(This isn't intended to stab at folks that still use Macs -- I'm just doubt I'll ever work in the Mac world again). They chose to serve folks who are willing to put down a fair amount of money for a polished closed-box experience. Not what I wanted -- I found Linux, and that was pretty much it.
Wait, so, you refuse to use Macs (which are perfectly capable of running Linux and other open-source operating systems) not because you don't like the hardware, but because you have a philosophical objection to being only able to buy them from Apple?
So this makes me wonder what the point is of using Darwin.
What would be the point of running NetBSD?
What would it take for Darwin to become just as suitable as NetBSD is?
What would it take for Darwin to become just as suitable as Linux is?
What's the point of running KDE instead of Gnome? What's the point of using emacs instead of vim?
In Mac OS X's built-in Mail program, go to Mail/Preferences/Viewing and uncheck "Display images and embedded objects in HTML messages" to do the same thing. Be aware that attachments will still be displayed, and some pornographic spam includes graphics as attachments, but this is relatively uncommon. Unfortunately Mail doesn't seem to have the Load Images command that Mozilla does, which would be nice for legitimate HTML e-mails that you can't read because they're mostly graphics. And yes, it should be a toolbar button.
1. Default to no on the "this spam is spam-vertising the following URLs" though admittedly this may be rare; since our clients don't spam I only see false positives on spamverts.
It is rare. Might not be a bad idea though.
2. Use some kind of collaborative filter - SpamCop must have enough users so that instead of acting on single reports, only escalate complaints if the same email is complained about by 20+ users.
It's almost never the "same". Spam software adds random words or code to the subject line and message body, as well as changing the From address, with each message that gets sent out. You could set some thresholds I guess, wiithholding complaints for a particular abuse@ address until you get enough of them, but for a large ISP that doesn't make much sense, since they'll be getting lots of unrelated reports.
By the way, SpamCop's automated DNSRBL (bl.spamcop.net, which they warn you NOT to use to block spam, only to flag possible spam, because it's automated and not necessarily accurate) does use thresholds like this, although it doesn't apply to spamvertized URLs.
One nice thing about SpamCop is, since all the abuse reports are sent in exactly the same format, you can filter them when you receive them. If you want to ignore complaints when there are fewer than 20 for the same web site, you should be able to automate that somehow on your end. Also, apparently you can tell them to quit sending you reports for spamvertized web sites.
In December 1996 I wrote to the person in charge of the Klingon Bible Translation Project, and received a reply the next day:
> I have a question regarding your translation of the Bible into Klingon: > are you translating from an English translation, or from the original > Greek and Hebrew?
From the Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic when we have translators who know these languages. For those who know only English, those of us who do know the languages will check their work against the original.
:: Kevin A. Wilson:: :: Department of Near Eastern Studies:: :: The Johns Hopkins University::
(signature edited to get around Slashdot's lameness filter)
This is definitely a legitimate problem. The reason SpamCop sends reports based on URLs is, most spam includes a URL, and it may be the only link to the actual spammer (if the spam was sent through an open proxy, for example). So it is valuable to report these.
Of course, before the report is sent, SpamCop displays a list of each URL it found and th e-mail addresses that would be appropriate to send a complaint to; some are checked by default and some may not be. It's up to the user to double-check these before sending the report, and yeah, users are dumb. Occasionally I receive spam that contains the URL of my home page in the body, and I have to uncheck my own ISP.
The other category of SpamCop reports is people who think SpamCop is their universal unsubscribe tool for legitimate, non-spam lists which they did sign up for.
This seriously pisses me off. People do not understand the difference between spam (UCE or UBE) and anything they may not happen to want at the moment for any reason. If it came from someone you know, it's not spam! If it came from a company you've ever done business with, it's not spam! If it's something you (perhaps accidentally) signed up for at some point, it's not spam! It's really not that hard to tell the difference, and reporting non-spam as spam wastes everybody's time and makes it harder to deal with the real spam.
