You can disable autoloading by changing your CD-ROM drive settings.
That DCMA violation is facilitated by Microsoft and the CD-ROM drive manufacturers.
You should all short stocks of those companies now, because the upcoming lawsuit against those companies will be a landslide victory for Sunncomm Technologies.
I use the Internet as an information source for quick fix type of information (news, entertainment, troubleshooting, short articles, comparison shopping, etc.) and reference (API docs, dictionaries, etc.) type of information.
For anything more substantial I prefer books. For some reason I can not adequately concentrate on front of a monitor and absorb the data properly when it's more than 2 pages long. When I'm reading a book I can concetrate better and it just works better that way.
It has probably more to do with the environment I'm using computers and reading books on. When reading books, the environment is usually a very comfortable bed or chair with no a little distractions. With computers there's the Email, IM and usually a busy work environment that distracts me constantly.
So, for longer stuff, books all the way.
For things that don't need concentration, Internet all the way.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill coworkers with loud telephone voices
We're not talking about some random DDOSing of "high-profile" anti-spam resources here. Someone started a very coordinated attack on a NUMBER of anti-spam resources sometime last August. It's been escalating ever since, and the anti-spam resources are now being bombarded to a degree they can't take it any more.
If some script kiddie would be doing this, they'd target somethine like eBay or Amazon and get their 15 minutes of fame much faster than by targetting some anti-spam sites run by eternal geeks. Most people don't even care they go down (at first...).
Spammer's motivation is pretty clear. The blocklists are hurting them REALLY bad. It's evident from a number of sources where spammers bitch and whine about the blocklists. They're the most efficient spam fighting tool THAT ACTUALLY MAKES ISPs terminate the f***ing criminals in existence right now. Honeypots come close 2nd, while practically all other solutions are largely inefficient in getting the spammers kicked out off the Internet.
I'm kinda wondering, if I, as a lowly cable modem user, can easily identify hundreds (if not thousands, I haven't completely gone through my firewall logs) of zombies on the same netblock I'm on (68.0.0.0/8).
But the ISPs on that netblock (Cox, Charter, Bellsouth, Adelphia, Verizon, et.al.) can not.
You should see my firewall logs...day after day, the same IPs from the same ISPs are hammering me. It is CLEAR nothing's being done.
It's been reported that SpamCop is paying upwards to $30K / year for bandwidth as a direct cause of the continous DDOS attacks on it.
The spammers are doing everything they can to squeeze the anti-spammers out. They use frivolous lawsuits (aka Mark Felstein and his porn spamming backers) or DDOS attacks that either knock the anti-spam resources off completely or increase the costs so that no hobbyist can run them.
And while all this is going on, the law enforcement agencies are doing nothing to counter the clearly illegal acts of the spammers.
And ISPs are doing NOTHING to reduce the number of zombies on their networks. So the DDOS attacks continue.
Nice going.
It's only a matter of time when someone (Al Queda?) will use the zombie network for something that will truly be noticed.
The point is not whether or not you or anyone else feels like blocklists are valuable.
The point is there're people (spamming scum) taking down anything they don't like about using DDOS attacks and the law enforcement agencies and ISPs are doing NOTHING to stop it.
Whether you like blocklists or not, the fact is a lot of other people do like them. They are being denied a valuable resource (to them) by people who oppose to what blocklists do. The opposition is using clearly illegal means to achieve their goal of runnign down all and every blocklist out there. This is a very definition of censorship.
Wait till some scumbag doesn't like what you do on your server and DDOSes it to hell and back. You try to contact the FBI about it and they don't want to hear about it. I'm confident you'll see what the point is then.
Europeans have wanted to become like Americans for so long I can't even remember when it wasn't so.
When nearly all popular culture is produced by Americans, what do you expect?
It starts with popular culture when you're 8 years old. It takes over your value system by the time you're 16 (some of which IS good...freedom of speech and all that stuff). When you're an adult, only the very few can see what happened.
"If the chances of getting caught are higher than not, and getting caught means you loose all financial rewards from your actions, there will be no incentive to spam"
I'm sure the 5,000 pound penalty will make the UK spammers just quiver in fear. Not.
