This service WILL NOT be automatically switched-on on anyone's mailbox. The user MUST make the conscious decision to CHOOSE to turn this feature on. It is off by default for all users.
keep in mind that in this model, messages are not rejected, they are placed in a holding box. no message is ever lost unless the user takes the active step of deleting it. BIG, BIG difference. that holding box is conveniently surfaced in the user interface and identified as such, a holding box, NOT a trashcan or assumed spam box.
uhm okay. then all the user has to do in the first place is to not whitelist the spammer. Tell me how in the world a spammer could effectively manage to trick a single user, much less multiple users into believing they are their friends? They'd have to:
1) get past the initial challenge-response step which offers the spammer an image whose content they must identify and replicate to prove they are a human being. there currently is no known automated way of doing this.
2) trick the potential future recipient of their email into believing they are friendly to whitelist them.
Even if they make it past 1) and 2), since the originator's email must remain somewhat valid, if the user gets spammed en-masse, he/she can easily cut their balls off for good.
i challenge you to find a flaw in this system. The Bayesian system you believe ALSO uses the concept of a holding box, just like the earthlink system does.
the only difference is that bayesian system can still yield algorithm-induced false positives while enforcing passiveness on the email user's side.
C/R model puts the control into the hands of the user. this may or may not be a good thing, but if the interface is friendly enough, explanations clear enough, this should definitely be a GOOD THING.
Also, when you consider the fact that this system can only be activated on a user's mailbox if the user chooses to activate it, things are looking pretty good.
please mod parent up. people don't seem to grok the very simple fact that this feature is OPTIONAL ONLY, users must make a conscious choice to activate it. While it is not the end-all be-all solution, it is *a good* partial solution to a complex problem which would still remain complimentary to other initiatives such as legal actions and improvements of the SMTP protocol.
ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS NOT TURN THE FEATURE ON. Again, EarthLink's spam blocker feature is on an OPT-IN ONLY BASIS. This feature is NOT for everyone, it is only for people who make the conscious choice to activate it. Furthermore, checking your holding box won't be more painful than checking your real box. at all. And you can add any arbitrary address, even invalid return address to your whitelist. easily. EarthLink did score big time.
first off, this feature is OPTIONAL, on an OPT-IN basis. A user will have to make the conscious choice of activating this feature. So the poster's claim that the day it is turned on, all mailing lists will fail is FALSE. Second, NO MAIL IS EVER LOST, it just goes to a holding box. The user can quickly notice if they've forgotten to add an address to a whitelist. Third, mailing lists or any originating email address for that matter can be added to a user's whitelist. The interface makes this all very practical and highly painless.
maintaining a TCP connection is, indeed, expensive, that is if it is happening directly between the end-user and the web server. However, Propel's model sets up a proxy on EarthLink's end which interfaces with the endless amount of proxies that sit on user's computers, and TCP connections are maintained inbetween proxies. Yes it is expensive, hence the added cost. But the benefits are real. Not having to do SYN/ACK on each HTTP request is a HUGE saving.
Also, not all web servers have HTTP pipelining enabled. There are many reasons why web server administrators of heavily trafficked sites would elect to NOT enable pipeling, the main one being added CPU load (again i am talking about HEAVILY trafficked sites) and the fact that pipelining will hog a single HTTP listener for an increased amount of time, thereby reducing the pooling of resources across multiple simultaneous users.
DNS looks are NOT well-cached *at all*. i know for a fact that TTLs are largely ignored by slave and client DNS servers which implement their OWN caching settings across the board.
actually i *have* monitored HTTP transactions and done quite a bit of work on that. The single http connection does NOT always happen to retrieve all documents, it highly depends on how the server is configured and if HTTP pipelining is enabled. Some sites choose to not enable HTTP pipelining to not hog any HTTP listener for any lengthy amount of time so resources are better shared across users. Choosing to go one way or the other depends entirely on what type of content lives on your site, and whether or not server administrators are lazy or have a clue. On the flip-side of this you can also configure your web server to allow requesting clients to request a given file over multiple HTTP connections so data is downloaded asynchronously and pieced together by the HTTP client. ALSO, many heavily-trafficked web sites, host static text and media content such as images, javascripts, sounds, videos on separate, dedicated hosts that are specially configured to cache everything they can in RAM to minimize disk I/O while serving, to compress text data using gzip, and send specially-configured Last-Modified HTTP headers. Amazon does this. CNN does this. Yahoo does this. EarthLink does this on their portal too. Most heavy sites employ this technique. This new proxy model will allow a user's machine to gather everything using ONE PERSISTENT TCP connection to a proxy on EarthLink's end. it's actually quite brilliant. Again, do read the technical specs in details and apply their concepts in your head to some of your favorite sites.
