The biggest threat to email isn't open relays or proxies. The biggest threat is every fucking ninny out there that just has to run their own mail server and then does so poorly. If I want to receive mail from most of these idiots, then my server has to be willing to accept email from completely broken servers. In the end, that means spammers get through where I should be able to block them.
That couldn't be further from the truth. I volunteer admin time on an anti-spam system.
The most horribly broken, horribly insecure systems on the internet (besides small businesses running MS exchange) are those of some of the larger ISPs. *especially* those of the residential broadband providers. Not only are their systems broken, they're so arrogant, and so dead-set in their ways that they refuse to accept it when someone points out an obvious security flaw in their network.
I'm not running linux, but OS X, on a laptop. I had an uptime of about 65 days before I screwed something up and it had a kernel panic.
Yes, my laptop can sleep. I corrupted 2 hard disks and burned a horrible memory into a battery before I realized how stupid it is to actually use the sleep function on modern laptops.
1) sleep (as opposed to hibernate) doesn't actually shut the machine down, it just puts everything in low power mode, draining your battery. If you sleep your laptop while it's plugged in, go somewhere else and plug in your laptop again, you'll destroy your battery within 2 months.
2) the machine still generates heat when it's sleeping. With my P4 based laptop, it's enough heat to melt my vinyl bag near the exhaust port when i sleep the machine and put it in the bag for a few hours.
3) in low power mode, many laptops don't lock the disks (because they take longer to spin back up when they're locked.) Unlocked disks mean that the heads will strike the platters if the laptop gets hit hard enough.
Beyond that, resuming from sleep on a different network usually means restarting daemons and bouncing interfaces until they realize what's going on. At the very least, my local DNS cache (djbdns) needs to be reloaded.
If your actually having to reboot your linux box more than once a month your either playing with too many kernels or have a serious hardware problem.
Or you're running linux on a laptop. I reboot my linux machine as often as 3 times a day, because that's how often I go from one place to another with my computer. Waiting 25 to 30 seconds for my desktop to come up each time I boot is annoying to say the least.
Mail.app - it's nothing fancy but quite nice, the automagic filtering works better than anything else I've tried under Linux or Windows, it handles multiple accounts v.well - the only real problems I have are due to its inane rich-text-alike format.
The threading support in the latest version (the one for OS 10.3) is very poor. You can't easily see how a group of messages relate to one another like you can in Ximian evolution or mutt. It simply groups messages by subject, it doesn't create nested trees of messages. The gpg support (even with the plugin for it) is bad. You can verify signed messages, but you can't sign messages. Even with all that, the biggest issue for me is the speed. It takes mail a full 10 seconds to refresh a mailbox on an IMAP server that evolution can refresh instantly.
Safari - yeah, well, I'm a Mozilla fan;-). But it's quite a serviceable browser, lacking a bit in javascript & DOM stuff I guess, but still better than that Redmond-delivered p.o.s.
Apple actually broke a lot of the CSS support that khtml had (and still has on linux). There's plenty of CSS stuff that IE, Mozilla and Konqueror do well that Safari chokes on.
iTunes - All I can say is I guess you've never actually used it.
Oh, i've used it. The whole playlist/library thing is retarded. I already have a library of music, it's called the "file system". To listen to music in iTunes, you need to import the music into your library (which takes forever as iTunes checks the volume of each song you import), then create a playlist and import your music into that. Any sensible player would make the library completely optional. I also completely filled up my hard disk when I first opened iTunes because by default, iTunes makes a local copy of any file you're importing. This works *great* when you go to create a playlist of 40 something gigs of music that you've got shared on a network.
Besides, you're a lying troll, unless you hit it with a sledge hammer, that $500 worth of work would be covered under warranty for 52 weeks, let alone 3.
Calm down, you foaming at the mouth fucking fanatic.
It was covered under a warranty; I never said it wasn't. The fact that I had to lug a 60 lb computer with no handles through my local mall to the apple store and the fact that they kept it for almost a week when they were fixing it is bad enough.
I've had 2 bad power adapters, 2 bad motherboards, and bad memory for my iBook. Which I got in March.
but it's pretty! what, you expected working hardware in addition to a pretty package? sucker!
I bought a g4 eMac a few months ago and within 3 weeks it was in the shop for over $500 in work. Video card + monitor assembly was shot. A few weeks later, it was in the shop again for a bad motherboard. Not to mention the constant software issues. Aqua locks up solid after a few hours of actual usage. The apps that don't crash just plain suck (mail, safari, iTunes, i'm looking at you.) Don't even get me started on the horror that is printing from OS X.
Typing this from my IBM thinkpad (running Debian) which hasn't had a single hardware or software issue in the 14 months i've owned it.
For example, if you are a business owner producing widget A, and, while searching the web you find a company that buys A widgets to make B widgets, you proceed to look up their contact information, introduce yourself, and request someone get back to you if they are interested - this whole scenario is now illegal.