The career spammer, btw, *will* spam unless he's physically made not to. When faced with a possibility of real financial sanctions, he'll work harder to avoid getting caught instead of stopping spamming. You can count on that.
And he will never get caught. Because he'll hide his tracks by using other illegal methods the violations of which are also not enforced (creating and using trojaned spam networks, illegal open proxy hijacking, illegal netblock hijacking, etc.)
There is no financial penalty high enough to make spammers stop BEFORE getting caught. Actually I even think there are NO penalties that would make them stop before-the-fact.
We need to make an example of one or more of them. Nothing else will help.
Throw the book at them for each and every violation of any laws, domestic or foreign. Let's see them rot in jail in Singapore for a while due to open proxy hijacking.
I guess the Enron exec, who defrauded millions from their employees and shareholders should walk away free then?
Jail time for spammers is justified, IMHO, when we're talking about the career spamming scum. The ones who illegally hijack foreign servers, illegally hijack unused netblocks, continue spamming despite being terminated from multiple ISPs, continue spamming despite court orders to stop (Sam Khuri comes to mind), etc. etc.
I don't think a first time offender should be jailed, but there is NOTHING else that will stop the career spamming from spamming other than locking him up (with no Internet access). These people are sociopaths, they belong in jail.
A Study (instead of innuendo) finds that: "in 2001, the latest data available, H-1B workers with bachelor's degrees were paid more, on average, than U.S. citizens with bachelor's degrees. It would seem, then, that H-1B competition was actually putting upward pressure on wages."
Filthstein is trying to voluntarily drop the case against the individuals listed on his frivolous suit in an attempt to avoid paying for the legal fees in behalf of the defendants.
If he gets his wish, he's won. The only purpose of that lawsuit was to cause as much cost as possible to the defendants in legal fees and otherwise. It was such a blatant attempt to stiffle free speech, that Filthstein should be disbarred for it.
The lawsuit also exposed him as the quack as he is. He should be disbarred for that reason as well. You guys should read the motion to dismiss from the defendants' lawyers. It's absolutely hilarious on how it points out the glaring errors in Filthstein's suit. It's not just factual errors regarding the issue at hand, but procedural errors any competent lawyer would've caught before he would've filed the suit.
For the "FUCK SPEWS" crowd out there, this suit had NOTHING to do with SPEWS. Filthstein and his buddy, convicted cocaine trafficker Eddy Marin, were suing the most vocal critics of Eddy's spam empire, that's all. They just wrapped it around the "we hate SPEWS" banner, because otherwise it would've been too obvious that the suit was nothing but a SLAPP suit.
So, this 12-year-old has been identified by the RIAA as a major copyright infringer...I'd like to see what sort of half-assed process made that happen.
Could it be that they are just targetting people at random? Naah, can't be. If the RIAA says they're targetting the major infringers, it must be true...
This is exactly what I had in mind when I posted yesterday about how suing people that ON AVERAGE are sharing 1000 songs is going to also catch people, who are sharing way less than the 1000 songs.
But the RIAA lies well. With all the media publicity about the 261, the way it's being played out, everyone thinks every single one of those people are sharing 1000 songs or more.
Well done RIAA...until you nazis sued a 12-year-old girl living in subsidized housing authority apartment. Let's see how this goes, should be entertaining (except for the little girl, that is).
If they're saying the people, who they're suing traded ON AVERAGE 1000 songs, that means some of the people they're suing shared far less than 1000 songs.
1000 songs is...hmm...7 - 8 CD-Rs of music or roughly 80 albums (assuming none of them are mix albums or bootlegs). That's peanuts.
There are people out there that are distributing several orders of magnitude more music, EVERY DAY, and yet RIAA is claiming these people are the real problem. Bulls***. This is yet another RIAA lie that's going unchallenged, because the hack-journalists writing these stories know even less about file trading than the RIAA does.
If RIAA was trying to stop illegal trading of copyrighted music, they'd go after the mp3 ripping groups, who are the main source of the stuff that's circulating on the Internet.
But no, they'd rather use intimidation tactics disguised as some sort of campaign to get rid of "major infringers".
It is most likely spammers, because they are ALREADY engaging in criminal activities. It wouldn't be much of a leap for them to switch from illegal computer hijacking into DDOS.
