Spammers who do what? What exactly is it that they do with the verified addresses? They sell them to other spammers? Are you really saying that spammers trust each other enough to pay more for "verified" addresses? Can you support this with some evidence?
Perhaps they send more spam to those addresses. How? How can they send more spam? The costs are effectively free, spam is by its nature untargetted, and we've all seen (ooh, an anecdote) multiple spams from the same spammer in the same day. Under what circumstances would a spammer send less spam to an address? So, how can they send more?
> You've asked for statistics, but this is a case where none are really needed. Logic is good enough.
Because "logic" supports your position.
>What you've asked for can't be all that easily studied
It's trivially easy to study. The only question is how much time do you want to spend on it.
>Harvesting email addresses from opt-out lists has to be about the sleaziest thing a spammer could do.
I doubt that they do things just to be sleazy. What's the benefit to them in doing it? Or, given that it's zero cost to them to send spam, what's the benefit to avoiding unverified addresses? Please answer this question, as it's at the core of my argument.
>And you'll agree that the sleaziest spammers forge headers.
Relevant in what way?
>So, how on earth could you be 100% certain that your act of opting out has caused a given piece of spam?
I'd settle for statistics, preferably from an independent organisation.
>All you can do is look at the spam industry itself, and ask, "why wouldn't they harvest opt-outs for future spamming?" By opting out, after all, you've just given proof that the email address in question is valuable to you.
Gosh, yes, you're right. Now, follow through on that thought.
>Why wouldn't they want to take advantage of that piece of information.
Of course they would! Where on earth did I suggest otherwise?
What I asked, and the question that you're avoiding answering, is what on earth they could actually do with that information that would make you receive more spam.
They could sell the addresses, right? Who to? Would you buy anything "100% GARAUNTEED!!!!!" from a spammer? They could send more spam? How? That presupposes that they might under other circumstances send less spam, and by your arguments, what's the chances of them doing that?
>That opt-out lists will be abused by spammers is common-sense.
Abused how? Concrete examples, please.
> I think the burden of proof is on you to show otherwise.
>I'm calling bullshit on you. I challenge you to cite quantative evidence that replying to spam DOES NOT result in receiveing extra spam.
No, your pants are on fire.
I have no position, I made no claims. Don't for one second assume that you can simply turn the argument around and disprove something that I didn't say.
I'll take it from your passive-aggressive stance that you don't have the evidence that I asked for, shall I?
Look, chump, read what you're replying to. I'm not interested in your unrelated anecdotes. I too have an account that receives no spam, but what relevance does this have?
If you've got nothing to say on the subject at hand, why not just keep your opinions to yourself, or better yet, start your own thread.
This article quotes no figures, supplies no details. It's unverifiable, and it's provided by a.com with an interest in producing content. Its credibility is precisely and only that which you choose to invest in it.
On the other hand, it confirms your preconceptions, so it must be true!
There's no money in helping kiddies. There's votes to be had in saying that you're going to help them, but saying is a very different thing from doing.
I'm getting the distinct impression that it's all getting too big for Ian, and he really doesn't know what to do next. I read his post as a plea for help, but sans the important admission that he really, really needs it.
I wonder if he's stuck in the situation where he really wants to retain control over Freenet (for the best of reasons), but has hit the limit of his technical ability.
Where should he go from here? Assign the copy rights to the FSF and trust in the basic goodness of people, I suggest.
>The seventh is opt-out with an unsubscribe link that actually confirms your address as belonging to a live account.
The author doesn't say whether he believes this happens, but he implies so by adding another similar case: "The unsubscribe link removes you from the list in question, but it also adds your address to another list."
I'm calling bullshit on both of them. I challenge anyone here to cite any quantative evidence that replying to spam has resulted in them receiving so much as one extra message.
No, anecdotes don't cut it. Neither does common sense, or "Well, it stands to reason" arguments. Neither does the availability of "verified" address lists. I can create a billion psuedo-random addresses, call them "verified" and slap whatever price tag I like on them. It doesn't make it so, and remember what sort of people we're dealing with here. You don't think they'd screw each other over for a few bucks?
