...people just do not subscribe to free e-mail newsletters anymore, making a broad assumption that anyone offering them would be a spammer.
Sadly though this is often the case. The solution however is simple - create a different email address in your domain for each newsletter or company that you sign up for (for example "ticketmaster@mydomain.com") and use this for transactions. When the spam starts arriving (you WILL get spammed if you use ticketmaster by the way - read the ToS) then redirect the address to the relevant abuse email. Voila - the people responsible for the spam report themselves.
These would be the problems that don't involve 6 months of pissing around with software with literally ZERO documentation trying to get it to work right?
Ok.. lets talk hypothetically. Everyone switches to Linux. So now people write worms for Linux. Yeah that REALLY solved all the problems didn't it. The actual problem is that people write malware regardless of what platform it runs on. They are going to target the most prevalent OS whatever that may be. If the whole world used Macs we would see Mac worms. etc etc.
Thanks for the explanations. I actually didn't realise that there was a paying market for OSS coders to modify OSS code. Call me dumb but it's literally something that didn't occur to me. I'm sure this will be great for coders in Brazil.
The federal government is looking at concrete measures to stimulate free software as means of saving money and stimulating the national software industry.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but how is this going to stimulate the industry if there is no money to be made for the software "companies"? Surely this will damage the software industry?
For American readers, don't take anything that appears in The Sun too seriously. It's a bit Weekly World Newsish targeted at the absolute lowest mental ability level. The people that read The Sun are the sort that would be outraged at a "magic gizmo" that fined them every time they went over the speed limit. It will never happen.
How about some screenshots instead of this constant stream of marketing crap?
Hear hear. I think we all know the answer to that one though considering that the graphics in Ultima Online are crap and have always been crap and I predict will be crap for the forseeable future. Gameplay = great. Graphics = utter crap.
I thought there already were teddy bears with cameras in them, but that they were meant for spying on babysitters and stuff like that.
Yes but they would be specialist surveillance tools. To have cameras in EVERY teddy bear would be much more insidious. The one in the story can ID swear words, how long is it before they are listening for words like "plane" "allah" and "bomb" and sending transcripts to the authorities?
April fools jokes are all well and good but one cannot help but wonder if there is something more sinister underneath. Would make a great public reaction test - I wonder just how many enquiries / complaints they got about that story? In the event of problems "its an April fools joke" etc etc.
Coupled with XBox live with a broadband net connection the EyeToy has tremendous potential for abuse. How do people know it's not operating as a spy cam? Could someone use cracked code on a modded XBox to turn it into one?
Some people here aren't technical to the level of knowledge I mentioned though. I was just meaning to point out that the traffic going to "windows update" could be relatively easily discerned and filtered out and really shouldn't be counted as bandwidth being consumed by the worm itself. At least in my (Now I guess not so) humble opinion.:)
...which was my point entirely - people will be scrabbling for WindowsUpdate thus consuming extra bandwidth. My original point is that it's easy to blame a worm for everything when sometimes there are other more simple explanations.
For example - major power cuts like the US has seen recently (regardless of possible cause) network gear is going to be off for a while causing traffic to reroute. This could also contribute to a perceived "slow down".
Wow, insightful? Hardly.
You know, for a network admin, it's pretty trivial to be able to tell the traffic that's downloading the latest MS patch from the traffic that's incessantly trying to scan for uninfected hosts to infect.
Just thought you'd want to know.
You can contrast that to free software distribution systems where it's easy to set up a local mirror and theyby reduce the amount of traffic needed by orders of magnitude.
No shit! You know thats really interesting. If only MS had a system like tha... heyyy they DO! In fact you know - I have one. On my network.
I didnt say "if Cray "decided" to make another computer" I said "if a Cray "decided" to make another computer" - i.e. if a Cray machine itself suddenly decided to make another computer as in it developed AI became self aware etc etc.
I beleive that if this were to happen, I for one would be amongst the people saying "WTF????"
Yeah - I've found Hotmail to be quite convenient so long as you have it set to only accept messages from people in your address list and to assume everything else is spam.
