Well, I have already exercised my rights as granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office several times against individuals who decided that including one or more of my registered trademarks in their search-and-redirect "doorway" pages is the key to greater Internet sales.
I understand why they do it (usually they want to incorporate the Top 1000 Search Terms in a doorway page to their paysite, or the paysite they are financially affiliated with, that likely has no relation to few if any of those terms).
A law already exists and take my word for it, if you or any other party dare use my registered trademarks in your porno spam redirect pages we will be seeing each other in court.
Part of the reason is that trademarks must be actively defended to remain in effect, and part of it is the fun of the whole thing.
However, people who do not have the time and or money to register their trademarks do not have this option. A public person who finds his/her name being used to sell prurient matter has a defamation case, but it is likely that by the time a person is public, there would be too many such pages to attack.
I would advocate a law prohibiting unrelated terms and names in redirect marketing (doorway) pages, with violations incurring (and you'll like this) civil, not criminal penalties.
If this is "destroying the web," what would you call in-your face marketing, spam, porno, blind links, trick pages, circular searching, popups, consoles, spyware, and browser hijacking that is the daily Web experience? Already the web is getting quite close to useless, and it would be a good time to discuss how to clean it up.
I assume you're running Windows. I used Spam Killer exclusively, but was spending half my life maintaining it. There are no provisions for bayesian, decoding base-64, filtering html ! tags etc. I like to blacklist urls in clickable links so it also has to decode obfuscated urls also.
What I do now is use SpamPal (it's open-source) and use SpamKiller to delete anything with **SPAM** in the subject line. Setup SpamKiller to use SpamPal as your email client.
This setup slaughters spam. I think I've seen three spams in the last week with no false positives. My email is all over the web so I was receiving 200+ spams and infected mails a day.
SpamPal is a generic anti-spam prog which filters on regular expressions and can be set up to use plug-ins, including RBLs. Most of the issues I noted above with Spam Killer have been addressed already by others with SpamPal.
Spam is now legal insofar as the spammer includes adv: and a working email address (doesn't even have to check it).
Working state laws have been pre-empted. Many victims of spammers in Michigan and California received judgments, but no longer. Those judgments kept spammers on the run, making them hide their money in offshore accounts and keeping their apparent net worth=0 (excepting Ralsky).
Since spam benefits American companies owned by American citizens, real anti-spam legislation would have included sanctions against the beneficiaries of spam, including double penalties for income tax evasion and money laundering.
True, but won't help this guy if the spammer is attaching. I haven't seen this type of spam, but if it is happening, the spammers must have access to monstrous amounts of bandwidth, and be damned to clogged routers and mailservers. He would only need to send 10 million spams to use up a terabyte of his own bandwidth. (Spam runs typically number 100 million or so).
If the gain to the spammer is X, the loss on his million victims is on millionth of X each...
From what I understand, a spammer selling, for instance, penis enlargement pills will sell three or four bottles from a spam run of 100 million spams. Let's say he makes $200 and assume it is pure profit (it is).
Let's further assume of the 100 million spams, 10 million made it to the Microsoft Outlook Inboxes of unique users. Let's say that each spam took 5 seconds to delete. If their time is worth $10/hour (assume half the victims are kids students etc, and half are professionals) the spammer cost them $100,000 of their time to make his lousy $200.
This does not take into account higher ISP fees, anti-spam program costs, credit card back charges, loss of business from lost legit emails, and the terabytes of wasted bandwidth for each and every spam run.
Spammers are conscious of this and their continuing to do it is an indication of sociopathic behavior.
CF has access times an order of magnitude lower than even the fastest disk drives (0.000256s vs 0.006s), but its transfer rate is ~25% of current consumer magnetic disk drives.
I shoot professionally with both types of cards. The CF beats the microdrive, especially when reactivating the camera from a period of inactivity (the hard drive has to spin up). The time lag is about a second longer at spin-up and that has often cost me a shot.
OTOH CF cards die regularly and often, but my three 1gig microdrives have been in continuous, hard use in a since early 2001. They have outlasted two Nikon D1s and a Canon 1D. Interestingly, I thought one died, but it quit working in the Canon 1D, my main camera. It still works in other models of camera and the computer. It is probably on the way out, but I will wait to April to retire it when the Mark II comes out necessitating a move to 2gig units. Others have different opinions of Microdrive durability, but that is my experience.
