This is a list of domain names whose email addresses are actually cell phones. Emails sent to those domains become text msgs on people's phones. Its illegal to spam txt msgs at least in part because you pay to recieve them.
I have yet to recieve a spam text message and I have had a verizon txt account for a few years now.
The FTC is basically making a do-not-spam list to protect email linked txt message systems on mobile phone provider networks.
Frankly, the scum that would actually spam someone's phone deserve to be tracked down and executed.
Actually the fine for violating the DNC is up to $11,000 per incident. But there is no private right of action so its up to the bureucrats to enforce it at their whim.
They should combine your choice of fingers with a voice password and hash them together. Basically you imprint your finger, and provide a voice password and together they link to your credit cards, bank accounts etc.
A thief will not be able to reliably pick which finger you use and will not simultaneously be able to provide a voice pass phrase as well.
Actually this is just another group of lawyers taking a case where a company literally defrauded millions of people, albeit of a small sum per person, and turning it into a class action which means that they get to represent us without our consent and take a huge fee for their service and all we get is $7 in exchange for our dvd which cost at least $10 and many as much as $20.
Class actions of this size never benefit anyone but the lawyers.
I never got my CD class action check. Not that I really care.
As to the bandwidth costing money. Traditional VOIP does not use very much bandwidth and neither does Skype. It uses less than the client of a multiplayer game. What VOIP does require though is fast, consistent delivery of packets. I have a suspicion that one of the issues that College network administrators are concerned about is that VOIP will expose how inefficient and poorly managed many.edu networks are mostly by virtue of the fact that the higher ups in the.edu tech departments are always people who wouldn't know a router from a plunger and they mostly just hand down ridiculous memos full of meaningless buzzwords from the Microsoft and Dell sales pitches. My dept was ordered to manually install 5000 copies of mcaffee personal edition, patch the windows machines on every student computer and then manually trace thousands of unlabeled switch ports in order to make sure no one who had not had mcaffee installed yet had their port turned on. All noted down on scrap paper and hopefully sent to the people who were in command of the switch blades who would hopefully turn on the right ports.
I had to explain to angry parents and students why their 30k a year private university was taking 2-3 weeks after classes started to turn on internet connections. It took about 35 of us (about 28 of them outsourced) 3 weeks just to get the students who really cared about getting online turned on.
Total cost about $600,000. Now why couldn't we have bought a few antivirus appliances to put in the dorms and some routers or firewalls to break up the big broadcasts domains being used to spread the viruses in the first place? Why couldn't we just install a remote administration client on student machines so we could run antivirus and patches automatically?
I hear this argument all the time and I have heard it when I worked on a.edu network. I always say the same thing. The students pay for internet access in their housing fees and technology fees. It is not something the school provides for free. The mission of the school's network is for academic and research use which includes the free exchange of ideas outside of the classroom and with those outside of the University. So if a University provides a communications medium for which the students pay for as they pay for everything else then it should be as open as possible without being insecure for sensitive systems on the same network (ie the administration computers and databases and such). If you want a network that is only for pure academic use that is what Internet 2 is for.
Proprietary or not, it works and its easy to use. Skype does a lot of things differently than SIP. 256 bit AES encryption is strong enough to protect your data well into the near future.
It uses very little bandwidth and those Universities who are banning the software are just kneejerking to a new technology, just showing how far from the academic mission of research and experimentation most colleges have gone. Even more telling is how most Colleges charge exorbitant fees for local and long distance phone calls from student dorm phones. Why would they want to allow a technology onto their network that will mean less money going into their pockets.
As to the bandwidth issues, I think they greatly exaggerate the bandwidth use of a Skype supernode in order to justify their kneejerk reaction to any new technology on their network that does not come with a 3 year agreement with Dell and Microsoft.
Just ask questions that you have no right to ask and say its part of some secret regulation and if the person just aquiesces then you know he is probably a terrorist from some country where you do not question authority figures. If you complain then you must be a reasonable person from a democratic country.
I fix home computers as a side gig and I tell people, especially those people who own cheap or old computers and don't do much more than surf, email, and word process that user friendly versions of Linux are waiting for them, immune to nearly all viruses and spyware and the best part is they will probably not have to restart their computer anymore.
Did I mention they are free and I will make you the CD's for Fedora, Mandrake, Suse, or whatever other distro you want and you can just pay me to install them for you.
