'We don't have the ability to go to court and say, "We need a court order to effectuate the intercept."...
I think he means, "Without a reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed, we don't have the ability to go to court..."
Oh, I think he knows what he meant... He meant that his superiors have demanded the right to a dragnet, rather than "legal intercept when there's reasonable suspicion a crime has been committed." He's the general counsel of the FBI: He knows what he's saying.
Here's another meme from the "Your ISP sucks" asswipes: That somehow John Q. Air Conditioner Repairman Company has any idea how to tell if his ISP is "reputable" or not. They know nothing about email: They're buying a service and expect it to work, they have no frame of reference to even guess at the issues we're discussing here....And I'm an idiot? Puh-lease.
Run along now, junior: Your 25-user exchange 2003 box is calling. I think your backup failed.
Or perhaps considering this: "or somebody who reflexively reports all spam because they're, you know, pathetic and obsessed" you are a spammer yourself, and that's why you're being a jerk.
LMFAO! "She's a witch!" If it makes me a jerk to expose your opinionated nonsense for the tripe it is, then so be it.
No, dipshit: I manage a very-large email hosting environment comprising >15,000 domains and >150,000 mailboxes. My public MXs accept roughly 2 million messages per weekday, and reject about 10 times that amount. I completely understand the problem of spam, to a depth that would leave you in tears if I could reveal it all to you in one breath.
My point here is this: Spam sucks, but a certain amount of it is also a fact of life. People who obsess over it, get pissed off about it, or who start personal jihads to "destroy spam" or "destroy spammers" are delusional. Yes, we'd all love to shove it up their arse just once, but that's an unproductive path to pursue due the relative unlikelyhood of it ever happening. Just like the pathetic conspiracy theorists, just like the Alex Jones acolytes, just like the "Moon landing was a hoax" wackadoos, they're delusional, pathetic individuals seeking personal validation in a quixotic "battle" that, in many cases, can't be won because it exists only in their mind, or just can't be won because the way they're fighting is fucking stupid.
Spam will NEVER be solved with individual humans reporting individual messages. For that matter, even if we somehow achieve an environment where 100% of all email is either personally addressed by a human or from a 100% opt-in (triple-safety) sender, there will always be "junk" mail--from that web-site you bought a gift for your mom on three years ago with the sticky mailing list (triple out-out too!) to the Facebook profile you haven't visited in six month.
What users receive in their mailboxes is usually a function of their own stupidity--to protect customers from themselves involves striking a balance: If we used Spamhaus and their ridiculous, indiscriminate, quasi-fascist block-lists we'd lose half our customers overnight--they're mostly small businesses communicating with individuals and small-businesses and many of their customers either 1) Use shared web-hosting email 2) Use yahoo/hotmail/gmail or 3) Use a Windows Small-business-server on a cable modem. If we don't accept messages from them, our customers lose access to their customers, and we quickly lose access to them. True, we could attempt to sell services to companies we block, but that seems 1) Exceptionally self-serving--to the point where customers would be turned off. We know, this was tried once or twice by predecessors of mine... It did not go well. and 2) Exceptionally pointless. Companies either are comfortable with email hosting in the cloud or they aren't. And the ones who aren't won't generally accept being arm-twisted into the cloud so they can communicate with a vendor--they'll just find another vendor, and the original vendor (my customer) will find another email provider.
You need software analysis of content if you plan to get anything useful done. I'll say it again: Spamhaus is a guy with a good intention who has become obsessed with branding IPs as "spammers" indefinitely, even when the problem is demonstrably temporary because the ISP has terminated the person sending spam's account.
It is ultimately about methodology and mindset: Wouldn't you rather proactively recognize spam and drop it rather than reactively waiting for somebody to "report" individual IPs or IP blocks to the blacklist you trust totally blindly? That's a cat-and-mouse game that will last for-ev-er. If that's your bag? Run with it and make it your own: But you can have it. I only use DNS blacklists based on factual information, and use IP blocking sparingly (with a few notable exceptions, but even most of those aren't being done by our spam solution, but a our router...)
I'll stick to content-analysis, thanks, and leave the arbitrary, ham-fisted blocking to the hacks. If you're running some private mail server for 25 people you might be able to justify such a choice, but there is no way in hell that I can.
This advice is condescending and stupid. The problem isn't the provider: They're using shared IPs for hosted accounts, just like everybody else on earth.
Then why, in the last 15 years of having a domain, have I never been blocked, hmm? When he's been blocked multiple times. Don't have an answer for that, do you? Idiot.
Stupid people usually have the least creative insults. Certainly, I doubt I'll be able to craft a response as pithy and intelligent as yours was childish and asinine, and I could certainly never hope to reach the level of condescension you seem to exist at.
But I might suggest you've simply been lucky. In truth, you have zero control over what other people choose to do with their hosting accounts on the shared server where yours is. And, in fact, contrary to your asinine, childish attitude, that somehow, it is impossible for a "good" ISP to open an account for somebody intent on doing wrong I'd say "You're naïve."
