Engineering students, for one. Before I got my first graphic calculator (TI-83) I could have never imagined how much this would simplify problem solving. Looking forward to trying out the HP line.
Educating these people will not always work (as in real life)
This whole issue goes hand in hand with security, and software design. The onus is on the software developers.
Software that laypeople use should be designed to protect them from the real world (geeks use what they wish). And no, Microsoft software is not appropriate for the lay person: it requires frequent security updates, has too many complicated features that users misunderstand or misuse, has too many bells and whistles in Outlook etc. that introduce unnecessary security risks. There's no reason for script support in emails. I stip all my HTML mail to plaintext and have not missed a single word of meaning.
I have started looking at laypeople with Internet connections as very real risks to the digital world. If you consider this statement overblown, then consider the most serious network attacks to date. Almost all of them have used unsecured machines to launch attacks, or spam. And you must also realized that it is because of these unsecured hosts that plague most of the Internet that ISPs are forced to use increasingly restrictive filtering: they filter dangerous ports and drop mail from suspect IPs. Both of these are of huge detriment to all of our Internet experience.
I'm setting up my own Email server (yes, paid the extra bucks to get a business broadband account), complete with filters, attachment blocking, etc. Even purchased and read a couple of books on the subject... it's proven to be quite an educational endeavor.
Congrats! My Internet experience also 'opened up' when I took control of my own communications, instead of letting my ISP provide their own brand of crappy, buggy email service.
I have some recommendations for you. First, look into using postfix as your MTA. It has a much better security track record than sendmail, and is easier to configure (and IMHO is more flexible). Then activate DNSBLs, DNS blocklist, that will stop a huge amount of spam before it even wastes your bandwidth. I use the following option in postfix's main.cf to do filtering:
You can not get around this fact: the average person is of average intelligence. Most of us know a lot about how to 'properly' use computers because this is either our hobby or job. But the average person has no idea. Our secretaries at work, for instance, haven't a clue about anything beyond click, type, drag.
Then there's just plain stupid people, who think that an anonymous advertisement in their email, with spelling mistakes, lots of exclamation marks, and garbage writing warrants a legitimate product or service. A fool and their money...
So you'll either have to require better training for all computer users, which probably won't happen. Or you'll have to revise the types of software that laypeople use to protect them from the world.
Each user's version of Word will access the central server to determine how that person is allowed...
Do you ever get the feeling that our Windows machines will rely so much on "central servers"/network connections, even for goddam word processing, that in the future the entire nation's productivity will crash due to (heh) network crashes, "central server" problems, security issues, etc.
I think you're mistaken. When he says 'bounce spam' he doesn't mean composing a new message and sending it to the 'envelope from'. He means ensuring the spam message gets a 550 code, or something similiar, rather than 'accepting' it and trashing it later.
You're mistaken. I use fastmail as well and know that he's referring to the Mail Bounce feature, which is an unfortunate feature in an otherwise perfect mail service. When the user hits that button it basically forges a mailer-daemon error, and bounces it back to the envelope from. Not good practice.
I started to realize that email is no longer a tool of the little guy. I send my mail through my earthlink server which works but now I must watch my volume (no mailing lists hosted here I'm afraid) because of my 'terms-of-service'. Something about being a little guy or something like that.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. We'll watch the Internet divide among corporate/smallguy lines. All us small guys will still be able to communicate (provided our ISPs don't start filtering TCP packets based on port) amongst ourselves but will have to cross over into corporate territory to reach hotmail, yahoo, etc.
So if each big company decides to do this, they will all end up with slightly different lists of whitelisted SMTP servers. The Internet will degenerate into a fragmented, unreliable system where you never know who will receive your email. In fact, you'll be strong armed into using particular ISPs and using email addresses like shithead@att.net in order to get your email through to anybody. The Internet is thereby de-democratized and rolled back 10 years.
Spot on, mod this guy up. He hit the nail on the head.
I've found that if I bounce back every piece of true spam I get, over a few weeks or months, my rate of incoming spam seems to decrease substantially
Except for this bit. Never try to bounce spam, it just goes to the wrong destination and further pollutes the Internet.
After a few months of operation, it will become obvious that this plan is a disaster. Spam-friendly ISPs (and there are many with legit customers too) will still get on the whitelist, so incoming spam will not cease. But in the meantime, smaller ISPs around the world will get mighty pissed because their mail is rejected.
