My spam has been going up over the years, using the same email for 5+ years, seems to do it. And Im a busy Internet poster, and active on mailing lists and online BBS boards, so it compounds matters.
I've had my email address for a while, but what I do is, once in a while, I go on a hunt-and-kill binge.
I've stopped trying to track down where spams are coming from. I just follow the links to the web sites that they link to and contact the ISP to have them shut down. After each hunt-and-kill binge, my spam seems to quiet down quite nicely.
Spam sources are a bitch to track down, and a dime-a-dozen. On the other hand, spammers need consumers to be able to contact them, and web sites take some work to set up. If you shut down their web sites, it actually costs them money.
There's nothing about creating anti-spam laws. It's about prosecuting someone under existing fraud and consumer protection laws.
I think that this is very good. and it sets a good precident. We don't need more laws to control the garbage that goes on on the internet. We simply need
more inventive ways of enforcing the laws that already exist.
Monsterhut should not only be sued for misrepresenting customer consent to recieve the emails -- they should also be sued for misrepresenting where their email came from. Fraudulent headers are just that -- fraudulent. They should be attacked in the same lawsuit, and also prohibited.
Bwaha! There we go.. Time for a class-action lawsuit..
Of course, you'd have to lock down the full text of the email so that you could get the headers to locate the spammers..
TO do that, you'd have to supoena the Phone company.. If you could figure out if the spammers were all the same people, you might be able to get the phone company as a third party (they have LOTS of money to suck in..)
Add in punitive damages, and you've got a real nice class-action suit.
The infomercials about growing your penis are paid for by the advertisers. It also doesn't cost you anything to receive them. -- and you can program your TIvo to skip over them late at night (when most of them are on).
I have no problem with the infomercials, because they don't pretend to be anything else, and they don't fill up my mailbox, and they don't cost me more than the cost the person who paid to put them on the TV station.
Besides, if you actually sit up at 5AM watching one of those things, then you obviously don't have anything better to do, so they're providing you a service.. (at the very least, they're helping to pay the TV station for the costs of broadcasting 'buffy'.)
First of all, what would be wanted is not to back up the DVD. 'Backing up' a dvd is seen by many as euphamism for 'pirating'. Don't shoot your self in the foot by using that phrase.
The DMCA makes it illegal for you tor RECOVER a damaged DVD using any but the most primative methods.
That's more of a catcher than 'backing up' a DVD. Few people would see fit to 'back up' a perfectly good DVD, but many people might get raised hackles at the prospect of being legally prevented from recovering a damaged one.
I would also suggest a more direct question.
The question that I would ask would be more along the lines of:
The DMCA has severely limited consumer rights, and the Hollings bill (CBPTBPA, or whatever) threatens to almost completely
gut consumer rights.
Do you intend to vote for, or against Hollings' bill -- and what would your justification be for that vote?
The problem with leaktest is that it shows possible problems.. not real ones.
If you really want to pursue this, try using ethereal and watch the net...
a thirty-60 second snip will probably give a nice slice of viral life (if there is any).
Check at a couple of odd times (especially late at night, early morning).
If this MCNE is as bad as your story makes her out to be, chances are that you've been trojaned up the butt. Doing the Cover Your Ass dance sounds like a good idea too, since that one would be seen as doing your job -- as opposed to the MCNE's job.
Just for the fun of it, see if you can mount the unprotectes work file systems from home. Your ISP may have blocked that port at their boundary -- but who knows.
______________
The best approach (if you can pull it off, having already gone over her head), might be to go quietly offer to help the MCNA. If you can make her receptive to some support, she may be willing to work on problems that she probably doesn't have the solutions to at the moment. I doubt that she's negligent... More likely, the MCNA doesn't actually teach you how to secure networks in a real environment..:-{
If you (re)read the original article, the person 'responsible' for (not)maintining the network is identified an MCNE. The grandparent post is where the mis-identification as an MCSE occurred.
That having been said, the problem may still lie in her training as an MCNE. A friend of mine who did the A+ certification said that much of it is about how to calm down users when things blow up. It seems to me that she learned that part of her training pretty well. :-(
I would suggest a combination of crypto card AND password to authenticate someone signing contracts, etc. That would make it harder (not impossible, but harder) for someone unauthorized to start signing off on (say) multi-million dollar contracts to clean one window.
That having been said, the human factor is almost always the weakest link in any well-designed security system. Train, train, train --- and then have an occasional check to make sure that people don't still do silly stuff in spite of their training. (like giving their password to 'Mike from the security team', or writing it on their card).
