Chances are great that those were made by a spammer. Report the attempt to the appropriate ISP.
Having worked in abuse at an ISP before, I can say that ISPs get so many retarded complaints from people saying their firewall logged an unauthorized ICMP echo request and the hacker responsible should have his account immediately terminated that filtering out the nonsense from the legitimate issues really isn't worth the hassle. These complaints will be ignored.
I'd also suggest letting your ISP know: if spammers are looking in your ISP's space for abusable proxies the ISP can take protective actions.
Such as? Firewalling incoming ports? Most large residential broadband ISPs are already doing this.
Your ISP also may have greater clout with the spammer's ISP - at least it's worth a shot.
Your ISP may be able to put together a more intelligent complaint, which will increase the chances of having it looked at. It probably won't affect the chances of action being taken, unless your ISP is huge (RoadRunner, for example).
I think you're missing something. You seem to be implying that the Monkeys.com admin is giving up because he personally can't take the pressure anymore, and that he should try to persevere instead. While that sounds nice, you're forgetting reality:
1) While his servers are under a DDoS attack, nobody can use them, which means the blacklist is basically useless. This is why it's called "denial of service" - the ability to use the service is being denied.
2) The only technical way to withstand a DDoS attack while still continuing to provide service is to increase your bandwidth so you have enough to handle both the attack and legitimate requests. This costs a LOT of money. Another poster mentioned that SpamCop spent $30,000 on this. SpamCop has paid subscriptions (I'm a subscriber myself); Monkeys.com does not. Do you have an extra $30,000 lying around that you could donate? I don't.
3) The non-technical solution is to go through law enforcement. He contacted the FBI, and they didn't know what he was talking about. Perhaps he should keep trying, but due to the nature of the attack, I'm not sure the FBI could help if they wanted to - there's no way to track who is responsible for the attacks, so there's nobody to prosecute for a crime.
Yeah, years ago when blocklists were fairly new I had some idiot put the ISP I used on their list. It did get sorted before too long, but it was a big pain in the ass having a lot of people I knew unable to mail me because some bozo decided that one spammer on an ISP was justification to stop email going to all their customers.
Um, it sounds like you're a little unclear on exactly how DNSRBLs work. If people weren't able to send e-mail to you, it's because YOUR ISP was voluntarily choosing to use a blacklist that included the mail servers of your friends' ISPs. Sounds like a pretty silly thing for your ISP to do. I hope you complained to them about it.
You wouldn't allow your child to roam the streets of your town alone, so why would you let them roam the world's information networks unsupervised?
Depends on the age and maturity level of the child. I would allow a 16-yr-old to do things I would not allow a 12-yr-old to do. If I don't allow them to roam the streets of my town at 16, what happens when they turn 18 and move out and are suddenly roaming the streets of some other town without my knowledge?
for example, they quote some statistics about how teenagers engage in sex talk or meet up - but um, with dodgy old men, or simply other teenagers? It hardly surprises me that plenty of teenagers engage in sex chat or meet up with other teenagers, but the context of that survey implies it is the former.
I think the point they were trying to make was, if you talk to someone in a chatroom, you have no real guarantee that they are who they say they are - if they say they're another teenager, they might be another teenager or they might be a dodgy old man pretending to be a teenager. Obviously the vast majority of them really are other teenagers, and most of the time everything works out just fine.
When you arrange to meet someone, you can do so carefully (meet in a public place with lots of people around, go with parents or friends so you're not alone, and make sure you have a way to leave if things turn out not to be as you expected) or you can do so recklessly ("Hey, my parents will be out of town this weekend and they think I'm staying with a friend, here's my address"). If children aren't aware of the dangers, they won't make wise decisions. Parents can't always be there, which is why it's important to teach children how to make wise decisions on their own.
Do you remember what it was like being 12 years old?
Yeah, I spent as much time in front of a computer as possible - either at home, or staying after school to use the ones there. The difference was, nobody I knew had any idea what the Internet was - the World Wide Web didn't exist yet. A couple years later I started chatting online in the Teleconference on a local multi-line BBS, although I soon realized that you can't really get a word in edgewise at 300 baud (at that speed the text comes in as fast as you can read it), so it wasn't until we got a new computer and a 14.4kbps modem (when I was 16) that I really started talking to people online (still on BBSes - people were starting to use the Web, but ICQ didn't exist yet and I didn't know about IRC).
I met a girl from a BBS. She was huge. We played laser tag.
So anyway, yeah, I remember when I was 12 years old. It was nothing like being 12 years old would be today.
I just heard a discussion about this on the BBC's Radio Five Live. One concern they raised: children will not stop chatting online, but will simply switch to other chat services which are even less safe than MSN's. Not only that, but with the announcement of the impending closure, there will be a scramble to exchange contact information before the deadline, which may include phone numbers or other personal information (precisely the thing we don't want children to do).
Another point they made: when talking to your children about the dangers of talking to strangers online (or anything else, really) it's very important to explain WHY it's dangerous, and make sure they understand exactly what the dangers are and how to avoid them. Children tend to rebel against authority, especially when they can't see good reasons for the rules parents set for them.
The problem with watching DVDs on a computer monitor is, the picture is so clear you can see artifacts of the MPEG-2 compression, which you don't notice on a blurry TV screen.
Verisign have set up a server running Postfix which responds
Hmm, I was about to reply and say you're wrong, it's not Postfix - but then I checked, and they've changed it! When the service was first deployed, it was using a custom script that didn't even understand SMTP, it was just waiting for a certain number of lines, then displaying an error. It seemed to me that this script probably wasn't sophisticated enough to harvest e-mail addresses. Now that they're using a real SMTP server, though, I'm not so sure. They could very well be harvesting sender e-mail addresses (which are sent to Verisign before the error message is given).
Except, of course, that the G3 has no symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) capabilities.
Au contraire! Here's the actual chip I was talking about, the 750GX; that page says it "is architecturally based on the PowerPC 750FX processor." Here's a PDF about the 750FX which mentions SMP.
Sorry for being too lazy to find links earlier.:-)
No matter what the exact question is, the only safe answer is:
"I don't know."
Agreed. This statement transforms the situation from the customer vs. the tech support agent into the customer and the tech support agent vs. the mysterious Powers That Be. You've just made a connection with the customer that enables them to see you on their level, as another human being stuck in the same world they are, who just happens to know what they need to do to get their problem fixed. If the customer perceives a situation to be bad, take their side. If you can make it right, do so. If you can't, but it is fixable, offer to pass their concern along. If it's not fixable, make them feel like you're just as much a victim as they are - we're all in this together.
Note that if you say you'll pass their concern along, it's good karma to actually do so. If nobody gives a rat's ass about the customers, do what you need to do to keep your job; collecting bad karma isn't really so bad.
I've seen some places where shift-insert doesn't work. I think the address and subject fields in Microsoft Outlook is one place; you must use ctrl-v instead. And of course there are plenty of X apps that don't support that sort of thing.
1. The "X clipboard" that most people are talking about is NOT the "clipboard" from Windows. It is DRAG & DROP!!!! With the huge advantage that you can move windows around, raise and lower them, and close them, before you drop.
I've got a neat app called Clutter, which (among other things) displays an image of an album cover while you're playing MP3s in iTunes. It stores a database of album cover graphics, associated with the artist and album title. I can add new cover graphics by finding the album on the web, and dragging the image directly from a web page in Safari to Clutter's Now Playing window. That's how drag & drop ought to work.
Good explanation though; I was confused about the same issue until a few months ago.
So, it rivals OSX in usability because Nautilus has a toolbar button that opens a Documents folder, it can browse SMB and NFS shares, Evolution showed an hourglass cursor while launching, and - are you ready for this? - cut, copy and paste work.
Microsoft would block Google by simply adding a line to a file that requests Google not index their site. Google, being a respectable company, would honor that request (it's automated). It's a request, not a block.
Verisign has just acquired more domain names than there are atoms in the universe. If Mountain View wanted them they'd have to pay more money than exists, whereas it only cost versign a line in their DNS records.
Actually it's less than that. I believe there are 37 possible characters (letters, numbers, hyphen) and length must be between 1 and 63. Multiply that by two TLDs. So that's a maximum of 12871757084838317190619237434832975247557480597538 37041862618498070630852038814649441492983666689918 domains, however a few combinations are reserved (anything where the third and fourth characters are hyphens, for example) - some of these are reserved for domains encoded from a foreign character set (such as Japanese), I think the ones starting with bq-- or something like that. Of course the domains that are already registered don't really count.
#!/usr/bin/perl
use Math::BigInt; my $total=Math::BigInt->new('0'); my $charset=Math::BigInt->new('37'); for($x=1;$x<64; $x++) {
$total+=$charset**$x; } print $total*2,"\n";
Slashdot Mirror
Chances are great that those were made by a spammer. Report the attempt to the appropriate ISP.
Having worked in abuse at an ISP before, I can say that ISPs get so many retarded complaints from people saying their firewall logged an unauthorized ICMP echo request and the hacker responsible should have his account immediately terminated that filtering out the nonsense from the legitimate issues really isn't worth the hassle. These complaints will be ignored.
I'd also suggest letting your ISP know: if spammers are looking in your ISP's space for abusable proxies the ISP can take protective actions.
Such as? Firewalling incoming ports? Most large residential broadband ISPs are already doing this.
Your ISP also may have greater clout with the spammer's ISP - at least it's worth a shot.
Your ISP may be able to put together a more intelligent complaint, which will increase the chances of having it looked at. It probably won't affect the chances of action being taken, unless your ISP is huge (RoadRunner, for example).
I think you're missing something. You seem to be implying that the Monkeys.com admin is giving up because he personally can't take the pressure anymore, and that he should try to persevere instead. While that sounds nice, you're forgetting reality:
1) While his servers are under a DDoS attack, nobody can use them, which means the blacklist is basically useless. This is why it's called "denial of service" - the ability to use the service is being denied.
2) The only technical way to withstand a DDoS attack while still continuing to provide service is to increase your bandwidth so you have enough to handle both the attack and legitimate requests. This costs a LOT of money. Another poster mentioned that SpamCop spent $30,000 on this. SpamCop has paid subscriptions (I'm a subscriber myself); Monkeys.com does not. Do you have an extra $30,000 lying around that you could donate? I don't.
3) The non-technical solution is to go through law enforcement. He contacted the FBI, and they didn't know what he was talking about. Perhaps he should keep trying, but due to the nature of the attack, I'm not sure the FBI could help if they wanted to - there's no way to track who is responsible for the attacks, so there's nobody to prosecute for a crime.
Personally, I'd love to see some of you "knowledgable" folks start DDOSing the spammers.
They have more money than most of us do (because sleazy and/or retarded businesses pay them a lot of money to send spam). They'll win.
Yeah, years ago when blocklists were fairly new I had some idiot put the ISP I used on their list. It did get sorted before too long, but it was a big pain in the ass having a lot of people I knew unable to mail me because some bozo decided that one spammer on an ISP was justification to stop email going to all their customers.
Um, it sounds like you're a little unclear on exactly how DNSRBLs work. If people weren't able to send e-mail to you, it's because YOUR ISP was voluntarily choosing to use a blacklist that included the mail servers of your friends' ISPs. Sounds like a pretty silly thing for your ISP to do. I hope you complained to them about it.
You wouldn't allow your child to roam the streets of your town alone, so why would you let them roam the world's information networks unsupervised?
Depends on the age and maturity level of the child. I would allow a 16-yr-old to do things I would not allow a 12-yr-old to do. If I don't allow them to roam the streets of my town at 16, what happens when they turn 18 and move out and are suddenly roaming the streets of some other town without my knowledge?
for example, they quote some statistics about how teenagers engage in sex talk or meet up - but um, with dodgy old men, or simply other teenagers? It hardly surprises me that plenty of teenagers engage in sex chat or meet up with other teenagers, but the context of that survey implies it is the former.
I think the point they were trying to make was, if you talk to someone in a chatroom, you have no real guarantee that they are who they say they are - if they say they're another teenager, they might be another teenager or they might be a dodgy old man pretending to be a teenager. Obviously the vast majority of them really are other teenagers, and most of the time everything works out just fine.
When you arrange to meet someone, you can do so carefully (meet in a public place with lots of people around, go with parents or friends so you're not alone, and make sure you have a way to leave if things turn out not to be as you expected) or you can do so recklessly ("Hey, my parents will be out of town this weekend and they think I'm staying with a friend, here's my address"). If children aren't aware of the dangers, they won't make wise decisions. Parents can't always be there, which is why it's important to teach children how to make wise decisions on their own.
Do you remember what it was like being 12 years old?
Yeah, I spent as much time in front of a computer as possible - either at home, or staying after school to use the ones there. The difference was, nobody I knew had any idea what the Internet was - the World Wide Web didn't exist yet. A couple years later I started chatting online in the Teleconference on a local multi-line BBS, although I soon realized that you can't really get a word in edgewise at 300 baud (at that speed the text comes in as fast as you can read it), so it wasn't until we got a new computer and a 14.4kbps modem (when I was 16) that I really started talking to people online (still on BBSes - people were starting to use the Web, but ICQ didn't exist yet and I didn't know about IRC).
I met a girl from a BBS. She was huge. We played laser tag.
So anyway, yeah, I remember when I was 12 years old. It was nothing like being 12 years old would be today.
I am sorry I only listen to government / corporate approved news, this is a BBC free zone (USA)
I'm in the USA too. Listen here.
I just heard a discussion about this on the BBC's Radio Five Live. One concern they raised: children will not stop chatting online, but will simply switch to other chat services which are even less safe than MSN's. Not only that, but with the announcement of the impending closure, there will be a scramble to exchange contact information before the deadline, which may include phone numbers or other personal information (precisely the thing we don't want children to do).
Another point they made: when talking to your children about the dangers of talking to strangers online (or anything else, really) it's very important to explain WHY it's dangerous, and make sure they understand exactly what the dangers are and how to avoid them. Children tend to rebel against authority, especially when they can't see good reasons for the rules parents set for them.
Damn, I'm glad I finished my drink before I read your post. DeciJobs. That's brilliant.
The problem with watching DVDs on a computer monitor is, the picture is so clear you can see artifacts of the MPEG-2 compression, which you don't notice on a blurry TV screen.
Verisign have set up a server running Postfix which responds
Hmm, I was about to reply and say you're wrong, it's not Postfix - but then I checked, and they've changed it! When the service was first deployed, it was using a custom script that didn't even understand SMTP, it was just waiting for a certain number of lines, then displaying an error. It seemed to me that this script probably wasn't sophisticated enough to harvest e-mail addresses. Now that they're using a real SMTP server, though, I'm not so sure. They could very well be harvesting sender e-mail addresses (which are sent to Verisign before the error message is given).
Here's info on new versions of BIND 9 from ISC. Works for me.
I misread something. The 750GX is SMP-capable, but does not include an AltiVec-compatible SIMD unit. That's planned for a future version.
Except, of course, that the G3 has no symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) capabilities.
:-)
Au contraire! Here's the actual chip I was talking about, the 750GX; that page says it "is architecturally based on the PowerPC 750FX processor." Here's a PDF about the 750FX which mentions SMP.
Sorry for being too lazy to find links earlier.
No matter what the exact question is, the only safe answer is:
"I don't know."
Agreed. This statement transforms the situation from the customer vs. the tech support agent into the customer and the tech support agent vs. the mysterious Powers That Be. You've just made a connection with the customer that enables them to see you on their level, as another human being stuck in the same world they are, who just happens to know what they need to do to get their problem fixed. If the customer perceives a situation to be bad, take their side. If you can make it right, do so. If you can't, but it is fixable, offer to pass their concern along. If it's not fixable, make them feel like you're just as much a victim as they are - we're all in this together.
Note that if you say you'll pass their concern along, it's good karma to actually do so. If nobody gives a rat's ass about the customers, do what you need to do to keep your job; collecting bad karma isn't really so bad.
This one masquerades as a Microsoft security patch. If it was any smaller, it wouldn't be believable, would it?
I've seen some places where shift-insert doesn't work. I think the address and subject fields in Microsoft Outlook is one place; you must use ctrl-v instead. And of course there are plenty of X apps that don't support that sort of thing.
1. The "X clipboard" that most people are talking about is NOT the "clipboard" from Windows. It is DRAG & DROP!!!! With the huge advantage that you can move windows around, raise and lower them, and close them, before you drop.
I've got a neat app called Clutter, which (among other things) displays an image of an album cover while you're playing MP3s in iTunes. It stores a database of album cover graphics, associated with the artist and album title. I can add new cover graphics by finding the album on the web, and dragging the image directly from a web page in Safari to Clutter's Now Playing window. That's how drag & drop ought to work.
Good explanation though; I was confused about the same issue until a few months ago.
So, it rivals OSX in usability because Nautilus has a toolbar button that opens a Documents folder, it can browse SMB and NFS shares, Evolution showed an hourglass cursor while launching, and - are you ready for this? - cut, copy and paste work.
Yep, I'm sold.
3. PowerMacs appeared in 1993.
I respectfully disagree.
More info on robots.txt
Microsoft would block Google by simply adding a line to a file that requests Google not index their site. Google, being a respectable company, would honor that request (it's automated). It's a request, not a block.
Look, I CAME HERE FOR AN ARGUMENT, I'm not going to just stand...!!
Ohhhhhh, sorry, this is abuse!
Verisign has just acquired more domain names than there are atoms in the universe. If Mountain View wanted them they'd have to pay more money than exists, whereas it only cost versign a line in their DNS records.
8 37041862618498070630852038814649441492983666689918 domains, however a few combinations are reserved (anything where the third and fourth characters are hyphens, for example) - some of these are reserved for domains encoded from a foreign character set (such as Japanese), I think the ones starting with bq-- or something like that. Of course the domains that are already registered don't really count.
; $x++) {
Actually it's less than that. I believe there are 37 possible characters (letters, numbers, hyphen) and length must be between 1 and 63. Multiply that by two TLDs. So that's a maximum of 1287175708483831719061923743483297524755748059753
#!/usr/bin/perl
use Math::BigInt;
my $total=Math::BigInt->new('0');
my $charset=Math::BigInt->new('37');
for($x=1;$x<64
$total+=$charset**$x;
}
print $total*2,"\n";
Certainly 2x4 lumber is not actually 2x4.
I think in theory it's 2"x4" before planing it down, kinda like a 1/4lb. hamburger patty is "weight before cooking".