It WOULD be a significant leap from a legitimate business owner to all of a sudden to engage in an acticity that would result in a felony conviction, if he would get caught.
Most of the high volume spammers already have a criminal past (felony convictions for drug trafficking in the case of Eddy Marin for example). These people are perfectly capable, and willing, to break the law at any time. Given that most blocklists also try to mainly target these high volume spammers, it's not that big of a stretch to believe it's the spammers who are doing it.
Furthermore, blocklists DO work and are extremely effective. That is exactly why spammers hate them so much. It's, in some cases, completely destroying them.
In some cases, like Traffix, Inc. (grouplotto.com and bunch of other spam factories), they caused half the market capitalization of the publicly traded company to go poof. That's right...$100M+ of the company's worth dissappeared, because they were so thoroughly blocklisted their response rates dropped so dramatically their advertises weren't paying them that much any more. Don't believe me on this? Go read the SEC filings from Traffix, Inc.
Did it ever occur to you that ISPs do not get blocklisted in their entirety for signing up newbie spammers?
Did it ever occur to you that most career spammers that WOULD cause the ISP to get blocklisted to hell and back are all known and the reason why ISP's still sign them up is because they either do NO background checking or get greedy by the extra money the spamming scum is handing to them?
Slashdot Mirror
Competition is good.
If the Chinese launch succeeds, it should kick some NASA executive bootie.
You can disable autoloading by changing your CD-ROM drive settings.
That DCMA violation is facilitated by Microsoft and the CD-ROM drive manufacturers.
You should all short stocks of those companies now, because the upcoming lawsuit against those companies will be a landslide victory for Sunncomm Technologies.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill the DMCA
I use the Internet as an information source for quick fix type of information (news, entertainment, troubleshooting, short articles, comparison shopping, etc.) and reference (API docs, dictionaries, etc.) type of information.
For anything more substantial I prefer books. For some reason I can not adequately concentrate on front of a monitor and absorb the data properly when it's more than 2 pages long. When I'm reading a book I can concetrate better and it just works better that way.
It has probably more to do with the environment I'm using computers and reading books on. When reading books, the environment is usually a very comfortable bed or chair with no a little distractions. With computers there's the Email, IM and usually a busy work environment that distracts me constantly.
So, for longer stuff, books all the way.
For things that don't need concentration, Internet all the way.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill coworkers with loud telephone voices
Uh, follow the news, ok?
We're not talking about some random DDOSing of "high-profile" anti-spam resources here. Someone started a very coordinated attack on a NUMBER of anti-spam resources sometime last August. It's been escalating ever since, and the anti-spam resources are now being bombarded to a degree they can't take it any more.
If some script kiddie would be doing this, they'd target somethine like eBay or Amazon and get their 15 minutes of fame much faster than by targetting some anti-spam sites run by eternal geeks. Most people don't even care they go down (at first...).
Spammer's motivation is pretty clear. The blocklists are hurting them REALLY bad. It's evident from a number of sources where spammers bitch and whine about the blocklists. They're the most efficient spam fighting tool THAT ACTUALLY MAKES ISPs terminate the f***ing criminals in existence right now. Honeypots come close 2nd, while practically all other solutions are largely inefficient in getting the spammers kicked out off the Internet.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers
That wasn't a review. It was a press release.
:)
Interesting design. Looks like your typical skinned mp3 player
I'm kinda wondering, if I, as a lowly cable modem user, can easily identify hundreds (if not thousands, I haven't completely gone through my firewall logs) of zombies on the same netblock I'm on (68.0.0.0/8).
But the ISPs on that netblock (Cox, Charter, Bellsouth, Adelphia, Verizon, et.al.) can not.
You should see my firewall logs...day after day, the same IPs from the same ISPs are hammering me. It is CLEAR nothing's being done.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers
I guess you could call boycott a distributed denial of service attack, if you stretched the meaning of DDOS enough.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers
It's been reported that SpamCop is paying upwards to $30K / year for bandwidth as a direct cause of the continous DDOS attacks on it.