If so, you have to release the source for the modifications. However, you dont have all the source, since the ADO headers from MS link to compiled binary code. Now you have a bit of a jam, as I see it.
I don't think this is a big issue. All you need is the scripts needed to compile your code down to binaries. If the MS code that compiles itself
in is generated automatically by the standard scripts that come with the
compiler and that you generated, then there's nothing wrong with
deleting the MS code, and letting the compiler scripts regenerate them at the other end.
In that respect, the MS code, wold be something similar to an intermediate
piece of object code (it doesn't need to be distributed to allow the
re=creation of the object code).
what I find more interesting about that paragraph is this:
To that end, the Defense Department is now prohibited from purchasing any software that has not undergone security testing by the NSA.
Note that he said "tested". He did not say 'had passed testing by the NSA'. This means that MS software might be tested by the NSA, found to be a cyber-terrorist's wet dream and because it had miserably failed testing by the NSA would be purchasable by the Pentagon.
(you might consider that absurd until you've seen some of the submissions made to the courts by Microsoft's lawyers)
It's quite possible to purchase 'free' software. The difference between free software and proprietary software (like MS Windows) is that having 'purchased' the software, you are free to modify and redistribute (even resell) it, yourself.
People will often 'purchase' free software because they wish to support the work
of those who are supporting it, or because they wish to access support or other special packages that the seller makes available with a purchase.
Some companies purchase 'free' software because it makes the accounting
department happier.
I remember having access to a password list for a couple of thousand
users (decrypted). From the glance I got, probably 5-10% of the people had a password of 'password'.
The second paragraph really deserves to be included:
Through it's own use of the evidence, Microsoft essentially admits
that these terms refer to the genus of computer software products
that have windowing capability. Just as with "light beer", and
"matchbox toys", it logically follows that the use of "windows",
"window" and "windowing" is also generic when used to refer to the
same class of products.
I think that they pretty much shot themselves in the foot on this one...
I'm the child of a mixed race marriage. On that basis my very existence is
anthema to their attitude.
Nontheless, I'm not willing to ban them because they're NAZIs. I'm willing to ban, as Canada does, the promotion of hatred and violence against people, and
I'm willing to accept if that bans aspects of what the NAZIs or neo NAZIs do.
I will not, however, ban them by name.
I would much rather see things like the French people rising into the streets to extort their countrymen to vote against people like Lepen. This means that
they are active in the protection of their own freedom, and the freedom of the
people around them. This leaves me feeling far more safe than the German rules
that are at the whim of a government to create and destroy -- whether or not
the people of Germany agree with it.
Rules restricting freedom to protect the people from 'nasty people' is the
first step that the NAZIs used to turn the Republic into the Reich.
Laws don't protect freedoms.
Governments don't protect freedoms
People protect freedoms. People who are willing to fight to
protect those freedoms
On September 11, three airplains were slammed into American landmarks while their passengers used their cell phones and air phones to call for help.
Passengers of the fourth airplane finally got the message. "Don't wait for the cavalry. They can't reach 10,000 feet."
Those passengers died fighting to get control back from the hijackers. If they hadn't been shot down, they might have even made it home alive. yes, I believe -- based on the original news reports -- that they were shot down,.
I'm not going to criticize the decision made to do that. It should be noted, however, that 'the cavalry' really only had two choices: Shoot them down, or let them fly closer to their destination. The only real question was timing.
Since then, the flying public has learned one lesson. We are responsible for our own safety and freedom. There is no superhero coming to our rescue.
Unfortunately, most of us still think that that
rule only applies in the air. I believe that it applies everywhere and eveywhen.
The NAZIs destroyed libery in the name of protecting the German people
from the enemy. Back then, the enemy was Jews. These days, some people consider NAZIs to be the enemy against whom it is OK to
surrender our liberties.
Those Jews
who survived the holocaust learned from their experience -- but only in relation to themeselves.
(When dealing with other minorities (palestinians) they have, unfortunately,
learned the lessons more directly from their former oppressors )
These days, Jews are not a valid scapegoat for our
freedoms so the true neo-nazis will need to find a different scapegoat.
The current 'anti-imigration' stuff of the far-right is one possible approach,
but more sophisticated neo-NAZIs might choose more palpable targets, like neo-NAZIs, hackers or terrorists -- and use the blatent neo-nazis as decoys to draw fire.
For me, the enemy is not in the name. It is by their actions that I judge people by, and that is how I will decide to either support them, or fight
them.
Pick a name -- any name, and I will defend your freedoms -- but
if you attack my liberty, I reserve the right to fight back.
