. No one has a clue, but it just seems like 6 months ought to be long enough to do it.
to give you an idea of how empty the proverbial 20 year projection is, put "reasoning like a human" at the 20 year mark and then, devoid of any thought of what technology might need to be developed, start working backwards with bemchmarks of achievement that approach "reasoning like a human".
what is the smallest software achievement (not hardware, that is always the only thing achieved) that could constitute a milestone towards "reasoning like a human"? what exists today that could do it if it had enough hardware?
for that matter, what hardware could someone possibly be imagining that couldn't be put together today as thousands of multi-Ghz CPU's, high speed memory, and Gigabits of IO connections?
in general, no one has a clue, but everyone thinks someone will have one given some vaguely long enough projection, 20 years seemingly the magic number for the nearly impossible.
continuous 6 months sliding windows for the merely improbable.
rd
It's merely intended as a convenient resource for programmers.
shouldn't someone tell them about Google?
from TFA: OOR users, tasked with creating a computer program for manufacturing machines, for example, would be able to search multiple computer languages and formats for the unambiguous words and action commands.
from my experience, the ambiguous words is the documentation, followed closely by the comments.
"unambiguous words and action commands"? Is this what "experts in words" call a computer language syntax? now we're going from "you don't need to be no stinkin' programmer, all you need to do is point and click and connect the dots" to "it will create programs by searching computer languages for action commands".
wow. good luck with that. just what we need, another good AI boondoggle.
It's the programmers who are securely employed who will have the time and energy to contribute to open sores.
actually it's usually people with an overactive social life that contribute to open sores.
Or are these people just Luddites who mourned the demise of the telegraph and have also never used a telephone?"
No, they use a telephone and mail. What percentage of people used a telegraph in it's time? There was no mourning its demise except from people in the industry that operated it.
Obviously, this is also a percentage of people that don't have a home computer on the internet. For many people there is no need for it. If for example there is no need for a computer, then there is no need to come to slashdot to read people's comments on not using computers.
rd
This is the most incoherent TFA I've ever seen linked by slashdot. We just went through CAPTCHA breaking a few days ago and here we go again with the dancing images and worse suggestions.
Sheesh, there's this underlying assumption that the CAPTCHA image is automatically being broken by spambots using OCR, but all it takes is CAPTCHA images where the letters are not cleanly separated to keep all but some as yet univented world class OCR from identifying the characters. Anyway, no one has presented a case for automatic OCR breaking anyway.
It'd be nice to see some more basic examinations of the technologies involved in attack and defend of websites. We deal with this in adminning our websites day in and day out so this is an important subject.
rd
This may be so obvious no one has commented on it, but this appears to me the person used a three hole paper punch on perhaps a copier/laser paper page, and carried it in a notebook. The edges of the holes have stress on them.
:)
All the straight lines in the markings were done with a guide or stencil of some sort. The markings above the 3 are too well done 45 degrees to be freehand and are almost exactly the same size.
The first part of binary (if you will) marks line up all eight rows down. However, starting at the tenth column in from the right side, the columns strat slanting from right to left on down. They still neatly line up, but you have to follow the slant down.
As someone pointed out earlier, the top and bottom marks are both eight rows, and the eight row is shortened in both. The bottom is raggiedier as if he was getting tired by that point, but still looks columnar to me. The gaps are zeros, I think, not gaps between groups of marks.
I count 57 bits across the top. Many of the gaps are two zeros. When I divvy up the top line into bytes, the ASCII decimal values are:
230 mu
230 mu
115 s
156 British pound sign
228 sigma
147 o circumflex
93 right bracket
extra bit, stop bit perhaps
231 zeta
57 9
156 British pound sign
156 British pound sign
217 right angle (same as the E sign in the hex portion)
51 3
186 norm
Given the symbol theme with the hex values, this looks like straight binary ASCII to make some kind of symbolic statement (no pun intended
rd
I think I saw this on Smallville. Wasn't it an SOS from Krypton?
1 Billion is one hell of a domestic eavesdropping operation, which is essentially what the goons are bound and determined to do.
If they have to say it's to find child porn whatever electronic device it may be on, who can say no to stopping child porn?
If they have any difficulty with funding Iraq for the rest of the year, they may resort to calling it stopping child porn in Iraq. Probably would work.
rd
For the record, Google purchased Postini in the not to distant past.
I did not know Google had purchased Postini. I use it as an individual for my ISP mail account, and also handles my web site email whcih I forward to my ISP email account, and it does the job perfectly. Intercepts hundreds of spams a day and lets through very few of them to me.
That includes doing a very good job on bouncebacks when my web site domain is used for mass mailings by spammers. Postini deals successfully with thousands of those not deliverable meesages in those cases.
I pay a very small fee per month for it, included as part of my ISP account.
rd
he's not wanting just registration, he's after complete identification of the person, so that you can't just keep registering new names...
actually, just enough identification to keep from posting under multiple names, which is a higher bar to cross than strictly necessary for posting in Washington Post blogs. I am registered there and have been posting frequently until lately when it became so bad no one could possibly be trying to read the huge cut and pastes of garbage dumped in there. So I understand the source of his frustration.
They already have registration and login, so the posts are not anonymous. The registration requires an email address. However, I don't recall the "confirm registration with a number we send you in an email, or a link if you want to, to confirm registration", which most sites with a modicum of control do.
I think the following would more than suffice for a public forum like the Washington Post:
- Require a "paid for" email address for registration by banning free email domains.
- Require a confirmation from info received at the email address given with registration.
- Display some lower portion of the IP address and location with each post.
- Disable the account of anyone you ban. The email address is still in use and cannot be used again to re-register after being banned. This is easier than adding the email address to a ban list for an admin situation like the Washington Post has.
Even when Joe Blow registers with his 5 cable internet email addresses, it is clearly apparent when the posts from supposedly different people are coming from the same place. On the other hand, there could be 5 different people posting from the same place, and that's fine too. It just stops the maliciousness of posing as regular posters or other contrived dialogues when the source location is clear.
In addition, when the posting can be pinpointed back to a specific internet acount, the poster is all of a sudden not so anonymous and whose bad behavior will have consequences, at least in accessing the Washington Post with that email address as a login.
These are all simple steps, and require no extra work on the Washington Post admin's part, in fact would cut way down on the complaints they would get.
rd
I have my own domain and email server and I do not see anything like this.
:)
Right, I rarely see it. Just so happens I was on the receiving end the last two days, over with now. (One came in even as I typed that.
By no means do I have a high traffic site. However it does have a high ranking in Google search results and well known software to spammers (phpBB), so I am visited around the clock by attempted spammers and occasionally my domain is used as a bogus from address for spamming, but they switch around quite a bit because once you're used your domain makes blacklists (as many of the spam refused message in the bounceback indicates).
If spammers for the most part are able to register on your site they will register and leave the malware links every so often. If they get blocked you end up being used as a from domain for a huge spam attack, I am quite sure partly to mostly out of revenge, as if, maybe next time you'll know better than to block us.
rd