However, if you run your own mail server you will get quite annoyed, but all hope is not lost. Here is a brilliant solution for postfix that will let you deliver mail specifically bound for, say, attglobal.net through your ISP's hopefully whitelisted customer-use mail server instead of direct delivery. So AT&T will see your ISP's mail server connecting for this mail, while all your other mail can be delivered direct.
I'm mighty disappointed in AT&T. This move further commercializes Internet connectivity by giving big business the green light to send any mail while blocking all the small guys. Seriously.
This is the kind of information that can be easily postedon USENET. This would provide worldwide public access distribution for the content, except at ISPs that choose to censor the data of course.
Why not put the documents on a P2P file sharing network, to provide access even if the "source" gets shut down? Oh yeah, I forgot, because only criminals and kids with lack of morals use P2P file sharing.
On a disk where there is not much write access, ever tried using a large flash drive such as a 2 GB USB flash drive? Sure, it's expensive but there are no moving parts to fail. Oh, and no noise:)
The article certainly isn't news... it isn't even informative. What point is it trying to make? That the predominantly young, technically well-educated, and academic community that is the user base of the open source movement is 'dangerous'? Bullshit. Ignore Rob Enderle of TechNewsWorld so he can't afford his crack any more.
You know who I think are more like terrorists? Religious fundamentalists of all kinds (Christian, Islamic, Jewish, whoever); politicians that are secretly fascists, who want to take away Americans' rights (Cheney comes to mind); and companies that are so large that they can manipulate the government, to the detriment of citizens.
However, most people actually have some sort of public existence: they run a business and want clients to be able to contact them
Funny you should mention that... I actually do run a business, and have an academic presence too. For me it's just a matter of keeping contact separated into three classes: absolutely private, general public (that's business, etc.) and finally completely disposable. The general public contact info doesn't even have to change yearly, since in reality spam is somewhat slow to start up. I kept my last public email address for two years.
Everyone should know this by know, but you can control spam by keeping tabs on where your email address goes.
The address I use to post to USENET is completely disposable. The 'swen' worm in fact picked up my USENET addy and spammed it with about 40,000 emails. The address is now dead, but I saw that coming.
I have a public address which I give to casual contacts (who may not be totally trustworthy). This address changes yearly, and this keeps it spam free.
My well guarded private address, which I only give to my closest friends, has gotten no spam for 5 years. I receive about 20 emails per day at that private address and there is 0 spam.
As a user and developer of open source technologies, I feel it's much more important to push open source into governments than it is to convince businesses and large corporations to make the move.
The government represents us. They spend a helluva lot of citizens' tax dollars, and it is quite logical for us to encourage them to use inexpensive technologies where they can. Also, considering what a tremendous security risk it can be to have a government running a single platform, it's good to encourage diversity in the government's information systems.
As for businesses using Linux and open source... I can't see why people care so much. I run a small business and rely on Linux to save costs and make efficient use of old hardware, and this gives me a competitive advantage. Why should we, as a community, go out of our way to tell businesses what's best for them? Let capitalism sort it out right? Dog eat dog and all that:)
now IBM will have something to collect when it wins
This was what I was thinking too. * And * now the SCO execs have some people with pretty serious investments in their company that they are going to be accountable to. If I was in McBride, I would try to be accountable to as few people as possible -- because when you're hauled before court and it's exposed that your company has no product, provides no services and has tried to manipulate investors using unjustified, false claims, the last thing you want is to be several million dollars in debt to confused and angry capital investors.
Wow! I remember thinking it was madness it had shot up to $10 on this ludicrous war and $15-$16 was the peak of the insanity.... In other news, SCO's stock surged $4.97, or 32 percent
This is what happens when you have an economy run off the whims of idiots. Let's face it, most people are of average intelligence and fewer still know fuck all about anything technical. These dumb investors are going to shreek like the neighbor's little girls when the stock plummets and they walk away poor.
I don't speak from ignorance here; I'm within earshot of the neighbor's kids and they never shut up. They would cry worse still if they learned that most investors know very little about the companies they are throwing their money at. All they see is, "wow... confidence! rising stock" and they're in. I'm sorry these people are going to get so incredibly screwed.
