I dropped Quickbooks in favour of letting a bookkeeper take care of my books, I noticed QB becoming more and more bloated each year and of course they practically force a yearly upgrade on your anyway, which in my case works out to about the same cost as just handing over my books to the bookkeeper and saying "go for it!".
I really doubt QB will ever be ported to Linux, it relies heavily on IE to render its windows, it relies heavily on Outlook Express for sending out invoices (not sure if they fixed that but try using Thunderbird as you default mail application and see what it does to QB).
QB used to be the main reason I stuck to Windows as well, but frustration got the better of me and besides, accounting isn't my cup of tea and more often than not I was months behind in entering anything into Quickbooks.
Yup, I was born and raised in the UK until I was 13 at which time we emigrated to Canada. I still have family in the UK, but I have no desire to visit thanks to what I consider invasive monitoring and a problem with their youth being a tad violent, even with all the monitoring apparently.
The place is only a few steps away from Orwell's 1984.
Showtime has always struggled to compete with HBO it seems, at first I think Dead Like Me was their answer to competing with Six Feet Under, I personally liked DLM more than SFU but I guess the person who gets to run SHO just didn't like the show so he/she pulled the plug.
They've done the same to other shows I think too, you'll just get into the show and suddenly all mention of it will be gone from the channel itself and their website. You have to go search Google to find out what happened and usually it is just quietly cancelled.
I guess we should be thankful that Stargate SG1 managed to get a long run there before moving to SciFi.
Showtime are bad for this, Dead Like Me was a quirky show that gained decent ratings and critics liked it, we were enjoying it but then apparently the head of Showtime personally didn't like the show and cancelled it. Nice.
No more subscription to Showtime for this household, there is no use getting into watching one of their series if they're always going to get cancelled fairly early on. In that case I'll just download them.
Definitely, I have swapped out all my old WD and Maxtors in favour of the 80GB Samsung drives, they were also one the first drive makers to bring back the 3 year warranty.
They are fast little drives and with the fluid bearings are quite a bit quieter than the drives they replaced.
Actually the 942 DVR (I have the Canadian equiv., Bell ExpressVu 9200) has a nifty modulator built in to the thing. It will output on ch. 21-69 UHF or also on the higher cable band so you can actually integrate it with existing household cable. Even if you had cable you could put the PVR on say ch. 120 or something so as not to interfere with the cable chans.
The 942 also includes a second UHF remote for the TV2 feature, basically the receiver acts in two modes, in single mode both TV1 and TV2 show the same content and can be controlled by either remote. In dual mode you have seperate content going to each TV, each acts basically like a seperate receiver entirely. Each TV can be watching seperate live or recorded material.
The 942 has 2 satellite tuners built in, you can record 2 shows at once from it (HD or SD), plus it also has a OTA tuner inside so if you can receiver OTA digital you can actually record 3 programs at once.
Oh, and that modulated output, it is a MTS stereo output so the remote TVs also get full stereo sound over the coax, very few consumer receivers have that feature, I've seen it on a few analog Cband receivers before and maybe the odd high end VCR.
Overall the 942 is a pretty sweet satellite receiver. Just wish it held more than 25 hours of HD content:)
Re:Where are the Editor's Choice CRTs??
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CNET's HDTV World
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· Score: 1
We purchased a Panasonic PT-47X54 (47" CRT RPTV) in February of this year from Sears here in Canada, we are very happy with the resulting HD picture this puppy pumps out. It does require a bit of screwing with the convergence but once setup it looks very good.
This unit was in third spot behind 2 Sony's on the Consumer Reports review of HD sets, it wasn't far behind either, it was also much cheaper than the Sony units.
We paid $1,799 CAD for it, today the same set is $1,499 from Sears.
HD looks freaking sweet on it, dependent on source of course, from Cband 4Dtv HBO-HD is clear and very nice to watch, while from an overcompressed pizza dish (ExpressVU) it is still better than DVD quality but somewhat softer for the most part, some stuff they have does look good.
One nice thing, I get to see Stargate Atlantis in HD on Canada's movie services, although we don't get Universal HD so no Battlestar Galactica for us.
Overall I don't watch very many SD programs these days.
Is anyone working on some sort of magnetic shielding? Basically simulate the natural shielding that is protecting us here on earth.
I'm beginning to wonder if one of the reasons we aren't seeing tons of alien races around the galaxy is because it is near impossible to migrate from your home planet.
I had a call yesterday from a client, his PC which I recently reformatted and installed Win2K on for him was freezing up, apparently something to do with the floppy drive since that is when it froze as he was trying to open his "financial docs" at the time.