I suppose its the same for all email these days though sadly.
Imagine that Cray computer decides to make a personal computer. It has a 150 MHz processor, 200 megabytes of RAM, 1500 megabytes of disk storage, a screen resolution of 4096 x 4096 pixels, relies entirely on voice recognition for input, fits in your shirt pocket and costs $200-$300. What's the first question that the computer community asks? "Is it PC compatible?"
I think if a Cray "decided" to make another computer the actual computer community's responses would be more along the lines of "WTF?????"
Slashdot Mirror
..quantum physics probably doesn't exist...
...people just do not subscribe to free e-mail newsletters anymore, making a broad assumption that anyone offering them would be a spammer.
Sadly though this is often the case. The solution however is simple - create a different email address in your domain for each newsletter or company that you sign up for (for example "ticketmaster@mydomain.com") and use this for transactions. When the spam starts arriving (you WILL get spammed if you use ticketmaster by the way - read the ToS) then redirect the address to the relevant abuse email. Voila - the people responsible for the spam report themselves.
So far, we don't know how to make machines that make art, thus we have to make art ourselves.
Lets just pray we never have art that makes machines.
..then I'd absolutely love to see your average user and admin using Linux across the board.
I can't get viruses or hackers because I run Lie-nucks. What? Patch? No I still smoke. KerWHAT? We had popcorn yesterday...
Not all admins patch boxes. Those that do don't get hit like this, regardless of if they are running Linux / BSD / Solaris / OSX.
If everyone ran Linux then we would see a lot of malware targetted at Linux. If everyone ran OSX then we would see a lot of malware targetted at OSX.
Etc. etc. rpt ad infinitum.
one word to solve all your problems: Linux
.. lets talk hypothetically. Everyone switches to Linux. So now people write worms for Linux. Yeah that REALLY solved all the problems didn't it. The actual problem is that people write malware regardless of what platform it runs on. They are going to target the most prevalent OS whatever that may be. If the whole world used Macs we would see Mac worms. etc etc.
These would be the problems that don't involve 6 months of pissing around with software with literally ZERO documentation trying to get it to work right?
Ok
Thanks for the explanations. I actually didn't realise that there was a paying market for OSS coders to modify OSS code. Call me dumb but it's literally something that didn't occur to me. I'm sure this will be great for coders in Brazil.
The federal government is looking at concrete measures to stimulate free software as means of saving money and stimulating the national software industry.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but how is this going to stimulate the industry if there is no money to be made for the software "companies"? Surely this will damage the software industry?
For American readers, don't take anything that appears in The Sun too seriously. It's a bit Weekly World Newsish targeted at the absolute lowest mental ability level. The people that read The Sun are the sort that would be outraged at a "magic gizmo" that fined them every time they went over the speed limit. It will never happen.
Plan 9? Bunnies in spacesuits (one might say designed for OUTER space..) called Glenda???
I'm beginning to see a theme here...
How about some screenshots instead of this constant stream of marketing crap?
Hear hear. I think we all know the answer to that one though considering that the graphics in Ultima Online are crap and have always been crap and I predict will be crap for the forseeable future. Gameplay = great. Graphics = utter crap.
I thought there already were teddy bears with cameras in them, but that they were meant for spying on babysitters and stuff like that.
Yes but they would be specialist surveillance tools. To have cameras in EVERY teddy bear would be much more insidious. The one in the story can ID swear words, how long is it before they are listening for words like "plane" "allah" and "bomb" and sending transcripts to the authorities?
The Times reported on 1st April 1998 that, "Teddy bears...will soon be fitted with tiny cameras to spy on families across Britain."
Eye Toy anyone?
April fools jokes are all well and good but one cannot help but wonder if there is something more sinister underneath. Would make a great public reaction test - I wonder just how many enquiries / complaints they got about that story? In the event of problems "its an April fools joke" etc etc.
Coupled with XBox live with a broadband net connection the EyeToy has tremendous potential for abuse. How do people know it's not operating as a spy cam? Could someone use cracked code on a modded XBox to turn it into one?