So, do you have any suggestions on how SpamCop's reporting service could be improved, aside from requiring all users to take a competency test before using it?
[OT] I recommend CleverNickName's book, "Dancing Barefoot", particularly the story "The Saga of SpongeBob VegasPants", which tells how he (a geek and long-time Star Trek fan) met William Shatner for the first time, and what a miserable experience it was. Quite amusing.
Be aware that SpamCop.com is not the same as SpamCop.net - I'm not sure who SpamCop.com is, but having worked in the abuse department at an ISP, as well as having been a paying subscriber for a couple of years now, I can say that SpamCop.net is absolutely wonderful. They're best known for automating spam reporting - you paste in your message with full headers, and they figure out where it came from and prepare an e-mail to be sent to the administrators of those networks. Upon your approval, the complaints are sent from a unique SpamCop.net e-mail address, so your own e-mail address is not revealed (in case the complaint is forwarded to the spammers), yet you still receive any replies (SpamCop forwards them back to you).
On top of that, they also offer a service for $3/month that includes just about everything you could look for in an e-mail provider - pop3, imap, webmail, the ability to retrieve mail from other POP3 (and recently AOL and Hotmail) accounts, e-mail forwarding, easier spam reporting, and of course, spam filtering using a variety of blacklists (including SpamCop's own automated RBL) and recently SpamAssassin. It's all fully configurable so you can use it however you'd like.
Again, I have no connection to them, but SpamCop's reporting really does great things towards reducing the total volume of spam going around (by informing network administrators of the problem in a clear and consistent format so it's easy to deal with). I've only seen a couple of abuse reports from SpamCop.com, compared to thousands from SpamCop.net.
however I feel that the "people like you" comment is a little unfair.
A little perhaps, and it's great that you're no longer causing a problem, but the fact remains that for a brief period of time, you were part of the problem. Spam came through your server. There are many others like you - good intentioned, but making an honest mistake once, quite by accident, and then fixing the problem and never doing it again - and these people collectively make up a very significant source of spam. That's why AOL blocks you.
That said, I'm glad you've learned enough about it now to be a responsible Internet citizen, and I certainly don't want to discourage you from continuing on that path. Something you may want to look into is forwarding all mail destined for @aol.com to your ISP's SMTP server; they should be able to relay it to AOL (and since you're using one of your ISP's IP addresses, they should allow relaying from you).
You clearly have a very different idea of free than most people.
Unfortunately no, he shares the same idea of "free" that most people have: no immediate monetary cost to them.
The other day I got modded down as flamebait for pointing out that Opera isn't Free Software, and a reply similar to this one, angrily stating that yes it's free, you just have to view ad banners.
plus you dont have to worry about being filtered or black listed.
Um, you do realize those types of services often get blacklisted as well, for a variety of possible reasons? Usually not for very long, but it certainly happens quite a bit. Of course, if you're outsourcing to them, you can just say it's their problem and not yours; meanwhile your mail isn't getting out.
You know, I got two O'Reilly t-shirts at OSCon, and have worn them occasionally since then. Two different people have commented, and both assumed it was a reference to The O'Reilly Factor.
What about the idea of just leaving it up there? Maybe send it towards the sun to be destroyed, if that's possible, rather than just leaving it to float and potentially get in the way later.
I was under the impression no real 3d cards are available on the mac. I mean real as in professional. Geforce's are fast but they are not accurate and can misrender information that a wildcat or a quadro can not. Quite essential for a movie.
As far as I'm aware, those types of cards aren't used for this type of work at all. Something like this might be more appropriate? But I don't work in that industry, so I have no idea.
Slackware 4.0 used -I, Slackware 7.0 and 7.1 used -y, and Slackware 8.0 or 8.1 switched to -j. Going back and forth between servers with different versions installed and getting errors every time I tried to use bzip2 with tar was pretty damned annoying. I agree that -y makes the most sense, but -j is the future!
find -exec works on most systems to produce a hierarchial structure.
