in this moment thats simply what i thought, yeah, totally exaggerated, you're right. but thats what was in my mind at that moment. after all, there are enough idiots around in this world... Maybe i should stop reading the news
On my daily walks with the dog i one day spotted something in a silver box near the path and found it was a small aluminium box. I personally did not think that it could be related to geocaching at all and called the local polica station and asked them what to do, as in this case it was me who was afraid to touch or open it because i thought this is a bomb... Well, one of the first things this police officer said was
"i bet this is one of those geocaching boxes, that is not uncommon these days" So i asked him: "shall i really open it" officer: "yes, open it" "and what if it is a bomb and i blow up?" officer: "then i will keep my ears shut!":-)
of course there was nothing interesting in this box and no bomb at all. but i really had to laugh about this quite cool and funny officer
you're right, i have never lived in Japan, but visited it. but i think you can confirm that although the example with green tea might be not correct, that the ratio of vegetable to meat in the food they eat is different. there is noodles or rice and some meat in small pieces mixed into it, or sushi of course, but generally meat is not so dominant in food.
If you eat that much steak (1 kg/day), you're not gonna feel too good.
1 kilo was of course an exaggeration, but my co-workers simply do eat ALOT of meat, for them the idea of eating something without meat in it at all is almost impossible for them to imagine. so 1 kilo of course is an exaggeration
you are right that there belongs more to the picture that Japan belongs to the healthiest and longest-lived countries in the world although the average working time might is much higher than in most of the other industrial countries.
the other factor which comes in here which benefits the japanese is the way they eat or better, what they eat. A lot of fish, a lot of vegetables, green tea... To sum it up: they eat little fat and healthier stuff.
compare this to USA or UK, where fast food dominates what people eat, where coffee and coke often is the only stuff people drink the whole day.
other thing: the majority of my american coworkers here never go to doctors. they take pills and drugs the whole day. instead of changing their way of life, calming down, solving their personal problems, eating better stuff (!) they try to cure everything with drugs, drink coke the whole day, eat a kilo of steak every day and then complain that they suffer from heartburn and again take pills against heartburn....
of course this is not representative, might be strange co-workers here. but on the other hand i noticed something the last time i was in new york when i watched TV ads: i have never travelled to a country where there are dozens of tv ads every hour for products to reduce heartburn - this confirms my observation. instead of eating different stuff people buy these drugs. this is obviosuly not the right solution. in the long run this affects your health.
Why do you think, that test.de does not have an MX entry
dig mx test.de fails
I bet that they must have gotten thousands of mails everyday from thousands of postmasters testing their new mailserver setup, programmers of cgi scripts testing their shop-orders from "Test" Accounts... and of course spammers....
Your isp can be totally against spamming and enforce it heavily... You'll still get blocked out because their are always people who will register a server or hosting account and then spam as much as possible till they get shutdown.
that is not true. SPEWS knows that every ISP has a certain amount of customers willing to spam. No provider will get blocked for having occasional (!) spammers on his nets. And SPEWS will not block nets that fast one spamrun originates from a net. They start threatening a ISP if he continously fails to do something against the spammers, that means, terminates their connections or shuts down the spamvertized sites.
Mind that usually no ISP gets blocked suddenly, most of the blocked companies to not ever reply to messages sent to abuse@ISP or at least they never gave the impression, that they are trying to get rid of the spammers.
Spews will then block an entire ip block in which the offending ip belongs and then both your isp and yourself will suffer.
there are numerous reports about ISPs who did not care about well known spam gangs in their nets and only then reacted, after their internet had been turned into a big intranet after a spews listing. Only when other innocent customers of the ISP start complaining about their own ISP and threaten to terminate contracts, then often only at that point the ISPs have reacted and shut down spammer lines.
SPEWS does work, although in that case mentioned today the collateral damage is too hight.
"Remember the coffee cam? Now that was cool. Wasn't it at MIT?" Yep. It's all been downhill since then.
