What I find frustrating as someone that filters a whole lot of spam on my servers is that I can't get usable information out of the APNIC WHOIS. I really can't find anything worthwhile in about 90% of my queries while LARTing spam. It's quite frustrating. I've considered blocking all.cn,.kr,.jp,.tw,.ar,.br, and other TLDs since I don't directly contact any body in those particulat TLDs. I am on mailing lists that have addresses with those TLDs on them that I would have to account for. As a sysadmin I find the quality of foreign WHOIS to be a major problem.
Yeah. I know. I spent the better part of last night searching Discovery.com for a reference to the show I was told about. No luck yet. If anyone has any better luck, please share the links and the search string!
BTW, a 100 year high doesn't consitute a warming of the Earth. Climate study isn't a short term thing. It has to be looked at in the medium to long term. Hell El Nino can disrupt the short term view enough to make you think that the Earth is going to cook before the Kennedy files are opened.
Also, I'm not referring to the last Ice Age per say. The last Ice Age wasn't a true "snow ball" either. The tropics were still accessible. The Snow Ball Earth that I'm referring to (I need to find the article for you) was a complete covering of the Earth's surface with hundreds of meters of ice and snow. Even the equator had roughly 90 meters of ice on top of it. The physical evidence proves it. Yes, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking the same thing that the biologist community thought and said. They said that found the theory reasonible except that if the entire Earth's surface was covered in ice, there could be no life. Light (solar energy), the basis of life couldn't get through the ice. The geologists were stumped on that one until an artic diver happened to notice something under the ice in one of his dives. He found a plethora of life below the ice in the form of green algae and a few other things that I can't think of the words for. He said there was at least 30 meters of ice above him. He said there was a great deal of bright light coming down through the ice. He knew why also. If you quickly freeze ice, air will get trapped inside and form the white spots you see in ice cubes. If you cool it slowly though, the ice will freeze from the bottom up and will not contain air pockets (many anyways) making it extremely transparent. He proved the theory. Whew, enough typing. I've got to get to work.:)
We actually have fairly accurate weather data that dates back hundreds of thousands of years thanks to geologists. That was part of how they proved the Snow Ball Earth theory. They found the layer of rock formed during the Snow Ball and on top that found a very thick layer of calcium carbonate that was formed during the rapid thawing. Our recorded weather data doesn't go back terribly far. Rocks go back a long long ways though.:)
The warming we think we're seeing is actually very short term (term as in hundreds of years). The Earth doesn't travel around the Sun in a perfect circle. It's an oval of sorts. Elyptical (sp?). That isn't constant either. Over time the cycle changes. At one point it gets warm (now). At the other end of the cycle it gets colder than shit (read: ice age). Supposedly we're reaching the peak. We're actually starting an ice age. Not that you I, or your kids' grandkids' will ever see it but it is beginning. Sure we're putting crap in the air that wasn't as prevalent without us. Then again, CO2 is required to keep Earth warm. Without it, we'd be cold as hell, even this close to the Sun.
You need to get a fscking clue and read my post below. Global warming is media and policitcal hype. It's something to sell you on the evening news and sell you during political campaigns. That facts refute it. The media won't tell you that though. The weather has been acting odd this year. Here in the very southeast corner of Kansas tomorrow on the 18th of February the expected temp will be 65 degrees. That's odd. That doesn't prove that global warming is real.
I heard about a study that was talked about on Discovery about two common myths, global warming and deforestation. I haven't seen it on Discovery though. What it boiled down to was some time back a bunch of scientists and other *ologists (thousands) signed a paper saying that both were real and major problems. Supposedly it got press coverage out the ass. This Discovery special was about about another paper that came out right after the first (because of the first) from many many more thousands of scientists and other *ologists that said that both were a crock of shit, media and political propoganda. Oddly enough the media didn't give the 2nd paper much billing (I wonder why...). The 2nd paper and the people that signed it proved that deforestation was not a problem and that their research showed that our planet's tree population was far greater than it was in the 1920's and increasing rapidly. They of course did say that chopping down unexplored rain forests could very likely wipe out plant and animal life that had never been recorded. Of course that's no deforestation. They also proved that the Earth is not getting warmer. They proved that in fact the Earth is really getting colder. In the short term were are reaching the peak of some loop that I can't recall the name of. It's supposed to be some variation in the distance from the Sun we typically follow. It's not a round path we follow. It's more oval. Elyptical (sp?). And it varies over time and repeats itself. We're reaching the hotter part of that peak. We are however in the long run starting another Ice Age. Yes, it's true. All these record highs recorded this winter do not mean that the Earth is really warming. They don't support global warming in the least. We are actually cooling in the long run. We will have another ice age before the Sun starts growing to the point that it will cause Earth to heat up. The short time period has us getting warmer. The medium time period has us starting and ice age. The long term time period has the Sun frying our asses.
