You would VRFY against the HELO address to confirm the MAIL_FROM information. If the HELO address was a relay, you would escalate the query to the highest priority MX record available.
If you did that, then a dictionary attack would still crap out as your domain would not match up as a valid MX record to your senders address.
I've looked over SPF and it scares the hell out of me. You are going to use the TXT field, which is an open text arena, to attempt to delivery specific, parsed data. That's a bad design from step one.
If this is implimented as some kind of standard, it will be a massive PITA
From what I've read, albeit briefly, this seems to be a process in which email being sent is validated against DNS entries for what mail servers can send email for my address.
Seems like a variation of the VRFY command in SMTP.
Except now I have to keep DNS records in sync with my SMTP records.
Generally having the same information kept in two places is a complication that people try to avoid.
I was considering if you used the SMTP VRFY you might be able to accomplish must/all of the objectives provided by SPF et al without the need to managing two seperate sources of information or two protocols.
Something like this:
HELO mydomain1.com
MAIL FROM: joe_user@mydomain.com
RCPT TO: recipient@otherdomain.com
Once the information from the Envelope is received, this information is sent back to mydomain1.com (after validating reverse DNS lookup to match mydomain1.com as a MX record for mydomain.com) asking to VRFY joe_user@mydomain.com. Response from this inquiry determines the delivery of the email.
mydomain1.com must be the lowest numbered MX record in the mail delivery system to ensure that relays are not required to manage a complete list of users.
I realize that in the past VRFY has been used to exploit deliverable spam addresses, but I think that's pretty moot considering I routinely see massive dictionary attacks against my mail servers in search of any names it can match.
But you now ask for the same level of open information from your senders. I think this won't do anything less to block spam than SPF or other domain records, it simply ensures that the addresses being used by the sender are valid.
The advantage I see here is that there is no change to existing technology and might be implimented much easier by providing a single point of information for email addresses.
I don't see that this is much different from using DNS as a suppliment to the SMTP VRFY protocol.
VRFY simply asks the SMTP server if the arguement is a valid email account for that server. This has been historically used to exploit addresses from this server for email spoofing by spammers. Being able to prevent someone to use this same kind of reverse lookup procedure to block email seems redundant.
I would think that if everyone supported the existing VRFY command and every mail server did a reverse VRFY to validate the email account, you would be MUCH better off. Consider this process:
You send email to Me via HELO/MAIL_FROM
I go back to your HELO mail server and do a lookup to VRFY the MAIL_FROM
Success upon that look-up determines the deliverability of your email
You would have to make more intelligent relays for outgoing email from companies.
You would have to modify the process to query the highest MX record of the HELO domain to keep list management down to a single point.
Maybe I'm missing something, but how can that not be just as effective as what they are offering today? However, I would consider it to be much easier to use because now one server (SMTP) manages all the information regarding email, rather than publishing it into the DNS records and yet another server. This is starting to sound like FTP's data/control channels.
It won't stop spam. But it will guarantee a level of traceability that we don't have today.
And it won't require someone to constantly update/modify the DNS record system every time you create a new user account
It's going to come down to a tool for Corporate Control. Look around. Who's spending the money on legislation? What are the doing with it, opening up access or trying to limit it?
File Sharing implies a level of choice. You choose to share files or not. You choose to share files about east-block pornography or not.
Spam does not give you any choice about participation or content selection
Hence the vehemence.
Your efforts to equate spam with P2P is entirely out of context and shortsighted. If I want to use P2P and my hard drive is filled up with things that I was not seeking, then it might be closer to spam and would be considered annoying at the least. But the RIAA has already tried this and it fails.
Nothing is going to take any affect until they incorporate at least some of these items into the CAN SPAM law
Recipients of SPAM can take legal action, they do not have to wait for their ISP to do it
Spammers can be charged on a per incident bases of a minimum of $1,000 each
ISPs who do not close down OpenRelay and Proxy mail servers within their subnets can be fined $10,000 for each incident server that is not removed from service within 24 hours of discovery.
ISPs shall incorporate 24-hour based port scans of all their customer computers. As part of the DHCP process, they shall conduct an OpenRelay and Proxy check against their customer computers.