I asked why he couldn't just copy the file to the hard drive and the open it.. "umm, don't want the other office staff accessing this file".. *sigh*.. so looks like a service call to figure out what is up.
He also said that since the switch (from Win98 installed circa 1997) all his Word docs have mysteriously converted themselves to PDF files, I tried to explain that without the proper software to do that the computer just cannot magically convert files to other formats but apparently somehow the ghosts that lurk inside computers did so on his system.
I did manage to give him hassle about buying the cheapest hardware he could find (Gigabyte motherboards with Duron CPUs) and that in his situation (they run the POS system at his pub and are used for financial stuff) he shouldn't be cheaping out to save a few bucks here and there.
Funny enough, I mention I can get him systems for $499 (CAD) that include 1 year warranty and come with WinXP but he just has to then show me some computers from "Generic Computers" that are maybe $50 cheaper with no mention of warranty and no operating system included.. *sigh*.. and I suppose I'm the one going to be stuck servicing them.
And just to add to this.. our abuse@ address does work as we use a catchall for our main account.
SPEWS went as far as blocking secondary DNS servers on a couple of different networks as well, for no reason other than an email address on our servers being used by this guy on one domain registration he did elsewhere, again, if he had used gmail.com, aol.com, hotmail.com or yahoo.com would SPEWS have listed their entire infrastructure to force their hand? Didn't think so, so why should we small hosts have to be treated like this when SPEWS don't have the balls to do the same to the large networks?
I really can't believe that the guy would be breaking Gmail TOS by listing a Gmail.com email address in a whois record.
No contact was made directly from SPEWS to us, nadda, there was nothing to ignore because nothing arrived.
And again, I had NO WAY of knowing this client was a spammer as he was NOT using my services to pursue that career goal he had and therefore he was also NOT in any shape or form breaking my terms of service.
This brought up another problem with my NOC, how am I supposed to terminate a client when said client is NOT breaking my TOS?
I am being asked to take SPEWS at their word that this person is a spammer, I was provided zero proof of such, said client was not using my services to spam nor were any of the domains he hosted with us tied to spam or any complaints of spamming, in fact he was a reseller and all the domains he had were in fact local clients in his home town.
Of course I had no choice but to dump the client as my NOC forced the issue but we were not really obligated to do anything as this person had not broken any of our terms of service agreements as he was not using any of our resources for spam activities and this was meerly a side business he had.
Basically SPEWS resorted to terrorism in this case becasuse while they claim spammers should get real jobs it apparently does not include them having legitimate hosting services on other networks.
You mean we just need to add "are you a spammer?" on the signup form and we'll always be able to tell if a client is legit?
Exactly how do you figure a legitimate hosting provider is going to know BEFOREHAND that a new client is a spammer?
Any hosting provider could inadvertantly host a spammer, heck I've been blacklisted because a client of mine was involved with spammers elsewhere outside my services and the client had not once used my servers as part of his spammer resources, how am I supposed to know that he is involved elsewhere though? I was never informed of it, just one day SPEWS has us listed and even has some of our secondary DNS servers listed, none of which had anything to do with propogating any actual spam.
And yet somehow, magically, we are supposed to just know our client is a spammer.
They never did explain to me why they didn't also list the guys cable company, his telco, his other utilities he used outside his spamming activities, I mean fair is fair, if you want to punish spammers just list every possible service company they deal with and be done with it.
I generally dislike shopping at Walmart because of those goofy looking rejects, but this changed recently when a new Walmart opened up even closer to where we live. We used to have to travel 45 minutes to the nearest Walmart in a larger city, but in the last 3 months another one has opened up in a town only 20 minutes from us, same size store too.
Well the one in the larger city is almost always chock full of rejects and it is simply a pain to get around in it due to there being so many people shopping there. Not so at this new Walmart, there is about 1/3 the amount of shoppers in it at any given time, it is quite a nice change.
As an added bonus for us a lower priced grocery chain also opened up a store right next to this new Walmart, so now we don't have to travel 45 minutes to those types of stores anymore but can get there in 20 minutes.
Our local stores are 10-20 minutes from our house, in essence those local stores are now going to lose out because these new lower priced outlets are almost just as close to us.
And again I state I doubt very much that they would have listed Gmail, AOL or any other large ISP had this user used an email address under those domains.
I'm all for getting rid of spammers, I run mail servers that filter as much of the crap as possible, however I am NOT a spam supporter and was mistakenly painted as one by SPEWS.