As far as I'm concerned, spam is so untargetted that replying to an unsubscribe cannot possibly make it worse. It's vanishingly unlikely to make it better, but how, exactly, does it make it worse?
Examples, statistics please. No more anecdotes, no more gut feelings.
When our network fileserver fills up (as it does twice a week or so), I start emailing things to myself through the corporate mail server. When the mail server fills up, I start adding to my intranet HTTP pages. When all else fails, I start sending (encrypted) data back to myself via my ISPs external mail servers.
It would of course be far better for the company if they just sprang for some new drives in the fileserver, but engineer and bandwidth costs don't appear as capital expenses, so they are viewed as being effectively "free". Sigh.
>unless the guv'mnt decides to install those big gate antennas all over your local neighborhood,
Post Offices first, because mumble, anti-terrorism, antrax mutter. Then banks, because blah critical infrastructure waffle war on drugs something. Then mall entrances, because, well, we damn well can. We can stop there, because anyone that doesn't get snared by those at least once a week probably lives with their sister-momma in a shack in the bayou, and the Feds can pretty much whack them whenever they want.
> I worked for ATTBI and there were quite a few people (calling in to me alone) that were infected with some sort of trojan/virus and they had been automatically disabled.
And my friend had his Telewest account disabled because he was infected with Code Red. Thus he was assured by the phone drone that finally gave him a reason. Here's how the conversation went:
Friend: "How can my Linux box be infected with Code Red?"
Phone Drone: "Well, what are you running on it."
Friend: "Uh, ssh, an ftp server, Apache."
Phone Drone: "Apache's a web server, right?"
Friend: "Uh, yes. Why? Code Red only effects Microsoft IIS."
Phone Drone: "Apache has an IIS component."
Friend: "Sorry? It must be a bad line. What did you just say?"
Phone Drone: "Apache has an IIS component or module. It's vulnerable. That's your problem. You need to patch it and run your virus checker."
Friend: "My head just exploded."
You see, that's the problem with your argument right there. ISPs do fuck up, and when they do, it's biased bullshitters - like you, I'll come right out and suggest - that enter a surreal world of spin to explain and defend the policies that lead to the automatic no-argument no-comebacks disconnections. But hey, it's just some college student putting themselves into debt for the rest of their life; what's their word against a Perl script written by a guy that probably spent his college years playing Quake.
No, but that's because nobody's offered an alternative, so they don't look bad by comparison. Purchasers tolerate games being ruined by cheating weenies because their choice is broken games or no games. What kind of choice is that?
And then when the aimbots appear, those same customers whine that the game has been ruined. I agree that it's the customers' fault, but on the other hand, it's not as though they have a choice between robust games and flakey games, it's either flakey games or nothing. It's be nice if they had the option to go with something robust.
> There's a long history of cheating in Netrek. Paranoid model, my ass. (I think the old versions were even peer-to-peer.)
Well, they weren't, they were X apps, which makes your opinion on the ability to cheat rather spurious, doesn't it?
The RSA client authentication was a layer on top of the network model. It was breakable by a man-in-the-middle attack, if you could change the result of a getpeername() call on the victim client machine (root access or just -assert on a SunOS/Solaris shared object machine).
So, yes, you could cheat by writing a hacked client. And you know what? It didn't really help. You could get torpedoes to auto-aim. Great, except that just meant that clued players could almost always dodge them, and you couldn't fire them so as to deny an area of space, a dreadful disadvantage. You could get a mean phaser-lock (assuming that you had no lag), but you still had to decide if the range/fuel/damage equation made sense. You could get the client to flick shields up and down to try and split damage, but not with the same sense of context as a human player, leading to you taking hull damage when you really needed to be at maximum warp. You could show cloaked ships on the tactical screen, but only at the incorrect and erratically updated position that the server sent, with incorrect heading and speed information that meant that you knew that they were there, but not what they were doing or how to hit them.