Sony doesn't have progressive scan CCDs. Of course, even as I say that, Canon is phasing it out. It was the thing they called digital motor drive. Sony's lenses are nice, but the Canon's is a more modern design than the Zeiss. I favor their Elura line, the 20MC is the most recent with progressive scan. Maybe $300 used on Ebay, so you don't have to worry as much when you leave it en prise in your hotel room. They are smaller than the Sony DCR-PC* series. Any of these you can stick in your pocket and the image quality is fantastic.
Interestingly, SCO.com came up instantly when typed directly into another browser (Netscape if it makes a difference). Clicking the link in the submission produces an error -- probably sco is blocking access based on the referrer.
She said.. her company (one of the bigger independent IT outsourcing companies in the midwest) hasn't sold a single SCO product in over a year. She said from her chair, she wouldn't notice if they fell off the face of the earth.
I hope she's ready for a lawsuit from SCO demanding damages for underperformance, breach of contract, litigous libel, slander, unintentional infliction of emotional distress... etc... etc...
Lookup vx2.betterinternet I had to pull it off my dad's computer. Adaware missed it. Spybot S&D found it but wouldn't remove it. Manual removal resulted in it reinstalling itself, a different version. It, alone had seven concurrent parasite processes. It, alone caused his 450mhz windows98 system to grind to a crawl. The only way to remove it is to exit to dos, remove the file and hack the registry (for some reason it leaves two windows taskbars). That's the crappiest one I found so far. By itself it qualifies as an epidemic.
He is in the sweet spot -- the time where his new-ish machine is obsolete, but not enough have died yet for their parts to become available on ebay. If he waits a couple of months, the parts should start to become available.
The problem with ebay is that all the electronics sellers have decided that $10 is the minimum shipping charge, even on a small part. I had a guy charge me that for an LCD inverter (weight: less than 1 ounce) and mail it to me unprotected in an envelope 1st class ($0.37 stamp).
If the part prices are truly a problem, he can desktopify the laptop and get another, they are cheap these days. I did that with a Thinkpad T23 with broken LCD -- it is now a firewall/spam filter left on 24/7.
I wonder if we as a species have thrown a destabilizing factor into that robust bio-system by stressing it past its ability to recover.
This kind of talk epitomizes the hubris of mankind. Our indirect industrial activity and driving SUVs is now being likened to mass
extinctions of the end-Triassic or K-T variety. If repeated strikes of kilometer-wide asteroids couldn't "stress it past the ability to recover," why do you think our industrial activity will? Why do you want to think that?
Are you suggesting, as many in academe and the Third World who wish an inversion of the social order, that we return to a 16th century lifestyle, including population reduction?
The fact is, periods of global warming have happened in the past, in the absence of industrialized civilization, indeed, in the absence of man himself. Who was to blame for those? Or what is to blame? I say blame need not be assigned; it is the course of nature.
The fact is, climactic changes over the course of centuries is normal and to be expected. These variations, over time scales greater than our lifetimes, are perfectly normal. One of the things that drives be bonkers is this sudden insistence of normalcy at the scientific level. Watch the weather on TV the next time it rains. The meteorologist will say how much precip the storm has brought, and then inevitably state how much yearly rain shortfall/excess over normal there has been -- as if it has to be exactly on the expected totals every day of the year. In places with a rainy and dry season, there may be two days per year where the yearly rainfall accumulation total agrees with the expected accumulation - on a perfectly normal year.
It is my opinion that global warming is simply another tactic, like political correctness, to induce guilt in western thinking.
Finally, in the spirit of forgiveness, I should actually be *thankful* to Real Networks for actually asking for the credit card number because I pressed ALT F4 the moment I saw it. So, you see, Real Networks have saved me from themselves - a fate worse than death:-) Thanks, guys!
Well shit, you missed out on the best part. On the next page it asks for your social security number, ATM PIN, and mothers maiden name.
That is interesting because it parallels the conversation I had with others while I was waiting for the clerk to bring out the drive from the back.
One swore never to use WDs. Another swore never to use Maxtors. Another swore never to use Seagates "And they're noisy!" And I personally will never use IBM Deskstars (I think they don't make them anymore, I wonder why).