Most consumers using cable modems have the option of setting up a web page for free through their ISP... Similarly, anyone who can afford about 35.00 a month can get a really solid hosted site
Even the 'solid hosted sites' are insufficient for those that want to do more than 'run a web site'. For plain web space, yes we will always have this. But neither of the options you provided give the same flexibility as running your own site off your own connection. For instance, short of a co-location, what commercial service will let you:
Administer your own mail servers, employing whatever server-side filtering you want
Run your own web server, with access that lets you recompile the thing to tweak it however you want
Run your own DNS servers to host your own, and friends' zones
Have full access to the packet filter on the connection, so you can accept and deny the traffic you want
I can do all of these from home on a permanent connection that costs me $30/month. I'm worried that I won't be able to do this in the future, unless I'm willing to spend a lot more money. But there's * no need * for a lot of money, you see, because I'm just processing packets like everyone else.
Buying a Palladium-enabled computer will be like buying a car with a top speed of 65 miles per hour.
You know what's also a scary thought? That my current desktop computer, with a 2 GHz processor, IA32 architecture, running Windows 2000 may in fact be more functional than a computer from a 5 years in the future.
ISPs have a strong incentive to divide internet use into separate categories, for strong price-discriminating power.
There's more to it than that and it's actually quite devious. Remember that telcos, cable networks are all ultimately related to content providers. These are big companies with arms that reach everywhere (think AOL/Time-Warner) and they have traditionally made their money by selling content to consumers. Pay attention to this part: The Internet threatens the traditional model, because it allows anyone to serve content to anyone else. Their solution: establish ourselves as Internet Service Providers (esp. cable), subsidiary companies of the big media content providers, and ensure that our customers can't serve content to anyone. They become consumers, everything is back to normal.
As long as I can send IP packets between my computer and yours, we still will be able to communicate much as is done today.
Back to the old skool, anyone? Let's set up some dedicated modem links. Or, cache the data for future transfer and then in a predetermined time window have our modems connect and perform a data transfer. Ugly shit;)
The Internet (which had government, and now much commercial backing) changed all this because we suddenly had reliable data networks over which to send all our data. No more need for direct links between friends. But there's no denying the Internet is commercial in nature. Telcos are the backbones.
If things get ugly, we still have our original methods. Or improved: how about some dedicated optic links between hosts? Enough of these in a city and you have a fully operational freenet. Or over radio links, other unlicensed frequencies, etc. etc.
Slashdot Mirror
That's quite a relief that it's binary!
c kme
% strings democracy-enforcer.exe | grep http
http://votingHQ/cgi-bin/addvote.cgi?pass=ha
This whole issue goes hand in hand with security, and software design. The onus is on the software developers.
Software that laypeople use should be designed to protect them from the real world (geeks use what they wish). And no, Microsoft software is not appropriate for the lay person: it requires frequent security updates, has too many complicated features that users misunderstand or misuse, has too many bells and whistles in Outlook etc. that introduce unnecessary security risks. There's no reason for script support in emails. I stip all my HTML mail to plaintext and have not missed a single word of meaning.
I have started looking at laypeople with Internet connections as very real risks to the digital world. If you consider this statement overblown, then consider the most serious network attacks to date. Almost all of them have used unsecured machines to launch attacks, or spam. And you must also realized that it is because of these unsecured hosts that plague most of the Internet that ISPs are forced to use increasingly restrictive filtering: they filter dangerous ports and drop mail from suspect IPs. Both of these are of huge detriment to all of our Internet experience.
Congrats! My Internet experience also 'opened up' when I took control of my own communications, instead of letting my ISP provide their own brand of crappy, buggy email service.
I have some recommendations for you. First, look into using postfix as your MTA. It has a much better security track record than sendmail, and is easier to configure (and IMHO is more flexible). Then activate DNSBLs, DNS blocklist, that will stop a huge amount of spam before it even wastes your bandwidth. I use the following option in postfix's main.cf to do filtering:
smtpd_client_restrictions =reject_rbl_client sbl.spamhaus.org
reject_rbl_client blackholes.easynet.nl
reject_rbl_client relays.ordb.org
reject_rbl_client list.dsbl.org
reject_rbl_client ipwhois.rfc-ignorant.org
You can not get around this fact: the average person is of average intelligence. Most of us know a lot about how to 'properly' use computers because this is either our hobby or job. But the average person has no idea. Our secretaries at work, for instance, haven't a clue about anything beyond click, type, drag.
Then there's just plain stupid people, who think that an anonymous advertisement in their email, with spelling mistakes, lots of exclamation marks, and garbage writing warrants a legitimate product or service. A fool and their money...
So you'll either have to require better training for all computer users, which probably won't happen. Or you'll have to revise the types of software that laypeople use to protect them from the world.
After a few months of operation, it will become obvious that this plan is a disaster. Spam-friendly ISPs (and there are many with legit customers too) will still get on the whitelist, so incoming spam will not cease. But in the meantime, smaller ISPs around the world will get mighty pissed because their mail is rejected.
