1. 44.3 % of the spammers want to get me rich, too.
2. 32.2 % want to enlarge my penis.
3. 25.3 % want to get me cheap mortage.
4. 86.4 % can't spell.
5. 98.3 % have a broken email program which produces defunct email header lines
What bothers me most is that 0% of the spam has penis size decreasing products.
Where is the market for those of us who are scaring women away with our incredibly huge johnsons?
Few months back I sent an important dll as an email attachment to one developer who works for a different company. He replied to me saying that their email security gateway had blocked the email. So I sent the dll again, zipped this time. Again the attachment was blocked. Their security software even scanned zip files! It was really frustrating trying to send an important file which is not even executable by itself, just because the system admin thought it was good idea to block the files he/she thought were unsafe.
I instruct people that I will be sending a file to that the email I send will contain a link to a server I keep files like that on. They are also told the Subject line and when to expect the email so they don't clickity-click on a virus/trojan program link.
In this case, why are programs like Gator not removed by anti-virus software? By all definitions, Gator (or is it now Claria) and similar programs are Trojans
Gator is a commercial product.
It's a very touchy situation for large anti-virus corporations to remove applications like that.
Spybot S&D and Spysweeper OTOH, will gladly remove gator.
Is it easier to speak dangerous words when your face isn't on the screen?
It's much more difficult to be angry with what an animated character says than a human.
Can humans stand to be that close for that long
on
The Wrong Stuff
·
· Score: 1
I don't see that discussed very often. Most 'can' or 'should it be done' articles just look at the hardware side.
Most couldn't stand to be around a relative or husband-wife 24 hours a day for a few weeks.
Is it likely that we can keep several people in constant close proximity for a couple of years without one of them 'losing it' and splattering the inside of the craft with blood?
You're advocating boycotting the POS browser that at least 95% of people use. While a noble cause, IE is here to stay, warts, bugs 'n all. The best you can probably do it get your friends/family converted (no more popups!), but corp America won't go for it, and neither will Grandmaw who can't install jack shit (except for gator and hotbar, of course).
If only FireFox would take a page from these slimebags and make it as easy to install the better browser as it is to install Hotbar. We could get way more people converted that way.
I'm not sure what you mean about 'easy to install'. It doesn't ask for much input from the user.
Firefox is installed on every infected box that wanders through this building. Googlebar / Cards / DictionarySearch are installed also. It's set to be the default browser and the desktop link says 'Firefox Browser use this for no popups'.
The clients are impressed. No popups, faster browsing, and the boxes don't come back weeks later with more problems.
Those clients brag to their friends and their friends install it too.
Sorry, but I'm not willing to get email with a service that supports the use of adware/scumware.
I looked at the linked page, but although it made several accusations, it almost, but not quite, actually backs up those accusations with facts. It's rather vague. For instance, the "How does it Violate Privacy?" doesn't say how it violates privacy. WTF?
What's strange also is that in contrast to the article, the ratings are as low as possible. All of them are:
"1 - The lowest on the scale of 1 to 5, exhibiting a few potentially harmful or scummy traits with little effect on the end user.".
vim would receive the same ratings.
I'd never looked at the scumware site until now, but I do hope that their reviews more often than not include some useful information. I'd like to have an informative scumware site to look information up at.
Re:Problem that doesn't exist big time...
on
Passport to Nowhere
·
· Score: 1
There is a security benefit to decentralized security.
For most purposes, I don't mind if there is one set of database servers providing security for 1000's of sites as long as the 1000's of sites only see a hash of some data for confirmation purposes.
OTOH, I'm not giving bank routing numbers to an online centralized security setup. When I do need to use direct pay or deposit online, there isn't any way for me to see how (or who) they are keeping my data. So, I use a seperate banking account for those purposes. It has no overdraft protection, and a very low balance.
