You've got my curiosity, so I'll ask a possibly stupid question -- what do you mean? Does something related to travel (vibration, aging, etc.) cause the quality of Guinness to suffer?
Not even so. With high-index lenses, correcting the vision of someone who is "legally blind" isn't all that problematic, assuming normal myopia/astigmatism/whatever.
Of course, actual glass lenses would be quite thick, probably leading to the "coke-bottle" effect.
They'd also weigh a *lot* -- imagine the pressure of two thick lenses pressing down on the bridge of your nose constantly.
Now, there are degenerative conditions which can prevent correction of eyesight in those so afflicted. However, since the site simply said "legally blind", I'm not that impressed -- it basically sounds like it was done by a deaf guy with glasses.
Spam cannot be controlled purely through software, because artificially restricting what one can do with a system limits its utility, and will cause people to cry foul when they can no longer do things quite so easily.
Legislation cannot solve everything, since jurisdictions are limited.
The best solution may very well be a mix of the two -- legislation which isn't excessively broad, but does make illegal (for example) forged headers, has the potential to do much to slow spam originating from the U.S.
Software must not impose excessive restrictions upon the user, and should be written in such a way that it is likely to only penalize spammers while not imposing more than minimal burden upon innocent bystanders (Paul Graham's suggestions and techniques fit nicely here). The idea is to impose a great burden upon the spammer, to impose minimal burden upon the user, and to differentiate between the two (spammers vs. users) as well as possible.
Interestingly enough, many people speak of Outlook [Express] plugins for handling Bayesian filtering. I'm really not sure why MS hasn't stepped up to the plate and incorporated some such technology into their desktop products.
Not to spend too much time trying to guess the intentions of MS here, but given that Hotmail does implement filtering, as I see it there are a few possibilies --
Conspiracy Theory -- Microsoft is trying to give Hotmail advantages over "outside" email services by giving the user additional value, possibly as a push towards the general use of "Passport-enabled" services.
Product Testing -- Microsoft is using Hotmail as a testbed for filtering techniques before integrating anything into a product. As Paul Graham has written, web applications provide a great way to make changes to software and observe the results immediately.
"Choose Your Battles Wisely" Theory -- Microsoft has no desire to compete with companies which produce filtering software for Windows, as the market is not yet large enough to worry about.
Guesses aside, the overall point of this post is that neither legislation nor technology is sufficient to eliminate spamming, although I do believe that if filters were installed by default and mail clients made it obvious to the user that product offers and sales pitches received were likely to be illegitimate then the average rube who would otherwise consider the purchase of a "spamvertised" product would be slightly better informed, and thus less likely to pay for the spammers' wares.
To summarize the previous summary of the intent of this post, I'm a longwinded bastard, and I agree that legislation would be helpful.
Good work. I guess I was in a bit of a bad mood yesterday, eh?
Random thoughts -- if I had more time to spare, I'd spend more time on organization.
You suggest that servers will, at a later date, become "immune" to heavy load, whether it be by caching, tons of RAM and CPU cycles, or whatever. I can agree with that, especially since most of them will be serving static images.
The problem as I see it isn't server load, but bandwidth. A hosting service may be okay with hosting spammers, but when their upstream bandwidth costs increase heavily, they will either have to charge more or stop hosting spammers, both of which make it harder to profitably spam.
You say that a spam solution has to consider only one factor: does it reduce spam?
My response to that is that if you are burdening the user, they will switch to less cumbersome forms of communication, such as instant messaging. In that case, you're moving the problem to another domain, not eliminating it.
If circumvention is simple, such as putting the recipient's address in the "From" line, then it will not stop spam either.
Do you disagree with either of the previous paragraphs? I feel that both factors are highly important when considering any spam solution.
If it is not simple to use and hard to circumvent, it will not stop spam, period.
Have you worked technical support? It's an interesting experience, and will probably teach you nothing in terms of technical knowledge. However, it does teach you what people want and expect. Most people don't want to know ANYTHING about how their system actually works. They want doggedly simple, and that's about it. So, any solution to spam has to consider that somebody's mother needs to be able to use it without knowing that keys are involved, much less signing and generating them.
You mentioned that spammers could forge headers, which is a *huge* problem with many attempts at automatic blacklisting or whitelisting at the moment. However, you didn't address any solutions to the problem.