In my personal experience, the IBMs fail with regularity. OTOH I have several old working WD's in my parts box, going back to 400MB that never failed. I have had several IBM Deskstars fail in normal operation, as well as quite a few Travelstars. The only good thing about those IBM failures is that they take a long time dying -- i.e. no motor failures or headcrashes. They seem to be flaky, I got my data off. IBM does make good when you RMA them, but they take so long, by the time you get the new drive it is obsolete.
I went to Toshibas for laptops, but then my dad got a new HP laptop for Christmas and its Toshiba hard drive seized within the first week. At least he didn't have time to store any significant amount of data on it.
So far I've had good luck with WD's. I went for the identical drive in case I wanted to raid it someday.
From the article: First stop was the Fry's Electronics in Sunnyvale, Calif., shortly before 11 a.m., where I discovered early-bird shoppers already had snapped up the Mintek models at $26.99.
Fry's stocks the loss leaders throughout the day. It pays to ask a clerk if there are more in the back (using the tone of voice that you KNOW there are more). Last week they had 250gb WD drives on sale for $149 after rebate ($219 OTD). Of course the shelf was empty when I got there. I asked the clerk and hung out 20 minutes, until he brought out four more from the back (spying the screen, I saw they had 140 units on hand).
After burn-in (do NOT cut out the UPC for rebate until after burn in) I realized I had no way to back up a drive this size. So two days later I went back and got another, using the above process.
I built a site for a client and deliberately left off his email in the contact page. He insisted I put it in and eventually I gave in, after explaining the hazards of doing so. In compromise, I put it in as a non-clickable graphic. Within a week he was getting seven spams a day.
BTW, if you're going to try to get hired (I know you're joking) don't use email to send your resume. For business purposes, email is broken.
Yenc is a joke. It, and years ago, Base-64 were merely attempts by Usenet users to lose AOLers (me-too'ers) and more recently Outlook users by obsoleting their client software.
Of course, eventually their software gets updated and they come back. In the meantime Usenet is filled with their complaints and the attendant responses from the Usenet intelligentia, who daily demonstrate their superiority by instructing them to "Get a Real Newsreader (tm)."
They won't, and after their software updates things will quiet down. But in two or three years another new eocoding scheme will take off like wildfire. Not because it is better, or more efficient. But because it will allow the longtime Usenet users to temporarily lose the AOLers and Outlook users again.
I remember the anti Base64 arguments back when that came out and they were exactly the same as the anti-Yenc complaints currently being heard on Usenet.
Just to stay on topic, this counts as Internet Pollution (R) because many posters try to make everybody happy by reposting the same files in Base64, thus more than doubling the bandwidth in some binary newsgroups.
Thanks for the tip on the NNTP servers. I'll check it out.
I have 3.04 installed on several computers, but I fear it is slowly getting obsoleted. I actually used the mail feature in Netscape 3.04 until I recently switched servers. For some reason nothing I do will make the new POP server accept the mail password if it sent from Netscape. If it comes from Outbreak Express or my spam filter program it takes it just fine. Weird. Similarly, I used to use the news feature but it doesn't do Yenc which seems to be the method of encoding binaries currently in style.
I use 3.04 non-gold with java and js turned off, images on. It worked pretty well until last year... now a lot of sites seem to be IE-only. Even some Ebay sellers (who you would think want everyone possible to be able to see their ad) make that mistake.
When forced off Netscape, I use IE 6 with Popup Cop ( a shareware prog) blocking all the webcrap. IE really sucks though -- why oh why does it keep so much default cache (2 gig on my machine). If you run IE, try PurgeIE (another shareware prog) after emptying temporary internet files to see how many files it loses track of. Speaking of IE shareware, why is IE free but to safely run it you need $100 of shareware. And when it loads up, you cannot save pictures as anything but untitled bitmaps. The only thing it does better is save login credentials (and even that is not so smart, considering how easy it is to pull out those masked passwords out of IE - NEVER save Paypal and banking passwords in IE).
Netscape seems to run just fine with 15mb cache and is immune to flash, java tricks and lame DHTML bullshit.
I empathize with your hijack experience. I have to regularly patrol google for webmasters who use *my* names on their previously-mentioned keyword page / meta-refresh trick. Apparently they find out the top web searches, then create and upload keyword pages containing those terms, which try to redirect you to their lame site. Usually one email is enough to make him knock it off (if he is even still there), but sooner or later another pops up.
