If somebody has a problem with back scatter then they obviously don't have their SPF records set up correctly. They aren't so innocent. I'm getting spam traffic from their domain.
I'm sorry, Mr Holier Than Thou Standards Guru, but could you please point me to the standard that requires e-mail systems to support SPF?
You'll be there a while, because there is no such standard. Moreover, there probably never will be, because SPF is fundamentally broken in several ways. If you use SPF, either setting it up for your own domains or filtering on it, then you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem. And it's is a lousy way to filter e-mail anyway, since it's statistically beyond hope of anything close to acceptable reliability, while any decent multi-pronged approach can easily get high-90s accuracy with negligible false positive rates.
I'm giving up mods to post this, but it really needs to be said.
People need to stop blaming things on services who pragmatically choose to violate selected aspects of decades-old standards that don't address today's realities. The problem with modern e-mail is that the standard is hopelessly out of touch with modern demands. There should long ago have been a consistent standard that covered things like sender authentication, encryption and signing, formatted messages ("HTML e-mails"), smart handling of errors without treating them all as e-mails in their own right, and numerous other fundamentally broken parts of the original e-mail specs. But there isn't, so people try to do reasonable things and stay as true to the standard as they can without being dogmatic about it when it's obviously a stupid thing to do.
So no, I don't think silent dropping needs to stop under all circumstances. E-mail has never had useful reliability of delivery (another thing a replacement standard should deal with) so you can't count on it anyway. On the other hand, I'm sick and tired of getting a deluge of hundreds of unwanted e-mails in ten minutes because someone sent out a mail with webmaster@my.domain as the sender, and loads of people who were confident enough that the message was spam to block it still sent back a bounce message to an address that is 99.99% likely to have been faked as well in that case. I'm sorry, but that's just antisocial behaviour, and responsible sysadmins should take steps to avoid it: if you're confident enough to refuse delivery, why aren't you confident enough not to reverse-spam the innocent bystander? If you're running a sensible service where a user can whitelist specific senders or switch off spam filtering altogether for specific receiving addresses if they want to guarantee receiving everything, and they've opted in to your spam filtering, this shouldn't be a problem.
The authorities in the UK had exactly that problem with tax returns a few months ago. IIRC, they ended up having to extend the official deadline for filing, because so many people tried (perfectly within the rules) to file their returns on the last day, but couldn't because the system was down.
I guess the approach to this depends on your medium-term strategy. If you are concerned that Linux and OS X market share is likely to increase significantly based on current trends, and you acknowledge that Vista has been a failure in the market but there is still a lot of demand for XP today, then this indicates a need to move in a different direction where you can compete effectively with Linux and OS X a few years down the line but no desperate need to shift dramatically in the near future.
If you assume that the thing most holding back Linux and OS X today is application (including driver) support, and you acknowledge that this is the major technical reason people are still using Windows, then from the previous assumptions you must expect software companies to focus more on portability and use of cross-platform libraries in future as the target markets using alternative operating systems grow. However, you can use this to your advantage, because it means if your new direction plays nicely, it will continue to be at least as attractive for software developers to support your platform as any of your rivals when they go cross-platform.
If you look at the major competition in Linux and OS X, both are based on decades-old concepts that are tried and tested, but also aren't particularly well suited to current trends in networked access, mobile devices, and the like. This creates an opportunity for your new direction to provide genuine improvements for the users while learning from the successful ideas that have gone before, and thus to make your new platform the more attractive one.
And here's the kicker. If you're Microsoft, you are one of the few companies on the planet that has sufficient development resources, financial reserves and attention from software developers to have a credible shot at this. But you need to be honest about the situation, and make a few hard choices about who you're going to put in charge, since your problem is not your generally very smart technical people or your generally very effective marketing people, it's your generally missing the point management people.
I don't really expect them to do this, because I don't think they have the guts to bet the house on such a big move. But I honestly believe their best strategy in the market today is to sit in a holding pattern on the XP/Vista line for the near future (when neither Linux nor OS X is a serious threat to their dominance), aim to have a serious alternative a few years down the line that can compete on merit in a market where one-OS software is increasingly rare and the threats from alternative platforms like Linux, OS X, and whatever new trends emerge in web-based and mobile computing are growing. Along the way, they could move towards open standards and continue their strategy of basically giving away powerful development tools that support their platform, which would undermine some of the key selling points of the opposition, and continue to support the company via sales and incremental improvements to XP and Office for the immediate future.
