a little lamish on the effects by todays standards
In my book that was one of the best parts of Dr. Who. I laughed out loud at many of the cheesey effects and believe that aspect really made it all work and let them take artistic license to the extreme. IMHO, it would have been far less entertaining if they had done high end effects and staging.
What would the show have been with Dahlecks (sp?) that did not have toilet plungers for arms?
aol would most likely MAKE Beos suck... It's not that far-fetched though, if they could get FTC approval.
I think the FTC would approve it in seconds. The idea of AOL having an OS (added to the browser they already have) and competing with MS would be a dream for them. The US Gov't is only continuing the antitrust suit because of pressure from the states and the people. I think they would jump at the chance to have an opportunity to drop the case with a "see, they have strong competition now, AOL on the desktop front, Linux and BSD on the server front".
I do agree with you on the fact AOL would probably make BeOS suck (by geek standards of suckiness), but you have to remember the AOL client sucks in my book though seems to be quite popular with non-geeks. I am not dead sure AOL could, or would, pull it off, but I certainly can't see the US Gov't getting in the way of them trying. Same goes for the EU.
The only reason Palm would be interested in either is for something like the Audrey, which already is known to be a colossal failure
Audrey, at least the concept, was not exactly deemed a "colossal failure". Their main problem was they were part of the massacre at 3Com, Audrey never had a chance. The concept was well received, I have several friends that have one and they mostly love them. The in the kitchen, super convenient, Palm docking station part was quite excellent.
Yeah, there were weaknesses. Mail was kind of weak, but that could have been fixed. The browser really sucked, that could have probably been eliminated. Channels were quite cool and convenient. The screen was way too small, as was the keyboard. Price was too high.
Bottom line, the concepts that Audrey introduced were actually quite well received and many considered them promising. It had quite a few issues, but it was pretty good for a first shot. My guess is if there was an Audrey part deaux, it could have been (or could be) very successful. It would not shock me at all if Palm were looking at doing something like that on their own and BeIA could be a decent choice (QNX in the original Audrey was not bad either). I personally think the Audrey concept was just a year or so ahead of its' time (the LCD and flash are just too expensive now to make a price competiive product).
Recently, I opened a Hotmail account. Within minutes, I had my first spam arrive (toner cartridges). Minutes. On an address that has never been given out, used, or posted anywhere.
The most likely cause for that is the address may have been assigned before, was abandoned, and made available again. That happened to me when I signed up for DSL, got an email account along with it, and the spam was rolling in within minutes. It became clear that a fair percentage of the spam, some music newletters, and some legitimate personal mail (from his sister, and a cousin) were addressed to the same specific name, and he shares my initials.
Bottom line, super-popular services like Hotmail, and large ISPs like Mindspring, will re-use abandoned addresses. If the previous owner was careless, or, as many of us do, used the Hotmail account as a spam box, you could very well be the unlucky recipient of a lot of spam.
It is not a considerable amount of work. It's almost trivial
Depends on how well their systems are setup, and whether they considered CID info important. With the exception of this kind of situation, the need for that is rare. Most ISPs have no interest in cluttering up their billing databases with irrelevant stuff like CID. If it is logged at all, it is often kept in a separate logs that are FIFOd rather rapidly. Even in these days of cheap HDs, this stuff adds up fast, and only the critical stuff is kept (for billing, spam research, etc.).
I would call the ISP ASAP and ask them to cull the data and save it for the police.
Good advice, I should have stated that (I was THINKING it).
The worm attacked whitehouse.gov, and although I truly dislike Bush and his administration, I can see how this could be construed as an attack against the United States itself.
Perhaps he/she should have attacked microsoft.com. It would have been far more appropriate. Heck, we would have probably put up a statue of him/her in/. Plaza, school children would have sung songs about him/her, perhaps even a holiday and parades.;)
PPP gives you the IP to use, but where do you think their PPP deamon gets the IP to give to you? That's right, a DHCP server. Just because you're not running a DHCP client doesn't mean that your IP isn't coming from DHCP.
Not in any commercial dialup gear I have used. Generally, the PPP termination gear in a rack is assigned a pool of addresses to assign, or in some cases an IP is assigned to each modem. IP addresses for those with static IPs on a dialup (sort of rare) is generally obtained from a RADIUS server.
I can't even see why anyone would want to add the overhead of DHCP to this scenario. It would be a pretty precarious situation where a modem rack would not be assigned enough IPs to handle maxed out capacity, and this would be best handled internally within the concentrator's PPP termination s/w, why throw another protocol and server into the fray.