A good ISP is monitoring what you do, and watching for spikes in traffic on certain ports (among other things) but even with that monitoring in place, and even with an engine in place to automate shutting down accounts that appear to be spamming without human intervention, somebody has to actually break the TOS (or at least, appear to break it) for the ISP to figure out they're doing it. That means that at least some spam would have to be actually sent somewhere prior to the ISP being able to do anything about it....And if that recipient happened to be a Spamhaus honeypot mailbox, or somebody who reflexively reports all spam because they're, you know, pathetic and obsessed, then yes, Virginia, it is completely possible for somebody hosting at a "good ISP" to get painted with the same brush because somebody on the same server did something inappropriate.
But hey, man, whatever: Keep believing you're immune to their arbitrary hammer just because it has never hit you. Keep believing there's magic that allows a "good ISP" to see into the future and know who is going to violate TOS before they do it. Most of all, keep thinking that "trust-us-we-know-best!" model of zero-oversight spam prevention is best--it will make the day when Spamhaus does screw you over (or one of your customers) that much sweeter for those of us living in the real world.
Find yourself a better provider. Most people have never been blocked, and you've been collaterally damaged multiple times? Why would you stick with those cowboys?
This advice is condescending and stupid. The problem isn't the provider: They're using shared IPs for hosted accounts, just like everybody else on earth. Where is he going to find a provider that doesn't use shared IPs? Please don't say "IPv6"--there are a host of other problems that go along with that "solution" to make it a non-starter.
How about, instead, spamhaus takes a little care and due dilligence when it lists addresses? Maybe put in a system so that providers who are policing their environments can easily get their IPs and ranges delisted? THAT ALONE would make dealing with them less-brutal for the honest sys admins who have clients using shared hosting to send legitimate email. If you think "it only happens at bad ISPs" you obviously haven't been around the block enough times to know how ignorant that statement paints you to be.
an ISP whom I have a range with once sold an adjacent block to a spammer, who got it listed on Spamhaus. Spamhaus blocked the/27, which included the top end of my range
Change your ISP
That's not a practical option for a great many locations... If you're in a data center your choices are whatever telcos they have available, or you can pay out of pocket to "build-in" somebody else, but that's usually cost prohibitive.
The problem I have with spamhaus is that they do shit like this all the time. All. The. Time. We took on a client who switched to a well-known, Tier 1 ISP from their "cruddy" local service because their "low-life" ISP couldn't give them enough IP space. They got assigned a/24. As luck would have it, their/24 was part of a/28 that was listed by spamhaus. When they switched to the Tier-1 ISP from the local "scummy" operator they started off having a very-high rate of acceptance at destination servers. After the switch? They started getting about 50% rejects. When we investigated we found that spamhaus was blocking a fucking/28, seemingly to "punish" the Tier 1 ISP for having any spam coming from any of their IPs.
Getting a single IP unlisted as "false-positive" is nearly impossible: Getting a/28 delisted from their blocklist? Good fucking luck. The client ended up demanding (and receiving) a/24 assignment from another part of the provider's inventory to get out of it, but it cost them plenty: The delay ballooned their bill from our original estimate to a significantly higher amount, and all because some jack-ass in Denmark is so obsessed with junk mail (does he not have Spam Assassin or Barracuda running?) that he has declared a multi-decade jihad against spam, and indicates he gives not shit zero what collateral damage he causes.
That's my beef: His motives are admirable, but his methods are fucking fascist.
Specifically, keeping guns out of the hands of lunatics and felons does not, in any way, shape or form "infringe" on your right to bear arms.
It does when the government starts making laws that allow family members or government agents to put a person on a one-year block just because "they might be a little blue". Once the lists exist, they'll be abused. Once they're abused, they can be abused with regularity. Once the abuse is regular, it can be codified in law. Once the law says no one can own guns, the government can send anyone to the internment camps without fear of popular uprising. Just like the Japanese-Americans.
This is illogical, paranoid nonsense. You make the (unsupported) argument that family members or government agents can put a person on a "one year block" because they're "a little blue." Please cite some proof--such a registry does not exist, nor has it been proposed.
As for your historical example, in the first place, Japanese-Americans had the right to bear arms--yet almost none of them resisted by force. Those who did were slaughtered. So your example is stupid on two levels: First, the interned-Japanese Americans had access to guns and it didn't stop them from being placed in camps and second, the ones who did resist technically did "avoid" being put in concentration camps, but they did so by being killed, so I'm not sure that's really a big "win."
When I went to school (I'm 46), "Wrinkle in Time" was on the curriculum.
Me too, in fact I can say that without a doubt, Wrinkle in Time stimulated by lifelong love of science-fiction, and made me at least marginally more interested in school subjects like math and science. At least enough to understand that while I enjoyed science fiction, actual science probably wasn't my bailiwick because of all the quiet time and sitting still required.
In the end, the court had mercy on the non-executive employees who were at risk of getting laid off with an unreimbursed $5-10k Amex bill to boot, but American Express made their lives absolutely *miserable* for months while the auditors scrutinized the bills to make sure the charges weren't "excessive" (and thus excluded from reimbursement) unless they had the cash to pay their bills out of pocket while waiting to get their expenses approved.
