>On the server front, it's another matter entirely. Here Linux is a direct competitor to Microsoft and so, a threat.
Amen. The end-user's desktop will remain Bill's, if for no other reason than the fact that most of the games out there are being written for 'doze, and the Office monopoly.
But the big bucks are in the operating system licenses for servers.
> Whether we see MicrograssSoftroot-movements spring up, I doubt.
Ditto. Astroturf is a technique used when you have a many-to-one relationship, you want to influence the "one", and the "one" is both visible to the "many" but insulated from reality. Politicians are great examples of creatures that can be moved by astroturf campaigns.
IT managers are invisible - the turfers can neither identify nor contact them. IT managers are legion - the turfers can't concentrate their campaign on a single target. And IT managers draw their expertise from multiple sources - and consequently it's difficult to influence them by influencing key underlings like congressional staffers.
Everything we're seeing today was reflected in the Hallowe'en documents. The world is unfolding as it should.
>On the server front, it's another matter entirely. Here Linux is a direct competitor to Microsoft and so, a threat.
Amen. The end-user's desktop will remain Bill's, if for no other reason than the fact that most of the games out there are being written for 'doze, and the Office monopoly.
But the big bucks are in the operating system licenses for servers.
> Whether we see MicrograssSoftroot-movements spring up, I doubt.
Ditto. Astroturf is a technique used when you have a many-to-one relationship, you want to influence the "one", and the "one" is both visible to the "many" but insulated from reality. Politicians are great examples of creatures that can be moved by astroturf campaigns.
IT managers are invisible - the turfers can neither identify nor contact them. IT managers are legion - the turfers can't concentrate their campaign on a single target. And IT managers draw their expertise from multiple sources - and consequently it's difficult to influence them by influencing key underlings like congressional staffers.
Everything we're seeing today was reflected in the Hallowe'en documents. The world is unfolding as it should.
>
I have had an email address for 4 years
now and I don't get spammed at all, why cause I don't plaster on every stupid webform I see.
Eh? You obviously use a different Internet than mine.
I've never given a valid email address to any company, nor have I ever typed it into a webform.
I have, however, posted to USENET unmunged from 1992 to 1995. The spam started in 1994 and didn't start to go down until I "whined" to every spammer's upstream and started whacking the moles.
>Who are you going to side with, the customer/spammer who pays you ten of thousands
of dollars a year or more
While I loathe the "mainsleaze" guys like TFSM and Spamazon and what-not, all of my spam comes from $19.95/month throwaway dialup accounts (and about 90% of it from uu.net dialups).
Every time I report one of those whackamoles (well, until UUNET took over the spam business, because they just/dev/null abuse reports after sending me a uunet abuse ticket number lottery ticket), I'm costing that spammer's ISP money, because the abuse department has to read it, store it, and if enough complaints about a user are received, investigate and act on it. When it costs an ISP more than $19.99 a month to sell a spammer a dialup account, the spam will stop.
Whether the spam stops because the ISP got a clue and (pick one or all of "stopped selling accounts to spammers", "blocked port 25 on new users", or "required credit card validation", or any other set of proactive measures), or because the ISP got blackholed a'la AGIS and ended up the world's biggest LAN, isn't my problem.
> When I worked for EarthLink/MindSpring, we were told to avoid giving users UUNet POPs at all costs.
Fascinating. Regrettably, it appears that policy has begun to change (or ELNK/MSPG is real desperate for POP space, probably a combination of both), as I've begun to see reports of uu.net POPs on their network status pages.
Good on ya, though. Even from a customer service standpoint, I'd rather dial into a POP that's dedicated to my own ISP, rather than share it with the zillion other ISPs in the area.
You can control how much capacity you put into your own POPs. With uu.net, I'd imagine it's a matter of paying more, and having it take longer. The delays from phone companies on adding capacity to a POP are pretty scary - and presumably wouldn't start until after you'd begged (and paid)
uu.net to beg (and pay) the phone company to do the trunking magic.
Quoth uu.net: > > Each Internet Network must be responsive to unsolicited email and network abuse
complaints,
Quoth mrsam, probably after spraying coffee all over his monitor: > [...] abuse@uu.net is just a big gaping sinkhole.
I don't see any contradiction. I mean, nowhere does it say that uu.net has to be responsive! It just says that that if you wanna peer with 'em, you have to be responsive.
"Wanna peer with us? Be a good netizen and whack your spammers so we don't have to carry the traffic. But don't expect us to do do jack shit about the spam our users cram through your pipes."
To which my response would be "I wouldn't peer in their mouths if they were dyin' of thirst", but I digress.
> How many ISPs do you know of (no, AOL is *not* an ISP, it's an advertising
agency . ..) that even come close to this one requirement
Buggered if I know. Anyone remotely big enough has already been swallowed up.
If AOL owns equipment (as opposed to just leasing POPs and assigning them.aol.com DNS info), they might qualify, but I can't imagine why they'd bother. I'd put good money that the vast majority of AOL's traffic is just bits being shovelled from one part of AOL's network to another. Why peer? Their users are just on a really big LAN.
Of course, if AOL merely leases POPs, then that "internal to AOL" traffic is a heck of a lot. But if AOL is mostly leased POPs from ISPs, then they can't meet the geogrpahic requirements.
Hmm... if it's half-and-half, though... maybe they are the one. Didn't AOL pick up a big pile of modem banks and other ISP toys when they bought out Compuserve a few years back?
Other ideas - maybe the Mindspring/Earthlink agglomeration? Or the biggest-ass uu.net "reseller", good ol' msn.com?
>Because they're now sticking it to their wholesale
customers, the ISP's who rely on their POPs.