Basically, you could write a client that performed like a highly skillful but almost totally clueless human. Tactically, it was fine; if you could muscle in close, you could hit the "splurge" key and brutalise most human players with a profligate burst of weapon fire. But strategically (which is what mattered in Netrek) that would often leave you low on fuel and damaged exactly when you needed to be somewhere else fast. The only really useful parts were information features, i.e. keeping track and highlighting enemy carriers. But even then, the client was just guessing, and it wasn't doing anything that a good human player wouldn't do. One of the big indicators of good design is that nobody ever wrote a decent robot player for Netrek. The game simply had too much emergent complexity, and the network model stopped robots from gaining enough of a tactical advantage to make up for their strategic failings. Netrek is Go to XPilot's Chess.
Remember, I was talking about the network model. Netrek sends very few pieces of information that it doesn't absolutely have to. If you don't have friendly ships close enough to enemy ships, you get no information on them, and likewise for enemy planets. If you're close, you can see that 3 armies have just been beamed up from a planet, but you don't know which of the two ships in orbit beamed them up. You get position, speed, heading info for enemy ships, and nothing else, not shield info, not damage info. The only snafu that I found was that cloaked ship information identifies the ship (so that you can display the player and type) when it should really just be handled as "unidentified unit" data (but it would be fairly easy to identify it anyway by elimination, so I'm letting that one slide).
When I see a game with a better network model (and basic design) than Netrek, I'll happily acknowlege it. I'm still waiting.
Try to keep up, I'm talking about network data. If object information is even sent to a client that's not in a state where it should be able to see it, then you've already got a broken model.
then the design is flawed. The network model should be paranoid and should hide data. Having the source available should only tell you exactly what it is that you can't exploit.
Dear god, open source games developers have known this for years. Netrek figured it out in 1988! Why do commercial games developers insist on re-inventing the wheel and making the same mistakes over and over?
Your post has an undescriptive subject, and therefore the content is worthless. OK, I didn't read the content, but the subject should be enough to judge it on, right?
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, thanks for the unverifiable anecdote!
Spammers who do what? What exactly is it that they do with the verified addresses? They sell them to other spammers? Are you really saying that spammers trust each other enough to pay more for "verified" addresses? Can you support this with some evidence?
Perhaps they send more spam to those addresses. How? How can they send more spam? The costs are effectively free, spam is by its nature untargetted, and we've all seen (ooh, an anecdote) multiple spams from the same spammer in the same day. Under what circumstances would a spammer send less spam to an address? So, how can they send more?
> You've asked for statistics, but this is a case where none are really needed. Logic is good enough.
Because "logic" supports your position.
>What you've asked for can't be all that easily studied
It's trivially easy to study. The only question is how much time do you want to spend on it.
>Harvesting email addresses from opt-out lists has to be about the sleaziest thing a spammer could do.
I doubt that they do things just to be sleazy. What's the benefit to them in doing it? Or, given that it's zero cost to them to send spam, what's the benefit to avoiding unverified addresses? Please answer this question, as it's at the core of my argument.
>And you'll agree that the sleaziest spammers forge headers.
Relevant in what way?
>So, how on earth could you be 100% certain that your act of opting out has caused a given piece of spam?
I'd settle for statistics, preferably from an independent organisation.
>All you can do is look at the spam industry itself, and ask, "why wouldn't they harvest opt-outs for future spamming?" By opting out, after all, you've just given proof that the email address in question is valuable to you.
Gosh, yes, you're right. Now, follow through on that thought.
>Why wouldn't they want to take advantage of that piece of information.
Of course they would! Where on earth did I suggest otherwise?
What I asked, and the question that you're avoiding answering, is what on earth they could actually do with that information that would make you receive more spam.
They could sell the addresses, right? Who to? Would you buy anything "100% GARAUNTEED!!!!!" from a spammer? They could send more spam? How? That presupposes that they might under other circumstances send less spam, and by your arguments, what's the chances of them doing that?
>That opt-out lists will be abused by spammers is common-sense.
Abused how? Concrete examples, please.
> I think the burden of proof is on you to show otherwise.
You're entitled to that thought.
> How about the story the other day where they actually interviewed a spammer who said he "loved" unsubscribe emails?
That would be an anecdote.
>It may well be an "anecdote,"
It's an actual anecdote. There's no need to "quote" it.
>but it's an anecdote straight from the pigs mouth.