I am not real sure how a typical Linux PPP daemon handles this, but that would be kind of irrelevant to this topic as few ISPs of any size use a Linux based PPPd, they use dedicated racks like 3Com, Lucent or Cisco primarily.
For the point of this article, I think this is irrelevant anyway. If the victim can get a couple IP addresses and exact times (probably from an intermediate SMTP host to ensure accuracy) the ISP, if they are cooperative and competent, can probably (with considerable work) get the CID data. You want multiples as you want to see the same CID info from several calls. There is a high risk of this not being fruitful though, as many ISPs do not log CID (or don't even get it), and it is often in a different log (call logs vs. radius) so they need to be cross-referenced.
And you can relay through their server from any IP address, whether it is theirs or not, as long as you put [somestring]@gte.net or [somestring]@verizon.net in the From field of the e-mail message
Yup, you sure can! I just relayed an SMTP session from a machine at work (not on verizon's net) using "jblow@verizon.net" in the from field using smtp.verizon.net. The mail came through on my yahoo account no problem.
Boy, they sure are tough on spammers (not). Pretty sad, pretty typical from a phone company.
Slashdot is accessible, plastic.com? never heard of it.
Thanks, that is interesting to know. Either/. just isn't on their radar, or wild, wide-open discussion is not a big problem for them. Plastic.com, BTW, is a slashcode site, aimed more at politics and general discussion rather than geekdom topics. I don't go there much (and it is much less popular than/.) but I do know many who non-geeks who do.
Can we still use this to undermine the act or are we back to square one?
IANAL, but I seem to recall several laws have been challenged, and overturned, without a live case to chew on. It would seem a major problem with a justice system that requires someone to risk jail and/or a fine to challenge a law. I believe that using an active case like this is just the "easy" way to force a judge to look at an issue, but there are other ways to get a hearing in court. One such example is the case of the Communications Decency Act that was struck down before being enforced. It was brought into the legal system not as the defense of a criminal case, but as an ACLU originated lawsuit, ACLU vs Reno. I do not know the legalities of when this can be done, perhaps someone can enlighten us on this?
I'm sure they will be verifying that the e-mail address specified belongs to the user that is logged in
Yes, quite possible, but it is a lot of work, will add a lot of latency, and tax a lot of servers. I doubt they are going to do it.
Why is everyone complaining so much about someone trying to stop people from using their servers to spam/forge e-mails?
Why don't you read the posts of those complaining? Most are quite clear as to why this is problematic. 2 main reasons is many, many honest, non-spamming, non-forging, users use their own domain or work domain and send mail from home. The workarounds are often expensive, painful, and depending on what other mechanims they have in place, difficult, kludgey or near-impossible.
Let's see: there was a riot. A bunch of hoodlums were tearing the town apart, looting, attacking police with petrol bombs, etc. One of the cops (apparently) lost his head an shot one of the rioters.
And, if the reports are correct, this guy was in the process of throwing a fire extinguisher at the already besieged officers. Assuming that was true, it is clearly a case of self-defense.
It is really too bad that such extreme violence is occurring. Tens of thousands of peaceful protestors is a very powerful statement, violence from a minority only mutes their message and dilutes their cause.
So find an email host that has an MTA on port 25, and a MSA on port 587 using SMTP auth.
Sure, there are plenty of hacks around it, heck, you could put one on port 80, but most folks aren't that crafty, nor should they have to be. This is a support and customer service headache.
No, they didn't. I use smtp.mindspring.com and smtp.earthlink.net and both relay just fine (when on their network of course). I NEVER use my ISP issued address in any way, always using either a work address or my personal domain, no problems whatsoever. If you are not using one of the servers above, try them, you'll like them. Yes, they do block port 25.
My DSL link through Earthlink will not allow me to use anything but earthlink.com as a sending domain.
That is strange. I use Mindspring DSL (owned by Earthlink) and have no problem whatsoever using their SMTP servers with a non-Mindspring/Earthlink domain. I also have co-workers with Earthlink DSL, and no issues. I just did a test (telnetting to port 25, doing manual SMTP commands) using smtp.earthlink.net, sending a mail to my personal domain, using a yahoo.com address as the from in the "mail from" and a totally fake domain in the "FROM" header in the body, and it went through no problem.
Bottom line, use smtp.earthlink.net or smtp.mindspring.com and you should have no problems. They are just restricting by IP, no content restrictions at all. Not sure what smtp you are using that is forcing @earthlink.com.