Good point - I've long suspected that uu.net isn't really interested in the business of POP-leasing. It'd explain a lot of things, not just the spam problem. (Moderators - mod the parent of this post up!)
With the impending doom of PSINet, however, they may be able to jack up the rates high enough to make it profitable again. Goodness knows Worldcom's desperate enough for revenue.
(OK, useful commentary over, now on to more kvetching about the dreck uu.net shovels into my mailbox every friggin' day...)
If you're an ISP, consider finding alternate arrangements. More and more uu.net dialups are finding their way into routers' blocklists every day as individual admins give up on uu.net dialups as nothing but a spam source.
I'm off to tweak Apache into displaying "If you're reading this, you're on a uu.net POP. Go tell your ISP to lease their POPs from someone a little more reputable" whenever a user comes in from 63.[wholebunchastuff]...
Yeah, I know, uu.net probably leases the same POP to multiple ISPs and does authentication at the RADIUS server level, so you can't just say "63.foo.bar.baz is msn.com, 63.foo.bar.qux is earthlink.net".
But dialsprint arguably had the same problem (I don't think they're exclusively Earthlink?), and went from 25000+ spams a day reported to Spamcop down to nearly nothing upon blocking port 25. Sure, it took six months of half the 'net bitching at them 24/7, but they finally relented, and the spamload dropped within 24 hours of implementation. Looks like all their spammers have since migrated to uu.net, who remain unresponsive after three years.
>Oh, you mean like how my 4 year old (I think, maybe 5) 2/4 gig Ditto Tape Drive WON'T work under Win ME?
Yeah, I hate those tricks.
Me? Got a Genius Colorpage I scanner in '94. Was bad enough to set it up (weird half-ass 8-bit ISA "kinda-SCSI" card) in DOS for Win3.1, which was what it shipped with.
Turns out the NT drivers worked with Win95.
Turns out it's not on any supported lists for W98.
Turns out if you try to use the same drivers in W98, the machine locks hard.
Solution: Boot W98SE into safe mode to install the drivers without blowing anything up.
Then boot to regular mode and it works just fine.
Eat me, Bill. Even if a $129 USB scanner is probably better than this thing I bought just before the web got popular and everyone had to have a scanner... I will not let Bill make me throw out perfectly functional hardware just 'cuz he thinks I should.
Why pay for something you don't need, especially when the "upgrade" serves only to make you pay for other things you didn't need before your "upgrade"?
Where I come from, that's not an upgrade, it's throwing good money after bad.
>Also there is currently a large bounty being offered to anyone who can crack the encryption algorithm being used with
it. Unfortunately its only open to the closed set of developers working with the product, at least currently.
s/to anyone/on anyone/g
OK, there's the "external" version of the bounty program;-)
>[buyers of Dells, Compaqs, etc] will
receive a "Restore CD" instead of a Windows install CD.
Can anyone with one of the name-brand PCs clarify what's going on under the hood? (Yeah, I know, anyone who's likely to be able to describe it isn't buying name-brand... but maybe you've got some less-clued friends?;-)
My guess is that the "restore CD" is a bootable CDROM that basically copies stuff off a hidden partition on the hard drive. That is, you get the preconfigured box with a copy of a drive image on a hidden partition. Your "restore CD" is a glorified "run Ghost and get your partition back" device.
(I'm coming to this conclusion from the other end, because it's similar to how I restores hozed windoze installs. For each 'doze box, I burn a CDROM for each box with two disk images: "W98SE as it installed itself right out of the box", and "after I install sound and video drivers and the basic set of DOS and 'doze apps and utils I can't live without, and after I nuke the 10-20M of crap like that advertising they put in the "oobe" directory, and the umpteen megs of media sounds and other dreck, and with all the registry tweaks like disabling the low diskspace annoybot, that I think are essential." In short, one for "start from scratch and save an hour" and one for "start from a good base install and save two hours".
I then have a generic boot floppy with DOS, FDISK, MSCDEX.EXE, Ghost, and real-mode drivers for the umpteen CDROMs and DVD-ROMs I have on the various boxen.
Going from "I just bought a blank hard drive" to "I'm up and running" takes 15 minutes.
Anyways, it sounds like what Dell and other name-brand guys are doing is "stick the Ghost image somewhere on the hard drive and lock it to the hardware, so we can do quick reinstalls of Windoze". It's just that by sticking it on the hard drive, they're terminally screwing anyone whose hard drive blows up... of course, what does Dell care about that? (And in fairness to them, the end-luser would likely "send the computer back" in such a situation, rather than "restore from backup" implies an awareness of "backup", and if they knew what *that* meant, they'd never trust a "restore CD" in the first place...)
>I already promised myself before WindowsME came out that I'm sticking with Win98SE.
Me too.
My Winboxen run 98SE, and all boot to DOS, not 'Doze. I can swap hard drives on removable racks between a 486/66, a P166, a couple of I-Openers, and my C550. They're like big-ass floppies whenever I want to shovel files from one box to another
Advantage 1: I never have to worry about plug-and-pray "detecting" new hardware when all I want to do is move some files.
Advantage 2: Backups and reinstallations are trivial. Norton Ghost under raw DOS, or dd under linux.
Advantage 3: I've seen a friend's box unable to boot due to registry corruption. Me? I'm always guaranteed to have access to the 4-5 copies of USER.DAT and SYSTEM.DAT stored in the SYSBCKUP directory. And I'm guaranteed that they'll never be overwritten because DOS doesn't know they exist!
WinME?
