I have that beat pretty handily. A couple years ago, when EVDO was something even geeks were fairly new to and the general public hadn't a clue, I logged into a MUD I play on from the middle of the Hoover Dam and did a "you'll never guess where I'm logging in from!" deal on public channels.
"In-flight wifi, on the other hand, sounds far more promising. I can imagine it being used for some really awesome things, like movie rentals that work directly with your laptop.
Or voice over IP via a bluetooth headset paired to the laptop.
Actually, I travel through 8 - 10 airports a year on average and I've never been held up for extra scrutiny over my Sony PCG-SRX77 (http://myarticle.enet.com.cn/images/200510/1128762957284.jpg).
Of course, I've gotten through security with the wrong boarding pass (accidentally switched with a travel companion before reaching security), with an expired ID, and with a laptop bag that had wires hanging out of it every which way because I was in a hurry. One time, the people seated at the x-ray machine asked me what they were seeing in my bag. I told them it was probably my spare battery and they just said ok (no hand search). As I was putting my shoes on and gathering my things, I realized I didn't have my spare battery in the laptop bag - it was an external hard drive.
My experiences from regional airports (which, oddly enough, are the safest and best managed from a security standpoint) to international airports across the US suggests that these people don't know what they're looking for and largely don't care. I don't pretend to know how many are smart or dumb, but I will say that if you give someone a boring enough job, eventually they *will* stop caring. Apathy is a way of life at 'security' checkpoints in America's airports. They need to run drills on these guys once a month or so to keep them on their toes.
"Do people in the U.S. lose sleep over the fact that they are forced to pay to kill Iraqis? Will people in the U.S. lose sleep when they realize that the huge rise in prices, which has already started, is mostly timed for the end of Dick Cheney's and George W. Bush's terms in office? Whether or not they lose sleep, killing Iraqis definitely lowers the quality of life in the United States."
I definitely lose sleep over the fact that I'm forced to pay to kill Iraqis, and it's been going on for years. I mean, with all the modern weaponry and firepower at our disposal, I would have thought we'd have finished off the population by now, which would mean I wouldn't have to pay to kill Iraqis anymore.
I think our President needs to speed up this process. There's only about 24 million of them, so if we dispatched 2 million a month, this whole thing would be over in a year's time.
Mr President, end this war the easy way, for the sake of my wallet!
Forget your customers, get your ass down to the local library and get your hands on the text of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act right NOW. You're opening yourself up to upwards of trillions in liability if your filtering doesn't work perfectly 100% of the time. You're also opening yourselves up to massive liability with the federal government (hint: take a quick look at Comcast vis-a-vis Bit Torrent).
Quit spending all day being a PR monkey and get back to being a lawyer for your company. You're giving bad advice that has the potential to obliterate your employer.
Apple's continued stance that they know what's best for their customers and that their products are 'perfect' as-is prevents what could be revolutionary products from ever reaching that potential. No matter how good, how cool, how well designed a product they release, it's their attitude toward the people who invest in those products that will ensure that Apple will never achieve Microsoft's level of success.
They can innovate to extraordinary levels in many ways, but so long as they keep the snotty outlook on the world at large, they're just another tech company. Apple, you need to stop acting like assholes, and stop treating your customers like every last one is a worthless idiot.
Don't you know anything about bullets? They explode on impact, make a cool "pew" noise, cause sparks to fly up in the air, and blow huge holes in airplane skin. Once there's one hole, all the passengers nearby get sucked out through it (no matter how small it is), and then the whole fuselage peels open like an aluminum can!
They couldn't get the trademark for something they didn't invent. NSFW is a 4chan thing. Mootles would undoubtedly have evidence of significant prior art somewhere in his sperm-soaked basement apartment of his parents' tiny shack.
How is it a silver lining that Congress may reconsider Congressionally mandated Federal control over the internet in the United States?
If there's one thing Congress and the rest of the Federal government have proven time and time again it's that the only thing they're good at is spending money. Everything else they try to do (ie. all the stuff they spend the money on), they can't help but fuck it up. Never heard the phrase, "Good enough for government work"?
If you're in favor of Ted "Series-of-Tubes" Stevens and his band of merry men handing over control of the internet to the F "OMFG A DECISECOND FLASH OF BREAST!" CC, then I have to ask, why do you hate the internet?
