NO. A central authority-based communications system is not going to accomplish much... it will, however, put the power of communications in the hands of few companies (probably monopolies)... it will let them charge fees... and it will ruin the versatility, adaptability, and reliability that we have because there is a great diversity of small hosts handling all their own email.
You want to stop spam? Grab spamprobe or something and watch your spam disappear. You want a more efficient and scalable solution for a big organization? Install DCC and be done with spam for your whole site. Seriously, spam is no longer a problem because both user-side and server-side tools with near perfect accuracy exist. If you're seeing spam, it's because your ISP isn't taking advantage of the filtering solutions that are available.
I'm not talking out of my ass... I've been keeping a close eye on mail and spam issues for the past decade. Spam is dead, so if spam still bothers you force your ISP to employ modern filtering. My university did, and the flood of spam dropped from 100/day to 0 in my account (they're using DCC). At home I employ spamprobe and again I see next to 0 spam.
There are several projects out there that are detecting and blocking open relays (quite effective... I have used this and similar blocklists on my mail server). FTC wouldn't be doing anything groundbreaking, except more formally contacting the owners. Not that mail server admins don't notice when millions of sites start bouncing their mail because they're listed on such places as ordb and dsbl! After all, that is part of the effect of blocklists... puts pressure on people who run improper mail servers.
I bet after with that $250,000 reward they care now. Assuming SCO can pay it.
I kind of doubt it. Let's say the spam company that hired the programmer gets greedy and wants to go for the 250k. Things would get pretty crazy when the programmer in question reveals the identify of the company employing him to develop viruses and other illegal software. There's blackmail involved here, then again there's no honor among thieves... man, I'd like to see the sh*t hit the fan on this front.
I think it means very little that the worm launches an attack against SCO. The primary purpose of this worm, like the Mimails that preceded it, is the wide-spread distribution of a zombie network for the purpose of propagating spam. You see, spammers hire programmers to do this coding for them (read up a bit on Mimail and spam) in order to help their spam biz. While the hired programmer was at it, he probably threw in the SCO bit for shits and giggles. Or maybe he's a younger programmer and just kind of immature. Either way, the spammers (the people commissioning the construction of the worm) don't care.
To me this sounds like the most likely scenario -- remember that spam and viruses are linked. The SCO thing is just throwing people off track.
There is an analysis posted on USENET, describes the binary and followups include information about variants that are being seen sending the same payload. Might as well read up if you're interested in the technical details.
You are absolutely right. Windows insecurities are what primarily feed Internet spam, in the ways you have pointed out. Outlook alone is probably among the most blameworthy when it comes to facilitating world-wide spam (through worm vulnerability and intergration with Internet Explorer). Open SMTP relays are passe; who needs to find open relays when you (the spammer) can craft and distribute your own spamming software to millions of Windows users?
There's lots of great filtering technologies available out there, and the best ones are non-commercial in nature. Microsoft or Yahoo have not helped my spam situation; but spamprobe, bogofilter, spamassassin, and spambayes definitely have helped me, in very real terms: > 99% accuracy, with (generally) zero false positives depending on the quality of configuration.
Now an appeal to you folks out there who use these filters I've mentioned with similar good results (w.r.t. accuracy): we no longer see spam thanks to our filters. How about taking it one step further? Join the WPBL project and help us centrally collect IP addresses of spammers. It's an automated system to determine real-time spam sources using reliable, trusted data contributors. We are currently tracking over 15,000 IPs.
What the hell is happening to Winamp? Used to be that you could get a version of their good old 2.x series from this site (the latest 2.x were lean, but still do video!)
The latest version I have is 2.91 with md5sum: 68f0f87b12306939e7e3c7549db5df5f winamp291_full.exe
Is there anything newer? Why can't I find these on their web site? There's version 5 now available. What is this... slackware?! (version jump)
Put aside the fact that all DRM can easily be bypassed anyway. But filtering 'copyrighted' content based on a hash? Give me a break. I'll padd my AVI withone byte and throw your hash completely off. This is like editing MP3's ID tags -- it changes the hash, makes it impossible to automatically identify a file.
