Maybe an automated highway is more complicated than something like a self-parking mechanism, because many more parties are involved
I don't think an automated highway is all that complicated. Basicly rather then a strech of flat road, the vehicel drives on a set of metal rails. For scaleability you can add additional compartments for more passangers, and even additional engines. Not only can you read the paper or use your laptop, but you can even fetch a bite to eat. The need for safty belts is not quite as nessicary as the vehicel travels in one direction and traffic flow is pre-determined. I hear it's all the rage in europe!
In some states, it is no longer a requirement to know how to parallel park in order to get a license. Therefore, even though I've been driving for two years, I still can't parallel park.
I never thought it was a requirement in any state.
I rather thought the test was setup with a number of specific tasks you had to peform, and you got graded on each one.
In Washington, I remember being told that if you refuse to parallel park, you would lose more points then if you tried and failed, unless you hit a cone. But also, from what I remember, you could pass the test either way even if you fail backing around the corner and parallel parking, which actually I did.
I can parallel park though I prefer not to, esp with my new car that you can't really see the front end while seated inside.
ICP Global Technologies 10010 BatterySaver Solar panel in theory provides 15watts of power.
Laptop is prefered because typicaly speaking they consume less then 20watts with the disk spinning, atleast mine power supply is rated for 20watts, never broke out the multi-meter. I'd have to see how much mine actualy consumes @ boot and @ disk power down and engery save mode.
Embedded is prefered over laptop, though laptops can be adapted, for the most part in the event of reboot you still stuffer from a dependance on disk boot, and that ever common "Cmos battery failed, values reset, press f1 to enter setup". Let alone issues of leaving a disk out in the natural enviroment.
"When I say "real world", I'm talking about real businessess. Not someone who works from their house and likes to play with linux. You know...real businesses, like those that call real consultants or hire real IT staff for real solutions. The ones that pay the bills of people like me."
What a silly thing to say. A SOHO that has a home-based business is a "real business". A lot of them don't have "real IT staff", or funds for "real consultants". Although they do have "real money" to buy "real products", from "real companies" that do have people familiar with "real IT issues", and the expertise to package that into a "real solution".
This sounds like the classic example of the IT consultent class system. I find the whole attitude of if it's not a cisco router or a USR/3com modem it's not real most annoying. Franky speaking, I've found USRs to be the most unreliable modems you can buy, assuming *real* conditions like crappy lines or actually handshaking with something that isn't also a USR/3com product. "It must be your lines cause it's a 3com modem it's the best"... right... as I hook up some generic that actually works right under the same conditions.
Reality is, no one needs morality if there isn't enough to eat. Standards are established not by what works best but by what is ever the cheepest you can get away with.
If an emergency IT-related visit can be avoided via ondemand fail-over to dialup, then all is good, that's rather the point. The real world has people who don't have the forsight to actualy budget, practicaly filled with buggers who CAN'T remember their passwords, and could only afford/budget for the crap connection and expect it to work 24/7.
That's rather the nice thing about uClinux, some one who likes to play with linux can protype a solution. I would not be shocked at all if there was an ongoing HSRP project for future appliances due to the fact that the number of people willing to pay for the *real solution* are in the minority. It would be nice if everyone had the budget for what was the best, but reality is very diffrent.
And franky, I'd like to flog all those high paid consultents who actually deployed USR/3com modems without actually testing to see if they will even work with the host/client in question.
No, in the real world, where we get paid to set these things up, the standard config is a Cisco 1721 with a T1/E1
In the real world, where there *is* a market for Linksys routers because not everyone can afford a 1721 let alone a t1/e1 connection, let alone some bugger to set one up.
Do I think this thin thing supports HSRP? *NO* In fact, i'm unsure if there even is anything resembling HSRP under linux yet. What I am sure of is, assuming you are behind a nat firewall, you can indeed change from peforming nat one one device to a ppp device. Very sloppy in contrast to HSRP, but effective.
And why is it always assumed that the *real world* is an enviroment with a budget for a t1/e1 anyway? Is SOHO just a figment of my imagination?
So it's a cute idea, probably do-able, but not worth it in practice. You'd be better off going with a cheap bare bones system running Linux or FreeBSD. No CD or floppy drive and underclock it to reduce power consumption.
