I can't understand why Apple is not making this unit skinnable with changeable face plates.
Skins are what made Winamp popular, not its sound quality.
Furthermore the face plates would play into the strengths of the Apple user demographics. They would absolutely love to be able to design their own faceplates. As popular as iPod is now, with face plates it'd blow up.
Having worked extensively with programmers from three continents (Europe, North America and Asia) and a few from Africa, the ability of any programmer is not measured by their nationality, race or native language, but their skills as a programmer, which does include things like the ability to communicate effectively.
Indians, in general, do their jobs just as well as anyone else as long as their english is good enough.
In fact, I just finished a project I was supervising, where the star performer was one of the Indian contractors. He was one of the best programmers I've had the pleasure of working, anywhere. Furthermore, the worst programmer in the team was one of the full-time employees of the company I work for, i.e. someone born and raised in the US. Not only was he lazy, unskilled, but he also had a severe attitude problem about receiving feedback or acting on it. Little good his excellent command in the English language did for him, when he didn't want to use that skill...
Right now I'm supervising an outsourcing project where all the programming is performed by Indian programmers. The quality of the code is, in general, better than average and the team includes several senior programmers, even one with an PHd (and, oh boy, can you tell the difference between him and everyone else).
Basically everything you said about outsourcing is untrue. The only thing you said that is true, is that publicly traded companies in the US are greedy above anything else and will without intervention from people who know the real pitfalls of any upper level business decision go with the cheapest option in every case. Short term (3-month outlook) profits over long term success...it's rather sad actually.
The confontration at the FTC summit in DC was instigated by Mark Felstein, an attorney, who the New York Bar Association wouldn't accept into their ranks because of his past deeds, and who sued seven high-profile anti-spammers trying to silence their vocal dissaproval against the Florida spammers hiding behind him. He physically asasulted (pushed and shoved) the FTC commissioner when he was trying to separate him from anti-spammmers he was trying to bully in front of the cameras.
Talking about the wider issue of why people are increasing their hostility towards spammers...This is exactly what ALWAYS happens when the laws of the land are unjust. That's when vigilante justice has always historically arrived. It is clear to everyone, but spamming criminals, that the current laws do not protect Internet users from the illegal activities of the few. This is why some (not all, not most, some) of us feel like they're entirely entitled to take the law into their own hands, however (legally) wrong that might be.
Personally, if I knew I could get away with destroying some spammers infrastructure, be that his house, network connectivity, spamming data centers, his supply chain or whatever else the spammer needs for his spamming activity, without hurting anyone else in the process, I would do it right now. Furthermore, if someone actually did that and was caught, I would donate to his legal defense in a heartbeat.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers. The more painful and slower, the better.
Dude, try and distinguish between Usenet (or/.) bravado and the reality.
When people say death to spammers, I don't think anyone, but the kookiest, really means that. It's more of an expression of the frustration felt by everyone who hates spam. It's the frustration towards spammers, law enforcement, legislators, ISPs, mainsleazers hiring spammers, spamware peddlers, and everyone else not doing their part to stop spam when they could.
You say punishment should fit the crime. I would tend to agree with that statement. However, the current situation, and it has been so ever since spammers started their criminal activities, is that there is NO punishment. The criminals get away with everything they do. Just look at the the interview with Alan Ralsky. The criminal being interviewed practically confesses to several serious cybercrimes, to spamming (illegally) and is unrepentant and wows to continue with new illegal ways to spam (stealth spam). What the hell are we supposed to think? That's when people start saying things like death to spammers, not because they really want them dead, but in the same way kids say "I hate you, I hope you're dead" when they get angry at someone.
And to conclude:
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers. The more painful and slower, the better.
This has nothing to do with prohibition, but the dubious background of the players in the game. A very large number of career spammers are career conmen with convictions for some type of fraud. Eddie Marin is a convicted coccaine dealer. Alan Ralsky has a number of shady business dealings in his past. Thomas Cowles defrauded his spamming partners and got jailtime.
In addition, large parts of the spamming business is ALREADY in the hands of organized crime, especially in countries like Russia where the mafia has moved onto every profitable business to get their cut.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers. The more painful and slower, the better.
The typical Internet user uses very little outbound bandwidth, so 80% of your customers have little need for high upload bandwidth, so the ISPs are limiting their network infrastructure costs by setting upload limits lower than download limits.