The spammers are doing everything they can to squeeze the anti-spammers out. They use frivolous lawsuits (aka Mark Felstein and his porn spamming backers) or DDOS attacks that either knock the anti-spam resources off completely or increase the costs so that no hobbyist can run them.
And while all this is going on, the law enforcement agencies are doing nothing to counter the clearly illegal acts of the spammers.
And ISPs are doing NOTHING to reduce the number of zombies on their networks. So the DDOS attacks continue.
Nice going.
It's only a matter of time when someone (Al Queda?) will use the zombie network for something that will truly be noticed.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers
The point is not whether or not you or anyone else feels like blocklists are valuable.
The point is there're people (spamming scum) taking down anything they don't like about using DDOS attacks and the law enforcement agencies and ISPs are doing NOTHING to stop it.
Whether you like blocklists or not, the fact is a lot of other people do like them. They are being denied a valuable resource (to them) by people who oppose to what blocklists do. The opposition is using clearly illegal means to achieve their goal of runnign down all and every blocklist out there. This is a very definition of censorship.
Wait till some scumbag doesn't like what you do on your server and DDOSes it to hell and back. You try to contact the FBI about it and they don't want to hear about it. I'm confident you'll see what the point is then.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers
Europeans have wanted to become like Americans for so long I can't even remember when it wasn't so.
When nearly all popular culture is produced by Americans, what do you expect?
It starts with popular culture when you're 8 years old. It takes over your value system by the time you're 16 (some of which IS good...freedom of speech and all that stuff). When you're an adult, only the very few can see what happened.
"If the chances of getting caught are higher than not, and getting caught means you loose all financial rewards from your actions, there will be no incentive to spam"
I'm sure the 5,000 pound penalty will make the UK spammers just quiver in fear. Not.
The career spammer, btw, *will* spam unless he's physically made not to. When faced with a possibility of real financial sanctions, he'll work harder to avoid getting caught instead of stopping spamming. You can count on that.
And he will never get caught. Because he'll hide his tracks by using other illegal methods the violations of which are also not enforced (creating and using trojaned spam networks, illegal open proxy hijacking, illegal netblock hijacking, etc.)
There is no financial penalty high enough to make spammers stop BEFORE getting caught. Actually I even think there are NO penalties that would make them stop before-the-fact.
We need to make an example of one or more of them. Nothing else will help.
Throw the book at them for each and every violation of any laws, domestic or foreign. Let's see them rot in jail in Singapore for a while due to open proxy hijacking.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers
I guess the Enron exec, who defrauded millions from their employees and shareholders should walk away free then?
Jail time for spammers is justified, IMHO, when we're talking about the career spamming scum. The ones who illegally hijack foreign servers, illegally hijack unused netblocks, continue spamming despite being terminated from multiple ISPs, continue spamming despite court orders to stop (Sam Khuri comes to mind), etc. etc.
I don't think a first time offender should be jailed, but there is NOTHING else that will stop the career spamming from spamming other than locking him up (with no Internet access). These people are sociopaths, they belong in jail.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers
A Study (instead of innuendo) finds that: "in 2001, the latest data available, H-1B workers with bachelor's degrees were paid more, on average, than U.S. citizens with bachelor's degrees. It would seem, then, that H-1B competition was actually putting upward pressure on wages."
Filthstein is trying to voluntarily drop the case against the individuals listed on his frivolous suit in an attempt to avoid paying for the legal fees in behalf of the defendants.
If he gets his wish, he's won. The only purpose of that lawsuit was to cause as much cost as possible to the defendants in legal fees and otherwise. It was such a blatant attempt to stiffle free speech, that Filthstein should be disbarred for it.
The lawsuit also exposed him as the quack as he is. He should be disbarred for that reason as well. You guys should read the motion to dismiss from the defendants' lawyers. It's absolutely hilarious on how it points out the glaring errors in Filthstein's suit. It's not just factual errors regarding the issue at hand, but procedural errors any competent lawyer would've caught before he would've filed the suit.
For the "FUCK SPEWS" crowd out there, this suit had NOTHING to do with SPEWS. Filthstein and his buddy, convicted cocaine trafficker Eddy Marin, were suing the most vocal critics of Eddy's spam empire, that's all. They just wrapped it around the "we hate SPEWS" banner, because otherwise it would've been too obvious that the suit was nothing but a SLAPP suit.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers
"The New York City papers are all over this"
Couldn't have happened at a better place, heh.