Of course these last two items also mean that the ISPs will enforce that no customer can run any kind of service on their computers. This will kill dyndns.org and others as a viable business. Nothing in here requires them to do this, but the marketing engine will. Everyone that they knock off the system is a risk mitigation at the minimum and a potential revenure generator if they sign up for static IP business accounts (that typically can run services).
No matter how you figure it, spammers will be the death of the publicly available internet.
Since they cost upwards of 20 Billion dollars in damages to the US Economy every year, label them as Terrorists and put them all in Guantanimo Bay as Enemy Combatants.
That'll remove the problem AND keep them out of the legal system. And no one has to bitch that the US is continuing it's inhumane practice of capital punishment!
I was reading through some of these posts and it would would be nice if someone would actually read the fucking article and the fucking announcement. Then they might realize that the Logo Contest isn't about the cute little Deamon that we all know and love so well.
It's about the pile of Deamons doing the Iwo Jima thing on top of all your Monitors.
This image is a little tricky to duplicate and has some rather aggressive connotations. Far more aggressive than anything in the more generic BSD Deamon that you find on this slashdot page. I think their contest is well warranted and appropriate.
Actually, the swastika was a highly religious symbol with very positive connotations until circa 1930. Since then it has been completely changed in the psyche of most of the world. In this case, it might be best to leave the swastika in the bad category. This is despite the fact that a reverse (counterclockwise?) swastika is actually a symbol from American Indian Cultures (I think you can find it in Navajo patterns). The point is that so much damage has been done under this symbol that is transgresses any kind of religious, political, or racial barriers.
This difference is that everyone's been affected by the swastika of Nazism.
The imagery of The Devil is strictly a Christian based ideology and is not as wide spread in the world as the experiences with the swastika. Using your logic of one religious/political group taking offense means it's bad for everyone equates to the Jewish Star being totally Evil in the eyes of everyone who is non-Jewish in the Middle East. Especially the Palistines.
However, the BSD daemon has the distinct appearance of looking cute or disarming. If someone want's to see this as a satanical reference they might do better elsewhere.
I think it is high time you started to get past your phobias and started looking at things for more than two seconds. Your's is the voice of Righteous InTolerance and Fear Driven Protectionism rather than risking alternative ideas or even thinking about alternative ideas and to test your faiths (religious and otherwise) to validate them or to improve upon them. That's living. Clinging to an ancient scripture and refusing to even consider it's interpretation is a muted death.
But the link provided in the original post was not of this nature. Reminded me more of Iwo Jima only with some violence in there.
Not having read anything on this, I'm guessing that the logo contest is not about the cute little deamon, but the larger graphic identifying NetBSD as distinct from *BSD or *nix software
The acid test will be how long it will take for Vonage to respond to this Advisory. They ship affected Cisco routers.
They can run a telephone communications business with a mere fraction of the people that AT&T does, but can they effectively managed their system when something goes wrong?
All plasmas screen advertisement screens will automatically change according to the demographics represented by my RFID tags I'm wearing, or based upon a demographic RFID type DNS lookup against my RFID tags.
Anyone can track anyone elses stuff
Want to know what your SO is doing? track them via RFID and identify all RFID's within range of them
Walk into a store and they'll be able to not only identify you, but obtain a complete financial records and shopping tendencies.
In short, the data that we carry with us via RFID will precede our every action in society.
Imagine having BLOGS based on RFID's. "I dated a guy named Joe with an RFID tag of XYZ and he's a real loser/winner".
Makes Minority Report and Gattica seem pretty likely in our lifetimes.
If I microwave my clothes, will it destroy the RFID's???
Now that we've pretty much proven the the current Congress is entirely incapable of doing squat for it's voting constituents (and worlds for their Special Interest, PACs, and Business/Corporate campaign contributors) I am wondering what will really happen next.
This is pretty clear evidence that Congress doesn't really do a great job in protecting the interests of the voting public.
It seems to me that these people have forgotten that while we live in an Economic system called a Capitalist system, we live in a Political system called a Democracy. They are not the same system and not the same functionally.
Business has done an excellent job at protecting themselves at every turn under the banners of "Don't hurt the already ill economy" or "Free Trade, Capitalism forever" without any voices standing up for the basic rights of the voting public.