I've had companies tell me they want me to carry a "personal responsibility" corporate card for business expenses, and my answer is always a flat "No." They've asked me to put business expenses on my personal card and here, again, the answer is, always, a flat "No." They can issue me corporate responsibility AmEx if they need me to pay business expenses directly, and I'll be happy to itemize the bill for them, but I won't sign against my own personal credit and then wait until some minor Grade 38 Bureaucrat wants to have an argument about the fact that I tipped $3 on a $18 cab ride, and holds up paying my entire expense report over it.
If they won't give me a card they're responsible for? Then too bad: Somebody else can make the trip, or my boss can come with and charge all my expenses on his card.
I'm astonished that the studio executives own intestines didn't spring forth and strangle the man for such blatant hypocrisy. I'm astonished that politicians aren't on television right now saying "Yeah, that's some pot/kettle 'black' shit right there. I'm astonished any reporter he was talking to didn't kick him in the balls. I mean, I probably would have done all those things. Simultaneously in fact.
That's a television show, all to itself, if you can actually pull it off without hurting yourself. I'd DVR that.... Or maybe D/L the torrent if I forgot....Shit, even if you do get hurt, the audience would be mesmerized...
It's easy to understand now why the gov is so ravenously desperate for gun control and elimination of our 2nd Amendment RKBA. When that's gone, then they can finish eliminating the 1st, the 4th, the 5th, etc.
I used to think the right wing gun nuts were all paranoid delusional whacko's but more and more I begin to see that perhaps they may have been correct all along.
The erosion of your other constitutional rights have somewhere between little and nothing to do with minute limits on the second amendment right to bear arms we're talking about. Specifically, keeping guns out of the hands of lunatics and felons does not, in any way, shape or form "infringe" on your right to bear arms. The only people who will be prevented from buying a gun don't actually have a legal right to buy one in the first place: As a society we long ago accepted that crimes (or actual, provable insanity) were legitimate reasons to limit a person's liberty. Beyond this, it is a childish fantasy to believe that the fat-slobs from the local "militia" are ever going to overthrow jack-shit.
Simply put: A direct confrontation with the U.S. military where you attempt to "restore our freedoms" would be a pathetic, one-sided massacre. Every participant would be dead in minutes, hours if they're really "lucky." The survivors would be rounded up, tried for treason, and executed.
Your best hope for restoring lost rights is, and always will be, the ballot box. Show me a person who thinks he can effectively "defend" his constitutional rights with his civilian caliber semi-automatic pistol/rifle and I'll show you somebody who hasn't spent even ten minutes in the military.
That kind of "contract" sounds likely to be invalid due to unconscionability.
Sounds great - why don't you spend $30k on a civil suit against Amazon over access to your $5 movie? Chances are that after you've spent the first $1k they'll just mail you a check for $5 so that your damages go out the window.
Yep, that's the scam: "Suuuuure you can assert your rights in court..." Granted, a good lawyer experienced at suing high-class scum like this will pre-emptively include language indicating the legal fees they've already incurred are part of their demand for damages and also include language that beyond the issues of damages, the litigation is also about contract law... Makes it harder for Amazon to seal off the suit with a $5 check, since the damages are beyond the $5 fee.
I second that emotion. One of my least favorite things about the web is its habit of competing to have the most obnoxious auto-play videos on the home page, or worse, on deeper pages. Autoplay is to the web what "volume-up!" for commercials is to television: A way to make an unpalatable but necessary facet of the site or programming into a braying, annoying burden to be circumvented. "Volume up!" is one of the top 5 reasons consumers give for using DVRs to zap commercials.
Personally, I just don't use sites that start braying video at me the moment I hit their homepage--I prefer to listen to music and don't want to hear an advertisement for a car come blaring into me headphones.
That is something I still do not understand. How is it that making an unauthorized copy of something without payment is theft, but depriving me of paid for content is not?
It was in what was formerly known as "the fine print," and is now colloquially referred to as the "Terms of Service." The one advantage "fine print" had over "ToS" was that a company generally couldn't change their "fine print" very often, and if they did, they'd have to inform their customers of said change in writing, which would be expensive (think stamps, paper, and envelopes, and man-power to fill, seal, address, and affix stamps to them) not to mention that the idea that one party can unilaterally re-write a contract "after the fact" is a relatively recent addition to our jurisprudence.
With ToS they just insert a clause that says "or anything else we choose to add later" and your only recourse is to stop using the product--immediately--if they institute a change you don't like.
It ain't a "free market," and it can't become a "Free market" in the foreseeable future. Get back to me if mankind can evolve out of mortal fear for his own existence to the point where he can "shop around" for the cheapest E.R. after he breaks a leg, gets hit by a car, or has an appendix attack.
I agree with you. It is not a free market. At this point the rational thing to do is either support a single payer healthcare system, or let poor people who can't pay for their healthcare suffer without bothering our conscience.