One thing I know i've discussed over a pint of beer are remote observation stations, trivial little devices that measure temprature, water level, that sorta thing. Out of the way places with NO easy access to landlines.
If you are talking off the shelf barebones system, you are talking a minium of 60watts for basic option. 10watts is a hell of alot more attractive if your power source is something like solar and battery storage.
Its not the speed, its the fact that people on dial up generally don't have a dedicated land line for the internet. Not many people would be happy to tie up the telephone for over a day.
Get a digital subscription, download the night before or while you are at work. Make it automated so you don't even know it's there. Few people need to use the phone between let's say 2-4am
What you call foothills the people on the east cost call mountains. I noticed this perspective diffrence between the east and west cost a long time ago. Not that the east cost doesn't have a mountain range, they are NOT the Rockies.
But hey, since you live in a place with much more in the way of impressive peaks, why don't *you* get your own segway and test to see how well it works in your enviroment.
56k is better then nothing. Keep in mind also the fact that primarly text information gets compressed unlike in broadband technologies. Keep in mind that many a small business or small remote office doesn't nessicarly need lots and lots of bandwidth just to get e-mail.
Hackability? Well I'm somewhat curious what they can do with such a device. The first thing that comes to mind is a standby gateway that goes online when the primary gateway fails. This would be MOST handy.
The question of the day is, can you download a CD's worth of material over dialup? The answer is YES. Would you want to? Depends on who you are!
650megs would take about 26hours at 56K assuming conditions were ideal. Ideal conditions are clean line and zmodem transfer from a shell account mind you, but you get the picture.
Reality wise, 28.8k to 33.6 are more realistic speeds for most people... about 43 - 50 hours..
Ok, so between 26 and 50 hours to transfer a CD over standard dialup a connection.
-----------
For a weekly newspaper subscription, this is not exactly *where it's at*. For a monthly subscription though, it could be. Assuming you can actually provide your content in roughly 325 megs... This would cut our estimates down to 13-25hours. Such a document could easily be retrieved if you downloaded something for a week at between 2-4hours a day connect time.
This is by NO means terrific, but I can see it as being do able for a monthly publication of somesort.
I was running BSD for a short period of time way back in the later half of the 1990s. Basicly solaris was slowaris on my sparc and it was a legit option so hey. So technicaly I started with SunOS.
Near as I can remember, the last BSD distro for the PC I tried was probally Freebsd, which has exactly what you described, nice hardware detection and somewhat slick desktop. It even detected my Linksys netcard where redhat failed (circa 2000).
The only thing I really miss from FreeBSD is the ftp client has a nice text status bar.
I went with linux though for a few reasons, primarly because most of the software I want works with minium tweeking, as in the people who develop the software are usually running linux. Also the fact that all the crap you need is on CDs. This choice was made when I had a 56k connection mind you, and I was spending most of my time hunting around the net for trivial crap.
Hey, i'd agree with you 100% here. It is indeed their service, and they have every right to restrict access to whom ever they choose.
However, to offer PAY licenses for 3rd parties is just freaking nutty. The logic "Running an (IM) network is expensive" is incorrect to assume that *your* free software is somehow more profitable then someone else's free software, which technicaly could be true if the adverts pay for the service.
Ok then... allow license to use the service but conform to the advert system. This would *suck* for many end users, but then microsoft couldn't use the excuse about profit.
I get most if this information via text anyway... It doesn't matter to me if the staff attorney has their reproductive organs externaly or otherwise, nor if they can see their feet if standing upright.
At one point in history, Adobe did have a version of Photoshop for Solaris 2. Part of the reason I know this was I was looking into big ass monitors in the mid 1990's, and discovered I could get into a sun with a big ass screen with a buttload of ram for about the cost of a new big ass multi-sync monitor, and the same chap that was selling used Sun equipment also had copies of Photoshop for sale. Plus my scanner had NO win95 support, but did have Sane support. For your average user, this wasn't what you would call an acceptable solution as it was a multi-grand software package where PC editions were just under a grand. Near as I can remember, there was NO option for for direct purchace of a *nix edition. X support was really quite spiffy.