I would have expected that the issues surrounding the Internet would have become more political by now, but I believe I assumed that more people would care about these things. Recently I have been approached by a number of people who honestly thought that the CAN-SPAM law was going to solve all their problems. They thought I was full of BS when I told them CAN-SPAM actually legalized spam. But then they never read it and I did.
The reality is this: Congress will never really do anything to protect the private citizen unless there is some Corporation behind the initiative to either make money, or block their competition. I haven't really seen anything of late that would contradict this. Have you?
Does anyone know how SPF can be managed via dynamice DNS type of DNS services?
It seems to me that having my reverse DNS lookup containing my ISP's domain name rather than mine would help my server configuration. I have a problem with my DNS in that reverse lookups are resolved to a DNS entry, but it belongs to my ISP domain and not my domain name. This gets some people pissy, but I don't see it being worth spending $100 a month extra from my ISP.
And if anyone even thinks about responding with, "Change your ISP" I'll beat them severly with a Windows CD. I don't have any alternative ISP's available. If someone would be willing to help pay the $200 monthly fees for any alternatives I would consider it.
Would SPF help this problem? Would I actually be able to gain trust from others? Would DynDNS be able to accomodate this feature? (I'll have to ask them...)
I think a lot of this falls back to a much simply question: Why do we have DHCP addresses on the internet anyways? They do not change. I think mine is about 9 months old. Others tell of greater than a year with the same IP address. I think it would actually help security if people where give static IP addresses. Then they would have to take care of it to ensure they don't act stupid.
It isn't Intel Inside that is the obsession. It's Bigger is Better.
The tendency for American Culture to embrace fast, high power PC's (far beyond anything we'll ever need) is found throughout the culture.
SUV's
4GHz CPU's for email
7000 sq ft homes for 2 people
We are a nation of excess. Look at furniture from a Europe and you'll find it's very small in comparison to the American standards. I was in a furniture store here run by some Italians and I asked about the general differences. The answer was interesting, "Things are smaller in Europe".
I personally would love to get a transmeta machine because of the low power and heat. But the availability in the United States is nothing short of pathetic. Anything I can find is so grossly overpriced compared to anything else on the market that it's discouraging.
When you consider VIA is selling desktop units for as little as $250 for a 500MHz machine it's a little difficult to spend thousands for a transmeta product. They have to figure out a better pricing model.
But I read this series about a year ago and was strongly impressed with many of his descriptions of cities and society. There are many parallels that are still being found and developed today.
IMHO, Isaac Asimov already explored this kind of social interaction in the Robot Series of novels. The two main characters are Elijah Baley and his partner R. Daneel Oliva, who are both detectives in the series.
Of particular importance is the world of Solaria where the society had evolved to such a point that any direct human contact was avoided as much as possible and people rarely met in person.
My copy shows a print date of 1983. So that puts The Robot Series well before the Internet was routinely available. However, there are some significant implications that he seems to have identified rather well in this series.
By the way, the entire human population of Solaria died off and no one was left except for one robot. It's an interesting story. I do hope that AIM isn't the beginning of this here on Earth.
Truly a waste of CPU time, more than anything else.
I like the very short comment that it would have to be based on Open Standards. Yeah, right. Microsoft? Don't make me laugh! I would rather trust the Government than Microsoft.
All that aside. I think it would be a serious waste of time if they didn't come up with anything useful out of all these CPU cycles. Imagine what would happen to SETI@HOME if they were able to get 20 seconds of CPU computation for each email sent?
You would have to assume that you could afford to keep each connection open during this 10-20 second pause in computation. That means that you are not only limited to how many emails you can send at any one time, but how many connections you can manage. For a high population corporate server, this would be too much.
But it's still mostly free to send spam. With the CPU doing all the work and the email getting delivered eventually, it really won't stop spam getting delivered. Just increase the cost a little bit, if any.
And how would it affect the spammers who send email through virus infected zombie computers? The spammer could unload their spam onto the 150,000 zombied computers that they own and let them manage the 8,000 emails per day, giving them an effective throughput of still well over millions per day.
If Microsoft had some security on their system, then then might be able to actually limit the spam in the world.