When that goofy MPAA fud spot (with the film technician complaining about how his salary suffers because of people downloading movies) appeared at a local movie theatre, the audience was actually laughing aloud. Younger people may be... how can I put it... unsympathetic to the plight of the recording industry associations.
Here's something weird I tried (yeah, I'll admit it... I was drunk). Gibberish is high in entropy and hence doesn't compress well.
So, you can strip out things like headers, whitespace, HTML, convert everything to lowercase, and run it all through gzip. Then take a look at the percentage the message was reduced by.
What I found that (not surprisingly) legitimate mail with normal words in it reduced by a significantly greater % than spam with lots of gibberish in it.
Re:You misunderstand how the rate control works
on
Icecast 2.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
Thanks for the reply xiphmont. I have been trying to debug my situation for a while now... what I can't figure out is that when doig a TCP transfer (like an FTP) to the host running my icecast server, I can transfer at ridiculous rates like 150 KBytes/sec. Yet my audio streams almost always die within a few minutes of connecting. This makes me think it can't be a bandwidth issue... then again, maybe it's a Winamp and XMMS bug I'm seeing?
All icecast 2 betas I tried were missing a vital feature; the ability to flood audio data out at the start of the TCP connection (rather than deliver it at the stream bitrate) -- this is vital because when you take too long delivering the data your stream can die due to filled queues.
For example, there may be temporary packet loss on the network that results in TCP data queueing up at the sending side. Now unless icecast can correct for that rate mismatch, you're consistently behind and eventually the stream dies.
I think they might have now added the fix, which is to step up its send rate from the stream bitrate whenever it has to, i.e. whenever the client falls behind (temporary network glitch). The unfortunate result otherwise is that your streams can die on a flaky network connection, even if the average bandwidth over time is more than enough to handle the audio stream!
Or... let me know, try my stream . Does it die on you quite quickly after connect?
Neither of these methods work at the network layer; they all rely on fancy Application-layer 'features', none of which my mail client uses. HTML can never reveal that I'm reading messages, and there certainly is no receipt/confirmation enabled. Look ma, I'm invisible
Give me a break. DNS itself is virtually unchanged over all these years. You've pretty much got SOA, NS, A, CNAME, and MX records and some other record types for meta information. RFID? Active Directory? Ppphtt.
I hope these problems I've seen recently are just temporary, but Google (or at least, google.ca) is having problems. A friend of mine noticed this too and in fact we were discussing this earlier. These can be show-stoppers, so they'd better iron it out before IPO:
The search engine stalls and introduces delays longer than any I've experienced in the past
There is more and more garbage in the index. In particular, sites that appear to have figured out the google algorithm and are using sites with similar content and mutual links to rank higher
Sometimes, pages I know are there appear to be dropping into blackholes. As in, they disappear and there are no search results -- but a few hours later, there are thousands of results
I think it might have been a prominent documentary maker who said this: why is that society warmly embraces images of guns killing people, but hides in terror from the image of a penis bringing life?
Re:Sadly, universities have the least free speech.
on
What You Can't Say
·
· Score: 1
Sadly, universities are becoming the places where free speech is the *least* tolerated.
If I publicly said (or especially published) anything with the slightest anti-homosexual tone, I would have my balls cut off by the LGBT fascists that rule my campus. I happen to enjoy sleeping with women, is this a problem?
I like this approach, and will likely participate, but I do wonder how the project can avoid malicious data poisoning using zombie submitters and forged examples.
Data contributors are tightly controlled. All contributors are screened, and authentication is involved in any data injection into the database. There is no anonymous data submission, ever. Also, the database requires reports of IPs sending non-spam making it easier to locate abusers of the system (who deviate seriously from the norms). Yes, a contributor could forge data. But since all 'reports' are tagged with a user account, users abusing the system can be immediately removed.
If you know what you're doing with email, and use a statistical filter such as spamprobe (or SA/other bayesian) from procmail, consider joining the community wpbl experiment. This is essentially an IP blocklist built automatically, in real-time, from many statistical filters (no manual user action ). IPs from mail are automatically extracted, classified as spam or good by your bayesian filter, then reported to the central server 24 hours a day. This is not like spamcop.