Instead of reading the article, read Propel's technical specs, they are far more informative and insightful. You will that there is much, much more involved than simple compression. Also this technology is not meant to improve the data transfer speed of all protocols (POP, SMTP etc.), it is designed to specifically improve HTTP transactions during typical web surfing.
As i have repeatedly said to many confused posters, go read the full technical spec before you start rambling. you WILL see that there is much, MUCH more involved than simple compression. There technology is NOT about compression. They leverage compression as part of a far more comprehensive framework involving smart caching based on checksums (beyond the rather limited use of information contained in HTTP headers which is LARGELY NOT used by most site authors/administrators), persistent connections which save you a lot of time on redundant DNS lookups (again, TTL is largely poorly implemented across name servers AND operating system TCP stacks), and TCP SYN/ACK transactions at the initial stages of an HTTP connection.
No, actually, please do take a thorough read at all the technologies and methodologies involved in his acceleration framework. Compression is a tiny portion of many, many other things working together to speed your web surfing. Basically they're able to "isolate" static and/or non-changing portions of documents and "cache" those portions locally on the hard drive. Their local proxy maintains persistent connections to remote proxy servers, which can save tremendous time typically spent in DNS lookups and TCP SYN/ACK transactions during initial stages of an HTTP transaction.
actually there is MUCH more than simple compression going on. be sure to read all the technologies and methodologies involved on propel's web site. Among which:
persistent connections. that'll save you time wasted on redundant name lookups, and initial server connections.
caching at various layers, including individual elements of pages, using dynamic reconstruction of pages while isolating updated content.
Combining all these things together, that is, persistent connections, caching AND compression make for FAR MORE efficient web browsing. You are essentially circumventing a lot of the limitations of the HTTP protocol by only making those HTTP connections to your local machine which acts as a SMART proxy.
hey hey geekette, i just read your journal entry. if, by any chance, u do see this message and have time to waste, please try to read my last journal entry on war in iraq... i'll preface all this that i understand the pain you feel for our troops and for the people of iraq, it's truly horrible and sad to have been placed in this situation. i'm merely attempting to show that containment would only starve iraqis longer, and that i'd like peace activists to try to stop and think about the complex situations invovled, stop going to demonstrations simply to repeat shallow slogans such as "war is not the answer", and focus their efforts on keeping this administration on its toes to follow-through in the proper reconstruction of Iraq, to build a better future for the iraqis, and start a process of stability in the middle-east. take care....
no damnit. haven't you heard of the zero-barrier? it's that precise moment before which the thing needs to get blown up so the two pieces of the asteroid pass right by earth. Surely the movie Armageddon has it all figured out.
actually yet another very fine American Jerry Bruckheimer film called "Armageddon" would indeed teach you that throwing missiles to an asteroid wouldn't do shit. Instead you gotta send bruce willis after it, so he can dig a whole to its core, drop a nuke, and blow the thing into pieces. Jerrry Bruckheimer rules.
Cringely == teh troll.
on
The Faded Sun
·
· Score: 0, Troll
I've read quite a few articles from Cringely and my assessment of his writing is that he is a whiney little bitch with some sort of odd agenda. Many of his articles make blanket assumptions without ever offering any sort of backing to his arguments.
Case in point: He simply claims Java will die. Newsflash, it won't. It is a superior language and, more importantly, superior application architecture framework. I don't want to start a holy war of languages, i believe they all have their place, but Object Orientation, inheritance and polymorphism, at the language layer, make for comparably more robust applications. The Java API lets developers focus on the business logic at hand, it turns hackers into analysts, enforces them to think about the possiblity of reusable components. Sure there's a lot of bad Java code out there. I'm just saying it is more likely to bring out quality code than any other platform.
Java also benefits from TREMEDOUS support in the open-source community, from FREE web application frameworks such as Tomcat and Jboss. Another important thing is that Java development can happen on ANY Platform. With java development you are tied to no single operating system and processor. There is a java VM and SDK out there for every major enviroment and a lot of less popular ones.
Take the example of a web application written in Java and based on the servlet/jsp architecture: Production systems that run your application for the public run Sun Solaris on big-iron processors. Does that mean developers need Solaris at their desktop? hello no. They can use windows, linux and macosx. It is very easy to "mimmic" the entire application locally while performing your development and connecting to localhost for testing.