Of course suggestions can be useful. However, unless you've addressed the problems of not burdening the user and preventing circumvention, you're honestly probably not saying anything that's already been said. There are a host of spam solutions out there, but very few of them offer both features in a way that can be used on a scale large enough to make it harder to send spam.
I'd be even more, um, almost impressed if you made an attempt to address the obvious flaws in your argument, especially the idea that spammers could just fire off a new set of keys, and the fact that the average grandmother won't be able to use PGP without assistance.
I know, it's easier to pretend that you're offended that I said "fuck", because after all, the word "fuck" makes little kids do heroin.
...and slow down the rate of legitimate mailings as well.
The point is not to throw out the baby with the bathwater -- to avoid encumbering normal communications while imposing the largest possible burden on spammers.
So what's to keep spammers from generating a new set of keys for each spam run? They sign a message, then mass-mail it. Remember, we're discussing a solution to reduce spam overall, not just keep it from YOUR inbox. I suppose you'd support forcing Grandma to go have people sign her PGP key on Bingo Night?
Come up with a truly easy-to-use solution to requiring PGP/GPG encryption (including making it automatic for Grandma), then I'll entertain the idea of requiring certain things of the users. Until then, just saying "Require PGP!" does nothing but make you look like you haven't considered the problem on a widespread scale (read: on a scale large enough to benefit others, not just you and the "elite few") and are just trolling.
And for the final word on "behoove", you quote a 1913 dictionary, which apparently marked the usage as obsolete at the time. Go fuck yourself -- you're about one step away from arguing that because Shakespeare used a certain turn of phrase it must have a place in modern English.
I saw the parent through meta-moderation -- I think it should have gotten much higher, and I don't think "funny" is the word to describe it. SCO basically says what everyone here has been saying all along.
And when the spammers set up a catchall alias that routes to/dev/null?
Oh, look, you've done nothing to stop spam, and annoyed people who send you legitimate mail.
Also, many spammers already are using forged addresses. Many will set the sender address to one of the recipients. As former tech support, I used to take many calls from people who were convinced that somebody had "hacked [their] account" because they got spam with their own address listed as the sender.
Holding connections open will also increase server load, and you haven't gotten past the fact that attempting to automatically send mail to people who email you will piss them off.
Forging sender information is nothing new, and the disadvantages of your proposed system will likely outweight the advantages by far, as it rewards spammers who forge information and causes additional frustration to those who email you.
Paul Graham's solutions attempt to reduce the chances that a given unwanted message will show up in your mailbox. By making smaller the chance that a given recipient will see a given message, the solutions proposed attempt to undermine the economics of spamming.
The best your proposal will do is cause message delivery to take longer -- but it will do so in a way that will slow your servers and cause unnecessary collateral damage by causing increased load on others' machines.
When you can come up with a system which will cause fewer messages to be viewed by uninterested people without causing superfluous messages to be sent (as you propose) or cause more extra load to be imposed upon innocents than on those doing the spamming, write up an article and submit it to Slashdot.
Any spam "solution" has to consider a two factors:
Who is burdened? The system you suggest will send more unwanted mail to senders of legitimate communications. This system imposes an unavoidable burden upon everyone, as opposed to spam, which only currently burdens the recipient (ISP, user, etc.).
Is it easy to circumvent? Were the system you suggest put into wide distribution, spammers could forge headers quite easily, or even set up a catch-all alias at their own site which would accept mail.
It looks like in your case, the problem is worse than the solution.
I wasn't referring to a 1x1 gif, just displaying an image in a 1x1 box, causing the browser to consume resources without affecting the page display significantly.
Remember, this is the land where the mear act of opening some plastic wrap constitutes acceptance of an EULA.
Again, convince a judge of that, and I'll be convinced. And it's "mere".
We too should attempt to use it to our behoove.
Ummm...
From
Merriam-Webster: Main Entry: behoove Pronunciation: bi-'huv Function: verb Inflected Form(s): behooved; behooving Etymology: Middle English behoven, from Old English behOfian, from behOf Date: before 12th century transitive senses : to be necessary, proper, or advantageous for <it behooves us to go> intransitive senses : to be necessary, fit, or proper
Thanks for enforcing my point regarding litigious fools with too much money.