All these scientists that signed the 2nd paper discounted what the 1st guys said and they did it with an overwhelming number of people. Of course the media didn't cover that. The media never wants to cover something like that. Blood and guts sells. Death and destruction sells. Conspiracy sells. Telling the public that violence in schools is actually decreasing and is lower now than it was in the troubled 70s doesn't sell. Plastering a blood-splattered babbling kid on the evening news that "saw it all" sells.
Enough of my rambling. You've heard it all before. My question is, has anyone seen this Discovery episode? Does anyone know where more information can be had? I'd love to see the episode. It sounds like a good one. I still like the one that proved that something like 600 million years ago we had a Snow Ball Earth and the one that proved all human life as we know it today originated from deep within Africa. Both of those were good shows.
I put it on all of my webpages in tiny white text somewhere. I also put in spamtrap addresses in the same manor that auto-forward to that address. It's something I recommend to *EVERYONE*.
I tend to agree. MAPS is useless for the most part as far as listing actual spammers. Now I do like to use their RSS. Many anti-spam admins still report open relays to MAPS. I do. Because of that they have a decent list of open relays. I also like their DUL. It was created in a fairly professional way. They did the leg work to identify actual dialup user netblocks rather than me trying to make a quick guess. I like that. I don't hit the DUL much (maybe 500 times per week on average) but every so often it gets hit hard and I'm glad I shelled out the $$$ for it. I use the ORSS for most of my filtering. I zone transfer it so I get the SPEWS stuff as well. It works well for me. Add that to me huge Sendmail access list and you have a decent setup.
I consult with a small ISP in Kansas. We started using MAPS' DUL and RSS quite a while back (zone transfers). Then I added the ORSS (zone transfers) which also gave me SPEWS, Spamhaus Block List (SBL), and SpamSites.org. When MAPS went commercial, we bought zone transfer rights to the RSS and DUL. About that same time I also added RSL, Summit Blocking List (SBL), and FlowGoAway who doesn't have a website. On top of all that I also reject mail from domains that don't resolve and I maintain an extensive Sendmail access list full of Alan Ralsky's domains, spam supporting providers like Broadwing, spamware vendors, and domains and IPs of every spamming outfit I come across. In total I'm up to 4682 entries. Oh, and I also filter message bodies on certain content that identify unique pieces of spam like all those "Enter your email address on this website to be unsubsribed" things. Works great. This time last year I was filtering maybe 10,000 pieces of spam per week. I'm over 100,000 pieces of spam per week now. Considering we only have 2500 users, that's a lot of filtered spam. Roughly 40 per person per week.
What all of this rambling means is that you can filter out a great deal of spam with the right DNS blacklists. I only use DNSbl's that allow zone transfers because I don't want network latency to slow down mail delivery. It really is a worthwhile thing to do.
Finally the best thing that you can do for your users is educate them. Give them very clear examples of how doing simple things like giving your personal email to a credit card company, entering it in a guestbook, using it in USENET, using it on any public discussion board, and many more can increase their spam intake many fold. Explain that to them. Show them the proof. It's not hard to generate spam. Hell create a dummy account and make a few posts in the newsgroups. Never give the address to anyone else and don't use it yourself. Give it a week. Then show the results to your users as proof of USENET address harvesting.
Finally, don't be part of the problem (this is to the parent of the article). Be proactive in fighting spam. Sitting back and bitching about it doesn't help anyone. If you put up a server that's an open relay then you fucked up. It's your responsibility as an administrator to make sure you do your job right. Putting up and open relay isn't doing your job right (are you listening all of you damned Exchange admins?! 90% of the open relays I find and report are running Exchange!!!). When you get spam, report it (called LARTing). Drop a copy to uce@ftc.gov. Reporting stock spam to the SEC. Report bogus drug scams (loose 100lbs tonight while you sleep!) to the FDA. Report Nigerian Monet scams to the Secret Service. Report the spamertised sites to their providers and ask that they investigate (don't accuse in case it's a Joe Job). Parse through the headers and learn to identify relayed spam, BS headers, and other tricks of the trade. Submit open relays for listing in all the open relay blacklists. Report it to the owner of the IP as well. DO YOU PART! If you're not going to do you part to fight spam or ensure that you're servers are properly configured, THEN GET YOU SERVERS AND YOUR ASS OFF THE 'NET BECAUSE YOU DON"T BELONG IN THIS COMMUNITY!! Don't be part of the problem.
