SpamAssassin, when properly configured, has spectacular spam detection accuracy. For your account or for a small domain, you should be able to see SA yield "near perfect" filtering (i.e., probably as good as a human could pull off).
That's the point at which we become interested in SpamAssassin users joining WPBL, an automated spam reporting system. Powered by scripts living in procmail and cron, participating systems send WPBL lists of IP addresses sending spam and ham. The central server crunches this data hourly to produce a list [rsync://rsync.pc9.org/wpbl/wpbl-blocks.cidr] of blocked IP addresses that are spam sources.
If your site uses SA and you have verified your spam detection accuracy as nearly-perfect, you might be interested in contributing your spam/ham sighting stats to WPBL. The resulting block list can be used by anyone (and is used by some ISPs for spam scoring). The way I think of it is, after you've taken care of the spam problem at your site why not help tell the rest of the world where spam is coming from.
Spammers use stolen resources (hijacked zombie computers, DSL/cable connections) in order to further their business.
Spammers do not seek consent before bombarding email systems with their marketing information.
Spammers generally disrespect requests for them to stop sending unsolicited email, and in fact often send more mail after such requests (selling 'confirmed' addresses to colleagues)
Spammers deliberately conceal their location of 'business', mislead consumers in their 'marketing campaigns' and forge their identities.
It's good to see these people increasingly treated as what they really are, criminals that have been harming society and getting away with it because our current laws are too slow to catch up. What they're doing is not only annoying, but harmful to innocent peoples' systems.
...knowing that my mail client doesn't even load images -- it just strips down all that HTML mess to plaintext. I never trusted pretty emails.
Honestly, looking at something like emails -- what does all this "meta deta" add that isn't available from plain text information content? Want a hyperlink, spell out its URL. Want some lines? Play around with hyphens. It's really not so bad, and so so much less dangerous.
It's really disconcerting for me that practically all the distros want you to have root access even to install a simple MP3 player from their package files
I always tended to think that packages were for the admin. If you want to install software, you can still install it under your home directory like we've done since the 70's... compile it from source. These days, thanks to autoconf/automake, it's as easy as
Maybe I'm just unitiated, but wouldn't a linux terminal server work better
Setting up a linux 'terminal server' (using XDMCP to provide X logins to thin clients) is exceedingly easy to set up, and your thin clients can be running pretty much any UNIX flavour that supports XDMCP. I personally like this set up because the client computers can be as dumb as possible (and bloody cheap), and you can invest server resources in your central server - make it real beefy, dual processors, gigabytes of RAM:) The thin clients on the other hand can be 486's you've pulled out of the garbage, with no hard drives, 8 MB of RAM. Put decent video cards in them and your cheap thin clients will look beautiful.
Don't jump to conclusions. Reporters are notorious for being inaccurate, and modern news services are notorious for rapidly spreading news stories whether or not the sources are credible.
Our government and NORAD monitor everything and know what's going on. You can't expect to know the real story until you have your own satellite in orbit and your own offshore seismic monitoring stations.
So if you're stressed out right now I suggest you read a good book, hit up a good house party, get drunk, get laid, smoke dope, whatever -- and don't worry so much on a Saturday night.
Funny thing is, if politicians and military people could do the same (chill out a bit) instead of going ape shit and provoking escalations, we would live in a safer, happier world. So if there is something to worry about, let's hope that the People in Power don't do anything too stupid. When in doubt, be nice.
You forgot claria (used to be gator), the people who install marketing research software on windows without permission from the owner. They essentially do the same kind of illegal hijacking of resources as viruses do, except they're profitable:)
People who intentionally cause massive harm to others should be punished
Yes, you're right! Now let's apply it:
VISA, a company that hires behavioural psychologists to determine new ways to induce vulnerable people to borrow as much money as they can, often times resulting in shattered lives (lifelong debt, bankruptcy)
Enterprise Arms, manufacturers and sells devices that are built solely for the purpose of killing other humans (and large mammals) "NEW! Romanian WASR-10, AK47 Type Rifle"
...