I've used procmail, yes, but we're talking about a general-purpose solution with the goal of reducing the chances that people will find it profitable to send spam.
If you want to run off about using litigation to get back at spammers, you'd be better off trying to convince us that attempts to get around spamassassin or other filtering software is a violation of anti-circumvention laws.
Of course, it still doesn't get at the root cause, and while it may make you feel better to pretend that you have the resources to hire sufficient legal counsel to make such an argument in court, you're doing nothing to solve the root problem -- that of spam in general.
What you're proposing is that you send a message in response to every message you receive. Furthermore, you're suggesting that the message you send in response have an invalid (random) return address.
How is this a good idea?
Okay, say machine scott@b.com is sending to larry@a.com. Assume that all machines are running your "callback" software.
B connects to A. A holds the connection open, as you proposed, and sends a message to scott@b.com, with a forged header so that it looks as though it came from "random1928@c.com".
Okay, B has a pending connection to A. A has an open connection to B, and B tries to deliver the mail to C.
So the user scott@b.com has now gotten spam from random1928@c.com. The operator of c.com isn't happy, because it looks like he's sending spam. The guy at b.com isn't happy, because for every message he sends to a.com ends up in a spam for him.
If the sites involved had catchall aliases (which would accept mail to any address at that domain), the number of connections would increase continually, and nothing would ever actually be confirmed, until a connection or DNS lookup failed somewhere, in which case every pending connection would fail.
SMTP already includes a command for address verification -- it's called VRFY. Most sites shut it off, though, because instead of spamming tons of random addresses, one could just VRFY tons of random addresses. This would make spammers' jobs easier -- they would be able to ensure that each address to which they send mail represents an actual mailbox.
Getting back to your suggestion, though -- this is a truly bad idea. Try it on paper if you don't believe me. Assume that most or all of the hosts are running the software which you propose. Keep in mind that you may suggest inserting headers so that servers can communicate to each other and keep track of which messages are in response to other messages, but headers can (and are!) forged.
If this caught on in a big way, almost certainly less load than spam imposes on its own, assuming that this was run on the servers. However, since Bayesian filters are best left to the individual to personalize to their own specific preferences, the load would likely be distributed across the clients (such as Mozilla), as opposed to the servers.
Graham did mention users with broadband connections, implying that this would be something that the client would pull down.
Fetching an HTTP request and parsing the returned text really has no more security risks than automatically parsing text which is sent to you via email. As long as the software is designed sensibly, there shouldn't be any additional security problems.
This is difficult to say, but one benefit of the proposed system is that it only loads pages linked from messages which are not obvious in their classification. What is questionable in one person's inbox may not be questionable in another's. This reduces the chance that a concocted email will create such a DDOS attack -- it would have to be created in such a way as to be tagged as "possibly, but not definitely, spam" by many different programs given the unique corpora of those running the software.
This is really the big issue -- making sure that an implementation is widespread enough to make a real difference in the habits of spammers and the networks which support them. Reaching this critical mass may take a while, but the point of the article is that by also parsing the links in the email, you get a better idea of how relevent the message may or may not be.
In other words, you get a more accurate filter which takes into account more than the message itself -- it also considers the content which the message is trying to put across.
I'm assuming you don't subscribe to any mailing lists, or get important email from cron or any other automated tasks.
Go ahead and try to get the court to enforce a license agreement on a PGP key. If you can afford the legal fees, it'll just reestablish my faith in America as the land where even idiots can end up with more money than they know what to do with.
How about using the bayesian algorithms we have today and apply them to the referred web pages?
You mean doing exactly what is described in the article?
If the spam is waiting on the site, why not have filters go look at what's there? You could apply the filtering algorithm pretty much unchanged to the contents of the site
Dammit, people. Sure, there are stupid people out there, and many of them post at times. But if you're going to moderate, PLEASE read the article yourself!
I see no problem here. This is similar to having a secretary presort my mail before presenting it to me.
If somebody sends me a piece of mail, and my secretary sees something which may be of interest, she may call the sender to determine whether the piece of mail is truly of interest or not.
Whether she determines that the mail is of interest to me or not, in sending the mail the advertiser invited me or an agent working on my behalf to investigate what they have to offer.