Have any of you visited MPEG-LA's website, specifically the contact page? Do so and take a look at the employees' pictures. Wow. MPEG-LA employs some goodlookin' women. Check out Courtney Ford. Oh hell yeah! Check please!
That's not packet switching. It was more or less the invention of a shared communication channel. AlohaNet inspired behind Ethernet but they are not related. Read Ethernet by O'Reilly, Chapter One, for a good discussion of the history.
I too work at a university and the question has come up here before. It's already been suggested but wireless is a good way to go. Another might be to raise disk space quotas. More bandwidth is good but you also have to take care of what you buy. ie, buy a Packeteer to go with it. More lab machines. Better lab machines. Laptop checkout. NIDS to help better security. Minimal support of a local gaming server for the dorms. I know it sounds unusual and doesn't sound like it supports education, but really it does. Everyone needs to upplug from reality every so often--students included. Kids love gaming. Hell I love gaming. Netadmins hate gaming over the 'Net connection because of the bandwidth demands (I'm a netadmin). Supply some resources to have one local to campus that can only be accessed from the campus. Donate it to the SGA and let them admin it. Create a technology resource center where students can reserve time to use high tech stuff like fancy scanners, CD burners, etc...
Here's a thought. Ask the students what they think their money should be spent on.:-)
This greatly reminds me of the PowerPC Mhz discussions. For example, 1Ghz PIII vs a PPC G4 500Mhz. The PIII sounds like it whips the G4 but it doesn't. Thanks to some of the G4's features, like AltiVec, the G4 performs better than the PIII. Of course the average user doesn't look at benchmarks when they buy their computer. The average user doesn't understand them anyway.
...but I don't have near that much bandwidth to donate. IMHO, if a given site needs that much bandwidth (especially an open source one) then there should be a dozen or more mirrors set up off of round-robin DNS w/ fault tolerance. I don't know of anyone that could justify to the powers that be that they need to pay more $$ for +25Mbits of bandwidth to sustain something for which they get no return on (no visible return to the suits at least). If there was a need for only 2Mbits, then I'm sure many placed already have that much to spare. IMHO there should be a dozen or two mirrors. I can't see it working any other way unless there just happens to be a rich geek that wants to put up the green for a big fat pipe. I would if I could but I'm not Bill G.
That's an idea! Linus should ask Bill G to front the green for the Linux kernel site. I know Billy-boy would do it. He's all for helping the community...;-)
I think of it this way. If it's written by humans, it's bound to have problems. How many problems depends on the human and how much they care about their project.
Is Philips still planning on not letting Universal us the standard audio CD logos on their CDs because of the Red Book compliance issues? To me that's a very strong statement.
...in a few of my entry-level CS classes where on more than one occasion my work looked remarkably like others in the class, including that of the instructor that also work the assignments during the same timeframe that we did. I didn't copy and neither did anyone else. It's just that the instructor grilled steps into our head on how we *should* program something. When all was said and done, our source had a certain resemblence to one another. On one of the hardest assignments in the class, a calendar, my source was almost identical in parts to the instructor's. We even chose many of the same variable names. I can easily see how 2 or 3 people out of a class of say 500 could have very similar source. Can't you?
Sure you did. Both his and my experience tag you as either what he wrote or like a handful of my users that think that me as an ISP filtering their mail is wrong and demand to receive all the spam. I think it's totally justified.
Please mod the parent way down. Apparently this guy didn't fully read the story. It also sounds like he has a grudge against anti-spammers in general, probably against ISPs that filter email based on their efforts as well. He sounds eerily familiar, like one of my users that ranted and raved at me until I used Sendmail's SPAMFRIEND declaration to let mail destined to that user bypass all my spam checks. Of course he now gets around 200 pieces of spam per week but who's counting. If this guy would have read the story he would have noted that the original recipient wasn't listed on any website as an address posted for the purpose of receiving job requests and resumes. In fact the guy had nothing to do with the hiring of people at his place of work. BS also couldn't provide the URL at which he claimed to have found the address that solicited his resume. At one point he said he may have accidentally got his address from a spamming list. Whoops! The author also pointed out that the address was only used as a POP pickup and for spam LARTs. A "honest attempt to ensure that only HR Departments received his mail" my ass. Obviously this guy didn't read the story or he would have picked up on those minor pieces of fact.
I love it when ignorant people, such as the parent of this thread think, that anti-spammers tag team alleged spammers and get off on our actions. "oh baby, I got another potential spammer boot from the provider. Was it good for you?". Yeah, uh huh. Whatever. This guy does not deserve a 5.
