how is neocron otherwise nowadays? i tried it in the beta for a short while, and found it, eh, rather empty back then except the cellar where everyone was killing rats, and i couldn't find the way out of the 'city'(dunno if one existed then even).. so, is there finally something worthwhile to do?
It's pretty good - I've been playing it since November 02 and I'm still not bored. What I particularly like about it is that because its done by an independent company there is a lot of stuff in there that you just wouldnt see elsewhere - strippers for example.They have a free 10 day trial at the moment so why not check it out?
If you want to see some other stuff try the Nema magazine:
There has been a thread on the Neocron Forums about this. It surprises me that many people still have boxes that work - one guy today was bragging that he doesnt patch or use any form of firewall or anti virus on XP for 2 years and has had no problems.
And when the spammers set up a catchall alias that routes to/dev/null?
To do that they would have to be using a legit domain.
Oh, look, you've done nothing to stop spam, and annoyed people who send you legitimate mail.
You mean apart from force them to use valid return addresses?
Also, many spammers already are using forged addresses. Many will set the sender address to one of the recipients.
I know. In fact I mentioned this in the comment you replied to.
Holding connections open will also increase server load,
So what? It's what servers are there for. Oh dear the server load increased but we get less spam so who cares? I dont see that many people complaining about the incresed server load that SpamAssasin causes.
and you haven't gotten past the fact that attempting to automatically send mail to people who email you will piss them off.
I don't think it will at all. So what you receive an email the first time you email someone (obviously you would use a white list after the first few emails).
Forging sender information is nothing new, and the disadvantages of your proposed system will likely outweight the advantages by far, as it rewards spammers who forge information and causes additional frustration to those who email you.
As mentioned before, and in my previous comment, I am well aware of this. However it could be used in conjunction with other methods.
Paul Graham's solutions attempt to reduce the chances that a given unwanted message will show up in your mailbox. By making smaller the chance that a given recipient will see a given message, the solutions proposed attempt to undermine the economics of spamming.
I think his idea is interesting, however how long is it before servers are immune to this type of DDoS?
The best your proposal will do is cause message delivery to take longer -- but it will do so in a way that will slow your servers and cause unnecessary collateral damage by causing increased load on others' machines.
No, the best thing is it forces the use of a valid return address. Obviously this will be vulnerable to address spoofing initially but it would mean the spammers have to do more work. Surely the ability to spoof addresses however is the real problem with spam.
When you can come up with a system which will cause fewer messages to be viewed by uninterested people without causing superfluous messages to be sent (as you propose) or cause more extra load to be imposed upon innocents than on those doing the spamming, write up an article and submit it to Slashdot.
And when you can sound less patronising, perhaps you should go work tech support again.
Any spam "solution" has to consider a two factors:
Who is burdened? The system you suggest will send more unwanted mail to senders of legitimate communications. This system imposes an unavoidable burden upon everyone, as opposed to spam, which only currently burdens the recipient (ISP, user, etc.).
Is it easy to circumvent? Were the system you suggest put into wide distribution, spammers could forge headers quite easily,
No. Any spam solution only has one factor to consider: Does it reduce spam? That's it. Years ago SpamAssasin would not have been practical for many people as the processing overhead would have been silly for the average user however in these days where any organisation can afford another box to be used just to run SA it makes sense.
or even set up a catch-all alias at their own site which would accept mail.
...thus using a valid domain that you could report.
It looks like in your case, the problem is worse than the solution.
Well excuse fucking me for trying.
Too many people do not put forward ideas because they are afraid of being patronised or shot down by other people. I'm a fan of the evolution of ide
What you're proposing is that you send a message in response to every message you receive. Furthermore, you're suggesting that the message you send in response have an invalid (random) return address.
Not invalid, randomly generated throwaway address. Perhaps use the supplied email address from the sender. For example - take the last spam sender I received a message from - "VividVideo2003@popstar.com". So mail comes in, relay holds the connection open while a mail from "VividVideo2003(at)popstar.com@mydomain.com" is sent back. It bounces back to the address (valid address). Connection logged and dropped. Temp mail address deleted.
The problem is going to be that they will start using forged valid addresses.
Why not just have the filter reply to the sending address with it's own randomly generated addy and auto drop those messages that use fake addresses that bounce? This could be done within seconds in most cases. The only issues here would be storage of the spam and how long you wait. It could be done by "keeping the spammer on the line" during the SMTP transfer also causing the transmission of spam to be delayed. Could it work?
