Ya, I imagine it could be better than a standard car.. I just wonder if it'd keep up with a decent muscle car.:)
This is my car. Well, mine is pewter, with the 5 spoke rims, and much stickier tires. Where people spin their wheels, I'm already accelerating away.. Woosh. Oh, and mine has some other tricks under the hood, but we'll keep those quiet til race day.
Now, if it can keep up, or even come close, I'd seriously consider trading my car in..
This would have been more appropriately asked to lawyers, not a bunch of IANAL's.:)
But, from the experience I have (a few law classes, and plenty of time on both sides with lawyers), a ban such as this, while to encourage the person not to do something, is more inclined to give a harsher penalty if they should do it again.
For example, if you get a DUI, you'll very likely lose your license. You may also be prohibited from drinking. It varies by the state and circumstances. Now say you go to a bar and drink. You probably won't get caught. But if you go to a bar and are involved in a bar fight, now you'll be dragged off for VOP. Judges don't generally like it when you do something directly against what they just told you, and will probably drop you in the nearest jail for the full term of your probation, or longer, depending on his mood.
I've heard judges let things go lightly, because they know it was a subtle offense. Like, the VoIP, and IP enabled appliances that I see referenced in the comments. If you were chatting up underaged girls and the judge said to stay off the Internet, but then you were caught talking to your mom on a Vonage phone, he'd probably let it go. But if you were on a PC in a Internet Cafe, trolling for underage girls, sure as hell you'd be spending time in jail.
Consider the incident with Richard Ricci in the Elizabeth Smart case (kidnapping in Utah). Ricci was told by the judge not to drink. They raided his house because they suspected he might be involved (and then it was later proven he wasn't), but arrested him for drinking a beer. If he didn't have the beer, they would have needed real evidence to arrest him. Since he had violated that prior ruling, he was screwed, even though that's the only thing he had done wrong. If they hadn't suspected him of kidnapping and murder, they would have probably let him go with a warning.
But likewise, people like you believe that you can't sue someone in another country. It happens every day. It may be harder to do, but it is possible.
An action like this isn't just a case for lawsuits, it can also be the basis for criminal charges.
Say I, as an American, ask all my friends in other countries to incur huge costs to you, just because I believe you're doing wrong. Does that make me in the right?
For example, many people believe PayPal is an evil company. So, to get them back, you have 10,000 'foreigners' run fradulent credit card transactions day and night through proxy servers around the world.
Instead of getting them through artificially increasing their bandwidth bill, you're getting them by incurring fees from the credit card companies.
Does it hurt the consumer? No, the banks will allow chargebacks.
Does it hurt PayPal? Yes.
Does it do any good? No.
Is it wrong? Yes.
I did this 3 years ago, for a cross-country drive (Tampa, FL to Los Angeles, CA, 2500 miles, 2.5 days). I wanted to "broadcast" my drive, so I had my Linux laptop capturing from a webcam, and sending the pictures back up to my web server.
I used the Nextel im1100. The speed wasn't great (or even good most of the time), but it let me get the images up slowly. I could get one frame every 5 to 10 seconds sent up, which was more than enough to entertain my friends, who would check up on my progress every few hours.
You have to do a ppp script, just like you would dialing up on a conventional modem to an ISP. The init string was something odd. I think it was AT&S0=0 . The dial string was simply "ATDT". If you search around on DejaNews, you can find the right init string, if I'm mistaken.
There are other providers who's modems work exactly the same way. When I was researching it 3 years ago, they all acted like serial cards. I picked Nextel, because I already had a couple cell phones with them, and I could simply add it to my account. I don't know if things have really changed, but when I was looking at them, they advertise a "max" speed, which is *MUCH* higher than your real connection speed. In other words, you'll never see the speeds they offer. Generally it'll be 9600 baud, with really bad latency. 400ms+ pings were the norm.
Nextel will tell you specifically that they won't work on anything but Windows, but trust me, it works fine. It's the difference between what the support people know, and the way it really is.:)
The im1100 has it's own battery, it doesn't depend on the laptop for power. For my drive, I had the laptop and the modem plugged into a power inverter. I got pulled over twice on that drive. The cops gave my setup a really funny look, but didn't really say anything about it. Oddly enough, driving 2500 miles, you really start questioning if the speed limit should be so low..
I kept asking myself, "My car can easily do 160mph. I'm doing 75mph. If I doubled my speed, I'd cut this drive time in half. It's 800 miles to the next state. At 75, that's 10.6hrs. at 100, that's 8hrs. At 130mph (a nice cruise speed for my car) that's 6.1 hours. 6.1 hours sounds a lot better than 10.6 hours."
Right about the time I'd start trying it, is when I'd get pulled over. Since I was on I-10 in fuckin' Wyle E. Coyote country, where the cactus outnumber the humans 100000:1 they were ok with my 5mph over. They just wanted to remind me to slow down. I'm good with that. I like warnings a lot more than tickets.
Oh, and if you try to figure out my average speed for the drive (41mph), I did stop in El Paso for 12 hours, and had 6 fuel stops (4 of them I was kinda fuzzy from lack of sleep and a constant caffeine buzz). I also hit shitty traffic in San Antonio, and tried to stop in Bum-stick Arizona for cigarettes (couldn't find my brand), and again in Phoenix (again, couldn't find my brand). I was twitching by the time I got to California, and it was 2 days to find a store that had my brand.
It's an interesting drive. Everyone should try it once by themselves, just to say they did it.:) Oh, and never drive it in a U-Haul. It took 5 days with only one real sleep stop.
Wouldn't the designation of 'parks' on Mars best be left up to the people settling there? Like, we think we know a little bit about what's there, but really we don't know much of anything. Mapping from space, and a few square miles of exploration doesn't mean we know squat about Mars.
For example, what if we find a huge system of underground caves, like exist all over the Earth. Maybe they're too close to the surface to even put a city. That would be a better choice, rather than marking 1000 square miles saying "This is park."
Not that it really matters. We haven't sent person #1 there yet, much less colonists. Really, the rules will be established by whoever gets there first, and then be redefined by whoever takes power there first. If a country puts a big freakin' space gun on Mars, and starts shooting down other countries landers, that leaves that country in control to say what a park is. Or more like, if the colonists decide that they're independant (with the big freakin' space gun to prove it), they get to declare their parks.
That's what the U.S. did. They told England, "This is ours". It doesn't matter what they declared as what before the colonists came over, it's all been changed since then. The only big differences are the distance, and the space gun.:)
Ya, but aparently the Lycos idea is to fill up their line with something, anything, to run the bandwidth bill up. ICMP, HTTP, whatever, as long as it fills the line.
Ok, do something like `cat/dev/zero | netcat [spammerip] 25`
And to the spamadvertised sites
`cat/dev/zero | netcat [spammerip] 80`
You could get more creative. You could find the form that allows a post, and form a script that tries to do a upload over POST, and effectively do the same thing.