A teenager who wrote a lame virus. Thousands of hours of productivity lost! Sure, it was hard to pick out those hours impacted due to the virus but we're pretty sure it was still really really malicious. And damaging! LET'S DRAW AND QUARTER HIM, THE BLOOD OF THE TEENAGE HACKER WILL RUN IN THE STREETS! OR AT LEAST A PUBLIC EXECUTION!!!
Give me a fucking break. The 18 year old writes a mediocre virus and you're all up in arms... how about this fucking company (a.k.a. Gator) that has been compromising millions of computers (trespassing, breaking and entering, whatever) for profit? Don't fool yourself, one's a kid being stupid, the other's a profitable company and they're both doing the same thing.
By actually giving them a candidate they can agree with?
The way I look at it is, you have a duty to exercise your power in the democracy. You're a citizen of a great country, and your life is probably pretty good -- why not take the little bit of time required to exercise a privilege that billions of people throughout history could have only dreamed of. In the very least, register to vote, go vote -- if there's no valid choice, spoil your ballot. If all (esp. young) voters did this instead of sitting at home on their lazy asses, it would send a powerful message: we have control, we think you all suck, but in a heartbeat we can remove you from power.
I used to always wonder why bankruptcy lawyer commercials always said stuff like "Stop creditor harassment."
Your post makes a very good point about how extreme the harassment from debt collectors is. Everyone should take another look at the star38 website... ('Why Use *38') you can see that the service mainly targets debt collectors who need a new kind of tool to deceive and harass their targets. Sure, there are tons of uses for star38 but the company's marketing efforts are directed towards debt collectors. Who, most people would agree, use immoral and reprehensible methods to attain their fiscal goals.
Remember that the USA (and Canada too actually) are debt-addicted nations. People routinely owe money to others, and there is a cat and mouse game of the debtors persuing the indebted. I wouldn't be surprised if the star38 owner really is being harassed by people who think he's being a huge asshole by giving debt collectors this tool.
The point of SPF was not to eliminate spam, but to eliminate spoofing
That's what I thought too, but the people pushing SPF think otherwise, quoting from their page:
"What do the customers want? They want to communicate with their friends and family; and they want to not get spam. They do not particularly care if a few eggs are broken along the way."
Re:I've got mine on pre-order.
on
Port-A-Nuke
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· Score: 1
The reason I haven't converted my bedroom is that the compact floresent bulbs do have a 1 to 2 second startup delay
This is not the case for all bulbs. I bought some Sylvania "soft white" this summer and they turn on in about 0.5 seconds, and at that time they are full-on. By the way, the output spectrum is beautiful - cool white. But I would suggest that compact fluorescents may not be good for a bedroom anyway because ideal fluorescent applications are where the light is on for long stretches of time - hours at a time, not off/on quickly.
Re:I've got mine on pre-order.
on
Port-A-Nuke
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· Score: 2, Insightful
100% of the energy consumed in your CPU is converted to heat, not just "most of it".
whoa, help me understand this. Let's say I've got an electrical device that is 25% efficient. If the entire device consumes 100 watts, it does 25 watts (25 J/s work) and dissipates 75 watts as heat. So doesn't it waste most of the power? If it converted all the input power to heat, then how could it do any work?
Re:I've got mine on pre-order.
on
Port-A-Nuke
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· Score: 1
While you focus on energy consumption, you ignore the energy required to manufacture and replace existing items
This is a good point, I would definitely like to see more analysis of the technologies being compared. By the way, compact fluorescent is a relatively new technology. The bulbs are often compact spirals, packaged so that they are no larger than a conventional incandescent. There is more waste for sure at disposal (built in ballast) but you don't have to replace fixtures!
Re:I've got mine on pre-order.
on
Port-A-Nuke
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· Score: 4, Insightful
doesn't anyone realize we're using more electrical power than ever before?
Maybe worth pointing out that we don't need to be using more electrical power than ever before. I believe our current state reflects an inability of american society to realize that conservation is worthwhile and necessary.
100+ watt CRT versus 30 watt LCD monitor; 100 watt incandescent light bulbs versus 25 watt compact fluorescent. These technologies are readily available, are in many states are now economical alternatives. So use them!
The tech industry is also obsessed with high performance chips that have power consumption through the roof (most of it waste, of course). Where's the direction toward more energy efficient processing alternatives? Most applications do not need 1 GHz processors.