If you're one of the 20%, who would really benefit from broadband uploads as well (online gaming, personal web servers for friends and family, etc.), you either pay extra or you're just plain screwed.
Since this 20% of your customer base represents such a small percentage of your overall revenue, the savings outweigh the churn from that part of your customer base.
That's why you don't see shoes that fit Shaquille O'Neal in regular shoe stores:)
I agree, this is extremely shortsighted and doesn't enable us to take full advantage of the capabilities and promise of broadband services. I think this is one of the reasons why broadband adoption has been slow in the US.
Except of course that they DO have limits. They have daily and monthly caps. Exceeding those caps will result in a warning or account cancellation, if the account holder continues using too much bandwidth.
I am a Cox customer and they introduced bandwidth caps last spring, I believe. There was a big broohaa about it actually.
I used to leech a LOT of stuff (half a dozen high speed FTP sessions open for hours on end, I would start the downloads in the morning, then go to work, basically leeching whole FTP sites during the day), but I never got warned about it by Cox. I was a little bit surprised. I am 100% sure I exceeded their bandwidth caps plenty of times.
Geez, just leave that somethingawful.com non-event out of this.
The script kiddies at SA just went on a hissy fit due to being hosted by a blatant spam supporter. There was no overzealous blocklisting.
Re:Unfortunately much spam originates from the US.
on
UK Spam Law Goes Live
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The spam sent from China and Korea is overwhelmingly sent by US based spammers exploiting the widespread open proxy problem in the Far East.
The other major source of spam from the Far East are the "bulletproof" spamming facilities provided to US based career spammers by greedy Chinese administrators.
It is not that difficult at all to track who is responsible for the spam, just see who's being advertised.
In addition, most of these types of spam has a "fingerprint" that pinpoints the spam to some career spammer. The fingerprint can be a domain name, method of operandi, language in the spam, anything really. Resources like ROKSO at spamhaus.org are very good at identifying the real source of the spam.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers. The more painful and slower, the better.
monkeys.com used to have one, until the spammers DDOSed him.
Several other people are still running proxy honeypots with great success. They are a great resource for finding out which ISPs harbor proxy hijacking criminals.
For all of you, who think spammers will check whether the proxy works first, spammers do no such thing. They actively scan for open proxies and immediately start blasting away. That's just like with spamming. You really think spammers check every Email address on their lists is real?
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers. The more painful and slower, the better.
As an avid gamer and owner of several different video game systems and a PC used extensively for gaming, I gotta say the holiday guide is an absolute joke.
The games on the list are dated, and there are several newer, much better games available for nearly every single game they list. For example, nobody in their right mind would choose NFL Fever 2004 instead of Madden 2004 or ESPN NFL on XBox.
If you're using that guide to buy games for your kids, friends or relatives, please expect them to hate you after Christmas.
Others have already explained that these criminal use zombies in combination with chained proxies to hide their tracks. That's what's making it kinda difficult to track them down.
However, Steve Linford has stated before that he and the law enforcement agencies he's working with do have sufficient evidence to go after (some of) the perp(s) engaging in these criminal activities. I'm not sure why there hasn't been any arrests yet. I do take Steve's word for it though, he's not the kind of a person to say something like that just to grandstand.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers. The more painful, the better.
I used to be loyal to a fault. Then I noticed the corporations treat their employees like commodity regardless.
Was buddy-buddy with the bosses, too. I still am, whenever the boss is someone I would be friends with if he wasn't my boss, but I don't make the mistake of thinking that means anything in my professional life.
Why should I be loyal or obligated to someone who will fire my ass in a second, if the company's bottom line dictates it?
Think about it.
I have long since decided that my obligation is to my work only, i.e. that I will do my job and all of it the best I possibly can.
If a new employer comes along and decides to offer me better compensation or otherwise offer a better deal, I'm outta here just as fast as I would, if the company's quarterly earnings were dissapointing and they laid me off. At no circumstance will I EVER feel obligated to do anything just because someone has a fancier title than I do and is my boss.
That sort of stuff is for lambs.
I'm paid to do a job, nothing more or nothing less. That's where my obligation starts and ends.
The UK case where the "hacker" claimed a trojan was responsible for the hacking attempts on the US server is very interesting.