Disadvantage 1: Hide DOS (taking away the only "good" thing about W9x as far as I'm concerned)
Disadvantage 2: "System Restore" means "your hard drive thrashes and is one hell of a performance bottleneck" (or "you can't actually do anything to your own box until you disable it")
Disadvantage 3: Lessee, more DRM crap in WinMediaPlayer, more bloat in the browser...
Whistler:
All the WinME bugs, plus "phone home" copy protection, plus (I forget whether this went into Win2K or not) all that crap about "certified" drivers as part of the efforts to keep me away from the WAV data on my sound card... feh. I can't be bothered anymore.
For that matter, WinME sounded so lame I couldn't be bothered to pirate it just to satisfy my curiosity. Whistler sounds like more of the same. My home Winboxen will stick with 98SE, and my future boxen will just migrate to Linux and FreeBSD.
Agreed. This isn't about piracy, it's about privacy.
Give away a smartcard reader and a serialized smartcard with every install. And (well, this is the problem with closed-source, ain't it?) require the presence of the card for activation without phoning home.
It'd also be a major step towards market acceptance of smartcard technology at the consumer level.
And unlike the guaranteed-privacy-invasive "clearinghouse" idea, at least the smartcard idea is capable of being implemented without compromising privacy.
> > You will just have to call MS and explain why you are doing so (basically they will be able to relicense the
copy). > > will it be a 900 number? or will i be put on hold for three hours?
>if a/.er (trolls excluded) went and retrieved the nuke, it's not like they would
detonate it. it would most likely be disassembled, and pictures of it would go on the web.
Yep. Given what's in the bomb, the slashdotter would most likely be disassembled, chromosome by chromosome, and pictures would wind up on the web... after being scanned in from a medical textbook on dermatological evidence of radiation poisoning.
(Oh, you meant the bomb would be disassembled... sorry;-)
A few keyword searches on "glowing blue vial" or "cobalt" should reveal what happens when people who don't know what they're doing get their hands on stuff like the sources from certain types of X-ray machines. (The short version reads: "GO DARWIN!")
As for the nuke in question, the one good thing about the condition in which it's been maintained (i.e. it hasn't been maintained!), is that it's probably of very little use, even to a terrorist.
> > [ original poster asking why we're so hung up on X-files stuff like abandoned nukes and spy stations ]
Ever since Woz and Jobs built the first Apple in their garage in 1977 (or the TMRC hacked railroads at MIT in the 60s), geek culture has been built on the notion that anyone can have the power to change the world at his fingertips.
Compared to what geeks have accomplished in the past 20 years, a nuke is insignificant by comparison.
>We know of only one removable ATA drive: Castlewood's Orb. [... but ] the 4C Entity is delivering a solution tailor-made
for fixed disk ATA drives, and building right into the specification for industry standard fixed
drives.
This is indisputable.
Now ask yourself, why is it there?
Because anyone with a removable IDE rack and Win9x set to boot to DOS can use any "fixed" ATA drive like a 30 gigabyte floppy with Norton Ghost by yanking it out of one machine and shoving it into another.
(Or anyone with a removable IDE rack and a Real OS and/bin/dd for that matter.)
Hell, you can do it without the rack if you're willing to open your case to unplug the drive and remove it. All the rack does is make a 5-minute operation into a 10-second one.
$20 for the drive bay. $10 for the rack. Buy one rack per drive, and one bay per box. (And yes, they exist in SCSI variants too.) Standard equipment on every box I build for myself and friends - backing up boot partitions and 'doze installs is now too easy not to do, and it's a great use for all those ~1G drives we seem to have floating around. (200M for swap and/tmp, the rest is backup for the boot partition)
But instead of our own systems, we could just as easily be replicating TiVo drives, or drives from Nomad jukeboxes. Or 30G drives full of DiVX'd $MOVIEOFTHEWEEKs that the guy down the hall just slurped down through his broadband pipe.
That's what they're scared of.
Of course, I say "fuck 'em". My right to back up my data is a right. MPAA's "right" to protect its content through CPRM isn't a right, it's called "prior restraint", and they can go piss up a rope.
(BTW, am I the only one who read "4CEntity" as "Force Entity" and parsed it as "the entity that imposes the whim of the entertainment industry upon the PC industry by force?")
> They literally
demanded to know how she knew that she had been fired, despite the fact that they had already turned
off her phone and disabled her logon and key card.
"I'm sorry, but as I no longer work here, I see no need to answer that. If you're interested in hiring me as a consultant in order to investigate security leaks within your organization, my fee is $10,000 per minute. Just let me know when to start the clock."
>the math isn't hard, but there is the Poles Problem.
Basically as you approach the poles the longitude lines come close together.
Where's the problem?
I hereby volunteer for all 720 points at 89N and 89S! (Woohoo, look at my stats go up!:-)
To be fair, I also volunteered for most of those points in the blue parts of the planet near the Equator, where longitude points are a long way apart. (What, you wanna prove I wasn't there? Fine! Go there and look for yourself! Bet your pictures look just like mine!)
The stuff has a sixteen hour half life, though, so lifespan may be an issue.
Crap, forgot this part. Probably you lob a bunch of heavy elements up there and create the Am-242 by neutron bombardment or other reaction. Separate it chemically in situ on the spacecraft, and deposit it on the "engine" plate every few days.
Since it's done in a cycle of a few days, the "missing link" would probably be "how do we rebuild our reactor after we've separated out the Am-242 from the original fuel".
> especially in space where dumping excess heat is a
monumental task
Vapor-depositing Am-242 on a sheet of glass to make the new "engine" every couple of days sounds like a process that would require plenty of heat.
("Latent heat of steam is for wimps, real men worry about the latent heat of a vaporized radioactive metal!")