Good. As a small ISP owner, I purchase things like Co-location services, computer equipment and occasionally software and use it to produce websites and applications. I get calls and emails *constantly* from businesses that take the time to find out my name and contact information and try to sell me things. ISP Services, software, etc. I tell these people nearly instantly that I'm not interested in buying their services (in my experience, anyone that needs to advertise their services like this is only interested in ripping people off) and I tell them to remove me from their lists. Others keep calling. 3 or 4 of them every single day. The email is worse. I would love to be able to slap these people with fines when they try to peddle their crap to me and waste my time.
Roughly 90% of my snail mail box is junk mail. Yet I don't see any politicians jumping on bills like these that would outlaw sending bulk or individual "commercial" letters.
At what cost? Routers are working harder, code has been introduced into core servers that has no technical reason to exist, and an IP address, or possibly a sizeable range of IP addresses are now blacklisted worldwide.
Well, not really. Just that no A records can reliably point into those blocks now, since the "quick fix" that tons of people used just blocked a few subnets owned by verisign. Of course, verisign has bunches of subnets where they can point this thing, and that quick fix is going to expire pretty quickly. The not-so-quick fix for BIND (the one that only respects NS records from the root servers) is also easily evaded by VeriSign.
What network operators need to do is track down every last IP block that verisign owns and start broadcasting NULL routes for those blocks. Forget about spotty reception of a handful of IPs, Verisign would effectively be off the Internet. We'd lose root servers 'a' and 'j', but we'd gain an Internet without verisign, and I don't think anyone would argue that that was a bad thing. Explain to companies like this "If you pull rank on us, we take our toys (and your entire revenue stream) and go home."
That terrorism is limited to goofballs bombing a volkswagen or `small scale` incidents unless they receive major funding, logistical support, intel, and backing
I'm sorry.. what?!
9/11 took a handful of dedicated pissed off people with average intelligence and the a few thousand dollars.
It doesn't take a genius to realize:
Planes go very fast
Planes carry a lot of highly flammable fuel; especially those going on long trips
Airport security sucks; and one could (and still can) get any sort of weapon abord a commercial airliner if they really want to. The volume of people coming through international airports makes it nearly impossible to adequately search everyone.
Take-off and landing is the hardest part of flying an airplane. Cruising (and getting a running start while aiming at buildings) isn't really difficult.
explain again how the 9/11 terrorists needed any sort of funding, training, or high quality intelligence at all.
Finally one of my customers told me that AOL 7 (or whatever the latest version is) has a special "report spam and block it" button. AOLusers tend to use it to kill off newsletters that they are subscribed to. It does the work, but too many lusers hitting the switch runs you strate for the blacklist. And there is NOWHERE to complain.
From: http://postmaster.info.aol.com./faq.html If the problem persists, then refer to aol.com's ARIN or InterNIC record for the current Network Operations Center contact information, or call 703-265-4670 to reach the Member Services Postmaster/ISP Support Line.
Contact them. They keep logs of why they block servers, including every user to click that "report + block" button. Simply send them the double-opt-in subscription messages that you recieved from those users so that they could join your mailing lists. AOL will LART the user who filed a bad report, and you'll be removed from their blacklist.
I just took an old 486 and set up a copy of Winroute on Win2K. I know I could have done the same thing on Linux, but I like the Winroute configuration program and can run it on my main box and connect to the router remotly.
I used to do that. Well, not exactly that, I had a linux machine with a WiFi PCI card in it, a pair of ethernet cards, and some firewall/NAT rules in IPtables. Worked great. Of course, that was until I looked at the power consumption. That stupid machine was using 300 Watts of power nearly continually, between fans, hard disks, a K6-2 300, wifi, etc. And man was it loud.
I went out and bought one of these netgear routers (yea, the one they talk about in the article.. I patched mine about 2 weeks ago.) 14 Watts of power consumption, and it lets me shut off the 5 port switch I was using too. I paid $25 for the thing after a MFG rebate, and I'm easily saving that much in power every single month. The reboots are a bit annoying, but they're rare (unless you have multiple machines that need the same ports forwarded often.)
You honestly changed your vote for president in 3 hours? To who? More interesting than that is if it took you the, full 3 hours, or just the few seconds it took to read the accusation. 143 words got you to change you vote.
Well, about 20 minutes to read the accusation, look into some of the facts for myself, look into the response from the Dean campaign, and decide that Dean (or his campaign manager) was willfully harassing voters in an attempt to get his name out.
Did you know anything about Howard Dean or did he have your vote, 100% from shear name recognition?
I knew plenty about Howard Dean. I've been reading his weblog fairly regularly, Watching his appearances on CSPAN, and done some reasearch into what his track record in Vermont.
