The show's hard to come into after the initial episodes whereas the "each week is a nice, neat self contained little episode" approach means that you can miss a whole month of it and still know what's going on.
Which is why it was OK for me to miss several episodes of Voyager or Enterprise at a time, thus they lost me as a viewer for those episodes because there was nothing there to force me into watching the show every week. Babylon 5, on the other hand, had me planning my week around their schedule so I wouldn't miss it, because if I did there was a good chance I'd miss something important. It all depends on how you look at it, I guess. Personally I'd rather have a well thought out show with an interesting ongoing story than these little cookie-cutter episodes they've been putting out.
From my experience, you're in the minority. We're not an ISP, but we do host e-mail for a number of companies. We recently implemented Vircom's modusMail which is expensive, but the virus and spam filtering it provides is simply amazing. It catches about 99% of the incoming spam and all of the current viruses. It auto updates both filters pretty much daily, sometimes more.
The spam filter is very aggressive, so when we first implemented it there were some false positives. It throws everything it filters into a quarantine and generates daily quarantine reports to all of the users along with a "release" link. If there's a FP in there, the user can release it right then and there. It even offers to whitelist the sender to prevent more FP's in the future.
I know there have been some FP's since we track the release clicks, but we've had no complaints and nothing but praise since we put it in.
The best part is that our e-mail admin time has been reduced only to adding new accounts:).
I have 3 kids all under age 5. Plenty of emergencies arise--as you can imagine. Without cell phones, how would we be able to deal with them?
Not to sound insensitive, but you would deal with them the same way people dealt with them before they had cell phones. I'm assuming your place of work has a company land-line that people can reach you on if they have a true emergency.
Now, all of a sudden, it's not ok anymore.
Frankly, I wouldn't be taking something like that to work with me anyway. I've seen companies get evicted from their offices where the employees were not allowed to take anything with them unless it was obviously a personal item. Something like a laptop could be looked upon as a corporate asset that the leasing company isn't going to want to let walk out the door. Of course you can file a claim and get it back later, but it could be weeks before you saw it again.
There are all sorts of issues involved with employees using their own personal property for business purposes, especially at their place of work.
I always thought the Slashdot 'nerd' was someone who was good with computers, a hacker, a programmer, a sysadmin, someone with computer science chops.
In my vocabulary, that would be a geek. I find 'geek' to be a compliment and 'nerd' an insult. If you look these up on dictionary.com they both share the same basic meaning, but I think our culture has made a distinction between them.
If you read the article and know anything about DNS, you can see that he is splitting the file into 126 byte segments and storing the parts in TXT records of individual hosts. The host naming scheme is quite clever, I might add.
The goal is to offload the duty of serving up the files from the download servers to an existing distributed network. He even mentions that the DNS servers caching these records would consume massive amounts of memory, and then (like a spammer) blows it off as "its [memory] not that expensive today anyway."
If this is actually implemented on a wide scale, DNS administrators will simply stop caching TXT records, putting the load right back on the original download server where it belongs. Or worse, they may stop caching records altogether, which could only lead us all down the path of chaos, death and destruction.
I agree that it's clever, but like a deadly virus, not something that should leave the lab on a large scale.
Weight sensors are for truck weigh stations. You're probably referring to an induction coil embedded in the road farther away from the light so it knows you're coming.
Of course you can get the addresses that match between the two lists, that's the whole point, so they can be removed. There is a risk that a spammer would instead use those addresses in a different list, which is what I said. The brute force portion applies to the addresses that do NOT match their existing list. The way it's designed is so that the spammer will not end up with MORE addresses than they already have.
See the JunkBusters Junk Mail page for good tips on this. Somewhere on that site is a link to the DMA's Mail Preference Service, which will get you off all DMA member mailing lists. Don't like pre-approved credit cards? There is a toll free number you can call that will tell the three major credit reporting agencies not to release your information (see here. There is a lot you can do to stop the junk snail-mail.
See the site in my sig. Uses MD5 to distribute addresses so the spammers can remove addresses that match, while not exposing the others for harvesting. Of course, it can be brute-forced, but the chances of getting a match that way are so slim that I doubt any spammer would make an effort to do so when there are easier ways to harvest addresses. Then there is the issue of the spammer getting a match and moving it to a "better" list because they would know it was a live address. All risks, of course, but what doesn't have risk on the Internet?
...because the database is dinky and nobody cares about it.
I'm sure someone said that about slashdot when it first got started. As for the DMA's list, you have to be a DMA member to get it. COODB is targeting the smaller "hit and run" operations run by people with a shred of decency left in them.
As with anything else, if you don't like it, don't use it. Personally, I would like to see it get big and stop some unwanted e-mails from ever being sent (I'm involved with the project in case you couldn't tell). No, it's not perfect, but it's a start.