"It's against that backdrop that the PUC staff -- the only players in the room without their own chips in the game -- have adopted the position that Munoz hasn't proven his case," yet . . . . the PUC staff is recommending that the commission open a new investigatory docket to explore Sprint's security issues, and to force the company to undergo security audits,"
This is a standard bureaucratic coverup. "There's no problem here, but we're taking steps to solve the problem that we're sure doesn't exist in spite of the evidence to the contrary".
To admit that Ruebel is correct, the commission would have to admit that they were asleep at the switch (excuse the pun). It's far more politically prudent for them to belittle pooh pooh, and nay-say him, while at the same time, responding (or appearing to respond) to the publicity around his complaints.
In the meantime, Ruebel spends years of his life proving that Organized Crime (of some sort) is messing with the LA phone system but gets no compensation for his work, or his lost 'business' (I have a bit less sympathy for the latter).
I don't think that Ford did anything illegal. If anybody did anything illegal it would be the credit reporting companies that allow any company or group with enough money to generate identity theft kits with just a victim^w customer's home address.
When these people got Ford's 'access codes' they essentially got their ID within the credit bureau. The credit bureaus trusted that Ford was 'honest' with their credit requests -- not asking for any sort of proof that the people for whom the credit reports were being requested had given their assent to have that data released.
As a result. these script kiddies^w^w^w Ford was able to get identity theft kits on a truckload of (mostly) rich people just based on their home addresses.
If anything is going to put a big "oomph" behind online privacy initiatives in the states, I think that this may be it.
Palpatine is a dictator--but a relatively benign one, like Pinochet. It's a dictatorship people can do business with.
I heard rumors that, before submitting this article, the author made inquiries
with NASA about obtaining some of those bricks that they use to shield the
shuttle on re-entry.
For those of you who don't read outside of the tech/SF industries, Pinochet made
the news, not too long ago when spain had Britain arrest him for the kidnapping,
torture and murder of Spanish nationals in Chile after his
'benign'
rise to power, where he bombed the presidential pallace. After the death of Chile's
elected president, he hunted down the supporters of the
elected government, arresting, torturing and/or killing them ('disappearing').
If that's what he calls benign, I'd hate to see what he calls 'nasty'. It's
not exageration to say that Pinochet's CIA-supported regime probably has more
blood on his hands than AL Quaida (which also had CIA support).
And, as for Palpatine's lament that " "the bureaucrats are in charge now." He was in
the middle of an attempt to (successfully) manipulate Padme into making
a move that would give him the chancelorship (and eventual emperorship) of the
republic.
I note that the people who are berating the research are using two different approaches to the burden of proof:
Any indication, whatsoever, that the research may not be 100% accurate is proof positive that it is fatally flawed, and should be acted upon as such.
Any claim that their sponsors' work is non-benevolent should not be acted upon until it is proven to the n'th sigma of probability.
That having been said, I note that CIMMYT, which found 12-35% contamination of wild corn, found (near) zero contamination of samples which had been kept isolated for a number of years. this points away from the probability of systemic error in their lab methods.
also: If PCR was so flawed as to regularly give a 30% false positve rate, I expect that it would have been abandoned years ago. That it is still used more than a decade after it had been invented is an indication that it is more reliable than not.
Cats that learn to meow in like human babies cry get human adult attention -- as such, they are more likely to get food and other assistance. This makes them more likely to survive.
Cats that can't meow human-like don't get the resulting survival benefits.
Cats that genetically tend to meow in a human-like way are much more likely to 'learn' that this kind of meow gets them what they want.
Even if there is a learned response element, it can still be an evolutionary driving force.
This leads me to an ineresting speculation: Psych labs that have been running rats in mazes for the last 20 years may have accidently bred a maze-running strain of rat. The question might make for an interesting psychology/genetics experiment one day.
Slashdot Mirror
I've had my email address for a while, but what I do is, once in a while, I go on a hunt-and-kill binge.
I've stopped trying to track down where spams are coming from. I just follow the links to the web sites that they link to and contact the ISP to have them shut down. After each hunt-and-kill binge, my spam seems to quiet down quite nicely.
Spam sources are a bitch to track down, and a dime-a-dozen. On the other hand, spammers need consumers to be able to contact them, and web sites take some work to set up. If you shut down their web sites, it actually costs them money.
I think that this is very good. and it sets a good precident. We don't need more laws to control the garbage that goes on on the internet. We simply need more inventive ways of enforcing the laws that already exist.
Monsterhut should not only be sued for misrepresenting customer consent to recieve the emails -- they should also be sued for misrepresenting where their email came from. Fraudulent headers are just that -- fraudulent. They should be attacked in the same lawsuit, and also prohibited.