Of course, that probably only delays the problem. (How do you dump the heat from the glass plate into space? I dunno, maybe you just use the waste heat to drive Peltier devices and generate more electricity... but now it's sounding less like a "cheap and light self-contained ion engine" and more like a "use a big RTG to power a conventional ion engine" solution.)
>Once you have made the am-242 into a thin film, how exactly do you get it to stop fissioning?
You don't - if you want to slow the spacecraft down (albeit gradually), you just spin a reaction wheel and turn the "engine" (or spacecraft) around by 180 degrees.
This sounds like one hell of a cool technology. It sounds like you get the performance of an ion drive without the need for the solar panels to "power" it, since the decay products of the Am-242 provide the ions.
Ancient tech: Rockets are insanely wasteful since you're accelerating millions of tons of propellant stuck to your engine. Oh yeah, somewhere buried under all the propellant and the tanks might be a payload, but you'd never notice it.
Current tech: Take a big heavy solar panel (or RTG) and a little bitty tank of Xenon. The big heavy electrical thing exists only to ionize the Xenon, charge a plate, and spit the Xe nuclei out the back end. It's more efficient then rockets, but you still have to accelerate the damn electrical power source needed to make the ions.
This thing: Scrap the electrical generator, just use a heavy element that not only ionizes itself, but it also automatically takes care of the spitting the particles out the back end part. The propulsion system is basically all fuel, and it all gets converted to kinetic energy in the form of fission products.
>You make it sound as though most BIOS's don't allow you to change the logo.. on most systems you can acually
change the logo when you update the BIOS.
Yeah, that's the point. Most of the BIOS update programs are DOS executables on floppies, distributed in binary form by BIOS manufacturers.
The neat thing about Qnxflash was that (a) it runs under a UNIX variant, and (b) source is available.
Remember the goal of the article here -- instead of your PC showing Dell or Compaq's logo fullscreen, you want a picture of Tux;-)
> How do you know that someone else didn't spam on his behalf to discredit
him.
This is called a "Joe Job", and yes, it happens from time to time.
Unfortunately, Uzi's spams come direct-to-MX from IP addresses and domains owned and operated by him (I've received copies of it myself), and the headers I got match the ones that have been posted to news.admin.net-abuse.* recently.
That's conclusive proof that it's him behind the spams.
> but in no way is the embargo doing what
it's PR claims it's meant to. [mumble mumble Noam Chomsky mumble mumble]
Waaaaaaaaitaminit, dude, just you don't get off that easy. When Saddam invaded Kuwait and Bush Sr. said "Hey, let's blow this fux0r off the map", weren't you humanitarian/peacenik types saying "no blood for oil, sanctions are the way to handle this"?
When it was a choice between bombing and sanctions, sanctions were great.
Now that bombing him is off the table, it's a choice between sanctions (and what, a stern rebuke from his High School teacher?) and something less than sanctions, you presumably favor something less than sanctions?
This guy is building nukes fer chrissakes, and he may be crazy enough to use 'em.
Indeed, the only reason I'm saying "may" instead of "is" is because he didn't use chemical weapons when he lobbed a pile of Scuds at Israel and Saudi Arabia, and while he's quite content nerve-gas his own citizens, he knew the Israelis, Americans, and Saudis wouldn't take that kinda shit.
(And for all I know, the reason he didn't go chemo is because his chemo warheads wouldn't have given him range with the Scuds, and he *couldn't*, rather than *wisely chose not to*, go chemo.)
Ender's Game taught me everything I need to know about dealing with bullies. (And anyone who's "strong" enough to nerve gas his own citizens when there's no fear of retaliation, but won't nerve-gas his enemies in war is just that - a bully, albeit a smart one). You don't just beat them, you beat the hell out of them (which we chose not to do in 1991), and you make sure they can never do it again.
Remember, the purpose of sanctions is not "to help the Iraqi people". It's to make sure Saddam cannot develop WMD capability. I'm not saying it's working as well as it should, and in an age where anyone with an antistatic bag can shove an Athlon up their ass (I'd like to see 'em try it with a motherboard:-) and walk across the border, I'm not even saying it can work in terms of denying him access to technology. But unless you've got something better in mind...
This runs in QNX from the console, but there's no reason it couldn't be adapted to other motherboards and BIOS setups.
The nice thing is that it's a BIOS hack, so even if you yank out a hard drive to boot Windoze to play some games, you still have your funky boot logo.
Yeah, I also like watching my PC autodetect the hard drives, and I also like seeing all the boot log stuff scrolling by on a *nix boot. But as others have correctly pointed out, this just scares most sheeple, who want to look at something pretty so they don't have to wonder what's going on under the hood. Whether we like their preference or not, it's real, and our obligation should be to the user, not to our notions of what a *nix boot "should" look like.
> hope you choke and die under a mountain of your own chattle.
Which was my point to the original poster - I was agreeing with him - unless we can come up with something better than Marxism's "well, it sounds like it'll solve the problem of people who'd prefer their PS2s to people starving to death, but won't actually work in real life..."
I wanna see something that does solve the problem. Not just something that feels good and fails to solve the problem.
But if we're gonna have people starving to death whether some of us get our PS2s or not, I'd rather at least some of us get PS2s.
I believe it was Churchill who said something to the effect that Democracy (by which he probably meant "capitalism under the limitations imposed by a Parliamentary or Republican form of government") basically sucks, but at least it sucks less than anything else that's been tried so far.
>I like the last recommendation, give him the domain but toss him in jail for spamming.:-) Then he
could sell the domain to Nissan Motors to pay his attorney fees for the spamming charges. That
would be poetic justice...