Absolutely! I've been saying for years that if we aren't willing to say "Fuck you, drop dead!" when destitute people can't afford to be cured then, as a society, we're suckers to support anything but a single-payer system.
They didn't. Though they did last longer than Futurama, the newer episodes are soul-crushingly bad.
Well... They're certainly not good, that's for sure.
But recent "Simpsons" are still far better than Comedy Central era Futurama... Mainly due to the fact that there wasn't a multi-year hiatus during which the entire writing staff moved on to other jobs. This is the main problem with Futurama at this point: The people who made the show funny and charming and cute are all gone, having made careers for themselves based on the funny/charming/cuteness of Futurama.
The Simpsons have turned-over writers (shit, didn't Conan O'Brien write for that show at one point?) but never everybody all at once, and they never had a multi-year hiatus during which the writers that knew the show, even if they stuck around, had time to forget some of the details that made it funny.
All things considered, though, what this says loudest is "FOR GOD'S SAKE, DON'T TAKE YOUR QUIRKY SHOWS TO FOX!" Even if they buy them they'll just ruin them by cancelling them prematurely, putting fans and staff on a roller-coaster for no-apparent-reason. At least they didn't ruin Family Guy....Yet...
In hindsight, I sort of wish the ending to Futurama had been the last shot in "The Devils Hands are Idle Playthings," with Frye and Leela walking away together, happy.
"Fucking awful" is a bit strong, but they definitely weren't up to par. I'm not surprised it was cancelled, and at this point I'd be much happier if they put the series to bed instead of continually trying to bring it back, as it will inevitably get worse every time they do.
Not sure I can get on board with "awful" being "a bit strong." If anything, I'd say "fucking awful" is a generous review. It was obvious they weren't using the same writers, and the episodes had none of the charming self-deprecation/self-parody that made the originals so special and cute and fun. Leela and Frye being "on again/off again" felt lame and contrived--neither one of them is going to do any better. She's a one-eyed alien and he's a man-out-of-time pizza delivery guy.
In fact, that's another problem: They changed Frye's character such that he wasn't really a "man out of element" pizza guy anymore and had become a standard bumbling loser boyfriend foil for Leela.
All the benefits of private sector comes only when there is high degree of competition between the private companies and there is an informed consumers making rational choices to provide feedback.
This is the biggest myth about health care: That people make "rational, informed" choices. They don't. You don't have an appendix attack and shop around to a few hospitals to see who has the best rate: They put you in the ambulance and you go to the closest place with a resource available to save your life. As for a "free market" in health care, that's an interesting academic discussion, but certainly isn't something that will ever exist in the real world.
There is a massive barrier to entry in providing services: You can't just up and become a doctor. There's licensing, education, and liability insurance premiums. In a "free market" new providers would rush to provide the service that has become so rare that the price spiked. But that's an 8-12 years pipeline to add new doctors, and a 2-6 year pipeline for new RNs, MSNs. And all of that adds up to this: It isn't really a free market, and there probably isn't much hope of it ever becoming one because sick patients will always be mostly frightened and want the first option that saves their lives. Our society will never allow any random to person to just say "I'm a doctor!" and provide medical care. So we're stuck: We can't grow the supply of doctors and high-skill nurses fast enough to provide care for all the sick people, and we can't get sick people to say "fuck you! I'd rather die than pay that much!" (yet) so that's where it stands.
It ain't a "free market," and it can't become a "Free market" in the foreseeable future. Get back to me if mankind can evolve out of mortal fear for his own existence to the point where he can "shop around" for the cheapest E.R. after he breaks a leg, gets hit by a car, or has an appendix attack.
One of the comments on the article was more informative to me than the article alone...
It is NOT about spam. It is about purchasing "legitimacy" quickly."
You're welcome.
Or at least the appearance of legitimacy. Next, Twitter will unveil a portion of their API where somebody can offer a service to "rate" the quailty of your followers and then somebody else will invent a means to manipulate that (see also SEOs vs. Google for the last decade or so) and we'll be right back here this time next year talking about companies that build "legit" backstories so your "fake" twitter accounts stay active "long enough" to count as "legit" followers...
What a shame to shutdown the source of so much fun! I see that they released a couple of the classic games open source, so perhaps some sort of good can come from that.
I'm not sure if it is "xenophobia" to truthfully say that we have a jobs crisis in this country and are importing foreigners to drive down wages on the few remaining middle-class wage jobs. That's not "Xenophobia," that's mathematics.
So why not have a minimum salary for H1B employees? Increase with inflation every year of course.
The H1-Bs being underpaid is their business model. Plus it doesn't hurt that if he's fired he's kicked out of the country--nothing like an employee who can't quit without being deported to keep the complaints from staff down...
Slashdot Mirror
'We don't have the ability to go to court and say, "We need a court order to effectuate the intercept."...
I think he means, "Without a reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed, we don't have the ability to go to court ..."
Oh, I think he knows what he meant... He meant that his superiors have demanded the right to a dragnet, rather than "legal intercept when there's reasonable suspicion a crime has been committed." He's the general counsel of the FBI: He knows what he's saying.