"If you're fired because you're white, you have a claim" "If you're fired because you're a man, you have a claim" "If you're fired because you're Christian, you have a claim"
And if your wife hits you, you have a claim against her for domestic violence, right?
You're not really that naive, are you?
In the real world, if the guy doing the hiring/firing doesn't like white people, you can be out of a job for any other reason in the world. In the real world, if the woman doing the hiring/firing thinks all men are rapists-waiting-to-happen, you can be out of a job for any other reason in the world. In the real world, if the Muslim doing the hiring/firing isn't fond of infidels, you most certainly will be out of a job.
In a world where you can be fired because it's sunny outside, you can be passed up for hiring or fired for being white... because it's sunny outside. It absolutely can and does happen, because the overall mindset in this country is that racism doesn't happen to whites, sexism doesn't happen to men, and domestic violence doesn't happen to husbands. Every bit of it is just as disgusting and wrong as the preceeding opposite (with the exception of domestic violence, which has -always- been that way).
Yes, very good, the article does indeed indicate that IBM is seeking $1 Million in damages per battery. Something you need to understand about damages is that they do not necessarily mean that 'X' number of dollars were removed from your hands.
The overall potential damage to IBM of this infringement would be in the hundreds of millions, if not the billions both directly and indirectly for years to come. Asking for massive damages is not unreasonable under those circumstances.
Are you insane? $1Million is cheap, frankly, considering how incredibly damaging this could have been for IBM. With enough of these out there, IBM might have been facing a hundred different suits, half of them class-action, from all over the world. That says nothing for the positively massive loss of business they could potentially suffer as a result of a turn in public perception of their products. If just one of those batteries hit the laptop of, say, the CEO of a fortune 500, IBM could see millions in business go *poof* as fast at the battery burns.
"The reason you dropped two bombs was that one was a uranium based device, the other a plutonium device of radically different design. You just had to try both designs out, didn't you?"
Prior to being dropped on its target, the Uranium bomb wasn't even tested. The mechanics of it were so simple that it was assumed to be every bit as reliable as a conventional bomb. The Plutonium bomb had been tested previously, so we knew it worked. The physics were solid, but the mechanics of the implosion device were in question until it was tested (at the Trinity test site).
So in one hand you've got a bomb we knew would work, and in the other you've got a bomb we'd tested already. Just had to try out both designs? That's just stupid.
Both were dropped because they didn't surrender immediately. Had they continued their refusal to surrender, we would have kept dropping nuclear weapons until no one was left alive from that country to threaten the world. The United States did not start that war, we ended it. We ended it by hitting two military targets, one of which was chosen because of the military value combined with the fact that the surrounding topography drastically limited the blast radius to minimize civilian casualties. You just can't drop bombs that big without civilian casualties. On the other hand, there was no way to convince Japan that continuing the fight was futile without dropping bombs that big. Until they believed that they would be completely annihilated without even the honor of taking as many of their enemy down with them, they were committed to a land war where every man, woman, and child would fight to the death.
I'm sure there must be some reason why I can't tell whether that blog poster (and yes, the 'site' cited is actually nothing more than the incoherent ramblings of yet another of 10 trillion 'bloggers') is far left wing or far right wing. The only thing I can tell for sure is that they're unstable at room temperature.
Let's get a few things straight:
1) Refusing to finance a given decision does NOT mean you are against having choice in the matter 2) Shifting power from the Federal government to the state governments does NOT equal fascism 3) Refusing to subsidize something does NOT equate to being against it 4) Being thrifty when it's not your money does NOT equate to being a religious whackjob 5) The US Consitution still defines the role of the Federal government. Since the Federal government has proven many times over that it only does well the jobs laid out for it by the US Constitution, it makes sense that we restrict its roles thereto.
Ron Paul isn't a nut - he's just thinking far beyond the average member of the body politic.
I trust my government as far as I can throw it. And frankly, I'd like to see just how far I can throw parts of my government, like this fellow quoted in the article.
"(That's right, puTTY was made for Windows users to get unix functionality, not vice versa.)"
You realize, of course, that you're also describing Linux with this statement? Just because something's designed to get you functionality already available elsewhere doesn't mean it's automatically inferior.