(not that I'm giving hacking lessons or anything)
The creativity of how you'd do it is up to you. But my entire thought is, what goes around, comes around. If you guys start doing this, they'll start doing it back. Or someone else will thing you're a spammer and hit you.
We've received SpamCop complaints before. They're really great folks, I like their policies. 100% of our complaints have either been replies to billing queries, where a real human answered a real human's question, or it was an automated message spawned by the user (password retrevial, usually). We point it out, case closed.
The best one I've seen is where someone ordered something online, the billing person emailed saying something to the effect "Your credit card was declined, would you like to cancel the order or provide another form of payment". They sent it straight off to SpamCop. I got with the billing person, they showed me the order, we sent this back to SpamCop, and got an apology from the lady. She makes it a habit of reporting everything in her box as spam.
It's people like that who ruin the whole attempt at an anti-spam system.
> This is just stupid. An iptables rule doesn't give you infinite > bandwidth. It doesn't change who they are attacking, it just DOUBLES > the bandwidth costs for you, and it looks like you are trying to flood > those sites. It would be a more effective flood if you just used PING > -F anyhow.
Actually, if you're dealing with real bandwidth, you're paying on the 95th percentile on the highest number, coming or going.
More than 90% of a spammer's bandwidth is outbound. So they can take that incoming traffic and not care in the least about it.
The same thing applies to us, doing web sites. Our ratio is just about 9:1 out to in. A request comes in (GET / HTTP/1.1\n\n"), and we send out the html or image. Our mail server is one of the few that are different, where they take in substantial bandwidth, and put out very little.
Basically, you can hit any of our cities with 500Mb/s constantly all month, and not only wouldn't we notice, but our bill wouldn't change by one cent.
>> if they do it by DNS names, >...then they would be idiots. Surely they WON'T do it via DNS.
Well, they may need to do it, or be constantly updating the drone sites. If the spam is advertising bad.spammer.com, they've already set a very short TTL on their DNS record, and usually have several diverse lines ready. If the first line is shut down, they change the DNS record and are back up in minutes.
I've talked to plenty of spammers. I've told them I don't approve of what they do. They all say "But it's all double opt-in". If I can get them to do a select on their database, I'll always find one of my many Email addresses, which I've never opted into anything with.
They usually have the new DNS records ready, so they just copy and restart their nameserver. They know they'll be shut down, they have no expectations otherwise. So a good spammer won't advertise http://1.2.3.4/spam.html , they will advertise http://bad.spammer.com/spam.html , becaues they can keep it alive longer.
>> Lycos DDoS's me. I set up machines to redirect the abusive traffic to >> say whitehouse.gov, ftc.gov, or lycos.com.
> In which case, *you*, not Lycos, is the one who will be gone after by > the police/lawyers--if any come, which is by no means a certainty.
If I remember the iptables rule right, it acts like a router rewriting the packet, so it continues on to the new destination as if you were never involved.
But, it really doesn't matter to me, I'm not going to need to do it. I run a spam-free environment. If we end up with a spammer on the network somehow, I shut off their port on the switch, before a tech could even get to the machine to unplug it. I'm a real ass that way, but it's my network, and my rules.
Now, if every admin were like me, we wouldn't even be having this conversation. But someone is always out to make a buck. We make enough bucks from legitimate customers, we don't need their trouble.
There's already a reply that gives a good hint. Check your logs. A bunch of them will be these open relays. There are a few sources online that have lists too. I can't remember the good site that I got a bunch from, and I just reinstalled Linux on my home machine yesterday (for fun), so I don't have all my bookmarks any more. If it wasn't in my "Daily Reading" folder, I didn't really need it.
The only difference is in that I wasn't spamming something. I was demonstrating how the spammers hide their source. And my destination list was of 1, not millions.
I'm really not for direct marketing. I don't like a newspaper full of ads. I don't like that 90% of the mail coming to my house is advertising. And I don't like that 99% of the traffic coming to our mail server is advertising.
I'm all for a 100% ban on spam. If I never received another piece of spam, I'd be a very happy camper. As it is, we receive between 80k and 100k pieces of email on our mail server per day. The viruses are automagically deleted (no executable-ish attachments at all), and the spams are tagged by several means so the users can filter them.
My users are pretty happy. They don't get much of the 'evil' of Email in their box. The occasional piece of spam makes its way through. I'm down from 1000+ per day to maybe one or two per day.
We could all take on the new Lycos approach, and kill either the spammers or the Internet at large. Set up your mail server to `ping -c 10000000 $spamserver`. They send spam, we detect spam, their connection goes to shit. The more people they hit, the more traffic they generate. They send a million pieces of spam, that's a million people hitting them back. But again, we're using an illegal tactic to stop a grey-market business.
In most areas, spam isn't illegal.
I'd like it if I didn't receive another unsolicited AOL CD in the mail, but what do I do, send 10k letters back to AOL? Nope.
Maybe the e-postage propositions are a good choice, but who's to collect the postage? If I have to receive 100k emails a day, I damned well want to be reimbursed for the server time (cost of a good machine, time maintaining it, etc)
I wrote a proof of concept once, similiar to your form filling script.
Someone said that you can't spam and hide it.
I wrote a script to prove you could. It took about 20 minutes to put together to my satisfaction.
I had 3 files. A names file, a domains file, and a words file.
It would take one to three words from the "names" file, and generate a name. It would take some combination of those, sometimes with a random character or two, and then take a random domain from the "domains" file, to form an Email address.
I'd then take the "words" file, and make a subject line 2 to 15 words long, and a message body that was between 10 and 100 words long.
To some of the messages, I attached arbitrary length attachments (generated as it ran), with filenames from the 'words' file, and I think 8 common extensions (.doc,.txt,.zip....)
I then used a common misconfiguration in web proxy servers (allowing CONNECT), and set it up to randomly select proxy servers to mail through, all over the world.
Then I said "are you sure about what you said 20 minutes ago?"
He said "yes".
I ran the script. He was receiving about 1000 messages per minute, and couldn't tell what was real and what wasn't. They only thing he knew is that he saw text scrolling by on my screen (a little status information for myself), and me laughing my ass off.
There was absolutely nothing consistant with the messages. Different senders, different bodies, different attachments (if they existed at all), and all coming from different "mail servers". The receiving mail server assumes the IP it received from is the previous mail server, so those proxies showed up in the header.
I never did run it against a spammer. It wasn't worth it. You know the 'from' address is bogus anyways. Any address they may list on their site is probably bogus ( remove_me@bad.spammer.com ? ha!). It was proof of the concept that anything can come from anywhere. He couldn't identify that it was me, because the was nothing to identify that it was me. The only way he could have possibly found out that it was me (other than my laughing), was to try to contact these ISP's with misconfigured proxy's, and ask them to give him the IP who sent it through. Good luck. I don't speak any Chinese, and at least 100 of those proxy servers were over there.
No, to be a DoS attack, they must attempt to deny service.
If I take an extra 100Mb/s on a 1Gb/s line, does it slow down my network? No. Was it an attempt to do so? Yes.
Several years ago, Some kid got on two boxes at his university. They had a T3. We had a T3 (like I said, several years ago). They were pushing 30Mb/s constantly at my one box for two days. It started on a Saturday night. It wasn't enough to knock my box down.
I sent a nice email over to the school with all the information I had. Needless to say, there was hell to pay over at the school. They were terribly concerned why *THEIR* network was having problems all weekend. They were very thankful that I informed them.
Now, was that an attempt at a DoS? Yes.
Was it enough traffic to actually break anything? No.
Did the kid get expelled from the school? Yes.
Now the bigger question, if the school hadn't handled it, where do I go next? To their ISP. Well, actually my ISP, who would contact their ISP, and threaten to block whatever block size necessary to stop it. a/8 should be sufficent, I'd think.
"Sorry, we're going to null route your/8 until you can contain the problem on your end."
That'd go over really freakin' well, I'm sure, especially if my provider is big enough.:)
If they're on the same provider, someone's service is getting immediately disconnected. Yes, I've been in on those calls, both for DoS attacks, and for spam.
ISP: "There's a customer on x line that's spamming" Me: "Well, not that my opinion matters, but I would have already shut them off." ISP: "We did about 5 minutes ago."
But hey, however they want to play the game. It's their company.
Oooohh, this is such a bad idea on so many fronts.
1) They're going to get sued. Not just sued, sued a whole lot. Asses in a sling kinda sued. Spammers that are making good money have the budget to sue, and really Lycos is completely in the wrong here. Morally, sure spam sucks. But you can't do it this way.
2) It's against so many different TOS's that isn't even funny. With very very very few execptions, users can't legally run it (check your provider's TOS). They're opening every user up for:
a) federal charges.
b) lost ISP connection.
c) Lawsuit for damages from the spammers.
3) So you flood a facility with an OC3. Now not only have to screwed up one guy's day, you've screwed up everyone's day at that facility. Or worse, the screen savers send such a load to knock down a server, that they inadvertantly overload a few major peerings instead.
How about this for a proof of the point. I have a GigE connection in 3 different cities. My provider has multiple OC192's heading all over the place.
I rig up something that can handle a 1Gb/s through it, that can take the abuse, and still appear to be functional. Come on, think creatively, it's not that hard to do. I can serve 1Gb/s of web traffic with 6 machines. Actually, I do with 15 machines, at a very low percentage of their capability. So no matter what they throw at me, they can't take the servers or my line down.
Or worse yet, they attack me, so I flood them back with 3Gb/s. I'd bet I can swamp lycos.com. Sure, they'll bitch. They'll moan. They'll threaten lawsuits, but I returned exactly what they were doing. More than likely they'll lose in court.
Isn't there a rule for iptables to redirect traffic coming into one IP, into another one? a one-liner, if I remember right.
Lycos DDoS's me. I set up machines to redirect the abusive traffic to say whitehouse.gov, ftc.gov, or lycos.com. Ah, lets play nice here, lets redirect the traffic to google.com, and watch the lawsuits really fly. So Lycos makes a valiant attempt to knock Google offline. That'll go over really well in court.
Or, as one comment in here already said, if they do it by DNS names, just change the DNS record.
bad.spammer.com. IN CNAME lycos.com.
or
bad.spammer.com. IN A 209.202.248.202
bad.spammer.com. IN A 209.202.216.27
(That's what Lycos resolves as for me)
or just negate it entirely.
bad.spammer.com. IN A 127.0.0.1
or have a little fun.
bad.spammer.com. IN A 255.255.255.255
And [insert deity here] forbid, someone compromises the machine which controls this action. If I were an evil hacker (hush you people in the crowd), that'd be a great play toy. Wanna knock off some competition, just point Lycos to them, and turn off their ability to throttle.
I'd be *REALLY* pissed if I was hosting one, or there was a compromised box somewhere off in a corner that I didn't know about, and they decided to knock one of my networks offline.
Most spammers move around so frequently, attacking a particular hostname or provider really doesn't freakin' matter. They change the domain the links go to, and start sending again. The usable age of a spam is only 3 days. Spammers consider if it hasn't been read in 3 days, it's not going to be read.
I wish them luck, and hope they have a big enough budget to keep their executives who came up with this brilliant scheme out of federal prison. I sure as hell hope they don't accidently point at me for being a target, 'cause sure as hell they won't be on line long.
Actually, with an announcement like this, they've opened themselves up for being the blame of almost any DDoS attack.
You know, Jesus just a man, who a dozen nutjubs worshiped, and a few hundred years after he died, a bunch of people wrote down effectively was an urban legand. (I knew this guy, who knew this guy, who saw...). Unadmissible as evidence in courts for a reason. It's completely unreliable.
We did this thing in grade school to prove the point. We started at one side of the classroom. The teacher gave the first student a simple statement. Each person told the next person, until it got to the last person on the other side of the room. By the time it got there, it didn't even resemble the first statement.
So you have a belief system based off of something that may or may have happened 2000 years ago, in a book that was written hundreds of years later, and has been rewritten more times than you realize, to suit the political, economic, or social needs of the ruling party at that time.
But, since we're going to cite the bible about the loving and compassionate god, ya, he's a really swell fella.
Punished his first two creations by effectively disowning them and kicking them out of the garden of Eden.
Flooded a planet to kill everything but a pair of each creature.
Because his loving creations wanted to be closer to him, he destroyed their tower, and made it so they couldn't understand each other.
And his treatment of a dissident was eternal damnation in hell.
That's not loving and caring. That's vengeful and spiteful.
Oh, and don't forget the Crusades. Would a loving, caring, compassionate 'God' send so many people to fight each other, both sides in his name. That's a god who likes war, killing, and bloodshed for his own entertainment. And it didn't end with the Crusades, we're doing it right now. All you have to do is listen to Bush's speeches.
But now that I've offended you completely, let me remind you of a few other things.
The bible was written after the theoretical time that Jesus was alive (obviously). The entire religion starts with 'creation', which kind of misses the point that humans have been roming this planet for over 10,000 years, and the fact that we know planets and stars are *MUCH* older than that.
The entire concept of "Hell", as well as "Satan" is a creation of christianity. And even more interestingly, virtually every holiday that you celebrate in the name of your god, was stolen from other, much older, religions.
So, when I joke about going to hell, it's a joke, because there's no such place. It's as believable as aliens.
Now you're really pissed, huh? Now consider all the other religions in the world, and every time you go off about your God and your bible, they "know" that you're wrong, because they believe in their god(s) and/or goddess(es).
I've really learned the deviant world over the last several years. Really, to be able to fight an enemy, you have to understand them. I've taught a few people some tricks, but usually it's so they can identify them being used against us.
If you watch my journal, I don't necessarly get into that. It's not a hacking school.:)
(ducking from the programmers throwing rocks, saying "Those punks aren't hackers!")