However, if you run your own mail server you will get quite annoyed, but all hope is not lost. Here is a brilliant solution for postfix that will let you deliver mail specifically bound for, say, attglobal.net through your ISP's hopefully whitelisted customer-use mail server instead of direct delivery. So AT&T will see your ISP's mail server connecting for this mail, while all your other mail can be delivered direct.
I'm mighty disappointed in AT&T. This move further commercializes Internet connectivity by giving big business the green light to send any mail while blocking all the small guys. Seriously.
This is the kind of information that can be easily postedon USENET. This would provide worldwide public access distribution for the content, except at ISPs that choose to censor the data of course.
Why not put the documents on a P2P file sharing network, to provide access even if the "source" gets shut down? Oh yeah, I forgot, because only criminals and kids with lack of morals use P2P file sharing.
On a disk where there is not much write access, ever tried using a large flash drive such as a 2 GB USB flash drive? Sure, it's expensive but there are no moving parts to fail. Oh, and no noise :)
The article certainly isn't news... it isn't even informative. What point is it trying to make? That the predominantly young, technically well-educated, and academic community that is the user base of the open source movement is 'dangerous'? Bullshit. Ignore Rob Enderle of TechNewsWorld so he can't afford his crack any more.
You know who I think are more like terrorists? Religious fundamentalists of all kinds (Christian, Islamic, Jewish, whoever); politicians that are secretly fascists, who want to take away Americans' rights (Cheney comes to mind); and companies that are so large that they can manipulate the government, to the detriment of citizens.
Stupid Canadians, think they can generate electricity from water. Give me coal or nuclear any day!
Everyone should know this by know, but you can control spam by keeping tabs on where your email address goes.
The address I use to post to USENET is completely disposable. The 'swen' worm in fact picked up my USENET addy and spammed it with about 40,000 emails. The address is now dead, but I saw that coming.
I have a public address which I give to casual contacts (who may not be totally trustworthy). This address changes yearly, and this keeps it spam free.
My well guarded private address, which I only give to my closest friends, has gotten no spam for 5 years. I receive about 20 emails per day at that private address and there is 0 spam.
As a user and developer of open source technologies, I feel it's much more important to push open source into governments than it is to convince businesses and large corporations to make the move.
:)
The government represents us. They spend a helluva lot of citizens' tax dollars, and it is quite logical for us to encourage them to use inexpensive technologies where they can. Also, considering what a tremendous security risk it can be to have a government running a single platform, it's good to encourage diversity in the government's information systems.
As for businesses using Linux and open source... I can't see why people care so much. I run a small business and rely on Linux to save costs and make efficient use of old hardware, and this gives me a competitive advantage. Why should we, as a community, go out of our way to tell businesses what's best for them? Let capitalism sort it out right? Dog eat dog and all that
This is what happens when you have an economy run off the whims of idiots. Let's face it, most people are of average intelligence and fewer still know fuck all about anything technical. These dumb investors are going to shreek like the neighbor's little girls when the stock plummets and they walk away poor.
I don't speak from ignorance here; I'm within earshot of the neighbor's kids and they never shut up. They would cry worse still if they learned that most investors know very little about the companies they are throwing their money at. All they see is, "wow... confidence! rising stock" and they're in. I'm sorry these people are going to get so incredibly screwed.
- Administer your own mail servers, employing whatever server-side filtering you want
- Run your own web server, with access that lets you recompile the thing to tweak it however you want
- Run your own DNS servers to host your own, and friends' zones
- Have full access to the packet filter on the connection, so you can accept and deny the traffic you want
I can do all of these from home on a permanent connection that costs me $30/month. I'm worried that I won't be able to do this in the future, unless I'm willing to spend a lot more money. But there's * no need * for a lot of money, you see, because I'm just processing packets like everyone else.Back to the old skool, anyone? Let's set up some dedicated modem links. Or, cache the data for future transfer and then in a predetermined time window have our modems connect and perform a data transfer. Ugly shit ;)
The Internet (which had government, and now much commercial backing) changed all this because we suddenly had reliable data networks over which to send all our data. No more need for direct links between friends. But there's no denying the Internet is commercial in nature. Telcos are the backbones.
If things get ugly, we still have our original methods. Or improved: how about some dedicated optic links between hosts? Enough of these in a city and you have a fully operational freenet. Or over radio links, other unlicensed frequencies, etc. etc.