If what they did to me was correct then they should be listing the guys utility companies and anyone else who does business with him, right down to the corner shop where he buys milk.
Now had they warned me first, had they informed me about it, etc. I would have taken the steps necessary, but really the guy was doing zero spamming from my servers so technically he was within the TOS so it becomes quite tough to deal with.
It came down to "kick your client because he's a spammer, we're not providing you with proof we're just telling you he's a spammer".
Don't worry, I informed the NOC of the displeasure of them taking SPEWS so seriously when this was obviously something I had no knowledge of and could not have known about.
They lost business from us over it and other things, btw, the NOC was the same one that bought that SCO license which was the final straw.
I've had run ins with SPEWS, they don't just list IP addresses that are spamming but will also list IPs only slightly associated with a spammer.
Example, I had a long term hosting reselling client, he had sites relevant to the local area he lived in at the time, mostly some sites based around Oregon, etc and they were all perfectly legitimate sites. He had never relayed any spam via my servers.
After a couple of years this fellow had taken to working with some of the big spammers, he was doing this elsewhere and I had absolutely zero knowledge of it as the account he had with us was still perfectly normal.
One day I get a call from our NOC that one of our servers had been disconnected due to a SPEWS listing and they were going to terminate my server entirely. I was shocked, I had no idea why and they finally pointed me to the SPEWS listing on the newsgroups.
What had happened was this person had used an email address on the domain he hosted with me as a contact for another domain he was using elsewhere, all of sudden this made me "spam friendly" apparently.
This person caused trouble on several of my servers also because of secondary DNS, SPEWS actually started listing my secondary DNS boxes because of this.
I was quite pissed off because of all of this because my company had zero knowledge of what this client was doing elsewhere and we had nothing at all to do with any spam deliveries and yet we were branded guilty with little choice in booting the client and then begging SPEWS to delist us.
Our TOS states we don't allow spam to generate from our clients nor do we allow it to generate elsewhere pointing towards their domain names hosted with us. It doesn't state we can dictate what they do elsewhere however and frankly we have no business knowing what our clients do elsewhere.
It took two seperate tries to fix this problem, we were delisted only to be relisted again later for the exact same thing and this was after we had completely removed the client from our servers. Our NOC had access to our server and I told them to look for themselves to see we had long since removed the client but had no control over what DNS servers they listed in their zone records, that was the issue the second time, our DNS servers still appearing in the zone records was enough apparently, even if we'd long since removed the domains and zones from our DNS.
In short SPEWS caused hours of downtime for our clients due to a false accusation, we were never informed by anyone at SPEWS this client had ties elsewhere and we had never had any spam sent via our server.
Quite honestly, had SPEWS been a local office I would have probably shown up with a baseball bat and beat some common sense into them for a while.
SPEWS it one of the RBL's that will NOT be used on any mail server we have control over. They proved to us that they are very prone to over reaction. What really makes me mad is would they have listed AOL if the guy had used his AOL email address instead? How about Hotmail? Gmail? Doubtful.
As I asked them, are they listing the guys cable company? His utility providers? The restaurants he eats at?
As a hosting provider I offer both ports 25 and port 26 to clients who have blocking from their ISPs.
All CPanel based hosts can easily enable this in the system control panel, I only have one CPanel box and this works well.
On the regular systems you can either do it via a second process listening on port 26 or alternatively you can use IPTABLES to redirect port 26 to port 25 easy enough.
I had little choice in offering this option since clients on various ISPs have port 25 blocked, in some cases (Telus) they won't even tell the customer the port is blocked and instead blame the hosting provider, pretty pathetic actually.
Since I also consult a few ISPs I have recommended to them to close that port outbound except via their own SMTP server and to open it for those who request it be open with the caveat of if they ever get infected it gets closed and remains closed.
Our local ISP was faced with a choice, invest in some hefty hardware to keep up with the ever increasing noise coming into the SMTP server and continue to hear complaints from his clients or start using RBL lists and spam filters.
We went the RBL list route, it was cheaper than accomodating the spammers that's for sure, this is a dialup ISP that has a steadily declining userbase as customers switch to broadband, why should he be forced to invest in powerful hardware to handle email that worked fine for his client base until the spammers began to abuse it?
These days he filters with RBLs at the frontdoor, then if they make it past those they are processed through SpamAssassin for scoring, if they hit 10+ then the connection is dropped entirely.
His customers are happy, he is happy, his tech support staff is happy. Those that don't like the filters can have them disabled for their accounts and there is an alternate address they can use that doesn't have RBL filtering.
