Ok, assuming this is true (and I doubt that for the majority of spam it is - most regular open relays, for instance, are mal-configured Microsoft and Sendmail SMTP servers, which by default include origin information in the email headers), do you think that adding $50 ($20 for an ISP, $30 for a domain name) seriously adds that much to the cost of sending spam?
Btw, SPF proponents believe that domains can be blacklisted within the first hour through the use of honey pot addresses.
...as opposed to IP addresses the spam is coming from. It's a bit more accurate and less susceptable to false positives for ordinary cases, I guess, than something like SPEWS, but more open to abuse.
Further, purchase of a domain requires control of a credit card. The credit card can be traced. If nothing else, this can cost the purchaser use of that credit card (which may be stolen).
This is true of Internet access in general, so if SPF proponents are seriously arguing this, it means they're even less bright than I thought they were.
Remember: Spam isn't free to the spammer, it's just unmetered and cheap. Right now, spammers have to afford to buy a new Internet account for any spam they send. Adding $15-30 to that amount for a new domain name really doesn't significantly increase the amount in costs.
The reason spam is a huge problem and paper junk mail isn't is that spam is free to send. The postage cost for sending paper junk mail means that there's a limit on how much will get sent to me. It cost you money to register your domain name. If it gets blacklisted within the first 24 hours, then you've spent quite a bit of money just to be able to spam for 24 hours.
This is a falacy. The reason spam is a huge problem is that it's unmetered, not that it's free, it certainly isn't free. Spammers already spend a lot of money on subscribing to ISPs, I suspect the $20-30 to register a domain is a drop in the bucket.
We should also expect that ISPs will start to refuse mail when 1,000,000 mails come from a domain that was activated yesterday.
The domain doesn't have to have been activated yesterday. I gave the example to show how quick you can be, ie how quickly SPF can be defeated, but obviously a determined spammer can register "sleeper" domains months in advance, and probably would.
A tory is a member of the Conservative and Unionist Party of Great Britain, otherwise known as the Conservative Party, the Conservatives, or... the Tories. Traditionally, the Conservatives are right wing: tough on law and order, nasty on immigration, intolerant of subcultures, and poor on resolving economic inequalities.
The Liberal Democrats are broadly left wing, usually combining personal freedoms with regulated economics. So it's not a good fit.
FWIW, industry gossip has them trying to pull out of Verizon Wireless, but waiting for the right opportunity. At one point it looked like they may buy AT&T, other rumours have them hitting on T-Mobile.
The reason is that the partnership with Verizon has always been somewhat torturous. Originally, Vodafone bought a west coast mobile company that had partnered with Verizon (then Bell Atlantic) in a wireless venture called PrimeCo. Verizon threw a fit because they had wanted to run said mobile company. Worse, Verizon had decided they wanted CDMA for Bell Atlantic Mobile, as they'd done with PrimeCo, and Vodafone was very likely to want to convert the west coast operation to GSM. BAM immediately announced they wanted to close PrimeCo. PrimeCo was wound down, and at the last minute, Vodafone capitulated and offered to merge their US operations with Verizons into what then became Verizon Wireless.
If that sounds a little obnoxious, well, it was, and Vodafone has really played second fiddle to Verizon throughout the "partnership". They have a share in a mobile company that doesn't do GSM, and uses the half-arsed US version of the IS-95 standard, which doesn't even support SIM cards (if it did, you might see dual standard GSM/CDMA phones.)
So Vodafone wants out. They're waiting really for the opportunity. If T-Mobile sells the old Voicestream company (currently T-Mobile USA) they may take a bite at that, if the price is right.
Not because his website is particularly great, but because, if you View Source, you get...
Thanks for checking out our source code! I plan to use this space to post special messages to those who are helping to improve our web site -- by making our site the best it can be. The fact that you are peeking behind the scenes at our site means you can make an important difference to this Internet effort. I'm grateful for your help and support in this campaign. Now let's keep working to build the 21st Century of our dreams!
Al Gore
Because, as we all know, Al used to hand write his HTML...;-)
Yeah, it's on the front page at http://www.georgewbush.com, under the heading "Now we've blocked outside access to our website, here's what we're really going to do."
I also found the "Blair: He may be a dope, but he's OUR dope" article, and "Poland: They may support us, but they're next for the Shock 'n' Awe Treatment" articles most enlightening.
I think everyone would be somewhat relieved if the US government decided to limit its involvement in other country's elections to organizing letter writing campaigns. Definitely an improvement on Pinochet, or the Contras.
As for ordinary American citizens, they should feel free to write to anyone they want.