I think version 3.x was the last version for the Sun but it leads me to ask.... if they developed a Solaris edition, why have they not bothered with a BSD/Linux edition.
if your buying a namebrand system (especially M$ henchmen Dell) you should expect to agree to every EULA ever written for any and every version of Windows
The problem is the fact that they present this screen which logs on your hard disk that you have already read all the approperate EULA. While I personaly just click through the shit personaly, I can appricate the fact that in a business enviroment that this is simply unacceptable. I think the complaint was the fact that these materials were not made available to the end user for review before pressing "any key".
Even DigitalConvergence with their wonderful cuecat device would send you their EULA via fax upon request, or by US-post.
Now... since Dell was smart enough to have a dedicated partition to hold this little bootstrap and screen, they should also go that extra step and actually INCLUDE THE FUCKING EULAs. If you do in it ascii you can probally fit all the approperate EULAs in under a few megabytes.
I find it shocking that we naturaly assume that cd to HD copy involves *ripping*. Somewhere around here I have an old toshiba 2x drive which doesn't offer that new fangled protected track protection. It will copy tracks as files without *ripping* without bit errors.
It's difficult if not impossible to duplicate a hardware lock (parallel port dongle), and it costs money to do.
The average joe can't duplicate a port dongle, but it's not like it can't be done. I remember this was the fad in the 1980's. Usually if it's a popular application, someone will post the plans to duplicate it. PC users were most annoyed because they couldn't use their printer with the parallel port dongle, so they found cracked versions of the software.
If i'm not mistaken, f-protect offers free updates, though i'd have verify this. I use the dos version of their product, which is free for personal use, requires no subscription what so ever. It looks however on their page that their definitions can easily be downloaded.
http://www.f-secure.com/download-purchase/update s. shtml
While I won't go as far as saying Symantec *should* give away free updates, but i'm saying these other people do. Symantec after all pretty much gives away their product with the purchace of many motherboards / systems. I don't honestly know where they get these pirate numbers from.
Now if you could easily download updates from elsewhere and convert them into Symantec antivirus readable form, that would resolve the issue all together, as far as them being jarheads that is.
Under the Spews model, there is no reward for corrected behavier. So while an ISP may get blocked for supporting spamers, there is no motovation to stop if there is no reward involved. If they loose all their legit customers due to blocking, guess who pays their bills? *The Spammers*.
This has been noted many times when legit people pick up blacklisted IP addresses. They are stick stuck with the legacy of prior abuse whether their intent is legit or not. This ends up being counter productive because an ISP holding these blacklisted blocks can't get legit customers.
The idea should be to encourage ISPs to conform to a set of rules regarding spam, rather then blanket blacklisting. Without an acceptable procedure to address legit customers the "Don't punish me because my ISP supports spammers! Wah!" crowd wins. ISPs who are actually concerned with getting legit e-mail would have second thoughts about adopting a Spews like standard for fear of loosing legit customers.
In a pigs eye. I understand where they are comming from, really I do. However Spews's mision statement of attempting to encourage real users to move from their spam infected ISP just didn't work. If all the real users left, and only spammers remained, it does jack shit for discouraging that form of behavier. If all the real users just switched to hotmail, again it does jack shit to discourage the behavier. The only way that their mission would be successful if their list was in wide spread use cutting off the spammers income and making it a pointless business venture.
While quite a few people actually used spews, mailadmins whom i've spoken with pretty much didn't want the headache complaints generated both spammers and legit users attempting to get e-mail out.
Re:My experience with that...
on
GTK+ TTY Port
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· Score: 1
On the other hand, Xfree86 on Cygwin [cygwin.com] is free - as in beer and as in Xfree license.
I'll have to give Cygwin and Xfree86 a try again. One thing that I enjoy about Starnet is the fact that you can run Gnome and have it totaly incorperated into your windows desktop 100% transparently. And Starnet was lightning fast over my lan.
I haven't tried the Hummingbird or WRQ solutions to be honest, I was pretty happy with starnet. However, if there was a reasonable TTY solution I probally wouldn't have bothered getting DSL.
I talked to one ISP that was using SPEWS and he had it as first line or defense with no possible way to whitelist anyone. It is nice to know that everyone out there is not blindly acting as they did.
Usually the argument is that Spews them selves isn't blacklisting people but it's rather the ISPs who are blacklisting. That's just bonehead logic cause Spews like any other similar service makes a freaking list.