But, would hell be such a bad place. Imagine, all the people in history that weren't nice enough to head to heaven. I wouldn't want to spend eternity with a bunch of goodie-goodie's anyways. Fuck that.
Well, you can watch for a few things. For smaller sites, be sure they're going through a reputable billing company. When you go to the site, go to their payment page, and see where it goes. Quite a few companies use places like iBill, CCBill, and Verotel. I'll warn you now, Verotel has a bad habit of spamming people it billed later for other clients. Quite a few companies that I know of stopped using them for specifically that reason.
You can also go through an AVS. One I work with is ProAdult.
Use This Link if you sign up. I wanna make a buck on it too.:)
You pay once through ProAdult, and get access to every site on their network. Last time I looked, there were 50,000 sites listed. I wrote a search engine for it not too long ago, which hasn't been implemented quite yet. They're still discussing the additional hardware that will be required.
With an AVS like ProAdult, you're not giving every joe-porn-webmaster your information, you give it to the AVS once. You have the option of cancelling online or calling the billing office, and I assure you it's all honest.
I highly recommend an AVS. With ProAdult, you sign up, get access to a huge members area, bigger than most big sites, and then you still get access to all these other sites with the same membership (no additional fees).
I do agree that there are plenty of crooks out there. For the most part, what they're advertising is generally in there. Anyone who is taking money risks losing their account due to chargebacks. If you sign up, and they don't give you what you expected, and you can't cancel with a refund, you just have to call your bank and tell them that you were brought in with false advertising, and demand a refund. Most banks are very good about taking care of their clients in this respect. They don't care, Visa or Mastercard yanks the money right back out of the billing company's account.
For the CC companies, and the billing companies, there's a big convoluted system that they have, that ensures the money is available to get back. They do a rolling hold on the account. It's something like 30% to 50% of the charges are held for 6 months. So if I bill $10k this month, they hold $5k and send me $5k. It goes on every month like that, but in 6 months, I'll start getting the holdback from 6 months ago.
If there's a situation where an account gets too many chargebacks, they suspend your account, and hold onto all the money, I believe for another 6 months. That way, anyone who charges back can get their money back.
They're really freakin' strict with online adult stuff, becaues it has been a problem in the past. I think they're allowed under 1% chargebacks. So if 1 in 100 people charge back, they're screwed. Sometimes it's not a percentage, but a fixed number.
Places like iBill don't really care. If you call and demand a refund, they'll give it to you. It'll piss off the site owner, but at least you the user is covered.
Don't make a habit of doing chargebacks though, if you do, your own bank may cut you off, and it may start a fraud investigation against you.
I've only done three chargebacks in my life.
One was against Western Union, where they attempted a money transfer, failed, and still billed my credit card for it. They recognized that the transfer never happened, but wouldn't refund the amount to the bank. My bank was amazed. The branch manager called for me, and she was stunned at what asses they were. It was something like "Ya, we billed you, no we didn't send any money, and no we won't refund you."
One was against a 3rd party who was working with Capital One, who I authorized for a one time fee, cancelled, and they kept billing me. Capital One was very good about taking care of that.
The third was due to a stolen card. Not stolen inf
Well, it doesn't stop phishing. Ideally, the person stealing information is going to be the only one using it. I get your Bank Of America login information, I log in and transfer your balance out. You shouldn't get 100 people logging into your account to transfer out small balances.
But hey, I'm not a phisher. Maybe they are stupid and share it with all their friends.
I was at Rite-Aid the other day, and they have credit cards that you can simply buy at the register. You pay cash to add to the balance. No trail to who you really are.
"I'm not willing to spend my money on something someone else paid for."
If you aren't willing to use your credit card for that service, **DON'T USE IT**. Just because you're afraid to use your credit card, does that make it OK to steal? That's like saying you're afraid to be tracked at the grocery store, so you shoplift.
>Thats too funny. Now im going to sue you for damage to my split sides.
What's funnier is that it's true.:)
> God should sue GW Bush for defamation of the Christian Character, and bringing Christianity into disrepute.
Hehe. Well, hate to break it to you, but I heard a rumor that God was dead. That may explain why I haven't had any lightning bolts thrown at me lately.:)
[checking sky. noting cloud formations. diving for sufficently grounded cover]
Hehe. Ok, maybe I should say I get anything that's Internet based free, legally.:)
Owners of sites can give me passwords.
Providers can give me space and bandwidth.
Content providers can give me access to their online content to use, or CD's of their content.
Really, most of the stuff posted to newsgroups or shared by P2P is stolen. I'm not screaming "oh my god, don't use that, it's illegal, immoral, and fattening". No. I'm just saying everyone knows it's illegal.
Look at it from the owner's point of view.
I make a porn video. It has 5 actors/actresses in it. Each one gets paid at least $500 for the shoot, but if it's a *GOOD* video, they're getting a lot more. Then I have to pay the camera man, sound man, director, makeup artist, wardrobe, props, and probably rental on the location. Now I have raw footage.
Someone else is going to take that video, capture it to a PC (even DV has to be transfered), convert it to a format that can be viewed by most people (mpg, avi, wmv, rm), and probably at least do some editing, such as putting interesting scenes together, taking out the crap footage (which there's usually a *LOT* of), adding titles, sounds, cleaning up parts, etc, etc.
So by the time it hits my web site, there's a good chance I've spent at least a few thousand dollars on it.
Now say this is a brand new site that I feel is the greatest thing since sliced bread. I get a dozen videos together of my own creation, and stick them online.
Joe Schmuch user goes and pays the $4.99 1 day trial, and downloads everything. He names the files appropriately, and sticks them up in his P2P client. In a few days every one of those videos has propogated out through the P2P networks. Tell me that's not stealing. Not only isn't it stealing, it's enough to run up and coming businesses out of business entirely. The same thing applies to passwords. If this same site shows up on a passwordz list, they may be screwed. If the bandwidth cost exceeds what they've made, they may just have to shut down over it. Like, if the only sale I made was the $4.99, but 10k people come in over the weekend and suck down my videos, it may cost me thousands in the bandwidth bill. Can I justify keeping the site up? Nope. It'll take me months just to recoop that first month's losses.
Now, I have absolutely no sympathy for the record lables, for many many reasons. They've been squeezing people for every penny they can get for many many years. Will it run the music industry out of business? Maybe. Have they been screwing people for a long time, yes.
But me as a small porn site owner is *NOT* the record industry.
Slashdot Mirror
Ya, I imagine it could be better than a standard car.. I just wonder if it'd keep up with a decent muscle car.
This is my car. Well, mine is pewter, with the 5 spoke rims, and much stickier tires. Where people spin their wheels, I'm already accelerating away.. Woosh. Oh, and mine has some other tricks under the hood, but we'll keep those quiet til race day.
Now, if it can keep up, or even come close, I'd seriously consider trading my car in..
Just 130? And they don't indicate the acceleration.
My TransAm does at least 160, or at least that's where I bury the speedometer.. I didn't have to strip out the interior, or modify anything..
Ok, ya, I don't get the fuel economy (only 26mpg), but hey, I don't drive far either. The T/A is much safer than that little egg shell though.
This would have been more appropriately asked to lawyers, not a bunch of IANAL's. :)
But, from the experience I have (a few law classes, and plenty of time on both sides with lawyers), a ban such as this, while to encourage the person not to do something, is more inclined to give a harsher penalty if they should do it again.
For example, if you get a DUI, you'll very likely lose your license. You may also be prohibited from drinking. It varies by the state and circumstances. Now say you go to a bar and drink. You probably won't get caught. But if you go to a bar and are involved in a bar fight, now you'll be dragged off for VOP. Judges don't generally like it when you do something directly against what they just told you, and will probably drop you in the nearest jail for the full term of your probation, or longer, depending on his mood.
I've heard judges let things go lightly, because they know it was a subtle offense. Like, the VoIP, and IP enabled appliances that I see referenced in the comments. If you were chatting up underaged girls and the judge said to stay off the Internet, but then you were caught talking to your mom on a Vonage phone, he'd probably let it go. But if you were on a PC in a Internet Cafe, trolling for underage girls, sure as hell you'd be spending time in jail.
Consider the incident with Richard Ricci in the Elizabeth Smart case (kidnapping in Utah). Ricci was told by the judge not to drink. They raided his house because they suspected he might be involved (and then it was later proven he wasn't), but arrested him for drinking a beer. If he didn't have the beer, they would have needed real evidence to arrest him. Since he had violated that prior ruling, he was screwed, even though that's the only thing he had done wrong. If they hadn't suspected him of kidnapping and murder, they would have probably let him go with a warning.
But likewise, people like you believe that you can't sue someone in another country. It happens every day. It may be harder to do, but it is possible.
An action like this isn't just a case for lawsuits, it can also be the basis for criminal charges.
Say I, as an American, ask all my friends in other countries to incur huge costs to you, just because I believe you're doing wrong. Does that make me in the right?
For example, many people believe PayPal is an evil company. So, to get them back, you have 10,000 'foreigners' run fradulent credit card transactions day and night through proxy servers around the world.
Instead of getting them through artificially increasing their bandwidth bill, you're getting them by incurring fees from the credit card companies.
Does it hurt the consumer? No, the banks will allow chargebacks.
Does it hurt PayPal? Yes.
Does it do any good? No.
Is it wrong? Yes.
I did this 3 years ago, for a cross-country drive (Tampa, FL to Los Angeles, CA, 2500 miles, 2.5 days). I wanted to "broadcast" my drive, so I had my Linux laptop capturing from a webcam, and sending the pictures back up to my web server.
:)
:) Oh, and never drive it in a U-Haul. It took 5 days with only one real sleep stop.
I used the Nextel im1100. The speed wasn't great (or even good most of the time), but it let me get the images up slowly. I could get one frame every 5 to 10 seconds sent up, which was more than enough to entertain my friends, who would check up on my progress every few hours.
You have to do a ppp script, just like you would dialing up on a conventional modem to an ISP. The init string was something odd. I think it was AT&S0=0 . The dial string was simply "ATDT". If you search around on DejaNews, you can find the right init string, if I'm mistaken.
There are other providers who's modems work exactly the same way. When I was researching it 3 years ago, they all acted like serial cards. I picked Nextel, because I already had a couple cell phones with them, and I could simply add it to my account. I don't know if things have really changed, but when I was looking at them, they advertise a "max" speed, which is *MUCH* higher than your real connection speed. In other words, you'll never see the speeds they offer. Generally it'll be 9600 baud, with really bad latency. 400ms+ pings were the norm.
Nextel will tell you specifically that they won't work on anything but Windows, but trust me, it works fine. It's the difference between what the support people know, and the way it really is.
The im1100 has it's own battery, it doesn't depend on the laptop for power. For my drive, I had the laptop and the modem plugged into a power inverter. I got pulled over twice on that drive. The cops gave my setup a really funny look, but didn't really say anything about it. Oddly enough, driving 2500 miles, you really start questioning if the speed limit should be so low..
I kept asking myself, "My car can easily do 160mph. I'm doing 75mph. If I doubled my speed, I'd cut this drive time in half. It's 800 miles to the next state. At 75, that's 10.6hrs. at 100, that's 8hrs. At 130mph (a nice cruise speed for my car) that's 6.1 hours. 6.1 hours sounds a lot better than 10.6 hours."
Right about the time I'd start trying it, is when I'd get pulled over. Since I was on I-10 in fuckin' Wyle E. Coyote country, where the cactus outnumber the humans 100000:1 they were ok with my 5mph over. They just wanted to remind me to slow down. I'm good with that. I like warnings a lot more than tickets.
Oh, and if you try to figure out my average speed for the drive (41mph), I did stop in El Paso for 12 hours, and had 6 fuel stops (4 of them I was kinda fuzzy from lack of sleep and a constant caffeine buzz). I also hit shitty traffic in San Antonio, and tried to stop in Bum-stick Arizona for cigarettes (couldn't find my brand), and again in Phoenix (again, couldn't find my brand). I was twitching by the time I got to California, and it was 2 days to find a store that had my brand.
It's an interesting drive. Everyone should try it once by themselves, just to say they did it.
Wouldn't the designation of 'parks' on Mars best be left up to the people settling there? Like, we think we know a little bit about what's there, but really we don't know much of anything. Mapping from space, and a few square miles of exploration doesn't mean we know squat about Mars.
:)
For example, what if we find a huge system of underground caves, like exist all over the Earth. Maybe they're too close to the surface to even put a city. That would be a better choice, rather than marking 1000 square miles saying "This is park."
Not that it really matters. We haven't sent person #1 there yet, much less colonists. Really, the rules will be established by whoever gets there first, and then be redefined by whoever takes power there first. If a country puts a big freakin' space gun on Mars, and starts shooting down other countries landers, that leaves that country in control to say what a park is. Or more like, if the colonists decide that they're independant (with the big freakin' space gun to prove it), they get to declare their parks.
That's what the U.S. did. They told England, "This is ours". It doesn't matter what they declared as what before the colonists came over, it's all been changed since then. The only big differences are the distance, and the space gun.
> if only you could script a girlfriend.
....
Why would I want to do that. I already have
Hmmm....
Girlfriends v2.0
Maybe I could work some of the bugs out.
if ($moodswing){
&shut_up;
};
if (!$aroused){
$aroused = 1;
};
Ahhh, the possibilities.
Ya, but aparently the Lycos idea is to fill up their line with something, anything, to run the bandwidth bill up. ICMP, HTTP, whatever, as long as it fills the line.
Ok, do something like `cat
And to the spamadvertised sites
`cat
You could get more creative. You could find the form that allows a post, and form a script that tries to do a upload over POST, and effectively do the same thing.
(not that I'm giving hacking lessons or anything)
The creativity of how you'd do it is up to you. But my entire thought is, what goes around, comes around. If you guys start doing this, they'll start doing it back. Or someone else will thing you're a spammer and hit you.
We've received SpamCop complaints before. They're really great folks, I like their policies. 100% of our complaints have either been replies to billing queries, where a real human answered a real human's question, or it was an automated message spawned by the user (password retrevial, usually). We point it out, case closed.
The best one I've seen is where someone ordered something online, the billing person emailed saying something to the effect "Your credit card was declined, would you like to cancel the order or provide another form of payment". They sent it straight off to SpamCop. I got with the billing person, they showed me the order, we sent this back to SpamCop, and got an apology from the lady. She makes it a habit of reporting everything in her box as spam.
It's people like that who ruin the whole attempt at an anti-spam system.
> This is just stupid. An iptables rule doesn't give you infinite
> bandwidth. It doesn't change who they are attacking, it just DOUBLES
> the bandwidth costs for you, and it looks like you are trying to flood
> those sites. It would be a more effective flood if you just used PING
> -F anyhow.
Actually, if you're dealing with real bandwidth, you're paying on the 95th percentile on the highest number, coming or going.
More than 90% of a spammer's bandwidth is outbound. So they can take that incoming traffic and not care in the least about it.
The same thing applies to us, doing web sites. Our ratio is just about 9:1 out to in. A request comes in (GET / HTTP/1.1\n\n"), and we send out the html or image. Our mail server is one of the few that are different, where they take in substantial bandwidth, and put out very little.
Basically, you can hit any of our cities with 500Mb/s constantly all month, and not only wouldn't we notice, but our bill wouldn't change by one cent.
>> if they do it by DNS names,
>
Well, they may need to do it, or be constantly updating the drone sites. If the spam is advertising bad.spammer.com, they've already set a very short TTL on their DNS record, and usually have several diverse lines ready. If the first line is shut down, they change the DNS record and are back up in minutes.
I've talked to plenty of spammers. I've told them I don't approve of what they do. They all say "But it's all double opt-in". If I can get them to do a select on their database, I'll always find one of my many Email addresses, which I've never opted into anything with.
They usually have the new DNS records ready, so they just copy and restart their nameserver. They know they'll be shut down, they have no expectations otherwise. So a good spammer won't advertise http://1.2.3.4/spam.html , they will advertise http://bad.spammer.com/spam.html , becaues they can keep it alive longer.
>> Lycos DDoS's me. I set up machines to redirect the abusive traffic to
>> say whitehouse.gov, ftc.gov, or lycos.com.
> In which case, *you*, not Lycos, is the one who will be gone after by
> the police/lawyers--if any come, which is by no means a certainty.
If I remember the iptables rule right, it acts like a router rewriting the packet, so it continues on to the new destination as if you were never involved.
But, it really doesn't matter to me, I'm not going to need to do it. I run a spam-free environment. If we end up with a spammer on the network somehow, I shut off their port on the switch, before a tech could even get to the machine to unplug it. I'm a real ass that way, but it's my network, and my rules.
Now, if every admin were like me, we wouldn't even be having this conversation. But someone is always out to make a buck. We make enough bucks from legitimate customers, we don't need their trouble.
There's already a reply that gives a good hint. Check your logs. A bunch of them will be these open relays. There are a few sources online that have lists too. I can't remember the good site that I got a bunch from, and I just reinstalled Linux on my home machine yesterday (for fun), so I don't have all my bookmarks any more. If it wasn't in my "Daily Reading" folder, I didn't really need it.
The only difference is in that I wasn't spamming something. I was demonstrating how the spammers hide their source. And my destination list was of 1, not millions.
I'm really not for direct marketing. I don't like a newspaper full of ads. I don't like that 90% of the mail coming to my house is advertising. And I don't like that 99% of the traffic coming to our mail server is advertising.
I'm all for a 100% ban on spam. If I never received another piece of spam, I'd be a very happy camper. As it is, we receive between 80k and 100k pieces of email on our mail server per day. The viruses are automagically deleted (no executable-ish attachments at all), and the spams are tagged by several means so the users can filter them.
My users are pretty happy. They don't get much of the 'evil' of Email in their box. The occasional piece of spam makes its way through. I'm down from 1000+ per day to maybe one or two per day.
BTW, I *HIGHLY* recommend MailScanner (http://mailscanner.info).
We could all take on the new Lycos approach, and kill either the spammers or the Internet at large. Set up your mail server to `ping -c 10000000 $spamserver`. They send spam, we detect spam, their connection goes to shit. The more people they hit, the more traffic they generate. They send a million pieces of spam, that's a million people hitting them back. But again, we're using an illegal tactic to stop a grey-market business.
In most areas, spam isn't illegal.
I'd like it if I didn't receive another unsolicited AOL CD in the mail, but what do I do, send 10k letters back to AOL? Nope.
Maybe the e-postage propositions are a good choice, but who's to collect the postage? If I have to receive 100k emails a day, I damned well want to be reimbursed for the server time (cost of a good machine, time maintaining it, etc)
I wrote a proof of concept once, similiar to your form filling script.
Someone said that you can't spam and hide it.
I wrote a script to prove you could. It took about 20 minutes to put together to my satisfaction.
I had 3 files. A names file, a domains file, and a words file.
It would take one to three words from the "names" file, and generate a name. It would take some combination of those, sometimes with a random character or two, and then take a random domain from the "domains" file, to form an Email address.
I'd then take the "words" file, and make a subject line 2 to 15 words long, and a message body that was between 10 and 100 words long.
To some of the messages, I attached arbitrary length attachments (generated as it ran), with filenames from the 'words' file, and I think 8 common extensions (.doc,
I then used a common misconfiguration in web proxy servers (allowing CONNECT), and set it up to randomly select proxy servers to mail through, all over the world.
Then I said "are you sure about what you said 20 minutes ago?"
He said "yes".
I ran the script. He was receiving about 1000 messages per minute, and couldn't tell what was real and what wasn't. They only thing he knew is that he saw text scrolling by on my screen (a little status information for myself), and me laughing my ass off.
There was absolutely nothing consistant with the messages. Different senders, different bodies, different attachments (if they existed at all), and all coming from different "mail servers". The receiving mail server assumes the IP it received from is the previous mail server, so those proxies showed up in the header.
I never did run it against a spammer. It wasn't worth it. You know the 'from' address is bogus anyways. Any address they may list on their site is probably bogus ( remove_me@bad.spammer.com ? ha!). It was proof of the concept that anything can come from anywhere. He couldn't identify that it was me, because the was nothing to identify that it was me. The only way he could have possibly found out that it was me (other than my laughing), was to try to contact these ISP's with misconfigured proxy's, and ask them to give him the IP who sent it through. Good luck. I don't speak any Chinese, and at least 100 of those proxy servers were over there.
No, to be a DoS attack, they must attempt to deny service.
If I take an extra 100Mb/s on a 1Gb/s line, does it slow down my network? No. Was it an attempt to do so? Yes.
Several years ago, Some kid got on two boxes at his university. They had a T3. We had a T3 (like I said, several years ago). They were pushing 30Mb/s constantly at my one box for two days. It started on a Saturday night. It wasn't enough to knock my box down.
I sent a nice email over to the school with all the information I had. Needless to say, there was hell to pay over at the school. They were terribly concerned why *THEIR* network was having problems all weekend. They were very thankful that I informed them.
Now, was that an attempt at a DoS? Yes.
Was it enough traffic to actually break anything? No.
Did the kid get expelled from the school? Yes.
Now the bigger question, if the school hadn't handled it, where do I go next? To their ISP. Well, actually my ISP, who would contact their ISP, and threaten to block whatever block size necessary to stop it. a
"Sorry, we're going to null route your
That'd go over really freakin' well, I'm sure, especially if my provider is big enough.
If they're on the same provider, someone's service is getting immediately disconnected. Yes, I've been in on those calls, both for DoS attacks, and for spam.
ISP: "There's a customer on x line that's spamming"
Me: "Well, not that my opinion matters, but I would have already shut them off."
ISP: "We did about 5 minutes ago."
But hey, however they want to play the game. It's their company.
Oooohh, this is such a bad idea on so many fronts.
1) They're going to get sued. Not just sued, sued a whole lot. Asses in a sling kinda sued. Spammers that are making good money have the budget to sue, and really Lycos is completely in the wrong here. Morally, sure spam sucks. But you can't do it this way.
2) It's against so many different TOS's that isn't even funny. With very very very few execptions, users can't legally run it (check your provider's TOS). They're opening every user up for:
a) federal charges.
b) lost ISP connection.
c) Lawsuit for damages from the spammers.
3) So you flood a facility with an OC3. Now not only have to screwed up one guy's day, you've screwed up everyone's day at that facility. Or worse, the screen savers send such a load to knock down a server, that they inadvertantly overload a few major peerings instead.
How about this for a proof of the point. I have a GigE connection in 3 different cities. My provider has multiple OC192's heading all over the place.
I rig up something that can handle a 1Gb/s through it, that can take the abuse, and still appear to be functional. Come on, think creatively, it's not that hard to do. I can serve 1Gb/s of web traffic with 6 machines. Actually, I do with 15 machines, at a very low percentage of their capability. So no matter what they throw at me, they can't take the servers or my line down.
Or worse yet, they attack me, so I flood them back with 3Gb/s. I'd bet I can swamp lycos.com. Sure, they'll bitch. They'll moan. They'll threaten lawsuits, but I returned exactly what they were doing. More than likely they'll lose in court.
Isn't there a rule for iptables to redirect traffic coming into one IP, into another one? a one-liner, if I remember right.
Lycos DDoS's me. I set up machines to redirect the abusive traffic to say whitehouse.gov, ftc.gov, or lycos.com. Ah, lets play nice here, lets redirect the traffic to google.com, and watch the lawsuits really fly. So Lycos makes a valiant attempt to knock Google offline. That'll go over really well in court.
Or, as one comment in here already said, if they do it by DNS names, just change the DNS record.
bad.spammer.com. IN CNAME lycos.com.
or
bad.spammer.com. IN A 209.202.248.202
bad.spammer.com. IN A 209.202.216.27
(That's what Lycos resolves as for me)
or just negate it entirely.
bad.spammer.com. IN A 127.0.0.1
or have a little fun.
bad.spammer.com. IN A 255.255.255.255
And [insert deity here] forbid, someone compromises the machine which controls this action. If I were an evil hacker (hush you people in the crowd), that'd be a great play toy. Wanna knock off some competition, just point Lycos to them, and turn off their ability to throttle.
I'd be *REALLY* pissed if I was hosting one, or there was a compromised box somewhere off in a corner that I didn't know about, and they decided to knock one of my networks offline.
Most spammers move around so frequently, attacking a particular hostname or provider really doesn't freakin' matter. They change the domain the links go to, and start sending again. The usable age of a spam is only 3 days. Spammers consider if it hasn't been read in 3 days, it's not going to be read.
I wish them luck, and hope they have a big enough budget to keep their executives who came up with this brilliant scheme out of federal prison. I sure as hell hope they don't accidently point at me for being a target, 'cause sure as hell they won't be on line long.
Actually, with an announcement like this, they've opened themselves up for being the blame of almost any DDoS attack.
You know, Jesus just a man, who a dozen nutjubs worshiped, and a few hundred years after he died, a bunch of people wrote down effectively was an urban legand. (I knew this guy, who knew this guy, who saw...). Unadmissible as evidence in courts for a reason. It's completely unreliable.
We did this thing in grade school to prove the point. We started at one side of the classroom. The teacher gave the first student a simple statement. Each person told the next person, until it got to the last person on the other side of the room. By the time it got there, it didn't even resemble the first statement.
So you have a belief system based off of something that may or may have happened 2000 years ago, in a book that was written hundreds of years later, and has been rewritten more times than you realize, to suit the political, economic, or social needs of the ruling party at that time.
But, since we're going to cite the bible about the loving and compassionate god, ya, he's a really swell fella.
Punished his first two creations by effectively disowning them and kicking them out of the garden of Eden.
Flooded a planet to kill everything but a pair of each creature.
Because his loving creations wanted to be closer to him, he destroyed their tower, and made it so they couldn't understand each other.
And his treatment of a dissident was eternal damnation in hell.
That's not loving and caring. That's vengeful and spiteful.
Oh, and don't forget the Crusades. Would a loving, caring, compassionate 'God' send so many people to fight each other, both sides in his name. That's a god who likes war, killing, and bloodshed for his own entertainment. And it didn't end with the Crusades, we're doing it right now. All you have to do is listen to Bush's speeches.
But now that I've offended you completely, let me remind you of a few other things.
The bible was written after the theoretical time that Jesus was alive (obviously). The entire religion starts with 'creation', which kind of misses the point that humans have been roming this planet for over 10,000 years, and the fact that we know planets and stars are *MUCH* older than that.
The entire concept of "Hell", as well as "Satan" is a creation of christianity. And even more interestingly, virtually every holiday that you celebrate in the name of your god, was stolen from other, much older, religions.
So, when I joke about going to hell, it's a joke, because there's no such place. It's as believable as aliens.
Now you're really pissed, huh? Now consider all the other religions in the world, and every time you go off about your God and your bible, they "know" that you're wrong, because they believe in their god(s) and/or goddess(es).
Welcome to the club.
I've really learned the deviant world over the last several years. Really, to be able to fight an enemy, you have to understand them. I've taught a few people some tricks, but usually it's so they can identify them being used against us.
If you watch my journal, I don't necessarly get into that. It's not a hacking school.