New York is the biggest entertainment marketplace in the world (except, maybe, LA). RIAA now has practically the entire city against them.
Let's hope that translates to fewer music purchases over the next few weeks.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill the RIAA
So, this 12-year-old has been identified by the RIAA as a major copyright infringer...I'd like to see what sort of half-assed process made that happen.
Could it be that they are just targetting people at random? Naah, can't be. If the RIAA says they're targetting the major infringers, it must be true...
This is exactly what I had in mind when I posted yesterday about how suing people that ON AVERAGE are sharing 1000 songs is going to also catch people, who are sharing way less than the 1000 songs.
But the RIAA lies well. With all the media publicity about the 261, the way it's being played out, everyone thinks every single one of those people are sharing 1000 songs or more.
Well done RIAA...until you nazis sued a 12-year-old girl living in subsidized housing authority apartment. Let's see how this goes, should be entertaining (except for the little girl, that is).
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill the RIAA
Welcome to the future...if the RIAA/MPAA bought legislators get their wishes.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill the RIAA
Another Anonymous Coward, another moron who totally misses the point.
Think before you post indeed.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill the RIAA
1000 songs shared is NOTHING.
If they're saying the people, who they're suing traded ON AVERAGE 1000 songs, that means some of the people they're suing shared far less than 1000 songs.
1000 songs is...hmm...7 - 8 CD-Rs of music or roughly 80 albums (assuming none of them are mix albums or bootlegs). That's peanuts.
There are people out there that are distributing several orders of magnitude more music, EVERY DAY, and yet RIAA is claiming these people are the real problem. Bulls***. This is yet another RIAA lie that's going unchallenged, because the hack-journalists writing these stories know even less about file trading than the RIAA does.
If RIAA was trying to stop illegal trading of copyrighted music, they'd go after the mp3 ripping groups, who are the main source of the stuff that's circulating on the Internet.
But no, they'd rather use intimidation tactics disguised as some sort of campaign to get rid of "major infringers".
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill the RIAA
It is most likely spammers, because they are ALREADY engaging in criminal activities. It wouldn't be much of a leap for them to switch from illegal computer hijacking into DDOS.
It WOULD be a significant leap from a legitimate business owner to all of a sudden to engage in an acticity that would result in a felony conviction, if he would get caught.
Most of the high volume spammers already have a criminal past (felony convictions for drug trafficking in the case of Eddy Marin for example). These people are perfectly capable, and willing, to break the law at any time. Given that most blocklists also try to mainly target these high volume spammers, it's not that big of a stretch to believe it's the spammers who are doing it.
Furthermore, blocklists DO work and are extremely effective. That is exactly why spammers hate them so much. It's, in some cases, completely destroying them.
In some cases, like Traffix, Inc. (grouplotto.com and bunch of other spam factories), they caused half the market capitalization of the publicly traded company to go poof. That's right...$100M+ of the company's worth dissappeared, because they were so thoroughly blocklisted their response rates dropped so dramatically their advertises weren't paying them that much any more. Don't believe me on this? Go read the SEC filings from Traffix, Inc.
"I thought that it least the PS2 was sold for a nominal profit"
Hmm, I didn't know that. Couldn't Google anything real quick either.
How about GameCube?
All video game consoles are sold at loss. The business is already exactly like the razor blade business.
I know that 1% is not the same as "less than 1%".
But I guess you missed that...
Did it ever occur to you that ISPs do not get blocklisted in their entirety for signing up newbie spammers?
Did it ever occur to you that most career spammers that WOULD cause the ISP to get blocklisted to hell and back are all known and the reason why ISP's still sign them up is because they either do NO background checking or get greedy by the extra money the spamming scum is handing to them?
"...and many ISPs (mine included) did nothing in response to my complaints (because they knew I wasn't going to move)."
Uh, if that was really the case, the ISP belonged in the bloclist.
"It certainly doesn't help anyone!"
Um, yes it does. It helps the people, who use a bloclist that lists your ISP as a spam enabling ISP.