A simple answer is a bittorrent solution to the blacklists or other data, or a p2p type of app to get the lists or data out tot he servers/customers.
BitTorrent has its weakness... the data source is exposed. Here is a well thought out plan on how to securely distribute information without exposing the data source or carriers. This guy calls it Distributed HTTP server blocklist system
Nielsen//NetRatings, reports that three out of every four home and work Internet users, or 76 percent of active Web surfers
This doesn't make sense. Perhaps the genius technologists at Nielson assume that all Internet traffic is Web (or W-W-W) traffic. Ummm, no.
These kind of statements should tip you off that these people probably have no idea what they're talking about. If they can't even describe it in an accurate manner, how accurately have they gathered the results? This kind of data is meant for the PHB, but geeks know it's bunk.
I believe the term was parasitic computing. Ideally the web master makes visitors aware to what's going on. You're using visitors' computing power to accomplish a neat sort of distributed computing. Great idea, if you're not just stealing resources
Slashdot Mirror
NO. A central authority-based communications system is not going to accomplish much... it will, however, put the power of communications in the hands of few companies (probably monopolies)... it will let them charge fees... and it will ruin the versatility, adaptability, and reliability that we have because there is a great diversity of small hosts handling all their own email.
You want to stop spam? Grab spamprobe or something and watch your spam disappear. You want a more efficient and scalable solution for a big organization? Install DCC and be done with spam for your whole site. Seriously, spam is no longer a problem because both user-side and server-side tools with near perfect accuracy exist. If you're seeing spam, it's because your ISP isn't taking advantage of the filtering solutions that are available.
I'm not talking out of my ass... I've been keeping a close eye on mail and spam issues for the past decade. Spam is dead, so if spam still bothers you force your ISP to employ modern filtering. My university did, and the flood of spam dropped from 100/day to 0 in my account (they're using DCC). At home I employ spamprobe and again I see next to 0 spam.
There are several projects out there that are detecting and blocking open relays (quite effective... I have used this and similar blocklists on my mail server). FTC wouldn't be doing anything groundbreaking, except more formally contacting the owners. Not that mail server admins don't notice when millions of sites start bouncing their mail because they're listed on such places as ordb and dsbl! After all, that is part of the effect of blocklists... puts pressure on people who run improper mail servers.
I think it means very little that the worm launches an attack against SCO. The primary purpose of this worm, like the Mimails that preceded it, is the wide-spread distribution of a zombie network for the purpose of propagating spam. You see, spammers hire programmers to do this coding for them (read up a bit on Mimail and spam) in order to help their spam biz. While the hired programmer was at it, he probably threw in the SCO bit for shits and giggles. Or maybe he's a younger programmer and just kind of immature. Either way, the spammers (the people commissioning the construction of the worm) don't care.
To me this sounds like the most likely scenario -- remember that spam and viruses are linked. The SCO thing is just throwing people off track.
There is an analysis posted on USENET, describes the binary and followups include information about variants that are being seen sending the same payload. Might as well read up if you're interested in the technical details.
You are absolutely right. Windows insecurities are what primarily feed Internet spam, in the ways you have pointed out. Outlook alone is probably among the most blameworthy when it comes to facilitating world-wide spam (through worm vulnerability and intergration with Internet Explorer). Open SMTP relays are passe; who needs to find open relays when you (the spammer) can craft and distribute your own spamming software to millions of Windows users?
There's lots of great filtering technologies available out there, and the best ones are non-commercial in nature. Microsoft or Yahoo have not helped my spam situation; but spamprobe, bogofilter, spamassassin, and spambayes definitely have helped me, in very real terms: > 99% accuracy, with (generally) zero false positives depending on the quality of configuration.
Now an appeal to you folks out there who use these filters I've mentioned with similar good results (w.r.t. accuracy): we no longer see spam thanks to our filters. How about taking it one step further? Join the WPBL project and help us centrally collect IP addresses of spammers. It's an automated system to determine real-time spam sources using reliable, trusted data contributors. We are currently tracking over 15,000 IPs.