This is not to say I think it's a good idea, but then I didn't think the Guardian's campaign was a good idea either. Though I also didn't see it as ill-intentioned.
Hmmm. Well, I'm sure it's ok and well intentioned, it just looks bad.
On another topic, I hadn't been to www.georgewbush.com in a while, and I was surprised at "90% income tax for overseas nationals" was one of Bush's policies. He's usually against income taxes, I thought. And what do people think of the "Iraq: No new troops needed, all troops currently stationed in Iraq to remain there for 10 more years. That goes for those in Afghanistan too" policies?
This is the 21st Century. Our population centers, the sizes of population in certain areas, the types of food we buy and use, the jobs we used to purchase food, are all dependent on a particular type of infrastructure.
If the price of local calls went up to $1 a minute tomorrow, with long distance and mobile phone air time costing double that, do you think people could easily just throw their phones away, and still perform the same amount of business, ensuring the food is still delivered and paid for?
The "list" is given the somewhat odd filename caging.xls. Vague, but not exactly positive, as it appears to imply a negative use, and it's difficult to think of positive uses for the list anyway.
I guess if the box of paperclips had the label "Eye pokers", the analogy would be complete.
Vodafone uses GSM. W-CDMA is actually a UMTS system, and UMTS is best described as GSM version 2. Cingular implements both IS-136 and GSM, and is slowly moving up to some varient of UMTS.
As you say, Sprint PCS, Verizon Wireless, and ALLTEL use the IS-95 standard; Nextel uses "iDEN", a Motorola-designed technology which currently uses a time division, multiple access, air interface technology, but it's not related to IS-136 in any way (which is what people are normally refering to when they say "TDMA". I'm not sure if you meant that, but even if you didn't, I suspect others read that into your comment so I want to clarify)
I don't understand why what Apple is "aiming at" makes any difference to me at all. Either the product suits my needs, or it doesn't. Either I buy it, or I don't. Marketroids' predictions about what I am likely to spend my money on based on my age, gender, and income are spectacularly useless to me
That's fine, but in general when people make comments in public along the lines of "Too expensive/not useful", they're usually implying that the product will be unsuccessful. My original comment was aimed that that perception - sure, you don't want it, I don't want it either, personally, but I think it has potential to be successful regardless.
Libertarians are not your friends either. They will want to ease restrictions on work (and workers).
I'm not sure that's completely a bad thing, at least, not in terms of restrictions on who can be employed and where.
Part of the rush towards outsourcing has been because Americans over-priced themselves during the late nineties, Slashdotters frequently said they wouldn't accept a programming job that paid less than six digits. At the same time as this was happening, there was a backlash against H1-Bs, H1-Bs were being used as the sole method of increasing outside skills, and H1-Bs are, ultimately, not an attractive proposition for anyone outside of the US except a small minority of people who aren't tied down and do not want to become Americans. The backlash meant the INS enforced salary requirements - not as much as many wanted, but enough to ensure H1-Bs wouldn't have much affect.
So H1-Bs didn't push down salaries. Companies that employed H1-Bs got it in the neck. And it became more and more expensive to operate entire facilities within the US.
Hence outsourcing.
Now, take a more libertarian view on who you can employ and on immigration: make it easier for skilled people to come to the US (especially those who want to become Americans) and drop the salary restrictions. Suddenly it becomes much more affordable to operate entire facilities in the US. This keeps jobs and money within the country - yes, some of those jobs will come from people coming in, but it's not as if they're going to spend their entire salaries in other countries, which is what's happening now. As a whole, the numbers of jobs increase.
The problem is that immigration = more jobs is one of those equations that isn't intuitively obvious, and indeed runs counter to propaganda from anti-immigrant campaigns over the centuries. The fact is though that immigration does mean more jobs: it means more competition on salaries, which keeps jobs in the US because ultimately it has to be affordable to operate local facilities, and it means money stays in the US and gets spent in the US.
I don't agree with the entire Libertarian platform, but this is one of those things I think they have right. Now, if they can avoid gutting health and safety, and minimum salaries, at the same time, I'd even consider their position moral.
As an ex-member of the Liberal Democrats, I'm not sure I agree with you. The UK has a two party system with an additional "spoiler" party. The result is that, at least from 1979 to 1997, Britain had an immensely unpopular government that was difficult to get rid of. The current government seems, to me, to be more representative of how the British see themselves and is fractionally more popular than that government, but only because the "spoiler" at the moment is not a natural home, at the moment, for ex-Tories.
What the system seems to do is make sure the most organized, least factionalized, of the two main parties wins, regardless of how representative its values are.