To be honest, i'd have to read the sendmail docs to see how easy it would be to whitelist someone, but i'm sure it could be done. I have full empathy for people in Brazil who are victims of full fleged blacklistings. Granted my userbase isn't large at all, but if someone was indeed blacklisted and had just cause to e-mail someone on my machine, and at the very least had a fixed ip address, then by all means i'd look into it.
I agree with the bonehead admins to an extent, the fact that there are certain blocks that are proven to be troublesome. But that is no excuse for not having a valid procedure to actually whitelisting actual users.
Now what i'm curious about is if it would be reasonable to configure sendmail or other mail package to rather then "reject" flagged spam sites off the bat to put them on hold, making sure that you keep their outbound port open as long as possible.
Blocking entire IP blocks is nothing short of techie-terrorism. In other words, you can't convince the real wrong doers to stop, so you harm the innocent bystanders to try to get them to revolt.
In some cases blocking whole IP blocks was justified. I prefer spamhaus as a whole due becaue it makes my life easier making a valued judgement whether or not to block a whole block.
Spews does not seem to acknoloage the fact that they practice a form of censorship by encouraging others to censor out specific sites. What I find worse are their users who don't seem to understand that they are censoring sites. I use spamhaus my self and I freely admit i'm the final censor who is engaging in the censorship of unsolisited marketing materials.
Re:Why go back to the CLI
on
GTK+ TTY Port
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Why, except for a pathetic fetish for obsolete technology, would you want to use a text-based interface to your X-Server?
If you are stuck with 56k, I can see this being very handy, very very handy! While yes we have faster then dialup connections, they are not all available from everywhere. Also, if you are with an ISP that bills based on byte use, I can see this as being most excelent.
Also... if you are stuck in the Windows world, Xservers can be damn costly. Starnet for example charges $245 for their X-server. I assume since it can operate via TTY that it can also operate via ssh/telnet.
Lastly, the more complex you make the plumbing, the easier it is to stuff up the drain. One thing nice about pathetic obsolete terminals is the fact that they work, they always work. The server may go down, but you know full well that ye' old terminal isn't very likely to fail. They don't need upgrades, patches, and in them selves can't get a worm/virus.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe an automated highway is more complicated than something like a self-parking mechanism, because many more parties are involved
I don't think an automated highway is all that complicated. Basicly rather then a strech of flat road, the vehicel drives on a set of metal rails. For scaleability you can add additional compartments for more passangers, and even additional engines. Not only can you read the paper or use your laptop, but you can even fetch a bite to eat. The need for safty belts is not quite as nessicary as the vehicel travels in one direction and traffic flow is pre-determined. I hear it's all the rage in europe!
In some states, it is no longer a requirement to know how to parallel park in order to get a license. Therefore, even though I've been driving for two years, I still can't parallel park.
I never thought it was a requirement in any state.
I rather thought the test was setup with a number of specific tasks you had to peform, and you got graded on each one.
In Washington, I remember being told that if you refuse to parallel park, you would lose more points then if you tried and failed, unless you hit a cone. But also, from what I remember, you could pass the test either way even if you fail backing around the corner and parallel parking, which actually I did.
I can parallel park though I prefer not to, esp with my new car that you can't really see the front end while seated inside.
ICP Global Technologies 10010 BatterySaver Solar panel in theory provides 15watts of power.
Laptop is prefered because typicaly speaking they consume less then 20watts with the disk spinning, atleast mine power supply is rated for 20watts, never broke out the multi-meter. I'd have to see how much mine actualy consumes @ boot and @ disk power down and engery save mode.
Embedded is prefered over laptop, though laptops can be adapted, for the most part in the event of reboot you still stuffer from a dependance on disk boot, and that ever common "Cmos battery failed, values reset, press f1 to enter setup". Let alone issues of leaving a disk out in the natural enviroment.
"When I say "real world", I'm talking about real businessess. Not someone who works from their house and likes to play with linux. You know...real businesses, like those that call real consultants or hire real IT staff for real solutions. The ones that pay the bills of people like me."
/budget for the crap connection and expect it to work 24/7.
What a silly thing to say. A SOHO that has a home-based business is a "real business". A lot of them don't have "real IT staff", or funds for "real consultants". Although they do have "real money" to buy "real products", from "real companies" that do have people familiar with "real IT issues", and the expertise to package that into a "real solution".