Spammers are lying vermin... except when they're telling us what we want to hear, apparently.
>I'm calling bullshit on you. I challenge you to cite quantative evidence that replying to spam DOES NOT result in receiveing extra spam.
No, your pants are on fire.
I have no position, I made no claims. Don't for one second assume that you can simply turn the argument around and disprove something that I didn't say.
I'll take it from your passive-aggressive stance that you don't have the evidence that I asked for, shall I?
Look, chump, read what you're replying to. I'm not interested in your unrelated anecdotes. I too have an account that receives no spam, but what relevance does this have?
If you've got nothing to say on the subject at hand, why not just keep your opinions to yourself, or better yet, start your own thread.
What part of "anecdote" are you unclear about?
This article quotes no figures, supplies no details. It's unverifiable, and it's provided by a .com with an interest in producing content. Its credibility is precisely and only that which you choose to invest in it.
On the other hand, it confirms your preconceptions, so it must be true!
There's no money in helping kiddies. There's votes to be had in saying that you're going to help them, but saying is a very different thing from doing.
I'm getting the distinct impression that it's all getting too big for Ian, and he really doesn't know what to do next. I read his post as a plea for help, but sans the important admission that he really, really needs it.
I wonder if he's stuck in the situation where he really wants to retain control over Freenet (for the best of reasons), but has hit the limit of his technical ability.
Where should he go from here? Assign the copy rights to the FSF and trust in the basic goodness of people, I suggest.
>The seventh is opt-out with an unsubscribe link that actually confirms your address as belonging to a live account.
The author doesn't say whether he believes this happens, but he implies so by adding another similar case: "The unsubscribe link removes you from the list in question, but it also adds your address to another list."
I'm calling bullshit on both of them. I challenge anyone here to cite any quantative evidence that replying to spam has resulted in them receiving so much as one extra message.
No, anecdotes don't cut it. Neither does common sense, or "Well, it stands to reason" arguments. Neither does the availability of "verified" address lists. I can create a billion psuedo-random addresses, call them "verified" and slap whatever price tag I like on them. It doesn't make it so, and remember what sort of people we're dealing with here. You don't think they'd screw each other over for a few bucks?
As far as I'm concerned, spam is so untargetted that replying to an unsubscribe cannot possibly make it worse. It's vanishingly unlikely to make it better, but how, exactly, does it make it worse?
Examples, statistics please. No more anecdotes, no more gut feelings.
My point is that if you're viewing government as Them, then you're complicit in its theft from Us.
Via Spaced, I'll just float the idea of Simon Pegg.
When our network fileserver fills up (as it does twice a week or so), I start emailing things to myself through the corporate mail server. When the mail server fills up, I start adding to my intranet HTTP pages. When all else fails, I start sending (encrypted) data back to myself via my ISPs external mail servers.
It would of course be far better for the company if they just sprang for some new drives in the fileserver, but engineer and bandwidth costs don't appear as capital expenses, so they are viewed as being effectively "free". Sigh.
>unless the guv'mnt decides to install those big gate antennas all over your local neighborhood,
Post Offices first, because mumble, anti-terrorism, antrax mutter. Then banks, because blah critical infrastructure waffle war on drugs something. Then mall entrances, because, well, we damn well can. We can stop there, because anyone that doesn't get snared by those at least once a week probably lives with their sister-momma in a shack in the bayou, and the Feds can pretty much whack them whenever they want.
Government, eh? Of the people, by the people and for the people. What country do you think you live in?
>Sounds a lot like Quake-type games .. like HalfLife.
A couple of things:
> I worked for ATTBI and there were quite a few people (calling in to me alone) that were infected with some sort of trojan/virus and they had been automatically disabled.
And my friend had his Telewest account disabled because he was infected with Code Red. Thus he was assured by the phone drone that finally gave him a reason. Here's how the conversation went:
You see, that's the problem with your argument right there. ISPs do fuck up, and when they do, it's biased bullshitters - like you, I'll come right out and suggest - that enter a surreal world of spin to explain and defend the policies that lead to the automatic no-argument no-comebacks disconnections. But hey, it's just some college student putting themselves into debt for the rest of their life; what's their word against a Perl script written by a guy that probably spent his college years playing Quake.