I gave up membership of the Lib Dems after the last election because I looked at their manefesto and thought it was one of the worst, basist, appeals to popularism over rationality I'd seen in a long time. It was representative of a party that knew it wouldn't get elected and was only interested in broadening its support base. It's trying to do the same tactic as Ralph Nader is trying to do in the US, only it's significantly more successful and more damaging.
I post to/., have an iPod too, but that doesn't mean I think that any gadget Apple sells is aimed specifically at me. It happens they're very useful for a group that includes me.
As far as the picture iPod goes, I have no use for one. But I know friends of mine who are far from being gadget freaks who'd love such a thing.
Because you don't know which photos you're going to want to see.
It's the same principle as having an MP3 player with 5-30Megs of disk space instead of 64Mb. Sure, you're not going to want to listen to more than a handful of songs when you're away from your computer...
...but which songs are they going to be?
Likewise, do you really know what photos you're going to want to show the people at work? Do you really want to care, ahead of time, about making that selection?
Like I said, this improves the value of the iPod. If you know you can have both your music and your photo library on a unit you carry everywhere, it may be more valuable than just having your music on a unit you carry everywhere.
Many digital cameras have a higher resolution or larger LCD, most, in my experience, do not
Many digital cameras are small, credit card sized, units people would feel happy carrying everywhere. But most aren't
Most digital cameras have a decent amount of capacity, and can use inexpensive SD/MMC cards. However, the largest capacity MMC card that's generally affordable at the moment is somewhere in the region of 256Mb. If you're taking photos all the time, that's going to feel a little cramped.
Actually, it does make sense. I'm seeing a lot of people with camera phones who use them, for the most part, to show pictures they've collected to other people. The major limitation of them is that they can only store pictures they took with the phone. I have a friend who is in absolute love with her two nieces and any opportunity she has she'll use to show pictures, but for now it's been email (awkward to make sure it's with you when you want it) or camera phone (only shows pictures taken and not yet deleted) bound.
I predict that people who buy iPods with this will use it - people will store their entire digital photo libraries on it and whip out the iPod to show friends and family photos they've taken.
While this functionality will not sell iPods alone, I think it has great potential to make an iPod that's a "I'd kind of like this" into a "I really want this". Slashdotters are, as usual, not what this iPod's aimed at. Think more in terms of proud family members - mothers and aunts especially.
Why do you think layoffs are illegal there? And why else would they have a national health system?
That's totally irrelevent. Are all enterprises under the control of "the people" as a collective group (either in some Utopian way or via the government)? No? Well, then how the hell is it communist?
It sounds to me like you're saying that because a country has a few socialist laws, it must be communist. That's not right.
And yet- they've got a universal health care system and we don't.
Most modern, industrialised, nations do. I was unaware that communism had triumphed throughout most of the world, I thought it was pretty much universally accepted it hadn't.
The real point of SPF and Sender ID is to make it hard for spammers to forge their "from" addresses, so that blacklists and whitelists can be more effective.
That's probably overstating what these technologies actually do, and bringing a different issue into the system.
SPF/etc doesn't really do anything specific as far as spammers go (that is, it doesn't treat spammers as some special case, and spammers by themselves aren't going to be disproportionally encumbered by this technology), and it doesn't preventing anyone from simply forging addresses (that is, using an address in the From line that doesn't map back to the spammer.) What it does do is prevent someone from using a From address whose domain belongs to someone else without that owner's permission.
The intent is to deal with "Joe Jobs", by ensuring that a domain name owner has the final say over any emails sent out whose From envelope address contains that domain name.
Now, some people are associating this with spam, on the grounds that some spammers send out emails with unauthorized email addresses as the From line. This, I suspect, is being done purely because it's easier than registering a domain. However, registering domain names isn't difficult or particularly expensive, so that spam is simply going to start coming from new domains rather than disappear.
To give you some idea of how ineffectual this is in terms of stopping spam, I registered a new domain for myself last week. Within fifteen minutes of me going to register.com, entering the credit card number, and accepting everything, the domain was live. That is, there was a DNS server under my control pointing at it, and my work DNS (completely unrelated to the DNS server I attached the domain to) was resolving the name correctly. If I were a spammer, I would have been able to start sending out spam under a non-blacklisted domain within fifteen minutes of me registering the domain.
The real major (positive) impact this will have is on certain types of virus. There are many viruses that work on the basis of sending out emails that look like they come from trusted friends (by searching, for example, an address book and sending emails from the owner of the address book, or sending them from addresses in the address book.) SPF has the potential to make that close to impossible.
The downside, of course, is that the technology isn't completely transparent. Roaming (where you use multiple ISPs but want to use one email address) becomes difficult if your choice of email address is from an ISP that uses SPF, and which doesn't have a suitable relay server available for you to send outgoing email via - and suitable can just mean that your email software doesn't support whichever of the myriad of authenticated SMTP systems your ISP uses.
