This eliminates most of the trickery, but not necessarily all of it--I worked for a major electronics maker. During "model change season", management would add extra inspections. The best went into newly-released model numbers, while marginal would be diverted to the last runs of old models or to later runs of new. They even told us that it was because the first batch of new models was critical because that's where the reviewers got their product.
If broadband ISP's would stop effectively discouraging firewalls...First step in tech support is "turn off your firewall...And if it's an email problem, install Outlook Express, then we'll help you"
Hmmm...maybe the hacker/spammers have infiltrated the ISP helpdesk...
An ISP needs legit customers. I'd be amazed if there are enough spammers to pay the overhead at an ISP. If an ISP has nothing but spammers, they will absolutely be blacklisted and manually blocked. They will have a hard time getting bandwidth--They need at least plausable deniability.
If they have spammers, they need people to say "Don't punish me because my ISP supports spammers! Wah!"
I use tagging, but there are still a couple of problems with it. One is that if you don't preemptively expire tags, you wind up with more spam, as spammers will send to somebody+tagFOO@example.org, somebody+tagBAR@example.org, etc. It also adds to the undeliverables for your ISP--My ISP gets lots of mail to tagFOO@example.org.
The more serious problem is that I want to get responses to Usenet, and not just from technially adept people. I was recently shovelling out an old account that I've essentially abandoned, and found a response to a years-old usenet post. Based on that I had a good conversation with the responder, and wound up selling him stuff. Wouldn't have happened if it had been to an expired tagged address.
Funny that they use Wabash Indiana in an article about overly-lighted cities. When I lived there, it was just about the darkest town I'd been in--I think they used a single 40 watt bulb per block.
The checks and balances are that if the list is too aggressive and arbitrary, few will use it. If there were some sort of official process to prevent a blacklist entry the spammers and their ISP's would learn to use the process to their advantage. The point of most blacklists isn't to block individual spam, it is to pressure the big guys into doing the right thing. In your case, you should find a spam-free host for outgoing mail, if not for all connectivity.
Similar stories about Vegas machines have said that the odds of winning are monitiored, accurate and regulated. The odds of almost winning are heavily skewed in favor of the player, and have nothing to do with actual odds.
For personal use and up to mid-sized delivery, the highway system is the best choice. For really large jobs, although it is possible to use the highway system, trains make more sense.
One of these tasks is transporting new automobiles...
Exactly the opposite for me--I've seen enough of Linux that I'm pretty sure I'd be happy with it, but every install I've tried has had a different problem that has discouraged me from switching. A pre-configured Linux system will let me figure Linux out at the luser level first, and I'll be reasonably confident that the problems I'm having are mine, and not driver or configuration issues. $200 is a fairly low price for that, considering that in most respects it will be a significant upgrade from my current box.
Using SPEWS should be decided both on technical and ethical merits. Blocking the exact spam sources is the technical reason. Putting pressure on ISP's that refuse to cancel spammers is the ethical reason. Unless hosting spammers can affect legitimate customers, there is little incentive for a greedy provider to do the right thing.
Also--SPEWS evidence files are not all-inclusive. They say what got the provider in, but not necessarily what's keeping them in. A few providers are in the habit of moving spammers rather than deleting them, or of deleting spammer accounts slowly enough that the spammer still gets full benefit. In these cases, the newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email is a good resource--Someone there will give verifiable facts about what's keeping a SPEWS listing active.
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This eliminates most of the trickery, but not necessarily all of it--I worked for a major electronics maker. During "model change season", management would add extra inspections. The best went into newly-released model numbers, while marginal would be diverted to the last runs of old models or to later runs of new. They even told us that it was because the first batch of new models was critical because that's where the reviewers got their product.
If broadband ISP's would stop effectively discouraging firewalls...First step in tech support is "turn off your firewall...And if it's an email problem, install Outlook Express, then we'll help you"
Hmmm...maybe the hacker/spammers have infiltrated the ISP helpdesk...
Depends on WHICH version of the article you read. The first link (PBS) has an article, but with the phrase
"conducted them using direct e-mail (yes, spam)".
The second nearly identical article (inc.com) says
"I had an opt-in e-mail list of 7,500 names"
Unless he's using the spammer's definition of opt-in, there is a significant difference in these articles.
Napster is shut down, so the threat of peer to peer filesharing is over.
An ISP needs legit customers. I'd be amazed if there are enough spammers to pay the overhead at an ISP. If an ISP has nothing but spammers, they will absolutely be blacklisted and manually blocked. They will have a hard time getting bandwidth--They need at least plausable deniability.
If they have spammers, they need people to say "Don't punish me because my ISP supports spammers! Wah!"
I use tagging, but there are still a couple of problems with it. One is that if you don't preemptively expire tags, you wind up with more spam, as spammers will send to somebody+tagFOO@example.org, somebody+tagBAR@example.org, etc. It also adds to the undeliverables for your ISP--My ISP gets lots of mail to tagFOO@example.org.
The more serious problem is that I want to get responses to Usenet, and not just from technially adept people. I was recently shovelling out an old account that I've essentially abandoned, and found a response to a years-old usenet post. Based on that I had a good conversation with the responder, and wound up selling him stuff. Wouldn't have happened if it had been to an expired tagged address.
Funny that they use Wabash Indiana in an article about overly-lighted cities. When I lived there, it was just about the darkest town I'd been in--I think they used a single 40 watt bulb per block.
The checks and balances are that if the list is too aggressive and arbitrary, few will use it. If there were some sort of official process to prevent a blacklist entry the spammers and their ISP's would learn to use the process to their advantage. The point of most blacklists isn't to block individual spam, it is to pressure the big guys into doing the right thing.
In your case, you should find a spam-free host for outgoing mail, if not for all connectivity.
Similar stories about Vegas machines have said that the odds of winning are monitiored, accurate and regulated. The odds of almost winning are heavily skewed in favor of the player, and have nothing to do with actual odds.
For personal use and up to mid-sized delivery, the highway system is the best choice. For really large jobs, although it is possible to use the highway system, trains make more sense.
One of these tasks is transporting new automobiles...
Exactly the opposite for me--I've seen enough of Linux that I'm pretty sure I'd be happy with it, but every install I've tried has had a different problem that has discouraged me from switching. A pre-configured Linux system will let me figure Linux out at the luser level first, and I'll be reasonably confident that the problems I'm having are mine, and not driver or configuration issues. $200 is a fairly low price for that, considering that in most respects it will be a significant upgrade from my current box.
Using SPEWS should be decided both on technical and ethical merits. Blocking the exact spam sources is the technical reason. Putting pressure on ISP's that refuse to cancel spammers is the ethical reason. Unless hosting spammers can affect legitimate customers, there is little incentive for a greedy provider to do the right thing.
Also--SPEWS evidence files are not all-inclusive. They say what got the provider in, but not necessarily what's keeping them in. A few providers are in the habit of moving spammers rather than deleting them, or of deleting spammer accounts slowly enough that the spammer still gets full benefit. In these cases, the newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email is a good resource--Someone there will give verifiable facts about what's keeping a SPEWS listing active.