Yes, you are correct on the port 25 blocking, that is pretty common these days.
Yes, but MANY ISPs, perhaps most, block outbound port 25. I don't know if Verizon does. If an ISP were to reject emails not from their domain, and block port 25, this would be a major problem. I guess you can still use the "Reply To" header, but that is kind of weak.
Overall, this move is a headache for those of us that try to do work from home, expecially those that are not techies. I can't tell you how many headaches this is going to cause various support organizations and customers. I totally believe that the defacto standard method of ISPs restricting by IP to their own networks only was a decent way to approach this.
The real problem is that as each ISP takes a different approach, the problem gets more and more complicated as the corporate and non-ISP email providers help desks need to track solutions by ISP for how customers need to configure outbound mail.
I'll go even further to say this solves nothing. If I were a spammer running on Verizon I would just use a fake address within the Verizon domain to circumvent it (eg. fake_user@verizon.com).
Bottom line, really bad idea, a sizable percentage of their honest customers are going to be seriously inconvenienced by this and it does little to prevent spam.
All interfaces take, well, getting used to in the beginning, this isn't exclusive to computer interfaces
Yes, but you still need to do this kind of research to make it even better and more intuitive. It isn't even close to Mac (or Windows for that matter) in its' intuitiveness.
Taking your car controls as an example, most manufacturers put the basics in roughly the same place for a reason. When you deviate, you frustrate, and better have a good reason for it. I know I have rented some cars in my time where it took me a couple minutes to figure out how to open the gas cap and that generally leaves a bad taste.
Bottom line, I think this kind of research is exactly the right approach.
Clearly MS would have a TOS for this service, but where would it be?
This would not be too hard to do. Recently when I was at a hotel that had ethernet in the room. They resolved every DNS query to the same IP that had a web server with the TOS and pricing, etc. Once I agreed (clicked a button) they turned me loose on the real net. A nice elegant solution. Hacking up a simple DNS server to respond to any query with the same IP would be trivial. Hacking up a router to do a MAC addr lookup and route non-recognized traffic to a separate network is slightly less trivial, but quite do-able too.
Something like this could easily be done in the park bench scenario. They could keep a db of the MAC addrs that have agreed to the TOS, FIFOing out inactive MACs (not used in the past few weeks) to keep the db a reasonable size. If they detect a MAC that is not in the db, they just force you to go to that server and agree to the TOS. Hackable, sure, but most everything is, it would probably satisfy the needs quite well.
It is called cheap PR, plain and simple. They very well might pick up some MSN subscriptions too. Doing something like this is probably cheaper than a single 30 second advert during a prime-time sitcom.
But the OS can't catch on Big Time until there are serious options in the home peripheral market. It just goes round and round.
IMHO, if every peripheral ever made supported Linux I don't think there would be an appreciably larger marketshare in the consumer space. Linux is a PITA (Pain In The Ass). Don't get me wrong, I love Linux, but its' user friendliness is weak at this point. That is clearly the reason it is doing poorly as a "client" OS. Similarly, the reason it has been astronomically successful in the server market is that the clientelle in that market recognizes the power and flexibility and are willing to endure the pain (or already endured the pain).
Lots of people recognize this, and there are some great efforts to overcome it. Until that happens the consumer market for Linux will be weak, the demand for linux drivers for consumer hardware will be weak and they will be either not important, or a low priority to produce.
For my part, I'd love to see IBM port Notes to Linux just so I don't have to use WINE to read internal email...
Actually you may be able to use a native Linux app to read your Notes mail. Notes 4.x servers support POP3. I believe Notes 5.x servers even support IMAP (IMAP rocks). Lastly both revs in common use support LDAP. My former employer used Notes, most of us hated it so we used POP (ours did not support IMAP). I used Fetchmail to pull down my mail with POP, then served it up on my own server with IMAP. This worked great with one excpetion, the formatting did not come through so those emails that used colors for reply comments were a bit hard to follow.
It is quite possible your Notes admin has not turned on POP/IMAP and LDAP but it is worth checking. If you know your admin, ask him/her, or just point a client (or telnet to port 110 and 143) at your Notes server and try.
Slashdot Mirror
a little lamish on the effects by todays standards
In my book that was one of the best parts of Dr. Who. I laughed out loud at many of the cheesey effects and believe that aspect really made it all work and let them take artistic license to the extreme. IMHO, it would have been far less entertaining if they had done high end effects and staging.
What would the show have been with Dahlecks (sp?) that did not have toilet plungers for arms?
aol would most likely MAKE Beos suck... It's not that far-fetched though, if they could get FTC approval.
