LSD-25, a ruger 10-22 with a 30 round banana clip, model rocket ni-chrome wire, a 12 volt battery, and the day after a run to chinatown on Chinese New Years with a fistful of twenties in a slowly cruising car, looking for people wanting to sell gunpowder based ordinance, bandaids, lots of baindaids and bandages, bicycle inner tubes, a sharp knife, trees with forks in the trunks about head high overlooking a concentration of worthy adversaries, and did I mention LSD-25?, an electronic pick lock, duct tape, lots of duct tape, and metallic camping matches, the kind that light dozens of times soaking wet, a vise, a hammer, a wrench set, and a solid core door on two old sawhorses.
The dealio about spam for me, who owns an ISP is this: 1. cost of tech support answering calls about "how do I deal with all this spam?" 2. cost of R&D resources in-house to improve spam filters 3. cost of "abuse desk" staff who follow-up on complaints of spam originating from our ~ 2,000 internal and hosted domains 4. cost of overbuilding our network to handle the processing, storage and bandwidth costs of handling spam.
those spam filters burn boku CPU, those new image based spams are a lot larger than text and significantly eat bandwidth. 5. cost of detecting customers infected by spam bot software and helping them scrub it from their systems 6. cost of getting us/keeping us off blacklists because we have infected customers spewing spam
What's the big deal about this? We're a small ISP and we have to absorb all these costs because our customers don't think they should have to pay more to cover our ever increasing costs in this regard. We're out a couple hundred grand a year at least.
This doesn't even cover the distributed loss of productivity across our customer base to deal with the spam which gets through, it doesn't cover the loss of opportunity in our organization because of the effort we need to spend on this instead of providing better service or new services to our customers because we are working on this.
I'm an old fart of 46, my wife and I own an ISP in Santa Cruz California and have 3 kids. I would characterize it a little differently, I would say kids today are growing up "differently" than their parents, which is always true.
One of the modern differences is adults and kids are all spending a lot of time sitting around the glowing toob or walking around with a permanent sound track blasting in their ears where previously they did not (because they could not, those gadgets didn't exist).
This does seem to translate into a growing over weight, sedentary population, though, both kids and adults.
I grew up in the 'burbs but close to large open undeveloped spaces so spent many a happy summer with my brothers stealing lumber from construction sites and building tree houses and things like that. My wife has similar stories (sans lumber stealing).
A letter the gummit doesn't contribute to anything. As always, in every generation, the parents need to provide the guidence necssary to keep the kids healthy. IN the case of my wife and I, being ISPs and all, we have a huge room full of computers, one for each person and I have a couple. And we compute all the time. However, we also walk everytwhere, camp and go backpacking. A few years ago, wanting a place for our kids to roam outdoors as we had, we bought a few acres a few miles from Yosemite and spend weeks up there every year.
So: everything's cool in the proper dosage, parents: kick the kids outside and make them walk places and feed them good food. Government need not apply. End of story.
This particular problem could indeed have been solved with encryption.
Wrt telecommuting introducing another attack vector via the link between
the laptop and the employer network, don't forget the link between the laptop
and the Internet.
If the employee not only uses the laptop to connect with their employer,
but to browse the web with a web browser or use a mail client to read
their email as well, they are a lot more likely to get infected by
something with a keystroke logger, password grabber, etc which can
facilitate a directed attack on the employer network.
The issue of securing a network from attacks from the outside is one thing,
but the additional burden of securing every offsite computer and educating
every telecommuter on maintaining that security is mind boggling. From that
perspective, perhaps the gains of telecommuting are offset by the costs of
securing the offsite computers from the Internet, hence securing the employer
network from the (infected) offsite computers.
The Feds use a couple of logs. First, the Apache access log which says which file was requested from what IP over the web. They get this from the site hosting the content. Then, they check the IP against the ARIN database, and contact the ISP who provides Internet access with that IP, and request the name of the person who "leased" the IP at the the time of access.
The subpoenas which come to use are generally for data about which of our customers was using a given IP at a given time. They're not obligated to tell us any info about the case, but one subpeona was related to a murder in Idaho (according to the agent) and a couple others were related to child porn (according to the agent).
I figure whatever the agents say may or may not be true, they may be spinning to get better results. As long as a judge signs off on the subpoena, we follow the law. (unfortunately, this administration seems to be trying to get around judicial oversite...)
I am the owner of a small ISP in Santa Cruz, California. We get a couple/few subpoenas a year from the FBI, like most ISPs. My concern with data retention of logs, which is what is being asked for here, is: 1. privacy - 'nuff said 2: the cost to the ISP.
We're a small ISP, and we keep a week or two of backups and it's already several terabytes. Now, the feds want us to extract all the access, email and web log files from the backups and save them from 2 years. There's a couple thousand ISPs in the US, spread this cost over the US industry, and you are looking at millions, perhaps tens of millions of dollars per year in additional storage and staff costs.
