"when we see computers on our network that are doing things that are known bot activities--say, a computer is spewing out thousands of spam e-mails,"
Yeah, well done chief. How about you take that menace down until the idiot behind the box fixes it? How about that? How on earth does verified network abuse not warrant an immediate disconnect?
As an email admin, this is welcome news, but it's yet again not enough. Keeping botnets in check is admittedly not the easiest thing in the world for an ISP to tackle, but for fuck's sake, direct to MX smtp traffic from residential IP space couldn't be simpler to capture and redirect prior to leaving their network cloud, and if the morons at Comcast et al would get their shit together and act responsibly for a change, they might actually be part of the solution to the spam problem as opposed to one of the biggest contributers to it.
Musâ...lim/ËmÊOEzlÉm, ËmÊSz-, ËmÊSs-/ Show Spelled [muhz-lim, mooz-, moos-] Show IPA adjective, noun, plural -lims, -lim.
â"adjective 1.of or pertaining to the religion, law, or civilization of Islam. â"noun 2.an adherent of Islam. 3. Black Muslim. Also, Moslem, Muslem (for defs. 1, 2).
Origin:
Ar, lit., a person who submits. See Islam
I think what you meant to say is that not every Muslim is hell bent on shoving their superstitious bullshit down everyone else on the planet's throats on pain of death.
You know, like the Christians did until just a (very) few centuries ago.
... now it's the creationists forcing their pseudo science into the minds of children not just at home, but now in the context of a science classroom.
As soon as I hear any single one of them clamoring for "alternates" to the theory of gravity, then I'll let this go, but until then, it's making a mockery of education and makes us the laughing stock of the world.
>> It all depends on how anal the wronged company decides it wants to be about the situation.
If we use RIAA math, then surely every stray packet that got dropped trying to route here surely would have translated to an album sale... So by now... after some math...... They owe them US $4.51 billion in lost revenue.
... I'd go so far to say that they're causing brain damage, too. That's assuming the smacktards yapping away and swerving from lane to lane had anything to damage in the first place.
Seriously: Can't they attenuate this with shielding of some sort? Even just coating the interiors with metallic paint should help... not sure how that would affect their reception, though.
Don't know about you guys, but I'm willing to put up with extendable antennae again if it means less risk of a tumor in my head.
I'm the mail admin for one of the largest RE companies in N America. Ho boy, believe me, they've discovered spam.
There's been a rash of scumbags pushing CDs with the email address of every realtor, mortgage officer, etc in the country. The local boards will either sell or outright give their members' contact info to anyone who'll ask for it. And there's no end of "internet marketing people" trying to make a buck off of it.
Listing flyer spam, "come see our great new product for realtors" spam, mortgage brokers promising the lowest rates, along with all the Nigerian generals and v1kgr4 ads you can stomach on top of it all.
As the market tanks, this is only going to get worse. In this industry, the boom caused every slimey jerk who'd otherwise be conning little old ladies into faulty used cars got in to ride the big wave in, with promises of 6% commissions of $500k homes. Now they're getting hungry, desperate (their income just got cut in half, you'd be too), and they're resorting to ugly measures... anything to generate leads, and thus income. It's going to get a lot worse before it gets any better...
Selling his $430K house and BMW? I'd venture a guess he has at least one good kidney he could spare. Maybe his buddies in the Russian mob or China could lend him a hand.
Cruel and unusual punishment should really be brought back for instances like this. I say make an example of this jerk for the other Ralsky's of the world to take notice of. As a mail admin who has to continually clean up the messes morons like this create, I'd love to get a few sucker punches in myself.
And just how big is your sysadmin team? Ever try this? We put up rDNS requirement as a basis for hard-rejection 2 years ago during a virus outbreak that nearly knocked us off the map... NEVER EVER AGAIN will we try this. My phone was ringing off the hook for 2 weeks with these morons wondering why the big bad corporate mail system was requiring them to actually know something about mail to deliver mail to us.