Doign anything at all is slow as Hell on EDGE. I've used several networks since they became available. EDGE is just plain slower than anything else I've ever tried. Verizon's 1xRTT is better than dial-up, but tends to drop a lot of packets when your signal isn't so hot. As such, the overal bandwidth drops as the signal degrades. Sprint 1xRTT does incredibly well with low signal. It's slightly slower than Verizon's 1xRTT under ideal conditions, but doesn't have any of the same issues when the signal degrades. I don't know how they do that. Verizon's and Sprint's EVDO services are both pretty fast and reliable. Each are solid DSL speed, though Sprint can be quicker (especially if you're in a RevA area).
All in all, I've found that Verizon's 1xRTT on virtually no signal still works faster on web pages and whatever else than EDGE. EDGE is just plain slow; there's no way around it. We can talk theory all day long, but fact remains that from New York to Miami to Las Vegas and at least a dozen cities in between, EDGE is a joke compared with anything else.
Stop abusing email. It's not intended as a file transfer system. For that, we have FTP. If you're looking to display pictures using Google services, why not use Picasa's publishing features? You can publish the album right to a Google webpage that's fast and accessible. It's also designed to do what you're trying to do. It'll also play video with sound, streamed.
Then you can send them an email with an HTML link that they can click. That's more what email is for.
Put me on the jury. I don't care if there's video evidence, a signed confession, and an open court confession; I just couldn't bring myself to convict the guy responsible. Heisenburg and quantum mechanics both provide enough "reasonable doubt" in this case for me.
"perhaps you should block "huge netblocks" from the US too as long as they are the number one shit spewer and bot haven."
FYI, I -do- have some netblocks based in the US and Canada blocked. They're much fewer and farther between because it's so difficult to isolate a netblock of abusers with virtually no legitimate users on it. That also doesn't take into account dynamic IPs and the like. I can't block Comcast (oh God, please? can I? please?!) because I'd instantly end up with tons of complaints about legitimate email being blocked. I -can- block off a netblock in China because I know exactly which customers have -any- international dealings with China, and those with extensive ties there have longer whitelists and less active netblock filters on them.
Per my own statistics, at any given time, roughly 35 - 40% of the spam hitting our mail filter is coming in from the US. Of the rest of the spam (and something like 94 - 96% of all connections to the mail filter are for spam at this point), some 90%+ is coming from Asia (mostly Russia and China). China's my second biggest offender at ~15% total spam volume.
You see, this has nothing to do with not liking a particular country or region. It has everything to do with the fact that the problem of spam is horrific and is only getting worse. I'm being forced to drill down to levels I'd have laughed at at this time two years ago. I'm also spending more time dealing with the issue that I should have to, but I pride myself on not getting complaints from customers that too much spam is coming in and not getting more than a couple false-positive reports every couple of weeks. As I said, I'm now looking at having to filter out over 95% of emails sent to customers. It's turning into a fight where searching for good emails within the spam is like finding a needle in a haystack. Anything that makes that haystack smaller is a good thing. If I had a nice long list of reliably bad netblocks within the US and Canada that I could block without pissing off customers, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
At least the US has been prosecuting those who spam from within its borders. That at least is somewhat helpful. It hasn't had a noticeable impact on the level of spam I've seen, but maybe if more places did it, we'd see better results.
This isn't about this country vs that country, nor is it accusing a certain group of people of being bad people. It's about trying to filter out the crap in the most efficient way possible without spending 14 hours a day doing it in a world that's drowning in spam. The last thing on my mind is where a spammer lives, what language he speaks, or what color his skin is. The only thing I care about is his garbage not hitting my customers' inboxes and me not having to work 18 hour days to make that happen. I hate having to deal with this stuff; I want to do real work. I long for the days where the only spam filtering I had to do for customers was Bayesian and it worked.
"Kudos, you sound just like that new Pope that was part of the Hitler youth."
Nice roundabout way of calling me a Nazi. Unfortunately for you, I'm not nearly so ignorant of historical fact. First of all, Joseph Ratzinger had the misfortune of being born in Bavaria. During the time of Nazi reign over Bavaria, all males over the age of 14 years were required by law to be enrolled in the Hitler Youth program. As the New York Times noted, he was actually quite defiant of the law, refusing to show up for legally mandated meetings and other activities.
So if you're saying that I've had the misfortune to grow up living under a brutal and genocidal regime and that I've done the best I can under the circumstances without getting myself killed, then you're offtopic and wrong. Otherwise, if you're trying to make some other association, you're still offtopic, still wrong, and an asshole.