Look at freshmeat. I don't see the Java community getting any smaller. In fact, Java is part of most university computer science curriculums, though i'll admit it's no real indicator of its prevalence in the business world.
But still, name one technology out there that is a good replacement for Java? Maybe there are some. But Cringeley doesn't come CLOSE to name any. So why then is Java doomed? what are its competitors? he doesn't care to delve into that, he prolly doesn't care. He likes making assumptions and offer no backing.
Cringeley is piss-poor journalism at its best.
What has this fucker ever done beside mindless rants in poorly-researched columns?
let's see here: How about a PowerPC 7500/100 bought in early 1996. So that's uhh 6 years? I used it for two years while in college as a video digitizing platform, web authoring tool, web server (running webstar, and later lass with filemaker pro), a TV (i didn't have TV but i did have a VCR so i ran the dorm's cable to my VCR's tuner then sent the video and sound outputs from the VCR to my mac's video and sound inputs). Then after college i did some web authoring consulting as well as web hosting. I had a good co-location deal at a local ISP where i placed my mac to serve hundreds of web sites, some of them were database-driven using filemaker pro -> lasso -> webstar, i even had a mail server and a dns server running on the thing. So my mac was a dedicated server for a couple of years. After that i bought my own house with a basic residential DSL connection. I stopped the whole consulting and co-location thing, and brought it back at my home where it serves a few hobby domains of mine.
Ever since i bought the mac, it has been ON every single day of its life, minus maybe a few days here and there when i was moving or tweaking it or upgrading its processor, its hard drives, added level 3 cache, added more RAM, PCI cards for Ultra2 SCSI support.
6 years.
every single day.
It's still running. in fact i'm ssh'ed into it rite now from work. Well yeah i couldn't resist installing LinuxPPCQ42000 back in 2000. heh.
It's still using the same power supply. same mobo.
shit i could spend a couple hundred bucks right now and upgrade it to a G4 and run OS X server if i wanted.
yeah. if that's not hard evidence of shelf-life and i don't fucking know what is.
EarthLink has actually increased its subscriber base since last quarter and since a year ago to 5 million subscribers, with exceptional growth in broadband subscriptions. EarthLink also has the largest broadband subscriber footprint of any single ISP in the United States. I would hardly compare AOL and MSN's woes to EarthLink's.
EarthLink does have issues with turning some profits but losses are very low, and they added 52 million dollars in cash to the bank, bringing their cash position to over a half a billion dollars.
Additionally, EarthLink is aggressively pursuing in 2003 the "value" $10 dial-up business by offering services thru its recently acquired PeoplePC subsidiary, which is guna put a lot of lethal pressue on United Online which offers spam-ridden, windows-only service thru custom dial-up/networking software which basically takes over your tcp/ip stack.
EarthLink is by far the most diversified ISP in the United States. AOL and MSN are doomed dinosaurs stuck in the dial-up age, scrambling for their lives trying to land broadband deals with telcos a whole TWO YEARS behind their fiercest competitors.
Please mod parent way up. According to the link he posted, the whole Internet Privacy act is a JOKE, yet a crapload of arguably-legal sites appear to be using it. If i was a law enforcement agent, i would search google for "431.322.12" and go on a shopping spree.
Slashdot Mirror
please mod parent way up.
you too can enjoy it. heh.
keep in mind that in this model, messages are not rejected, they are placed in a holding box. no message is ever lost unless the user takes the active step of deleting it. BIG, BIG difference. that holding box is conveniently surfaced in the user interface and identified as such, a holding box, NOT a trashcan or assumed spam box.
1) get past the initial challenge-response step which offers the spammer an image whose content they must identify and replicate to prove they are a human being. there currently is no known automated way of doing this.
2) trick the potential future recipient of their email into believing they are friendly to whitelist them.
Even if they make it past 1) and 2), since the originator's email must remain somewhat valid, if the user gets spammed en-masse, he/she can easily cut their balls off for good.
i challenge you to find a flaw in this system. The Bayesian system you believe ALSO uses the concept of a holding box, just like the earthlink system does.
the only difference is that bayesian system can still yield algorithm-induced false positives while enforcing passiveness on the email user's side.
C/R model puts the control into the hands of the user. this may or may not be a good thing, but if the interface is friendly enough, explanations clear enough, this should definitely be a GOOD THING.
Also, when you consider the fact that this system can only be activated on a user's mailbox if the user chooses to activate it, things are looking pretty good.
please mod parent up. people don't seem to grok the very simple fact that this feature is OPTIONAL ONLY, users must make a conscious choice to activate it. While it is not the end-all be-all solution, it is *a good* partial solution to a complex problem which would still remain complimentary to other initiatives such as legal actions and improvements of the SMTP protocol.
ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS NOT TURN THE FEATURE ON. Again, EarthLink's spam blocker feature is on an OPT-IN ONLY BASIS. This feature is NOT for everyone, it is only for people who make the conscious choice to activate it. Furthermore, checking your holding box won't be more painful than checking your real box. at all. And you can add any arbitrary address, even invalid return address to your whitelist. easily. EarthLink did score big time.
TAKE THIS UP YOUR ASS ALAN RALSKY
imagine a blinding, sunshades-requiring, skin-melting, vampire-killing, burn-baby-burn, let-there-be-FUCKLOADS-of-light beowulf cluster of those.
looflirpa is April Fool spellt backwards.
ph33r.
maintaining a TCP connection is, indeed, expensive, that is if it is happening directly between the end-user and the web server. However, Propel's model sets up a proxy on EarthLink's end which interfaces with the endless amount of proxies that sit on user's computers, and TCP connections are maintained inbetween proxies. Yes it is expensive, hence the added cost. But the benefits are real. Not having to do SYN/ACK on each HTTP request is a HUGE saving.
Also, not all web servers have HTTP pipelining enabled. There are many reasons why web server administrators of heavily trafficked sites would elect to NOT enable pipeling, the main one being added CPU load (again i am talking about HEAVILY trafficked sites) and the fact that pipelining will hog a single HTTP listener for an increased amount of time, thereby reducing the pooling of resources across multiple simultaneous users.
DNS looks are NOT well-cached *at all*. i know for a fact that TTLs are largely ignored by slave and client DNS servers which implement their OWN caching settings across the board.
actually i *have* monitored HTTP transactions and done quite a bit of work on that. The single http connection does NOT always happen to retrieve all documents, it highly depends on how the server is configured and if HTTP pipelining is enabled. Some sites choose to not enable HTTP pipelining to not hog any HTTP listener for any lengthy amount of time so resources are better shared across users. Choosing to go one way or the other depends entirely on what type of content lives on your site, and whether or not server administrators are lazy or have a clue. On the flip-side of this you can also configure your web server to allow requesting clients to request a given file over multiple HTTP connections so data is downloaded asynchronously and pieced together by the HTTP client. ALSO, many heavily-trafficked web sites, host static text and media content such as images, javascripts, sounds, videos on separate, dedicated hosts that are specially configured to cache everything they can in RAM to minimize disk I/O while serving, to compress text data using gzip, and send specially-configured Last-Modified HTTP headers. Amazon does this. CNN does this. Yahoo does this. EarthLink does this on their portal too. Most heavy sites employ this technique. This new proxy model will allow a user's machine to gather everything using ONE PERSISTENT TCP connection to a proxy on EarthLink's end. it's actually quite brilliant. Again, do read the technical specs in details and apply their concepts in your head to some of your favorite sites.
Instead of reading the article, read Propel's technical specs, they are far more informative and insightful. You will that there is much, much more involved than simple compression. Also this technology is not meant to improve the data transfer speed of all protocols (POP, SMTP etc.), it is designed to specifically improve HTTP transactions during typical web surfing.
enjoy.
it's actually pretty bad-ass.
- persistent connections. that'll save you time wasted on redundant name lookups, and initial server connections.
- caching at various layers, including individual elements of pages, using dynamic reconstruction of pages while isolating updated content.
Combining all these things together, that is, persistent connections, caching AND compression make for FAR MORE efficient web browsing. You are essentially circumventing a lot of the limitations of the HTTP protocol by only making those HTTP connections to your local machine which acts as a SMART proxy.Simply brilliant.
hey hey geekette, i just read your journal entry. if, by any chance, u do see this message and have time to waste, please try to read my last journal entry on war in iraq ... i'll preface all this that i understand the pain you feel for our troops and for the people of iraq, it's truly horrible and sad to have been placed in this situation. i'm merely attempting to show that containment would only starve iraqis longer, and that i'd like peace activists to try to stop and think about the complex situations invovled, stop going to demonstrations simply to repeat shallow slogans such as "war is not the answer", and focus their efforts on keeping this administration on its toes to follow-through in the proper reconstruction of Iraq, to build a better future for the iraqis, and start a process of stability in the middle-east. take care ....
no damnit. haven't you heard of the zero-barrier? it's that precise moment before which the thing needs to get blown up so the two pieces of the asteroid pass right by earth. Surely the movie Armageddon has it all figured out.
actually yet another very fine American Jerry Bruckheimer film called "Armageddon" would indeed teach you that throwing missiles to an asteroid wouldn't do shit. Instead you gotta send bruce willis after it, so he can dig a whole to its core, drop a nuke, and blow the thing into pieces. Jerrry Bruckheimer rules.