I don't know you at all, man, but I can't imagine you're running anything but a hobbyist site with that attitude. This does not cut it in the ISP or corporate sector when I have 5 million mails a day coming in and just me and one other guy keeping the mail clusters up and running. You tell my board that the sales people can't get emails from their clients becuase their mail admin was the CEO's son-in-law and unqualified to run a mail system on the Internet.
Well I do. The spam situation is out of control. If the problem is that a remote MTA doesn't have a proper reverse DNS entry for instance, that needs to be fixed. Why should I modify my MTA to support other people's broken ones?
Agreed spam is completely out of control. I'm guesstimating 90+% of my mail traffic is unsolicited crap.
Hell - You familiar with the old CRLF problems that 20+ years after SMTP was invented people still can't come to terms with? I had to put a wrapper in front of my smtp daemon to correct all these stupid bare line feeds spit out by these mailers. I was getting 100K's of rejections just due to this not that long ago...
You aren't doing your users a service by blocking legitimate mail because it breaks RFC or your personal ideas of how things should work. If it's your mail server managing MX for your own domain, then by all means go NANAE and blacklist the entire net away. The rest of us that do this for a living will have to continue dealing with the morons out there.
HELO verification as far as verifying HELO matching fqdn or ptr record or something is a highly dangerous thing to do and will lead to tons of false positives. Ever notice how many MSexChange servers are running out there declaring "IAMASTUPIDEXCHANGESERVER.LOCAL" or something?
Like it or not, and whether the rfc's require it or not, there are an awful lot of people out there using mail servers setup by people completely and utterly unqualified to maintain them. And you bet your ass your users are going to complain (loudly) when they can't get emails from their customers/clients/aunt betty/whatever.
Same for requiring reverse dns, spf records, etc. Use any of these for hard rejection, and you're nuts. (Hear me AOL?)
The problem with this is what happens to legitimate mailing lists? Take Bugtraq for example. How many people subscribe to their lists? It would cost them a fortune to exist.
The only real way to get rid of this is to force sender verification. SPF is a good start, but won't go far enough, IMHO. SMTP itself needs to be tossed out in favor of something new, but getting the impetus behind this is enormous to say the least.
I run a large corporate mail system - about 25000 user accounts.
I can NOT operate a mail server in this day and age without the use of these blocklists. We use a highly elaborate system rbls - spamhaus, njabl, ordb, along with others and some of my own design - as well as spamassassin and virus filters. Of the > 1000000 emails we process dailt, better than 85% is spam by every metric you choose to go by. I still get tons of it in my mailbox since the 'postmaster' and other administrative addresses are posted in spider-friendly plain text on our websites (I've complained to no avail).Think about that - I get 1 milllion emails a day running through my mail server, 850000 of which are spam.
A few weeks ago, easynet.nl's rbls were taken down, whom I was using as my only means of blocking mails from dynamic ranges, as well as one of my open proxy lists. The load on our mail server went through the roof as we were flooded with hundreds of thousands of junk mails poring in from dynamically assigned ip ranges and hijacked proxies, all of which have NO BUSINESS WHATSOEVER sending my users their garbage.
You have to understand that Ralsky and his criminal contemporaries are costing businesses like mine billions of dollars. Billions with a "B". The authorities have so far proven incapable of dealing with this problem, and this new law won't change a fucking thing. While blocklists are hardly perfect, it's one of the most effective tools I have at my disposal to limit the ammount of money Ralsky and his kind can steal from me and my employers on any given day.
I don't give a rat's ass if you and your "online business" can't adequately manage a confirmed opt-in mailing list. Either hire someone to do it, or get off the 'net until you can.
Oh please. This moron with an already lengthy criminal record and has in this very article confessed to breaking the law (by means of hijacking open proxies/relays to spew his filth) - this guy is going to stop breaking the law?
While I'm not about to defend this "license to spam" bill G Dubya was benevolent enough to sign into law, Ralsky and his ilk can't afford to operate under the letter of this law. Can't use a fake address or domain? Have to process unsubscribes? Well, he's going to have to process all that mail coming in and that means running a mail system powerful enough to not meltdown under the load of bounces his bulk mailings create. The reason so many dipshit spammers get into this business is the perception that it costs you nothing to send millions of emails - this is going to change.