(ducking from the programmers throwing rocks, saying "Those punks aren't hackers!")
There should be an Email in your box from me.
But, would hell be such a bad place. Imagine, all the people in history that weren't nice enough to head to heaven. I wouldn't want to spend eternity with a bunch of goodie-goodie's anyways. Fuck that.
(oops, said the F-word, I'm goin' to hell. hehe)
Well, you can watch for a few things. For smaller sites, be sure they're going through a reputable billing company. When you go to the site, go to their payment page, and see where it goes. Quite a few companies use places like iBill, CCBill, and Verotel. I'll warn you now, Verotel has a bad habit of spamming people it billed later for other clients. Quite a few companies that I know of stopped using them for specifically that reason.
You can also go through an AVS. One I work with is ProAdult.
Use This Link if you sign up. I wanna make a buck on it too.
You pay once through ProAdult, and get access to every site on their network. Last time I looked, there were 50,000 sites listed. I wrote a search engine for it not too long ago, which hasn't been implemented quite yet. They're still discussing the additional hardware that will be required.
With an AVS like ProAdult, you're not giving every joe-porn-webmaster your information, you give it to the AVS once. You have the option of cancelling online or calling the billing office, and I assure you it's all honest.
I highly recommend an AVS. With ProAdult, you sign up, get access to a huge members area, bigger than most big sites, and then you still get access to all these other sites with the same membership (no additional fees).
I do agree that there are plenty of crooks out there. For the most part, what they're advertising is generally in there. Anyone who is taking money risks losing their account due to chargebacks. If you sign up, and they don't give you what you expected, and you can't cancel with a refund, you just have to call your bank and tell them that you were brought in with false advertising, and demand a refund. Most banks are very good about taking care of their clients in this respect. They don't care, Visa or Mastercard yanks the money right back out of the billing company's account.
For the CC companies, and the billing companies, there's a big convoluted system that they have, that ensures the money is available to get back. They do a rolling hold on the account. It's something like 30% to 50% of the charges are held for 6 months. So if I bill $10k this month, they hold $5k and send me $5k. It goes on every month like that, but in 6 months, I'll start getting the holdback from 6 months ago.
If there's a situation where an account gets too many chargebacks, they suspend your account, and hold onto all the money, I believe for another 6 months. That way, anyone who charges back can get their money back.
They're really freakin' strict with online adult stuff, becaues it has been a problem in the past. I think they're allowed under 1% chargebacks. So if 1 in 100 people charge back, they're screwed. Sometimes it's not a percentage, but a fixed number.
Places like iBill don't really care. If you call and demand a refund, they'll give it to you. It'll piss off the site owner, but at least you the user is covered.
Don't make a habit of doing chargebacks though, if you do, your own bank may cut you off, and it may start a fraud investigation against you.
I've only done three chargebacks in my life.
One was against Western Union, where they attempted a money transfer, failed, and still billed my credit card for it. They recognized that the transfer never happened, but wouldn't refund the amount to the bank. My bank was amazed. The branch manager called for me, and she was stunned at what asses they were. It was something like "Ya, we billed you, no we didn't send any money, and no we won't refund you."
One was against a 3rd party who was working with Capital One, who I authorized for a one time fee, cancelled, and they kept billing me. Capital One was very good about taking care of that.
The third was due to a stolen card. Not stolen inf
Well, it doesn't stop phishing. Ideally, the person stealing information is going to be the only one using it. I get your Bank Of America login information, I log in and transfer your balance out. You shouldn't get 100 people logging into your account to transfer out small balances.
But hey, I'm not a phisher. Maybe they are stupid and share it with all their friends.
I was at Rite-Aid the other day, and they have credit cards that you can simply buy at the register. You pay cash to add to the balance. No trail to who you really are.
Say that one more time.
"I'm not willing to spend my money on something someone else paid for."
If you aren't willing to use your credit card for that service, **DON'T USE IT**. Just because you're afraid to use your credit card, does that make it OK to steal? That's like saying you're afraid to be tracked at the grocery store, so you shoplift.
>Thats too funny. Now im going to sue you for damage to my split sides.
:)
:)
What's funnier is that it's true.
> God should sue GW Bush for defamation of the Christian Character, and bringing Christianity into disrepute.
Hehe. Well, hate to break it to you, but I heard a rumor that God was dead. That may explain why I haven't had any lightning bolts thrown at me lately.
[checking sky. noting cloud formations. diving for sufficently grounded cover]
Hehe. Ok, maybe I should say I get anything that's Internet based free, legally. :)
Owners of sites can give me passwords.
Providers can give me space and bandwidth.
Content providers can give me access to their online content to use, or CD's of their content.
Really, most of the stuff posted to newsgroups or shared by P2P is stolen. I'm not screaming "oh my god, don't use that, it's illegal, immoral, and fattening". No. I'm just saying everyone knows it's illegal.
Look at it from the owner's point of view.
I make a porn video. It has 5 actors/actresses in it. Each one gets paid at least $500 for the shoot, but if it's a *GOOD* video, they're getting a lot more. Then I have to pay the camera man, sound man, director, makeup artist, wardrobe, props, and probably rental on the location. Now I have raw footage.
Someone else is going to take that video, capture it to a PC (even DV has to be transfered), convert it to a format that can be viewed by most people (mpg, avi, wmv, rm), and probably at least do some editing, such as putting interesting scenes together, taking out the crap footage (which there's usually a *LOT* of), adding titles, sounds, cleaning up parts, etc, etc.
So by the time it hits my web site, there's a good chance I've spent at least a few thousand dollars on it.
Now say this is a brand new site that I feel is the greatest thing since sliced bread. I get a dozen videos together of my own creation, and stick them online.
Joe Schmuch user goes and pays the $4.99 1 day trial, and downloads everything. He names the files appropriately, and sticks them up in his P2P client. In a few days every one of those videos has propogated out through the P2P networks. Tell me that's not stealing. Not only isn't it stealing, it's enough to run up and coming businesses out of business entirely. The same thing applies to passwords. If this same site shows up on a passwordz list, they may be screwed. If the bandwidth cost exceeds what they've made, they may just have to shut down over it. Like, if the only sale I made was the $4.99, but 10k people come in over the weekend and suck down my videos, it may cost me thousands in the bandwidth bill. Can I justify keeping the site up? Nope. It'll take me months just to recoop that first month's losses.
Now, I have absolutely no sympathy for the record lables, for many many reasons. They've been squeezing people for every penny they can get for many many years. Will it run the music industry out of business? Maybe. Have they been screwing people for a long time, yes.
But me as a small porn site owner is *NOT* the record industry.
Ahhhhh..
I wasn't ever in on the plans, I just saw them do it. But that does make a lot of sense. I know water by itself isn't conductive, but salt in it is.
Errrr, I mean "No, I didn't see anything, Mr. Principal".
Bah, it's been over 15 years, he can't suspend me now.