Lastly, the guest said that you can't (for the most part) beat a polygraph with anything mjaor (such as if you murdered someone). Why? Because you conscience would get the best of you. The one exception is if you life was in danger. (he didn't elaborate much on what that meant)
If you are the type of person who can murder someone, isn't there a higher probability that you don't have much of a conscience? Yes, I know, it's still the case that most murderers will have done it for a stupid reason and feel wrong afterwards, but in sheer percentage terms, you'd expect a higher proportion of those who feel no shame in murder to have committed one than those who do.
This is probably why the "serial killer" in the example passed the detector, for example.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, assuming this is true (and I doubt that for the majority of spam it is - most regular open relays, for instance, are mal-configured Microsoft and Sendmail SMTP servers, which by default include origin information in the email headers), do you think that adding $50 ($20 for an ISP, $30 for a domain name) seriously adds that much to the cost of sending spam?
Remember: Spam isn't free to the spammer, it's just unmetered and cheap. Right now, spammers have to afford to buy a new Internet account for any spam they send. Adding $15-30 to that amount for a new domain name really doesn't significantly increase the amount in costs.
The Liberal Democrats are broadly left wing, usually combining personal freedoms with regulated economics. So it's not a good fit.
The reason is that the partnership with Verizon has always been somewhat torturous. Originally, Vodafone bought a west coast mobile company that had partnered with Verizon (then Bell Atlantic) in a wireless venture called PrimeCo. Verizon threw a fit because they had wanted to run said mobile company. Worse, Verizon had decided they wanted CDMA for Bell Atlantic Mobile, as they'd done with PrimeCo, and Vodafone was very likely to want to convert the west coast operation to GSM. BAM immediately announced they wanted to close PrimeCo. PrimeCo was wound down, and at the last minute, Vodafone capitulated and offered to merge their US operations with Verizons into what then became Verizon Wireless.
If that sounds a little obnoxious, well, it was, and Vodafone has really played second fiddle to Verizon throughout the "partnership". They have a share in a mobile company that doesn't do GSM, and uses the half-arsed US version of the IS-95 standard, which doesn't even support SIM cards (if it did, you might see dual standard GSM/CDMA phones.)
So Vodafone wants out. They're waiting really for the opportunity. If T-Mobile sells the old Voicestream company (currently T-Mobile USA) they may take a bite at that, if the price is right.
Not because his website is particularly great, but because, if you View Source, you get...
Because, as we all know, Al used to hand write his HTML...I also found the "Blair: He may be a dope, but he's OUR dope" article, and "Poland: They may support us, but they're next for the Shock 'n' Awe Treatment" articles most enlightening.
As for ordinary American citizens, they should feel free to write to anyone they want.
This is not to say I think it's a good idea, but then I didn't think the Guardian's campaign was a good idea either. Though I also didn't see it as ill-intentioned.
On another topic, I hadn't been to www.georgewbush.com in a while, and I was surprised at "90% income tax for overseas nationals" was one of Bush's policies. He's usually against income taxes, I thought. And what do people think of the "Iraq: No new troops needed, all troops currently stationed in Iraq to remain there for 10 more years. That goes for those in Afghanistan too" policies?
If the price of local calls went up to $1 a minute tomorrow, with long distance and mobile phone air time costing double that, do you think people could easily just throw their phones away, and still perform the same amount of business, ensuring the food is still delivered and paid for?
I guess if the box of paperclips had the label "Eye pokers", the analogy would be complete.
As you say, Sprint PCS, Verizon Wireless, and ALLTEL use the IS-95 standard; Nextel uses "iDEN", a Motorola-designed technology which currently uses a time division, multiple access, air interface technology, but it's not related to IS-136 in any way (which is what people are normally refering to when they say "TDMA". I'm not sure if you meant that, but even if you didn't, I suspect others read that into your comment so I want to clarify)
Part of the rush towards outsourcing has been because Americans over-priced themselves during the late nineties, Slashdotters frequently said they wouldn't accept a programming job that paid less than six digits. At the same time as this was happening, there was a backlash against H1-Bs, H1-Bs were being used as the sole method of increasing outside skills, and H1-Bs are, ultimately, not an attractive proposition for anyone outside of the US except a small minority of people who aren't tied down and do not want to become Americans. The backlash meant the INS enforced salary requirements - not as much as many wanted, but enough to ensure H1-Bs wouldn't have much affect.
So H1-Bs didn't push down salaries. Companies that employed H1-Bs got it in the neck. And it became more and more expensive to operate entire facilities within the US.