I have a reputable ISP.
Here's another meme from the "Your ISP sucks" asswipes: That somehow John Q. Air Conditioner Repairman Company has any idea how to tell if his ISP is "reputable" or not. They know nothing about email: They're buying a service and expect it to work, they have no frame of reference to even guess at the issues we're discussing here. ...And I'm an idiot ? Puh-lease.
Run along now, junior: Your 25-user exchange 2003 box is calling. I think your backup failed.
Or perhaps considering this: "or somebody who reflexively reports all spam because they're, you know, pathetic and obsessed" you are a spammer yourself, and that's why you're being a jerk.
LMFAO! "She's a witch!" If it makes me a jerk to expose your opinionated nonsense for the tripe it is, then so be it.
No, dipshit: I manage a very-large email hosting environment comprising >15,000 domains and >150,000 mailboxes. My public MXs accept roughly 2 million messages per weekday, and reject about 10 times that amount. I completely understand the problem of spam, to a depth that would leave you in tears if I could reveal it all to you in one breath.
My point here is this: Spam sucks, but a certain amount of it is also a fact of life. People who obsess over it, get pissed off about it, or who start personal jihads to "destroy spam" or "destroy spammers" are delusional. Yes, we'd all love to shove it up their arse just once, but that's an unproductive path to pursue due the relative unlikelyhood of it ever happening. Just like the pathetic conspiracy theorists, just like the Alex Jones acolytes, just like the "Moon landing was a hoax" wackadoos, they're delusional, pathetic individuals seeking personal validation in a quixotic "battle" that, in many cases, can't be won because it exists only in their mind, or just can't be won because the way they're fighting is fucking stupid.
Spam will NEVER be solved with individual humans reporting individual messages. For that matter, even if we somehow achieve an environment where 100% of all email is either personally addressed by a human or from a 100% opt-in (triple-safety) sender, there will always be "junk" mail--from that web-site you bought a gift for your mom on three years ago with the sticky mailing list (triple out-out too!) to the Facebook profile you haven't visited in six month.
What users receive in their mailboxes is usually a function of their own stupidity--to protect customers from themselves involves striking a balance: If we used Spamhaus and their ridiculous, indiscriminate, quasi-fascist block-lists we'd lose half our customers overnight--they're mostly small businesses communicating with individuals and small-businesses and many of their customers either 1) Use shared web-hosting email 2) Use yahoo/hotmail/gmail or 3) Use a Windows Small-business-server on a cable modem. If we don't accept messages from them, our customers lose access to their customers, and we quickly lose access to them. True, we could attempt to sell services to companies we block, but that seems 1) Exceptionally self-serving--to the point where customers would be turned off. We know, this was tried once or twice by predecessors of mine... It did not go well. and 2) Exceptionally pointless. Companies either are comfortable with email hosting in the cloud or they aren't. And the ones who aren't won't generally accept being arm-twisted into the cloud so they can communicate with a vendor--they'll just find another vendor, and the original vendor (my customer) will find another email provider.
You need software analysis of content if you plan to get anything useful done. I'll say it again: Spamhaus is a guy with a good intention who has become obsessed with branding IPs as "spammers" indefinitely, even when the problem is demonstrably temporary because the ISP has terminated the person sending spam's account.
It is ultimately about methodology and mindset: Wouldn't you rather proactively recognize spam and drop it rather than reactively waiting for somebody to "report" individual IPs or IP blocks to the blacklist you trust totally blindly? That's a cat-and-mouse game that will last for-ev-er. If that's your bag? Run with it and make it your own: But you can have it. I only use DNS blacklists based on factual information, and use IP blocking sparingly (with a few notable exceptions, but even most of those aren't being done by our spam solution, but a our router...)
I'll stick to content-analysis, thanks, and leave the arbitrary, ham-fisted blocking to the hacks. If you're running some private mail server for 25 people you might be able to justify such a choice, but there is no way in hell that I can.
This advice is condescending and stupid. The problem isn't the provider: They're using shared IPs for hosted accounts, just like everybody else on earth.
Then why, in the last 15 years of having a domain, have I never been blocked, hmm? When he's been blocked multiple times. Don't have an answer for that, do you? Idiot.
Stupid people usually have the least creative insults. Certainly, I doubt I'll be able to craft a response as pithy and intelligent as yours was childish and asinine, and I could certainly never hope to reach the level of condescension you seem to exist at.
But I might suggest you've simply been lucky. In truth, you have zero control over what other people choose to do with their hosting accounts on the shared server where yours is. And, in fact, contrary to your asinine, childish attitude, that somehow, it is impossible for a "good" ISP to open an account for somebody intent on doing wrong I'd say "You're naïve."