Make time for fun! Go out, meet people. Don't just worry about your tech toys and homework. Besides, having fun keeps your brain healthy and actually makes it easier to handle stress etc. later on. It's all about balance.
If you're worried about your stuff getting stolen... pack cheap/bargain stuff (or make your own), and don't keep anything valuable in dorms. Leave the fancy computer at home; build your own piece of trash from Accounting dept refuse!
Set aside a "study time" each day to actually get your work done. If you do this simple bit of organization, you'll probably get excellent grades without tremendous effort. Laziness/slashdot is what kills time, and ruins studies.
The sexual opportunities at college are endless. If you're into something but have never tried it (e.g. clown sex) I suggest overtly bringing up the topic with the ladies after a few drinks. You may think I'm kidding but you will probably run into someone who shares your passion - and you can have kinky clown sex all night. Or whatever.
So it started with technological innovation, and saw rapid development through the cooperation of governments and universities. It was refined and improved thanks to the effort of a bunch of awfully dedicated academics to the point where it could merge with mainstream technologies (talking PPP over analog phone modems). The new worldwide resource gave us the ability to communicate like never before.
Things were going so well, until the marketers came on board and started flooding people with ads and junk whatever way they could find. Spam was funny at first; now it's a serious waste of bandwidth and resources, with business people resorting to purely criminal activities in order to flood their advertising and harm benevolent volunteer organizations. Thanks to dirty business the Internet has become a battle ground. Spyware and even viruses are directly linked to immoral advertising/spam.
Now, I don't hate marketing people (I run a businses, and am a student in Management) but it's safe to say that immoral marketers are f*cking up the Internet.
The first twenty posts for this article should prove as valuable for marketing research of slashdot readership. You should be posting pornography, not links to tech articles. Yes, I'm kind of joking but kind of not.
but it appears some 2003 and 2004 pennies are magnetic (this surprised me)
Based on empirical observations, it seems that Canadian pennies with the letter 'p' under the Queen of England's head are magnetic and other pennies are not. I have yet to find an exception to this!
I pulled out a big old magnet and a pocketful of Canadian change, to see what would happen. My 1974 to 2003 1 cent pieces are not magnetic, but it appears some 2003 and 2004 pennies are magnetic (this surprised me). The 10 cent, 25 cent, 1 dollar and 2 dollar pieces are all magnetic. I haven't found any 5 cent magnetic pieces.
Yup, I'll second this -- it actually works. We have a big wooden cabinet in our student lounge; I glued two of these hard drive speakers to it and it makes some pretty loud noise. The impedences ar weird though, so use a cheap old (e.g. Value Village) amp.
Some friends and I have an approx 10 MBytes application we want to distribute over the Internet, looking into hosting costs we see that it would cost us a bundle. So does coral let us serve our file to a slashdot-like crowd without breaking the bank?
Slashdot Mirror
What will the honest folk at claria (a.k.a. gator), "A Leader in On Line Behavioral Marketing", The do about this?
SpamAssassin, when properly configured, has spectacular spam detection accuracy. For your account or for a small domain, you should be able to see SA yield "near perfect" filtering (i.e., probably as good as a human could pull off).
That's the point at which we become interested in SpamAssassin users joining WPBL, an automated spam reporting system. Powered by scripts living in procmail and cron, participating systems send WPBL lists of IP addresses sending spam and ham. The central server crunches this data hourly to produce a list [rsync://rsync.pc9.org/wpbl/wpbl-blocks.cidr] of blocked IP addresses that are spam sources.
If your site uses SA and you have verified your spam detection accuracy as nearly-perfect, you might be interested in contributing your spam/ham sighting stats to WPBL. The resulting block list can be used by anyone (and is used by some ISPs for spam scoring). The way I think of it is, after you've taken care of the spam problem at your site why not help tell the rest of the world where spam is coming from.
- Spammers use stolen resources (hijacked zombie computers, DSL/cable connections) in order to further their business.
- Spammers do not seek consent before bombarding email systems with their marketing information.
- Spammers generally disrespect requests for them to stop sending unsolicited email, and in fact often send more mail after such requests (selling 'confirmed' addresses to colleagues)
- Spammers deliberately conceal their location of 'business', mislead consumers in their 'marketing campaigns' and forge their identities.