The German Magazine "Der Spiegel" bought the Coffee Machine (yes, its the real one!) and has it online now for a year or two, don't know exactly. Here it is:
I've been dealing with them for quite a while now. Most of these people come from Nigeria, South Africa and Sierra Leone, some are working from the Netherlands and Spain, that's at least the stuff i get, other might experience different.
These lads operate from internet cafees and usually call you from public telephones and are just one tiny part of an organized gang. They make the contact with you and tell you to contact their "lawyer" for further clearance. For that contact mabye they get some money from the gang.
This lawyer then does have a fixed telephone line which one could call (if i were to waste some money on fooling them, i prefer, when they call me.).
So if i have one of the guys from lagos i want to report, then i put together all the evidence on these scammers i have, which basically is the pics they sent (if they are real), then i usually have their voices they left on my voicebox and some faked docuemnts which often filled in in their hand-writing. so i then forward it to the nigerian police and that's it, most of the time their mailbox is over quota, if i contact the embassy of these countries they never reply.
so there could be two reasons, why you hardly read that they get arrested:
1) the police does not care 2) there are far more poor people in these countries trying to earn some money by scamming, that the polices efforts are in vain.
I guess, it's a combination of both.
anyway, i could be wrong, after all i cannot check if anything is being done against them, i just collect evidence and that's it.
Yes, this is all stuff they sent to me to "proove", that their claims are true, i.e., that i am the next kin of somebody or that they really have some 50 millions of dollars deposited at some company where i just have to pick it up (after paying $X Dollars to get it)
There are quite a few scanned passports they have sent me, i wonder, if these are the real passports, or stolen from other people, or by deceased people.
In the past i had simply deleted all these 419 scams. But then, while accidently finding the site www.whatsthebloodypoint.com I got inspired by that idea, to waste the time of these suckers.
So i started registering a few "dynip"-domains to my home-run linux machine and started replying to those guys using a obiously silly name. Since the scammers always want to phone one up, i gave them one of these free voice2mail service numbers and belive me, i had about 2 or 3 voice mails in my letterbox. It is really nice to know, that these criminals had to spend money for these long distance calls.
Whats bad about folling these assholes is, that you definately can waste time of these criminals, usually you are able to send most of the mails to many of them and just exchange the names. If you are good, you manage to exchange up to 20 mails with them, provide them with fake Western Union numbers and make them go to the loal western union office and feel like idiots if they are told, that the number was fake. Also make them fax you all the "important" documents to you, always they will have to pay for a long distance call.
Unfortunately there are more of these scammers than people like me have time, in the end, i get more 419 mails than i can reply to and so the rest of my time i contact abuse departments and make them shut down the mailboxes of the scammers.
People, please set up fake accounts and reply to these bastards and tell them after a few mails how much you hate them and how they give their country (usually Nigeria, South Africa) a bad name!.
Contrary to usual spammers their reply addresses have to exist, so go and spam their boxes or waste their time!
If anyones interested, i have a few pictures the scammers sent to me and some voicemessages uploaded. Oh how i hate these bastards.
Here you find an unsorted collection of pics and voice messages:
FARAMIR IS NOT A BAD GUY! In the book he is the smarter, wiser brother who is tragically overlooked by his father (Steward of Gondor) in favor of Boromir. He is perhaps the most insightful human to appear in the entire epic. The movie makes him into power-obsessed idot who comes to his senses sudenly and rather inexplicably. I suppose the writers were trying to play up the corrupting power of the ring, but instead they ruined a great character.
full ACK! this is what bothered me most of all, i simply could not understand, why Faramirs character was change that much.
One very efficient way for a spammer to know that your account exists is using webbugs, often 1x1 images, which often are not so trivial to detect. some are obvious like
would be trivial for a spammer to send a image of some kind and log your ID "5". While something like that could easily be detected by a spamfilter, the following could be just the same
<img src="http://site.invalid/images/5.jpg">
buy using a simple rewrite-rule in apache there could be a script behind logging your ID which in that example could be "5".