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What I find frustrating as someone that filters a whole lot of spam on my servers is that I can't get usable information out of the APNIC WHOIS. I really can't find anything worthwhile in about 90% of my queries while LARTing spam. It's quite frustrating. I've considered blocking all .cn, .kr, .jp, .tw, .ar, .br, and other TLDs since I don't directly contact any body in those particulat TLDs. I am on mailing lists that have addresses with those TLDs on them that I would have to account for. As a sysadmin I find the quality of foreign WHOIS to be a major problem.
BTW, a 100 year high doesn't consitute a warming of the Earth. Climate study isn't a short term thing. It has to be looked at in the medium to long term. Hell El Nino can disrupt the short term view enough to make you think that the Earth is going to cook before the Kennedy files are opened.
Also, I'm not referring to the last Ice Age per say. The last Ice Age wasn't a true "snow ball" either. The tropics were still accessible. The Snow Ball Earth that I'm referring to (I need to find the article for you) was a complete covering of the Earth's surface with hundreds of meters of ice and snow. Even the equator had roughly 90 meters of ice on top of it. The physical evidence proves it. Yes, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking the same thing that the biologist community thought and said. They said that found the theory reasonible except that if the entire Earth's surface was covered in ice, there could be no life. Light (solar energy), the basis of life couldn't get through the ice. The geologists were stumped on that one until an artic diver happened to notice something under the ice in one of his dives. He found a plethora of life below the ice in the form of green algae and a few other things that I can't think of the words for. He said there was at least 30 meters of ice above him. He said there was a great deal of bright light coming down through the ice. He knew why also. If you quickly freeze ice, air will get trapped inside and form the white spots you see in ice cubes. If you cool it slowly though, the ice will freeze from the bottom up and will not contain air pockets (many anyways) making it extremely transparent. He proved the theory. Whew, enough typing. I've got to get to work. :)
We actually have fairly accurate weather data that dates back hundreds of thousands of years thanks to geologists. That was part of how they proved the Snow Ball Earth theory. They found the layer of rock formed during the Snow Ball and on top that found a very thick layer of calcium carbonate that was formed during the rapid thawing. Our recorded weather data doesn't go back terribly far. Rocks go back a long long ways though. :)
The warming we think we're seeing is actually very short term (term as in hundreds of years). The Earth doesn't travel around the Sun in a perfect circle. It's an oval of sorts. Elyptical (sp?). That isn't constant either. Over time the cycle changes. At one point it gets warm (now). At the other end of the cycle it gets colder than shit (read: ice age). Supposedly we're reaching the peak. We're actually starting an ice age. Not that you I, or your kids' grandkids' will ever see it but it is beginning. Sure we're putting crap in the air that wasn't as prevalent without us. Then again, CO2 is required to keep Earth warm. Without it, we'd be cold as hell, even this close to the Sun.
You need to get a fscking clue and read my post below. Global warming is media and policitcal hype. It's something to sell you on the evening news and sell you during political campaigns. That facts refute it. The media won't tell you that though. The weather has been acting odd this year. Here in the very southeast corner of Kansas tomorrow on the 18th of February the expected temp will be 65 degrees. That's odd. That doesn't prove that global warming is real.
All these scientists that signed the 2nd paper discounted what the 1st guys said and they did it with an overwhelming number of people. Of course the media didn't cover that. The media never wants to cover something like that. Blood and guts sells. Death and destruction sells. Conspiracy sells. Telling the public that violence in schools is actually decreasing and is lower now than it was in the troubled 70s doesn't sell. Plastering a blood-splattered babbling kid on the evening news that "saw it all" sells.
Enough of my rambling. You've heard it all before. My question is, has anyone seen this Discovery episode? Does anyone know where more information can be had? I'd love to see the episode. It sounds like a good one. I still like the one that proved that something like 600 million years ago we had a Snow Ball Earth and the one that proved all human life as we know it today originated from deep within Africa. Both of those were good shows.
I put it on all of my webpages in tiny white text somewhere. I also put in spamtrap addresses in the same manor that auto-forward to that address. It's something I recommend to *EVERYONE*.
I tend to agree. MAPS is useless for the most part as far as listing actual spammers. Now I do like to use their RSS. Many anti-spam admins still report open relays to MAPS. I do. Because of that they have a decent list of open relays. I also like their DUL. It was created in a fairly professional way. They did the leg work to identify actual dialup user netblocks rather than me trying to make a quick guess. I like that. I don't hit the DUL much (maybe 500 times per week on average) but every so often it gets hit hard and I'm glad I shelled out the $$$ for it. I use the ORSS for most of my filtering. I zone transfer it so I get the SPEWS stuff as well. It works well for me. Add that to me huge Sendmail access list and you have a decent setup.