I don't think you're crazy at all; actually, I very much agree with you. But I think the market will change quite sharply to sort this out, and the general pattern of human behaviour in the western world will change to match.
Likewise. There's a whole world of landfill sites (a whole western world, at least) full of things we didn't recycle efficiently, either because we didn't know how or we just didn't bother. I don't know enough about the techniques involved to judge this, but it seems that if deep mining operations are commercially viable today, landfill mining could become commercially viable in the not-too-distant future.
I think the other thing that will have to change is this idea that you buy something but then "upgrade" it after only a very short period of use and throw the old one away, even though the old one still worked perfectly well or needed only routine maintenance to repair. Our culture has become terribly wasteful, because today's economics (and poor customer service when it comes to getting things repaired) practically force anyone sensible to buy a new replacement for things. That's just crazy.
That only works mathematically if there are a few really low bandwidth users and a lot of users who are each cruising only modestly above the average mark. This strikes me as unlikely, though not completely implausible: I find it difficult to believe that the majority of subscribers to a typical unmetered ISP are hardcore P2Pers, and only a small minority just use basic e-mail and surfing, with the occasional streaming download.
That's a very fair point (and, in fact, the reason I personally left Facebook very soon after joining it).
But in most cases, it's harder for friends to tag you etc. if you don't have an active account yourself.
(As an aside, providing such personal information about others without their consent is pretty clearly illegal in some places, as is storing it by the social networking site.)
Social networking sites are fundamentally about sharing data. Lots of people, particularly the younger generation, forget this in their desire to play with the latest fad (which, like the one before it, will probably move on in a year or two). But, surprising as it may seem, you don't have to give your complete life story to someone else by joining Facebook, or to post your intimate secrets for the whole world to see on LiveJournal, or to give a minute-by-minute commentary on what you're doing, or to put those slightly dubious looking photos up on a public photo gallery.
I don't see how it would help if someone running a social networking site that collects all your data chose to share the source code. The source code is irrelevant: they still have your data. This is a simple privacy issue, and nothing to do with RMS-style rights to change source code.
Thank you for your comments. We regret that because it makes no business sense to continue providing an unlimited bandwidth service, we will be discontinuing this offering from next month. Current subscribers may transfer to our metered service with no disruption. This service is commercially viable and we expect it to remain so, and most users will find the metered service significantly cheaper as they will no longer be subsidising a small minority of heavy users.
At your current usage rates, we estimate that your own monthly bill on the metered service would be approximately:
$1,764.38
Please note that this figure is an estimate based on your current usage level, and may go down or up depending on your future usage patterns.
Actually, when the masses have actually been asked in a referendum, they have generally rejected the various EU constitution/superstate treaties. It's just that this time around with the Lisbon treaty, only one government has so far had the courage to go to its people and ask (well, actually their constitution required it). Despite widespread criticism, other leaders have ratified the treaty againt popular opinion. The masses aren't apathetic, they just aren't being given the choice, in one of the most flagrant violations of democracy in recent history.
And for the avoidance of doubt, we don't get to elect the people with real power in the EU framework, who are apparently behind this particular affront to privacy, either.
I've already stated in another post that I hope we will at least get such benefits from the current global warming hype. This is not in dispute.
More interesting/difficult questions are possible, however. For example, is it best to pay some environmental cost now in order to develop less technologically advanced nations, in the expectation that over the long run such developments will accelerate the progress towards more environmentally friendly technology in the future? Or do we not have time for that, in which case we need to be developing those more environmentally friendly measures in the West, while somehow convincing places like China to halt their rapid expansion? Just knowing that global warming is happening won't help us to answer practical questions like these.
I'm also curious as to why he's saying "Maybe you should move out of the way" rather than "LOOK OUT!!!" Typical physicists...
I believe I can help you there, with a little explanation of the mindset of modern graduates. You see, I once knew three students who shared a house during their time at university: a mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer. One night they got back home, and found that they'd left the cooker on and a small kitchen fire was starting.
"Don't worry, I'll get it," said the engineer. He picked up the fire extinguisher by the door and unloaded it completely on the fire, putting the fire out. The students all went off to their rooms to bed, and cleared up the mess in the morning.
The following night, they again got home to find the kitchen ablaze.
"Don't worry, I've got this one," said the physicist. Whipping out his pocket calculator, he determined the exact direction of application and amount of foam required to put the fire out, picked up the fire extinguisher, and dealt with the problem, and the guys went off to their rooms to bed.
The next night, someone had yet again left the power on and caused a fire.
"Don't worry, I can work this one out," said the mathematician. "You guys go on up to bed." The scientist and the physicist departed, leaving the mathematician to look around for something he could use to put the fire out.
The mathematician spotted the fire extinguisher, calculated that the amount of foam remaining was sufficient to put out the fire... and went to bed, happy that a solution to the problem existed.
Sorry, I did use an ambiguous word that time. I meant only that water vapour is far greater in quantity. I could also have pointed out that other gases such as methane are more effective per unit. But what counts is the combination of quantity and potency, and as you say, on that metric CO2 is the most significant contributor to the effect today.
Please note that the post to which I replied said that climate change was (a) man-made, and (b) a disaster. I'm not sure anyone here is denying that there is robust evidence of change happening; I'm certainly not. What I object to is hysteria about how we're all going to die tomorrow or something, and to blanket statements that imply the whole deal is caused because we drive too many cars or some similarly specific claim.
I saw a survey a few months ago where members of the public were asked their views on global warming. The overwhelming majority of them were sure it was a major problem.
Then again, the overwhelming majority of them also:
failed to identify greenhouse gases correctly (most could only name CO2; in fact, water vapour is far more significant, and numerous other common chemicals contribute to the effect)
weren't even close on the relative contributions of greenhouse gases made by various common human activities such as different forms of transport and industrial activities (most people thought it was mostly from cars; in fact, transportation makes up less than 1/6th of man-made emissions, with power generation making the largest contribution)
were spectacularly incorrect about the total proportion of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere today that are generated by human activities (giving figures in the 90s of percent in some cases; in fact, less than one part in 20 of the greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere are contributed by human activity, and the remainder are a result of natural cycles).
I'm not sure why I posted all that, except perhaps to demonstrate that we should be very wary of allowing politics or popular opinion to be confused with actual science.
Only history will prove them right or wrong. Prior to that, we are just running around with our hands in the air like chicken-little and demanding that massive works are undertaken to shore up the sky.
No, we're doing more than that. We are also diverting resources and attention away from other worthy goals. A lot more people are currently dying of preventable causes or suffering reduced quality of life than the worst predictions suggest global warming will affect a long way into the future. In many parts of the world, secure food and water supplies, reliable shelter from the elements, basic sanitation and elementary medicine are still rare.
I hope that if nothing else, the current emphasis on fighting climate change will serve the same role as things like space exploration and military research have in the past: acting as a catalyst for research that is useful in other areas, such as more efficient use of natural resources, methods of power generation that are sustainable in the long term, and earlier detection of and more robust defence against environmental disasters like the tsunamis and earthquakes we see all too frequently in some areas.
You have to admire the politics of fear. Aside from perhaps the politics of envy, it is the most unprincipled way to make a case for anything. And yet it is spectacularly successful. You can convince people who don't know any better to support you without having to make any factual arguments. You can label anyone who opposes you a threat, so that again people who don't know any better will therefore be suspicious, and since it's impossible to prove a negative, it is hard for the opposition to defend themselves robustly in such an environment (unless they can appeal to a greater fear). Since on any given specialist subject, inevitably most people won't know much about the details, you can turn an entire population's view on a subject with nothing but oratory, regardless of how much factual evidence supports or opposes your case.
Slashdot Mirror
SPF is great. It isn't a total solution, and there are negatives, but it certainly is better than the anyone is anyone free for all.
Actually, statistically it is not much better than that.
Hint: For those domains that have valid SPF records set up, what proportion do you think just allow sending from anywhere?