Of course, you'd have to lock down the full text of the email so that you could get the headers to locate the spammers..
TO do that, you'd have to supoena the Phone company .. If you could figure out if the spammers were all the same people, you might be able to get the phone company as a third party (they have LOTS of money to suck in..)
Add in punitive damages, and you've got a real nice class-action suit.
I have no problem with the infomercials, because they don't pretend to be anything else, and they don't fill up my mailbox, and they don't cost me more than the cost the person who paid to put them on the TV station.
Besides, if you actually sit up at 5AM watching one of those things, then you obviously don't have anything better to do, so they're providing you a service .. (at the very least, they're helping to pay the TV station for the costs of broadcasting 'buffy'.)
The DMCA makes it illegal for you tor RECOVER a damaged DVD using any but the most primative methods. That's more of a catcher than 'backing up' a DVD. Few people would see fit to 'back up' a perfectly good DVD, but many people might get raised hackles at the prospect of being legally prevented from recovering a damaged one.
I would also suggest a more direct question. The question that I would ask would be more along the lines of:
If you really want to pursue this, try using ethereal and watch the net... a thirty-60 second snip will probably give a nice slice of viral life (if there is any).
Look for things like:
- Port 1443 scans (the recent MS worm),
- lot's of Nimda-type HTTP requests ( GET
/scripts , GET /c/winnt, get /_mem_bin )
- other wierd activity
Check at a couple of odd times (especially late at night, early morning).If this MCNE is as bad as your story makes her out to be, chances are that you've been trojaned up the butt. Doing the Cover Your Ass dance sounds like a good idea too, since that one would be seen as doing your job -- as opposed to the MCNE's job.
Just for the fun of it, see if you can mount the unprotectes work file systems from home. Your ISP may have blocked that port at their boundary -- but who knows.
______________
The best approach (if you can pull it off, having already gone over her head), might be to go quietly offer to help the MCNA. If you can make her receptive to some support, she may be willing to work on problems that she probably doesn't have the solutions to at the moment. I doubt that she's negligent... More likely, the MCNA doesn't actually teach you how to secure networks in a real environment .. :-{
That having been said, the problem may still lie in her training as an MCNE. A friend of mine who did the A+ certification said that much of it is about how to calm down users when things blow up. It seems to me that she learned that part of her training pretty well.
:-(
That having been said, the human factor is almost always the weakest link in any well-designed security system. Train, train, train --- and then have an occasional check to make sure that people don't still do silly stuff in spite of their training. (like giving their password to 'Mike from the security team', or writing it on their card).
One nice thing about APL is that a piece of tight APL code is equally incomprehensible in any human language.
I don't think this is a big issue. All you need is the scripts needed to compile your code down to binaries. If the MS code that compiles itself in is generated automatically by the standard scripts that come with the compiler and that you generated, then there's nothing wrong with deleting the MS code, and letting the compiler scripts regenerate them at the other end.
In that respect, the MS code, wold be something similar to an intermediate piece of object code (it doesn't need to be distributed to allow the re=creation of the object code).
(you might consider that absurd until you've seen some of the submissions made to the courts by Microsoft's lawyers)
People will often 'purchase' free software because they wish to support the work of those who are supporting it, or because they wish to access support or other special packages that the seller makes available with a purchase.
Some companies purchase 'free' software because it makes the accounting department happier.
Let the Copyright games begin!
The security implications are horrifying.
Bwa ha ha ha ha ha!
Nontheless, I'm not willing to ban them because they're NAZIs. I'm willing to ban, as Canada does, the promotion of hatred and violence against people, and I'm willing to accept if that bans aspects of what the NAZIs or neo NAZIs do.
I will not, however, ban them by name.
I would much rather see things like the French people rising into the streets to extort their countrymen to vote against people like Lepen. This means that they are active in the protection of their own freedom, and the freedom of the people around them. This leaves me feeling far more safe than the German rules that are at the whim of a government to create and destroy -- whether or not the people of Germany agree with it.
Rules restricting freedom to protect the people from 'nasty people' is the first step that the NAZIs used to turn the Republic into the Reich.
Laws don't protect freedoms.
Governments don't protect freedoms
People protect freedoms. People who are willing to fight to protect those freedoms
On September 11, three airplains were slammed into American landmarks while their passengers used their cell phones and air phones to call for help.
Passengers of the fourth airplane finally got the message. "Don't wait for the cavalry. They can't reach 10,000 feet."
Those passengers died fighting to get control back from the hijackers. If they hadn't been shot down, they might have even made it home alive. yes, I believe -- based on the original news reports -- that they were shot down,. I'm not going to criticize the decision made to do that. It should be noted, however, that 'the cavalry' really only had two choices: Shoot them down, or let them fly closer to their destination. The only real question was timing.