The teenager and his lawyers presented no evidence whatsoever about the existance of the trojan on his computer. Based on the press coverage on the case they didn't even identify which trojan had supposedly infected his home computer.
In fact, based on press coverage, experts working for the prosecutors even stated for the record that there was no evidence to suggest there ever was a trojan.
It's not attacking several financial sites, just Fethard Finance.
The.biz TLD has been regularly used by spammers, who use the zombie networks to host their websites and even DNS servers. I bet fethard.biz is ran by someone, who is sick and tired of getting the.biz domain thorouhgly plonked by blocklists and complained either directly to the criminal spammers or the admins of the.biz TLD and the spammers got a word of that.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers. The more painfully and slowly, the better.
What's to keep real terrorists from using these spammer created zombie networks for some good old DDOSes on banks and other financial institutions, government networks, critical infrastructure services, etc.?
The zombie networks are wide open for anyone to exploit them. It's just a matter of time until they will be used for some real terrorism.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers. The more painfully and slowly, the better.
The camera phones are not made for photographers, but teenagers who like to snap pictures of their friends snapping pictures of each other, then send them to other friends who weren't there.
Social mobs and all that.
For that purpose the camera phones are extremely adequate. You don't need zillion megapixels. I'd even say 1.1 megapixels is more than enough.
This victory is bitter sweet. While the judge did throw the case out completely, he didn't rule that the defendants' (anti-spammers) legal costs should be paid by the plaintiff (spammers).
You can help by donating to the legal defense fund established by the SpamCon Foundation. The donations are tax deductible.
Slashdot Mirror
So, it's ok to invade privacy of some, but not of others, based on where they were born?
That's way cool.
And to think, this country was built by immigrants. They used to be foreigners, you know...
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill hypocricy
So...what are you going to say when they extend this program to include US citizens/residents?
It's going to come...
What are you going to say when foreign countries are all going to start doing this to all foreigners entering their countries?
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill hypocricy
I can't understand why Apple is not making this unit skinnable with changeable face plates.
Skins are what made Winamp popular, not its sound quality.
Furthermore the face plates would play into the strengths of the Apple user demographics. They would absolutely love to be able to design their own faceplates. As popular as iPod is now, with face plates it'd blow up.
Having worked extensively with programmers from three continents (Europe, North America and Asia) and a few from Africa, the ability of any programmer is not measured by their nationality, race or native language, but their skills as a programmer, which does include things like the ability to communicate effectively.
Indians, in general, do their jobs just as well as anyone else as long as their english is good enough.
In fact, I just finished a project I was supervising, where the star performer was one of the Indian contractors. He was one of the best programmers I've had the pleasure of working, anywhere. Furthermore, the worst programmer in the team was one of the full-time employees of the company I work for, i.e. someone born and raised in the US. Not only was he lazy, unskilled, but he also had a severe attitude problem about receiving feedback or acting on it. Little good his excellent command in the English language did for him, when he didn't want to use that skill...
Right now I'm supervising an outsourcing project where all the programming is performed by Indian programmers. The quality of the code is, in general, better than average and the team includes several senior programmers, even one with an PHd (and, oh boy, can you tell the difference between him and everyone else).
Basically everything you said about outsourcing is untrue. The only thing you said that is true, is that publicly traded companies in the US are greedy above anything else and will without intervention from people who know the real pitfalls of any upper level business decision go with the cheapest option in every case. Short term (3-month outlook) profits over long term success...it's rather sad actually.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill greed
How many falsehoods can you fit into a /. post?
The confontration at the FTC summit in DC was instigated by Mark Felstein, an attorney, who the New York Bar Association wouldn't accept into their ranks because of his past deeds, and who sued seven high-profile anti-spammers trying to silence their vocal dissaproval against the Florida spammers hiding behind him. He physically asasulted (pushed and shoved) the FTC commissioner when he was trying to separate him from anti-spammmers he was trying to bully in front of the cameras.
Talking about the wider issue of why people are increasing their hostility towards spammers...This is exactly what ALWAYS happens when the laws of the land are unjust. That's when vigilante justice has always historically arrived. It is clear to everyone, but spamming criminals, that the current laws do not protect Internet users from the illegal activities of the few. This is why some (not all, not most, some) of us feel like they're entirely entitled to take the law into their own hands, however (legally) wrong that might be.