What all of this rambling means is that you can filter out a great deal of spam with the right DNS blacklists. I only use DNSbl's that allow zone transfers because I don't want network latency to slow down mail delivery. It really is a worthwhile thing to do.
Finally the best thing that you can do for your users is educate them. Give them very clear examples of how doing simple things like giving your personal email to a credit card company, entering it in a guestbook, using it in USENET, using it on any public discussion board, and many more can increase their spam intake many fold. Explain that to them. Show them the proof. It's not hard to generate spam. Hell create a dummy account and make a few posts in the newsgroups. Never give the address to anyone else and don't use it yourself. Give it a week. Then show the results to your users as proof of USENET address harvesting.
Finally, don't be part of the problem (this is to the parent of the article). Be proactive in fighting spam. Sitting back and bitching about it doesn't help anyone. If you put up a server that's an open relay then you fucked up. It's your responsibility as an administrator to make sure you do your job right. Putting up and open relay isn't doing your job right (are you listening all of you damned Exchange admins?! 90% of the open relays I find and report are running Exchange!!!). When you get spam, report it (called LARTing). Drop a copy to uce@ftc.gov. Reporting stock spam to the SEC. Report bogus drug scams (loose 100lbs tonight while you sleep!) to the FDA. Report Nigerian Monet scams to the Secret Service. Report the spamertised sites to their providers and ask that they investigate (don't accuse in case it's a Joe Job). Parse through the headers and learn to identify relayed spam, BS headers, and other tricks of the trade. Submit open relays for listing in all the open relay blacklists. Report it to the owner of the IP as well. DO YOU PART! If you're not going to do you part to fight spam or ensure that you're servers are properly configured, THEN GET YOU SERVERS AND YOUR ASS OFF THE 'NET BECAUSE YOU DON"T BELONG IN THIS COMMUNITY!! Don't be part of the problem.
It's official! /. has been /.ed with LOVE !!!
How about a /. article asking someone to marry you? ;-)
First off, congrats! Secondly, can we see some pictures of the happy couple?
Have any of you visited MPEG-LA's website, specifically the contact page? Do so and take a look at the employees' pictures. Wow. MPEG-LA employs some goodlookin' women. Check out Courtney Ford. Oh hell yeah! Check please!
That's not packet switching. It was more or less the invention of a shared communication channel. AlohaNet inspired behind Ethernet but they are not related. Read Ethernet by O'Reilly, Chapter One, for a good discussion of the history.
...as long as they don't resort to spamming to advertise their fake sites. I'd have to LART them if they did.
Here's a thought. Ask the students what they think their money should be spent on. :-)
This greatly reminds me of the PowerPC Mhz discussions. For example, 1Ghz PIII vs a PPC G4 500Mhz. The PIII sounds like it whips the G4 but it doesn't. Thanks to some of the G4's features, like AltiVec, the G4 performs better than the PIII. Of course the average user doesn't look at benchmarks when they buy their computer. The average user doesn't understand them anyway.
That's an idea! Linus should ask Bill G to front the green for the Linux kernel site. I know Billy-boy would do it. He's all for helping the community... ;-)
That makes no sense. It's like saying that he broke into the building even though they gave him the key. Makes no sense at all.
I think of it this way. If it's written by humans, it's bound to have problems. How many problems depends on the human and how much they care about their project.
Is Philips still planning on not letting Universal us the standard audio CD logos on their CDs because of the Red Book compliance issues? To me that's a very strong statement.
...in a few of my entry-level CS classes where on more than one occasion my work looked remarkably like others in the class, including that of the instructor that also work the assignments during the same timeframe that we did. I didn't copy and neither did anyone else. It's just that the instructor grilled steps into our head on how we *should* program something. When all was said and done, our source had a certain resemblence to one another. On one of the hardest assignments in the class, a calendar, my source was almost identical in parts to the instructor's. We even chose many of the same variable names. I can easily see how 2 or 3 people out of a class of say 500 could have very similar source. Can't you?
No but that does make you appear to be someone that picks a fight just to pick a fight.
Sure you did. Both his and my experience tag you as either what he wrote or like a handful of my users that think that me as an ISP filtering their mail is wrong and demand to receive all the spam. I think it's totally justified.
I love it when ignorant people, such as the parent of this thread think, that anti-spammers tag team alleged spammers and get off on our actions. "oh baby, I got another potential spammer boot from the provider. Was it good for you?". Yeah, uh huh. Whatever. This guy does not deserve a 5.