What i am going to say: If i automatically follow the links in spam and try to slashdot the files linked to in the spam, i will definitely hit some of these webbugs, veryfiying that the spam reached the recipient.
i think you don't get it. you should see a 404 error only if you ask for a file on a server, which does not exist. but a 404 is not the answer a browser will return, if the domain does not exist
the article makes this mistake again also in the last paragraph VeriSign is not alone in seeking to replace 404 errors. Microsoft has also directed users of its Internet Explorer Web browser to a Microsoft search page when typing unassigned domain names into the browser's URL bar.
Also, Kronenbourg 1664 is brewed in Alsace in France.
thanks for informing me about that, i simple was not shure. Anyway, that beer was good though, and gave me a horrible head-ache, which was correlated to the high amount i drank...
BTW, i am not bavarian and agree in your opinion about them.
It's sad that the author mentions Lowenbrau in comparison to Suse, since Lowenbrau is the most disgusting german beer I can think of (gimme a Thorbrau Kellerbier!)
i agree that the Lowenbrau beer which you buy abroad is completely different to the original one. I tasted Lowenbrau in Malta, where they also brew it, it's someting completely different.
Belgians brew beer not messed up with Cherry-, Lemon-, Banana-Juice ?
Living in a country next to Belgium i have never found a Belgian Beer being able to compete in anyway with german beer, at least german beer is not being full of chemicals.
But well, i am unshure now: is Kronenbourg a Belgian Beer? I am not really shure, but with that stuff i really almost killed me, one night in Luxembourg we drank about 20 glasses, that was a horrible night:) That evening was fine, if this Kronenbourg really was brewed in Belgium i might reconsider my opinion, but i honestly warn you: Never try these belgian mixed-beers....
Debian GNU/Linux : I'd pair Debian with a something like Weihenstephaner HefeWeissBier. The Debian Free Software Guidelines are reminiscent of the German Beer Purity laws, which mandate that the beer be made out of malt, hops, yeast and water alone
I really never thought about that parallel:) Using Debian now for quite a time and finding it so stable and free from fancy stuff, being really "pure" i find that parrallel to the "Deutsches Reinheitsgebot" (German Beer Purity law) remarkable.
Being a lover of our german beer, consisting of the 4 ingredients only, with no addiotional artifical stuff, no other flavours and chemicals, this really must be the reason, i like debian so much !
There's really nothing beating german beer (gimme a Licher Pils!)
Three o'clock in the afternoon now, hmm, to early to go to the fridge now and get a beer out...
However, this sort of thing was inevitable, and the moral of the story is: Don't used closed-source software. At all. Period.
To a certain point i agree with you, but i for example do use open source and just look at the sources, if it is a really security related application or service.
In other words: Even if you would use open source, most of the people would not read the sources (or be able to understand it at all!) and would not detect that the application if phoning home or doing unwanted things.
as somebody else stated already: as long as it is written in the EULA and if you have accepted that, it is ok to let an application phone home if you are using it pirated.
Open Source software has been the bedrock of Internet email servers for 25+ years! Who needs Exchange?
my clients do not need exchange. but they are used to using outlook (express) and want to use the neat calender which is included in outlook. that's they key point. it's that stupid calender. set up a IMAP Server and you have the mailfunctionality just like with the exchange server, but because of that bloody calender my customer want i am forced to sell exchange even if i'd much more prefer the linux/imap/Horde IMP combination.
It's unfortunately what the clients want and not what i would like to sell. there should be a connector connecting the outlook calender to some daemon which has the Calenderentries in a mySQL DB for example.
The problem is that you can send SMS's for free via the internet. Do a google search for free SMS.
it's the problem of the SMS gateway on the internet which you use how to finance that. not your's.
if the sender has to pay for SMS, then in other words the SMS gateway on the internet has to pay for that and would have to finance that with ads. When the SMS hype here in Europe started, we had lots of these gateways where you could send SMS via them for free. Now, 2 years later, there's none left i know of offering this for free.
so what does that mean: it is too expensive sending "bulk SMS" and you obviously don't get enough revenue by companies sponsoring this service. fine for me the way it is now here, i never get SMS-spam and i send more SMS than making phone calls.
if the recipient has to pay, it will end with the same spam situation we now have with emails.