Personally, if I knew I could get away with destroying some spammers infrastructure, be that his house, network connectivity, spamming data centers, his supply chain or whatever else the spammer needs for his spamming activity, without hurting anyone else in the process, I would do it right now. Furthermore, if someone actually did that and was caught, I would donate to his legal defense in a heartbeat.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers.
The more painful and slower, the better.
Dude, try and distinguish between Usenet (or /.) bravado and the reality.
When people say death to spammers, I don't think anyone, but the kookiest, really means that. It's more of an expression of the frustration felt by everyone who hates spam. It's the frustration towards spammers, law enforcement, legislators, ISPs, mainsleazers hiring spammers, spamware peddlers, and everyone else not doing their part to stop spam when they could.
You say punishment should fit the crime. I would tend to agree with that statement. However, the current situation, and it has been so ever since spammers started their criminal activities, is that there is NO punishment. The criminals get away with everything they do. Just look at the the interview with Alan Ralsky. The criminal being interviewed practically confesses to several serious cybercrimes, to spamming (illegally) and is unrepentant and wows to continue with new illegal ways to spam (stealth spam). What the hell are we supposed to think? That's when people start saying things like death to spammers, not because they really want them dead, but in the same way kids say "I hate you, I hope you're dead" when they get angry at someone.
And to conclude:
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers. The more painful and slower, the better.
This has nothing to do with prohibition, but the dubious background of the players in the game. A very large number of career spammers are career conmen with convictions for some type of fraud. Eddie Marin is a convicted coccaine dealer. Alan Ralsky has a number of shady business dealings in his past. Thomas Cowles defrauded his spamming partners and got jailtime.
In addition, large parts of the spamming business is ALREADY in the hands of organized crime, especially in countries like Russia where the mafia has moved onto every profitable business to get their cut.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers. The more painful and slower, the better.
"Why is bandwidth offered so asymmetrically?"
:)
Because they can?
The typical Internet user uses very little outbound bandwidth, so 80% of your customers have little need for high upload bandwidth, so the ISPs are limiting their network infrastructure costs by setting upload limits lower than download limits.
If you're one of the 20%, who would really benefit from broadband uploads as well (online gaming, personal web servers for friends and family, etc.), you either pay extra or you're just plain screwed.
Since this 20% of your customer base represents such a small percentage of your overall revenue, the savings outweigh the churn from that part of your customer base.
That's why you don't see shoes that fit Shaquille O'Neal in regular shoe stores
I agree, this is extremely shortsighted and doesn't enable us to take full advantage of the capabilities and promise of broadband services. I think this is one of the reasons why broadband adoption has been slow in the US.
Except of course that they DO have limits. They have daily and monthly caps. Exceeding those caps will result in a warning or account cancellation, if the account holder continues using too much bandwidth.
I am a Cox customer and they introduced bandwidth caps last spring, I believe. There was a big broohaa about it actually.
I used to leech a LOT of stuff (half a dozen high speed FTP sessions open for hours on end, I would start the downloads in the morning, then go to work, basically leeching whole FTP sites during the day), but I never got warned about it by Cox. I was a little bit surprised. I am 100% sure I exceeded their bandwidth caps plenty of times.
Geez, just leave that somethingawful.com non-event out of this.
The script kiddies at SA just went on a hissy fit due to being hosted by a blatant spam supporter. There was no overzealous blocklisting.
The spam sent from China and Korea is overwhelmingly sent by US based spammers exploiting the widespread open proxy problem in the Far East.
The other major source of spam from the Far East are the "bulletproof" spamming facilities provided to US based career spammers by greedy Chinese administrators.
It is not that difficult at all to track who is responsible for the spam, just see who's being advertised.
In addition, most of these types of spam has a "fingerprint" that pinpoints the spam to some career spammer. The fingerprint can be a domain name, method of operandi, language in the spam, anything really. Resources like ROKSO at spamhaus.org are very good at identifying the real source of the spam.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers. The more painful and slower, the better.
monkeys.com used to have one, until the spammers DDOSed him.
Several other people are still running proxy honeypots with great success. They are a great resource for finding out which ISPs harbor proxy hijacking criminals.