Resulting in a million little.gz files? OK, but that's obnoxious. I meant compressing the whole tree into one single compressed file; sorry if I wasn't clear.
bzip2 is really slow, and can only compress one file at a time, while zip can compress an entire directory hierarchy. That's why if you have more than one file to compress, you have to tar them first (although gnutar can do bzip2 at the same time, so it's mostly a non-issue).
(Speaking of which, what's up with the bzip2 option changing from I to y to j? Couldn't they just pick something and stick with it?)
By the way, although WinZip can decompress gzip files, it cannot decompress bzip2 files AFAIK, which is retarded.
Can't Winzip handle tar and gzip? Isn't gzip fairly cross-platform?
gzip can only compress a single file, while zip can compress an entire hierarchial tree. This is why if you want to compress more than one file with gzip, you have to tar it first (.tar.gz aka.tgz). Tar by itself, of course, does no compression at all, just sticks things together.
One disadvantage of this that I've heard is, if the compressed file becomes corrupt, it's much easier to recover most of the contents with zip than tar/gzip; if you can recover all but one file, you may lose a single file from the zip archive, but if you can't extract the tar file, you've lost everything. I'm not sure how big a deal this is or whether it's even accurate, but I heard it somewhere.
The DMCA is a copyright law; the anti-circumvention stuff only applies if you're circumventing something that was designed to prevent you from copying the content. Downloading HTML in your browser has been ruled not to qualify as copying, I believe (even if it gets copied to your cache on disk). I could very well be mistaken about that; IANAL so somebody correct me.
Slashdot Mirror
(This isn't intended to stab at folks that still use Macs -- I'm just doubt I'll ever work in the Mac world again). They chose to serve folks who are willing to put down a fair amount of money for a polished closed-box experience. Not what I wanted -- I found Linux, and that was pretty much it.
Wait, so, you refuse to use Macs (which are perfectly capable of running Linux and other open-source operating systems) not because you don't like the hardware, but because you have a philosophical objection to being only able to buy them from Apple?
So this makes me wonder what the point is of using Darwin.
What would be the point of running NetBSD?
What would it take for Darwin to become just as suitable as NetBSD is?
What would it take for Darwin to become just as suitable as Linux is?
What's the point of running KDE instead of Gnome? What's the point of using emacs instead of vim?
In Mac OS X's built-in Mail program, go to Mail/Preferences/Viewing and uncheck "Display images and embedded objects in HTML messages" to do the same thing. Be aware that attachments will still be displayed, and some pornographic spam includes graphics as attachments, but this is relatively uncommon. Unfortunately Mail doesn't seem to have the Load Images command that Mozilla does, which would be nice for legitimate HTML e-mails that you can't read because they're mostly graphics. And yes, it should be a toolbar button.
Wow, me too. I'm amazed that his bank's ATM fee is only $1. I would have gotten $38.50.
Credit unions, man. Most of them don't charge any fees. Look into it.
In Mail.app, I separate mail addresses with commas, and I get a drop-down to choose from.
:-)
Thank you! I couldn't figure out how to do this.
Nothing new here for the well-informed Slashdot reader.
Wow, is that an oxymoron, or what?
1. Default to no on the "this spam is spam-vertising the following URLs" though admittedly this may be rare; since our clients don't spam I only see false positives on spamverts.
It is rare. Might not be a bad idea though.
2. Use some kind of collaborative filter - SpamCop must have enough users so that instead of acting on single reports, only escalate complaints if the same email is complained about by 20+ users.
It's almost never the "same". Spam software adds random words or code to the subject line and message body, as well as changing the From address, with each message that gets sent out. You could set some thresholds I guess, wiithholding complaints for a particular abuse@ address until you get enough of them, but for a large ISP that doesn't make much sense, since they'll be getting lots of unrelated reports.
By the way, SpamCop's automated DNSRBL (bl.spamcop.net, which they warn you NOT to use to block spam, only to flag possible spam, because it's automated and not necessarily accurate) does use thresholds like this, although it doesn't apply to spamvertized URLs.