This sounds like the classic example of the IT consultent class system. I find the whole attitude of if it's not a cisco router or a USR/3com modem it's not real most annoying. Franky speaking, I've found USRs to be the most unreliable modems you can buy, assuming *real* conditions like crappy lines or actually handshaking with something that isn't also a USR/3com product. "It must be your lines cause it's a 3com modem it's the best"... right... as I hook up some generic that actually works right under the same conditions.
Reality is, no one needs morality if there isn't enough to eat. Standards are established not by what works best but by what is ever the cheepest you can get away with.
If an emergency IT-related visit can be avoided via ondemand fail-over to dialup, then all is good, that's rather the point. The real world has people who don't have the forsight to actualy budget, practicaly filled with buggers who CAN'T remember their passwords, and could only afford
That's rather the nice thing about uClinux, some one who likes to play with linux can protype a solution. I would not be shocked at all if there was an ongoing HSRP project for future appliances due to the fact that the number of people willing to pay for the *real solution* are in the minority. It would be nice if everyone had the budget for what was the best, but reality is very diffrent.
And franky, I'd like to flog all those high paid consultents who actually deployed USR/3com modems without actually testing to see if they will even work with the host/client in question.
No, in the real world, where we get paid to set these things up, the standard config is a Cisco 1721 with a T1/E1
In the real world, where there *is* a market for Linksys routers because not everyone can afford a 1721 let alone a t1/e1 connection, let alone some bugger to set one up.
Do I think this thin thing supports HSRP? *NO* In fact, i'm unsure if there even is anything resembling HSRP under linux yet. What I am sure of is, assuming you are behind a nat firewall, you can indeed change from peforming nat one one device to a ppp device. Very sloppy in contrast to HSRP, but effective.
And why is it always assumed that the *real world* is an enviroment with a budget for a t1/e1 anyway? Is SOHO just a figment of my imagination?
So it's a cute idea, probably do-able, but not worth it in practice. You'd be better off going with a cheap bare bones system running Linux or FreeBSD. No CD or floppy drive and underclock it to reduce power consumption.
One thing I know i've discussed over a pint of beer are remote observation stations, trivial little devices that measure temprature, water level, that sorta thing. Out of the way places with NO easy access to landlines.
If you are talking off the shelf barebones system, you are talking a minium of 60watts for basic option. 10watts is a hell of alot more attractive if your power source is something like solar and battery storage.
Its not the speed, its the fact that people on dial up generally don't have a dedicated land line for the internet. Not many people would be happy to tie up the telephone for over a day.
Get a digital subscription, download the night before or while you are at work. Make it automated so you don't even know it's there. Few people need to use the phone between let's say 2-4am
What you call foothills the people on the east cost call mountains. I noticed this perspective diffrence between the east and west cost a long time ago. Not that the east cost doesn't have a mountain range, they are NOT the Rockies.
But hey, since you live in a place with much more in the way of impressive peaks, why don't *you* get your own segway and test to see how well it works in your enviroment.
56k is better then nothing. Keep in mind also the fact that primarly text information gets compressed unlike in broadband technologies. Keep in mind that many a small business or small remote office doesn't nessicarly need lots and lots of bandwidth just to get e-mail.
Hackability? Well I'm somewhat curious what they can do with such a device. The first thing that comes to mind is a standby gateway that goes online when the primary gateway fails. This would be MOST handy.
The question of the day is, can you download a CD's worth of material over dialup? The answer is YES. Would you want to? Depends on who you are!
650megs would take about 26hours at 56K assuming conditions were ideal. Ideal conditions are clean line and zmodem transfer from a shell account mind you, but you get the picture.
Reality wise, 28.8k to 33.6 are more realistic speeds for most people... about 43 - 50 hours..
Ok, so between 26 and 50 hours to transfer a CD over standard dialup a connection.
-----------
For a weekly newspaper subscription, this is not exactly *where it's at*. For a monthly subscription though, it could be. Assuming you can actually provide your content in roughly 325 megs... This would cut our estimates down to 13-25hours. Such a document could easily be retrieved if you downloaded something for a week at between 2-4hours a day connect time.
This is by NO means terrific, but I can see it as being do able for a monthly publication of somesort.