It's good to see these people increasingly treated as what they really are, criminals that have been harming society and getting away with it because our current laws are too slow to catch up. What they're doing is not only annoying, but harmful to innocent peoples' systems....knowing that my mail client doesn't even load images -- it just strips down all that HTML mess to plaintext. I never trusted pretty emails.
Honestly, looking at something like emails -- what does all this "meta deta" add that isn't available from plain text information content? Want a hyperlink, spell out its URL. Want some lines? Play around with hyphens. It's really not so bad, and so so much less dangerous.
Don't jump to conclusions. Reporters are notorious for being inaccurate, and modern news services are notorious for rapidly spreading news stories whether or not the sources are credible.
Our government and NORAD monitor everything and know what's going on. You can't expect to know the real story until you have your own satellite in orbit and your own offshore seismic monitoring stations.
So if you're stressed out right now I suggest you read a good book, hit up a good house party, get drunk, get laid, smoke dope, whatever -- and don't worry so much on a Saturday night.
Funny thing is, if politicians and military people could do the same (chill out a bit) instead of going ape shit and provoking escalations, we would live in a safer, happier world. So if there is something to worry about, let's hope that the People in Power don't do anything too stupid. When in doubt, be nice.
You forgot claria (used to be gator), the people who install marketing research software on windows without permission from the owner. They essentially do the same kind of illegal hijacking of resources as viruses do, except they're profitable :)
Give me a fucking break. The 18 year old writes a mediocre virus and you're all up in arms... how about this fucking company (a.k.a. Gator) that has been compromising millions of computers (trespassing, breaking and entering, whatever) for profit? Don't fool yourself, one's a kid being stupid, the other's a profitable company and they're both doing the same thing.
Remember that the USA (and Canada too actually) are debt-addicted nations. People routinely owe money to others, and there is a cat and mouse game of the debtors persuing the indebted. I wouldn't be surprised if the star38 owner really is being harassed by people who think he's being a huge asshole by giving debt collectors this tool.
100+ watt CRT versus 30 watt LCD monitor; 100 watt incandescent light bulbs versus 25 watt compact fluorescent. These technologies are readily available, are in many states are now economical alternatives. So use them!
The tech industry is also obsessed with high performance chips that have power consumption through the roof (most of it waste, of course). Where's the direction toward more energy efficient processing alternatives? Most applications do not need 1 GHz processors.
So it started with technological innovation, and saw rapid development through the cooperation of governments and universities. It was refined and improved thanks to the effort of a bunch of awfully dedicated academics to the point where it could merge with mainstream technologies (talking PPP over analog phone modems). The new worldwide resource gave us the ability to communicate like never before.
Things were going so well, until the marketers came on board and started flooding people with ads and junk whatever way they could find. Spam was funny at first; now it's a serious waste of bandwidth and resources, with business people resorting to purely criminal activities in order to flood their advertising and harm benevolent volunteer organizations. Thanks to dirty business the Internet has become a battle ground. Spyware and even viruses are directly linked to immoral advertising/spam.
Now, I don't hate marketing people (I run a businses, and am a student in Management) but it's safe to say that immoral marketers are f*cking up the Internet.
The first twenty posts for this article should prove as valuable for marketing research of slashdot readership. You should be posting pornography, not links to tech articles. Yes, I'm kind of joking but kind of not.
I pulled out a big old magnet and a pocketful of Canadian change, to see what would happen. My 1974 to 2003 1 cent pieces are not magnetic, but it appears some 2003 and 2004 pennies are magnetic (this surprised me). The 10 cent, 25 cent, 1 dollar and 2 dollar pieces are all magnetic. I haven't found any 5 cent magnetic pieces.
Yup, I'll second this -- it actually works. We have a big wooden cabinet in our student lounge; I glued two of these hard drive speakers to it and it makes some pretty loud noise. The impedences ar weird though, so use a cheap old (e.g. Value Village) amp.
Some friends and I have an approx 10 MBytes application we want to distribute over the Internet, looking into hosting costs we see that it would cost us a bundle. So does coral let us serve our file to a slashdot-like crowd without breaking the bank?