If somebody has a problem with back scatter then they obviously don't have their SPF records set up correctly. They aren't so innocent. I'm getting spam traffic from their domain.
I'm sorry, Mr Holier Than Thou Standards Guru, but could you please point me to the standard that requires e-mail systems to support SPF?
You'll be there a while, because there is no such standard. Moreover, there probably never will be, because SPF is fundamentally broken in several ways. If you use SPF, either setting it up for your own domains or filtering on it, then you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem. And it's is a lousy way to filter e-mail anyway, since it's statistically beyond hope of anything close to acceptable reliability, while any decent multi-pronged approach can easily get high-90s accuracy with negligible false positive rates.
It violates RFCs
I'm giving up mods to post this, but it really needs to be said.
People need to stop blaming things on services who pragmatically choose to violate selected aspects of decades-old standards that don't address today's realities. The problem with modern e-mail is that the standard is hopelessly out of touch with modern demands. There should long ago have been a consistent standard that covered things like sender authentication, encryption and signing, formatted messages ("HTML e-mails"), smart handling of errors without treating them all as e-mails in their own right, and numerous other fundamentally broken parts of the original e-mail specs. But there isn't, so people try to do reasonable things and stay as true to the standard as they can without being dogmatic about it when it's obviously a stupid thing to do.
So no, I don't think silent dropping needs to stop under all circumstances. E-mail has never had useful reliability of delivery (another thing a replacement standard should deal with) so you can't count on it anyway. On the other hand, I'm sick and tired of getting a deluge of hundreds of unwanted e-mails in ten minutes because someone sent out a mail with webmaster@my.domain as the sender, and loads of people who were confident enough that the message was spam to block it still sent back a bounce message to an address that is 99.99% likely to have been faked as well in that case. I'm sorry, but that's just antisocial behaviour, and responsible sysadmins should take steps to avoid it: if you're confident enough to refuse delivery, why aren't you confident enough not to reverse-spam the innocent bystander? If you're running a sensible service where a user can whitelist specific senders or switch off spam filtering altogether for specific receiving addresses if they want to guarantee receiving everything, and they've opted in to your spam filtering, this shouldn't be a problem.
Ah, now I understand that Jack Nicholson line...
OMG!!11!!!eleven! Total literature reference fail. My bad.
The authorities in the UK had exactly that problem with tax returns a few months ago. IIRC, they ended up having to extend the official deadline for filing, because so many people tried (perfectly within the rules) to file their returns on the last day, but couldn't because the system was down.
Yep. Why were the bad guys always "proceeding forward of myself" instead of "walking in front of me"?
"Proactive" is a perfectly good English word. It just sucks when management/consultant types misuse it while trying to sound clever.
This is usually done by the sort of person who says "utilise" instead of "use" and doesn't know the difference between the nouns "use" and "usage".
I guess I'm just not cool anymore...
Oh, dear. Epic coolness fail! Newspeak is made of win. You are not a legend.
Business plan failure at line #1: assumption that technical edge is the priority and not sales.
I guess the approach to this depends on your medium-term strategy. If you are concerned that Linux and OS X market share is likely to increase significantly based on current trends, and you acknowledge that Vista has been a failure in the market but there is still a lot of demand for XP today, then this indicates a need to move in a different direction where you can compete effectively with Linux and OS X a few years down the line but no desperate need to shift dramatically in the near future.
If you assume that the thing most holding back Linux and OS X today is application (including driver) support, and you acknowledge that this is the major technical reason people are still using Windows, then from the previous assumptions you must expect software companies to focus more on portability and use of cross-platform libraries in future as the target markets using alternative operating systems grow. However, you can use this to your advantage, because it means if your new direction plays nicely, it will continue to be at least as attractive for software developers to support your platform as any of your rivals when they go cross-platform.
If you look at the major competition in Linux and OS X, both are based on decades-old concepts that are tried and tested, but also aren't particularly well suited to current trends in networked access, mobile devices, and the like. This creates an opportunity for your new direction to provide genuine improvements for the users while learning from the successful ideas that have gone before, and thus to make your new platform the more attractive one.