I've found myself in this situation on several software support forums, where I was looking for a solution to some problem, and someone else had already posted the same problem, but it had not been answered. After I work out how to solve it by myself, often I want to be nice and post the solution, but the effort of creating an account essentially for someone else's gain is simply too much (I'm not an altruist;p)
Even worse, lately I've been seeing more tech support forums that require a login to see posts.
I've been finding them through google when I have a tech problem that isn't often dealt with. When I go to the site, I find that only part of the post is shown and there is a "log in to see replies " (or, full answer) link.
I will not log in and read/post to those particular forums. I have the couple of minutes to do so, but then I'm forcing other people to log in to read a solution I've found.
Hopefully, that trend will die out when the sites realize that their urge to send email advertisements to users will drive people who have good answers away.
How can the punishment serve a deterent, if the fine does not hurt??
Because, other Countries (and groups of) will see that they can do the same thing.
It's like a speeding ticket. One doesn't bother a wealthy person. But, they aren't immune to losing their driver's license if they get convicted for 10 speeding tickets in one year.
No, that's completely the wrong way of going about it, especially as various browsers are quite happy to spoof the user-agent header.
HTTP includes an Accept header that allows a browser to tell the server which content types it can handle. If you want to know if a browser can handle particular types of files, look at that header rather than the User-Agent header.
My reply was to a post that advocated NO identifying information be sent from a browser.
While we're at it, why tell them what browser you're using? All that does is allow them to "fix" things that aren't supported correctly by different browsers. It's a patch that allows browser writers to remain incompatible, while telling something to sites that need not concern them. There's no (really good) reason to require any information from a browser except which page you want.
It doesn't just allow them to fix things, it enables web authors to have several sets of web pages depending on the age of the web browser.
After all, we can't move forward with new & revised web standards if all web sites need to be completely compatible with older browsers and can't redirect updated browsers to updated web coding.
For example, I need to know if a particular user's browser can render X*ML. If their browser doesn't tell me what version it is, I can't code according to the new standards.
It isn't about fixing incompatibilies between browsers, it's about being compatible with different generations of browsers.
Um, you DO realize that the people writing these viruses have AV software to test against, right?? It's TRIVIAL for viruses to be written so that they don't raise any red flags.
If the AV is watching for changes to executable files, it isn't trivial.
And, the virus authors like to go after the lowest common denominator, people who use the default settings in their AV programs.
Yes, it's actually impossible to be protected against the 'latest virus that just came out', because it's impossible that your AV vendor has protection against a brand new immediately (unless the AV vendor wrote it themselves). There always must be a "window" between time of discovery of a new virus and the time that your AV is updated to protect against it during which you are vulnerable, and this is typically anything from a few hours to a few days.
It's not impossible, after all, good virus scanners do have advanced detection that will understand that something is 'fishy' with a new process that is trying to change executable files on a box.
But just try to explain this logic to the damn "if you run an AV and keep your definitions up to date you'll have no problems" crowd..
I do agree that keeping Anti-virus up to date won't keep problems out. If people plug a WindowsXP box to a network that has internet access, they'll be infected rather quickly because without a firewall on the box itself, they'll end up infected with something that will shut off the anti-virus software.
Do you have a cite for that? I just did a bit of googling, and all I can find are posts that complained about the fact that AOL, by default, showed newsgroup titles from the config database instead of dotted names, so that alt.aol-sucks showed up as "Flames and complaints about AOL". Some folks assumed that AOL renamed the group for some nefarious reason and came up with the description themselves, and others said that AOL was censoring the group because they couldn't find it. IIRC, the option to switch the list display from descriptions to newsgroup names was either always present or was added fairly early on, making it a moot point.
I'm a pretty good Googler, I don't remember AOL ever not carrying the group, I've found several posts from that timeframe (not from AOL sycophants) explicitly stating that AOL *has* always carried the group, and I find it hard to believe that not one person complained to alt-aol-sucks about AOL not carrying that very newsgroup, but maybe I'm just not searching on the right phrases.