And I'm sorry, but whoever you give your vote to, is also going to spam.
Bullshit. I refuse to vote for "the lesser of two evils", I'm going to vote for someone I agree with. Attacking and harassing voters so that they remember your name is not something I agree with. If every single candidate has resorted to spamming, I'll abstain instead of voting for one of those jackasses.
Increasing exposure to your opponent is just plain stupid, unless the spam is negative, which this one wasn't. Like it or not, spam is considered to be a cost effective way of advertising
What world do you live in?
In the real world, spam is a cost effective way of pissing people off and nothing else. Personally, whenever I receive a spam from an actual company, I call that company up and inform them that they've "made my list" and that I will never purchase products or services from them again.
I no longer have a land-line telephone, but when I did, telemarketers received similar treatment (except far more angrily.)
3 hours ago Howard Dean had my vote, 100%. If this message was sent by the Dean campaign (and according to one message I've seen posted here, it was), Howard Dean has lost my vote, and I will make it my mission to make sure that someone else wins the Democratic primary elections.
I like his sig, actually. Unfortunately, I completely hate him for the reasons mentioned above (and more. the guy is a complete asshat.) Because of HanzoSan, I'm seriously going to re-evaluate if I agree with Dean.
You can TLS/SSL POP/IMAP/Webmail all day long but that traffic is sent unencrypted over SMTP if it ever leaves your ISP's datacenter
If your SMTP server supports SSL on the client side, it also (usually) supports it between servers. If the recepient of your mail also has a server that supports SSL, you are infact, SSL all the way through from end to end. You have no guarantee that your recipients will support ssl, but it's possible. GPG (or personal certs) is still the only real way to guarantee that your mail will be encrypted the whole way.
However, having SSL'ed SMTP, IMAP or POP3 isn't currently to keep your individual mail messages from prying eyes in transit, it's to keep your password secure.
We also have problems with students going into labs and unjacking the patch cable from a desktop and plugging it into their own laptop. Again, no authenticated access. We tried port security but they either have fun by going around a room jacking in and disabling an entire room during an evening with no network techs around, or duplicating the mac address and doing it anyway. I guess what is left is somehow securing it into the back of a desktop but some determined soul with a crimp tool and 5 minutes could just cut it and make a new end.
If this is truly a problem you want to solve, get yourself a VPN concentrator (Cisco, among other companies makes them) and put your entire lab network on private IPs with no access to anything other than the concentrator. Install the VPN software on your workstations (and even give it to your students to use on their laptops) and you've got an authenticated user associated with each connection to the internet. You can even go one step further and get some wifi bridges and you're into the 21st century with secure, authenticated WiFi access around campus.
Some caveats: the cisco VPN software is Windows/Linux/OS X only. If you've got a large BSD/MacOS population on campus (or any BSD/Solaris/etc. workstations), you'll need to use the pptp concentrator module for those users.
He never told how, but the folks at the university's information security department somehow managed to track down the real sender. Thank goodness for dedicated information security peoples!
Closed circut TV cameras are fairly cheap, and the kinds of computers usually in university computer labs aren't. If your college is anything like mine, there's a camera pointed at just about every computer lab entrance or exit, to keep people from walking away with some fairly expensive equipment.
I wouldn't be surprised if some of these infringers the RIAA is going after now were on public computers when the RIAA found them. These closed circut tapes (if they haven't been rotated back into use yet) will probably be used in this case too.
However, even if you were you can still contest the ticket. Chances are if you are presentable in court you will win.
Not likely. They're very happy to plea bargain you down to something less than speeding, but once you've begun a trial the only way to win is to hope that the officer that issued you a ticket deosn't show up.
People who drop 10mph when they see a speed trap should have their licence revoked and fined 100$.
And people who don't drop their speed risk losing their license and being fined at the minimum $140.
As for the "50 to 30" in Canada we always have warning signs for that reason. E.g. if you see a "60 KM/h begins" sign it's a good idea to start slowing down to 60.
In the US there are very rarely warning signs, unless the speed decrease is due to construction. Often they place the first lower-limit sign after a sharp bend or in a patch of trees to make it hard to see from a distance.
Speed limits in the states are fucked up [well in New York anyways]. The last time I visited I was on highway 37 [east] for nearly 30 minutes before seeing a speed limit sign. I don't know what the assumed speed limit is [its 80KM/h for country roads and 50KM/h for city] in the states but it would be a good idea to lobby the state government to post more signs. Specially near the border so us tourists know what speed to drive!
The state speed limit (which is posted right after the "welcome to new york" signs on every road that crosses a state or national border) is 55 MPH. That means that unless you see a sign saying otherwise, every road is 55 MPH.
Whatever. Bad cops can exist anywhere.
They exist in abundance in New York's highway patrol (State Troopers)
That doesn't mean driving erratically and lax police powers is the solution. If you weren't speeding contest it. If you do speed, stop.