What the hell is happening to Winamp? Used to be that you could get a version of their good old 2.x series from this site (the latest 2.x were lean, but still do video!)
The latest version I have is 2.91 with md5sum:
68f0f87b12306939e7e3c7549db5df5f winamp291_full.exe
Is there anything newer? Why can't I find these on their web site? There's version 5 now available. What is this... slackware?! (version jump)
Put aside the fact that all DRM can easily be bypassed anyway. But filtering 'copyrighted' content based on a hash? Give me a break. I'll padd my AVI withone byte and throw your hash completely off. This is like editing MP3's ID tags -- it changes the hash, makes it impossible to automatically identify a file.
When that goofy MPAA fud spot (with the film technician complaining about how his salary suffers because of people downloading movies) appeared at a local movie theatre, the audience was actually laughing aloud. Younger people may be... how can I put it... unsympathetic to the plight of the recording industry associations.
Here's something weird I tried (yeah, I'll admit it... I was drunk). Gibberish is high in entropy and hence doesn't compress well.
So, you can strip out things like headers, whitespace, HTML, convert everything to lowercase, and run it all through gzip. Then take a look at the percentage the message was reduced by.
What I found that (not surprisingly) legitimate mail with normal words in it reduced by a significantly greater % than spam with lots of gibberish in it.
Thanks for the reply xiphmont. I have been trying to debug my situation for a while now... what I can't figure out is that when doig a TCP transfer (like an FTP) to the host running my icecast server, I can transfer at ridiculous rates like 150 KBytes/sec. Yet my audio streams almost always die within a few minutes of connecting. This makes me think it can't be a bandwidth issue... then again, maybe it's a Winamp and XMMS bug I'm seeing?
All icecast 2 betas I tried were missing a vital feature; the ability to flood audio data out at the start of the TCP connection (rather than deliver it at the stream bitrate) -- this is vital because when you take too long delivering the data your stream can die due to filled queues.
For example, there may be temporary packet loss on the network that results in TCP data queueing up at the sending side. Now unless icecast can correct for that rate mismatch, you're consistently behind and eventually the stream dies.
I think they might have now added the fix, which is to step up its send rate from the stream bitrate whenever it has to, i.e. whenever the client falls behind (temporary network glitch). The unfortunate result otherwise is that your streams can die on a flaky network connection, even if the average bandwidth over time is more than enough to handle the audio stream!
Or... let me know, try my stream
. Does it die on you quite quickly after connect?
Neither of these methods work at the network layer; they all rely on fancy Application-layer 'features', none of which my mail client uses. HTML can never reveal that I'm reading messages, and there certainly is no receipt/confirmation enabled. Look ma, I'm invisible
Give me a break. DNS itself is virtually unchanged over all these years. You've pretty much got SOA, NS, A, CNAME, and MX records and some other record types for meta information. RFID? Active Directory? Ppphtt.
I think it might have been a prominent documentary maker who said this: why is that society warmly embraces images of guns killing people, but hides in terror from the image of a penis bringing life?
If you know what you're doing with email, and use a statistical filter such as spamprobe (or SA/other bayesian) from procmail, consider joining the community wpbl experiment. This is essentially an IP blocklist built automatically, in real-time, from many statistical filters (no manual user action ). IPs from mail are automatically extracted, classified as spam or good by your bayesian filter, then reported to the central server 24 hours a day. This is not like spamcop.
Since the whole family's spending the day sitting on their fat asses, don't we already know the answer?
McDonalds
Seriously though, get off your duff and talk face to face. If the kids are being lazy about coming downstairs, make them come down.
This doesn't make sense. Perhaps the genius technologists at Nielson assume that all Internet traffic is Web (or W-W-W) traffic. Ummm, no.
These kind of statements should tip you off that these people probably have no idea what they're talking about. If they can't even describe it in an accurate manner, how accurately have they gathered the results? This kind of data is meant for the PHB, but geeks know it's bunk.
I believe the term was parasitic computing. Ideally the web master makes visitors aware to what's going on. You're using visitors' computing power to accomplish a neat sort of distributed computing. Great idea, if you're not just stealing resources