I'll look into it but I clearly remember it happening around the summer of 1994.
On the google note, google says that you didn't start posting to alt.aol-sucks from AOL until January 4, 2005...almost 10 months (IIRC) after AOL had usenet. So either you weren't posting before that time, google lost stuff, you were posting from another account, or you had x-no-archive on. (or google just plain sucks anymore)
From what I remember, you were posting quite soon after AOL got usenet access, but of course I would have no idea of where you were posting from if in fact you did post previous to Jan 4, 2005.
BTW: I'm not one of the trolls from that time period, but I see that people still Troll using your name. Sorry to see that. After all, you weren't a troublemaker in a.a-s. You tried to be helpful with problems people were having.
Eh? Which newsgroups were those? alt.aol-sucks was certainly available from AOL, and I posted there frequently, often via AOL IIRC - in fact, although the flames were annoying and juvenile, some of us occasionally got useful bug reports there.
alt.aol-sucks was not available to AOL users for quite a while.
I know this because I posted in & read alt.aol-sucks. At the time, I had both AOL and shell accounts. I was unable to see or search for that group from AOL. The only way to access that newsgroup from AOL was by using dejanews.
While alt.aol-sucks was full of a lot of noise, it did give information about some of AOL's worst practices.
Remember when AOL kept denying that it was overcharging people by counting 50 seconds as 2 minutes? AOL kept saying it wasn't true but alt.aol-sucks was right.
BTW: IIRC, I do remember you posting in a.a-s around 1995. I was the guy who created a newsgroup next to a.a-s so that people in a.a-s could crosspost and get their messages seen on AOL.
I'm getting a lot of mail addressed to accounts that don't exist from systems with names like omr-m14.mx.aol.com. Are these legitimate MTAs or open relays?
Those are dialup/broadband dynamic ips.
They are open relays if the Windows box at that ip is infected with a spammer trojan.
I've already had one of my competaters complain about me (unjustly) and now I'm blocked and I can't send email to aol customers. This is the first major step in isolating aol customers from non aol parts of the internet, watch how this turns out they will start "filtering" in a big way now.
Of course. AOL stands to make a lot more money by doing this.
Every dollar NOT spent on some spammer's site is a dollar available to AOL & the companies hosted there.
I too am concerned about the potential for abuse of a web site black list. I'm also concerned that AOL did not inform members of this change. Any ISP that implements a web site black list should redirect browsers to an HTML page that explains that the web site address is associated with known spammer.
AOL has a long history of not informing and many times outright lying.
When AOL first gave out usenet access to it's members, it promised to have every newsgroup available. Instead, AOL blocked newsgroups that were created to discuss (and flame of course) problems with AOL. On occasion, AOL staff would post in those groups saying that it wasn't true, but then of course someone would point out the fact that AOL staff were using other providers to post to those usenet groups.
I wouldn't be surprised to see AOL abuse this feature in a similar manner.
I don't recall seeing this in the news, and a cursory Google search didn't come up with a suspect's name (beyond conjecture about Al Queda operatives and Jewish conspiracy theories). Who did they catch? Have they convicted him yet?
We'll never know the truth. It's always going to be a real-life X-File because the Anthrax was made by the same people making the accusations.
There are dozens of theories flying around including one that includes: Congress was a target, so it prodded them into voting for war against Afghanistan & Iraq.
I don't believe that's true. But, I do know that with so many people trying to keep their heads from rolling, we'll never know what really happened.
If it really was a simple story like 'boy meets anthrax, boy takes anthrax, boy mails anthrax after meeting ebola', we'd already be done watching the court proceedings on CourtTV.
Slashdot Mirror
Even more fun.
Interrupt the 'conversation' and introduce yourself as a telephone sanitizer.
Once you get to the bits about how important it is to always have a towel on-hand, they'll be long gone.
Supermarkets do that as well... they call that Muzak.
After hearing a Muzak version of 'Cat Scratch Fever' by Ted Nugent while shopping, I've been scared. Very scared.