How about the guy who changes lanes abruptly without signaling? Or the woman doing makeup while driving to work in the morning? Or the guy who insists on sitting in the left lane doing 20 MPH under the speed limit holding up traffic. How come there are never police patrolling looking for those dangerous activities? I never once said that there should be a reduced police presence, just that the police need to stop going after the crimes that give them the most cash per ticket and start going after the crimes that actually cause traffic accidents.
Oh yes, that's the solution. Lower police presense because bad drivers won't improve their driving skills.
Did I say to reduce police presence? No. I said that the police need to get past the speeding thing and start enforcing the laws that will actually prevent accidents.
Or, how about this altruistic solution. Those same drivers that fear getting ticketed.... DRIVE THE SPEED LIMIT.
People do drive the speed limit; the problem is that because the police will pull you over and ticket you for going even slightly over the limit, everyone freaks out and drops down to 10 mph *under* the limit whenever they see them.
My bro and I cruise around town quite a bit [we do the chores for the family] and whenever we see a speed trap on the highway we continue on the same speed and occasionally wave to the cops. Why? Because we weren't speeding. No need to slam on the brakes.
Wave to the cops? hah. You've obviously never been ticketed for going 57 in a 55, or something equally outrageous. How about a cop sitting behind a tree at the exact point where the limit drops from 50 to 30. The police have stopped caring about actually helping people and improving highway saftey, and turned it into a game to see how many people they can ticket and how much revenue they can generate.
Almost like saying "if people stopped pirating media less people would be arrested.".
Erm. Copyright violation isn't a criminal offense, it's a civil one. No one gets arrested for copyright violation.
Or should we make the punishments more severe? Personally I think people rolling through stop lines should be fined 500$. I think speeders should have their license revoked. If the cops spent a day doing a traffic blitz they could probably catch a few hundred people [town of 50K here...] easy.
as another poster pointed out. speeding accounts for the cause of a whopping 1% of accidents. However, I'm willing to bet that "fear of getting a speeding ticket" accounts for a good 10% of accidents. Where I live, in upstate New York, people are generally afraid of the police. Driving around during rush hour I usually see about 2 or 3 accidents a day, and invariably there is a speed trap 200 to 300 feet before the accident. People see the speed trap, slam on the breaks (even if they weren't speeding), and get rear-ended.
The police need to stop screwing around with speed traps, where they succeed in doing nothing but scaring the populous and causing accidents, and start enforcing the laws that would actually prevent accidents. Reckless driving, changing lanes without signaling, speeding under unsafe weather conditions, following too close, etc.
As I have nothing of *that* much importance on my box, I'll take the chance and NOT update. I've heard these update stories too many times before.
While I can sympathize with your situation of living in mortal fear of updating your software (such is life when using microsoft products), Please please please lock your machine up behind a firewall of some sort (software firewalls don't count.) While you've got nothing of importance on your machine, You have an IP address and the ability to send spam or other malicious traffic to the entire internet should your machine be broken into.
Joe Rubin, director of public and congressional affairs for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, disagreed. "I wouldn't be upset to see a cheap airfare e-mailed to me," he said. "If Sears sends me an e-mail regarding a discount on a lube job at Sears, that's something that most consumers probably won't be upset about."
Who the hell are they kidding? I don't want to hear about cheap airfare or a discount lube job, first because I don't need either of these things (Does anyone randomly decide to go on a trip just because they get a cheap rate on airfare? If you've got 2,500 miles before you need another oil change, would you bring your car into sears now anyway just because it's 30% off? No!) and also because I don't want Sears, Delta or Congress deciding what I'm interested in hearing about at any given time. If I'm interested in a cheap oil change, I'll look for one. If I'm interested in low-cost airfare, I'll look for it. And if I really want them to send me these offers in the mail 15 times an hour, I'll sign up for such a service.
I can't believe that these congressmen don't feel the same way as 99.9999999999999999% of the american public do about this. Maybe it's because they've been living under a rock for their entire term and they don't know that the rest of the country is under attack from these marketing monkeys. The fact that both proposed legislations allow opt-out mailings is insane. The fact that some idiot decides that there are 100,000 viagra buyers using email addresses under my 1 user domain, and so he's going to cost me lots of money sending gigabytes of mail traffic to them every day, but because he's piping his mail through thousands of open proxies I can't do a damn thing about it is insane. If I were to dump several tons of garbage in his living room every day, he'd call the cops and I'd be arrested.
What about IMAP? Is it secure? Does it support SSL?
both IMAP and SMTP also support ssl nativley.
I use wifi around my apartment, and I encrypt everything via either ssl (imap, smtp and http) or ssh tunnels. After living on a non-switched college network for 4 years, I've learned to never trust the local network anywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
The biggest threat to email isn't open relays or proxies. The biggest threat is every fucking ninny out there that just has to run their own mail server and then does so poorly. If I want to receive mail from most of these idiots, then my server has to be willing to accept email from completely broken servers. In the end, that means spammers get through where I should be able to block them.