If the secretary, assistant, or spam filter determines that the offer is not worth my time, then I probably don't want to spend my time with it. However, if an agent acting on my behalf decides that the product or service offered does not meet my interests or needs, then I owe the advertiser nothing -- they extended an offer and invited me to learn more.
An automated agent working on my behalf in corner cases[1] where it cannot otherwise determine whether an item might be of interest is no more responsible for the advertisers' resources than the secretary who calls an 800 number to investigate a product offer.
[1] As described in the article, I might add. The article suggests that parsing pages referred to in the email may lead to a more accurate rating.
What would be really neat is a website enumerating the things that would have become public-domain under original copyright law (14yr/28yr), and urging people to write their congressperson explaining just how much their vote depends upon something being done about copyright law eliminating the public domain.
Yes, I'm aware that many of these games are not yet past the 28-year mark, but they will be.
I think that if people realized that old games, music, movies, and media in general would become public domain if copyright were restricted to a 28 year maximum, there would be a lot more support for the idea. As it is, most people probably don't realize that there even is a public domain into which works would fall once copyright expired.
I'm not sure if this is a troll, a bad joke, or just based on a misunderstanding. I'll assume the third.
GNU has _nothing_ to do with the clipboard behavior of X. GNU software (many important libraries and command-line utils) forms the core of the operating system, but GNU is in no way responsible for X or its copy/paste semantics.
There are 9,839 packages in Debian's unstable repository. Chances are probably pretty good that most of the software you're building from scratch is already neatly and conveniently packaged by Debian, and can be installed (with all of the libraries and other programs on which it may depend!) with a single command.
If you're building and installing tons of things from source you're probably missing out on the advantages of letting the system manage packages, such as automatic upgrades of EVERY SINGLE PROGRAM AND LIBRARY you have installed with a single command.
Regarding configure script breakage, it may also be that the user doesn't have the proper development libraries installed.
I've found that Debian is awesome in letting me build things from source, as it tracks build dependancies as well as the normal "can't-run-without-it" deps.
What the parent seems to expect is that./configure will download and install the packages required to build the software, including development libs/headers.
Apparently it's not enough that people write software and contribute it to the community, the parent poster wants them either to also distribute copies of libraries upon which the software is built, or ensure that the autoconf stuff also handles administering the system for them.
Fuck, people, if you want to build things from source, you have to understand a *little* bit about the fact that you occasionally will need to have something installed that most people don't have or want by default. If Debian insisted that some XML library's development headers be installed by default just in case some snivelling newbie wanted to build a package that requires devel headers to build, I'd call that a less useful system, not a more useful one.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, the article didn't make a huge deal out of the idea of conditionally checking borderline cases instead of all cases.
;-)
I was in quite a sore mood yesterday as well -- new jobs are stressful, and I was in quite a funk.
You've got my curiosity, so I'll ask a possibly stupid question -- what do you mean? Does something related to travel (vibration, aging, etc.) cause the quality of Guinness to suffer?
Oh, and greetings from across the pond.
Not even so. With high-index lenses, correcting the vision of someone who is "legally blind" isn't all that problematic, assuming normal myopia/astigmatism/whatever.
Of course, actual glass lenses would be quite thick, probably leading to the "coke-bottle" effect.
They'd also weigh a *lot* -- imagine the pressure of two thick lenses pressing down on the bridge of your nose constantly.
Now, there are degenerative conditions which can prevent correction of eyesight in those so afflicted. However, since the site simply said "legally blind", I'm not that impressed -- it basically sounds like it was done by a deaf guy with glasses.
Spam cannot be controlled purely through software, because artificially restricting what one can do with a system limits its utility, and will cause people to cry foul when they can no longer do things quite so easily.
Legislation cannot solve everything, since jurisdictions are limited.
The best solution may very well be a mix of the two -- legislation which isn't excessively broad, but does make illegal (for example) forged headers, has the potential to do much to slow spam originating from the U.S.
Software must not impose excessive restrictions upon the user, and should be written in such a way that it is likely to only penalize spammers while not imposing more than minimal burden upon innocent bystanders (Paul Graham's suggestions and techniques fit nicely here). The idea is to impose a great burden upon the spammer, to impose minimal burden upon the user, and to differentiate between the two (spammers vs. users) as well as possible.
Interestingly enough, many people speak of Outlook [Express] plugins for handling Bayesian filtering. I'm really not sure why MS hasn't stepped up to the plate and incorporated some such technology into their desktop products.