In either case, I'm sure it was obvious to any objective reader that I was referring to the deluge of spam, viruses, and other unwanted abuse of network and internet resources coming from that part of the world. More specifically, I see Russia and China as being the worst offenders.
"Not everyone is blocking.asia."
Gee, y'think?
"Try asking the average American consumer of home internet service"
Fatal flaw: they don't control what's blocked upstream of them.
"I love it when computer administrators like to make it sound like they're going to change the world from their desk. "You just watch... I'll ban your IP. Then see how you like it when nobody from the 40 employee company I work for reads your spam!""
I have no delusions of grandeur. I choose to block something at the firewall, a few dozen people don't see it while they're at work. I choose to block something at the spam filter (domain, netblock, country, etc), roughly a couple of thousand don't see any emails coming in from it. However, if you were keeping up with email abuse forums, you'd find out that I'm by far not the only one, nor the most militant, in blocking off huge swaths in an attempt to make the job of keeping the spam out more doable.
Change the world? Hardly, I just want the people working for this company to be able to work in peace and for the company's customers to be happy with their email so they'll continue hosting through us. In the meantime, I have a lot of other stuff that needs doing, so I don't need to sit here fiddling with filters 10 hours a day. "Block first; whitelist later" is becoming the norm for a lot of people who are being plagued by this flood of garbage that keeps getting worse every day. I just happen to think it's unfortunate for the legitimate people to get caught in the middle.
"From the domain owner's side, it essentially declares in which jurisdiction(s) any disputes are to be resolved. Countries are free to subdivide their own domain space as they see fit, of course, and to impose whatever requirements they deem necessary to register."
Brilliant! So the next time Pakistan and India get into a diplomatic scuffle bordering on nuclear war, India can invalidate the domain registrations of every Pakistani company, and Pakistan can follow suite, and tens of thousands of businesses and individuals can get screwed out of hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars! YAY!
Or...
They could keep a neutral party in charge of given TLDs whose only concern is keeping order within the world of the TLD. No, I like your idea better.
Slashdot Mirror
I have that beat pretty handily. A couple years ago, when EVDO was something even geeks were fairly new to and the general public hadn't a clue, I logged into a MUD I play on from the middle of the Hoover Dam and did a "you'll never guess where I'm logging in from!" deal on public channels.
I'm such an ass.
"In-flight wifi, on the other hand, sounds far more promising. I can imagine it being used for some really awesome things, like movie rentals that work directly with your laptop.
Or voice over IP via a bluetooth headset paired to the laptop.
Wait a minute... D'OH!
Actually, I travel through 8 - 10 airports a year on average and I've never been held up for extra scrutiny over my Sony PCG-SRX77 (http://myarticle.enet.com.cn/images/200510/1128762957284.jpg).
Of course, I've gotten through security with the wrong boarding pass (accidentally switched with a travel companion before reaching security), with an expired ID, and with a laptop bag that had wires hanging out of it every which way because I was in a hurry. One time, the people seated at the x-ray machine asked me what they were seeing in my bag. I told them it was probably my spare battery and they just said ok (no hand search). As I was putting my shoes on and gathering my things, I realized I didn't have my spare battery in the laptop bag - it was an external hard drive.
My experiences from regional airports (which, oddly enough, are the safest and best managed from a security standpoint) to international airports across the US suggests that these people don't know what they're looking for and largely don't care. I don't pretend to know how many are smart or dumb, but I will say that if you give someone a boring enough job, eventually they *will* stop caring. Apathy is a way of life at 'security' checkpoints in America's airports. They need to run drills on these guys once a month or so to keep them on their toes.
"Do people in the U.S. lose sleep over the fact that they are forced to pay to kill Iraqis? Will people in the U.S. lose sleep when they realize that the huge rise in prices, which has already started, is mostly timed for the end of Dick Cheney's and George W. Bush's terms in office? Whether or not they lose sleep, killing Iraqis definitely lowers the quality of life in the United States."
I definitely lose sleep over the fact that I'm forced to pay to kill Iraqis, and it's been going on for years. I mean, with all the modern weaponry and firepower at our disposal, I would have thought we'd have finished off the population by now, which would mean I wouldn't have to pay to kill Iraqis anymore.
I think our President needs to speed up this process. There's only about 24 million of them, so if we dispatched 2 million a month, this whole thing would be over in a year's time.