I was running BSD for a short period of time way back in the later half of the 1990s. Basicly solaris was slowaris on my sparc and it was a legit option so hey. So technicaly I started with SunOS.
Near as I can remember, the last BSD distro for the PC I tried was probally Freebsd, which has exactly what you described, nice hardware detection and somewhat slick desktop. It even detected my Linksys netcard where redhat failed (circa 2000).
The only thing I really miss from FreeBSD is the ftp client has a nice text status bar.
I went with linux though for a few reasons, primarly because most of the software I want works with minium tweeking, as in the people who develop the software are usually running linux. Also the fact that all the crap you need is on CDs. This choice was made when I had a 56k connection mind you, and I was spending most of my time hunting around the net for trivial crap.
Hey, i'd agree with you 100% here. It is indeed their service, and they have every right to restrict access to whom ever they choose.
However, to offer PAY licenses for 3rd parties is just freaking nutty. The logic "Running an (IM) network is expensive" is incorrect to assume that *your* free software is somehow more profitable then someone else's free software, which technicaly could be true if the adverts pay for the service.
Ok then... allow license to use the service but conform to the advert system. This would *suck* for many end users, but then microsoft couldn't use the excuse about profit.
Better yet, what's wrong with a paper copy?
Ummm... perhaps because paper can't remember if you looked at it or not?
I get most if this information via text anyway... It doesn't matter to me if the staff attorney has their reproductive organs externaly or otherwise, nor if they can see their feet if standing upright.
At one point in history, Adobe did have a version of Photoshop for Solaris 2. Part of the reason I know this was I was looking into big ass monitors in the mid 1990's, and discovered I could get into a sun with a big ass screen with a buttload of ram for about the cost of a new big ass multi-sync monitor, and the same chap that was selling used Sun equipment also had copies of Photoshop for sale. Plus my scanner had NO win95 support, but did have Sane support. For your average user, this wasn't what you would call an acceptable solution as it was a multi-grand software package where PC editions were just under a grand. Near as I can remember, there was NO option for for direct purchace of a *nix edition. X support was really quite spiffy.
I think version 3.x was the last version for the Sun but it leads me to ask.... if they developed a Solaris edition, why have they not bothered with a BSD/Linux edition.
if your buying a namebrand system (especially M$ henchmen Dell) you should expect to agree to every EULA ever written for any and every version of Windows
The problem is the fact that they present this screen which logs on your hard disk that you have already read all the approperate EULA. While I personaly just click through the shit personaly, I can appricate the fact that in a business enviroment that this is simply unacceptable. I think the complaint was the fact that these materials were not made available to the end user for review before pressing "any key".
Even DigitalConvergence with their wonderful cuecat device would send you their EULA via fax upon request, or by US-post.
Now... since Dell was smart enough to have a dedicated partition to hold this little bootstrap and screen, they should also go that extra step and actually INCLUDE THE FUCKING EULAs. If you do in it ascii you can probally fit all the approperate EULAs in under a few megabytes.
I find it shocking that we naturaly assume that cd to HD copy involves *ripping*. Somewhere around here I have an old toshiba 2x drive which doesn't offer that new fangled protected track protection. It will copy tracks as files without *ripping* without bit errors.
It's difficult if not impossible to duplicate a hardware lock (parallel port dongle), and it costs money to do.
The average joe can't duplicate a port dongle, but it's not like it can't be done. I remember this was the fad in the 1980's. Usually if it's a popular application, someone will post the plans to duplicate it. PC users were most annoyed because they couldn't use their printer with the parallel port dongle, so they found cracked versions of the software.
If i'm not mistaken, f-protect offers free updates, though i'd have verify this. I use the dos version of their product, which is free for personal use, requires no subscription what so ever. It looks however on their page that their definitions can easily be downloaded.
e s. shtml
http://www.f-secure.com/download-purchase/updat
While I won't go as far as saying Symantec *should* give away free updates, but i'm saying these other people do. Symantec after all pretty much gives away their product with the purchace of many motherboards / systems. I don't honestly know where they get these pirate numbers from.
Now if you could easily download updates from elsewhere and convert them into Symantec antivirus readable form, that would resolve the issue all together, as far as them being jarheads that is.
An ISP needs legit customers.
No, an isp needs customers, legit or otherwise.