The majority of people are just plain stupid. Fair comment that people should not have to be computer experts to operate a computer. I have no idea how my car's engine works but do I really need to if I can drive the thing? Similarly you should not have to possess expert knowledge to write a letter in Word.
I've done my time working tech support, and I have some personal favorites.
First there was the person who filled in an order for a new telephone, had it approved and delivered and fitted then complained to the Helpdesk that their voicemail was still full.
I've had someone who didn't know their own name.
One of our departments called complaining that their phones were broken. We asked what made them think that they were broken and we were told "because they hadn't received any calls." (Nobody had called them and they didn't think to test by calling themselves).
My current all time favourite however has to be this caller who commented on the call queue music -
Luser: "Ohh that sounded like I was listening to Barry White then - but I can't have been can I?"
"So I'm reading all over about how companies are desperate for people who know how to work with chicks, especially now that they are so common down in the Mall. But how -- short of a course with a mate's girlfriend or some other exercise in expensive sex for hire -- can I acquire even the most basic information or experience with big tits? There doesn't seem to be many tutorials or introductions online; what would be nice, but I can't seem to find either, would be a simulator that would run on a PC. All I want to know is if I like enough to be seriously interested."
Computers can never be as smart as humans because of the simple fact that humans have souls which allow a creative nature.
Souls do not exist. The word "soul" is the name attributed to the emergent properties of the billions of neurons that are the human brain, much in the way that "flight" is the name given to the emergent properties of millions of mechanical and electrical parts that are a jet plane.
Why not have a system where to send mail, you HAVE to have a digital certificate issued by a trusted third party. The certs expire, and you have to provide legit details to get one. All mail sent is signed with your cert. Get too many complaints, and your cert is revoked. Servers only accept mail with valid certs. Allow cert blocking to block all mail from the same company regardless of route.
Your problem is that Peachtree does not work with multiple users using a module at the same time. As many of us know here, it doesnt matter what you ask / tell / demand users to do, they will screw things up.
Can you not host the module(s) in question on different network shares and set the shares to only permit one concurrent user? Coupled with an auto-disconnection timeout that would ensure that only one user could use the module at the same time.
Alternatively perhaps use the Terminal Services functions of one of the XP machines for that module and make people use the terminal server - as XP only supports one TS user, it would ensure that only one user was in the module at any one time.
...actually I think the problem is since I downloaded it the author has updated the game by a point release - this is probably why my scores.dat doesnt work.
Hmm.. I downloaded the zip version if that makes a difference (the zip just extracts to a folder where you run it directly).
I just made a copy of the folder, deleted the scores.dat, ran it which generated a fresh scores.dat, quit, replaced the scores.dat with the one in question then ran the game and my old scores were back again.
Actually, the replays are saved along with the score when you get a highscore. You can view them from the highscore list.
Haven't found a way to export the replays from the highscore list though...
Oh man the only thing that could make this better would be if the truck caught fire at the end.
Looks like I have a new favourite game.
If only you could save movies - I've got it so the guy sits on the roof, slides to the back as the truck goes up the ramps, gets bounced into the air then batted against the wall by the roof of the truck. He lends, then the truck lands its rear wheels on him. Superb!
Too many people use IM, so block it. This ignores the fact that many people using it may well have a valid, work-related reason for doing so.
This is true, however where I work the vast majority used IM for nothing constructive whatsoever.
I operate a simple policy - you get what you need. If you need IM then you simply need to ask for it. The idea is to prevent abuse, not make people's work lives difficult. I've found this works as people won't ask for something if they can't justify it, however if they have a legitimate reason I am more than happy to facilitate whatever they need.
Bottom line is that you are at work to work, not get paid for pissing about on the Internet.
My boss asked me just this morning about a way to monitor the about of time and sites visited by a few "problem" employees. I'm a DBA, and not very well versed in system administration, but how would one go about tracking and reporting this sort of information? I'm especially intrigued by the idea of a customized intranet page or (even better) a daily email sent to the employee and his supervisor
Very very easy. For example so long as your intranet is set to use user authentication, then you know the users user account, which you can usually get to in server side code (in windows ASP it would be Request.ServerVariables("LOGON_USER") encapsulated in asp delimiters that get filtered out in/.).
A good way to do it is log all web accesses by user account into a database, and since you then have the user account from the Intranet page, as a DBA I'm sure I don't need to tell you how you do the next part:)
Blcoking 1863 does work, as I use that method myself.