Sorry to reply to myself but some people seemed to really like this so here is more of it in my as of yet incomplete essay on lawyers. I may post this on my seldom updated website in the coming days.
Lawyers:
I am probably one of the many people who feel that lawyers who make up the vast majority of the people writing the laws, the people working for the people who write the laws (clerks, assistants, interns, sycophants, ball washers), the people who lobby for such laws, the people who enforce the laws (the prosecutors not the cops), the people who interpret the laws (the judges), the people who defend you in court, the people you must pay when you need to use the courts, and the people who are paid to use the courts against you, have a bit too much power in our society.
If thats not bad enough they all invariably belong to the same organization known as The Bar Association, which is supposed to make sure lawyers act ethically, kind of the way the longshoreman's union makes sure that our ports are run efficiently. Now there are different Bar Associations for each state and some courts like the federal courts and the Supreme Court of the United States have their own Bar Associations. They are all basically the same, like branches of a major bank trading under different brand names appropriate to the region in which they operate only the Bar is far worse than any bank because a bank can only screw you out of money you are stupid enough to trust them with in the first place, and even if you really get yourself in hot water with the bank they are not allowed to imprison you or kill you, which is the one serious improvement that can be credited to modern lawyers, the elimination of debtor's prison.
Lawyers, who are far worse than banks, have become the ultimate gatekeepers to the use and protection of what is supposedly our government. The prime directive of any government to its citizens is its exclusive right to use force against pretty much anyone it wants to for any reason or no reason at all. Although in some rare cases a government expresses it's desire to, at least in theory, obey its own directives, called laws, there is no one allowed to use force to make them keep their promise.
Where did lawyers come from. Well the story goes that the gentle, "democratic" very loving (of boys), and tolerant Roman city-state, invented lawyers. They invented lawyers because in Roman courts only noblemen were allowed to speak and occasionally a mere peasant, called a plebian, who differed from a slave mainly in that he was not himself and could own property but unlike a nobleman could not use force to protect it, mistakingly thought that he might be able to get "justice" if he could convince the noblemen, who consisted of two groups, lawyers and military officers, that he was right and some other guy was wrong. The other guy was probably a nobleman who screwed the plebian out of money or raped his daughter and the only way to convince a court, run by other noblemen, that a plebian was right and a nobleman was wrong was by hiring another richer, more important, and perhaps smarter nobleman to plead the case for him. Otherwise the plebian, thats you by the way unless your checking account exceeds FDIC insurance limits. Peasants had little reason to use the courts against other peasants because they could just kill, maim, fight off, rape another peasant and the courts, run by nobleman and the military police, run by nobleman really couldn't give a shit.
If only things had stayed that way, but like any bank that charges exorbitantly high fees (almost all of them), the idea expanded so that now in just about the entire developed world, and by developed we mean a place where a lawyer is more useful than a gun in getting your way, only lawyers are allowed to speak in court. Well, that is not entirely true, you can speak in court if you want to, but the judge, also a lawyer, will likely disregard everything you say, especially anything that makes sense, and tell you ver
At least someone read it. And thats just one reason why I lost all interest in ever going to law school. Its a declining profession that is dragging our whole society down.
ID is just creationism with a new label to make it more palatable to the general public and not just fundamentalist lunatics. The only "scientists" working on ID are fundamentalist wack jobs whose PHD's were funded by Sun Moon (famous Cult leader) and others like him in an attempt to build support for ID by getting people with letters after their name say they agree with it even though those people are not actually involved in any "scientific" research, just fundamentalist lunacy.
They are probably one of the many people who feel that lawyers who make up the vast majority of the people writing the laws, the people working for the people who write the laws, the people who lobby for such laws, the people who enforce the laws (the prosecutors not the cops), the people who interpret the laws (the judges), the people who defend you in court, the people you must pay when you need to use the courts, and the people who are paid to use the courts against you, have a bit too much power in our society.
Dell sells a rack enclosure with a 1u sliding tray for an lcd, keyboard and mouse with a kvm switch. They have one in my schools network lab which doubles as its server farm.