Not to spend too much time trying to guess the intentions of MS here, but given that Hotmail does implement filtering, as I see it there are a few possibilies --
Conspiracy Theory -- Microsoft is trying to give Hotmail advantages over "outside" email services by giving the user additional value, possibly as a push towards the general use of "Passport-enabled" services.
Product Testing -- Microsoft is using Hotmail as a testbed for filtering techniques before integrating anything into a product. As Paul Graham has written, web applications provide a great way to make changes to software and observe the results immediately.
"Choose Your Battles Wisely" Theory -- Microsoft has no desire to compete with companies which produce filtering software for Windows, as the market is not yet large enough to worry about.
:-)
Guesses aside, the overall point of this post is that neither legislation nor technology is sufficient to eliminate spamming, although I do believe that if filters were installed by default and mail clients made it obvious to the user that product offers and sales pitches received were likely to be illegitimate then the average rube who would otherwise consider the purchase of a "spamvertised" product would be slightly better informed, and thus less likely to pay for the spammers' wares.
To summarize the previous summary of the intent of this post, I'm a longwinded bastard, and I agree that legislation would be helpful.
Basically, I'm saying, "me too".
In short, AOL.
Good work. I guess I was in a bit of a bad mood yesterday, eh?
Random thoughts -- if I had more time to spare, I'd spend more time on organization.
You suggest that servers will, at a later date, become "immune" to heavy load, whether it be by caching, tons of RAM and CPU cycles, or whatever. I can agree with that, especially since most of them will be serving static images.
The problem as I see it isn't server load, but bandwidth. A hosting service may be okay with hosting spammers, but when their upstream bandwidth costs increase heavily, they will either have to charge more or stop hosting spammers, both of which make it harder to profitably spam.
You say that a spam solution has to consider only one factor: does it reduce spam?
My response to that is that if you are burdening the user, they will switch to less cumbersome forms of communication, such as instant messaging. In that case, you're moving the problem to another domain, not eliminating it.
If circumvention is simple, such as putting the recipient's address in the "From" line, then it will not stop spam either.
Do you disagree with either of the previous paragraphs? I feel that both factors are highly important when considering any spam solution.
If it is not simple to use and hard to circumvent, it will not stop spam, period.
Have you worked technical support? It's an interesting experience, and will probably teach you nothing in terms of technical knowledge. However, it does teach you what people want and expect. Most people don't want to know ANYTHING about how their system actually works. They want doggedly simple, and that's about it. So, any solution to spam has to consider that somebody's mother needs to be able to use it without knowing that keys are involved, much less signing and generating them.
You mentioned that spammers could forge headers, which is a *huge* problem with many attempts at automatic blacklisting or whitelisting at the moment. However, you didn't address any solutions to the problem.
Of course suggestions can be useful. However, unless you've addressed the problems of not burdening the user and preventing circumvention, you're honestly probably not saying anything that's already been said. There are a host of spam solutions out there, but very few of them offer both features in a way that can be used on a scale large enough to make it harder to send spam.
OoooooOOooooOOOooooOOoooo. I'm *almost* impressed.
I'd be even more, um, almost impressed if you made an attempt to address the obvious flaws in your argument, especially the idea that spammers could just fire off a new set of keys, and the fact that the average grandmother won't be able to use PGP without assistance.
I know, it's easier to pretend that you're offended that I said "fuck", because after all, the word "fuck" makes little kids do heroin.
...and slow down the rate of legitimate mailings as well.
The point is not to throw out the baby with the bathwater -- to avoid encumbering normal communications while imposing the largest possible burden on spammers.
So what's to keep spammers from generating a new set of keys for each spam run? They sign a message, then mass-mail it. Remember, we're discussing a solution to reduce spam overall, not just keep it from YOUR inbox. I suppose you'd support forcing Grandma to go have people sign her PGP key on Bingo Night?
Come up with a truly easy-to-use solution to requiring PGP/GPG encryption (including making it automatic for Grandma), then I'll entertain the idea of requiring certain things of the users. Until then, just saying "Require PGP!" does nothing but make you look like you haven't considered the problem on a widespread scale (read: on a scale large enough to benefit others, not just you and the "elite few") and are just trolling.