The only problem is that they will move on to the next messenger that works (like Yahoo! etc).
If you wanted to be really insidious and get people to self police themselves, log all messenger messages and put a new section on your companies Intranet user customised page - something like "Hello xxxx, here are your last few messenger messages:
[bIcycleSExfiEND] w00t!
[cute^babe7599] SO BABEE U WANA C MY PIC?
[bIcycleSExfiEND] yeah - send it
[cute^babe7599] http://www.crackparty.com/showpictrojanisemachine? suckerid=bIcycleSExfiEND&referrid=1269
...
Please contact the helpdesk if you would like a complete log. Have a nice day."
...and below that: Here are your last few web accesses:
..."many aluminium plants are located near hydroelectric facilities (often built for that specific purpose), so the production of aluminium us perfectly sustainable too, just so long as it keeps raining."
Uh.. dude - you dont make aluminium out of water...
...cut to spammers setting up premium rate numbers to put in their SPAM messages in the hope that people will spam them back by calling them all the time.
...Now you can sell your own electronically encoded tunes on a gigantic global network that has a massive ad campaign behind it, for $40.
Good for CD Baby. They negotiated the deal with Apple and seem to be happy to provide the connection. The terms are more than reasonable. Hell, for $40, I'd make an album just to *see* if I had any musical talent that anyone else appreciated. (er, I don't.)...
You are of course assuming that Apple will pick your track to distribute - this is not the case and it is mentioned on the CDBaby site - they will submit it for approval, however companies such as Apple are under no obligation to publish it.
Slashdot Mirror
how is neocron otherwise nowadays? i tried it in the beta for a short while, and found it, eh, rather empty back then except the cellar where everyone was killing rats, and i couldn't find the way out of the 'city'(dunno if one existed then even).. so, is there finally something worthwhile to do?
/. PK'ers*
It's pretty good - I've been playing it since November 02 and I'm still not bored. What I particularly like about it is that because its done by an independent company there is a lot of stuff in there that you just wouldnt see elsewhere - strippers for example.They have a free 10 day trial at the moment so why not check it out?
If you want to see some other stuff try the Nema magazine:
Nema Issue 3
I play on server Pluto as Skinfitz.
*hides to escape hoards of
There has been a thread on the Neocron Forums about this. It surprises me that many people still have boxes that work - one guy today was bragging that he doesnt patch or use any form of firewall or anti virus on XP for 2 years and has had no problems.
Talk about lucky!
And when the spammers set up a catchall alias that routes to /dev/null?
To do that they would have to be using a legit domain.
Oh, look, you've done nothing to stop spam, and annoyed people who send you legitimate mail.
You mean apart from force them to use valid return addresses?
Also, many spammers already are using forged addresses. Many will set the sender address to one of the recipients.
I know. In fact I mentioned this in the comment you replied to.
Holding connections open will also increase server load,
So what? It's what servers are there for. Oh dear the server load increased but we get less spam so who cares? I dont see that many people complaining about the incresed server load that SpamAssasin causes.
and you haven't gotten past the fact that attempting to automatically send mail to people who email you will piss them off.
I don't think it will at all. So what you receive an email the first time you email someone (obviously you would use a white list after the first few emails).
Forging sender information is nothing new, and the disadvantages of your proposed system will likely outweight the advantages by far, as it rewards spammers who forge information and causes additional frustration to those who email you.
As mentioned before, and in my previous comment, I am well aware of this. However it could be used in conjunction with other methods.
Paul Graham's solutions attempt to reduce the chances that a given unwanted message will show up in your mailbox. By making smaller the chance that a given recipient will see a given message, the solutions proposed attempt to undermine the economics of spamming.
I think his idea is interesting, however how long is it before servers are immune to this type of DDoS?
The best your proposal will do is cause message delivery to take longer -- but it will do so in a way that will slow your servers and cause unnecessary collateral damage by causing increased load on others' machines.
No, the best thing is it forces the use of a valid return address. Obviously this will be vulnerable to address spoofing initially but it would mean the spammers have to do more work. Surely the ability to spoof addresses however is the real problem with spam.
When you can come up with a system which will cause fewer messages to be viewed by uninterested people without causing superfluous messages to be sent (as you propose) or cause more extra load to be imposed upon innocents than on those doing the spamming, write up an article and submit it to Slashdot.
And when you can sound less patronising, perhaps you should go work tech support again.