A good ISP is monitoring what you do, and watching for spikes in traffic on certain ports (among other things) but even with that monitoring in place, and even with an engine in place to automate shutting down accounts that appear to be spamming without human intervention, somebody has to actually break the TOS (or at least, appear to break it) for the ISP to figure out they're doing it. That means that at least some spam would have to be actually sent somewhere prior to the ISP being able to do anything about it. ...And if that recipient happened to be a Spamhaus honeypot mailbox, or somebody who reflexively reports all spam because they're, you know, pathetic and obsessed, then yes, Virginia, it is completely possible for somebody hosting at a "good ISP" to get painted with the same brush because somebody on the same server did something inappropriate.
But hey, man, whatever: Keep believing you're immune to their arbitrary hammer just because it has never hit you. Keep believing there's magic that allows a "good ISP" to see into the future and know who is going to violate TOS before they do it. Most of all, keep thinking that "trust-us-we-know-best!" model of zero-oversight spam prevention is best--it will make the day when Spamhaus does screw you over (or one of your customers) that much sweeter for those of us living in the real world.
Find yourself a better provider. Most people have never been blocked, and you've been collaterally damaged multiple times? Why would you stick with those cowboys?
This advice is condescending and stupid. The problem isn't the provider: They're using shared IPs for hosted accounts, just like everybody else on earth. Where is he going to find a provider that doesn't use shared IPs? Please don't say "IPv6"--there are a host of other problems that go along with that "solution" to make it a non-starter.
How about, instead, spamhaus takes a little care and due dilligence when it lists addresses? Maybe put in a system so that providers who are policing their environments can easily get their IPs and ranges delisted? THAT ALONE would make dealing with them less-brutal for the honest sys admins who have clients using shared hosting to send legitimate email. If you think "it only happens at bad ISPs" you obviously haven't been around the block enough times to know how ignorant that statement paints you to be.
AC @ 6:40 wrote :-
an ISP whom I have a range with once sold an adjacent block to a spammer, who got it listed on Spamhaus. Spamhaus blocked the /27, which included the top end of my range
Change your ISP
That's not a practical option for a great many locations... If you're in a data center your choices are whatever telcos they have available, or you can pay out of pocket to "build-in" somebody else, but that's usually cost prohibitive.
The problem I have with spamhaus is that they do shit like this all the time. All. The. Time. We took on a client who switched to a well-known, Tier 1 ISP from their "cruddy" local service because their "low-life" ISP couldn't give them enough IP space. They got assigned a /24. As luck would have it, their /24 was part of a /28 that was listed by spamhaus. When they switched to the Tier-1 ISP from the local "scummy" operator they started off having a very-high rate of acceptance at destination servers. After the switch? They started getting about 50% rejects. When we investigated we found that spamhaus was blocking a fucking /28, seemingly to "punish" the Tier 1 ISP for having any spam coming from any of their IPs.
Getting a single IP unlisted as "false-positive" is nearly impossible: Getting a /28 delisted from their blocklist? Good fucking luck. The client ended up demanding (and receiving) a /24 assignment from another part of the provider's inventory to get out of it, but it cost them plenty: The delay ballooned their bill from our original estimate to a significantly higher amount, and all because some jack-ass in Denmark is so obsessed with junk mail (does he not have Spam Assassin or Barracuda running?) that he has declared a multi-decade jihad against spam, and indicates he gives not shit zero what collateral damage he causes.
That's my beef: His motives are admirable, but his methods are fucking fascist.
Specifically, keeping guns out of the hands of lunatics and felons does not, in any way, shape or form "infringe" on your right to bear arms.
It does when the government starts making laws that allow family members or government agents to put a person on a one-year block just because "they might be a little blue". Once the lists exist, they'll be abused. Once they're abused, they can be abused with regularity. Once the abuse is regular, it can be codified in law. Once the law says no one can own guns, the government can send anyone to the internment camps without fear of popular uprising. Just like the Japanese-Americans.
This is illogical, paranoid nonsense. You make the (unsupported) argument that family members or government agents can put a person on a "one year block" because they're "a little blue." Please cite some proof--such a registry does not exist, nor has it been proposed.
As for your historical example, in the first place, Japanese-Americans had the right to bear arms--yet almost none of them resisted by force. Those who did were slaughtered. So your example is stupid on two levels: First, the interned-Japanese Americans had access to guns and it didn't stop them from being placed in camps and second, the ones who did resist technically did "avoid" being put in concentration camps, but they did so by being killed, so I'm not sure that's really a big "win."
When I went to school (I'm 46), "Wrinkle in Time" was on the curriculum.
Me too, in fact I can say that without a doubt, Wrinkle in Time stimulated by lifelong love of science-fiction, and made me at least marginally more interested in school subjects like math and science. At least enough to understand that while I enjoyed science fiction, actual science probably wasn't my bailiwick because of all the quiet time and sitting still required.
Since most people believe in God, the rate of depression would be expected to be very close to the population average.
Although what you say is true, it also implies that such a thing couldn't be controlled for, which it undeniably could.
In the end, the court had mercy on the non-executive employees who were at risk of getting laid off with an unreimbursed $5-10k Amex bill to boot, but American Express made their lives absolutely *miserable* for months while the auditors scrutinized the bills to make sure the charges weren't "excessive" (and thus excluded from reimbursement) unless they had the cash to pay their bills out of pocket while waiting to get their expenses approved.