One nice thing about SpamCop is, since all the abuse reports are sent in exactly the same format, you can filter them when you receive them. If you want to ignore complaints when there are fewer than 20 for the same web site, you should be able to automate that somehow on your end. Also, apparently you can tell them to quit sending you reports for spamvertized web sites.
here
In December 1996 I wrote to the person in charge of the Klingon Bible Translation Project, and received a reply the next day:
:: :: ::
> I have a question regarding your translation of the Bible into Klingon:
> are you translating from an English translation, or from the original
> Greek and Hebrew?
From the Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic when we have translators who know
these languages. For those who know only English, those of us who do know
the languages will check their work against the original.
:: Kevin A. Wilson
:: Department of Near Eastern Studies
:: The Johns Hopkins University
(signature edited to get around Slashdot's lameness filter)
This is definitely a legitimate problem. The reason SpamCop sends reports based on URLs is, most spam includes a URL, and it may be the only link to the actual spammer (if the spam was sent through an open proxy, for example). So it is valuable to report these.
Of course, before the report is sent, SpamCop displays a list of each URL it found and th e-mail addresses that would be appropriate to send a complaint to; some are checked by default and some may not be. It's up to the user to double-check these before sending the report, and yeah, users are dumb. Occasionally I receive spam that contains the URL of my home page in the body, and I have to uncheck my own ISP.
The other category of SpamCop reports is people who think SpamCop is their universal unsubscribe tool for legitimate, non-spam lists which they did sign up for.
This seriously pisses me off. People do not understand the difference between spam (UCE or UBE) and anything they may not happen to want at the moment for any reason. If it came from someone you know, it's not spam! If it came from a company you've ever done business with, it's not spam! If it's something you (perhaps accidentally) signed up for at some point, it's not spam! It's really not that hard to tell the difference, and reporting non-spam as spam wastes everybody's time and makes it harder to deal with the real spam.
So, do you have any suggestions on how SpamCop's reporting service could be improved, aside from requiring all users to take a competency test before using it?
[OT] I recommend CleverNickName's book, "Dancing Barefoot", particularly the story "The Saga of SpongeBob VegasPants", which tells how he (a geek and long-time Star Trek fan) met William Shatner for the first time, and what a miserable experience it was. Quite amusing.
Be aware that SpamCop.com is not the same as SpamCop.net - I'm not sure who SpamCop.com is, but having worked in the abuse department at an ISP, as well as having been a paying subscriber for a couple of years now, I can say that SpamCop.net is absolutely wonderful. They're best known for automating spam reporting - you paste in your message with full headers, and they figure out where it came from and prepare an e-mail to be sent to the administrators of those networks. Upon your approval, the complaints are sent from a unique SpamCop.net e-mail address, so your own e-mail address is not revealed (in case the complaint is forwarded to the spammers), yet you still receive any replies (SpamCop forwards them back to you).
On top of that, they also offer a service for $3/month that includes just about everything you could look for in an e-mail provider - pop3, imap, webmail, the ability to retrieve mail from other POP3 (and recently AOL and Hotmail) accounts, e-mail forwarding, easier spam reporting, and of course, spam filtering using a variety of blacklists (including SpamCop's own automated RBL) and recently SpamAssassin. It's all fully configurable so you can use it however you'd like.
Again, I have no connection to them, but SpamCop's reporting really does great things towards reducing the total volume of spam going around (by informing network administrators of the problem in a clear and consistent format so it's easy to deal with). I've only seen a couple of abuse reports from SpamCop.com, compared to thousands from SpamCop.net.
however I feel that the "people like you" comment is a little unfair.
A little perhaps, and it's great that you're no longer causing a problem, but the fact remains that for a brief period of time, you were part of the problem. Spam came through your server. There are many others like you - good intentioned, but making an honest mistake once, quite by accident, and then fixing the problem and never doing it again - and these people collectively make up a very significant source of spam. That's why AOL blocks you.