When a client goes from 100+ to around 10 spams per day they tend to be quite thankful, so some legitimate commercial mail might be bounced, very rarely though and those can be whitelisted easily enough.
Nice thing for him, he recently gained DLS services for his business and some people like his low spam email services they cancelled their other broadband and went back to his service.
Tucows are usually pretty good at dealing with non-responsive resellers and they will help you find a responsive reseller to transfer the domain to. At the very least they will help you maintain ownership of a domain.
I mentioned something like this to an ex boss of mine... for some reason he killed himself a while later. I've always had a nagging feeling that I shouldn't have mentioned it to him because it does tend to give you a "who gives a rats ass" attitude towards many things.
I'm with you there, I used to troubleshoot Windows for friends and family, not more except for immediate family members and even then they are now quite trained at remaining virus free after the first couple infections.
On my business side of things I do not offer Windows support outside of very basic stuff because it is just too much of a pain, like you say, after the first visit you are suddenly responsible for anything that goes wrong apparently, even when you've never even looked at the PC with issues, must have been something you did over the network.
Since I focus more on Linux and run Linux at home I do have local clients who require some Linux admin stuff once in a while, but even those clients still call up with questions about Windows workstation problems, I generally tell them I cannot help them as I don't use Windows at my home office, etc.
My wife once come home asking about removing viruses, etc. for a friend of hers, I told her at least $100 which resulted in them looking elsewhere, a local shop did it for $25, all the power to them I say since I value my time more than that I guess.
That local shop though, now they too charge in the $100 range for that type of work, I guess they figured it out after they realized each PC could take 2 or 3 hours to fix at times. At $25 a shot you have the same morons coming back weekly basically.
Re:So When Piracy Causes The End Of Freedom....
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Canada Says No To DMCA
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The whole grow op angle bugged me from the getgo, especially when it was disclosed the original reason the cops were there was nothing to do with the pot, they just discovered that during the search for stolen property that had taken them there.
Of course the RCMP are playing up the pot as much as possible since it is in their vested interest for the current laws to remain and/or tougher laws to be on the books. They were among the first to put up a stink when the government said it was looking to lessen charges involving weed.
All for a plant that some guy in the 20's didn't really like and he used a bunch of false information to make it illegal. Reefer Madness anyone?
It is a plant! I cannot believe we as a species are so holier than thou that we think we can declare entire plant species as "illegal". Pathetic waste of tax monies enforcing it and it amounts to little but a make work project for those in society who believe they have the right to dictate what others can and cannot do to their bodies.
Nobody has overdosed and died from smoking weed, meanwhile thousands die every year from alcohol poisoning, go figure.
" The "world" started with the Big Bang, according to current established scientific knowledge."
Umm, the "universe" started with a Big Bang according to current theories, the "world" (as in planet we live on) came about much much later, indeed, if the universe is 15 billion years old our planet is about 4.5 billion years old, so the "world" has only existed for 1/3 the age of the universe (as we currently believe it to be).
That alone should be a clue to the religious folks, considering humanity is but a blink in geological time even compared to our home biosphere's age does this mean we are but an afterthought to this supposed "god"?
But then I know a few folks who still believe that Earth holds the only life in the universe, yup, all that empty space, all those gas clouds holding the same ingredients we have here, all the diversity of life on our own planet and yet we are somehow "special" eh?
We are but talking monkeys, some of which just cannot accept random chance, they cannot accept mortality and they cannot accept death as the final destination. It is though, but luckily, just like you were completely unaware of existence before you were born you will be just as unaware of it once you die.
That bunch will block a whole lotta spam before it ever gets to discuss sending mail with the SMTP server.
Next, SimScan from Inter7.com, this little c app runs at the front end of the SMTP process, it will scan incoming mail at SMTP level with ClamAV and SpamAssassin, anything scoring over 10 in SA is dropped at SMTP level with a 5xx error.
SimScan allows you to fine tune settings on a per domain and per user level if you so desire, so it is easy to turn SA off entirely for a user who wants all the spam they can get, ditto for those who'd rather not be protected from viruses.
Using these features you stop a LOT of spam, likely in the 80% or higher range. Most domains we've applied this to have gone from hundreds per day to less than 10 per day.
It is imperative you also use the SURBL features in SA to stop more spam than ever, you should also use Razor2, DCC and Pyzor. I suggest upping the Razor2 scores a bit as well the defaults are quite low.