I think it's far more likely his operations will be further moved overseas to China or Korea or Brazil or some other spam haven and launder his money so as to evade the law. Ralsky nor any of his other idiot contemporaries are going to change their stripes. Only the small timers are going to be discouraged by this, and the majority of spam will still come from the same spamhauses that send most of it now. Nothing changes because of this. My mail server will remain under a constant state of siege by their kind, ad infinitum. Same as it ever was...
Both. Compare any of this to most of the A+ titles on shelves now.
I'm not trying to belittle the efforts of the developers of these titles, but it's a little bit of a stretch to compare Bookworm to the new Doom, or CnC, or Unreal, or anything remotely viable as a commercial product.
Sorry, but Java just isn't ready for these kinds of applications - I have my doubts it ever will be, nor does it really need to be. 'The right tool for the right job' applies in all things.
Where do you think it goes if it bounces? That 'reply-to' tag is a sure bet to be made up and non-existent.
Even if it does bounce and go to a real return address, do you really think that anyone's processing the bounces and removing them from the mail database? When they're sending millions of these at a time? It's a little hard to automate this unless you own the mail server that's receiving the bounced mails. Next to impossible to do with a throw-away hotmail account.
I believe one of the problems in the industry is that multi-year deals are actually kind of out of flavour. Labels used to look for career musicians. Now they rent you for an album; if you sell, you might get one more album. Rince, lather, repeat.
While this is true, this isn't the whole story. The labels will continue recording your albums for as long as they are making money - for them, mind you, not the artists, or at least this is at best a secondary thought. The problem with this system is that let's say a young band makes moderate profits (and winds up WAY in debt to the label, but taht's another story), and records a second album that doesn't do so well. The label then declines to fund recording of a third album, but since the badn is under contract for say seven or so albums, they are unable to shop their music around to other labels. This is the crux: Their own label will NOT fund costs for another album, yet they actively restrict the band from going with another label as they are under contract. These poor sods have no recourse - their recording career is effectively over. You can live off of proceeds from live shows, but it's nearly impossible to get mass exposure without major lable support. Hope you like flipping burgers!
Mind you, these contracts are ONLY allowed because the recording industry PAID FOR legislation that provides them exemption from existing labor laws that expressly forbid these kind of things.
What's wrong with using Spam Assassin? I don't seek out & destroy porn film makers, i just block their movies' entry into my home.
Your analogy isn't quite appropriate, I'm afraid. This is NOT a freedom of speech issue, this is a THEFT OF SERVICE issue. Plain and simple.
This isn't leveled as a personal attack against you, but this kind of attitude really pisses me off. You have very obviously never had to admin a mail server with several thousand users, or your attitude might be different. While blockig this garbage does indeed keep you from having to notice the bombardment your machine is seeing from this, you still have to contend with the problems of storage space to store all this unwanted crap (spamassassin, and other filtering tools typically keep a backup copy of the spam messages sent in the event of being flagged as a false positive), the bandwidth usage wasted when these morons mailbomb you - and this is VERY expensive in the business world where bandwidth is metered, and don't forget this costs you in man hours when you have to pay your sysadmins to setup and maintain the filtering lists and such. These are hours that could be much better spent doing something productive. Heaven forbid the CEO receives "Hot Animal Sex With Underage Girls" mails.
These cretins are STEALING from the companies where the employees whom they are attempting to peddle their filth to work.
Now, I believe in freedom of speech as much as the next guy - but NOT when it means I have to finance your ability to do so in the form of time and money. American Express can send all the pre-approved snail mail spam they want to me, and that's fine as they are responsible for paying for the postage. This is the same as if they delivered stacks of these letters to me, postage due on delivery, without being able to see what the f*** it is I'm paying for in advance.
Yeah, the BF1942 display issue is making a lot of people angry, me included. You might try this, which got it to (finally) work for me:
In the settings directory, there's a file called VideoDefaults.con. Open this in a text editor, and change the line
renderer.allowAllRefreshRates
from 0 to 1.