In order for that to work for the spammer, they would have to have your address to begin with, and the resulting list of "anti-spam demographic" addresses would probably be too small for them to bother creating a campaign for.
The only other way a voluntary centralized opt-out database could work would be for the spammer to submit their lists to the system to be scrubbed for them. Not a service I would want to provide free of charge, and I doubt the spammers would be willing to pay for it. Distributing MD5 hashes seems like a reasonable compromise to me.
Actually, once you get used to some of the contradictions in the attributes of various tags, it's easier to use than any other web-based language I've dealt with, and much faster to develop under. ColdFusion scripting is also a wonderful thing if you know how to use it properly.
Yes, they COULD kill off ColdFusion, but I doubt they would do that. IIRC there is something with Sun where M$ can't release anything related to Java without their permission or something. The current version of ColdFusion MX is built on a Java platform, so that could be a problem for them. Maybe they would sell it off to someone else and just keep Flash, etc. IMHO, I don't think Macromedia would sell out to Microsoft anyway, but I could be wrong.
1) It eats the bandwidth.
2) It takes up CPU time.
As you mentioned, for most providers this point is moot.
3) Why the hell would you want to provide a service that costs you to a non-paying customer?
It's all about customer service. The ability for a customer to forward their e-mail for a set time period after they leave would be worked into the price of their paid service. A provider that offers more features to their users can get away with charging a little more (AOL thinks this way, but unfortunately for them most of their users are less concerned with the AOL specific content than they are with basic Internet access these days).
4) Why the hell would I leave another way for an old buisiness I associated with to contact me?
That's up to you as a user of the service. There's nothing that says you HAVE to forward your old address. I'm sure a lot of people would use this, and I'm fairly certain that MOST ISP's would repect that person's privacy and not drop messages to them once they've cancelled (though there would be a few that would nag their users to come back, which is a mistake, IMHO).
Imagine the redundant e-mail messages and the bandwidth they would consume? How many e-mail addresses have you had that you used regularly, that you gave your friends and put on your resume and so on? I've had 12 in 15 years. Currently I check 3 e-mail (valid, non-spam) boxes when I get my mail. How long should they continue to forward messages?
Good question.. the US Postal Service forwards mail for 6 months IIRC, and since the Internet works much faster than real life (most of the time), then I would think that one or two months would be sufficient. The main purpose for forwarding e-mail would be to give the user a chance to let everyone know what their new address is, get online accounts updated, etc. One to two months should be more than enough time for this.
I do agree that there should not be a law requiring e-mail providers to forward messages after a user leaves, but it would be nice to see more providers offer this service to their users.
Exactly, so if a spammer is sending mail to loads of addresses on a domain, and some bounce because they don't exist, then the spammer KNOWS that the ones that DIDN'T bounce are GOOD addresses, and could possibly resell them at a premium because he knows they're valid. The spammer could also remove the invalid addresses, making his lists more effective and his operation more efficient by not sending to known bad addresses. In bouncing mail for dead accounts, you are helping the spammer, so not bouncing mail makes sense for fighting spam. However, it also has the side-effect of causing exactly the types of problems this story is about, which I think far outweighs the spam fighting angle. Some larger ISPs may disagree because of the sheer volume of spam they deal with, but for a small fry like me, it's not really such an issue.
I would expect a message from the phone company informing me that I was calling a cell number so I could make the decision to hang up and not pay the extra fees. If they just started charging me extra for calling a number that looks just like any other phone number, I'd have serious thoughts about cancelling my regular phone service and going with VoIP, or maybe just changing phone companies.
It may be someone else's call, but YOU'RE the one that decided to take your phone to another country. Since your phone number is still the same, the calling party has no way of knowing where your phone is at any given time (unless you tell them, of course). Say if you go to another country, and someone calling you does not know that, why should they pay long distance charges? As far as they're concerned, it's still a local number.
The same applies to my land line. If I forward my calls to the hotel where I'm staying in another state (I'm in the US) and someone calls me, *I* get charged the long distance for forwarding the call from my regular number. This makes sense since I am the one who decided to be somewhere else. Why should the cell system be any different?
Personally, if my phone bill is going to have extra charges because I'm calling someone's cell phone, I simply will not call cell phones. I already pay monthly fees and taxes up the wazoola to be connected to the phone system as it is. I will not pay extra to call a cellular phone.
If they implement this, I also expect to be warned when I dial a cell number, as they are currently no different from regular phone numbers to your average Joe. If I hear the warning, oh well, clickity click goes the receiver back on the cradle.
Then there is the issue of someone who has their land line forwarded to a cell number. Who would pick up the tab then, the person making the original call, or the person who has the number forwarded?