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I dropped Quickbooks in favour of letting a bookkeeper take care of my books, I noticed QB becoming more and more bloated each year and of course they practically force a yearly upgrade on your anyway, which in my case works out to about the same cost as just handing over my books to the bookkeeper and saying "go for it!".
I really doubt QB will ever be ported to Linux, it relies heavily on IE to render its windows, it relies heavily on Outlook Express for sending out invoices (not sure if they fixed that but try using Thunderbird as you default mail application and see what it does to QB).
QB used to be the main reason I stuck to Windows as well, but frustration got the better of me and besides, accounting isn't my cup of tea and more often than not I was months behind in entering anything into Quickbooks.
Yup, I was born and raised in the UK until I was 13 at which time we emigrated to Canada. I still have family in the UK, but I have no desire to visit thanks to what I consider invasive monitoring and a problem with their youth being a tad violent, even with all the monitoring apparently.
The place is only a few steps away from Orwell's 1984.
Showtime has always struggled to compete with HBO it seems, at first I think Dead Like Me was their answer to competing with Six Feet Under, I personally liked DLM more than SFU but I guess the person who gets to run SHO just didn't like the show so he/she pulled the plug.
They've done the same to other shows I think too, you'll just get into the show and suddenly all mention of it will be gone from the channel itself and their website. You have to go search Google to find out what happened and usually it is just quietly cancelled.
I guess we should be thankful that Stargate SG1 managed to get a long run there before moving to SciFi.
Showtime are bad for this, Dead Like Me was a quirky show that gained decent ratings and critics liked it, we were enjoying it but then apparently the head of Showtime personally didn't like the show and cancelled it. Nice.
No more subscription to Showtime for this household, there is no use getting into watching one of their series if they're always going to get cancelled fairly early on. In that case I'll just download them.
Definitely, I have swapped out all my old WD and Maxtors in favour of the 80GB Samsung drives, they were also one the first drive makers to bring back the 3 year warranty.
They are fast little drives and with the fluid bearings are quite a bit quieter than the drives they replaced.
Actually the 942 DVR (I have the Canadian equiv., Bell ExpressVu 9200) has a nifty modulator built in to the thing. It will output on ch. 21-69 UHF or also on the higher cable band so you can actually integrate it with existing household cable. Even if you had cable you could put the PVR on say ch. 120 or something so as not to interfere with the cable chans.
:)
The 942 also includes a second UHF remote for the TV2 feature, basically the receiver acts in two modes, in single mode both TV1 and TV2 show the same content and can be controlled by either remote. In dual mode you have seperate content going to each TV, each acts basically like a seperate receiver entirely. Each TV can be watching seperate live or recorded material.
The 942 has 2 satellite tuners built in, you can record 2 shows at once from it (HD or SD), plus it also has a OTA tuner inside so if you can receiver OTA digital you can actually record 3 programs at once.
Oh, and that modulated output, it is a MTS stereo output so the remote TVs also get full stereo sound over the coax, very few consumer receivers have that feature, I've seen it on a few analog Cband receivers before and maybe the odd high end VCR.
Overall the 942 is a pretty sweet satellite receiver. Just wish it held more than 25 hours of HD content
We purchased a Panasonic PT-47X54 (47" CRT RPTV) in February of this year from Sears here in Canada, we are very happy with the resulting HD picture this puppy pumps out. It does require a bit of screwing with the convergence but once setup it looks very good.
This unit was in third spot behind 2 Sony's on the Consumer Reports review of HD sets, it wasn't far behind either, it was also much cheaper than the Sony units.
We paid $1,799 CAD for it, today the same set is $1,499 from Sears.
HD looks freaking sweet on it, dependent on source of course, from Cband 4Dtv HBO-HD is clear and very nice to watch, while from an overcompressed pizza dish (ExpressVU) it is still better than DVD quality but somewhat softer for the most part, some stuff they have does look good.
One nice thing, I get to see Stargate Atlantis in HD on Canada's movie services, although we don't get Universal HD so no Battlestar Galactica for us.
Overall I don't watch very many SD programs these days.
Is anyone working on some sort of magnetic shielding? Basically simulate the natural shielding that is protecting us here on earth.
I'm beginning to wonder if one of the reasons we aren't seeing tons of alien races around the galaxy is because it is near impossible to migrate from your home planet.
I had a call yesterday from a client, his PC which I recently reformatted and installed Win2K on for him was freezing up, apparently something to do with the floppy drive since that is when it froze as he was trying to open his "financial docs" at the time.
.. "umm, don't want the other office staff accessing this file" .. *sigh* .. so looks like a service call to figure out what is up.