Any spam "solution" has to consider a two factors: Who is burdened? The system you suggest will send more unwanted mail to senders of legitimate communications. This system imposes an unavoidable burden upon everyone, as opposed to spam, which only currently burdens the recipient (ISP, user, etc.). Is it easy to circumvent? Were the system you suggest put into wide distribution, spammers could forge headers quite easily,
No. Any spam solution only has one factor to consider: Does it reduce spam? That's it. Years ago SpamAssasin would not have been practical for many people as the processing overhead would have been silly for the average user however in these days where any organisation can afford another box to be used just to run SA it makes sense.
or even set up a catch-all alias at their own site which would accept mail.
...thus using a valid domain that you could report.
It looks like in your case, the problem is worse than the solution.
Well excuse fucking me for trying.
Too many people do not put forward ideas because they are afraid of being patronised or shot down by other people. I'm a fan of the evolution of ide
What you're proposing is that you send a message in response to every message you receive. Furthermore, you're suggesting that the message you send in response have an invalid (random) return address.
Not invalid, randomly generated throwaway address. Perhaps use the supplied email address from the sender. For example - take the last spam sender I received a message from - "VividVideo2003@popstar.com". So mail comes in, relay holds the connection open while a mail from "VividVideo2003(at)popstar.com@mydomain.com" is sent back. It bounces back to the address (valid address). Connection logged and dropped. Temp mail address deleted.
The problem is going to be that they will start using forged valid addresses.
Why not just have the filter reply to the sending address with it's own randomly generated addy and auto drop those messages that use fake addresses that bounce? This could be done within seconds in most cases. The only issues here would be storage of the spam and how long you wait. It could be done by "keeping the spammer on the line" during the SMTP transfer also causing the transmission of spam to be delayed.
Could it work?
The majority of people are just plain stupid. Fair comment that people should not have to be computer experts to operate a computer. I have no idea how my car's engine works but do I really need to if I can drive the thing? Similarly you should not have to possess expert knowledge to write a letter in Word.
I've done my time working tech support, and I have some personal favorites.
First there was the person who filled in an order for a new telephone, had it approved and delivered and fitted then complained to the Helpdesk that their voicemail was still full.
I've had someone who didn't know their own name.
One of our departments called complaining that their phones were broken. We asked what made them think that they were broken and we were told "because they hadn't received any calls." (Nobody had called them and they didn't think to test by calling themselves).
My current all time favourite however has to be this caller who commented on the call queue music -
Luser: "Ohh that sounded like I was listening to Barry White then - but I can't have been can I?"
Tech: "Why's that?"
Luser:"Because he's dead."
It wasn't even Barry White - it was Thin Lizzy.
In server environements with stripped 15K cheetah SCSI drives, you'd worry more about stability than speed.
I think if I had stripped drives I'd be more worried about what sort of sicko strips a hard drive, and is he still hiding in the server room?
"So I'm reading all over about how companies are desperate for people who know how to work with chicks, especially now that they are so common down in the Mall. But how -- short of a course with a mate's girlfriend or some other exercise in expensive sex for hire -- can I acquire even the most basic information or experience with big tits? There doesn't seem to be many tutorials or introductions online; what would be nice, but I can't seem to find either, would be a simulator that would run on a PC. All I want to know is if I like enough to be seriously interested."
/.
You're in luck - there are several emulators available, however some of the older models are difficult to get hold of. You might want to look at this which was recently covered by
So flight does not exist?
Flight is the name given to what flying things do. You cannot have "flight" without something that flies.
Similarly you cannot have a "soul" without an infrastructure (i.e. the brain-mind).
Girlfriends have a low initial price, but a surprisingly high TCO.
I hear it's even more expensive if you fall outside of a support contract...
Looks like someone needs to get himself a girlfriend...
Computers can never be as smart as humans because of the simple fact that humans have souls which allow a creative nature.
Souls do not exist. The word "soul" is the name attributed to the emergent properties of the billions of neurons that are the human brain, much in the way that "flight" is the name given to the emergent properties of millions of mechanical and electrical parts that are a jet plane.
Why not have a system where to send mail, you HAVE to have a digital certificate issued by a trusted third party. The certs expire, and you have to provide legit details to get one. All mail sent is signed with your cert. Get too many complaints, and your cert is revoked. Servers only accept mail with valid certs. Allow cert blocking to block all mail from the same company regardless of route.
What do others think? Could it work?