I think the FTC would approve it in seconds. The idea of AOL having an OS (added to the browser they already have) and competing with MS would be a dream for them. The US Gov't is only continuing the antitrust suit because of pressure from the states and the people. I think they would jump at the chance to have an opportunity to drop the case with a "see, they have strong competition now, AOL on the desktop front, Linux and BSD on the server front".
I do agree with you on the fact AOL would probably make BeOS suck (by geek standards of suckiness), but you have to remember the AOL client sucks in my book though seems to be quite popular with non-geeks. I am not dead sure AOL could, or would, pull it off, but I certainly can't see the US Gov't getting in the way of them trying. Same goes for the EU.
The only reason Palm would be interested in either is for something like the Audrey, which already is known to be a colossal failure
Audrey, at least the concept, was not exactly deemed a "colossal failure". Their main problem was they were part of the massacre at 3Com, Audrey never had a chance. The concept was well received, I have several friends that have one and they mostly love them. The in the kitchen, super convenient, Palm docking station part was quite excellent.
Yeah, there were weaknesses. Mail was kind of weak, but that could have been fixed. The browser really sucked, that could have probably been eliminated. Channels were quite cool and convenient. The screen was way too small, as was the keyboard. Price was too high.
Bottom line, the concepts that Audrey introduced were actually quite well received and many considered them promising. It had quite a few issues, but it was pretty good for a first shot. My guess is if there was an Audrey part deaux, it could have been (or could be) very successful. It would not shock me at all if Palm were looking at doing something like that on their own and BeIA could be a decent choice (QNX in the original Audrey was not bad either). I personally think the Audrey concept was just a year or so ahead of its' time (the LCD and flash are just too expensive now to make a price competiive product).
Recently, I opened a Hotmail account. Within minutes, I had my first spam arrive (toner cartridges). Minutes. On an address that has never been given out, used, or posted anywhere.
The most likely cause for that is the address may have been assigned before, was abandoned, and made available again. That happened to me when I signed up for DSL, got an email account along with it, and the spam was rolling in within minutes. It became clear that a fair percentage of the spam, some music newletters, and some legitimate personal mail (from his sister, and a cousin) were addressed to the same specific name, and he shares my initials.
Bottom line, super-popular services like Hotmail, and large ISPs like Mindspring, will re-use abandoned addresses. If the previous owner was careless, or, as many of us do, used the Hotmail account as a spam box, you could very well be the unlucky recipient of a lot of spam.
Yes, givin the climaye for system engineers these days $10,000 BUX might be a few years salary
;)
I guess they are not very good at math. Might explain why they are having a contest to have others do math for them
It is not a considerable amount of work. It's almost trivial
Depends on how well their systems are setup, and whether they considered CID info important. With the exception of this kind of situation, the need for that is rare. Most ISPs have no interest in cluttering up their billing databases with irrelevant stuff like CID. If it is logged at all, it is often kept in a separate logs that are FIFOd rather rapidly. Even in these days of cheap HDs, this stuff adds up fast, and only the critical stuff is kept (for billing, spam research, etc.).
I would call the ISP ASAP and ask them to cull the data and save it for the police.
Good advice, I should have stated that (I was THINKING it).
The worm attacked whitehouse.gov, and although I truly dislike Bush and his administration, I can see how this could be construed as an attack against the United States itself.
/. Plaza, school children would have sung songs about him/her, perhaps even a holiday and parades. ;)
Perhaps he/she should have attacked microsoft.com. It would have been far more appropriate. Heck, we would have probably put up a statue of him/her in
PPP gives you the IP to use, but where do you think their PPP deamon gets the IP to give to you? That's right, a DHCP server. Just because you're not running a DHCP client doesn't mean that your IP isn't coming from DHCP.
Not in any commercial dialup gear I have used. Generally, the PPP termination gear in a rack is assigned a pool of addresses to assign, or in some cases an IP is assigned to each modem. IP addresses for those with static IPs on a dialup (sort of rare) is generally obtained from a RADIUS server.
I can't even see why anyone would want to add the overhead of DHCP to this scenario. It would be a pretty precarious situation where a modem rack would not be assigned enough IPs to handle maxed out capacity, and this would be best handled internally within the concentrator's PPP termination s/w, why throw another protocol and server into the fray.
I am not real sure how a typical Linux PPP daemon handles this, but that would be kind of irrelevant to this topic as few ISPs of any size use a Linux based PPPd, they use dedicated racks like 3Com, Lucent or Cisco primarily.