.. *sigh* .. and I suppose I'm the one going to be stuck servicing them.
I asked why he couldn't just copy the file to the hard drive and the open it
He also said that since the switch (from Win98 installed circa 1997) all his Word docs have mysteriously converted themselves to PDF files, I tried to explain that without the proper software to do that the computer just cannot magically convert files to other formats but apparently somehow the ghosts that lurk inside computers did so on his system.
I did manage to give him hassle about buying the cheapest hardware he could find (Gigabyte motherboards with Duron CPUs) and that in his situation (they run the POS system at his pub and are used for financial stuff) he shouldn't be cheaping out to save a few bucks here and there.
Funny enough, I mention I can get him systems for $499 (CAD) that include 1 year warranty and come with WinXP but he just has to then show me some computers from "Generic Computers" that are maybe $50 cheaper with no mention of warranty and no operating system included
And just to add to this .. our abuse@ address does work as we use a catchall for our main account.
SPEWS went as far as blocking secondary DNS servers on a couple of different networks as well, for no reason other than an email address on our servers being used by this guy on one domain registration he did elsewhere, again, if he had used gmail.com, aol.com, hotmail.com or yahoo.com would SPEWS have listed their entire infrastructure to force their hand? Didn't think so, so why should we small hosts have to be treated like this when SPEWS don't have the balls to do the same to the large networks?
I really can't believe that the guy would be breaking Gmail TOS by listing a Gmail.com email address in a whois record.
No contact was made directly from SPEWS to us, nadda, there was nothing to ignore because nothing arrived.
And again, I had NO WAY of knowing this client was a spammer as he was NOT using my services to pursue that career goal he had and therefore he was also NOT in any shape or form breaking my terms of service.
This brought up another problem with my NOC, how am I supposed to terminate a client when said client is NOT breaking my TOS?
I am being asked to take SPEWS at their word that this person is a spammer, I was provided zero proof of such, said client was not using my services to spam nor were any of the domains he hosted with us tied to spam or any complaints of spamming, in fact he was a reseller and all the domains he had were in fact local clients in his home town.
Of course I had no choice but to dump the client as my NOC forced the issue but we were not really obligated to do anything as this person had not broken any of our terms of service agreements as he was not using any of our resources for spam activities and this was meerly a side business he had.
Basically SPEWS resorted to terrorism in this case becasuse while they claim spammers should get real jobs it apparently does not include them having legitimate hosting services on other networks.
You mean we just need to add "are you a spammer?" on the signup form and we'll always be able to tell if a client is legit?
Exactly how do you figure a legitimate hosting provider is going to know BEFOREHAND that a new client is a spammer?
Any hosting provider could inadvertantly host a spammer, heck I've been blacklisted because a client of mine was involved with spammers elsewhere outside my services and the client had not once used my servers as part of his spammer resources, how am I supposed to know that he is involved elsewhere though? I was never informed of it, just one day SPEWS has us listed and even has some of our secondary DNS servers listed, none of which had anything to do with propogating any actual spam.
And yet somehow, magically, we are supposed to just know our client is a spammer.
They never did explain to me why they didn't also list the guys cable company, his telco, his other utilities he used outside his spamming activities, I mean fair is fair, if you want to punish spammers just list every possible service company they deal with and be done with it.
I generally dislike shopping at Walmart because of those goofy looking rejects, but this changed recently when a new Walmart opened up even closer to where we live. We used to have to travel 45 minutes to the nearest Walmart in a larger city, but in the last 3 months another one has opened up in a town only 20 minutes from us, same size store too.
Well the one in the larger city is almost always chock full of rejects and it is simply a pain to get around in it due to there being so many people shopping there. Not so at this new Walmart, there is about 1/3 the amount of shoppers in it at any given time, it is quite a nice change.
As an added bonus for us a lower priced grocery chain also opened up a store right next to this new Walmart, so now we don't have to travel 45 minutes to those types of stores anymore but can get there in 20 minutes.
Our local stores are 10-20 minutes from our house, in essence those local stores are now going to lose out because these new lower priced outlets are almost just as close to us.
And again I state I doubt very much that they would have listed Gmail, AOL or any other large ISP had this user used an email address under those domains.
I'm all for getting rid of spammers, I run mail servers that filter as much of the crap as possible, however I am NOT a spam supporter and was mistakenly painted as one by SPEWS.
If what they did to me was correct then they should be listing the guys utility companies and anyone else who does business with him, right down to the corner shop where he buys milk.