Y'know, I gotta admit I like that recommendation too.
In fairness to the scumbag, the right solution (and this meets the criterion) would separate the fact that he's spamming from the otherwise-valid issue he has with him being the guy with first claim to Nissan.com.
Like I said in the original post - if he hadn't spammed to promote his cause, I'd likely be a hell of a lot more sympathetic to his cause. Rule #3 - spammers are stupid. Sucks to be him.
I say he should retain the rights to the domain, but lose all IP connectivity under the terms of his AUP (which he's no doubt violated). If he wants to set up his web site with a new provider, and subsequently not spam for it, I'll cease to have a beef with him. Hell, Spamford Wallace went straight after a few years, why can't Uzi Nissan after a few months? What matters is that he stops spamming, not why he stops spamming.
Of course, until he stops spamming... well, fuck him and the car (presumably not a Nissan) he rode in on, but I've already been there and got modded down for it;-)
And just like a punk spamming thief, he
lies about his spamming too.
Fuck Uzi "scumbag" Nissan and the car he drove in on. I hope Nissanmotors.com's landsharks turn his site into a greasy yellow stain on his ISP's server room floor.
Slashdot Mirror
Amen. The end-user's desktop will remain Bill's, if for no other reason than the fact that most of the games out there are being written for 'doze, and the Office monopoly.
But the big bucks are in the operating system licenses for servers.
> Whether we see MicrograssSoftroot-movements spring up, I doubt.
Ditto. Astroturf is a technique used when you have a many-to-one relationship, you want to influence the "one", and the "one" is both visible to the "many" but insulated from reality. Politicians are great examples of creatures that can be moved by astroturf campaigns.
IT managers are invisible - the turfers can neither identify nor contact them. IT managers are legion - the turfers can't concentrate their campaign on a single target. And IT managers draw their expertise from multiple sources - and consequently it's difficult to influence them by influencing key underlings like congressional staffers.
Everything we're seeing today was reflected in the Hallowe'en documents. The world is unfolding as it should.
Amen. The end-user's desktop will remain Bill's, if for no other reason than the fact that most of the games out there are being written for 'doze, and the Office monopoly.
But the big bucks are in the operating system licenses for servers.
> Whether we see MicrograssSoftroot-movements spring up, I doubt.
Ditto. Astroturf is a technique used when you have a many-to-one relationship, you want to influence the "one", and the "one" is both visible to the "many" but insulated from reality. Politicians are great examples of creatures that can be moved by astroturf campaigns.
IT managers are invisible - the turfers can neither identify nor contact them. IT managers are legion - the turfers can't concentrate their campaign on a single target. And IT managers draw their expertise from multiple sources - and consequently it's difficult to influence them by influencing key underlings like congressional staffers.
Everything we're seeing today was reflected in the Hallowe'en documents. The world is unfolding as it should.
Eh? You obviously use a different Internet than mine.
I've never given a valid email address to any company, nor have I ever typed it into a webform.
I have, however, posted to USENET unmunged from 1992 to 1995. The spam started in 1994 and didn't start to go down until I "whined" to every spammer's upstream and started whacking the moles.
>Who are you going to side with, the customer/spammer who pays you ten of thousands of dollars a year or more
While I loathe the "mainsleaze" guys like TFSM and Spamazon and what-not, all of my spam comes from $19.95/month throwaway dialup accounts (and about 90% of it from uu.net dialups).
Every time I report one of those whackamoles (well, until UUNET took over the spam business, because they just /dev/null abuse reports after sending me a uunet abuse ticket number lottery ticket), I'm costing that spammer's ISP money, because the abuse department has to read it, store it, and if enough complaints about a user are received, investigate and act on it. When it costs an ISP more than $19.99 a month to sell a spammer a dialup account, the spam will stop.
Whether the spam stops because the ISP got a clue and (pick one or all of "stopped selling accounts to spammers", "blocked port 25 on new users", or "required credit card validation", or any other set of proactive measures), or because the ISP got blackholed a'la AGIS and ended up the world's biggest LAN, isn't my problem.
Fascinating. Regrettably, it appears that policy has begun to change (or ELNK/MSPG is real desperate for POP space, probably a combination of both), as I've begun to see reports of uu.net POPs on their network status pages.
Good on ya, though. Even from a customer service standpoint, I'd rather dial into a POP that's dedicated to my own ISP, rather than share it with the zillion other ISPs in the area. You can control how much capacity you put into your own POPs. With uu.net, I'd imagine it's a matter of paying more, and having it take longer. The delays from phone companies on adding capacity to a POP are pretty scary - and presumably wouldn't start until after you'd begged (and paid) uu.net to beg (and pay) the phone company to do the trunking magic.
> > Each Internet Network must be responsive to unsolicited email and network abuse complaints,
Quoth mrsam, probably after spraying coffee all over his monitor:
> [...] abuse@uu.net is just a big gaping sinkhole.
I don't see any contradiction. I mean, nowhere does it say that uu.net has to be responsive! It just says that that if you wanna peer with 'em, you have to be responsive.
"Wanna peer with us? Be a good netizen and whack your spammers so we don't have to carry the traffic. But don't expect us to do do jack shit about the spam our users cram through your pipes."
To which my response would be "I wouldn't peer in their mouths if they were dyin' of thirst", but I digress.
Buggered if I know. Anyone remotely big enough has already been swallowed up.
If AOL owns equipment (as opposed to just leasing POPs and assigning them .aol.com DNS info), they might qualify, but I can't imagine why they'd bother. I'd put good money that the vast majority of AOL's traffic is just bits being shovelled from one part of AOL's network to another. Why peer? Their users are just on a really big LAN.