You're too busy writing those personal ads on Yahoo Personals to bother reading spam.
True, but really, I am outdoorsy, intelligent, gentle yet assertive, and have a monster in my pants just like everyone else on yahoo!
1. 44.3 % of the spammers want to get me rich, too.
2. 32.2 % want to enlarge my penis.
3. 25.3 % want to get me cheap mortage.
4. 86.4 % can't spell.
5. 98.3 % have a broken email program which produces defunct email header lines
What bothers me most is that 0% of the spam has penis size decreasing products.
Where is the market for those of us who are scaring women away with our incredibly huge johnsons?
Few months back I sent an important dll as an email attachment to one developer who works for a different company. He replied to me saying that their email security gateway had blocked the email. So I sent the dll again, zipped this time. Again the attachment was blocked. Their security software even scanned zip files! It was really frustrating trying to send an important file which is not even executable by itself, just because the system admin thought it was good idea to block the files he/she thought were unsafe.
I instruct people that I will be sending a file to that the email I send will contain a link to a server I keep files like that on. They are also told the Subject line and when to expect the email so they don't clickity-click on a virus/trojan program link.
In this case, why are programs like Gator not removed by anti-virus software? By all definitions, Gator (or is it now Claria) and similar programs are Trojans
Gator is a commercial product.
It's a very touchy situation for large anti-virus corporations to remove applications like that.
Spybot S&D and Spysweeper OTOH, will gladly remove gator.
Why do people keep saying this? It's not peanuts, not to Microsoft, not to anyone. It is a considerable fine.
Especially if you're a shareholder.
Is it easier to speak dangerous words when your face isn't on the screen?
It's much more difficult to be angry with what an animated character says than a human.
I don't see that discussed very often. Most 'can' or 'should it be done' articles just look at the hardware side.
Most couldn't stand to be around a relative or husband-wife 24 hours a day for a few weeks.
Is it likely that we can keep several people in constant close proximity for a couple of years without one of them 'losing it' and splattering the inside of the craft with blood?
You're advocating boycotting the POS browser that at least 95% of people use. While a noble cause, IE is here to stay, warts, bugs 'n all. The best you can probably do it get your friends/family converted (no more popups!), but corp America won't go for it, and neither will Grandmaw who can't install jack shit (except for gator and hotbar, of course).
If only FireFox would take a page from these slimebags and make it as easy to install the better browser as it is to install Hotbar. We could get way more people converted that way.
I'm not sure what you mean about 'easy to install'. It doesn't ask for much input from the user.
Firefox is installed on every infected box that wanders through this building. Googlebar / Cards / DictionarySearch are installed also. It's set to be the default browser and the desktop link says 'Firefox Browser use this for no popups'.
The clients are impressed. No popups, faster browsing, and the boxes don't come back weeks later with more problems.
Those clients brag to their friends and their friends install it too.
Sorry, but I'm not willing to get email with a service that supports the use of adware/scumware.
I looked at the linked page, but although it made several accusations, it almost, but not quite, actually backs up those accusations with facts. It's rather vague. For instance, the "How does it Violate Privacy?" doesn't say how it violates privacy. WTF?
What's strange also is that in contrast to the article, the ratings are as low as possible. All of them are:
"1 - The lowest on the scale of 1 to 5, exhibiting a few potentially harmful or scummy traits with little effect on the end user.".
vim would receive the same ratings.
I'd never looked at the scumware site until now, but I do hope that their reviews more often than not include some useful information. I'd like to have an informative scumware site to look information up at.
There is a security benefit to decentralized security.
For most purposes, I don't mind if there is one set of database servers providing security for 1000's of sites as long as the 1000's of sites only see a hash of some data for confirmation purposes.
OTOH, I'm not giving bank routing numbers to an online centralized security setup. When I do need to use direct pay or deposit online, there isn't any way for me to see how (or who) they are keeping my data. So, I use a seperate banking account for those purposes. It has no overdraft protection, and a very low balance.