Now had they warned me first, had they informed me about it, etc. I would have taken the steps necessary, but really the guy was doing zero spamming from my servers so technically he was within the TOS so it becomes quite tough to deal with.
It came down to "kick your client because he's a spammer, we're not providing you with proof we're just telling you he's a spammer".
Don't worry, I informed the NOC of the displeasure of them taking SPEWS so seriously when this was obviously something I had no knowledge of and could not have known about.
They lost business from us over it and other things, btw, the NOC was the same one that bought that SCO license which was the final straw.
I've had run ins with SPEWS, they don't just list IP addresses that are spamming but will also list IPs only slightly associated with a spammer.
Example, I had a long term hosting reselling client, he had sites relevant to the local area he lived in at the time, mostly some sites based around Oregon, etc and they were all perfectly legitimate sites. He had never relayed any spam via my servers.
After a couple of years this fellow had taken to working with some of the big spammers, he was doing this elsewhere and I had absolutely zero knowledge of it as the account he had with us was still perfectly normal.
One day I get a call from our NOC that one of our servers had been disconnected due to a SPEWS listing and they were going to terminate my server entirely. I was shocked, I had no idea why and they finally pointed me to the SPEWS listing on the newsgroups.
What had happened was this person had used an email address on the domain he hosted with me as a contact for another domain he was using elsewhere, all of sudden this made me "spam friendly" apparently.
This person caused trouble on several of my servers also because of secondary DNS, SPEWS actually started listing my secondary DNS boxes because of this.
I was quite pissed off because of all of this because my company had zero knowledge of what this client was doing elsewhere and we had nothing at all to do with any spam deliveries and yet we were branded guilty with little choice in booting the client and then begging SPEWS to delist us.
Our TOS states we don't allow spam to generate from our clients nor do we allow it to generate elsewhere pointing towards their domain names hosted with us. It doesn't state we can dictate what they do elsewhere however and frankly we have no business knowing what our clients do elsewhere.
It took two seperate tries to fix this problem, we were delisted only to be relisted again later for the exact same thing and this was after we had completely removed the client from our servers. Our NOC had access to our server and I told them to look for themselves to see we had long since removed the client but had no control over what DNS servers they listed in their zone records, that was the issue the second time, our DNS servers still appearing in the zone records was enough apparently, even if we'd long since removed the domains and zones from our DNS.
In short SPEWS caused hours of downtime for our clients due to a false accusation, we were never informed by anyone at SPEWS this client had ties elsewhere and we had never had any spam sent via our server.
Quite honestly, had SPEWS been a local office I would have probably shown up with a baseball bat and beat some common sense into them for a while.
SPEWS it one of the RBL's that will NOT be used on any mail server we have control over. They proved to us that they are very prone to over reaction. What really makes me mad is would they have listed AOL if the guy had used his AOL email address instead? How about Hotmail? Gmail? Doubtful.
As I asked them, are they listing the guys cable company? His utility providers? The restaurants he eats at?
As a hosting provider I offer both ports 25 and port 26 to clients who have blocking from their ISPs.
All CPanel based hosts can easily enable this in the system control panel, I only have one CPanel box and this works well.
On the regular systems you can either do it via a second process listening on port 26 or alternatively you can use IPTABLES to redirect port 26 to port 25 easy enough.
I had little choice in offering this option since clients on various ISPs have port 25 blocked, in some cases (Telus) they won't even tell the customer the port is blocked and instead blame the hosting provider, pretty pathetic actually.
Since I also consult a few ISPs I have recommended to them to close that port outbound except via their own SMTP server and to open it for those who request it be open with the caveat of if they ever get infected it gets closed and remains closed.
Err DSL services is what he gained .. doh! :)
Our local ISP was faced with a choice, invest in some hefty hardware to keep up with the ever increasing noise coming into the SMTP server and continue to hear complaints from his clients or start using RBL lists and spam filters.
We went the RBL list route, it was cheaper than accomodating the spammers that's for sure, this is a dialup ISP that has a steadily declining userbase as customers switch to broadband, why should he be forced to invest in powerful hardware to handle email that worked fine for his client base until the spammers began to abuse it?
These days he filters with RBLs at the frontdoor, then if they make it past those they are processed through SpamAssassin for scoring, if they hit 10+ then the connection is dropped entirely.
His customers are happy, he is happy, his tech support staff is happy. Those that don't like the filters can have them disabled for their accounts and there is an alternate address they can use that doesn't have RBL filtering.
When a client goes from 100+ to around 10 spams per day they tend to be quite thankful, so some legitimate commercial mail might be bounced, very rarely though and those can be whitelisted easily enough.