I've got one of those registry hacks that disallow applications from changing the refresh rate on the monitor, and apparently BF1942 simply refuses to start with the default settings if it can't set it to 60 Hz. If you check the logfiles, you'll see it complains about an invalid video mode was specified.
This is a really stupid bug, and QA should be hanged by their toenails for missing this one, but that's EA for you. The demo had this same problem, and people were complaining about it then as well. The patch does nothing to address this (!!!).
Anyway, YMMV, as usual, but this got it working for me, and apparently a number of other people as well (check the forums on battlefield1942.com for more info).
This is not an issue of the originality of the concept. I think that everybody would agree that the concept of powered body armor long ago passed into the public domain.
That may be true, but it seems a more than a little hipocritical of Horizon to cry like a baby over someone plagiarizing their own plagiarized material. Look at the differences between the powered suits above, and the powered suits used in Appleseed. There are practically none.
I'm not saying MIT wasn't wrong here, but Horizon is just as wrong for stealing Shirow's material in the first place.
Is it just me, and the otaku on this site can back me up on this, or does the suit and helmet used here look almost exactly like this Orc power armor from Masamune Shirow's Appleseed (sorry, but I couldn't find any better images, and I'm too lazy to scan my books and post the pics online). The suit is just different enough from the K-2 Gasium to side-step plagiarism, but the helmet these guys are complaining about is identical - down to the triangle shaped plate on the forehead.
I say make MIT pay royalties on this blatant ripoff as soon as Mr Shirow starts receving royalty checks from Horizon Comics for their outright theft of his "intellectual property".
The internet is not making people more stupid, and isn't contributing to the demise of society... It is merely bringing the existing stupidity and lack of culture to the forefront of society, instead of letting it hide in dark corners... It is making depravity more visible, that's all.
Amen, brother (or sister, as the case may be). This is quite possibly the most insightful comment I've seen on this site in a while. The lowest common denominator is a lot closer to the median than most people are aware, or are willing to admit to themselves. P.T. Barnum (sp?) spelled it out years ago (you know, the "There's a sucker born every minute" quote), and nothing's changed.
I'm sure my karma's going to take a hit for this, but here goes:
Is there anyone reading/. that really hasn't gotten the point that Micro$oft makes horribly insecure products? Why is it that every single time yet another gaping hole is found for IE that it gets frontpage treatment here? Is this really news? Is this really surprising to anyone here?
It would seem to me that anyone having to deal with this problem (ie, the poor admins who have to look after Windows machines) would have already been alerted to this by the various security mailing lists available. The only point of posting these stories is for the militant OSS guys to pat themselves on the back and bemoan how Microsoft can't do anything right.
We already know this, people. Yes, IE is a POS. Yes, this is what happens when the marketing people dictate what direction your application development goes in. Yes, IE is more full of holes that swiss cheese.
Napster had what? 20 million + world wide users? They cant arrest millions
Ever heard of the "War on Drugs?" Anyone care to venture a guess how many people are serving prison terms for violations of these (very similarly draconian and equally unenforceable) laws? Washington has it's head up its ass, and this Ashcroft moron especially so.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm moving to Canada when the first book burnings start.
Slashdot Mirror
"when we see computers on our network that are doing things that are known bot activities--say, a computer is spewing out thousands of spam e-mails,"
Yeah, well done chief. How about you take that menace down until the idiot behind the box fixes it? How about that? How on earth does verified network abuse not warrant an immediate disconnect?
As an email admin, this is welcome news, but it's yet again not enough. Keeping botnets in check is admittedly not the easiest thing in the world for an ISP to tackle, but for fuck's sake, direct to MX smtp traffic from residential IP space couldn't be simpler to capture and redirect prior to leaving their network cloud, and if the morons at Comcast et al would get their shit together and act responsibly for a change, they might actually be part of the solution to the spam problem as opposed to one of the biggest contributers to it.
>> Not every muslim is an islamist.