I've found myself in this situation on several software support forums, where I was looking for a solution to some problem, and someone else had already posted the same problem, but it had not been answered. After I work out how to solve it by myself, often I want to be nice and post the solution, but the effort of creating an account essentially for someone else's gain is simply too much (I'm not an altruist ;p)
Even worse, lately I've been seeing more tech support forums that require a login to see posts.
I've been finding them through google when I have a tech problem that isn't often dealt with. When I go to the site, I find that only part of the post is shown and there is a "log in to see replies " (or, full answer) link.
I will not log in and read/post to those particular forums. I have the couple of minutes to do so, but then I'm forcing other people to log in to read a solution I've found.
Hopefully, that trend will die out when the sites realize that their urge to send email advertisements to users will drive people who have good answers away.
How can the punishment serve a deterent, if the fine does not hurt??
Because, other Countries (and groups of) will see that they can do the same thing.
It's like a speeding ticket. One doesn't bother a wealthy person. But, they aren't immune to losing their driver's license if they get convicted for 10 speeding tickets in one year.
No, that's completely the wrong way of going about it, especially as various browsers are quite happy to spoof the user-agent header.
HTTP includes an Accept header that allows a browser to tell the server which content types it can handle. If you want to know if a browser can handle particular types of files, look at that header rather than the User-Agent header.
My reply was to a post that advocated NO identifying information be sent from a browser.
Spoofing is another matter.
While we're at it, why tell them what browser you're using? All that does is allow them to "fix" things that aren't supported correctly by different browsers. It's a patch that allows browser writers to remain incompatible, while telling something to sites that need not concern them. There's no (really good) reason to require any information from a browser except which page you want.
It doesn't just allow them to fix things, it enables web authors to have several sets of web pages depending on the age of the web browser.
After all, we can't move forward with new & revised web standards if all web sites need to be completely compatible with older browsers and can't redirect updated browsers to updated web coding.
For example, I need to know if a particular user's browser can render X*ML. If their browser doesn't tell me what version it is, I can't code according to the new standards.
It isn't about fixing incompatibilies between browsers, it's about being compatible with different generations of browsers.
Um, you DO realize that the people writing these viruses have AV software to test against, right?? It's TRIVIAL for viruses to be written so that they don't raise any red flags.
If the AV is watching for changes to executable files, it isn't trivial.
And, the virus authors like to go after the lowest common denominator, people who use the default settings in their AV programs.
Yes, it's actually impossible to be protected against the 'latest virus that just came out', because it's impossible that your AV vendor has protection against a brand new immediately (unless the AV vendor wrote it themselves). There always must be a "window" between time of discovery of a new virus and the time that your AV is updated to protect against it during which you are vulnerable, and this is typically anything from a few hours to a few days.
..
It's not impossible, after all, good virus scanners do have advanced detection that will understand that something is 'fishy' with a new process that is trying to change executable files on a box.
But just try to explain this logic to the damn "if you run an AV and keep your definitions up to date you'll have no problems" crowd
I do agree that keeping Anti-virus up to date won't keep problems out. If people plug a WindowsXP box to a network that has internet access, they'll be infected rather quickly because without a firewall on the box itself, they'll end up infected with something that will shut off the anti-virus software.
Whoops
Those should have been Jan 4, 1995 instead of Jan 4, 2005
Do you have a cite for that? I just did a bit of googling, and all I can find are posts that complained about the fact that AOL, by default, showed newsgroup titles from the config database instead of dotted names, so that alt.aol-sucks showed up as "Flames and complaints about AOL". Some folks assumed that AOL renamed the group for some nefarious reason and came up with the description themselves, and others said that AOL was censoring the group because they couldn't find it. IIRC, the option to switch the list display from descriptions to newsgroup names was either always present or was added fairly early on, making it a moot point.