That couldn't be further from the truth. I volunteer admin time on an anti-spam system.
The most horribly broken, horribly insecure systems on the internet (besides small businesses running MS exchange) are those of some of the larger ISPs. *especially* those of the residential broadband providers. Not only are their systems broken, they're so arrogant, and so dead-set in their ways that they refuse to accept it when someone points out an obvious security flaw in their network.
On a crappy laptop, I think you mean. :-)
I'm not running linux, but OS X, on a laptop. I had an uptime of about 65 days before I screwed something up and it had a kernel panic.
Yes, my laptop can sleep. I corrupted 2 hard disks and burned a horrible memory into a battery before I realized how stupid it is to actually use the sleep function on modern laptops.
1) sleep (as opposed to hibernate) doesn't actually shut the machine down, it just puts everything in low power mode, draining your battery. If you sleep your laptop while it's plugged in, go somewhere else and plug in your laptop again, you'll destroy your battery within 2 months.
2) the machine still generates heat when it's sleeping. With my P4 based laptop, it's enough heat to melt my vinyl bag near the exhaust port when i sleep the machine and put it in the bag for a few hours.
3) in low power mode, many laptops don't lock the disks (because they take longer to spin back up when they're locked.) Unlocked disks mean that the heads will strike the platters if the laptop gets hit hard enough.
Beyond that, resuming from sleep on a different network usually means restarting daemons and bouncing interfaces until they realize what's going on. At the very least, my local DNS cache (djbdns) needs to be reloaded.
If your actually having to reboot your linux box more than once a month your either playing with too many kernels or have a serious hardware problem.
Or you're running linux on a laptop. I reboot my linux machine as often as 3 times a day, because that's how often I go from one place to another with my computer. Waiting 25 to 30 seconds for my desktop to come up each time I boot is annoying to say the least.
Mail.app - it's nothing fancy but quite nice, the automagic filtering works better than anything else I've tried under Linux or Windows, it handles multiple accounts v.well - the only real problems I have are due to its inane rich-text-alike format.
;-). But it's quite a serviceable browser, lacking a bit in javascript & DOM stuff I guess, but still better than that Redmond-delivered p.o.s.
The threading support in the latest version (the one for OS 10.3) is very poor. You can't easily see how a group of messages relate to one another like you can in Ximian evolution or mutt. It simply groups messages by subject, it doesn't create nested trees of messages. The gpg support (even with the plugin for it) is bad. You can verify signed messages, but you can't sign messages. Even with all that, the biggest issue for me is the speed. It takes mail a full 10 seconds to refresh a mailbox on an IMAP server that evolution can refresh instantly.
Safari - yeah, well, I'm a Mozilla fan
Apple actually broke a lot of the CSS support that khtml had (and still has on linux). There's plenty of CSS stuff that IE, Mozilla and Konqueror do well that Safari chokes on.
iTunes - All I can say is I guess you've never actually used it.
Oh, i've used it. The whole playlist/library thing is retarded. I already have a library of music, it's called the "file system". To listen to music in iTunes, you need to import the music into your library (which takes forever as iTunes checks the volume of each song you import), then create a playlist and import your music into that. Any sensible player would make the library completely optional. I also completely filled up my hard disk when I first opened iTunes because by default, iTunes makes a local copy of any file you're importing. This works *great* when you go to create a playlist of 40 something gigs of music that you've got shared on a network.
Besides, you're a lying troll, unless you hit it with a sledge hammer, that $500 worth of work would be covered under warranty for 52 weeks, let alone 3.
Calm down, you foaming at the mouth fucking fanatic.
It was covered under a warranty; I never said it wasn't. The fact that I had to lug a 60 lb computer with no handles through my local mall to the apple store and the fact that they kept it for almost a week when they were fixing it is bad enough.
I've had 2 bad power adapters, 2 bad motherboards, and bad memory for my iBook. Which I got in March.
but it's pretty! what, you expected working hardware in addition to a pretty package? sucker!
I bought a g4 eMac a few months ago and within 3 weeks it was in the shop for over $500 in work. Video card + monitor assembly was shot. A few weeks later, it was in the shop again for a bad motherboard. Not to mention the constant software issues. Aqua locks up solid after a few hours of actual usage. The apps that don't crash just plain suck (mail, safari, iTunes, i'm looking at you.) Don't even get me started on the horror that is printing from OS X.
Typing this from my IBM thinkpad (running Debian) which hasn't had a single hardware or software issue in the 14 months i've owned it.
For example, if you are a business owner producing widget A, and, while searching the web you find a company that buys A widgets to make B widgets, you proceed to look up their contact information, introduce yourself, and request someone get back to you if they are interested - this whole scenario is now illegal.