No, but that's because nobody's offered an alternative, so they don't look bad by comparison. Purchasers tolerate games being ruined by cheating weenies because their choice is broken games or no games. What kind of choice is that?
And then when the aimbots appear, those same customers whine that the game has been ruined. I agree that it's the customers' fault, but on the other hand, it's not as though they have a choice between robust games and flakey games, it's either flakey games or nothing. It's be nice if they had the option to go with something robust.
>have open-source developers already found a way to make quake 1 do multiplayer without allowing aiming proxies *and* [...] etc
Ooh, smart move. Point out the flaws in the design of a game that was commercial and closed source when it was designed.
Thanks for making my point for me, Coward. If you get the design wrong from day one, then you can pretty much forget about fixing it later.
> There's a long history of cheating in Netrek. Paranoid model, my ass. (I think the old versions were even peer-to-peer.)
Well, they weren't, they were X apps, which makes your opinion on the ability to cheat rather spurious, doesn't it?
The RSA client authentication was a layer on top of the network model. It was breakable by a man-in-the-middle attack, if you could change the result of a getpeername() call on the victim client machine (root access or just -assert on a SunOS/Solaris shared object machine).
So, yes, you could cheat by writing a hacked client. And you know what? It didn't really help. You could get torpedoes to auto-aim. Great, except that just meant that clued players could almost always dodge them, and you couldn't fire them so as to deny an area of space, a dreadful disadvantage. You could get a mean phaser-lock (assuming that you had no lag), but you still had to decide if the range/fuel/damage equation made sense. You could get the client to flick shields up and down to try and split damage, but not with the same sense of context as a human player, leading to you taking hull damage when you really needed to be at maximum warp. You could show cloaked ships on the tactical screen, but only at the incorrect and erratically updated position that the server sent, with incorrect heading and speed information that meant that you knew that they were there, but not what they were doing or how to hit them.
Basically, you could write a client that performed like a highly skillful but almost totally clueless human. Tactically, it was fine; if you could muscle in close, you could hit the "splurge" key and brutalise most human players with a profligate burst of weapon fire. But strategically (which is what mattered in Netrek) that would often leave you low on fuel and damaged exactly when you needed to be somewhere else fast. The only really useful parts were information features, i.e. keeping track and highlighting enemy carriers. But even then, the client was just guessing, and it wasn't doing anything that a good human player wouldn't do. One of the big indicators of good design is that nobody ever wrote a decent robot player for Netrek. The game simply had too much emergent complexity, and the network model stopped robots from gaining enough of a tactical advantage to make up for their strategic failings. Netrek is Go to XPilot's Chess.
Remember, I was talking about the network model. Netrek sends very few pieces of information that it doesn't absolutely have to. If you don't have friendly ships close enough to enemy ships, you get no information on them, and likewise for enemy planets. If you're close, you can see that 3 armies have just been beamed up from a planet, but you don't know which of the two ships in orbit beamed them up. You get position, speed, heading info for enemy ships, and nothing else, not shield info, not damage info. The only snafu that I found was that cloaked ship information identifies the ship (so that you can display the player and type) when it should really just be handled as "unidentified unit" data (but it would be fairly easy to identify it anyway by elimination, so I'm letting that one slide).
When I see a game with a better network model (and basic design) than Netrek, I'll happily acknowlege it. I'm still waiting.
Try to keep up, I'm talking about network data. If object information is even sent to a client that's not in a state where it should be able to see it, then you've already got a broken model.
Translation: the closest recorded by the guys putting out the press release, therefore give us more funding.
How many innocents have they hauled into court so far?
I make it a count of zero.
You're crying wolf. I hope you know the parable.
then the design is flawed. The network model should be paranoid and should hide data. Having the source available should only tell you exactly what it is that you can't exploit.
Dear god, open source games developers have known this for years. Netrek figured it out in 1988! Why do commercial games developers insist on re-inventing the wheel and making the same mistakes over and over?
Your post has an undescriptive subject, and therefore the content is worthless. OK, I didn't read the content, but the subject should be enough to judge it on, right?