Umm ... not to nitpick, but ... http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/muslim
Musâ...lim
â"adjective
1.of or pertaining to the religion, law, or civilization of Islam.
â"noun
2.an adherent of Islam.
3. Black Muslim.
Also, Moslem, Muslem (for defs. 1, 2).
Origin:
Ar, lit., a person who submits. See Islam
I think what you meant to say is that not every Muslim is hell bent on shoving their superstitious bullshit down everyone else on the planet's throats on pain of death.
You know, like the Christians did until just a (very) few centuries ago.
... now it's the creationists forcing their pseudo science into the minds of children not just at home, but now in the context of a science classroom.
As soon as I hear any single one of them clamoring for "alternates" to the theory of gravity, then I'll let this go, but until then, it's making a mockery of education and makes us the laughing stock of the world.
I've never been so ashamed to live in Texas.
>> It all depends on how anal the wronged company decides it wants to be about the situation.
If we use RIAA math, then surely every stray packet that got dropped trying to route here surely would have translated to an album sale ... So by now ... after some math ... ... They owe them US $4.51 billion in lost revenue.
... I'd go so far to say that they're causing brain damage, too. That's assuming the smacktards yapping away and swerving from lane to lane had anything to damage in the first place.
Seriously: Can't they attenuate this with shielding of some sort? Even just coating the interiors with metallic paint should help ... not sure how that would affect their reception, though.
Don't know about you guys, but I'm willing to put up with extendable antennae again if it means less risk of a tumor in my head.
Seriously?
... anything to generate leads, and thus income. It's going to get a lot worse before it gets any better ...
I'm the mail admin for one of the largest RE companies in N America. Ho boy, believe me, they've discovered spam.
There's been a rash of scumbags pushing CDs with the email address of every realtor, mortgage officer, etc in the country. The local boards will either sell or outright give their members' contact info to anyone who'll ask for it. And there's no end of "internet marketing people" trying to make a buck off of it.
Listing flyer spam, "come see our great new product for realtors" spam, mortgage brokers promising the lowest rates, along with all the Nigerian generals and v1kgr4 ads you can stomach on top of it all.
As the market tanks, this is only going to get worse. In this industry, the boom caused every slimey jerk who'd otherwise be conning little old ladies into faulty used cars got in to ride the big wave in, with promises of 6% commissions of $500k homes. Now they're getting hungry, desperate (their income just got cut in half, you'd be too), and they're resorting to ugly measures
... not to mention peeing in the pool ...
Selling his $430K house and BMW? I'd venture a guess he has at least one good kidney he could spare. Maybe his buddies in the Russian mob or China could lend him a hand.
Cruel and unusual punishment should really be brought back for instances like this. I say make an example of this jerk for the other Ralsky's of the world to take notice of. As a mail admin who has to continually clean up the messes morons like this create, I'd love to get a few sucker punches in myself.
Sorry, but no sympathy whatsoever here.
Yes that's true. I tell them to fix their MTA.
... NEVER EVER AGAIN will we try this. My phone was ringing off the hook for 2 weeks with these morons wondering why the big bad corporate mail system was requiring them to actually know something about mail to deliver mail to us.
...
And just how big is your sysadmin team? Ever try this? We put up rDNS requirement as a basis for hard-rejection 2 years ago during a virus outbreak that nearly knocked us off the map
I don't know you at all, man, but I can't imagine you're running anything but a hobbyist site with that attitude. This does not cut it in the ISP or corporate sector when I have 5 million mails a day coming in and just me and one other guy keeping the mail clusters up and running. You tell my board that the sales people can't get emails from their clients becuase their mail admin was the CEO's son-in-law and unqualified to run a mail system on the Internet.
Well I do. The spam situation is out of control. If the problem is that a remote MTA doesn't have a proper reverse DNS entry for instance, that needs to be fixed. Why should I modify my MTA to support other people's broken ones?
Agreed spam is completely out of control. I'm guesstimating 90+% of my mail traffic is unsolicited crap.