Of course, if AOL merely leases POPs, then that "internal to AOL" traffic is a heck of a lot. But if AOL is mostly leased POPs from ISPs, then they can't meet the geogrpahic requirements.
Hmm... if it's half-and-half, though... maybe they are the one. Didn't AOL pick up a big pile of modem banks and other ISP toys when they bought out Compuserve a few years back?
Other ideas - maybe the Mindspring/Earthlink agglomeration? Or the biggest-ass uu.net "reseller", good ol' msn.com?
Good point - I've long suspected that uu.net isn't really interested in the business of POP-leasing. It'd explain a lot of things, not just the spam problem. (Moderators - mod the parent of this post up!)
With the impending doom of PSINet, however, they may be able to jack up the rates high enough to make it profitable again. Goodness knows Worldcom's desperate enough for revenue.
(OK, useful commentary over, now on to more kvetching about the dreck uu.net shovels into my mailbox every friggin' day...)
If you're an ISP, consider finding alternate arrangements. More and more uu.net dialups are finding their way into routers' blocklists every day as individual admins give up on uu.net dialups as nothing but a spam source.
I'm off to tweak Apache into displaying "If you're reading this, you're on a uu.net POP. Go tell your ISP to lease their POPs from someone a little more reputable" whenever a user comes in from 63.[wholebunchastuff]...
Yeah, I know, uu.net probably leases the same POP to multiple ISPs and does authentication at the RADIUS server level, so you can't just say "63.foo.bar.baz is msn.com, 63.foo.bar.qux is earthlink.net".
But dialsprint arguably had the same problem (I don't think they're exclusively Earthlink?), and went from 25000+ spams a day reported to Spamcop down to nearly nothing upon blocking port 25. Sure, it took six months of half the 'net bitching at them 24/7, but they finally relented, and the spamload dropped within 24 hours of implementation. Looks like all their spammers have since migrated to uu.net, who remain unresponsive after three years.
Yeah, I hate those tricks.
Me? Got a Genius Colorpage I scanner in '94. Was bad enough to set it up (weird half-ass 8-bit ISA "kinda-SCSI" card) in DOS for Win3.1, which was what it shipped with.
Turns out the NT drivers worked with Win95.
Turns out it's not on any supported lists for W98.
Turns out if you try to use the same drivers in W98, the machine locks hard.
Solution: Boot W98SE into safe mode to install the drivers without blowing anything up.
Then boot to regular mode and it works just fine.
Eat me, Bill. Even if a $129 USB scanner is probably better than this thing I bought just before the web got popular and everyone had to have a scanner... I will not let Bill make me throw out perfectly functional hardware just 'cuz he thinks I should.
Why pay for something you don't need, especially when the "upgrade" serves only to make you pay for other things you didn't need before your "upgrade"?
Where I come from, that's not an upgrade, it's throwing good money after bad.
s/to anyone/on anyone/g
OK, there's the "external" version of the bounty program ;-)
Can anyone with one of the name-brand PCs clarify what's going on under the hood? (Yeah, I know, anyone who's likely to be able to describe it isn't buying name-brand... but maybe you've got some less-clued friends? ;-)
My guess is that the "restore CD" is a bootable CDROM that basically copies stuff off a hidden partition on the hard drive. That is, you get the preconfigured box with a copy of a drive image on a hidden partition. Your "restore CD" is a glorified "run Ghost and get your partition back" device.
(I'm coming to this conclusion from the other end, because it's similar to how I restores hozed windoze installs. For each 'doze box, I burn a CDROM for each box with two disk images: "W98SE as it installed itself right out of the box", and "after I install sound and video drivers and the basic set of DOS and 'doze apps and utils I can't live without, and after I nuke the 10-20M of crap like that advertising they put in the "oobe" directory, and the umpteen megs of media sounds and other dreck, and with all the registry tweaks like disabling the low diskspace annoybot, that I think are essential." In short, one for "start from scratch and save an hour" and one for "start from a good base install and save two hours".
I then have a generic boot floppy with DOS, FDISK, MSCDEX.EXE, Ghost, and real-mode drivers for the umpteen CDROMs and DVD-ROMs I have on the various boxen.
Going from "I just bought a blank hard drive" to "I'm up and running" takes 15 minutes.
Anyways, it sounds like what Dell and other name-brand guys are doing is "stick the Ghost image somewhere on the hard drive and lock it to the hardware, so we can do quick reinstalls of Windoze". It's just that by sticking it on the hard drive, they're terminally screwing anyone whose hard drive blows up... of course, what does Dell care about that? (And in fairness to them, the end-luser would likely "send the computer back" in such a situation, rather than "restore from backup" implies an awareness of "backup", and if they knew what *that* meant, they'd never trust a "restore CD" in the first place...)
Me too.
My Winboxen run 98SE, and all boot to DOS, not 'Doze. I can swap hard drives on removable racks between a 486/66, a P166, a couple of I-Openers, and my C550. They're like big-ass floppies whenever I want to shovel files from one box to another
Advantage 1: I never have to worry about plug-and-pray "detecting" new hardware when all I want to do is move some files.
Advantage 2: Backups and reinstallations are trivial. Norton Ghost under raw DOS, or dd under linux.
Advantage 3: I've seen a friend's box unable to boot due to registry corruption. Me? I'm always guaranteed to have access to the 4-5 copies of USER.DAT and SYSTEM.DAT stored in the SYSBCKUP directory. And I'm guaranteed that they'll never be overwritten because DOS doesn't know they exist!
WinME?