I've had companies tell me they want me to carry a "personal responsibility" corporate card for business expenses, and my answer is always a flat "No." They've asked me to put business expenses on my personal card and here, again, the answer is, always, a flat "No." They can issue me corporate responsibility AmEx if they need me to pay business expenses directly, and I'll be happy to itemize the bill for them, but I won't sign against my own personal credit and then wait until some minor Grade 38 Bureaucrat wants to have an argument about the fact that I tipped $3 on a $18 cab ride, and holds up paying my entire expense report over it.
If they won't give me a card they're responsible for? Then too bad: Somebody else can make the trip, or my boss can come with and charge all my expenses on his card.
Does it also correlate with more than usual incidences of requiring help for such maladies?
I'm astonished that the studio executives own intestines didn't spring forth and strangle the man for such blatant hypocrisy. I'm astonished that politicians aren't on television right now saying "Yeah, that's some pot/kettle 'black' shit right there. I'm astonished any reporter he was talking to didn't kick him in the balls. I mean, I probably would have done all those things. Simultaneously in fact.
That's a television show, all to itself, if you can actually pull it off without hurting yourself. I'd DVR that.... Or maybe D/L the torrent if I forgot. ...Shit, even if you do get hurt, the audience would be mesmerized...
MES-MER-IZED!
It's easy to understand now why the gov is so ravenously desperate for gun control and elimination of our 2nd Amendment RKBA. When that's gone, then they can finish eliminating the 1st, the 4th, the 5th, etc.
I used to think the right wing gun nuts were all paranoid delusional whacko's but more and more I begin to see that perhaps they may have been correct all along.
The erosion of your other constitutional rights have somewhere between little and nothing to do with minute limits on the second amendment right to bear arms we're talking about. Specifically, keeping guns out of the hands of lunatics and felons does not, in any way, shape or form "infringe" on your right to bear arms. The only people who will be prevented from buying a gun don't actually have a legal right to buy one in the first place: As a society we long ago accepted that crimes (or actual, provable insanity) were legitimate reasons to limit a person's liberty. Beyond this, it is a childish fantasy to believe that the fat-slobs from the local "militia" are ever going to overthrow jack-shit.
Simply put: A direct confrontation with the U.S. military where you attempt to "restore our freedoms" would be a pathetic, one-sided massacre. Every participant would be dead in minutes, hours if they're really "lucky." The survivors would be rounded up, tried for treason, and executed.
Your best hope for restoring lost rights is, and always will be, the ballot box. Show me a person who thinks he can effectively "defend" his constitutional rights with his civilian caliber semi-automatic pistol/rifle and I'll show you somebody who hasn't spent even ten minutes in the military.
That kind of "contract" sounds likely to be invalid due to unconscionability.
Sounds great - why don't you spend $30k on a civil suit against Amazon over access to your $5 movie? Chances are that after you've spent the first $1k they'll just mail you a check for $5 so that your damages go out the window.
Yep, that's the scam: "Suuuuure you can assert your rights in court..." Granted, a good lawyer experienced at suing high-class scum like this will pre-emptively include language indicating the legal fees they've already incurred are part of their demand for damages and also include language that beyond the issues of damages, the litigation is also about contract law... Makes it harder for Amazon to seal off the suit with a $5 check, since the damages are beyond the $5 fee.
Oh god, don't give developers ideas like that!
I second that emotion. One of my least favorite things about the web is its habit of competing to have the most obnoxious auto-play videos on the home page, or worse, on deeper pages. Autoplay is to the web what "volume-up!" for commercials is to television: A way to make an unpalatable but necessary facet of the site or programming into a braying, annoying burden to be circumvented. "Volume up!" is one of the top 5 reasons consumers give for using DVRs to zap commercials.
Personally, I just don't use sites that start braying video at me the moment I hit their homepage--I prefer to listen to music and don't want to hear an advertisement for a car come blaring into me headphones.
That is something I still do not understand. How is it that making an unauthorized copy of something without payment is theft, but depriving me of paid for content is not?
It was in what was formerly known as "the fine print," and is now colloquially referred to as the "Terms of Service." The one advantage "fine print" had over "ToS" was that a company generally couldn't change their "fine print" very often, and if they did, they'd have to inform their customers of said change in writing, which would be expensive (think stamps, paper, and envelopes, and man-power to fill, seal, address, and affix stamps to them) not to mention that the idea that one party can unilaterally re-write a contract "after the fact" is a relatively recent addition to our jurisprudence.
With ToS they just insert a clause that says "or anything else we choose to add later" and your only recourse is to stop using the product--immediately--if they institute a change you don't like.
It ain't a "free market," and it can't become a "Free market" in the foreseeable future. Get back to me if mankind can evolve out of mortal fear for his own existence to the point where he can "shop around" for the cheapest E.R. after he breaks a leg, gets hit by a car, or has an appendix attack.
I agree with you. It is not a free market. At this point the rational thing to do is either support a single payer healthcare system, or let poor people who can't pay for their healthcare suffer without bothering our conscience.