For the point of this article, I think this is irrelevant anyway. If the victim can get a couple IP addresses and exact times (probably from an intermediate SMTP host to ensure accuracy) the ISP, if they are cooperative and competent, can probably (with considerable work) get the CID data. You want multiples as you want to see the same CID info from several calls. There is a high risk of this not being fruitful though, as many ISPs do not log CID (or don't even get it), and it is often in a different log (call logs vs. radius) so they need to be cross-referenced.
And you can relay through their server from any IP address, whether it is theirs or not, as long as you put [somestring]@gte.net or [somestring]@verizon.net in the From field of the e-mail message
Yup, you sure can! I just relayed an SMTP session from a machine at work (not on verizon's net) using "jblow@verizon.net" in the from field using smtp.verizon.net. The mail came through on my yahoo account no problem.
Boy, they sure are tough on spammers (not). Pretty sad, pretty typical from a phone company.
Slashdot is accessible, plastic.com? never heard of it.
/. just isn't on their radar, or wild, wide-open discussion is not a big problem for them. Plastic.com, BTW, is a slashcode site, aimed more at politics and general discussion rather than geekdom topics. I don't go there much (and it is much less popular than /.) but I do know many who non-geeks who do.
Thanks, that is interesting to know. Either
Can we still use this to undermine the act or are we back to square one?
IANAL, but I seem to recall several laws have been challenged, and overturned, without a live case to chew on. It would seem a major problem with a justice system that requires someone to risk jail and/or a fine to challenge a law. I believe that using an active case like this is just the "easy" way to force a judge to look at an issue, but there are other ways to get a hearing in court. One such example is the case of the Communications Decency Act that was struck down before being enforced. It was brought into the legal system not as the defense of a criminal case, but as an ACLU originated lawsuit, ACLU vs Reno. I do not know the legalities of when this can be done, perhaps someone can enlighten us on this?
Does anyone know if /. and the like (plastic.com, etc.) are filtered in China? Just wondering.
I'm sure they will be verifying that the e-mail address specified belongs to the user that is logged in
Yes, quite possible, but it is a lot of work, will add a lot of latency, and tax a lot of servers. I doubt they are going to do it.
Why is everyone complaining so much about someone trying to stop people from using their servers to spam/forge e-mails?
Why don't you read the posts of those complaining? Most are quite clear as to why this is problematic. 2 main reasons is many, many honest, non-spamming, non-forging, users use their own domain or work domain and send mail from home. The workarounds are often expensive, painful, and depending on what other mechanims they have in place, difficult, kludgey or near-impossible.
Let's see: there was a riot. A bunch of hoodlums were tearing the town apart, looting, attacking police with petrol bombs, etc. One of the cops (apparently) lost his head an shot one of the rioters.
And, if the reports are correct, this guy was in the process of throwing a fire extinguisher at the already besieged officers. Assuming that was true, it is clearly a case of self-defense.
It is really too bad that such extreme violence is occurring. Tens of thousands of peaceful protestors is a very powerful statement, violence from a minority only mutes their message and dilutes their cause.
So find an email host that has an MTA on port 25, and a MSA on port 587 using SMTP auth.
Sure, there are plenty of hacks around it, heck, you could put one on port 80, but most folks aren't that crafty, nor should they have to be. This is a support and customer service headache.
Earthlink already did, months ago.
No, they didn't. I use smtp.mindspring.com and smtp.earthlink.net and both relay just fine (when on their network of course). I NEVER use my ISP issued address in any way, always using either a work address or my personal domain, no problems whatsoever. If you are not using one of the servers above, try them, you'll like them. Yes, they do block port 25.
My DSL link through Earthlink will not allow me to use anything but earthlink.com as a sending domain.
That is strange. I use Mindspring DSL (owned by Earthlink) and have no problem whatsoever using their SMTP servers with a non-Mindspring/Earthlink domain. I also have co-workers with Earthlink DSL, and no issues. I just did a test (telnetting to port 25, doing manual SMTP commands) using smtp.earthlink.net, sending a mail to my personal domain, using a yahoo.com address as the from in the "mail from" and a totally fake domain in the "FROM" header in the body, and it went through no problem.
Bottom line, use smtp.earthlink.net or smtp.mindspring.com and you should have no problems. They are just restricting by IP, no content restrictions at all. Not sure what smtp you are using that is forcing @earthlink.com.
Yes, you are correct on the port 25 blocking, that is pretty common these days.