The lowest power PC that I've been able to find is the Via Technologies line of mini-itx computers. These may rival with Transmeta computer chips, but they are hardly available in the US unless you get a notebook.
The mini-itx boards run something like a max output of 10W. That puts your LCD monitor as the power hog of the system.
If you are running a 1.3GHz Celeron today, then something like this might be an excellent solution.
According to the article he mentions that UserLinux is intended to be based upon Debian. The reason why is extremely important to understand:
The overall viability of UserLinux will be based upon the size and quality of the ecosystem of solutions around it, both Free and proprietary. So, in order to get any Free Software into businesses, our Free system must promote the creation of a large collection of proprietary solutions that do not exist today. As we penetrate the enterprise, we will continue to move Free Software higher up the application stack, until these businesses make use of Free Software predominantly. But you need proprietary software to get in the door.
We are looking at what is best described as an evolutionary process of development. This follows a more organic than Project Management path.
In the beginning there was Minix and it was expensive and not free but it worked well enough. Following this was the development of a free replacement called Linux.
Some time after that came Applixware, an Office Products Suite. It was expensive but it worked. Following this was StarOffice and now OpenOffice.
Given these two, we have evolved the software industry to such a point that there is now a very adequate if not excellent free software which can provide us with:
A base Operating System: Linux
A very suitable browser: Mozilla
A very suitable Office environment: OpenOffice
But before each of these could exist, there was a non-free proprietary variant. Not always the case: Xfree, Postgresql, vi, emacs, and so on. But they do exist.
The point that is so important here to understand and except is that Open Source, Free, non-Proprietary software is getting really good all the time.
Distributions themselves are following the same path. SuSE and RedHat cost money, but Debian and it's variants are getting better and gaining a larger percentage of users who consider these to be "good enough" to use every day.
In order to effectively provide a "good enough" solution to the Businesses, Open Source communities have to provide all of their free software as easily as possible. But it is extremely important to make it possible for someone to develop a proprietary software solution to fill in the niches that Debian is missing today so that Free Software, as a whole, can move into an ever increasing circle of "good enough" for users.
If there are any barriers of any kind to that entrance it will hurt the overall effectiveness of this process. Any questions or concerns, current or future, about the licensing of software development under Qt, MySQL or anything else, will only make it less attractive to a developer to invest in making a product for UnitedLinux only to have it completely fucked up by a bunch of whining lawyers.
Personally, I'm rather surprised that he didn't select GNUstep as the desktop of choice. Long term, it might be the best of the three options mentioned.
Slashdot Mirror
How long will these worms continue before someone leverages, and wins, a class action lawsuit against Microsoft for making bad product?
There's my rant. Now for the really interesting stuff
It's very polite of the crackers to intentionally avoid infecting .edu domains.
You would VRFY against the HELO address to confirm the MAIL_FROM information. If the HELO address was a relay, you would escalate the query to the highest priority MX record available.
If you did that, then a dictionary attack would still crap out as your domain would not match up as a valid MX record to your senders address.
I've looked over SPF and it scares the hell out of me. You are going to use the TXT field, which is an open text arena, to attempt to delivery specific, parsed data. That's a bad design from step one.
If this is implimented as some kind of standard, it will be a massive PITA
From what I've read, albeit briefly, this seems to be a process in which email being sent is validated against DNS entries for what mail servers can send email for my address.
Seems like a variation of the VRFY command in SMTP.
Except now I have to keep DNS records in sync with my SMTP records.
Generally having the same information kept in two places is a complication that people try to avoid.
I was considering if you used the SMTP VRFY you might be able to accomplish must/all of the objectives provided by SPF et al without the need to managing two seperate sources of information or two protocols.
Something like this:
Once the information from the Envelope is received, this information is sent back to mydomain1.com (after validating reverse DNS lookup to match mydomain1.com as a MX record for mydomain.com) asking to VRFY joe_user@mydomain.com. Response from this inquiry determines the delivery of the email.
mydomain1.com must be the lowest numbered MX record in the mail delivery system to ensure that relays are not required to manage a complete list of users.
I realize that in the past VRFY has been used to exploit deliverable spam addresses, but I think that's pretty moot considering I routinely see massive dictionary attacks against my mail servers in search of any names it can match.