Absolutely! I've been saying for years that if we aren't willing to say "Fuck you, drop dead!" when destitute people can't afford to be cured then, as a society, we're suckers to support anything but a single-payer system.
They didn't. Though they did last longer than Futurama, the newer episodes are soul-crushingly bad.
Well... They're certainly not good, that's for sure.
But recent "Simpsons" are still far better than Comedy Central era Futurama... Mainly due to the fact that there wasn't a multi-year hiatus during which the entire writing staff moved on to other jobs. This is the main problem with Futurama at this point: The people who made the show funny and charming and cute are all gone, having made careers for themselves based on the funny/charming/cuteness of Futurama.
The Simpsons have turned-over writers (shit, didn't Conan O'Brien write for that show at one point?) but never everybody all at once, and they never had a multi-year hiatus during which the writers that knew the show, even if they stuck around, had time to forget some of the details that made it funny.
All things considered, though, what this says loudest is "FOR GOD'S SAKE, DON'T TAKE YOUR QUIRKY SHOWS TO FOX!" Even if they buy them they'll just ruin them by cancelling them prematurely, putting fans and staff on a roller-coaster for no-apparent-reason. At least they didn't ruin Family Guy. ...Yet...
In hindsight, I sort of wish the ending to Futurama had been the last shot in "The Devils Hands are Idle Playthings," with Frye and Leela walking away together, happy.
"Fucking awful" is a bit strong, but they definitely weren't up to par. I'm not surprised it was cancelled, and at this point I'd be much happier if they put the series to bed instead of continually trying to bring it back, as it will inevitably get worse every time they do.
Not sure I can get on board with "awful" being "a bit strong." If anything, I'd say "fucking awful" is a generous review. It was obvious they weren't using the same writers, and the episodes had none of the charming self-deprecation/self-parody that made the originals so special and cute and fun. Leela and Frye being "on again/off again" felt lame and contrived--neither one of them is going to do any better. She's a one-eyed alien and he's a man-out-of-time pizza delivery guy.
In fact, that's another problem: They changed Frye's character such that he wasn't really a "man out of element" pizza guy anymore and had become a standard bumbling loser boyfriend foil for Leela.
All the benefits of private sector comes only when there is high degree of competition between the private companies and there is an informed consumers making rational choices to provide feedback.
This is the biggest myth about health care: That people make "rational, informed" choices. They don't. You don't have an appendix attack and shop around to a few hospitals to see who has the best rate: They put you in the ambulance and you go to the closest place with a resource available to save your life. As for a "free market" in health care, that's an interesting academic discussion, but certainly isn't something that will ever exist in the real world.
There is a massive barrier to entry in providing services: You can't just up and become a doctor. There's licensing, education, and liability insurance premiums. In a "free market" new providers would rush to provide the service that has become so rare that the price spiked. But that's an 8-12 years pipeline to add new doctors, and a 2-6 year pipeline for new RNs, MSNs. And all of that adds up to this: It isn't really a free market, and there probably isn't much hope of it ever becoming one because sick patients will always be mostly frightened and want the first option that saves their lives. Our society will never allow any random to person to just say "I'm a doctor!" and provide medical care. So we're stuck: We can't grow the supply of doctors and high-skill nurses fast enough to provide care for all the sick people, and we can't get sick people to say "fuck you! I'd rather die than pay that much!" (yet) so that's where it stands.
It ain't a "free market," and it can't become a "Free market" in the foreseeable future. Get back to me if mankind can evolve out of mortal fear for his own existence to the point where he can "shop around" for the cheapest E.R. after he breaks a leg, gets hit by a car, or has an appendix attack.
Or is it more like the Oklahoma Land Grab at this point?
Undeniably this.
The equipment to do the work is cheap and no longer requires a PhD... In a few years it will be as simple to sequence genes as it is to make a BLT.
One of the comments on the article was more informative to me than the article alone...
It is NOT about spam. It is about purchasing "legitimacy" quickly."
You're welcome.
Or at least the appearance of legitimacy. Next, Twitter will unveil a portion of their API where somebody can offer a service to "rate" the quailty of your followers and then somebody else will invent a means to manipulate that (see also SEOs vs. Google for the last decade or so) and we'll be right back here this time next year talking about companies that build "legit" backstories so your "fake" twitter accounts stay active "long enough" to count as "legit" followers...
Cat, meet mouse.
What a shame to shutdown the source of so much fun! I see that they released a couple of the classic games open source, so perhaps some sort of good can come from that.
I'm not sure if it is "xenophobia" to truthfully say that we have a jobs crisis in this country and are importing foreigners to drive down wages on the few remaining middle-class wage jobs. That's not "Xenophobia," that's mathematics.
talent pool is lacking = we don't want to pay
So why not have a minimum salary for H1B employees? Increase with inflation every year of course.
The H1-Bs being underpaid is their business model. Plus it doesn't hurt that if he's fired he's kicked out of the country--nothing like an employee who can't quit without being deported to keep the complaints from staff down...