Something makes me think they are buying from some spammer selling $59 "businesses" who tells them this is the way to make quick money. When they actually try it, they get their asses handed to them by the trademark owners.
Google did a good job of cleaning up THAT pollution as described here. A month ago many common pop culture searches would have turned up nothing but auto-generated commercial pages, all alike.
For example, searching on Paris
Hilton after her little slip-up returned hundreds upon hundreds of affiliates all spamming the same site which, in the end, did not actually have the infamous video. Today, there are much fewer such links.
Similarly, searching on an obscure actor would return hundreds of sites all wanting to sell you posters, DVDs and videos of the movie they had their bit parts in, but little actual information.
That is a good example of information pollution, a term I heard first from Earthlink.
It is the result of affiliation, combined with legions of small-time marketers who all think their affiliate page should be number one in a category. Using the services of firms like Web
Position Gold, many succeeded, pushing relevant results off the first ten pages.
Also, Amazon and Ebay have seized most of the keywords, which Google is slowly forcing off onto the paid listings.
I had actually quit Google and went over to MSN, as it had received much less attention by the page spammers and was able to return much more relevant results. But I prefer to browse using an early version of Netscape and for some reason doesn't load MSN well at all.
Google looks a lot cleaner, but spammers still seem to be trying their tricks. For instance, Google cleaned up that meta-refresh fault which would index the text full of keywords and ship you off to the spammed site once you went for it.
But spammers have come back with a javascript substitute that does the same thing.
I can see your point from that perspective. Guys who challenge/response everyone are definitely overdoing it, though it is easy to see why they make that mistake. It is similar to people who get telemarketed to so much that they refuse to answer the phone directly and instead let a machine take all their calls...
People usually call or email because they want something. Some people won't leave a message, because they don';t want their wants known. Others won't talk to a machine, but either way they don't get what they want.
As a matter of policy, I do not respond to whitelisting requests because the sender of the whitelisting request has already accused, with zero basis in fact, of being a spammer...
If you got a whitelisting request from him, it would have been because your message looks like spam. That is not a zero basis in fact from his perspective.
In fact it would be because you did something in your email to total a high bayesian filtering score.
As the sender *I* would not be insulted if that were to happen. In fact, it would be great to know that the mail I send is not being silently trashed. How unimportant is your message that the perceived insult is of greater importance?
I always wonder these days whether a mail got through, when it is not answered. I find I end up on the phone more often than not, because mail is no longer a reliable method of communication due to spam.
If you continue to get a lot of whitelist requests after such a system is implemented, it would behoove you to make your mail look less like spam. For instance, not using Base-64 encoding, or sending purely HTML mail, or including trademarked names of pharmaceuticals, or including random strings of characters, linking to spam domains, putting lookalike accented characters or too much punctuation in the subject line, or cc'ing or bcc'ing everyone in your mail.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I have already exercised my rights as granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office several times against individuals who decided that including one or more of my registered trademarks in their search-and-redirect "doorway" pages is the key to greater Internet sales.
I understand why they do it (usually they want to incorporate the Top 1000 Search Terms in a doorway page to their paysite, or the paysite they are financially affiliated with, that likely has no relation to few if any of those terms).
A law already exists and take my word for it, if you or any other party dare use my registered trademarks in your porno spam redirect pages we will be seeing each other in court.
Part of the reason is that trademarks must be actively defended to remain in effect, and part of it is the fun of the whole thing.
However, people who do not have the time and or money to register their trademarks do not have this option. A public person who finds his/her name being used to sell prurient matter has a defamation case, but it is likely that by the time a person is public, there would be too many such pages to attack.
I would advocate a law prohibiting unrelated terms and names in redirect marketing (doorway) pages, with violations incurring (and you'll like this) civil, not criminal penalties.
If this is "destroying the web," what would you call in-your face marketing, spam, porno, blind links, trick pages, circular searching, popups, consoles, spyware, and browser hijacking that is the daily Web experience? Already the web is getting quite close to useless, and it would be a good time to discuss how to clean it up.
One day when you ego search on "addaon" and come up with beastie porn maybe you'll see his point.
For now be thankful you don't have a popular name or site (yet).
What I do now is use SpamPal (it's open-source) and use SpamKiller to delete anything with **SPAM** in the subject line. Setup SpamKiller to use SpamPal as your email client.