Disadvantage 1: Hide DOS (taking away the only "good" thing about W9x as far as I'm concerned)
Disadvantage 2: "System Restore" means "your hard drive thrashes and is one hell of a performance bottleneck" (or "you can't actually do anything to your own box until you disable it")
Disadvantage 3: Lessee, more DRM crap in WinMediaPlayer, more bloat in the browser...
Whistler:
All the WinME bugs, plus "phone home" copy protection, plus (I forget whether this went into Win2K or not) all that crap about "certified" drivers as part of the efforts to keep me away from the WAV data on my sound card... feh. I can't be bothered anymore.
For that matter, WinME sounded so lame I couldn't be bothered to pirate it just to satisfy my curiosity. Whistler sounds like more of the same. My home Winboxen will stick with 98SE, and my future boxen will just migrate to Linux and FreeBSD.
Just read a post on the subject:
give M$ better options
Agreed. This isn't about piracy, it's about privacy.
Give away a smartcard reader and a serialized smartcard with every install. And (well, this is the problem with closed-source, ain't it?) require the presence of the card for activation without phoning home.
It'd also be a major step towards market acceptance of smartcard technology at the consumer level.
And unlike the guaranteed-privacy-invasive "clearinghouse" idea, at least the smartcard idea is capable of being implemented without compromising privacy.
>
> will it be a 900 number? or will i be put on hold for three hours?
Yes. To both of your questions.
Yep. Given what's in the bomb, the slashdotter would most likely be disassembled, chromosome by chromosome, and pictures would wind up on the web... after being scanned in from a medical textbook on dermatological evidence of radiation poisoning.
(Oh, you meant the bomb would be disassembled... sorry ;-)
A few keyword searches on "glowing blue vial" or "cobalt" should reveal what happens when people who don't know what they're doing get their hands on stuff like the sources from certain types of X-ray machines. (The short version reads: "GO DARWIN!")
As for the nuke in question, the one good thing about the condition in which it's been maintained (i.e. it hasn't been maintained!), is that it's probably of very little use, even to a terrorist.
> > [ original poster asking why we're so hung up on X-files stuff like abandoned nukes and spy stations ]
Ever since Woz and Jobs built the first Apple in their garage in 1977 (or the TMRC hacked railroads at MIT in the 60s), geek culture has been built on the notion that anyone can have the power to change the world at his fingertips.
Compared to what geeks have accomplished in the past 20 years, a nuke is insignificant by comparison.
But is it still news for nerds? You betcha ;-)
Because anyone with a removable IDE rack and Win9x set to boot to DOS can use any "fixed" ATA drive like a 30 gigabyte floppy with Norton Ghost by yanking it out of one machine and shoving it into another. (Or anyone with a removable IDE rack and a Real OS and /bin/dd for that matter.)
Hell, you can do it without the rack if you're willing to open your case to unplug the drive and remove it. All the rack does is make a 5-minute operation into a 10-second one.
$20 for the drive bay. $10 for the rack. Buy one rack per drive, and one bay per box. (And yes, they exist in SCSI variants too.) Standard equipment on every box I build for myself and friends - backing up boot partitions and 'doze installs is now too easy not to do, and it's a great use for all those ~1G drives we seem to have floating around. (200M for swap and /tmp, the rest is backup for the boot partition)
But instead of our own systems, we could just as easily be replicating TiVo drives, or drives from Nomad jukeboxes. Or 30G drives full of DiVX'd $MOVIEOFTHEWEEKs that the guy down the hall just slurped down through his broadband pipe.
That's what they're scared of.
Of course, I say "fuck 'em". My right to back up my data is a right. MPAA's "right" to protect its content through CPRM isn't a right, it's called "prior restraint", and they can go piss up a rope.
(BTW, am I the only one who read "4CEntity" as "Force Entity" and parsed it as "the entity that imposes the whim of the entertainment industry upon the PC industry by force?")
"I'm sorry, but as I no longer work here, I see no need to answer that. If you're interested in hiring me as a consultant in order to investigate security leaks within your organization, my fee is $10,000 per minute. Just let me know when to start the clock."
Where's the problem?
I hereby volunteer for all 720 points at 89N and 89S! (Woohoo, look at my stats go up! :-)
To be fair, I also volunteered for most of those points in the blue parts of the planet near the Equator, where longitude points are a long way apart. (What, you wanna prove I wasn't there? Fine! Go there and look for yourself! Bet your pictures look just like mine!)
Crap, forgot this part. Probably you lob a bunch of heavy elements up there and create the Am-242 by neutron bombardment or other reaction. Separate it chemically in situ on the spacecraft, and deposit it on the "engine" plate every few days.
Since it's done in a cycle of a few days, the "missing link" would probably be "how do we rebuild our reactor after we've separated out the Am-242 from the original fuel".
> especially in space where dumping excess heat is a monumental task
Vapor-depositing Am-242 on a sheet of glass to make the new "engine" every couple of days sounds like a process that would require plenty of heat. ("Latent heat of steam is for wimps, real men worry about the latent heat of a vaporized radioactive metal!")
Of course, that probably only delays the problem. (How do you dump the heat from the glass plate into space? I dunno, maybe you just use the waste heat to drive Peltier devices and generate more electricity... but now it's sounding less like a "cheap and light self-contained ion engine" and more like a "use a big RTG to power a conventional ion engine" solution.)
You don't - if you want to slow the spacecraft down (albeit gradually), you just spin a reaction wheel and turn the "engine" (or spacecraft) around by 180 degrees.
This sounds like one hell of a cool technology. It sounds like you get the performance of an ion drive without the need for the solar panels to "power" it, since the decay products of the Am-242 provide the ions.