Hell - You familiar with the old CRLF problems that 20+ years after SMTP was invented people still can't come to terms with? I had to put a wrapper in front of my smtp daemon to correct all these stupid bare line feeds spit out by these mailers. I was getting 100K's of rejections just due to this not that long ago
You aren't doing your users a service by blocking legitimate mail because it breaks RFC or your personal ideas of how things should work. If it's your mail server managing MX for your own domain, then by all means go NANAE and blacklist the entire net away. The rest of us that do this for a living will have to continue dealing with the morons out there.
HELO verification as far as verifying HELO matching fqdn or ptr record or something is a highly dangerous thing to do and will lead to tons of false positives. Ever notice how many MSexChange servers are running out there declaring "IAMASTUPIDEXCHANGESERVER.LOCAL" or something?
...
I see an awful lot of this on any given day
@400000004422e50b06a4b4dc Accept::RCPT::Rcpthosts_Rcptto: S:63.145.94.241:unknown H:ms1.remax.local F: T:xxxx@xxxxx
@400000004422e514391f8af4 Accept::RCPT::Rcpthosts_Rcptto: S:65.218.62.86:unknown H:wolf-server.WolfRealty.local F:xxxx@xxxx T:xxxx@xxxx
@400000004422e5340cc927bc Accept::RCPT::Rcpthosts_Rcptto: S:70.89.50.73:unknown H:apollo.kwlansdale.local F:xxxx@xxxxx T:xxxx@xxxx
@400000004422e53a3ae2842c Accept::RCPT::Rcpthosts_Rcptto: S:67.43.168.74:unknown H:bilbo.idcdomain.local F:xxxx@xxxx T:xxxx@xxxx
@400000004422e56c2bf424d4 Accept::RCPT::Rcpthosts_Rcptto: S:71.4.51.66:unknown H:cmsacsvr01.comstock.local F:xxxx@xxxx T:xxxx@xxxx
Like it or not, and whether the rfc's require it or not, there are an awful lot of people out there using mail servers setup by people completely and utterly unqualified to maintain them. And you bet your ass your users are going to complain (loudly) when they can't get emails from their customers/clients/aunt betty/whatever.
Same for requiring reverse dns, spf records, etc. Use any of these for hard rejection, and you're nuts. (Hear me AOL?)
The problem with this is what happens to legitimate mailing lists? Take Bugtraq for example. How many people subscribe to their lists? It would cost them a fortune to exist.
The only real way to get rid of this is to force sender verification. SPF is a good start, but won't go far enough, IMHO. SMTP itself needs to be tossed out in favor of something new, but getting the impetus behind this is enormous to say the least.
Someone mod parent up. Very well put.
I run a large corporate mail system - about 25000 user accounts.
I can NOT operate a mail server in this day and age without the use of these blocklists. We use a highly elaborate system rbls - spamhaus, njabl, ordb, along with others and some of my own design - as well as spamassassin and virus filters. Of the > 1000000 emails we process dailt, better than 85% is spam by every metric you choose to go by. I still get tons of it in my mailbox since the 'postmaster' and other administrative addresses are posted in spider-friendly plain text on our websites (I've complained to no avail).Think about that - I get 1 milllion emails a day running through my mail server, 850000 of which are spam.
A few weeks ago, easynet.nl's rbls were taken down, whom I was using as my only means of blocking mails from dynamic ranges, as well as one of my open proxy lists. The load on our mail server went through the roof as we were flooded with hundreds of thousands of junk mails poring in from dynamically assigned ip ranges and hijacked proxies, all of which have NO BUSINESS WHATSOEVER sending my users their garbage.
You have to understand that Ralsky and his criminal contemporaries are costing businesses like mine billions of dollars. Billions with a "B". The authorities have so far proven incapable of dealing with this problem, and this new law won't change a fucking thing. While blocklists are hardly perfect, it's one of the most effective tools I have at my disposal to limit the ammount of money Ralsky and his kind can steal from me and my employers on any given day.
I don't give a rat's ass if you and your "online business" can't adequately manage a confirmed opt-in mailing list. Either hire someone to do it, or get off the 'net until you can.