I'm a pretty good Googler, I don't remember AOL ever not carrying the group, I've found several posts from that timeframe (not from AOL sycophants) explicitly stating that AOL *has* always carried the group, and I find it hard to believe that not one person complained to alt-aol-sucks about AOL not carrying that very newsgroup, but maybe I'm just not searching on the right phrases.
I'll look into it but I clearly remember it happening around the summer of 1994. On the google note, google says that you didn't start posting to alt.aol-sucks from AOL until January 4, 2005...almost 10 months (IIRC) after AOL had usenet. So either you weren't posting before that time, google lost stuff, you were posting from another account, or you had x-no-archive on. (or google just plain sucks anymore)
From what I remember, you were posting quite soon after AOL got usenet access, but of course I would have no idea of where you were posting from if in fact you did post previous to Jan 4, 2005.
BTW: I'm not one of the trolls from that time period, but I see that people still Troll using your name. Sorry to see that. After all, you weren't a troublemaker in a.a-s. You tried to be helpful with problems people were having.
Eh? Which newsgroups were those? alt.aol-sucks was certainly available from AOL, and I posted there frequently, often via AOL IIRC - in fact, although the flames were annoying and juvenile, some of us occasionally got useful bug reports there.
alt.aol-sucks was not available to AOL users for quite a while.
I know this because I posted in & read alt.aol-sucks. At the time, I had both AOL and shell accounts. I was unable to see or search for that group from AOL. The only way to access that newsgroup from AOL was by using dejanews.
While alt.aol-sucks was full of a lot of noise, it did give information about some of AOL's worst practices.
Remember when AOL kept denying that it was overcharging people by counting 50 seconds as 2 minutes? AOL kept saying it wasn't true but alt.aol-sucks was right.
BTW: IIRC, I do remember you posting in a.a-s around 1995. I was the guy who created a newsgroup next to a.a-s so that people in a.a-s could crosspost and get their messages seen on AOL.
I'm getting a lot of mail addressed to accounts that don't exist from systems with names like omr-m14.mx.aol.com. Are these legitimate MTAs or open relays?
Those are dialup/broadband dynamic ips.
They are open relays if the Windows box at that ip is infected with a spammer trojan.
I've already had one of my competaters complain about me (unjustly) and now I'm blocked and I can't send email to aol customers. This is the first major step in isolating aol customers from non aol parts of the internet, watch how this turns out they will start "filtering" in a big way now.
Of course. AOL stands to make a lot more money by doing this.
Every dollar NOT spent on some spammer's site is a dollar available to AOL & the companies hosted there.
I too am concerned about the potential for abuse of a web site black list. I'm also concerned that AOL did not inform members of this change. Any ISP that implements a web site black list should redirect browsers to an HTML page that explains that the web site address is associated with known spammer.
AOL has a long history of not informing and many times outright lying.
When AOL first gave out usenet access to it's members, it promised to have every newsgroup available. Instead, AOL blocked newsgroups that were created to discuss (and flame of course) problems with AOL. On occasion, AOL staff would post in those groups saying that it wasn't true, but then of course someone would point out the fact that AOL staff were using other providers to post to those usenet groups.
I wouldn't be surprised to see AOL abuse this feature in a similar manner.
I don't recall seeing this in the news, and a cursory Google search didn't come up with a suspect's name (beyond conjecture about Al Queda operatives and Jewish conspiracy theories). Who did they catch? Have they convicted him yet?
We'll never know the truth. It's always going to be a real-life X-File because the Anthrax was made by the same people making the accusations.
There are dozens of theories flying around including one that includes: Congress was a target, so it prodded them into voting for war against Afghanistan & Iraq.
I don't believe that's true. But, I do know that with so many people trying to keep their heads from rolling, we'll never know what really happened.
If it really was a simple story like 'boy meets anthrax, boy takes anthrax, boy mails anthrax after meeting ebola', we'd already be done watching the court proceedings on CourtTV.