Actually, IMHO one of the main uses of text messages is to get messages from people you've never spoken to.
that is one of the main uses?
For example, when I'm visiting a city I might send email to friends of mine in that city asking them to send me a text message with their phone number in it, so I can just hit the "respond" button to call them back rather than entering in the number myself. It's basically a way for other people to send their contact info directly to my phone.
what about telling them to call and let it ring only one time? You would have the caller ID saved in your cellphone. That won't cost anybody a single cent and at least with the cellphones i have used (Nokia / Siemens) yo get a list of "unanswered calls" which would show me the number of the caller and enable me to call him back just one click away.
Slashdot Mirror
in this moment thats simply what i thought, yeah, totally exaggerated, you're right. but thats what was in my mind at that moment. after all, there are enough idiots around in this world... Maybe i should stop reading the news
On my daily walks with the dog i one day spotted something in a silver box near the path and found it was a small aluminium box. I personally did not think that it could be related to geocaching at all and called the local polica station and asked them what to do, as in this case it was me who was afraid to touch or open it because i thought this is a bomb ... Well, one of the first things this police officer said was
"i bet this is one of those geocaching boxes, that is not uncommon these days" :-)
So i asked him: "shall i really open it"
officer: "yes, open it"
"and what if it is a bomb and i blow up?"
officer: "then i will keep my ears shut!"
of course there was nothing interesting in this box and no bomb at all. but i really had to laugh about this quite cool and funny officer
you're right, i have never lived in Japan, but visited it. but i think you can confirm that although the example with green tea might be not correct, that the ratio of vegetable to meat in the food they eat is different. there is noodles or rice and some meat in small pieces mixed into it, or sushi of course, but generally meat is not so dominant in food.
If you eat that much steak (1 kg/day), you're not gonna feel too good.
1 kilo was of course an exaggeration, but my co-workers simply do eat ALOT of meat, for them the idea of eating something without meat in it at all is almost impossible for them to imagine. so 1 kilo of course is an exaggeration
you are right that there belongs more to the picture that Japan belongs to the healthiest and longest-lived countries in the world although the average working time might is much higher than in most of the other industrial countries.
....
the other factor which comes in here which benefits the japanese is the way they eat or better, what they eat. A lot of fish, a lot of vegetables, green tea... To sum it up: they eat little fat and healthier stuff.
compare this to USA or UK, where fast food dominates what people eat, where coffee and coke often is the only stuff people drink the whole day.
other thing: the majority of my american coworkers here never go to doctors. they take pills and drugs the whole day. instead of changing their way of life, calming down, solving their personal problems, eating better stuff (!) they try to cure everything with drugs, drink coke the whole day, eat a kilo of steak every day and then complain that they suffer from heartburn and again take pills against heartburn
of course this is not representative, might be strange co-workers here. but on the other hand i noticed something the last time i was in new york when i watched TV ads: i have never travelled to a country where there are dozens of tv ads every hour for products to reduce heartburn - this confirms my observation. instead of eating different stuff people buy these drugs. this is obviosuly not the right solution. in the long run this affects your health.
His Name is "Wernher Von Braun"
Why do you think, that test.de does not have an MX entry
dig mx test.de fails
I bet that they must have gotten thousands of mails everyday from thousands of postmasters testing their new mailserver setup, programmers of cgi scripts testing their shop-orders from "Test" Accounts... and of course spammers....
"Remember the coffee cam? Now that was cool. Wasn't it at MIT?" Yep. It's all been downhill since then.
The German Magazine "Der Spiegel" bought the Coffee Machine (yes, its the real one!) and has it online now for a year or two, don't know exactly. Here it is:
Coffee Cam
I've been dealing with them for quite a while now. Most of these people come from Nigeria, South Africa and Sierra Leone, some are working from the Netherlands and Spain, that's at least the stuff i get, other might experience different.
These lads operate from internet cafees and usually call you from public telephones and are just one tiny part of an organized gang. They make the contact with you and tell you to contact their "lawyer" for further clearance. For that contact mabye they get some money from the gang.
This lawyer then does have a fixed telephone line which one could call (if i were to waste some money on fooling them, i prefer, when they call me.).