Oh please. This moron with an already lengthy criminal record and has in this very article confessed to breaking the law (by means of hijacking open proxies/relays to spew his filth) - this guy is going to stop breaking the law?
...
While I'm not about to defend this "license to spam" bill G Dubya was benevolent enough to sign into law, Ralsky and his ilk can't afford to operate under the letter of this law. Can't use a fake address or domain? Have to process unsubscribes? Well, he's going to have to process all that mail coming in and that means running a mail system powerful enough to not meltdown under the load of bounces his bulk mailings create. The reason so many dipshit spammers get into this business is the perception that it costs you nothing to send millions of emails - this is going to change.
I think it's far more likely his operations will be further moved overseas to China or Korea or Brazil or some other spam haven and launder his money so as to evade the law. Ralsky nor any of his other idiot contemporaries are going to change their stripes. Only the small timers are going to be discouraged by this, and the majority of spam will still come from the same spamhauses that send most of it now. Nothing changes because of this. My mail server will remain under a constant state of siege by their kind, ad infinitum. Same as it ever was
Both. Compare any of this to most of the A+ titles on shelves now.
I'm not trying to belittle the efforts of the developers of these titles, but it's a little bit of a stretch to compare Bookworm to the new Doom, or CnC, or Unreal, or anything remotely viable as a commercial product.
Sorry, but Java just isn't ready for these kinds of applications - I have my doubts it ever will be, nor does it really need to be. 'The right tool for the right job' applies in all things.
Where do you think it goes if it bounces? That 'reply-to' tag is a sure bet to be made up and non-existent.
Even if it does bounce and go to a real return address, do you really think that anyone's processing the bounces and removing them from the mail database? When they're sending millions of these at a time? It's a little hard to automate this unless you own the mail server that's receiving the bounced mails. Next to impossible to do with a throw-away hotmail account.
I believe one of the problems in the industry is that multi-year deals are actually kind of out of flavour. Labels used to look for career musicians. Now they rent you for an album; if you sell, you might get one more album. Rince, lather, repeat.
While this is true, this isn't the whole story. The labels will continue recording your albums for as long as they are making money - for them, mind you, not the artists, or at least this is at best a secondary thought. The problem with this system is that let's say a young band makes moderate profits (and winds up WAY in debt to the label, but taht's another story), and records a second album that doesn't do so well. The label then declines to fund recording of a third album, but since the badn is under contract for say seven or so albums, they are unable to shop their music around to other labels. This is the crux: Their own label will NOT fund costs for another album, yet they actively restrict the band from going with another label as they are under contract. These poor sods have no recourse - their recording career is effectively over. You can live off of proceeds from live shows, but it's nearly impossible to get mass exposure without major lable support. Hope you like flipping burgers!
Mind you, these contracts are ONLY allowed because the recording industry PAID FOR legislation that provides them exemption from existing labor laws that expressly forbid these kind of things.
What's wrong with using Spam Assassin? I don't seek out & destroy porn film makers, i just block their movies' entry into my home.
Your analogy isn't quite appropriate, I'm afraid. This is NOT a freedom of speech issue, this is a THEFT OF SERVICE issue. Plain and simple.
This isn't leveled as a personal attack against you, but this kind of attitude really pisses me off. You have very obviously never had to admin a mail server with several thousand users, or your attitude might be different. While blockig this garbage does indeed keep you from having to notice the bombardment your machine is seeing from this, you still have to contend with the problems of storage space to store all this unwanted crap (spamassassin, and other filtering tools typically keep a backup copy of the spam messages sent in the event of being flagged as a false positive), the bandwidth usage wasted when these morons mailbomb you - and this is VERY expensive in the business world where bandwidth is metered, and don't forget this costs you in man hours when you have to pay your sysadmins to setup and maintain the filtering lists and such. These are hours that could be much better spent doing something productive. Heaven forbid the CEO receives "Hot Animal Sex With Underage Girls" mails.
These cretins are STEALING from the companies where the employees whom they are attempting to peddle their filth to work.