For those of you still running BBSes.. let's not forget the bbs archive where you can find every utility, door game, and bbs package ever created (well, almost).
Also there is the BBSnet IRC chat server where a lot of BBS authors and sysops, including the current maintainer of LORD, frequently hang out.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is why it was OK for me to miss several episodes of Voyager or Enterprise at a time, thus they lost me as a viewer for those episodes because there was nothing there to force me into watching the show every week. Babylon 5, on the other hand, had me planning my week around their schedule so I wouldn't miss it, because if I did there was a good chance I'd miss something important. It all depends on how you look at it, I guess. Personally I'd rather have a well thought out show with an interesting ongoing story than these little cookie-cutter episodes they've been putting out.
The spam filter is very aggressive, so when we first implemented it there were some false positives. It throws everything it filters into a quarantine and generates daily quarantine reports to all of the users along with a "release" link. If there's a FP in there, the user can release it right then and there. It even offers to whitelist the sender to prevent more FP's in the future.
I know there have been some FP's since we track the release clicks, but we've had no complaints and nothing but praise since we put it in.
The best part is that our e-mail admin time has been reduced only to adding new accounts :).
Not to sound insensitive, but you would deal with them the same way people dealt with them before they had cell phones. I'm assuming your place of work has a company land-line that people can reach you on if they have a true emergency.
Now, all of a sudden, it's not ok anymore.Frankly, I wouldn't be taking something like that to work with me anyway. I've seen companies get evicted from their offices where the employees were not allowed to take anything with them unless it was obviously a personal item. Something like a laptop could be looked upon as a corporate asset that the leasing company isn't going to want to let walk out the door. Of course you can file a claim and get it back later, but it could be weeks before you saw it again.
There are all sorts of issues involved with employees using their own personal property for business purposes, especially at their place of work.
In my vocabulary, that would be a geek. I find 'geek' to be a compliment and 'nerd' an insult. If you look these up on dictionary.com they both share the same basic meaning, but I think our culture has made a distinction between them.
If you read the article and know anything about DNS, you can see that he is splitting the file into 126 byte segments and storing the parts in TXT records of individual hosts. The host naming scheme is quite clever, I might add.
The goal is to offload the duty of serving up the files from the download servers to an existing distributed network. He even mentions that the DNS servers caching these records would consume massive amounts of memory, and then (like a spammer) blows it off as "its [memory] not that expensive today anyway."
If this is actually implemented on a wide scale, DNS administrators will simply stop caching TXT records, putting the load right back on the original download server where it belongs. Or worse, they may stop caching records altogether, which could only lead us all down the path of chaos, death and destruction.
I agree that it's clever, but like a deadly virus, not something that should leave the lab on a large scale.
Weight sensors are for truck weigh stations. You're probably referring to an induction coil embedded in the road farther away from the light so it knows you're coming.
Of course you can get the addresses that match between the two lists, that's the whole point, so they can be removed. There is a risk that a spammer would instead use those addresses in a different list, which is what I said. The brute force portion applies to the addresses that do NOT match their existing list. The way it's designed is so that the spammer will not end up with MORE addresses than they already have.
See the JunkBusters Junk Mail page for good tips on this. Somewhere on that site is a link to the DMA's Mail Preference Service, which will get you off all DMA member mailing lists. Don't like pre-approved credit cards? There is a toll free number you can call that will tell the three major credit reporting agencies not to release your information (see here. There is a lot you can do to stop the junk snail-mail.
See the site in my sig. Uses MD5 to distribute addresses so the spammers can remove addresses that match, while not exposing the others for harvesting. Of course, it can be brute-forced, but the chances of getting a match that way are so slim that I doubt any spammer would make an effort to do so when there are easier ways to harvest addresses. Then there is the issue of the spammer getting a match and moving it to a "better" list because they would know it was a live address. All risks, of course, but what doesn't have risk on the Internet?
...or have there been a lot more spam related stories than usual these past few weeks? Weird..
I'm sure someone said that about slashdot when it first got started. As for the DMA's list, you have to be a DMA member to get it. COODB is targeting the smaller "hit and run" operations run by people with a shred of decency left in them.
As with anything else, if you don't like it, don't use it. Personally, I would like to see it get big and stop some unwanted e-mails from ever being sent (I'm involved with the project in case you couldn't tell). No, it's not perfect, but it's a start.
The only other way a voluntary centralized opt-out database could work would be for the spammer to submit their lists to the system to be scrubbed for them. Not a service I would want to provide free of charge, and I doubt the spammers would be willing to pay for it. Distributing MD5 hashes seems like a reasonable compromise to me.
see tagline..