And here's the kicker. If you're Microsoft, you are one of the few companies on the planet that has sufficient development resources, financial reserves and attention from software developers to have a credible shot at this. But you need to be honest about the situation, and make a few hard choices about who you're going to put in charge, since your problem is not your generally very smart technical people or your generally very effective marketing people, it's your generally missing the point management people.
I don't really expect them to do this, because I don't think they have the guts to bet the house on such a big move. But I honestly believe their best strategy in the market today is to sit in a holding pattern on the XP/Vista line for the near future (when neither Linux nor OS X is a serious threat to their dominance), aim to have a serious alternative a few years down the line that can compete on merit in a market where one-OS software is increasingly rare and the threats from alternative platforms like Linux, OS X, and whatever new trends emerge in web-based and mobile computing are growing. Along the way, they could move towards open standards and continue their strategy of basically giving away powerful development tools that support their platform, which would undermine some of the key selling points of the opposition, and continue to support the company via sales and incremental improvements to XP and Office for the immediate future.
I don't think you're crazy at all; actually, I very much agree with you. But I think the market will change quite sharply to sort this out, and the general pattern of human behaviour in the western world will change to match.
Likewise. There's a whole world of landfill sites (a whole western world, at least) full of things we didn't recycle efficiently, either because we didn't know how or we just didn't bother. I don't know enough about the techniques involved to judge this, but it seems that if deep mining operations are commercially viable today, landfill mining could become commercially viable in the not-too-distant future.
I think the other thing that will have to change is this idea that you buy something but then "upgrade" it after only a very short period of use and throw the old one away, even though the old one still worked perfectly well or needed only routine maintenance to repair. Our culture has become terribly wasteful, because today's economics (and poor customer service when it comes to getting things repaired) practically force anyone sensible to buy a new replacement for things. That's just crazy.
That only works mathematically if there are a few really low bandwidth users and a lot of users who are each cruising only modestly above the average mark. This strikes me as unlikely, though not completely implausible: I find it difficult to believe that the majority of subscribers to a typical unmetered ISP are hardcore P2Pers, and only a small minority just use basic e-mail and surfing, with the occasional streaming download.
That's a very fair point (and, in fact, the reason I personally left Facebook very soon after joining it).
But in most cases, it's harder for friends to tag you etc. if you don't have an active account yourself.
(As an aside, providing such personal information about others without their consent is pretty clearly illegal in some places, as is storing it by the social networking site.)
...don't give it to them.
Social networking sites are fundamentally about sharing data. Lots of people, particularly the younger generation, forget this in their desire to play with the latest fad (which, like the one before it, will probably move on in a year or two). But, surprising as it may seem, you don't have to give your complete life story to someone else by joining Facebook, or to post your intimate secrets for the whole world to see on LiveJournal, or to give a minute-by-minute commentary on what you're doing, or to put those slightly dubious looking photos up on a public photo gallery.
I don't see how it would help if someone running a social networking site that collects all your data chose to share the source code. The source code is irrelevant: they still have your data. This is a simple privacy issue, and nothing to do with RMS-style rights to change source code.
Dear customer,
Thank you for your comments. We regret that because it makes no business sense to continue providing an unlimited bandwidth service, we will be discontinuing this offering from next month. Current subscribers may transfer to our metered service with no disruption. This service is commercially viable and we expect it to remain so, and most users will find the metered service significantly cheaper as they will no longer be subsidising a small minority of heavy users.
At your current usage rates, we estimate that your own monthly bill on the metered service would be approximately:
$1,764.38
Please note that this figure is an estimate based on your current usage level, and may go down or up depending on your future usage patterns.
Best wishes,
Your ISP
The masses are too apathetic to do anything
Actually, when the masses have actually been asked in a referendum, they have generally rejected the various EU constitution/superstate treaties. It's just that this time around with the Lisbon treaty, only one government has so far had the courage to go to its people and ask (well, actually their constitution required it). Despite widespread criticism, other leaders have ratified the treaty againt popular opinion. The masses aren't apathetic, they just aren't being given the choice, in one of the most flagrant violations of democracy in recent history.
And for the avoidance of doubt, we don't get to elect the people with real power in the EU framework, who are apparently behind this particular affront to privacy, either.