Yes, please do something about the apartment brokers. I hate wasting my time looking at an apartment in Park Slope and finding out its in BedStuy (ultra ghetto) or on Coney Island or not even in Brooklyn. Perhaps some system by which the neighborhood boundries are defined and a precise address is required for listing. Brokers in NYC are just shady by nature. I saw the same apartment twice with two different brokers (in a bit of a sting operation) and the first one offered it to me for $2000 with no fee and the second one wanted me to sign a fee contract just to see the place and wanted $2200. She also tried to tell me the fee was a months rent and upon reading the small print it states the fee was 15%. After calling her out on this she was so shocked she demanded the name of the other broker.
Aaah more parents living vicariously through their children the way Kim Jung Il lives vicariously through his millions of slave-citizens also under constant surveilance.
Why not underwear that can tell when teens are sexually aroused. That ought to stop sex in its tracks. Or condom packages that send an sms to the parents (and Walmart) letting them know its their kid's lucky day.
If parents are too busy to raise their kids by actual physical presence then they should not have them. And parents of teenagers would do well to remember what kinds of things they got into at their age and there is a very high probability that little Johnnie will be by both nature and nurture not much different than his parents in his adolescent behavior.
Web subscriptions or free through advertisements and newstands/vending machine print on demand is the future. This should be adopted by the major papers soon because I would really hate to see them go out of business as a newspaper is still the most reliable major media news by far over television and radio. TV and radio have way too much pressure to constantly have something to say so they make stuff up when it suits them. (remember when they were saying that 25 people died at in the columbine shooting when it was 13) Or that 25,000 people died on 9/11 when it was closer to 3,000.
Now that organized crime has begun to see the value in spoofing attacks and identity theft in general it will not be long before organized and well funded groups exploit the reality that it does not take that much money to build a computer capable of finding a collision for a md5 hash value in a reasonable amount of time. Perhaps 100k-500k. Well within the budget of both large organized crime syndicates, terrorists, and intelligence agencies.
Two minor details. The sun box I was talking about was running Solaris 5.8 or something like that. It sucked for good reason (really old) but we couldn't dump it for some bullshit reason.
I personally prefer SUSE as a user OS over Red Hat. At least when I compared the last redhat to Suse 9.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a list of domain names whose email addresses are actually cell phones. Emails sent to those domains become text msgs on people's phones. Its illegal to spam txt msgs at least in part because you pay to recieve them.
I have yet to recieve a spam text message and I have had a verizon txt account for a few years now.
The FTC is basically making a do-not-spam list to protect email linked txt message systems on mobile phone provider networks.
Frankly, the scum that would actually spam someone's phone deserve to be tracked down and executed.
Spam, one more reason to hate Floridians.
Because half the DC gang members are at home playing counterstrike in their mom's basement.
Actually the fine for violating the DNC is up to $11,000 per incident. But there is no private right of action so its up to the bureucrats to enforce it at their whim.
They should combine your choice of fingers with a voice password and hash them together. Basically you imprint your finger, and provide a voice password and together they link to your credit cards, bank accounts etc.
A thief will not be able to reliably pick which finger you use and will not simultaneously be able to provide a voice pass phrase as well.
Wait 5 years and we will be eligible to receive $7.10 as a settlement of a class action against Valve.
Actually this is just another group of lawyers taking a case where a company literally defrauded millions of people, albeit of a small sum per person, and turning it into a class action which means that they get to represent us without our consent and take a huge fee for their service and all we get is $7 in exchange for our dvd which cost at least $10 and many as much as $20.
Class actions of this size never benefit anyone but the lawyers.
I never got my CD class action check. Not that I really care.
As to the bandwidth costing money. Traditional VOIP does not use very much bandwidth and neither does Skype. It uses less than the client of a multiplayer game. What VOIP does require though is fast, consistent delivery of packets. I have a suspicion that one of the issues that College network administrators are concerned about is that VOIP will expose how inefficient and poorly managed many .edu networks are mostly by virtue of the fact that the higher ups in the .edu tech departments are always people who wouldn't know a router from a plunger and they mostly just hand down ridiculous memos full of meaningless buzzwords from the Microsoft and Dell sales pitches. My dept was ordered to manually install 5000 copies of mcaffee personal edition, patch the windows machines on every student computer and then manually trace thousands of unlabeled switch ports in order to make sure no one who had not had mcaffee installed yet had their port turned on. All noted down on scrap paper and hopefully sent to the people who were in command of the switch blades who would hopefully turn on the right ports.
I had to explain to angry parents and students why their 30k a year private university was taking 2-3 weeks after classes started to turn on internet connections. It took about 35 of us (about 28 of them outsourced) 3 weeks just to get the students who really cared about getting online turned on.
Total cost about $600,000. Now why couldn't we have bought a few antivirus appliances to put in the dorms and some routers or firewalls to break up the big broadcasts domains being used to spread the viruses in the first place? Why couldn't we just install a remote administration client on student machines so we could run antivirus and patches automatically?
I hear this argument all the time and I have heard it when I worked on a .edu network. I always say the same thing. The students pay for internet access in their housing fees and technology fees. It is not something the school provides for free. The mission of the school's network is for academic and research use which includes the free exchange of ideas outside of the classroom and with those outside of the University. So if a University provides a communications medium for which the students pay for as they pay for everything else then it should be as open as possible without being insecure for sensitive systems on the same network (ie the administration computers and databases and such). If you want a network that is only for pure academic use that is what Internet 2 is for.
Proprietary or not, it works and its easy to use. Skype does a lot of things differently than SIP. 256 bit AES encryption is strong enough to protect your data well into the near future.
It uses very little bandwidth and those Universities who are banning the software are just kneejerking to a new technology, just showing how far from the academic mission of research and experimentation most colleges have gone. Even more telling is how most Colleges charge exorbitant fees for local and long distance phone calls from student dorm phones. Why would they want to allow a technology onto their network that will mean less money going into their pockets.
As to the bandwidth issues, I think they greatly exaggerate the bandwidth use of a Skype supernode in order to justify their kneejerk reaction to any new technology on their network that does not come with a 3 year agreement with Dell and Microsoft.
yummy yellow cake. I knew Nigeria was good for something besides oil.
Just ask questions that you have no right to ask and say its part of some secret regulation and if the person just aquiesces then you know he is probably a terrorist from some country where you do not question authority figures. If you complain then you must be a reasonable person from a democratic country.
I fix home computers as a side gig and I tell people, especially those people who own cheap or old computers and don't do much more than surf, email, and word process that user friendly versions of Linux are waiting for them, immune to nearly all viruses and spyware and the best part is they will probably not have to restart their computer anymore.
Did I mention they are free and I will make you the CD's for Fedora, Mandrake, Suse, or whatever other distro you want and you can just pay me to install them for you.
Alas, maybe they are afraid they will miss me.
Sorry to reply to myself but some people seemed to really like this so here is more of it in my as of yet incomplete essay on lawyers. I may post this on my seldom updated website in the coming days.
Lawyers:
I am probably one of the many people who feel that lawyers who make up the vast majority of the people writing the laws, the people working for the people who write the laws (clerks, assistants, interns, sycophants, ball washers), the people who lobby for such laws, the people who enforce the laws (the prosecutors not the cops), the people who interpret the laws (the judges), the people who defend you in court, the people you must pay when you need to use the courts, and the people who are paid to use the courts against you, have a bit too much power in our society.
If thats not bad enough they all invariably belong to the same organization known as The Bar Association, which is supposed to make sure lawyers act ethically, kind of the way the longshoreman's union makes sure that our ports are run efficiently. Now there are different Bar Associations for each state and some courts like the federal courts and the Supreme Court of the United States have their own Bar Associations. They are all basically the same, like branches of a major bank trading under different brand names appropriate to the region in which they operate only the Bar is far worse than any bank because a bank can only screw you out of money you are stupid enough to trust them with in the first place, and even if you really get yourself in hot water with the bank they are not allowed to imprison you or kill you, which is the one serious improvement that can be credited to modern lawyers, the elimination of debtor's prison.
Lawyers, who are far worse than banks, have become the ultimate gatekeepers to the use and protection of what is supposedly our government. The prime directive of any government to its citizens is its exclusive right to use force against pretty much anyone it wants to for any reason or no reason at all. Although in some rare cases a government expresses it's desire to, at least in theory, obey its own directives, called laws, there is no one allowed to use force to make them keep their promise.
Where did lawyers come from. Well the story goes that the gentle, "democratic" very loving (of boys), and tolerant Roman city-state, invented lawyers. They invented lawyers because in Roman courts only noblemen were allowed to speak and occasionally a mere peasant, called a plebian, who differed from a slave mainly in that he was not himself and could own property but unlike a nobleman could not use force to protect it, mistakingly thought that he might be able to get "justice" if he could convince the noblemen, who consisted of two groups, lawyers and military officers, that he was right and some other guy was wrong. The other guy was probably a nobleman who screwed the plebian out of money or raped his daughter and the only way to convince a court, run by other noblemen, that a plebian was right and a nobleman was wrong was by hiring another richer, more important, and perhaps smarter nobleman to plead the case for him. Otherwise the plebian, thats you by the way unless your checking account exceeds FDIC insurance limits. Peasants had little reason to use the courts against other peasants because they could just kill, maim, fight off, rape another peasant and the courts, run by nobleman and the military police, run by nobleman really couldn't give a shit.