Since then, the flying public has learned one lesson. We are responsible for our own safety and freedom. There is no superhero coming to our rescue. Unfortunately, most of us still think that that rule only applies in the air. I believe that it applies everywhere and eveywhen.
The NAZIs destroyed libery in the name of protecting the German people from the enemy. Back then, the enemy was Jews. These days, some people consider NAZIs to be the enemy against whom it is OK to surrender our liberties. Those Jews who survived the holocaust learned from their experience -- but only in relation to themeselves. (When dealing with other minorities (palestinians) they have, unfortunately, learned the lessons more directly from their former oppressors )
These days, Jews are not a valid scapegoat for our freedoms so the true neo-nazis will need to find a different scapegoat. The current 'anti-imigration' stuff of the far-right is one possible approach, but more sophisticated neo-NAZIs might choose more palpable targets, like neo-NAZIs, hackers or terrorists -- and use the blatent neo-nazis as decoys to draw fire.
For me, the enemy is not in the name. It is by their actions that I judge people by, and that is how I will decide to either support them, or fight them.
Pick a name -- any name, and I will defend your freedoms -- but if you attack my liberty, I reserve the right to fight back.
This is a standard bureaucratic coverup. "There's no problem here, but we're taking steps to solve the problem that we're sure doesn't exist in spite of the evidence to the contrary".
To admit that Ruebel is correct, the commission would have to admit that they were asleep at the switch (excuse the pun). It's far more politically prudent for them to belittle pooh pooh, and nay-say him, while at the same time, responding (or appearing to respond) to the publicity around his complaints.
In the meantime, Ruebel spends years of his life proving that Organized Crime (of some sort) is messing with the LA phone system but gets no compensation for his work, or his lost 'business' (I have a bit less sympathy for the latter).
I don't think that Ford did anything illegal. If anybody did anything illegal it would be the credit reporting companies that allow any company or group with enough money to generate identity theft kits with just a victim^w customer's home address.
As a result. these script kiddies^w^w^w Ford was able to get identity theft kits on a truckload of (mostly) rich people just based on their home addresses.
If anything is going to put a big "oomph" behind online privacy initiatives in the states, I think that this may be it.
I heard rumors that, before submitting this article, the author made inquiries with NASA about obtaining some of those bricks that they use to shield the shuttle on re-entry.
For those of you who don't read outside of the tech/SF industries, Pinochet made the news, not too long ago when spain had Britain arrest him for the kidnapping, torture and murder of Spanish nationals in Chile after his 'benign' rise to power, where he bombed the presidential pallace. After the death of Chile's elected president, he hunted down the supporters of the elected government, arresting, torturing and/or killing them ('disappearing').
If that's what he calls benign, I'd hate to see what he calls 'nasty'. It's not exageration to say that Pinochet's CIA-supported regime probably has more blood on his hands than AL Quaida (which also had CIA support).
And, as for Palpatine's lament that " "the bureaucrats are in charge now." He was in the middle of an attempt to (successfully) manipulate Padme into making a move that would give him the chancelorship (and eventual emperorship) of the republic.
It's not like they've got to do a lot of work to create the base digital master!
Any indication, whatsoever, that the research may not be 100% accurate is proof positive that it is fatally flawed, and should be acted upon as such.
Any claim that their sponsors' work is non-benevolent should not be acted upon until it is proven to the n'th sigma of probability.
That having been said, I note that CIMMYT, which found 12-35% contamination of wild corn, found (near) zero contamination of samples which had been kept isolated for a number of years. this points away from the probability of systemic error in their lab methods.
also: If PCR was so flawed as to regularly give a 30% false positve rate, I expect that it would have been abandoned years ago. That it is still used more than a decade after it had been invented is an indication that it is more reliable than not.
It's probably a bit of both:
Cats that learn to meow in like human babies cry get human adult attention -- as such, they are more likely to get food and other assistance. This makes them more likely to survive.
Cats that can't meow human-like don't get the resulting survival benefits.
Cats that genetically tend to meow in a human-like way are much more likely to 'learn' that this kind of meow gets them what they want.
Even if there is a learned response element, it can still be an evolutionary driving force.
This leads me to an ineresting speculation: Psych labs that have been running rats in mazes for the last 20 years may have accidently bred a maze-running strain of rat. The question might make for an interesting psychology/genetics experiment one day.
Now it may just be a complete coincidence, but who's to say that these aren't both shills?
(this is an example of ad-hominum attack.)