I've already stated in another post that I hope we will at least get such benefits from the current global warming hype. This is not in dispute.
More interesting/difficult questions are possible, however. For example, is it best to pay some environmental cost now in order to develop less technologically advanced nations, in the expectation that over the long run such developments will accelerate the progress towards more environmentally friendly technology in the future? Or do we not have time for that, in which case we need to be developing those more environmentally friendly measures in the West, while somehow convincing places like China to halt their rapid expansion? Just knowing that global warming is happening won't help us to answer practical questions like these.
I'm also curious as to why he's saying "Maybe you should move out of the way" rather than "LOOK OUT!!!" Typical physicists...
I believe I can help you there, with a little explanation of the mindset of modern graduates. You see, I once knew three students who shared a house during their time at university: a mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer. One night they got back home, and found that they'd left the cooker on and a small kitchen fire was starting.
"Don't worry, I'll get it," said the engineer. He picked up the fire extinguisher by the door and unloaded it completely on the fire, putting the fire out. The students all went off to their rooms to bed, and cleared up the mess in the morning.
The following night, they again got home to find the kitchen ablaze.
"Don't worry, I've got this one," said the physicist. Whipping out his pocket calculator, he determined the exact direction of application and amount of foam required to put the fire out, picked up the fire extinguisher, and dealt with the problem, and the guys went off to their rooms to bed.
The next night, someone had yet again left the power on and caused a fire.
"Don't worry, I can work this one out," said the mathematician. "You guys go on up to bed." The scientist and the physicist departed, leaving the mathematician to look around for something he could use to put the fire out.
The mathematician spotted the fire extinguisher, calculated that the amount of foam remaining was sufficient to put out the fire... and went to bed, happy that a solution to the problem existed.
Sorry, I did use an ambiguous word that time. I meant only that water vapour is far greater in quantity. I could also have pointed out that other gases such as methane are more effective per unit. But what counts is the combination of quantity and potency, and as you say, on that metric CO2 is the most significant contributor to the effect today.
Please note that the post to which I replied said that climate change was (a) man-made, and (b) a disaster. I'm not sure anyone here is denying that there is robust evidence of change happening; I'm certainly not. What I object to is hysteria about how we're all going to die tomorrow or something, and to blanket statements that imply the whole deal is caused because we drive too many cars or some similarly specific claim.
I saw a survey a few months ago where members of the public were asked their views on global warming. The overwhelming majority of them were sure it was a major problem.
Then again, the overwhelming majority of them also:
I'm not sure why I posted all that, except perhaps to demonstrate that we should be very wary of allowing politics or popular opinion to be confused with actual science.
Only history will prove them right or wrong. Prior to that, we are just running around with our hands in the air like chicken-little and demanding that massive works are undertaken to shore up the sky.
No, we're doing more than that. We are also diverting resources and attention away from other worthy goals. A lot more people are currently dying of preventable causes or suffering reduced quality of life than the worst predictions suggest global warming will affect a long way into the future. In many parts of the world, secure food and water supplies, reliable shelter from the elements, basic sanitation and elementary medicine are still rare.
I hope that if nothing else, the current emphasis on fighting climate change will serve the same role as things like space exploration and military research have in the past: acting as a catalyst for research that is useful in other areas, such as more efficient use of natural resources, methods of power generation that are sustainable in the long term, and earlier detection of and more robust defence against environmental disasters like the tsunamis and earthquakes we see all too frequently in some areas.
To a real scientist, every issue is always subject to debate. Falsifiability is a key part of the scientific method.
You have to admire the politics of fear. Aside from perhaps the politics of envy, it is the most unprincipled way to make a case for anything. And yet it is spectacularly successful. You can convince people who don't know any better to support you without having to make any factual arguments. You can label anyone who opposes you a threat, so that again people who don't know any better will therefore be suspicious, and since it's impossible to prove a negative, it is hard for the opposition to defend themselves robustly in such an environment (unless they can appeal to a greater fear). Since on any given specialist subject, inevitably most people won't know much about the details, you can turn an entire population's view on a subject with nothing but oratory, regardless of how much factual evidence supports or opposes your case.