As a final point, I have 3 kids. Anyone invites me to a meeting and opens it with slides of child porn and my one thought is they are sick sick sick. Most of the people "invited" to the meeting are probably parents, you can sell anti-child porn without showing it to us! What does it say about our AG that he supports torture and has a collection of child porn which he shows to people?
Several people have pointed out there's no reason to look for asteroids which'll hit us if we've no means to deflect them.
Wrong. We will have a means some day, in the meantime, it's important to start the funding process, then the building of the observatories, so we can start cataloging the asteroids which are candidates to wipe us out.
Doing nothing with the assumption we can never do anything is against all evidence of progress in our history...
This seems like a totally useless way of keeping
people from smuggling knives onto planes, kicking in the door to the cockpit and taking over the controls after killing the pilots.
The game gives you a budget, from which you build
a basic city by laying out traffic and utility grids, then "zoning" with commercial, redidential and industrial districts. You use income from taxes, fees, etc, to expand the city. Very good for showing budgeting, also, pretty good intro to city design.
I own an ISP in Santa Cruz, CA.
We're implementing our own server side based
spam filters for our 20,000+ mailboxes.
We were considering colocating some servers at
Above.net, now we won't, our philosophy is to
give the individuals more control (hence our
filter technology) and not do system wide
filtering.
ZDNet testing labs did a comparison of
various spam filter technologies, the RBL ranked
rather low and also filtered out a small
percentage of "legit" email.
Unfortunately, he couldn't reconcile the rest of
his life with the peak experience of riding a lawn
chair and killed himself.
The New Yorker did a story on this a while back.
Very sad, I guess it shows that ambition and
intelligence are no proof against the great cosmic
darkness which tears at folks.
I own a small/mid sized ISP (7,000 customers) on
the California coast.
What's going on is the CLECs like Covad, Northpoint, and that lot are on the ropes. Their
model was to stuff DSLASMs in every CO in the
country and then get the customers later. This
model required an indefinite period of VC and IPO
money to flow in to fund it. The window has snapped
shut and many of these folks are unable to fund the
marketing costs required to populate those DSLAMs with paying customers.
Also a part of this is the "retail level" ISPs who
buy the wholesale DSL from those folks. They either
can't pay their bills upstream to the wholesalers
or have the wholesalers fold on them and leave their (the ISPs) customers up a creek.
The twin swords of culling and consolodation are
flashing through the market place.
Back in 1999, when we were trying to decide who to
go with for DSL, our choices were PacBell, Covad
and Northpoint. PacBell were the only folks who returned our calls (!). What decided us toward going with PB in the end was looking up info on
Covad and Northpoint in
Edgar and deciding their business plan made no
sense. It required too much money, too many years
running at an insane money burning loss, and we just couldn't see things going that way forever.
Too bad, because PacBell the company really, I mean, really, sucks. But despite all that, my ass kicking staff has managed to get over 800 folks onto DSL in the last 15 months in our one little county.
A couple of other things are happening:
ILECs and CLECs (PB & Covad) are eschewing truck rolls in favor of self install kits
Consumer DSL modems + filter kits are coming down in price, you can find them for about $170 now, so they'll be down to the cost of a 56k modem in a year or so.
It could end up the DSL market looks like the dialup market, ISPs selling the IP on top of the
circuit provided by the ILECs and the remaining
CLECs.
Slashdot Mirror
LSD-25, a ruger 10-22 with a 30 round banana clip, model rocket ni-chrome wire, a 12 volt battery, and the day after a run to chinatown on Chinese New Years with a fistful of twenties in a slowly cruising car, looking for people wanting to sell gunpowder based ordinance, bandaids, lots of baindaids and bandages, bicycle inner tubes, a sharp knife, trees with forks in the trunks about head high overlooking a concentration of worthy adversaries, and did I mention LSD-25?, an electronic pick lock, duct tape, lots of duct tape, and metallic camping matches, the kind that light dozens of times soaking wet, a vise, a hammer, a wrench set, and a solid core door on two old sawhorses.
The dealio about spam for me, who owns an ISP is this:
1. cost of tech support answering calls about "how do I deal with all this spam?"
2. cost of R&D resources in-house to improve spam filters
3. cost of "abuse desk" staff who follow-up on complaints of spam originating from our ~ 2,000 internal and hosted domains
4. cost of overbuilding our network to handle the processing, storage and bandwidth costs of handling spam.
those spam filters burn boku CPU, those new image based spams are a lot larger than text and significantly eat bandwidth.
5. cost of detecting customers infected by spam bot software and helping them scrub it from their systems
6. cost of getting us/keeping us off blacklists because we have infected customers spewing spam
What's the big deal about this? We're a small ISP and we have to absorb all these costs because our customers don't think they should have to pay more to cover our ever increasing costs in this regard. We're out a couple hundred grand a year at least.
This doesn't even cover the distributed loss of productivity across our customer base to deal with the spam which gets through, it doesn't cover the loss of opportunity in our organization because of the effort we need to spend on this instead of providing better service or new services to our customers because we are working on this.
I would characterize it a little differently, I would say kids today are growing up "differently" than their parents, which is always true.