Hence outsourcing.
Now, take a more libertarian view on who you can employ and on immigration: make it easier for skilled people to come to the US (especially those who want to become Americans) and drop the salary restrictions. Suddenly it becomes much more affordable to operate entire facilities in the US. This keeps jobs and money within the country - yes, some of those jobs will come from people coming in, but it's not as if they're going to spend their entire salaries in other countries, which is what's happening now. As a whole, the numbers of jobs increase.
The problem is that immigration = more jobs is one of those equations that isn't intuitively obvious, and indeed runs counter to propaganda from anti-immigrant campaigns over the centuries. The fact is though that immigration does mean more jobs: it means more competition on salaries, which keeps jobs in the US because ultimately it has to be affordable to operate local facilities, and it means money stays in the US and gets spent in the US.
I don't agree with the entire Libertarian platform, but this is one of those things I think they have right. Now, if they can avoid gutting health and safety, and minimum salaries, at the same time, I'd even consider their position moral.
What the system seems to do is make sure the most organized, least factionalized, of the two main parties wins, regardless of how representative its values are.
I gave up membership of the Lib Dems after the last election because I looked at their manefesto and thought it was one of the worst, basist, appeals to popularism over rationality I'd seen in a long time. It was representative of a party that knew it wouldn't get elected and was only interested in broadening its support base. It's trying to do the same tactic as Ralph Nader is trying to do in the US, only it's significantly more successful and more damaging.
I post to /., have an iPod too, but that doesn't mean I think that any gadget Apple sells is aimed specifically at me. It happens they're very useful for a group that includes me.
As far as the picture iPod goes, I have no use for one. But I know friends of mine who are far from being gadget freaks who'd love such a thing.
It's the same principle as having an MP3 player with 5-30Megs of disk space instead of 64Mb. Sure, you're not going to want to listen to more than a handful of songs when you're away from your computer...
Likewise, do you really know what photos you're going to want to show the people at work? Do you really want to care, ahead of time, about making that selection?
I predict that people who buy iPods with this will use it - people will store their entire digital photo libraries on it and whip out the iPod to show friends and family photos they've taken.
While this functionality will not sell iPods alone, I think it has great potential to make an iPod that's a "I'd kind of like this" into a "I really want this". Slashdotters are, as usual, not what this iPod's aimed at. Think more in terms of proud family members - mothers and aunts especially.
She's also far from being a private figure, she's a publicist and takes on a very public role.
It sounds to me like you're saying that because a country has a few socialist laws, it must be communist. That's not right.
Most modern, industrialised, nations do. I was unaware that communism had triumphed throughout most of the world, I thought it was pretty much universally accepted it hadn't.SPF/etc doesn't really do anything specific as far as spammers go (that is, it doesn't treat spammers as some special case, and spammers by themselves aren't going to be disproportionally encumbered by this technology), and it doesn't preventing anyone from simply forging addresses (that is, using an address in the From line that doesn't map back to the spammer.) What it does do is prevent someone from using a From address whose domain belongs to someone else without that owner's permission.
The intent is to deal with "Joe Jobs", by ensuring that a domain name owner has the final say over any emails sent out whose From envelope address contains that domain name.
Now, some people are associating this with spam, on the grounds that some spammers send out emails with unauthorized email addresses as the From line. This, I suspect, is being done purely because it's easier than registering a domain. However, registering domain names isn't difficult or particularly expensive, so that spam is simply going to start coming from new domains rather than disappear.
To give you some idea of how ineffectual this is in terms of stopping spam, I registered a new domain for myself last week. Within fifteen minutes of me going to register.com, entering the credit card number, and accepting everything, the domain was live. That is, there was a DNS server under my control pointing at it, and my work DNS (completely unrelated to the DNS server I attached the domain to) was resolving the name correctly. If I were a spammer, I would have been able to start sending out spam under a non-blacklisted domain within fifteen minutes of me registering the domain.
The real major (positive) impact this will have is on certain types of virus. There are many viruses that work on the basis of sending out emails that look like they come from trusted friends (by searching, for example, an address book and sending emails from the owner of the address book, or sending them from addresses in the address book.) SPF has the potential to make that close to impossible.
The downside, of course, is that the technology isn't completely transparent. Roaming (where you use multiple ISPs but want to use one email address) becomes difficult if your choice of email address is from an ISP that uses SPF, and which doesn't have a suitable relay server available for you to send outgoing email via - and suitable can just mean that your email software doesn't support whichever of the myriad of authenticated SMTP systems your ISP uses.
This is probably why the "serial killer" in the example passed the detector, for example.