That said, I'm glad you've learned enough about it now to be a responsible Internet citizen, and I certainly don't want to discourage you from continuing on that path. Something you may want to look into is forwarding all mail destined for @aol.com to your ISP's SMTP server; they should be able to relay it to AOL (and since you're using one of your ISP's IP addresses, they should allow relaying from you).
You clearly have a very different idea of free than most people.
Unfortunately no, he shares the same idea of "free" that most people have: no immediate monetary cost to them.
The other day I got modded down as flamebait for pointing out that Opera isn't Free Software, and a reply similar to this one, angrily stating that yes it's free, you just have to view ad banners.
plus you dont have to worry about being filtered or black listed.
Um, you do realize those types of services often get blacklisted as well, for a variety of possible reasons? Usually not for very long, but it certainly happens quite a bit. Of course, if you're outsourcing to them, you can just say it's their problem and not yours; meanwhile your mail isn't getting out.
the supposed great harm of spam
My thoughts.
You know, I got two O'Reilly t-shirts at OSCon, and have worn them occasionally since then. Two different people have commented, and both assumed it was a reference to The O'Reilly Factor.
What about the idea of just leaving it up there? Maybe send it towards the sun to be destroyed, if that's possible, rather than just leaving it to float and potentially get in the way later.
Implications?
I was under the impression no real 3d cards are available on the mac. I mean real as in professional. Geforce's are fast but they are not accurate and can misrender information that a wildcat or a quadro can not. Quite essential for a movie.
As far as I'm aware, those types of cards aren't used for this type of work at all. Something like this might be more appropriate? But I don't work in that industry, so I have no idea.
Is their even a MacOSX port for Renderman?
Not yet, but they're thinking about it.
Slackware 4.0 used -I, Slackware 7.0 and 7.1 used -y, and Slackware 8.0 or 8.1 switched to -j. Going back and forth between servers with different versions installed and getting errors every time I tried to use bzip2 with tar was pretty damned annoying. I agree that -y makes the most sense, but -j is the future!
tar -cvf - /tmp | gzip -c > out.tar.gz
/tmp
tar cvfz out.tar.gz
Much easier, if you're using gnutar, or whatever supports the -z option. The dash is now deprecated, for some odd reason.
find -exec works on most systems to produce a hierarchial structure.
.gz files? OK, but that's obnoxious. I meant compressing the whole tree into one single compressed file; sorry if I wasn't clear.
Resulting in a million little
bzip2 is really slow, and can only compress one file at a time, while zip can compress an entire directory hierarchy. That's why if you have more than one file to compress, you have to tar them first (although gnutar can do bzip2 at the same time, so it's mostly a non-issue).
(Speaking of which, what's up with the bzip2 option changing from I to y to j? Couldn't they just pick something and stick with it?)
By the way, although WinZip can decompress gzip files, it cannot decompress bzip2 files AFAIK, which is retarded.
Can't Winzip handle tar and gzip? Isn't gzip fairly cross-platform?
.tgz). Tar by itself, of course, does no compression at all, just sticks things together.
gzip can only compress a single file, while zip can compress an entire hierarchial tree. This is why if you want to compress more than one file with gzip, you have to tar it first (.tar.gz aka
One disadvantage of this that I've heard is, if the compressed file becomes corrupt, it's much easier to recover most of the contents with zip than tar/gzip; if you can recover all but one file, you may lose a single file from the zip archive, but if you can't extract the tar file, you've lost everything. I'm not sure how big a deal this is or whether it's even accurate, but I heard it somewhere.
...access to a work protected under this title.
Is Slashdot protected in this way?
The DMCA is a copyright law; the anti-circumvention stuff only applies if you're circumventing something that was designed to prevent you from copying the content. Downloading HTML in your browser has been ruled not to qualify as copying, I believe (even if it gets copied to your cache on disk). I could very well be mistaken about that; IANAL so somebody correct me.