Case in point: He simply claims Java will die. Newsflash, it won't. It is a superior language and, more importantly, superior application architecture framework. I don't want to start a holy war of languages, i believe they all have their place, but Object Orientation, inheritance and polymorphism, at the language layer, make for comparably more robust applications. The Java API lets developers focus on the business logic at hand, it turns hackers into analysts, enforces them to think about the possiblity of reusable components. Sure there's a lot of bad Java code out there. I'm just saying it is more likely to bring out quality code than any other platform.
Java also benefits from TREMEDOUS support in the open-source community, from FREE web application frameworks such as Tomcat and Jboss. Another important thing is that Java development can happen on ANY Platform. With java development you are tied to no single operating system and processor. There is a java VM and SDK out there for every major enviroment and a lot of less popular ones.
Take the example of a web application written in Java and based on the servlet/jsp architecture: Production systems that run your application for the public run Sun Solaris on big-iron processors. Does that mean developers need Solaris at their desktop? hello no. They can use windows, linux and macosx. It is very easy to "mimmic" the entire application locally while performing your development and connecting to localhost for testing.
Look at freshmeat. I don't see the Java community getting any smaller. In fact, Java is part of most university computer science curriculums, though i'll admit it's no real indicator of its prevalence in the business world.
But still, name one technology out there that is a good replacement for Java? Maybe there are some. But Cringeley doesn't come CLOSE to name any. So why then is Java doomed? what are its competitors? he doesn't care to delve into that, he prolly doesn't care. He likes making assumptions and offer no backing.
Cringeley is piss-poor journalism at its best.
What has this fucker ever done beside mindless rants in poorly-researched columns?
*scratching head*. *raising eyebrow*. OH OKEE COOL :) hehe
let's see here: How about a PowerPC 7500/100 bought in early 1996. So that's uhh 6 years? I used it for two years while in college as a video digitizing platform, web authoring tool, web server (running webstar, and later lass with filemaker pro), a TV (i didn't have TV but i did have a VCR so i ran the dorm's cable to my VCR's tuner then sent the video and sound outputs from the VCR to my mac's video and sound inputs). Then after college i did some web authoring consulting as well as web hosting. I had a good co-location deal at a local ISP where i placed my mac to serve hundreds of web sites, some of them were database-driven using filemaker pro -> lasso -> webstar, i even had a mail server and a dns server running on the thing. So my mac was a dedicated server for a couple of years. After that i bought my own house with a basic residential DSL connection. I stopped the whole consulting and co-location thing, and brought it back at my home where it serves a few hobby domains of mine.
Ever since i bought the mac, it has been ON every single day of its life, minus maybe a few days here and there when i was moving or tweaking it or upgrading its processor, its hard drives, added level 3 cache, added more RAM, PCI cards for Ultra2 SCSI support.
6 years.
every single day.
It's still running. in fact i'm ssh'ed into it rite now from work. Well yeah i couldn't resist installing LinuxPPCQ42000 back in 2000. heh.
It's still using the same power supply. same mobo.
shit i could spend a couple hundred bucks right now and upgrade it to a G4 and run OS X server if i wanted.
yeah. if that's not hard evidence of shelf-life and i don't fucking know what is.
heh.
WHOA my user id is older than pudge's. I feel So Elite now :) thanks Pudge :)
EarthLink does have issues with turning some profits but losses are very low, and they added 52 million dollars in cash to the bank, bringing their cash position to over a half a billion dollars.
Additionally, EarthLink is aggressively pursuing in 2003 the "value" $10 dial-up business by offering services thru its recently acquired PeoplePC subsidiary, which is guna put a lot of lethal pressue on United Online which offers spam-ridden, windows-only service thru custom dial-up/networking software which basically takes over your tcp/ip stack.
EarthLink is by far the most diversified ISP in the United States. AOL and MSN are doomed dinosaurs stuck in the dial-up age, scrambling for their lives trying to land broadband deals with telcos a whole TWO YEARS behind their fiercest competitors.
search.earthlink.net is just a direct interface to google search. you'll get the exact same results in either one.
Please mod parent way up. According to the link he posted, the whole Internet Privacy act is a JOKE, yet a crapload of arguably-legal sites appear to be using it. If i was a law enforcement agent, i would search google for "431.322.12" and go on a shopping spree.