But you now ask for the same level of open information from your senders. I think this won't do anything less to block spam than SPF or other domain records, it simply ensures that the addresses being used by the sender are valid.
The advantage I see here is that there is no change to existing technology and might be implimented much easier by providing a single point of information for email addresses.
I don't see that this is much different from using DNS as a suppliment to the SMTP VRFY protocol.
VRFY simply asks the SMTP server if the arguement is a valid email account for that server. This has been historically used to exploit addresses from this server for email spoofing by spammers. Being able to prevent someone to use this same kind of reverse lookup procedure to block email seems redundant.
I would think that if everyone supported the existing VRFY command and every mail server did a reverse VRFY to validate the email account, you would be MUCH better off. Consider this process:
Maybe I'm missing something, but how can that not be just as effective as what they are offering today? However, I would consider it to be much easier to use because now one server (SMTP) manages all the information regarding email, rather than publishing it into the DNS records and yet another server. This is starting to sound like FTP's data/control channels.
It won't stop spam. But it will guarantee a level of traceability that we don't have today.
And it won't require someone to constantly update/modify the DNS record system every time you create a new user account
It's going to come down to a tool for Corporate Control. Look around. Who's spending the money on legislation? What are the doing with it, opening up access or trying to limit it?
File Sharing implies a level of choice. You choose to share files or not. You choose to share files about east-block pornography or not.
Spam does not give you any choice about participation or content selection
Hence the vehemence.
Your efforts to equate spam with P2P is entirely out of context and shortsighted. If I want to use P2P and my hard drive is filled up with things that I was not seeking, then it might be closer to spam and would be considered annoying at the least. But the RIAA has already tried this and it fails.
Nothing is going to take any affect until they incorporate at least some of these items into the CAN SPAM law
Of course these last two items also mean that the ISPs will enforce that no customer can run any kind of service on their computers. This will kill dyndns.org and others as a viable business. Nothing in here requires them to do this, but the marketing engine will. Everyone that they knock off the system is a risk mitigation at the minimum and a potential revenure generator if they sign up for static IP business accounts (that typically can run services).
No matter how you figure it, spammers will be the death of the publicly available internet.
Since they cost upwards of 20 Billion dollars in damages to the US Economy every year, label them as Terrorists and put them all in Guantanimo Bay as Enemy Combatants.
That'll remove the problem AND keep them out of the legal system. And no one has to bitch that the US is continuing it's inhumane practice of capital punishment!
I was reading through some of these posts and it would would be nice if someone would actually read the fucking article and the fucking announcement. Then they might realize that the Logo Contest isn't about the cute little Deamon that we all know and love so well.
It's about the pile of Deamons doing the Iwo Jima thing on top of all your Monitors.
This image is a little tricky to duplicate and has some rather aggressive connotations. Far more aggressive than anything in the more generic BSD Deamon that you find on this slashdot page. I think their contest is well warranted and appropriate.
Actually, the swastika was a highly religious symbol with very positive connotations until circa 1930. Since then it has been completely changed in the psyche of most of the world. In this case, it might be best to leave the swastika in the bad category. This is despite the fact that a reverse (counterclockwise?) swastika is actually a symbol from American Indian Cultures (I think you can find it in Navajo patterns). The point is that so much damage has been done under this symbol that is transgresses any kind of religious, political, or racial barriers.
This difference is that everyone's been affected by the swastika of Nazism.
The imagery of The Devil is strictly a Christian based ideology and is not as wide spread in the world as the experiences with the swastika. Using your logic of one religious/political group taking offense means it's bad for everyone equates to the Jewish Star being totally Evil in the eyes of everyone who is non-Jewish in the Middle East. Especially the Palistines.
However, the BSD daemon has the distinct appearance of looking cute or disarming. If someone want's to see this as a satanical reference they might do better elsewhere.
I think it is high time you started to get past your phobias and started looking at things for more than two seconds. Your's is the voice of Righteous InTolerance and Fear Driven Protectionism rather than risking alternative ideas or even thinking about alternative ideas and to test your faiths (religious and otherwise) to validate them or to improve upon them. That's living. Clinging to an ancient scripture and refusing to even consider it's interpretation is a muted death.