Good. As a small ISP owner, I purchase things like Co-location services, computer equipment and occasionally software and use it to produce websites and applications. I get calls and emails *constantly* from businesses that take the time to find out my name and contact information and try to sell me things. ISP Services, software, etc. I tell these people nearly instantly that I'm not interested in buying their services (in my experience, anyone that needs to advertise their services like this is only interested in ripping people off) and I tell them to remove me from their lists. Others keep calling. 3 or 4 of them every single day. The email is worse. I would love to be able to slap these people with fines when they try to peddle their crap to me and waste my time.
Roughly 90% of my snail mail box is junk mail. Yet I don't see any politicians jumping on bills like these that would outlaw sending bulk or individual "commercial" letters.
Again, I wish they would.
At what cost? Routers are working harder, code has been introduced into core servers that has no technical reason to exist, and an IP address, or possibly a sizeable range of IP addresses are now blacklisted worldwide.
Well, not really. Just that no A records can reliably point into those blocks now, since the "quick fix" that tons of people used just blocked a few subnets owned by verisign. Of course, verisign has bunches of subnets where they can point this thing, and that quick fix is going to expire pretty quickly. The not-so-quick fix for BIND (the one that only respects NS records from the root servers) is also easily evaded by VeriSign.
What network operators need to do is track down every last IP block that verisign owns and start broadcasting NULL routes for those blocks. Forget about spotty reception of a handful of IPs, Verisign would effectively be off the Internet. We'd lose root servers 'a' and 'j', but we'd gain an Internet without verisign, and I don't think anyone would argue that that was a bad thing. Explain to companies like this "If you pull rank on us, we take our toys (and your entire revenue stream) and go home."
I'm sorry.. what?!
9/11 took a handful of dedicated pissed off people with average intelligence and the a few thousand dollars.
It doesn't take a genius to realize:
explain again how the 9/11 terrorists needed any sort of funding, training, or high quality intelligence at all.
Finally one of my customers told me that AOL 7 (or whatever the latest version is) has a special "report spam and block it" button. AOLusers tend to use it to kill off newsletters that they are subscribed to. It does the work, but too many lusers hitting the switch runs you strate for the blacklist. And there is NOWHERE to complain.
From: http://postmaster.info.aol.com./faq.html
If the problem persists, then refer to aol.com's ARIN or InterNIC record for the current Network Operations Center contact information, or call 703-265-4670 to reach the Member Services Postmaster/ISP Support Line.
Contact them. They keep logs of why they block servers, including every user to click that "report + block" button. Simply send them the double-opt-in subscription messages that you recieved from those users so that they could join your mailing lists. AOL will LART the user who filed a bad report, and you'll be removed from their blacklist.
I just took an old 486 and set up a copy of Winroute on Win2K. I know I could have done the same thing on Linux, but I like the Winroute configuration program and can run it on my main box and connect to the router remotly.
I used to do that. Well, not exactly that, I had a linux machine with a WiFi PCI card in it, a pair of ethernet cards, and some firewall/NAT rules in IPtables. Worked great. Of course, that was until I looked at the power consumption. That stupid machine was using 300 Watts of power nearly continually, between fans, hard disks, a K6-2 300, wifi, etc. And man was it loud.
I went out and bought one of these netgear routers (yea, the one they talk about in the article.. I patched mine about 2 weeks ago.) 14 Watts of power consumption, and it lets me shut off the 5 port switch I was using too. I paid $25 for the thing after a MFG rebate, and I'm easily saving that much in power every single month. The reboots are a bit annoying, but they're rare (unless you have multiple machines that need the same ports forwarded often.)
You honestly changed your vote for president in 3 hours? To who? More interesting than that is if it took you the, full 3 hours, or just the few seconds it took to read the accusation. 143 words got you to change you vote.
Well, about 20 minutes to read the accusation, look into some of the facts for myself, look into the response from the Dean campaign, and decide that Dean (or his campaign manager) was willfully harassing voters in an attempt to get his name out.
Did you know anything about Howard Dean or did he have your vote, 100% from shear name recognition?
I knew plenty about Howard Dean. I've been reading his weblog fairly regularly, Watching his appearances on CSPAN, and done some reasearch into what his track record in Vermont.
And I'm sorry, but whoever you give your vote to, is also going to spam.
Bullshit. I refuse to vote for "the lesser of two evils", I'm going to vote for someone I agree with. Attacking and harassing voters so that they remember your name is not something I agree with. If every single candidate has resorted to spamming, I'll abstain instead of voting for one of those jackasses.
Increasing exposure to your opponent is just plain stupid, unless the spam is negative, which this one wasn't. Like it or not, spam is considered to be a cost effective way of advertising
What world do you live in?