Under the Spews model, there is no reward for corrected behavier. So while an ISP may get blocked for supporting spamers, there is no motovation to stop if there is no reward involved. If they loose all their legit customers due to blocking, guess who pays their bills? *The Spammers*.
This has been noted many times when legit people pick up blacklisted IP addresses. They are stick stuck with the legacy of prior abuse whether their intent is legit or not. This ends up being counter productive because an ISP holding these blacklisted blocks can't get legit customers.
The idea should be to encourage ISPs to conform to a set of rules regarding spam, rather then blanket blacklisting. Without an acceptable procedure to address legit customers the "Don't punish me because my ISP supports spammers! Wah!" crowd wins. ISPs who are actually concerned with getting legit e-mail would have second thoughts about adopting a Spews like standard for fear of loosing legit customers.
In a pigs eye. I understand where they are comming from, really I do. However Spews's mision statement of attempting to encourage real users to move from their spam infected ISP just didn't work. If all the real users left, and only spammers remained, it does jack shit for discouraging that form of behavier. If all the real users just switched to hotmail, again it does jack shit to discourage the behavier. The only way that their mission would be successful if their list was in wide spread use cutting off the spammers income and making it a pointless business venture.
While quite a few people actually used spews, mailadmins whom i've spoken with pretty much didn't want the headache complaints generated both spammers and legit users attempting to get e-mail out.
On the other hand, Xfree86 on Cygwin [cygwin.com] is free - as in beer and as in Xfree license.
I'll have to give Cygwin and Xfree86 a try again. One thing that I enjoy about Starnet is the fact that you can run Gnome and have it totaly incorperated into your windows desktop 100% transparently. And Starnet was lightning fast over my lan.
I haven't tried the Hummingbird or WRQ solutions to be honest, I was pretty happy with starnet. However, if there was a reasonable TTY solution I probally wouldn't have bothered getting DSL.
I talked to one ISP that was using SPEWS and he had it as first line or defense with no possible way to whitelist anyone. It is nice to know that everyone out there is not blindly acting as they did.
Usually the argument is that Spews them selves isn't blacklisting people but it's rather the ISPs who are blacklisting. That's just bonehead logic cause Spews like any other similar service makes a freaking list.
To be honest, i'd have to read the sendmail docs to see how easy it would be to whitelist someone, but i'm sure it could be done. I have full empathy for people in Brazil who are victims of full fleged blacklistings. Granted my userbase isn't large at all, but if someone was indeed blacklisted and had just cause to e-mail someone on my machine, and at the very least had a fixed ip address, then by all means i'd look into it.
I agree with the bonehead admins to an extent, the fact that there are certain blocks that are proven to be troublesome. But that is no excuse for not having a valid procedure to actually whitelisting actual users.
Now what i'm curious about is if it would be reasonable to configure sendmail or other mail package to rather then "reject" flagged spam sites off the bat to put them on hold, making sure that you keep their outbound port open as long as possible.
Blocking entire IP blocks is nothing short of techie-terrorism. In other words, you can't convince the real wrong doers to stop, so you harm the innocent bystanders to try to get them to revolt.
In some cases blocking whole IP blocks was justified. I prefer spamhaus as a whole due becaue it makes my life easier making a valued judgement whether or not to block a whole block.
Spews does not seem to acknoloage the fact that they practice a form of censorship by encouraging others to censor out specific sites. What I find worse are their users who don't seem to understand that they are censoring sites. I use spamhaus my self and I freely admit i'm the final censor who is engaging in the censorship of unsolisited marketing materials.
Why, except for a pathetic fetish for obsolete technology, would you want to use a text-based interface to your X-Server?
If you are stuck with 56k, I can see this being very handy, very very handy! While yes we have faster then dialup connections, they are not all available from everywhere. Also, if you are with an ISP that bills based on byte use, I can see this as being most excelent.
Also... if you are stuck in the Windows world, Xservers can be damn costly. Starnet for example charges $245 for their X-server. I assume since it can operate via TTY that it can also operate via ssh/telnet.
Lastly, the more complex you make the plumbing, the easier it is to stuff up the drain. One thing nice about pathetic obsolete terminals is the fact that they work, they always work. The server may go down, but you know full well that ye' old terminal isn't very likely to fail. They don't need upgrades, patches, and in them selves can't get a worm/virus.