But the link provided in the original post was not of this nature. Reminded me more of Iwo Jima only with some violence in there.
Not having read anything on this, I'm guessing that the logo contest is not about the cute little deamon, but the larger graphic identifying NetBSD as distinct from *BSD or *nix software
The acid test will be how long it will take for Vonage to respond to this Advisory. They ship affected Cisco routers.
They can run a telephone communications business with a mere fraction of the people that AT&T does, but can they effectively managed their system when something goes wrong?
Think of the possibilities!!!!
In short, the data that we carry with us via RFID will precede our every action in society.
Imagine having BLOGS based on RFID's. "I dated a guy named Joe with an RFID tag of XYZ and he's a real loser/winner".
Makes Minority Report and Gattica seem pretty likely in our lifetimes.
If I microwave my clothes, will it destroy the RFID's???
Now that we've pretty much proven the the current Congress is entirely incapable of doing squat for it's voting constituents (and worlds for their Special Interest, PACs, and Business/Corporate campaign contributors) I am wondering what will really happen next.
This is pretty clear evidence that Congress doesn't really do a great job in protecting the interests of the voting public.
It seems to me that these people have forgotten that while we live in an Economic system called a Capitalist system, we live in a Political system called a Democracy. They are not the same system and not the same functionally.
Business has done an excellent job at protecting themselves at every turn under the banners of "Don't hurt the already ill economy" or "Free Trade, Capitalism forever" without any voices standing up for the basic rights of the voting public.
I would have expected that the issues surrounding the Internet would have become more political by now, but I believe I assumed that more people would care about these things. Recently I have been approached by a number of people who honestly thought that the CAN-SPAM law was going to solve all their problems. They thought I was full of BS when I told them CAN-SPAM actually legalized spam. But then they never read it and I did.
The reality is this: Congress will never really do anything to protect the private citizen unless there is some Corporation behind the initiative to either make money, or block their competition. I haven't really seen anything of late that would contradict this. Have you?
Does anyone know how SPF can be managed via dynamice DNS type of DNS services?
It seems to me that having my reverse DNS lookup containing my ISP's domain name rather than mine would help my server configuration. I have a problem with my DNS in that reverse lookups are resolved to a DNS entry, but it belongs to my ISP domain and not my domain name. This gets some people pissy, but I don't see it being worth spending $100 a month extra from my ISP.
Would SPF help this problem? Would I actually be able to gain trust from others? Would DynDNS be able to accomodate this feature? (I'll have to ask them...)
I think a lot of this falls back to a much simply question: Why do we have DHCP addresses on the internet anyways? They do not change. I think mine is about 9 months old. Others tell of greater than a year with the same IP address. I think it would actually help security if people where give static IP addresses. Then they would have to take care of it to ensure they don't act stupid.
It isn't Intel Inside that is the obsession. It's Bigger is Better.
The tendency for American Culture to embrace fast, high power PC's (far beyond anything we'll ever need) is found throughout the culture.
- SUV's
- 4GHz CPU's for email
- 7000 sq ft homes for 2 people
We are a nation of excess. Look at furniture from a Europe and you'll find it's very small in comparison to the American standards. I was in a furniture store here run by some Italians and I asked about the general differences. The answer was interesting, "Things are smaller in Europe".I personally would love to get a transmeta machine because of the low power and heat. But the availability in the United States is nothing short of pathetic. Anything I can find is so grossly overpriced compared to anything else on the market that it's discouraging.
When you consider VIA is selling desktop units for as little as $250 for a 500MHz machine it's a little difficult to spend thousands for a transmeta product. They have to figure out a better pricing model.
You missed the point. It's power. The old 90MHz CPU's where hot and power hungry,
I didn't realize it went that far back!
But I read this series about a year ago and was strongly impressed with many of his descriptions of cities and society. There are many parallels that are still being found and developed today.
IMHO, Isaac Asimov already explored this kind of social interaction in the Robot Series of novels. The two main characters are Elijah Baley and his partner R. Daneel Oliva, who are both detectives in the series.
Of particular importance is the world of Solaria where the society had evolved to such a point that any direct human contact was avoided as much as possible and people rarely met in person.