Your problem is that Peachtree does not work with multiple users using a module at the same time. As many of us know here, it doesnt matter what you ask / tell / demand users to do, they will screw things up.
Can you not host the module(s) in question on different network shares and set the shares to only permit one concurrent user? Coupled with an auto-disconnection timeout that would ensure that only one user could use the module at the same time.
Alternatively perhaps use the Terminal Services functions of one of the XP machines for that module and make people use the terminal server - as XP only supports one TS user, it would ensure that only one user was in the module at any one time.
...actually I think the problem is since I downloaded it the author has updated the game by a point release - this is probably why my scores.dat doesnt work.
I just managed to get the guy over the wall too.
Hmm.. I downloaded the zip version if that makes a difference (the zip just extracts to a folder where you run it directly).
I just made a copy of the folder, deleted the scores.dat, ran it which generated a fresh scores.dat, quit, replaced the scores.dat with the one in question then ran the game and my old scores were back again.
Perhaps try it with the zip version?
203K!!! omg is that possible??
Actually, the replays are saved along with the score when you get a highscore. You can view them from the highscore list.
Haven't found a way to export the replays from the highscore list though...
Kewl!! I've saved my scores.dat - presumably if you replace your scores with this one you will be able to see my masterpiece....
Oh man the only thing that could make this better would be if the truck caught fire at the end.
Looks like I have a new favourite game.
If only you could save movies - I've got it so the guy sits on the roof, slides to the back as the truck goes up the ramps, gets bounced into the air then batted against the wall by the roof of the truck. He lends, then the truck lands its rear wheels on him. Superb!
Too many people use IM, so block it. This ignores the fact that many people using it may well have a valid, work-related reason for doing so.
This is true, however where I work the vast majority used IM for nothing constructive whatsoever.
I operate a simple policy - you get what you need. If you need IM then you simply need to ask for it. The idea is to prevent abuse, not make people's work lives difficult. I've found this works as people won't ask for something if they can't justify it, however if they have a legitimate reason I am more than happy to facilitate whatever they need.
Bottom line is that you are at work to work, not get paid for pissing about on the Internet.
My boss asked me just this morning about a way to monitor the about of time and sites visited by a few "problem" employees. I'm a DBA, and not very well versed in system administration, but how would one go about tracking and reporting this sort of information? I'm especially intrigued by the idea of a customized intranet page or (even better) a daily email sent to the employee and his supervisor
/.).
:)
Very very easy. For example so long as your intranet is set to use user authentication, then you know the users user account, which you can usually get to in server side code (in windows ASP it would be Request.ServerVariables("LOGON_USER") encapsulated in asp delimiters that get filtered out in
A good way to do it is log all web accesses by user account into a database, and since you then have the user account from the Intranet page, as a DBA I'm sure I don't need to tell you how you do the next part
Blcoking 1863 does work, as I use that method myself.
? suckerid=bIcycleSExfiEND&referrid=1269
... etc... you get the idea.
The only problem is that they will move on to the next messenger that works (like Yahoo! etc).
If you wanted to be really insidious and get people to self police themselves, log all messenger messages and put a new section on your companies Intranet user customised page - something like "Hello xxxx, here are your last few messenger messages:
[bIcycleSExfiEND] w00t!
[cute^babe7599] SO BABEE U WANA C MY PIC?
[bIcycleSExfiEND] yeah - send it
[cute^babe7599] http://www.crackparty.com/showpictrojanisemachine
...
Please contact the helpdesk if you would like a complete log.
Have a nice day."
...and below that:
Here are your last few web accesses:
A year or two ago my DSL connection was cut off due to a billing cock up - the amount of work I got done during the down time was astounding.
..."many aluminium plants are located near hydroelectric facilities (often built for that specific purpose), so the production of aluminium us perfectly sustainable too, just so long as it keeps raining."
Uh.. dude - you dont make aluminium out of water...
...cut to spammers setting up premium rate numbers to put in their SPAM messages in the hope that people will spam them back by calling them all the time.
...Now you can sell your own electronically encoded tunes on a gigantic global network that has a massive ad campaign behind it, for $40. Good for CD Baby. They negotiated the deal with Apple and seem to be happy to provide the connection. The terms are more than reasonable. Hell, for $40, I'd make an album just to *see* if I had any musical talent that anyone else appreciated. (er, I don't.)...
You are of course assuming that Apple will pick your track to distribute - this is not the case and it is mentioned on the CDBaby site - they will submit it for approval, however companies such as Apple are under no obligation to publish it.