This setup slaughters spam. I think I've seen three spams in the last week with no false positives. My email is all over the web so I was receiving 200+ spams and infected mails a day.
SpamPal is a generic anti-spam prog which filters on regular expressions and can be set up to use plug-ins, including RBLs. Most of the issues I noted above with Spam Killer have been addressed already by others with SpamPal.
It does regulate spam. It legalized it.
Spam is now legal insofar as the spammer includes adv: and a working email address (doesn't even have to check it).
Working state laws have been pre-empted. Many victims of spammers in Michigan and California received judgments, but no longer. Those judgments kept spammers on the run, making them hide their money in offshore accounts and keeping their apparent net worth=0 (excepting Ralsky).
Since spam benefits American companies owned by American citizens, real anti-spam legislation would have included sanctions against the beneficiaries of spam, including double penalties for income tax evasion and money laundering.
True, but won't help this guy if the spammer is attaching.
I haven't seen this type of spam, but if it is happening, the spammers must have access to monstrous amounts of bandwidth, and be damned to clogged routers and mailservers.
He would only need to send 10 million spams to use up a terabyte of his own bandwidth. (Spam runs typically number 100 million or so).
From what I understand, a spammer selling, for instance, penis enlargement pills will sell three or four bottles from a spam run of 100 million spams. Let's say he makes $200 and assume it is pure profit (it is).
Let's further assume of the 100 million spams, 10 million made it to the Microsoft Outlook Inboxes of unique users. Let's say that each spam took 5 seconds to delete. If their time is worth $10/hour (assume half the victims are kids students etc, and half are professionals) the spammer cost them $100,000 of their time to make his lousy $200.
This does not take into account higher ISP fees, anti-spam program costs, credit card back charges, loss of business from lost legit emails, and the terabytes of wasted bandwidth for each and every spam run.
Spammers are conscious of this and their continuing to do it is an indication of sociopathic behavior.
I shoot professionally with both types of cards. The CF beats the microdrive, especially when reactivating the camera from a period of inactivity (the hard drive has to spin up). The time lag is about a second longer at spin-up and that has often cost me a shot.
OTOH CF cards die regularly and often, but my three 1gig microdrives have been in continuous, hard use in a since early 2001. They have outlasted two Nikon D1s and a Canon 1D. Interestingly, I thought one died, but it quit working in the Canon 1D, my main camera. It still works in other models of camera and the computer. It is probably on the way out, but I will wait to April to retire it when the Mark II comes out necessitating a move to 2gig units. Others have different opinions of Microdrive durability, but that is my experience.
Sony doesn't have progressive scan CCDs. Of course, even as I say that, Canon is phasing it out. It was the thing they called digital motor drive. Sony's lenses are nice, but the Canon's is a more modern design than the Zeiss. I favor their Elura line, the 20MC is the most recent with progressive scan. Maybe $300 used on Ebay, so you don't have to worry as much when you leave it en prise in your hotel room. They are smaller than the Sony DCR-PC* series. Any of these you can stick in your pocket and the image quality is fantastic.
Interestingly, SCO.com came up instantly when typed directly into another browser (Netscape if it makes a difference). Clicking the link in the submission produces an error -- probably sco is blocking access based on the referrer.
After reading this you will probably want to start hanging onto those faxes.
I hope she's ready for a lawsuit from SCO demanding damages for underperformance, breach of contract, litigous libel, slander, unintentional infliction of emotional distress... etc... etc...
Lookup vx2.betterinternet
I had to pull it off my dad's computer. Adaware missed it. Spybot S&D found it but wouldn't remove it. Manual removal resulted in it reinstalling itself, a different version. It, alone had seven concurrent parasite processes. It, alone caused his 450mhz windows98 system to grind to a crawl. The only way to remove it is to exit to dos, remove the file and hack the registry (for some reason it leaves two windows taskbars).
That's the crappiest one I found so far. By itself it qualifies as an epidemic.
He is in the sweet spot -- the time where his new-ish machine is obsolete, but not enough have died yet for their parts to become available on ebay. If he waits a couple of months, the parts should start to become available.
The problem with ebay is that all the electronics sellers have decided that $10 is the minimum shipping charge, even on a small part. I had a guy charge me that for an LCD inverter (weight: less than 1 ounce) and mail it to me unprotected in an envelope 1st class ($0.37 stamp).