Mr President, end this war the easy way, for the sake of my wallet!
Forget your customers, get your ass down to the local library and get your hands on the text of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act right NOW. You're opening yourself up to upwards of trillions in liability if your filtering doesn't work perfectly 100% of the time. You're also opening yourselves up to massive liability with the federal government (hint: take a quick look at Comcast vis-a-vis Bit Torrent).
Quit spending all day being a PR monkey and get back to being a lawyer for your company. You're giving bad advice that has the potential to obliterate your employer.
Apple's continued stance that they know what's best for their customers and that their products are 'perfect' as-is prevents what could be revolutionary products from ever reaching that potential. No matter how good, how cool, how well designed a product they release, it's their attitude toward the people who invest in those products that will ensure that Apple will never achieve Microsoft's level of success.
They can innovate to extraordinary levels in many ways, but so long as they keep the snotty outlook on the world at large, they're just another tech company. Apple, you need to stop acting like assholes, and stop treating your customers like every last one is a worthless idiot.
Don't you know anything about bullets? They explode on impact, make a cool "pew" noise, cause sparks to fly up in the air, and blow huge holes in airplane skin. Once there's one hole, all the passengers nearby get sucked out through it (no matter how small it is), and then the whole fuselage peels open like an aluminum can!
Ok, then we pull out of international markets and giggle while the world economy collapses.
Our trade deficit has been working against our interests too long anyway.
They couldn't get the trademark for something they didn't invent. NSFW is a 4chan thing. Mootles would undoubtedly have evidence of significant prior art somewhere in his sperm-soaked basement apartment of his parents' tiny shack.
How is it a silver lining that Congress may reconsider Congressionally mandated Federal control over the internet in the United States?
If there's one thing Congress and the rest of the Federal government have proven time and time again it's that the only thing they're good at is spending money. Everything else they try to do (ie. all the stuff they spend the money on), they can't help but fuck it up. Never heard the phrase, "Good enough for government work"?
If you're in favor of Ted "Series-of-Tubes" Stevens and his band of merry men handing over control of the internet to the F "OMFG A DECISECOND FLASH OF BREAST!" CC, then I have to ask, why do you hate the internet?
"If you're fired because you're white, you have a claim"
"If you're fired because you're a man, you have a claim"
"If you're fired because you're Christian, you have a claim"
And if your wife hits you, you have a claim against her for domestic violence, right?
You're not really that naive, are you?
In the real world, if the guy doing the hiring/firing doesn't like white people, you can be out of a job for any other reason in the world.
In the real world, if the woman doing the hiring/firing thinks all men are rapists-waiting-to-happen, you can be out of a job for any other reason in the world.
In the real world, if the Muslim doing the hiring/firing isn't fond of infidels, you most certainly will be out of a job.
In a world where you can be fired because it's sunny outside, you can be passed up for hiring or fired for being white... because it's sunny outside. It absolutely can and does happen, because the overall mindset in this country is that racism doesn't happen to whites, sexism doesn't happen to men, and domestic violence doesn't happen to husbands. Every bit of it is just as disgusting and wrong as the preceeding opposite (with the exception of domestic violence, which has -always- been that way).
Yes, very good, the article does indeed indicate that IBM is seeking $1 Million in damages per battery. Something you need to understand about damages is that they do not necessarily mean that 'X' number of dollars were removed from your hands.
The overall potential damage to IBM of this infringement would be in the hundreds of millions, if not the billions both directly and indirectly for years to come. Asking for massive damages is not unreasonable under those circumstances.
Are you insane? $1Million is cheap, frankly, considering how incredibly damaging this could have been for IBM. With enough of these out there, IBM might have been facing a hundred different suits, half of them class-action, from all over the world. That says nothing for the positively massive loss of business they could potentially suffer as a result of a turn in public perception of their products. If just one of those batteries hit the laptop of, say, the CEO of a fortune 500, IBM could see millions in business go *poof* as fast at the battery burns.
"The reason you dropped two bombs was that one was a uranium based device, the other a plutonium device of radically different design.
You just had to try both designs out, didn't you?"
Prior to being dropped on its target, the Uranium bomb wasn't even tested. The mechanics of it were so simple that it was assumed to be every bit as reliable as a conventional bomb. The Plutonium bomb had been tested previously, so we knew it worked. The physics were solid, but the mechanics of the implosion device were in question until it was tested (at the Trinity test site).