Actually, we have fun at work with all the viruses and worms. I have my TiBook at home and don't really care about anything (obviously).
Spoken like a true Mac admin.
Some people here aren't technical to the level of knowledge I mentioned though. I was just meaning to point out that the traffic going to "windows update" could be relatively easily discerned and filtered out and really shouldn't be counted as bandwidth being consumed by the worm itself. At least in my (Now I guess not so) humble opinion. :)
...which was my point entirely - people will be scrabbling for WindowsUpdate thus consuming extra bandwidth. My original point is that it's easy to blame a worm for everything when sometimes there are other more simple explanations.
For example - major power cuts like the US has seen recently (regardless of possible cause) network gear is going to be off for a while causing traffic to reroute. This could also contribute to a perceived "slow down".
Wow, you really are a whiny shite, aren't you?
Funny that I was thinking the same thing about you.
What's the matter? Arguments can't hold water?
Wow, insightful? Hardly. You know, for a network admin, it's pretty trivial to be able to tell the traffic that's downloading the latest MS patch from the traffic that's incessantly trying to scan for uninfected hosts to infect. Just thought you'd want to know.
Another stunning interjection.
Train wreck? What a total crock from Keynote. here is a well researched article that's easy to read for you [sciam.com].
y /story/0,10801,62375,00.html
r e_bol.html
a sp?namID=3365
I'm sorry but I cant find anything in there that says the train wreck didnt happen?
Are you saying that there was not a crash and that there were no cables affected by the crash?
These stories disagree with you:
http://www.computerworld.com/industrytopics/energ
http://www.isp-planet.com/technology/2001/baltimo
http://www.firefighting.com/articles/namFullView.
...snip grumble...
You can contrast that to free software distribution systems where it's easy to set up a local mirror and theyby reduce the amount of traffic needed by orders of magnitude.
No shit! You know thats really interesting. If only MS had a system like tha... heyyy they DO! In fact you know - I have one. On my network.
Incidentally in your mirroring system how do you keep all your software up to date and are 100% certain that it hasn't been tampered with?
Firstly during Code Red it got blamed for Internet slowdown, until someone realised that some major net cables were damaged in a train tunnel fire that later turned out to be the real reason.
Secondly, lots of people are (hopefully) going to be scrabbling for WindowsUpdate for patches which will also add to the bandwidth being consumed.
Mozilla doesn't forget my passwords. :)
Famous last words...
It's been done before - remember "Code Red"?
A guy called Herbert HexXer wrote an anti-worm called Code Green.
He got into a LOT of trouble over that I believe.
Odd that they have 16$ million in orders then.
I didnt say "if Cray "decided" to make another computer" I said "if a Cray "decided" to make another computer" - i.e. if a Cray machine itself suddenly decided to make another computer as in it developed AI became self aware etc etc.
I beleive that if this were to happen, I for one would be amongst the people saying "WTF????"
...spam is a bitch in there.
Yeah - I've found Hotmail to be quite convenient so long as you have it set to only accept messages from people in your address list and to assume everything else is spam.
I suppose its the same for all email these days though sadly.
I don't forget my passwords.
Famous last words...
Imagine that Cray computer decides to make a personal computer. It has a 150 MHz processor, 200 megabytes of RAM, 1500 megabytes of disk storage, a screen resolution of 4096 x 4096 pixels, relies entirely on voice recognition for input, fits in your shirt pocket and costs $200-$300. What's the first question that the computer community asks? "Is it PC compatible?"
I think if a Cray "decided" to make another computer the actual computer community's responses would be more along the lines of "WTF?????"
You say your box was compromised, therefore it quite possibly WAS your box doing the hacking, but under the control of either a worm or haxx0r.
Basically unless they have video of you actually hacking then how can they prove it was you?
Here is a story about a guy in the UK that got arrested for allegedly downloading child porn on his machine however his machine was found to be compromised by a trojan thus getting him off the hook.