If the part prices are truly a problem, he can desktopify the laptop and get another, they are cheap these days. I did that with a Thinkpad T23 with broken LCD -- it is now a firewall/spam filter left on 24/7.
Money is being made off (as opposed to with) Microsoft. Tons of it.
This kind of talk epitomizes the hubris of mankind. Our indirect industrial activity and driving SUVs is now being likened to mass extinctions of the end-Triassic or K-T variety. If repeated strikes of kilometer-wide asteroids couldn't "stress it past the ability to recover," why do you think our industrial activity will? Why do you want to think that?
Are you suggesting, as many in academe and the Third World who wish an inversion of the social order, that we return to a 16th century lifestyle, including population reduction?
The fact is, periods of global warming have happened in the past, in the absence of industrialized civilization, indeed, in the absence of man himself. Who was to blame for those? Or what is to blame? I say blame need not be assigned; it is the course of nature.
The fact is, climactic changes over the course of centuries is normal and to be expected. These variations, over time scales greater than our lifetimes, are perfectly normal. One of the things that drives be bonkers is this sudden insistence of normalcy at the scientific level. Watch the weather on TV the next time it rains. The meteorologist will say how much precip the storm has brought, and then inevitably state how much yearly rain shortfall/excess over normal there has been -- as if it has to be exactly on the expected totals every day of the year. In places with a rainy and dry season, there may be two days per year where the yearly rainfall accumulation total agrees with the expected accumulation - on a perfectly normal year.
It is my opinion that global warming is simply another tactic, like political correctness, to induce guilt in western thinking.
Well shit, you missed out on the best part. On the next page it asks for your social security number, ATM PIN, and mothers maiden name.
That is interesting because it parallels the conversation I had with others while I was waiting for the clerk to bring out the drive from the back.
One swore never to use WDs. Another swore never to use Maxtors. Another swore never to use Seagates "And they're noisy!" And I personally will never use IBM Deskstars (I think they don't make them anymore, I wonder why).
In my personal experience, the IBMs fail with regularity. OTOH I have several old working WD's in my parts box, going back to 400MB that never failed. I have had several IBM Deskstars fail in normal operation, as well as quite a few Travelstars. The only good thing about those IBM failures is that they take a long time dying -- i.e. no motor failures or headcrashes. They seem to be flaky, I got my data off. IBM does make good when you RMA them, but they take so long, by the time you get the new drive it is obsolete.
I went to Toshibas for laptops, but then my dad got a new HP laptop for Christmas and its Toshiba hard drive seized within the first week. At least he didn't have time to store any significant amount of data on it.
So far I've had good luck with WD's. I went for the identical drive in case I wanted to raid it someday.
Fry's stocks the loss leaders throughout the day. It pays to ask a clerk if there are more in the back (using the tone of voice that you KNOW there are more). Last week they had 250gb WD drives on sale for $149 after rebate ($219 OTD). Of course the shelf was empty when I got there. I asked the clerk and hung out 20 minutes, until he brought out four more from the back (spying the screen, I saw they had 140 units on hand).
After burn-in (do NOT cut out the UPC for rebate until after burn in) I realized I had no way to back up a drive this size. So two days later I went back and got another, using the above process.
I built a site for a client and deliberately left off his email in the contact page. He insisted I put it in and eventually I gave in, after explaining the hazards of doing so.
In compromise, I put it in as a non-clickable graphic. Within a week he was getting seven spams a day.
BTW, if you're going to try to get hired (I know you're joking) don't use email to send your resume. For business purposes, email is broken.
Yenc is a joke. It, and years ago, Base-64 were merely attempts by Usenet users to lose AOLers (me-too'ers) and more recently Outlook users by obsoleting their client software.
Of course, eventually their software gets updated and they come back. In the meantime Usenet is filled with their complaints and the attendant responses from the Usenet intelligentia, who daily demonstrate their superiority by instructing them to "Get a Real Newsreader (tm)."
They won't, and after their software updates things will quiet down. But in two or three years another new eocoding scheme will take off like wildfire. Not because it is better, or more efficient. But because it will allow the longtime Usenet users to temporarily lose the AOLers and Outlook users again.
I remember the anti Base64 arguments back when that came out and they were exactly the same as the anti-Yenc complaints currently being heard on Usenet.