One of the modern differences is adults and kids are all spending a lot of time sitting around the glowing toob or walking around with a permanent sound track blasting in their ears where previously they did not (because they could not, those gadgets didn't exist).
This does seem to translate into a growing over weight, sedentary population, though, both kids and adults.
I grew up in the 'burbs but close to large open undeveloped spaces so spent many a happy summer with my brothers stealing lumber from construction sites and building tree houses and things like that. My wife has similar stories (sans lumber stealing).
A letter the gummit doesn't contribute to anything. As always, in every generation, the parents need to provide the guidence necssary to keep the kids healthy. IN the case of my wife and I, being ISPs and all, we have a huge room full of computers, one for each person and I have a couple. And we compute all the time. However, we also walk everytwhere, camp and go backpacking. A few years ago, wanting a place for our kids to roam outdoors as we had, we bought a few acres a few miles from Yosemite and spend weeks up there every year.
So: everything's cool in the proper dosage, parents: kick the kids outside and make them walk places and feed them good food. Government need not apply. End of story.
If the employee not only uses the laptop to connect with their employer, but to browse the web with a web browser or use a mail client to read their email as well, they are a lot more likely to get infected by something with a keystroke logger, password grabber, etc which can facilitate a directed attack on the employer network.
The issue of securing a network from attacks from the outside is one thing, but the additional burden of securing every offsite computer and educating every telecommuter on maintaining that security is mind boggling. From that perspective, perhaps the gains of telecommuting are offset by the costs of securing the offsite computers from the Internet, hence securing the employer network from the (infected) offsite computers.
The subpoenas which come to use are generally for data about which of our customers was using a given IP at a given time. They're not obligated to tell us any info about the case, but one subpeona was related to a murder in Idaho (according to the agent) and a couple others were related to child porn (according to the agent).
I figure whatever the agents say may or may not be true, they may be spinning to get better results. As long as a judge signs off on the subpoena, we follow the law. (unfortunately, this administration seems to be trying to get around judicial oversite...)
I am the owner of a small ISP in Santa Cruz, California. We get a couple/few subpoenas a year from the FBI, like most ISPs. My concern with data retention of logs, which is what is being asked for here, is: 1. privacy - 'nuff said 2: the cost to the ISP.
We're a small ISP, and we keep a week or two of backups and it's already several terabytes. Now, the feds want us to extract all the access, email and web log files from the backups and save them from 2 years. There's a couple thousand ISPs in the US, spread this cost over the US industry, and you are looking at millions, perhaps tens of millions of dollars per year in additional storage and staff costs.
As a final point, I have 3 kids. Anyone invites me to a meeting and opens it with slides of child porn and my one thought is they are sick sick sick. Most of the people "invited" to the meeting are probably parents, you can sell anti-child porn without showing it to us! What does it say about our AG that he supports torture and has a collection of child porn which he shows to people?
Wrong. We will have a means some day, in the meantime, it's important to start the funding process, then the building of the observatories, so we can start cataloging the asteroids which are candidates to wipe us out.
Doing nothing with the assumption we can never do anything is against all evidence of progress in our history...
people from smuggling knives onto planes, kicking in the door to the cockpit and taking over the controls after killing the pilots.
Or maybe I'm missing something.
The game gives you a budget, from which you build
a basic city by laying out traffic and utility grids, then "zoning" with commercial, redidential and industrial districts. You use income from taxes, fees, etc, to expand the city. Very good for showing budgeting, also, pretty good intro to city design.
We were considering colocating some servers at Above.net, now we won't, our philosophy is to give the individuals more control (hence our filter technology) and not do system wide filtering.
ZDNet testing labs did a comparison of various spam filter technologies, the RBL ranked rather low and also filtered out a small percentage of "legit" email.
Check it out.
Unfortunately, he couldn't reconcile the rest of his life with the peak experience of riding a lawn chair and killed himself. The New Yorker did a story on this a while back. Very sad, I guess it shows that ambition and intelligence are no proof against the great cosmic darkness which tears at folks.
How do you identity civilians, etc? Not to mention Chinese embassies!
Also a part of this is the "retail level" ISPs who buy the wholesale DSL from those folks. They either can't pay their bills upstream to the wholesalers or have the wholesalers fold on them and leave their (the ISPs) customers up a creek.
The twin swords of culling and consolodation are flashing through the market place.
Back in 1999, when we were trying to decide who to go with for DSL, our choices were PacBell, Covad and Northpoint. PacBell were the only folks who returned our calls (!). What decided us toward going with PB in the end was looking up info on Covad and Northpoint in Edgar and deciding their business plan made no sense. It required too much money, too many years running at an insane money burning loss, and we just couldn't see things going that way forever.
Too bad, because PacBell the company really, I mean, really, sucks. But despite all that, my ass kicking staff has managed to get over 800 folks onto DSL in the last 15 months in our one little county.
A couple of other things are happening:
It could end up the DSL market looks like the dialup market, ISPs selling the IP on top of the circuit provided by the ILECs and the remaining CLECs.