And for the final word on "behoove", you quote a 1913 dictionary, which apparently marked the usage as obsolete at the time. Go fuck yourself -- you're about one step away from arguing that because Shakespeare used a certain turn of phrase it must have a place in modern English.
I saw the parent through meta-moderation -- I think it should have gotten much higher, and I don't think "funny" is the word to describe it. SCO basically says what everyone here has been saying all along.
Where are the mod points when you need them? Ugh.
I see you're logged in. That means that you can choose which Slashboxes to display -- and which to exclude.
I am forgetting nothing of the sort. I suggested a Slashbox which would cause images loaded by spam to also be loaded with the Slashdot home page.
Either you didn't read my original comment, or you had no idea that you could configure your display of the Slashdot homepage.
If the latter is true, click here, learn something, and have a nice day.
If the former is true, go fuck yourself. If you need some material to get it up, check out autopr0n's homepage.
Oh, look, you've done nothing to stop spam, and annoyed people who send you legitimate mail.
Also, many spammers already are using forged addresses. Many will set the sender address to one of the recipients. As former tech support, I used to take many calls from people who were convinced that somebody had "hacked [their] account" because they got spam with their own address listed as the sender.
Holding connections open will also increase server load, and you haven't gotten past the fact that attempting to automatically send mail to people who email you will piss them off.
Forging sender information is nothing new, and the disadvantages of your proposed system will likely outweight the advantages by far, as it rewards spammers who forge information and causes additional frustration to those who email you.
Paul Graham's solutions attempt to reduce the chances that a given unwanted message will show up in your mailbox. By making smaller the chance that a given recipient will see a given message, the solutions proposed attempt to undermine the economics of spamming.
The best your proposal will do is cause message delivery to take longer -- but it will do so in a way that will slow your servers and cause unnecessary collateral damage by causing increased load on others' machines.
When you can come up with a system which will cause fewer messages to be viewed by uninterested people without causing superfluous messages to be sent (as you propose) or cause more extra load to be imposed upon innocents than on those doing the spamming, write up an article and submit it to Slashdot.
Any spam "solution" has to consider a two factors:
Who is burdened? The system you suggest will send more unwanted mail to senders of legitimate communications. This system imposes an unavoidable burden upon everyone, as opposed to spam, which only currently burdens the recipient (ISP, user, etc.).
Is it easy to circumvent? Were the system you suggest put into wide distribution, spammers could forge headers quite easily, or even set up a catch-all alias at their own site which would accept mail.
It looks like in your case, the problem is worse than the solution.
I wasn't referring to a 1x1 gif, just displaying an image in a 1x1 box, causing the browser to consume resources without affecting the page display significantly.
I've used procmail, yes, but we're talking about a general-purpose solution with the goal of reducing the chances that people will find it profitable to send spam.
If you want to run off about using litigation to get back at spammers, you'd be better off trying to convince us that attempts to get around spamassassin or other filtering software is a violation of anti-circumvention laws.
Of course, it still doesn't get at the root cause, and while it may make you feel better to pretend that you have the resources to hire sufficient legal counsel to make such an argument in court, you're doing nothing to solve the root problem -- that of spam in general.
A 404 would cause load on their servers, but pulling actual images would rob their bandwidth as well.
What you're proposing is that you send a message in response to every message you receive. Furthermore, you're suggesting that the message you send in response have an invalid (random) return address.
How is this a good idea?
Okay, say machine scott@b.com is sending to larry@a.com. Assume that all machines are running your "callback" software.
B connects to A. A holds the connection open, as you proposed, and sends a message to scott@b.com, with a forged header so that it looks as though it came from "random1928@c.com".
Okay, B has a pending connection to A. A has an open connection to B, and B tries to deliver the mail to C.
So the user scott@b.com has now gotten spam from random1928@c.com. The operator of c.com isn't happy, because it looks like he's sending spam. The guy at b.com isn't happy, because for every message he sends to a.com ends up in a spam for him.
If the sites involved had catchall aliases (which would accept mail to any address at that domain), the number of connections would increase continually, and nothing would ever actually be confirmed, until a connection or DNS lookup failed somewhere, in which case every pending connection would fail.
SMTP already includes a command for address verification -- it's called VRFY. Most sites shut it off, though, because instead of spamming tons of random addresses, one could just VRFY tons of random addresses. This would make spammers' jobs easier -- they would be able to ensure that each address to which they send mail represents an actual mailbox.