So if i have one of the guys from lagos i want to report, then i put together all the evidence on these scammers i have, which basically is the pics they sent (if they are real), then i usually have their voices they left on my voicebox and some faked docuemnts which often filled in in their hand-writing. so i then forward it to the nigerian police and that's it, most of the time their mailbox is over quota, if i contact the embassy of these countries they never reply.
so there could be two reasons, why you hardly read that they get arrested:
1) the police does not care
2) there are far more poor people in these countries trying to earn some money by scamming, that the polices efforts are in vain.
I guess, it's a combination of both.
anyway, i could be wrong, after all i cannot check if anything is being done against them, i just collect evidence and that's it.
Yes, this is all stuff they sent to me to "proove", that their claims are true, i.e., that i am the next kin of somebody or that they really have some 50 millions of dollars deposited at some company where i just have to pick it up (after paying $X Dollars to get it)
There are quite a few scanned passports they have sent me, i wonder, if these are the real passports, or stolen from other people, or by deceased people.
In the past i had simply deleted all these 419 scams. But then, while accidently finding the site www.whatsthebloodypoint.com I got inspired by that idea, to waste the time of these suckers.
So i started registering a few "dynip"-domains to my home-run linux machine and started replying to those guys using a obiously silly name. Since the scammers always want to phone one up, i gave them one of these free voice2mail service numbers and belive me, i had about 2 or 3 voice mails in my letterbox. It is really nice to know, that these criminals had to spend money for these long distance calls.
Whats bad about folling these assholes is, that you definately can waste time of these criminals, usually you are able to send most of the mails to many of them and just exchange the names. If you are good, you manage to exchange up to 20 mails with them, provide them with fake Western Union numbers and make them go to the loal western union office and feel like idiots if they are told, that the number was fake. Also make them fax you all the "important" documents to you, always they will have to pay for a long distance call.
Unfortunately there are more of these scammers than people like me have time, in the end, i get more 419 mails than i can reply to and so the rest of my time i contact abuse departments and make them shut down the mailboxes of the scammers.
People, please set up fake accounts and reply to these bastards and tell them after a few mails how much you hate them and how they give their country (usually Nigeria, South Africa) a bad name!.
Contrary to usual spammers their reply addresses have to exist, so go and spam their boxes or waste their time!
If anyones interested, i have a few pictures the scammers sent to me and some voicemessages uploaded. Oh how i hate these bastards. Here you find an unsorted collection of pics and voice messages:
lordazrael.no-ip.com/419/
One very efficient way for a spammer to know that your account exists is using webbugs, often 1x1 images, which often are not so trivial to detect. some are obvious like
<img src="http://site.invalid/images/pic.pl?id=5">
would be trivial for a spammer to send a image of some kind and log your ID "5". While something like that could easily be detected by a spamfilter, the following could be just the same
<img src="http://site.invalid/images/5.jpg">
buy using a simple rewrite-rule in apache there could be a script behind logging your ID which in that example could be "5".
What i am going to say: If i automatically follow the links in spam and try to slashdot the files linked to in the spam, i will definitely hit some of these webbugs, veryfiying that the spam reached the recipient.
i think you don't get it. you should see a 404 error only if you ask for a file on a server, which does not exist. but a 404 is not the answer a browser will return, if the domain does not exist
the article makes this mistake again also in the last paragraph VeriSign is not alone in seeking to replace 404 errors. Microsoft has also directed users of its Internet Explorer Web browser to a Microsoft search page when typing unassigned domain names into the browser's URL bar.
unassigned domain names != 404 errors
who the hell wrote this article ?
Also, Kronenbourg 1664 is brewed in Alsace in France.
...
thanks for informing me about that, i simple was not shure. Anyway, that beer was good though, and gave me a horrible head-ache, which was correlated to the high amount i drank
BTW, i am not bavarian and agree in your opinion about them.
It's sad that the author mentions Lowenbrau in comparison to Suse, since Lowenbrau is the most disgusting german beer I can think of (gimme a Thorbrau Kellerbier!)
i agree that the Lowenbrau beer which you buy abroad is completely different to the original one. I tasted Lowenbrau in Malta, where they also brew it, it's someting completely different.