So in one hand you've got a bomb we knew would work, and in the other you've got a bomb we'd tested already. Just had to try out both designs? That's just stupid.
Both were dropped because they didn't surrender immediately. Had they continued their refusal to surrender, we would have kept dropping nuclear weapons until no one was left alive from that country to threaten the world. The United States did not start that war, we ended it. We ended it by hitting two military targets, one of which was chosen because of the military value combined with the fact that the surrounding topography drastically limited the blast radius to minimize civilian casualties. You just can't drop bombs that big without civilian casualties. On the other hand, there was no way to convince Japan that continuing the fight was futile without dropping bombs that big. Until they believed that they would be completely annihilated without even the honor of taking as many of their enemy down with them, they were committed to a land war where every man, woman, and child would fight to the death.
Government is a necessary evil - often more evil than necessary.
I'm sure there must be some reason why I can't tell whether that blog poster (and yes, the 'site' cited is actually nothing more than the incoherent ramblings of yet another of 10 trillion 'bloggers') is far left wing or far right wing. The only thing I can tell for sure is that they're unstable at room temperature.
Let's get a few things straight:
1) Refusing to finance a given decision does NOT mean you are against having choice in the matter
2) Shifting power from the Federal government to the state governments does NOT equal fascism
3) Refusing to subsidize something does NOT equate to being against it
4) Being thrifty when it's not your money does NOT equate to being a religious whackjob
5) The US Consitution still defines the role of the Federal government. Since the Federal government has proven many times over that it only does well the jobs laid out for it by the US Constitution, it makes sense that we restrict its roles thereto.
Ron Paul isn't a nut - he's just thinking far beyond the average member of the body politic.
I trust my government as far as I can throw it. And frankly, I'd like to see just how far I can throw parts of my government, like this fellow quoted in the article.
"(That's right, puTTY was made for Windows users to get unix functionality, not vice versa.)"
You realize, of course, that you're also describing Linux with this statement? Just because something's designed to get you functionality already available elsewhere doesn't mean it's automatically inferior.
Doign anything at all is slow as Hell on EDGE. I've used several networks since they became available. EDGE is just plain slower than anything else I've ever tried. Verizon's 1xRTT is better than dial-up, but tends to drop a lot of packets when your signal isn't so hot. As such, the overal bandwidth drops as the signal degrades. Sprint 1xRTT does incredibly well with low signal. It's slightly slower than Verizon's 1xRTT under ideal conditions, but doesn't have any of the same issues when the signal degrades. I don't know how they do that. Verizon's and Sprint's EVDO services are both pretty fast and reliable. Each are solid DSL speed, though Sprint can be quicker (especially if you're in a RevA area).
All in all, I've found that Verizon's 1xRTT on virtually no signal still works faster on web pages and whatever else than EDGE. EDGE is just plain slow; there's no way around it. We can talk theory all day long, but fact remains that from New York to Miami to Las Vegas and at least a dozen cities in between, EDGE is a joke compared with anything else.
Stop abusing email. It's not intended as a file transfer system. For that, we have FTP. If you're looking to display pictures using Google services, why not use Picasa's publishing features? You can publish the album right to a Google webpage that's fast and accessible. It's also designed to do what you're trying to do. It'll also play video with sound, streamed.
Then you can send them an email with an HTML link that they can click. That's more what email is for.
Put me on the jury. I don't care if there's video evidence, a signed confession, and an open court confession; I just couldn't bring myself to convict the guy responsible. Heisenburg and quantum mechanics both provide enough "reasonable doubt" in this case for me.
Well you've got me there. ;)
"perhaps you should block "huge netblocks" from the US too as long as they are the number one shit spewer and bot haven."
FYI, I -do- have some netblocks based in the US and Canada blocked. They're much fewer and farther between because it's so difficult to isolate a netblock of abusers with virtually no legitimate users on it. That also doesn't take into account dynamic IPs and the like. I can't block Comcast (oh God, please? can I? please?!) because I'd instantly end up with tons of complaints about legitimate email being blocked. I -can- block off a netblock in China because I know exactly which customers have -any- international dealings with China, and those with extensive ties there have longer whitelists and less active netblock filters on them.