Getting back to your suggestion, though -- this is a truly bad idea. Try it on paper if you don't believe me. Assume that most or all of the hosts are running the software which you propose. Keep in mind that you may suggest inserting headers so that servers can communicate to each other and keep track of which messages are in response to other messages, but headers can (and are!) forged.
Yes, it has been considered. Chances are a reasonably trained corpus will contain enough to not tag such messages as potential spam.
Only messages which were neither definitely legit or definitely spam would have their links traced.
Graham did mention users with broadband connections, implying that this would be something that the client would pull down.
In other words, you get a more accurate filter which takes into account more than the message itself -- it also considers the content which the message is trying to put across.
I'm assuming you don't subscribe to any mailing lists, or get important email from cron or any other automated tasks.
Go ahead and try to get the court to enforce a license agreement on a PGP key. If you can afford the legal fees, it'll just reestablish my faith in America as the land where even idiots can end up with more money than they know what to do with.
Here's to hoping M2 does its job in this case.
I see no problem here. This is similar to having a secretary presort my mail before presenting it to me.
If somebody sends me a piece of mail, and my secretary sees something which may be of interest, she may call the sender to determine whether the piece of mail is truly of interest or not.
Whether she determines that the mail is of interest to me or not, in sending the mail the advertiser invited me or an agent working on my behalf to investigate what they have to offer.
If the secretary, assistant, or spam filter determines that the offer is not worth my time, then I probably don't want to spend my time with it. However, if an agent acting on my behalf decides that the product or service offered does not meet my interests or needs, then I owe the advertiser nothing -- they extended an offer and invited me to learn more.
An automated agent working on my behalf in corner cases[1] where it cannot otherwise determine whether an item might be of interest is no more responsible for the advertisers' resources than the secretary who calls an 800 number to investigate a product offer.
[1] As described in the article, I might add. The article suggests that parsing pages referred to in the email may lead to a more accurate rating.
I've been thinking for a while about maybe having a Slashbox that displays images included in spam in a 1x1 pixel box.
Every load of Slashdot would hit spammers' servers.
What would be really neat is a website enumerating the things that would have become public-domain under original copyright law (14yr/28yr), and urging people to write their congressperson explaining just how much their vote depends upon something being done about copyright law eliminating the public domain.
Yes, I'm aware that many of these games are not yet past the 28-year mark, but they will be.
I think that if people realized that old games, music, movies, and media in general would become public domain if copyright were restricted to a 28 year maximum, there would be a lot more support for the idea. As it is, most people probably don't realize that there even is a public domain into which works would fall once copyright expired.
I'm not sure if this is a troll, a bad joke, or just based on a misunderstanding. I'll assume the third.
GNU has _nothing_ to do with the clipboard behavior of X. GNU software (many important libraries and command-line utils) forms the core of the operating system, but GNU is in no way responsible for X or its copy/paste semantics.
Ummm... Run Debian and stop wasting your time.
There are 9,839 packages in Debian's unstable repository. Chances are probably pretty good that most of the software you're building from scratch is already neatly and conveniently packaged by Debian, and can be installed (with all of the libraries and other programs on which it may depend!) with a single command.
If you're building and installing tons of things from source you're probably missing out on the advantages of letting the system manage packages, such as automatic upgrades of EVERY SINGLE PROGRAM AND LIBRARY you have installed with a single command.
Regarding configure script breakage, it may also be that the user doesn't have the proper development libraries installed.
./configure will download and install the packages required to build the software, including development libs/headers.
I've found that Debian is awesome in letting me build things from source, as it tracks build dependancies as well as the normal "can't-run-without-it" deps.
What the parent seems to expect is that
Apparently it's not enough that people write software and contribute it to the community, the parent poster wants them either to also distribute copies of libraries upon which the software is built, or ensure that the autoconf stuff also handles administering the system for them.
Fuck, people, if you want to build things from source, you have to understand a *little* bit about the fact that you occasionally will need to have something installed that most people don't have or want by default. If Debian insisted that some XML library's development headers be installed by default just in case some snivelling newbie wanted to build a package that requires devel headers to build, I'd call that a less useful system, not a more useful one.
Thanks for the kind words.
Happy hacking!