In the real world, spam is a cost effective way of pissing people off and nothing else. Personally, whenever I receive a spam from an actual company, I call that company up and inform them that they've "made my list" and that I will never purchase products or services from them again.
I no longer have a land-line telephone, but when I did, telemarketers received similar treatment (except far more angrily.)
3 hours ago Howard Dean had my vote, 100%. If this message was sent by the Dean campaign (and according to one message I've seen posted here, it was), Howard Dean has lost my vote, and I will make it my mission to make sure that someone else wins the Democratic primary elections.
Moron? You just don't like his sig, do you?
I like his sig, actually. Unfortunately, I completely hate him for the reasons mentioned above (and more. the guy is a complete asshat.) Because of HanzoSan, I'm seriously going to re-evaluate if I agree with Dean.
You can TLS/SSL POP/IMAP/Webmail all day long but that traffic is sent unencrypted over SMTP if it ever leaves your ISP's datacenter
If your SMTP server supports SSL on the client side, it also (usually) supports it between servers. If the recepient of your mail also has a server that supports SSL, you are infact, SSL all the way through from end to end. You have no guarantee that your recipients will support ssl, but it's possible. GPG (or personal certs) is still the only real way to guarantee that your mail will be encrypted the whole way.
However, having SSL'ed SMTP, IMAP or POP3 isn't currently to keep your individual mail messages from prying eyes in transit, it's to keep your password secure.
If anyone else doesn't quite remember 'subpoena' being in their day-to-day vocabulary either, this might help clear things up
the true source of the word, of course, can be found by breaking it into it's two root parts.
sub, as in below, and poena, the penis. below the penis, or "by the balls".
We also have problems with students going into labs and unjacking the patch cable from a desktop and plugging it into their own laptop. Again, no authenticated access. We tried port security but they either have fun by going around a room jacking in and disabling an entire room during an evening with no network techs around, or duplicating the mac address and doing it anyway. I guess what is left is somehow securing it into the back of a desktop but some determined soul with a crimp tool and 5 minutes could just cut it and make a new end.
If this is truly a problem you want to solve, get yourself a VPN concentrator (Cisco, among other companies makes them) and put your entire lab network on private IPs with no access to anything other than the concentrator. Install the VPN software on your workstations (and even give it to your students to use on their laptops) and you've got an authenticated user associated with each connection to the internet. You can even go one step further and get some wifi bridges and you're into the 21st century with secure, authenticated WiFi access around campus.
Some caveats: the cisco VPN software is Windows/Linux/OS X only. If you've got a large BSD/MacOS population on campus (or any BSD/Solaris/etc. workstations), you'll need to use the pptp concentrator module for those users.
He never told how, but the folks at the university's information security department somehow managed to track down the real sender. Thank goodness for dedicated information security peoples!
Closed circut TV cameras are fairly cheap, and the kinds of computers usually in university computer labs aren't. If your college is anything like mine, there's a camera pointed at just about every computer lab entrance or exit, to keep people from walking away with some fairly expensive equipment.
I wouldn't be surprised if some of these infringers the RIAA is going after now were on public computers when the RIAA found them. These closed circut tapes (if they haven't been rotated back into use yet) will probably be used in this case too.
However, even if you were you can still contest the ticket. Chances are if you are presentable in court you will win.
Not likely. They're very happy to plea bargain you down to something less than speeding, but once you've begun a trial the only way to win is to hope that the officer that issued you a ticket deosn't show up.
People who drop 10mph when they see a speed trap should have their licence revoked and fined 100$.
And people who don't drop their speed risk losing their license and being fined at the minimum $140.
As for the "50 to 30" in Canada we always have warning signs for that reason. E.g. if you see a "60 KM/h begins" sign it's a good idea to start slowing down to 60.
In the US there are very rarely warning signs, unless the speed decrease is due to construction. Often they place the first lower-limit sign after a sharp bend or in a patch of trees to make it hard to see from a distance.
Speed limits in the states are fucked up [well in New York anyways]. The last time I visited I was on highway 37 [east] for nearly 30 minutes before seeing a speed limit sign. I don't know what the assumed speed limit is [its 80KM/h for country roads and 50KM/h for city] in the states but it would be a good idea to lobby the state government to post more signs. Specially near the border so us tourists know what speed to drive!
The state speed limit (which is posted right after the "welcome to new york" signs on every road that crosses a state or national border) is 55 MPH. That means that unless you see a sign saying otherwise, every road is 55 MPH.
Whatever. Bad cops can exist anywhere.
They exist in abundance in New York's highway patrol (State Troopers)
That doesn't mean driving erratically and lax police powers is the solution. If you weren't speeding contest it. If you do speed, stop.