Nice thing for him, he recently gained DLS services for his business and some people like his low spam email services they cancelled their other broadband and went back to his service.
Tucows are usually pretty good at dealing with non-responsive resellers and they will help you find a responsive reseller to transfer the domain to. At the very least they will help you maintain ownership of a domain.
I mentioned something like this to an ex boss of mine ... for some reason he killed himself a while later. I've always had a nagging feeling that I shouldn't have mentioned it to him because it does tend to give you a "who gives a rats ass" attitude towards many things.
I'm with you there, I used to troubleshoot Windows for friends and family, not more except for immediate family members and even then they are now quite trained at remaining virus free after the first couple infections.
On my business side of things I do not offer Windows support outside of very basic stuff because it is just too much of a pain, like you say, after the first visit you are suddenly responsible for anything that goes wrong apparently, even when you've never even looked at the PC with issues, must have been something you did over the network.
Since I focus more on Linux and run Linux at home I do have local clients who require some Linux admin stuff once in a while, but even those clients still call up with questions about Windows workstation problems, I generally tell them I cannot help them as I don't use Windows at my home office, etc.
My wife once come home asking about removing viruses, etc. for a friend of hers, I told her at least $100 which resulted in them looking elsewhere, a local shop did it for $25, all the power to them I say since I value my time more than that I guess.
That local shop though, now they too charge in the $100 range for that type of work, I guess they figured it out after they realized each PC could take 2 or 3 hours to fix at times. At $25 a shot you have the same morons coming back weekly basically.
The whole grow op angle bugged me from the getgo, especially when it was disclosed the original reason the cops were there was nothing to do with the pot, they just discovered that during the search for stolen property that had taken them there.
Of course the RCMP are playing up the pot as much as possible since it is in their vested interest for the current laws to remain and/or tougher laws to be on the books. They were among the first to put up a stink when the government said it was looking to lessen charges involving weed.
All for a plant that some guy in the 20's didn't really like and he used a bunch of false information to make it illegal. Reefer Madness anyone?
It is a plant! I cannot believe we as a species are so holier than thou that we think we can declare entire plant species as "illegal". Pathetic waste of tax monies enforcing it and it amounts to little but a make work project for those in society who believe they have the right to dictate what others can and cannot do to their bodies.
Nobody has overdosed and died from smoking weed, meanwhile thousands die every year from alcohol poisoning, go figure.
" The "world" started with the Big Bang, according to current established scientific knowledge."
Umm, the "universe" started with a Big Bang according to current theories, the "world" (as in planet we live on) came about much much later, indeed, if the universe is 15 billion years old our planet is about 4.5 billion years old, so the "world" has only existed for 1/3 the age of the universe (as we currently believe it to be).
That alone should be a clue to the religious folks, considering humanity is but a blink in geological time even compared to our home biosphere's age does this mean we are but an afterthought to this supposed "god"?
But then I know a few folks who still believe that Earth holds the only life in the universe, yup, all that empty space, all those gas clouds holding the same ingredients we have here, all the diversity of life on our own planet and yet we are somehow "special" eh?
We are but talking monkeys, some of which just cannot accept random chance, they cannot accept mortality and they cannot accept death as the final destination. It is though, but luckily, just like you were completely unaware of existence before you were born you will be just as unaware of it once you die.
I manage a couple ISP incoming MTAs, they come looking for a anti-spam and anti-virus solution which is easy to provide them in OSS land.
...
First Qmail setup to use RBLs
cbl.abuseat.org sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org relays.ordb.org dynablock.njabl.org list.dsbl.org dul.dnsbl.sorbs.net
That bunch will block a whole lotta spam before it ever gets to discuss sending mail with the SMTP server.
Next, SimScan from Inter7.com, this little c app runs at the front end of the SMTP process, it will scan incoming mail at SMTP level with ClamAV and SpamAssassin, anything scoring over 10 in SA is dropped at SMTP level with a 5xx error.
SimScan allows you to fine tune settings on a per domain and per user level if you so desire, so it is easy to turn SA off entirely for a user who wants all the spam they can get, ditto for those who'd rather not be protected from viruses.
Using these features you stop a LOT of spam, likely in the 80% or higher range. Most domains we've applied this to have gone from hundreds per day to less than 10 per day.
It is imperative you also use the SURBL features in SA to stop more spam than ever, you should also use Razor2, DCC and Pyzor. I suggest upping the Razor2 scores a bit as well the defaults are quite low.