Ancient tech: Rockets are insanely wasteful since you're accelerating millions of tons of propellant stuck to your engine. Oh yeah, somewhere buried under all the propellant and the tanks might be a payload, but you'd never notice it.
Current tech: Take a big heavy solar panel (or RTG) and a little bitty tank of Xenon. The big heavy electrical thing exists only to ionize the Xenon, charge a plate, and spit the Xe nuclei out the back end. It's more efficient then rockets, but you still have to accelerate the damn electrical power source needed to make the ions.
This thing: Scrap the electrical generator, just use a heavy element that not only ionizes itself, but it also automatically takes care of the spitting the particles out the back end part. The propulsion system is basically all fuel, and it all gets converted to kinetic energy in the form of fission products.
Fucking cool.
Yeah, that's the point. Most of the BIOS update programs are DOS executables on floppies, distributed in binary form by BIOS manufacturers.
The neat thing about Qnxflash was that (a) it runs under a UNIX variant, and (b) source is available.
Remember the goal of the article here -- instead of your PC showing Dell or Compaq's logo fullscreen, you want a picture of Tux ;-)
This is called a "Joe Job", and yes, it happens from time to time.
Unfortunately, Uzi's spams come direct-to-MX from IP addresses and domains owned and operated by him (I've received copies of it myself), and the headers I got match the ones that have been posted to news.admin.net-abuse.* recently.
That's conclusive proof that it's him behind the spams.
Waaaaaaaaitaminit, dude, just you don't get off that easy. When Saddam invaded Kuwait and Bush Sr. said "Hey, let's blow this fux0r off the map", weren't you humanitarian/peacenik types saying "no blood for oil, sanctions are the way to handle this"?
When it was a choice between bombing and sanctions, sanctions were great. Now that bombing him is off the table, it's a choice between sanctions (and what, a stern rebuke from his High School teacher?) and something less than sanctions, you presumably favor something less than sanctions?
This guy is building nukes fer chrissakes, and he may be crazy enough to use 'em.
Indeed, the only reason I'm saying "may" instead of "is" is because he didn't use chemical weapons when he lobbed a pile of Scuds at Israel and Saudi Arabia, and while he's quite content nerve-gas his own citizens, he knew the Israelis, Americans, and Saudis wouldn't take that kinda shit.
(And for all I know, the reason he didn't go chemo is because his chemo warheads wouldn't have given him range with the Scuds, and he *couldn't*, rather than *wisely chose not to*, go chemo.)
Ender's Game taught me everything I need to know about dealing with bullies. (And anyone who's "strong" enough to nerve gas his own citizens when there's no fear of retaliation, but won't nerve-gas his enemies in war is just that - a bully, albeit a smart one). You don't just beat them, you beat the hell out of them (which we chose not to do in 1991), and you make sure they can never do it again.
Remember, the purpose of sanctions is not "to help the Iraqi people". It's to make sure Saddam cannot develop WMD capability. I'm not saying it's working as well as it should, and in an age where anyone with an antistatic bag can shove an Athlon up their ass (I'd like to see 'em try it with a motherboard :-) and walk across the border, I'm not even saying it can work in terms of denying him access to technology. But unless you've got something better in mind...
Openflash
This runs in QNX from the console, but there's no reason it couldn't be adapted to other motherboards and BIOS setups.
The nice thing is that it's a BIOS hack, so even if you yank out a hard drive to boot Windoze to play some games, you still have your funky boot logo.
Yeah, I also like watching my PC autodetect the hard drives, and I also like seeing all the boot log stuff scrolling by on a *nix boot. But as others have correctly pointed out, this just scares most sheeple, who want to look at something pretty so they don't have to wonder what's going on under the hood. Whether we like their preference or not, it's real, and our obligation should be to the user, not to our notions of what a *nix boot "should" look like.
Which was my point to the original poster - I was agreeing with him - unless we can come up with something better than Marxism's "well, it sounds like it'll solve the problem of people who'd prefer their PS2s to people starving to death, but won't actually work in real life..."
I wanna see something that does solve the problem. Not just something that feels good and fails to solve the problem.
But if we're gonna have people starving to death whether some of us get our PS2s or not, I'd rather at least some of us get PS2s.
I believe it was Churchill who said something to the effect that Democracy (by which he probably meant "capitalism under the limitations imposed by a Parliamentary or Republican form of government") basically sucks, but at least it sucks less than anything else that's been tried so far.
Y'know, I gotta admit I like that recommendation too.
In fairness to the scumbag, the right solution (and this meets the criterion) would separate the fact that he's spamming from the otherwise-valid issue he has with him being the guy with first claim to Nissan.com.
Like I said in the original post - if he hadn't spammed to promote his cause, I'd likely be a hell of a lot more sympathetic to his cause. Rule #3 - spammers are stupid. Sucks to be him.
I say he should retain the rights to the domain, but lose all IP connectivity under the terms of his AUP (which he's no doubt violated). If he wants to set up his web site with a new provider, and subsequently not spam for it, I'll cease to have a beef with him. Hell, Spamford Wallace went straight after a few years, why can't Uzi Nissan after a few months? What matters is that he stops spamming, not why he stops spamming.
Of course, until he stops spamming... well, fuck him and the car (presumably not a Nissan) he rode in on, but I've already been there and got modded down for it ;-)
Ordinarily, I sympathize with cases like his... that was until I found out Mr. Nissan was a punk spamming thief.
In fact, he's been a spammer since late October.
And just like a punk spamming thief, he lies about his spamming too.
Fuck Uzi "scumbag" Nissan and the car he drove in on. I hope Nissanmotors.com's landsharks turn his site into a greasy yellow stain on his ISP's server room floor.