How about the guy who changes lanes abruptly without signaling? Or the woman doing makeup while driving to work in the morning? Or the guy who insists on sitting in the left lane doing 20 MPH under the speed limit holding up traffic. How come there are never police patrolling looking for those dangerous activities? I never once said that there should be a reduced police presence, just that the police need to stop going after the crimes that give them the most cash per ticket and start going after the crimes that actually cause traffic accidents.
Oh yes, that's the solution. Lower police presense because bad drivers won't improve their driving skills.
Did I say to reduce police presence? No. I said that the police need to get past the speeding thing and start enforcing the laws that will actually prevent accidents.
Or, how about this altruistic solution. Those same drivers that fear getting ticketed.... DRIVE THE SPEED LIMIT.
People do drive the speed limit; the problem is that because the police will pull you over and ticket you for going even slightly over the limit, everyone freaks out and drops down to 10 mph *under* the limit whenever they see them.
My bro and I cruise around town quite a bit [we do the chores for the family] and whenever we see a speed trap on the highway we continue on the same speed and occasionally wave to the cops. Why? Because we weren't speeding. No need to slam on the brakes.
Wave to the cops? hah. You've obviously never been ticketed for going 57 in a 55, or something equally outrageous. How about a cop sitting behind a tree at the exact point where the limit drops from 50 to 30. The police have stopped caring about actually helping people and improving highway saftey, and turned it into a game to see how many people they can ticket and how much revenue they can generate.
Almost like saying "if people stopped pirating media less people would be arrested.".
Erm. Copyright violation isn't a criminal offense, it's a civil one. No one gets arrested for copyright violation.
Or should we make the punishments more severe? Personally I think people rolling through stop lines should be fined 500$. I think speeders should have their license revoked. If the cops spent a day doing a traffic blitz they could probably catch a few hundred people [town of 50K here...] easy.
as another poster pointed out. speeding accounts for the cause of a whopping 1% of accidents. However, I'm willing to bet that "fear of getting a speeding ticket" accounts for a good 10% of accidents. Where I live, in upstate New York, people are generally afraid of the police. Driving around during rush hour I usually see about 2 or 3 accidents a day, and invariably there is a speed trap 200 to 300 feet before the accident. People see the speed trap, slam on the breaks (even if they weren't speeding), and get rear-ended.
The police need to stop screwing around with speed traps, where they succeed in doing nothing but scaring the populous and causing accidents, and start enforcing the laws that would actually prevent accidents. Reckless driving, changing lanes without signaling, speeding under unsafe weather conditions, following too close, etc.
As I have nothing of *that* much importance on my box, I'll take the chance and NOT update. I've heard these update stories too many times before.
While I can sympathize with your situation of living in mortal fear of updating your software (such is life when using microsoft products), Please please please lock your machine up behind a firewall of some sort (software firewalls don't count.) While you've got nothing of importance on your machine, You have an IP address and the ability to send spam or other malicious traffic to the entire internet should your machine be broken into.
Joe Rubin, director of public and congressional affairs for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, disagreed. "I wouldn't be upset to see a cheap airfare e-mailed to me," he said. "If Sears sends me an e-mail regarding a discount on a lube job at Sears, that's something that most consumers probably won't be upset about."
Who the hell are they kidding? I don't want to hear about cheap airfare or a discount lube job, first because I don't need either of these things (Does anyone randomly decide to go on a trip just because they get a cheap rate on airfare? If you've got 2,500 miles before you need another oil change, would you bring your car into sears now anyway just because it's 30% off? No!) and also because I don't want Sears, Delta or Congress deciding what I'm interested in hearing about at any given time. If I'm interested in a cheap oil change, I'll look for one. If I'm interested in low-cost airfare, I'll look for it. And if I really want them to send me these offers in the mail 15 times an hour, I'll sign up for such a service.
I can't believe that these congressmen don't feel the same way as 99.9999999999999999% of the american public do about this. Maybe it's because they've been living under a rock for their entire term and they don't know that the rest of the country is under attack from these marketing monkeys. The fact that both proposed legislations allow opt-out mailings is insane. The fact that some idiot decides that there are 100,000 viagra buyers using email addresses under my 1 user domain, and so he's going to cost me lots of money sending gigabytes of mail traffic to them every day, but because he's piping his mail through thousands of open proxies I can't do a damn thing about it is insane. If I were to dump several tons of garbage in his living room every day, he'd call the cops and I'd be arrested.
If you have some suggestions for third party mail boxes that offer encrypted IMAP4 access, well, please share them.
here's one
You can get spam-protected ssl'ed IMAP, webmail and pop3 for $2 a month, and outgoing (ssl'ed) smtp access for another $3 a month.
What about IMAP? Is it secure? Does it support SSL?
both IMAP and SMTP also support ssl nativley.
I use wifi around my apartment, and I encrypt everything via either ssl (imap, smtp and http) or ssh tunnels. After living on a non-switched college network for 4 years, I've learned to never trust the local network anywhere.