Belgian Beer ?
:) That evening was fine, if this Kronenbourg really was brewed in Belgium i might reconsider my opinion, but i honestly warn you: Never try these belgian mixed-beers ....
Belgians brew beer not messed up with Cherry-, Lemon-, Banana-Juice ?
Living in a country next to Belgium i have never found a Belgian Beer being able to compete in anyway with german beer, at least german beer is not being full of chemicals.
But well, i am unshure now: is Kronenbourg a Belgian Beer? I am not really shure, but with that stuff i really almost killed me, one night in Luxembourg we drank about 20 glasses, that was a horrible night
Debian GNU/Linux : I'd pair Debian with a something like Weihenstephaner HefeWeissBier. The Debian Free Software Guidelines are reminiscent of the German Beer Purity laws, which mandate that the beer be made out of malt, hops, yeast and water alone
:) Using Debian now for quite a time and finding it so stable and free from fancy stuff, being really "pure" i find that parrallel to the "Deutsches Reinheitsgebot" (German Beer Purity law) remarkable.
...
I really never thought about that parallel
Being a lover of our german beer, consisting of the 4 ingredients only, with no addiotional artifical stuff, no other flavours and chemicals, this really must be the reason, i like debian so much !
There's really nothing beating german beer (gimme a Licher Pils!)
Three o'clock in the afternoon now, hmm, to early to go to the fridge now and get a beer out
However, this sort of thing was inevitable, and the moral of the story is: Don't used closed-source software. At all. Period.
To a certain point i agree with you, but i for example do use open source and just look at the sources, if it is a really security related application or service.
In other words: Even if you would use open source, most of the people would not read the sources (or be able to understand it at all!) and would not detect that the application if phoning home or doing unwanted things.
as somebody else stated already: as long as it is written in the EULA and if you have accepted that, it is ok to let an application phone home if you are using it pirated.
Here's a shining example of the same German legal system. Enough said!!
at least in germany no 6 year old boy gets banned from school and sued for kissing a girl.
.... try removing the blank after "index", should be index.html not index .html
Open Source software has been the bedrock of Internet email servers for 25+ years! Who needs Exchange?
my clients do not need exchange. but they are used to using outlook (express) and want to use the neat calender which is included in outlook. that's they key point. it's that stupid calender. set up a IMAP Server and you have the mailfunctionality just like with the exchange server, but because of that bloody calender my customer want i am forced to sell exchange even if i'd much more prefer the linux/imap/Horde IMP combination.
It's unfortunately what the clients want and not what i would like to sell. there should be a connector connecting the outlook calender to some daemon which has the Calenderentries in a mySQL DB for example.
That would do the job!
The problem is that you can send SMS's for free via the internet. Do a google search for free SMS.
it's the problem of the SMS gateway on the internet which you use how to finance that. not your's.
if the sender has to pay for SMS, then in other words the SMS gateway on the internet has to pay for that and would have to finance that with ads. When the SMS hype here in Europe started, we had lots of these gateways where you could send SMS via them for free. Now, 2 years later, there's none left i know of offering this for free.
so what does that mean: it is too expensive sending "bulk SMS" and you obviously don't get enough revenue by companies sponsoring this service. fine for me the way it is now here, i never get SMS-spam and i send more SMS than making phone calls.
if the recipient has to pay, it will end with the same spam situation we now have with emails.
Actually, IMHO one of the main uses of text messages is to get messages from people you've never spoken to.
that is one of the main uses?
For example, when I'm visiting a city I might send email to friends of mine in that city asking them to send me a text message with their phone number in it, so I can just hit the "respond" button to call them back rather than entering in the number myself. It's basically a way for other people to send their contact info directly to my phone.
what about telling them to call and let it ring only one time? You would have the caller ID saved in your cellphone. That won't cost anybody a single cent and at least with the cellphones i have used (Nokia / Siemens) yo get a list of "unanswered calls" which would show me the number of the caller and enable me to call him back just one click away.