Yes, but MANY ISPs, perhaps most, block outbound port 25. I don't know if Verizon does. If an ISP were to reject emails not from their domain, and block port 25, this would be a major problem. I guess you can still use the "Reply To" header, but that is kind of weak.
Overall, this move is a headache for those of us that try to do work from home, expecially those that are not techies. I can't tell you how many headaches this is going to cause various support organizations and customers. I totally believe that the defacto standard method of ISPs restricting by IP to their own networks only was a decent way to approach this.
The real problem is that as each ISP takes a different approach, the problem gets more and more complicated as the corporate and non-ISP email providers help desks need to track solutions by ISP for how customers need to configure outbound mail.
I'll go even further to say this solves nothing. If I were a spammer running on Verizon I would just use a fake address within the Verizon domain to circumvent it (eg. fake_user@verizon.com).
Bottom line, really bad idea, a sizable percentage of their honest customers are going to be seriously inconvenienced by this and it does little to prevent spam.
All interfaces take, well, getting used to in the beginning, this isn't exclusive to computer interfaces
Yes, but you still need to do this kind of research to make it even better and more intuitive. It isn't even close to Mac (or Windows for that matter) in its' intuitiveness.
Taking your car controls as an example, most manufacturers put the basics in roughly the same place for a reason. When you deviate, you frustrate, and better have a good reason for it. I know I have rented some cars in my time where it took me a couple minutes to figure out how to open the gas cap and that generally leaves a bad taste.
Bottom line, I think this kind of research is exactly the right approach.
Clearly MS would have a TOS for this service, but where would it be?
This would not be too hard to do. Recently when I was at a hotel that had ethernet in the room. They resolved every DNS query to the same IP that had a web server with the TOS and pricing, etc. Once I agreed (clicked a button) they turned me loose on the real net. A nice elegant solution. Hacking up a simple DNS server to respond to any query with the same IP would be trivial. Hacking up a router to do a MAC addr lookup and route non-recognized traffic to a separate network is slightly less trivial, but quite do-able too.
Something like this could easily be done in the park bench scenario. They could keep a db of the MAC addrs that have agreed to the TOS, FIFOing out inactive MACs (not used in the past few weeks) to keep the db a reasonable size. If they detect a MAC that is not in the db, they just force you to go to that server and agree to the TOS. Hackable, sure, but most everything is, it would probably satisfy the needs quite well.
Oh, is Microsoft just now testing DHCP and Ethernet?
Many would argue that 802.11b would be far better in this scenario. Less maintenance due to screwed up physical connectors, etc.
How else and why else would ms do such a thing?
It is called cheap PR, plain and simple. They very well might pick up some MSN subscriptions too. Doing something like this is probably cheaper than a single 30 second advert during a prime-time sitcom.
But the OS can't catch on Big Time until there are serious options in the home peripheral market. It just goes round and round.
IMHO, if every peripheral ever made supported Linux I don't think there would be an appreciably larger marketshare in the consumer space. Linux is a PITA (Pain In The Ass). Don't get me wrong, I love Linux, but its' user friendliness is weak at this point. That is clearly the reason it is doing poorly as a "client" OS. Similarly, the reason it has been astronomically successful in the server market is that the clientelle in that market recognizes the power and flexibility and are willing to endure the pain (or already endured the pain).
Lots of people recognize this, and there are some great efforts to overcome it. Until that happens the consumer market for Linux will be weak, the demand for linux drivers for consumer hardware will be weak and they will be either not important, or a low priority to produce.
For my part, I'd love to see IBM port Notes to Linux just so I don't have to use WINE to read internal email...
Actually you may be able to use a native Linux app to read your Notes mail. Notes 4.x servers support POP3. I believe Notes 5.x servers even support IMAP (IMAP rocks). Lastly both revs in common use support LDAP. My former employer used Notes, most of us hated it so we used POP (ours did not support IMAP). I used Fetchmail to pull down my mail with POP, then served it up on my own server with IMAP. This worked great with one excpetion, the formatting did not come through so those emails that used colors for reply comments were a bit hard to follow.
It is quite possible your Notes admin has not turned on POP/IMAP and LDAP but it is worth checking. If you know your admin, ask him/her, or just point a client (or telnet to port 110 and 143) at your Notes server and try.
but would many of the readers here want even a mental image of their mother-in-law's shower
;)
I don't know, but it is considerably better than Scotty Crane's coffee-table-style picture book of his late father's (Bob Crane, a.k.a. Col. Hogan) amateur pr0n