Actually, once you get used to some of the contradictions in the attributes of various tags, it's easier to use than any other web-based language I've dealt with, and much faster to develop under. ColdFusion scripting is also a wonderful thing if you know how to use it properly.
Fine by me, as long as they don't touch HomeSite+ I'm just fine..
Yes, they COULD kill off ColdFusion, but I doubt they would do that. IIRC there is something with Sun where M$ can't release anything related to Java without their permission or something. The current version of ColdFusion MX is built on a Java platform, so that could be a problem for them. Maybe they would sell it off to someone else and just keep Flash, etc. IMHO, I don't think Macromedia would sell out to Microsoft anyway, but I could be wrong.
hehe.. I remember CoW myself.. swing by if you like. We have a setup here that even The Grunt would be proud of ;)
In Internet time, 3 years IS a LONG time.
I think the server will be able to handle it.. it's the bandwidth I'm concerned with (only on a T1 here).
1) It eats the bandwidth. 2) It takes up CPU time.
As you mentioned, for most providers this point is moot.
3) Why the hell would you want to provide a service that costs you to a non-paying customer?
It's all about customer service. The ability for a customer to forward their e-mail for a set time period after they leave would be worked into the price of their paid service. A provider that offers more features to their users can get away with charging a little more (AOL thinks this way, but unfortunately for them most of their users are less concerned with the AOL specific content than they are with basic Internet access these days).
4) Why the hell would I leave another way for an old buisiness I associated with to contact me?
That's up to you as a user of the service. There's nothing that says you HAVE to forward your old address. I'm sure a lot of people would use this, and I'm fairly certain that MOST ISP's would repect that person's privacy and not drop messages to them once they've cancelled (though there would be a few that would nag their users to come back, which is a mistake, IMHO).
Imagine the redundant e-mail messages and the bandwidth they would consume? How many e-mail addresses have you had that you used regularly, that you gave your friends and put on your resume and so on? I've had 12 in 15 years. Currently I check 3 e-mail (valid, non-spam) boxes when I get my mail. How long should they continue to forward messages?
Good question.. the US Postal Service forwards mail for 6 months IIRC, and since the Internet works much faster than real life (most of the time), then I would think that one or two months would be sufficient. The main purpose for forwarding e-mail would be to give the user a chance to let everyone know what their new address is, get online accounts updated, etc. One to two months should be more than enough time for this.
I do agree that there should not be a law requiring e-mail providers to forward messages after a user leaves, but it would be nice to see more providers offer this service to their users.
Exactly, so if a spammer is sending mail to loads of addresses on a domain, and some bounce because they don't exist, then the spammer KNOWS that the ones that DIDN'T bounce are GOOD addresses, and could possibly resell them at a premium because he knows they're valid. The spammer could also remove the invalid addresses, making his lists more effective and his operation more efficient by not sending to known bad addresses. In bouncing mail for dead accounts, you are helping the spammer, so not bouncing mail makes sense for fighting spam. However, it also has the side-effect of causing exactly the types of problems this story is about, which I think far outweighs the spam fighting angle. Some larger ISPs may disagree because of the sheer volume of spam they deal with, but for a small fry like me, it's not really such an issue.
I would expect a message from the phone company informing me that I was calling a cell number so I could make the decision to hang up and not pay the extra fees. If they just started charging me extra for calling a number that looks just like any other phone number, I'd have serious thoughts about cancelling my regular phone service and going with VoIP, or maybe just changing phone companies.
It may be someone else's call, but YOU'RE the one that decided to take your phone to another country. Since your phone number is still the same, the calling party has no way of knowing where your phone is at any given time (unless you tell them, of course). Say if you go to another country, and someone calling you does not know that, why should they pay long distance charges? As far as they're concerned, it's still a local number.
The same applies to my land line. If I forward my calls to the hotel where I'm staying in another state (I'm in the US) and someone calls me, *I* get charged the long distance for forwarding the call from my regular number. This makes sense since I am the one who decided to be somewhere else. Why should the cell system be any different?
Personally, if my phone bill is going to have extra charges because I'm calling someone's cell phone, I simply will not call cell phones. I already pay monthly fees and taxes up the wazoola to be connected to the phone system as it is. I will not pay extra to call a cellular phone.
If they implement this, I also expect to be warned when I dial a cell number, as they are currently no different from regular phone numbers to your average Joe. If I hear the warning, oh well, clickity click goes the receiver back on the cradle.
Then there is the issue of someone who has their land line forwarded to a cell number. Who would pick up the tab then, the person making the original call, or the person who has the number forwarded?
For those of you still running BBSes.. let's not forget the bbs archive where you can find every utility, door game, and bbs package ever created (well, almost).
Also there is the BBSnet IRC chat server where a lot of BBS authors and sysops, including the current maintainer of LORD, frequently hang out.