Now, I believe in freedom of speech as much as the next guy - but NOT when it means I have to finance your ability to do so in the form of time and money. American Express can send all the pre-approved snail mail spam they want to me, and that's fine as they are responsible for paying for the postage. This is the same as if they delivered stacks of these letters to me, postage due on delivery, without being able to see what the f*** it is I'm paying for in advance.
This is a little off-topic, but oh well.
Yeah, the BF1942 display issue is making a lot of people angry, me included. You might try this, which got it to (finally) work for me:
In the settings directory, there's a file called VideoDefaults.con. Open this in a text editor, and change the line
renderer.allowAllRefreshRates
from 0 to 1.
I've got one of those registry hacks that disallow applications from changing the refresh rate on the monitor, and apparently BF1942 simply refuses to start with the default settings if it can't set it to 60 Hz. If you check the logfiles, you'll see it complains about an invalid video mode was specified.
This is a really stupid bug, and QA should be hanged by their toenails for missing this one, but that's EA for you. The demo had this same problem, and people were complaining about it then as well. The patch does nothing to address this (!!!).
Anyway, YMMV, as usual, but this got it working for me, and apparently a number of other people as well (check the forums on battlefield1942.com for more info).
This is not an issue of the originality of the concept. I think that everybody would agree that the concept of powered body armor long ago passed into the public domain.
That may be true, but it seems a more than a little hipocritical of Horizon to cry like a baby over someone plagiarizing their own plagiarized material. Look at the differences between the powered suits above, and the powered suits used in Appleseed. There are practically none.
I'm not saying MIT wasn't wrong here, but Horizon is just as wrong for stealing Shirow's material in the first place.
... meet Mr Kettle.
Is it just me, and the otaku on this site can back me up on this, or does the suit and helmet used here look almost exactly like this Orc power armor from Masamune Shirow's Appleseed (sorry, but I couldn't find any better images, and I'm too lazy to scan my books and post the pics online). The suit is just different enough from the K-2 Gasium to side-step plagiarism, but the helmet these guys are complaining about is identical - down to the triangle shaped plate on the forehead.
I say make MIT pay royalties on this blatant ripoff as soon as Mr Shirow starts receving royalty checks from Horizon Comics for their outright theft of his "intellectual property".
Bunch of hipocrites.
The internet is not making people more stupid, and isn't contributing to the demise of society... It is merely bringing the existing stupidity and lack of culture to the forefront of society, instead of letting it hide in dark corners... It is making depravity more visible, that's all.
Amen, brother (or sister, as the case may be). This is quite possibly the most insightful comment I've seen on this site in a while. The lowest common denominator is a lot closer to the median than most people are aware, or are willing to admit to themselves. P.T. Barnum (sp?) spelled it out years ago (you know, the "There's a sucker born every minute" quote), and nothing's changed.
This is human nature, end of story.
I'm sure my karma's going to take a hit for this, but here goes:
/. that really hasn't gotten the point that Micro$oft makes horribly insecure products? Why is it that every single time yet another gaping hole is found for IE that it gets frontpage treatment here? Is this really news? Is this really surprising to anyone here?
Is there anyone reading
It would seem to me that anyone having to deal with this problem (ie, the poor admins who have to look after Windows machines) would have already been alerted to this by the various security mailing lists available. The only point of posting these stories is for the militant OSS guys to pat themselves on the back and bemoan how Microsoft can't do anything right.
We already know this, people. Yes, IE is a POS. Yes, this is what happens when the marketing people dictate what direction your application development goes in. Yes, IE is more full of holes that swiss cheese.
Enough already.
Napster had what? 20 million + world wide users? They cant arrest millions
Ever heard of the "War on Drugs?" Anyone care to venture a guess how many people are serving prison terms for violations of these (very similarly draconian and equally unenforceable) laws? Washington has it's head up its ass, and this Ashcroft moron especially so.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm moving to Canada when the first book burnings start.
"Land of the Free" my ass.
I'm hoping that this was modded up as "funny".
The only thing the Bible has "proven" over the years is the propensity of dull-witted people to believe anything they're told.