For all of you, who think spammers will check whether the proxy works first, spammers do no such thing. They actively scan for open proxies and immediately start blasting away. That's just like with spamming. You really think spammers check every Email address on their lists is real?
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers. The more painful and slower, the better.
As an avid gamer and owner of several different video game systems and a PC used extensively for gaming, I gotta say the holiday guide is an absolute joke.
The games on the list are dated, and there are several newer, much better games available for nearly every single game they list. For example, nobody in their right mind would choose NFL Fever 2004 instead of Madden 2004 or ESPN NFL on XBox.
If you're using that guide to buy games for your kids, friends or relatives, please expect them to hate you after Christmas.
Others have already explained that these criminal use zombies in combination with chained proxies to hide their tracks. That's what's making it kinda difficult to track them down.
However, Steve Linford has stated before that he and the law enforcement agencies he's working with do have sufficient evidence to go after (some of) the perp(s) engaging in these criminal activities. I'm not sure why there hasn't been any arrests yet. I do take Steve's word for it though, he's not the kind of a person to say something like that just to grandstand.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers. The more painful, the better.
I used to be loyal to a fault. Then I noticed the corporations treat their employees like commodity regardless.
Was buddy-buddy with the bosses, too. I still am, whenever the boss is someone I would be friends with if he wasn't my boss, but I don't make the mistake of thinking that means anything in my professional life.
Why should I be loyal or obligated to someone who will fire my ass in a second, if the company's bottom line dictates it?
Think about it.
I have long since decided that my obligation is to my work only, i.e. that I will do my job and all of it the best I possibly can.
If a new employer comes along and decides to offer me better compensation or otherwise offer a better deal, I'm outta here just as fast as I would, if the company's quarterly earnings were dissapointing and they laid me off. At no circumstance will I EVER feel obligated to do anything just because someone has a fancier title than I do and is my boss.
That sort of stuff is for lambs.
I'm paid to do a job, nothing more or nothing less. That's where my obligation starts and ends.
The UK case where the "hacker" claimed a trojan was responsible for the hacking attempts on the US server is very interesting.
The teenager and his lawyers presented no evidence whatsoever about the existance of the trojan on his computer. Based on the press coverage on the case they didn't even identify which trojan had supposedly infected his home computer.
In fact, based on press coverage, experts working for the prosecutors even stated for the record that there was no evidence to suggest there ever was a trojan.
How on earth did he not get convicted???
It's not attacking several financial sites, just Fethard Finance.
.biz TLD has been regularly used by spammers, who use the zombie networks to host their websites and even DNS servers. I bet fethard.biz is ran by someone, who is sick and tired of getting the .biz domain thorouhgly plonked by blocklists and complained either directly to the criminal spammers or the admins of the .biz TLD and the spammers got a word of that.
The
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers.
The more painfully and slowly, the better.
"I don't like spam, but I have to admit that the thought of someone seriously inconveniencing SPEWS doesn't upset me too much."
You do like paying service fees to your spam enabling ISP though...you sure do hate spam a lot.
You did notice, btw, how SPEWS was only one of the anti-spamming resources being attacked by this worm, right?
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill hypocrites
Let me ask you this.
What's to keep real terrorists from using these spammer created zombie networks for some good old DDOSes on banks and other financial institutions, government networks, critical infrastructure services, etc.?
The zombie networks are wide open for anyone to exploit them. It's just a matter of time until they will be used for some real terrorism.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers. The more painfully and slowly, the better.
LOL
/.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill anonymous cowards posting useless, off-topic garbage on
Now you understand RIAA's War on P2P? It's not about piracy, it's about control of the industry.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill RIAA
His move to head the MPAA would just be making it official.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill corrupt politicians
The camera phones are not made for photographers, but teenagers who like to snap pictures of their friends snapping pictures of each other, then send them to other friends who weren't there.
Social mobs and all that.
For that purpose the camera phones are extremely adequate. You don't need zillion megapixels. I'd even say 1.1 megapixels is more than enough.
This victory is bitter sweet. While the judge did throw the case out completely, he didn't rule that the defendants' (anti-spammers) legal costs should be paid by the plaintiff (spammers).
You can help by donating to the legal defense fund established by the SpamCon Foundation. The donations are tax deductible.
Please do donate, if you have any to spare.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers