A flight line is certainly a far more hazardous place than a gas station. That is more of a mitigating risk based on the environment kind of thing. I wouldn't use any electronic device if I were, say, soaked in gasoline, regardless of how "safe" or "approved" it was.
I did find an official Navy response. (Yeah, not Air Force, I know, but should be similar.) Their conclusion? It could be possible to start a fire using a cellphone. However, their hypothetical solution to generate the correct voltage and spark requires dropping the phone, and having a spark generate when the battery pops off. Anyway, until we have one proven case where a cellphone has caused a fuel fire, I am going to continue to chalk it up to an urban legend.
Getting in and out of your car during refueling is much more dangerous, and that is not just MHO, but fact. How so? According to the Petroleum Equipment Institute, they do not have a single known case of a cell phone causing a fire. They have an entire page devoted to static electricity. (Of course, it is only fair to mention that ALL refueling fires are extremely rare to begin with, regardless of ignition source.)
They did a thing about this on Mythbusters on Discovery, and were unable to start a fire this way. They pretty much concluded that the static you build up from getting in or our of the car during a fill-up can cause a spark if you touch the car. And doing that near the fueling point can cause a fire. Of course, the worst thing you can do then, which most people do, is pull the hose out of the tank and proceed to spill a LOT of gas into an already burning fire. Not good, especially when you are the one removing the hose. Leave the handle and hose right where it is and get the hell out of there.
And here is a little more data on this urban myth.
If convicted, they should force him to work end user tech support during his jailtime. Of course, I'm sure some treaty out there would deem that cruel and unusual punishment and recommend execution as a more humane alternative.:)
Actually, if you really read the Bible, that's exactly what God is going to do. Eternal Hell (as in eternal burning, pain, suffering, etc.) is a Catholic invention that has been carried on by the Protestant churches. Most typical "Christians" will quote the one or two verses that allude to eternal punishment, ignoring many more verses stating that the unsaved will be destroyed, and completely missing the fact that being destroyed *is* an eternal punishment. Of course, most typical Christians only believe what their local pastor/preacher/whatever tells them, regardless of what the Bible says anyway, but that's a whole different debate.
And while I do have some "pretty good ideas" in the religious arena, I do tend to think Organized Religion and Organized Crime are exactly the same. They demand immediate payment to avoid a future punishment. Organized Religion is a protection racket and eternal hell is their version of keeping your business from accidently burning down. Granted there are exceptions to every rule, but most Organized Religion misses the point completely.
And I won't go into it here, but if you want actual verses to back up my claim, email me.
Since you obviously did not RTFA, I will attempt to explain.
Most old recordings on disc and cylinder are extremely fragile. In some cases, simply handling or moving them involves the risk of destruction, let alone actually sticking a needle to them. Here's a link to the old Tech TV clip to illustrate.
What the scientists did was to image the records without actually touching them, and generate the recordings that way. It is quite an impressive feat, actually. Sure, your little sound editor can clean it up real nice, but you've got to get the recording into a digital format first, and that's what this is about.
You, the grandparent poster, and whoever the hell modded you guys up all seem to have completely missed the point.
"In addition, by posting Content on an AIM Product, you grant AOL, its parent, affiliates, subsidiaries, assigns, agents and licensees the irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote this Content in any medium. You waive any right to privacy. You waive any right to inspect or approve uses of the Content or to be compensated for any such uses."
Since he had to agree to use the TOS to use AIM, would it not therefore be implicit that since AOL has the right to reproduce the content, that it therefore is being recorded? Seems like some bad District Attorneys out there to let that argument slip by. That says nothing of the waiving of any rights to privacy in the TOS.
It is not just EZPass you have to worry about. You have to avoid the toll roads altogether. I was watching one of those crime shows on TLC/Discovery and they were able to prove the suspect had used a toll road because they had the snapshots of his car/license plate from the toll booth. The catcher is, he used the manual lanes and paid the toll in cash. Those cameras don't just catch toll cheats, they "catch" everyone. I don't recall the state, but if one is doing it, then you have to assume they all are (if you're paranoid like me).
Why is this a hassle? Your company wants customers who run open relays and thus invite the attention of the various RBLs?
It is a hassle because even if the customers leave or are kicked off the network, they still have open relays, and are just going to sign up somewhere else and continue to be part of the problem. Getting them to fix it is a far better solution for everyone involved.
I've said this before, but I still think we give ourselves too much credit. I think we are seeing the results of much larger cycles in the sun that we do not fully understand.
Don't get me wrong, I think we are trashing the environment, and that if we don't do something about it, it will come back and bite us in the ass as a species, but I don't think it is a given fact that global warming is a direct result of our actions. There is simply too much we don't understand.
I agree completey, but you missed the most obvious counter argument.
4. If I burn a CD and snail mail it to you, should the Postal Service be held liable?
Shades of Minority Report?
on
Smart Billboards
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
That was the first thing I thought of when I saw this article.
Personally, I found the advertising techniques in that movie to be a hell of a lot scarier than the whole Future Crime stuff. Probably because the advertising could happen. As I watched the movie I was picturing advertising execs having wet dreams, and board meetings saying, "We need this!"
If any authorities look into this, I am gonna be pissed. I mean, if they can't bother to do anything when the anti-spam sitesgetattacked, then they better damn well not do anything now.
Of course, I am of the paranoid type who assumes that SCO would stage a DDoS against themselves just for the publicity, so what the hell do I know?
Servers are all over the world, mostly on cable networks (strangely enough very few DSL ones).
I think I have an answer to this. Around here (Chicago area) cable is a lot cheaper than DSL. Only recently have DSL prices come down around here, and even then, when they started dropping, Comcast doubled our bandwidth. I'm getting 3 megs down, 256k up, for around $40 a month. Most DSL does not come close.
What does that mean? Well, most Joe Average Broadband guys are using cable networks, and not DSL. It's cheaper and faster. People who use DSL are probably buying it because they have some specific requirements, or need business use (ie, faster uploads). Based on that hypothesis, DSL users would therefore be more spohisticated, and have much more secure servers. The home users on cable are the wide open unpatched Windows boxes where the guy is clicking every link he thinks he can see naked boobs on, and getting infected by various trojans and other viruses.
That's just my impression. I have no facts to back any of that up (except that cable is cheaper than dsl, at least in my area, and at my speeds). I could very well be unknowingly wearing an asshat right now...:) Consider it an educated guess.
According to the FCC website, while there is an industry approved standard of 2.5 hours, there is no set FCC rule as to how long it should take. Now, if AT&T can not get their ETR down to a reasonable time, then the FCC could step in and impose a mandated timeframe along with fines for failing to comply. But I would not expect that to happen anytime soon.
For a wireless to wireless transfer, the porting process should take approximately two and a half hours from the time the porting request is made of the old carrier. The FCC has not mandated a specific time frame for the porting process. Two and a half hours is the time frame agreed upon by the wireless industry, and the FCC supports and encourages carriers to use that time frame.
A wireline to wireless port will probably take longer to complete, and could take several days. Before porting between wireline and wireless phones, consumers should ask their new service provider how long the process will take.
Considering that Mars is experiencing global warming as well, maybe the situation is entirely out of our control? Perhaps we, as humans, have overrated our ability to affect our planet? Or would the extreme environmentalists claim we are somehow screwing Mars over too?
Of course, if this does indicate more of a pattern throughout the Solar System, then we have no control over it whatsoever. Which is probably why it's not really discussed.
Oh, and if you don't like the ABC link above, try it straight from the horse's mouth.
So, what's the problem? Are you too dumb to set something like that up??
Not to respond to Anonymous Coawrds, but in case anyone else was wondering the same thing...
I don't make policy. And those that do want a human to read over all support / abuse mail. So, while an auto-responder is fine, having a script delete mail that does not meet criteria is simply not going to fly with management.
Personally, I would love to have a script that parses the mail, runs some checks to verify it is indeed spam, go through the accounting logs and find the user, and then ban them if they are not already, and respond to the complainer with the results. But, my l33t coding skillz aside:) that simply is not going to happen as management would never allow it.
Sometimes in life, you have to do things the way other people want you too.
So, why don't you leave the keys in your car and the windows down everytime you park? You've got OnStar/LoJack/whatever. If you come out and the car is gone, you'll just call whoever, they'll track it down and get it back.
Not the best example, but the fact is, by the time you see a "large spike" in outbound port 25 traffic, it is too late. That's spam that just went out to the world.
Being forced to use our SMTP server if you are on our network is not such a big deal. Besides, we voluntarily submit our dial-up IPs to blacklists. So, even if we didn't block port 25, your mail wouldn't get to anyone using one of those blacklists anyway.
Of course, you are free to not use our services. That is the beauty of a free market.
Blocking SMTP is not idiocy. You might be inconvenienced a bit, but spammers still use throwaway accounts. They pay their first month of service, and then spam until the ISP finally catches on and shuts down the account. If it takes even 8 hours to catch them, that's millions of spams. Most of our spam reports are around 24 hours old when they reach us. That's 24 hours of constant spamming. Port 25 blocks keep them from being able to use our network to do that.
It may be a bit upsetting not to be able to run your own mailserver, but the amount of spam stopped far outweighs that inconvenience.
My guess is that part of the problem is that most abuse desks are flooded with inane crap. At least ours is. I can't tell you how many emails we get from people who forward a spam to us, and do not include full headers. I mean, they had to find the IP and track down who owned it to get the spam report to us, so how can they then forward us the spam and not include headers? Amazingly, that accounts for well over half the abuse mail we get. Then there are the people who send a message saying "Stop sending me spam" and include an IP address, followed by a copy of our ARIN netblocks, as if we didn't know who we were, and that's it. No spam, no timestamp. Nothing. Then there are the myriad of people who simply write our abuse desk with nothing more than "Please remove me from your mailing list." And it goes on and on and on like that. Of course, now that all the nice new viruses are out there, we also get a ton of "One of your users attacked me on port 135" emails. (We have port 135 blocked on our routers to keep from our users from infecting the net, but on the same NAS, they can still get to each other.) The best ones are from people who send us email claiming they are being attacked by one of our DNS servers because their firewalls are capturing logs of the DNS requests.
That's why, as I've said before, we love SpamCop. When we see a SpamCop report, we know we will have everything we need to knock someone off the network. Very seldomly have we gotten a SpamCop report on something that was not spam. As for the rest of the abuse mail? Maybe 1% or 2% have enough information to track the user, and are actual abuse issues. And usually, they were already banned from a SpamCop report.
Anyway, I've rambled on enough. But for those who don't work abuse for a large ISP, now you have a small glimpse of what the abuse mail looks like.
Slashdot Mirror
What? Darth Vader is Luke's father???
A flight line is certainly a far more hazardous place than a gas station. That is more of a mitigating risk based on the environment kind of thing. I wouldn't use any electronic device if I were, say, soaked in gasoline, regardless of how "safe" or "approved" it was.
I did find an official Navy response. (Yeah, not Air Force, I know, but should be similar.) Their conclusion? It could be possible to start a fire using a cellphone. However, their hypothetical solution to generate the correct voltage and spark requires dropping the phone, and having a spark generate when the battery pops off. Anyway, until we have one proven case where a cellphone has caused a fuel fire, I am going to continue to chalk it up to an urban legend.
Getting in and out of your car during refueling is much more dangerous, and that is not just MHO, but fact. How so? According to the Petroleum Equipment Institute, they do not have a single known case of a cell phone causing a fire. They have an entire page devoted to static electricity. (Of course, it is only fair to mention that ALL refueling fires are extremely rare to begin with, regardless of ignition source.)
They did a thing about this on Mythbusters on Discovery, and were unable to start a fire this way. They pretty much concluded that the static you build up from getting in or our of the car during a fill-up can cause a spark if you touch the car. And doing that near the fueling point can cause a fire. Of course, the worst thing you can do then, which most people do, is pull the hose out of the tank and proceed to spill a LOT of gas into an already burning fire. Not good, especially when you are the one removing the hose. Leave the handle and hose right where it is and get the hell out of there.
And here is a little more data on this urban myth.
If convicted, they should force him to work end user tech support during his jailtime. Of course, I'm sure some treaty out there would deem that cruel and unusual punishment and recommend execution as a more humane alternative. :)
As a last resort, just erase the poor bastards.
Actually, if you really read the Bible, that's exactly what God is going to do. Eternal Hell (as in eternal burning, pain, suffering, etc.) is a Catholic invention that has been carried on by the Protestant churches. Most typical "Christians" will quote the one or two verses that allude to eternal punishment, ignoring many more verses stating that the unsaved will be destroyed, and completely missing the fact that being destroyed *is* an eternal punishment. Of course, most typical Christians only believe what their local pastor/preacher/whatever tells them, regardless of what the Bible says anyway, but that's a whole different debate.
And while I do have some "pretty good ideas" in the religious arena, I do tend to think Organized Religion and Organized Crime are exactly the same. They demand immediate payment to avoid a future punishment. Organized Religion is a protection racket and eternal hell is their version of keeping your business from accidently burning down. Granted there are exceptions to every rule, but most Organized Religion misses the point completely.
And I won't go into it here, but if you want actual verses to back up my claim, email me.
Since you obviously did not RTFA, I will attempt to explain.
Most old recordings on disc and cylinder are extremely fragile. In some cases, simply handling or moving them involves the risk of destruction, let alone actually sticking a needle to them. Here's a link to the old Tech TV clip to illustrate.
What the scientists did was to image the records without actually touching them, and generate the recordings that way. It is quite an impressive feat, actually. Sure, your little sound editor can clean it up real nice, but you've got to get the recording into a digital format first, and that's what this is about.
You, the grandparent poster, and whoever the hell modded you guys up all seem to have completely missed the point.
According to AIM's TOS:
"In addition, by posting Content on an AIM Product, you grant AOL, its parent, affiliates, subsidiaries, assigns, agents and licensees the irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote this Content in any medium. You waive any right to privacy. You waive any right to inspect or approve uses of the Content or to be compensated for any such uses."
Since he had to agree to use the TOS to use AIM, would it not therefore be implicit that since AOL has the right to reproduce the content, that it therefore is being recorded? Seems like some bad District Attorneys out there to let that argument slip by. That says nothing of the waiving of any rights to privacy in the TOS.
And Yassar Arafat was awarded one. So that prize doesn't mean shit.
...make sure that SCO goes down in a ball of fire that can be seen around the world.
:)
What? You mean like this?
It is not just EZPass you have to worry about. You have to avoid the toll roads altogether. I was watching one of those crime shows on TLC/Discovery and they were able to prove the suspect had used a toll road because they had the snapshots of his car/license plate from the toll booth. The catcher is, he used the manual lanes and paid the toll in cash. Those cameras don't just catch toll cheats, they "catch" everyone. I don't recall the state, but if one is doing it, then you have to assume they all are (if you're paranoid like me).
Why is this a hassle? Your company wants customers who run open relays and thus invite the attention of the various RBLs?
It is a hassle because even if the customers leave or are kicked off the network, they still have open relays, and are just going to sign up somewhere else and continue to be part of the problem. Getting them to fix it is a far better solution for everyone involved.
Since when has spam resulted in the direct injury or death of a person?
:)
Well, it's not exactly the direct death, but I can think of at least one case where spam killed.
Not that I agree with the anology or anything, but you did ask, and its the best I got.
You know, a trident does have three points...
Wow. One little picture like that and you could effectively piss off a vast majority of the population of the planet.
As a whole, Humans are stupid.
I've said this before, but I still think we give ourselves too much credit. I think we are seeing the results of much larger cycles in the sun that we do not fully understand.
Why?
Because Mars is experiencing global warming too.
Don't get me wrong, I think we are trashing the environment, and that if we don't do something about it, it will come back and bite us in the ass as a species, but I don't think it is a given fact that global warming is a direct result of our actions. There is simply too much we don't understand.
I agree completey, but you missed the most obvious counter argument.
4. If I burn a CD and snail mail it to you, should the Postal Service be held liable?
That was the first thing I thought of when I saw this article.
Personally, I found the advertising techniques in that movie to be a hell of a lot scarier than the whole Future Crime stuff. Probably because the advertising could happen. As I watched the movie I was picturing advertising execs having wet dreams, and board meetings saying, "We need this!"
And now, here is the beginnings of it.
Great idea, and to save postage we can just send it with Darl when he goes...
If any authorities look into this, I am gonna be pissed. I mean, if they can't bother to do anything when the anti-spam sites get attacked, then they better damn well not do anything now.
Of course, I am of the paranoid type who assumes that SCO would stage a DDoS against themselves just for the publicity, so what the hell do I know?
Servers are all over the world, mostly on cable networks (strangely enough very few DSL ones).
:) Consider it an educated guess.
I think I have an answer to this. Around here (Chicago area) cable is a lot cheaper than DSL. Only recently have DSL prices come down around here, and even then, when they started dropping, Comcast doubled our bandwidth. I'm getting 3 megs down, 256k up, for around $40 a month. Most DSL does not come close.
What does that mean? Well, most Joe Average Broadband guys are using cable networks, and not DSL. It's cheaper and faster. People who use DSL are probably buying it because they have some specific requirements, or need business use (ie, faster uploads). Based on that hypothesis, DSL users would therefore be more spohisticated, and have much more secure servers. The home users on cable are the wide open unpatched Windows boxes where the guy is clicking every link he thinks he can see naked boobs on, and getting infected by various trojans and other viruses.
That's just my impression. I have no facts to back any of that up (except that cable is cheaper than dsl, at least in my area, and at my speeds). I could very well be unknowingly wearing an asshat right now...
According to the FCC website, while there is an industry approved standard of 2.5 hours, there is no set FCC rule as to how long it should take. Now, if AT&T can not get their ETR down to a reasonable time, then the FCC could step in and impose a mandated timeframe along with fines for failing to comply. But I would not expect that to happen anytime soon.
From the FCC FAQ:
How long will the porting process take?
For a wireless to wireless transfer, the porting process should take approximately two and a half hours from the time the porting request is made of the old carrier. The FCC has not mandated a specific time frame for the porting process. Two and a half hours is the time frame agreed upon by the wireless industry, and the FCC supports and encourages carriers to use that time frame.
A wireline to wireless port will probably take longer to complete, and could take several days. Before porting between wireline and wireless phones, consumers should ask their new service provider how long the process will take.
Considering that Mars is experiencing global warming as well, maybe the situation is entirely out of our control? Perhaps we, as humans, have overrated our ability to affect our planet? Or would the extreme environmentalists claim we are somehow screwing Mars over too?
Of course, if this does indicate more of a pattern throughout the Solar System, then we have no control over it whatsoever. Which is probably why it's not really discussed.
Oh, and if you don't like the ABC link above, try it straight from the horse's mouth.
So, what's the problem? Are you too dumb to set something like that up??
:) that simply is not going to happen as management would never allow it.
Not to respond to Anonymous Coawrds, but in case anyone else was wondering the same thing...
I don't make policy. And those that do want a human to read over all support / abuse mail. So, while an auto-responder is fine, having a script delete mail that does not meet criteria is simply not going to fly with management.
Personally, I would love to have a script that parses the mail, runs some checks to verify it is indeed spam, go through the accounting logs and find the user, and then ban them if they are not already, and respond to the complainer with the results. But, my l33t coding skillz aside
Sometimes in life, you have to do things the way other people want you too.
So, why don't you leave the keys in your car and the windows down everytime you park? You've got OnStar/LoJack/whatever. If you come out and the car is gone, you'll just call whoever, they'll track it down and get it back.
Not the best example, but the fact is, by the time you see a "large spike" in outbound port 25 traffic, it is too late. That's spam that just went out to the world.
Being forced to use our SMTP server if you are on our network is not such a big deal. Besides, we voluntarily submit our dial-up IPs to blacklists. So, even if we didn't block port 25, your mail wouldn't get to anyone using one of those blacklists anyway.
Of course, you are free to not use our services. That is the beauty of a free market.
Blocking SMTP is not idiocy. You might be inconvenienced a bit, but spammers still use throwaway accounts. They pay their first month of service, and then spam until the ISP finally catches on and shuts down the account. If it takes even 8 hours to catch them, that's millions of spams. Most of our spam reports are around 24 hours old when they reach us. That's 24 hours of constant spamming. Port 25 blocks keep them from being able to use our network to do that.
It may be a bit upsetting not to be able to run your own mailserver, but the amount of spam stopped far outweighs that inconvenience.
Disclaimer: I work for an ISP, but not Telia...
My guess is that part of the problem is that most abuse desks are flooded with inane crap. At least ours is. I can't tell you how many emails we get from people who forward a spam to us, and do not include full headers. I mean, they had to find the IP and track down who owned it to get the spam report to us, so how can they then forward us the spam and not include headers? Amazingly, that accounts for well over half the abuse mail we get. Then there are the people who send a message saying "Stop sending me spam" and include an IP address, followed by a copy of our ARIN netblocks, as if we didn't know who we were, and that's it. No spam, no timestamp. Nothing. Then there are the myriad of people who simply write our abuse desk with nothing more than "Please remove me from your mailing list." And it goes on and on and on like that. Of course, now that all the nice new viruses are out there, we also get a ton of "One of your users attacked me on port 135" emails. (We have port 135 blocked on our routers to keep from our users from infecting the net, but on the same NAS, they can still get to each other.) The best ones are from people who send us email claiming they are being attacked by one of our DNS servers because their firewalls are capturing logs of the DNS requests.
That's why, as I've said before, we love SpamCop. When we see a SpamCop report, we know we will have everything we need to knock someone off the network. Very seldomly have we gotten a SpamCop report on something that was not spam. As for the rest of the abuse mail? Maybe 1% or 2% have enough information to track the user, and are actual abuse issues. And usually, they were already banned from a SpamCop report.
Anyway, I've rambled on enough. But for those who don't work abuse for a large ISP, now you have a small glimpse of what the abuse mail looks like.