My copy shows a print date of 1983. So that puts The Robot Series well before the Internet was routinely available. However, there are some significant implications that he seems to have identified rather well in this series.
By the way, the entire human population of Solaria died off and no one was left except for one robot. It's an interesting story. I do hope that AIM isn't the beginning of this here on Earth.
Actually, the unit will still call OnStar because of the Airbag.
I didn't see anything that says the unit is incapable of calling OnStar even after the hacks are in place.
Truly a waste of CPU time, more than anything else.
I like the very short comment that it would have to be based on Open Standards. Yeah, right. Microsoft? Don't make me laugh! I would rather trust the Government than Microsoft.
All that aside. I think it would be a serious waste of time if they didn't come up with anything useful out of all these CPU cycles. Imagine what would happen to SETI@HOME if they were able to get 20 seconds of CPU computation for each email sent?
You would have to assume that you could afford to keep each connection open during this 10-20 second pause in computation. That means that you are not only limited to how many emails you can send at any one time, but how many connections you can manage. For a high population corporate server, this would be too much.
But it's still mostly free to send spam. With the CPU doing all the work and the email getting delivered eventually, it really won't stop spam getting delivered. Just increase the cost a little bit, if any.
And how would it affect the spammers who send email through virus infected zombie computers? The spammer could unload their spam onto the 150,000 zombied computers that they own and let them manage the 8,000 emails per day, giving them an effective throughput of still well over millions per day.
If Microsoft had some security on their system, then then might be able to actually limit the spam in the world.
The lowest power PC that I've been able to find is the Via Technologies line of mini-itx computers. These may rival with Transmeta computer chips, but they are hardly available in the US unless you get a notebook.
The mini-itx boards run something like a max output of 10W. That puts your LCD monitor as the power hog of the system.
If you are running a 1.3GHz Celeron today, then something like this might be an excellent solution.
Does this mean that I can once again google openly for a copy of decss or maybe even find it as part of a package/rpm/deb/tgz?
I looked at the survey
What kind of a survey has a question like, "To send a message to the greedy corporations"?
This is a sick joke that is nothing but a mis-conception and falsehood.
This is probably the ultimate FUD I've ever seen.
According to the article he mentions that UserLinux is intended to be based upon Debian. The reason why is extremely important to understand:
We are looking at what is best described as an evolutionary process of development. This follows a more organic than Project Management path.
In the beginning there was Minix and it was expensive and not free but it worked well enough. Following this was the development of a free replacement called Linux.
Some time after that came Applixware, an Office Products Suite. It was expensive but it worked. Following this was StarOffice and now OpenOffice.
Given these two, we have evolved the software industry to such a point that there is now a very adequate if not excellent free software which can provide us with:
- A base Operating System: Linux
- A very suitable browser: Mozilla
- A very suitable Office environment: OpenOffice
But before each of these could exist, there was a non-free proprietary variant. Not always the case: Xfree, Postgresql, vi, emacs, and so on. But they do exist.The point that is so important here to understand and except is that Open Source, Free, non-Proprietary software is getting really good all the time.
Distributions themselves are following the same path. SuSE and RedHat cost money, but Debian and it's variants are getting better and gaining a larger percentage of users who consider these to be "good enough" to use every day.
In order to effectively provide a "good enough" solution to the Businesses, Open Source communities have to provide all of their free software as easily as possible. But it is extremely important to make it possible for someone to develop a proprietary software solution to fill in the niches that Debian is missing today so that Free Software, as a whole, can move into an ever increasing circle of "good enough" for users.
If there are any barriers of any kind to that entrance it will hurt the overall effectiveness of this process. Any questions or concerns, current or future, about the licensing of software development under Qt, MySQL or anything else, will only make it less attractive to a developer to invest in making a product for UnitedLinux only to have it completely fucked up by a bunch of whining lawyers.
Personally, I'm rather surprised that he didn't select GNUstep as the desktop of choice. Long term, it might be the best of the three options mentioned.
Considering how difficult it is to have an effective means of OCR against a license plate I think you've missed an important point:
GPS and Cellular Triagulation can be done in the comfort of your very own data mining facility and done in a highly automated fashion.
I think you're a troll.