If only things had stayed that way, but like any bank that charges exorbitantly high fees (almost all of them), the idea expanded so that now in just about the entire developed world, and by developed we mean a place where a lawyer is more useful than a gun in getting your way, only lawyers are allowed to speak in court. Well, that is not entirely true, you can speak in court if you want to, but the judge, also a lawyer, will likely disregard everything you say, especially anything that makes sense, and tell you ver
Its doubly impressive because it is all in one sentence. I am Faulkner reborn! There is a typo in there.
At least someone read it. And thats just one reason why I lost all interest in ever going to law school. Its a declining profession that is dragging our whole society down.
ID is just creationism with a new label to make it more palatable to the general public and not just fundamentalist lunatics. The only "scientists" working on ID are fundamentalist wack jobs whose PHD's were funded by Sun Moon (famous Cult leader) and others like him in an attempt to build support for ID by getting people with letters after their name say they agree with it even though those people are not actually involved in any "scientific" research, just fundamentalist lunacy.
They are probably one of the many people who feel that lawyers who make up the vast majority of the people writing the laws, the people working for the people who write the laws, the people who lobby for such laws, the people who enforce the laws (the prosecutors not the cops), the people who interpret the laws (the judges), the people who defend you in court, the people you must pay when you need to use the courts, and the people who are paid to use the courts against you, have a bit too much power in our society.
Dell sells a rack enclosure with a 1u sliding tray for an lcd, keyboard and mouse with a kvm switch. They have one in my schools network lab which doubles as its server farm.
Yes, please do something about the apartment brokers. I hate wasting my time looking at an apartment in Park Slope and finding out its in BedStuy (ultra ghetto) or on Coney Island or not even in Brooklyn. Perhaps some system by which the neighborhood boundries are defined and a precise address is required for listing. Brokers in NYC are just shady by nature. I saw the same apartment twice with two different brokers (in a bit of a sting operation) and the first one offered it to me for $2000 with no fee and the second one wanted me to sign a fee contract just to see the place and wanted $2200. She also tried to tell me the fee was a months rent and upon reading the small print it states the fee was 15%. After calling her out on this she was so shocked she demanded the name of the other broker.
I just want to live in a Darkology.
You don't want to understand it. The only thing you need to understand is that big providers don't pay worth a damn anyways.
Aaah more parents living vicariously through their children the way Kim Jung Il lives vicariously through his millions of slave-citizens also under constant surveilance.
Why not underwear that can tell when teens are sexually aroused. That ought to stop sex in its tracks. Or condom packages that send an sms to the parents (and Walmart) letting them know its their kid's lucky day.
If parents are too busy to raise their kids by actual physical presence then they should not have them. And parents of teenagers would do well to remember what kinds of things they got into at their age and there is a very high probability that little Johnnie will be by both nature and nurture not much different than his parents in his adolescent behavior.
Web subscriptions or free through advertisements and newstands/vending machine print on demand is the future. This should be adopted by the major papers soon because I would really hate to see them go out of business as a newspaper is still the most reliable major media news by far over television and radio. TV and radio have way too much pressure to constantly have something to say so they make stuff up when it suits them. (remember when they were saying that 25 people died at in the columbine shooting when it was 13) Or that 25,000 people died on 9/11 when it was closer to 3,000.
Now that organized crime has begun to see the value in spoofing attacks and identity theft in general it will not be long before organized and well funded groups exploit the reality that it does not take that much money to build a computer capable of finding a collision for a md5 hash value in a reasonable amount of time. Perhaps 100k-500k. Well within the budget of both large organized crime syndicates, terrorists, and intelligence agencies.
Two minor details. The sun box I was talking about was running Solaris 5.8 or something like that. It sucked for good reason (really old) but we couldn't dump it for some bullshit reason.
I personally prefer SUSE as a user OS over Red Hat. At least when I compared the last redhat to Suse 9.