Per my own statistics, at any given time, roughly 35 - 40% of the spam hitting our mail filter is coming in from the US. Of the rest of the spam (and something like 94 - 96% of all connections to the mail filter are for spam at this point), some 90%+ is coming from Asia (mostly Russia and China). China's my second biggest offender at ~15% total spam volume.
You see, this has nothing to do with not liking a particular country or region. It has everything to do with the fact that the problem of spam is horrific and is only getting worse. I'm being forced to drill down to levels I'd have laughed at at this time two years ago. I'm also spending more time dealing with the issue that I should have to, but I pride myself on not getting complaints from customers that too much spam is coming in and not getting more than a couple false-positive reports every couple of weeks. As I said, I'm now looking at having to filter out over 95% of emails sent to customers. It's turning into a fight where searching for good emails within the spam is like finding a needle in a haystack. Anything that makes that haystack smaller is a good thing. If I had a nice long list of reliably bad netblocks within the US and Canada that I could block without pissing off customers, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
At least the US has been prosecuting those who spam from within its borders. That at least is somewhat helpful. It hasn't had a noticeable impact on the level of spam I've seen, but maybe if more places did it, we'd see better results.
This isn't about this country vs that country, nor is it accusing a certain group of people of being bad people. It's about trying to filter out the crap in the most efficient way possible without spending 14 hours a day doing it in a world that's drowning in spam. The last thing on my mind is where a spammer lives, what language he speaks, or what color his skin is. The only thing I care about is his garbage not hitting my customers' inboxes and me not having to work 18 hour days to make that happen. I hate having to deal with this stuff; I want to do real work. I long for the days where the only spam filtering I had to do for customers was Bayesian and it worked.
"Kudos, you sound just like that new Pope that was part of the Hitler youth."
.asia."
... I'll ban your IP. Then see how you like it when nobody from the 40 employee company I work for reads your spam!""
Nice roundabout way of calling me a Nazi. Unfortunately for you, I'm not nearly so ignorant of historical fact. First of all, Joseph Ratzinger had the misfortune of being born in Bavaria. During the time of Nazi reign over Bavaria, all males over the age of 14 years were required by law to be enrolled in the Hitler Youth program. As the New York Times noted, he was actually quite defiant of the law, refusing to show up for legally mandated meetings and other activities.
So if you're saying that I've had the misfortune to grow up living under a brutal and genocidal regime and that I've done the best I can under the circumstances without getting myself killed, then you're offtopic and wrong. Otherwise, if you're trying to make some other association, you're still offtopic, still wrong, and an asshole.
In either case, I'm sure it was obvious to any objective reader that I was referring to the deluge of spam, viruses, and other unwanted abuse of network and internet resources coming from that part of the world. More specifically, I see Russia and China as being the worst offenders.
"Not everyone is blocking
Gee, y'think?
"Try asking the average American consumer of home internet service"
Fatal flaw: they don't control what's blocked upstream of them.
"I love it when computer administrators like to make it sound like they're going to change the world from their desk. "You just watch
I have no delusions of grandeur. I choose to block something at the firewall, a few dozen people don't see it while they're at work. I choose to block something at the spam filter (domain, netblock, country, etc), roughly a couple of thousand don't see any emails coming in from it. However, if you were keeping up with email abuse forums, you'd find out that I'm by far not the only one, nor the most militant, in blocking off huge swaths in an attempt to make the job of keeping the spam out more doable.
Change the world? Hardly, I just want the people working for this company to be able to work in peace and for the company's customers to be happy with their email so they'll continue hosting through us. In the meantime, I have a lot of other stuff that needs doing, so I don't need to sit here fiddling with filters 10 hours a day. "Block first; whitelist later" is becoming the norm for a lot of people who are being plagued by this flood of garbage that keeps getting worse every day. I just happen to think it's unfortunate for the legitimate people to get caught in the middle.
"From the domain owner's side, it essentially declares in which jurisdiction(s) any disputes are to be resolved. Countries are free to subdivide their own domain space as they see fit, of course, and to impose whatever requirements they deem necessary to register."
Brilliant! So the next time Pakistan and India get into a diplomatic scuffle bordering on nuclear war, India can invalidate the domain registrations of every Pakistani company, and Pakistan can follow suite, and tens of thousands of businesses and individuals can get screwed out of hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars! YAY!
Or...
They could keep a neutral party in charge of given TLDs whose only concern is keeping order within the world of the TLD. No, I like your idea better.