Just to stay on topic, this counts as Internet Pollution (R) because many posters try to make everybody happy by reposting the same files in Base64, thus more than doubling the bandwidth in some binary newsgroups.
Thanks for the tip on the NNTP servers. I'll check it out.
I have 3.04 installed on several computers, but I fear it is slowly getting obsoleted.
I actually used the mail feature in Netscape 3.04 until I recently switched servers. For some reason nothing I do will make the new POP server accept the mail password if it sent from Netscape. If it comes from Outbreak Express or my spam filter program it takes it just fine. Weird. Similarly, I used to use the news feature but it doesn't do Yenc which seems to be the method of encoding binaries currently in style.
I use 3.04 non-gold with java and js turned off, images on. It worked pretty well until last year... now a lot of sites seem to be IE-only. Even some Ebay sellers (who you would think want everyone possible to be able to see their ad) make that mistake.
When forced off Netscape, I use IE 6 with Popup Cop ( a shareware prog) blocking all the webcrap. IE really sucks though -- why oh why does it keep so much default cache (2 gig on my machine). If you run IE, try PurgeIE (another shareware prog) after emptying temporary internet files to see how many files it loses track of. Speaking of IE shareware, why is IE free but to safely run it you need $100 of shareware. And when it loads up, you cannot save pictures as anything but untitled bitmaps. The only thing it does better is save login credentials (and even that is not so smart, considering how easy it is to pull out those masked passwords out of IE - NEVER save Paypal and banking passwords in IE).
Netscape seems to run just fine with 15mb cache and is immune to flash, java tricks and lame DHTML bullshit.
I empathize with your hijack experience. I have to regularly patrol google for webmasters who use *my* names on their previously-mentioned keyword page / meta-refresh trick. Apparently they find out the top web searches, then create and upload keyword pages containing those terms, which try to redirect you to their lame site. Usually one email is enough to make him knock it off (if he is even still there), but sooner or later another pops up.
Something makes me think they are buying from some spammer selling $59 "businesses" who tells them this is the way to make quick money. When they actually try it, they get their asses handed to them by the trademark owners.
For example, searching on Paris Hilton after her little slip-up returned hundreds upon hundreds of affiliates all spamming the same site which, in the end, did not actually have the infamous video. Today, there are much fewer such links.
Similarly, searching on an obscure actor would return hundreds of sites all wanting to sell you posters, DVDs and videos of the movie they had their bit parts in, but little actual information.
That is a good example of information pollution, a term I heard first from Earthlink.
It is the result of affiliation, combined with legions of small-time marketers who all think their affiliate page should be number one in a category. Using the services of firms like Web Position Gold, many succeeded, pushing relevant results off the first ten pages.
Also, Amazon and Ebay have seized most of the keywords, which Google is slowly forcing off onto the paid listings.
I had actually quit Google and went over to MSN, as it had received much less attention by the page spammers and was able to return much more relevant results. But I prefer to browse using an early version of Netscape and for some reason doesn't load MSN well at all.
Google looks a lot cleaner, but spammers still seem to be trying their tricks. For instance, Google cleaned up that meta-refresh fault which would index the text full of keywords and ship you off to the spammed site once you went for it.
But spammers have come back with a javascript substitute that does the same thing.
People usually call or email because they want something. Some people won't leave a message, because they don';t want their wants known. Others won't talk to a machine, but either way they don't get what they want.
As a matter of policy, I do not respond to whitelisting requests because the sender of the whitelisting request has already accused, with zero basis in fact, of being a spammer...
If you got a whitelisting request from him, it would have been because your message looks like spam. That is not a zero basis in fact from his perspective.
In fact it would be because you did something in your email to total a high bayesian filtering score.
As the sender *I* would not be insulted if that were to happen. In fact, it would be great to know that the mail I send is not being silently trashed. How unimportant is your message that the perceived insult is of greater importance?
I always wonder these days whether a mail got through, when it is not answered. I find I end up on the phone more often than not, because mail is no longer a reliable method of communication due to spam.
If you continue to get a lot of whitelist requests after such a system is implemented, it would behoove you to make your mail look less like spam. For instance, not using Base-64 encoding, or sending purely HTML mail, or including trademarked names of pharmaceuticals, or including random strings of characters, linking to spam domains, putting lookalike accented characters or too much punctuation in the subject line, or cc'ing or bcc'ing everyone in your mail.