Your opinion, apparently, is "100%", and facts won't affect that. If you feel that way, why are you still using a computer, heating the atmosphere unnecessarily? Unless you're solar, wind, or nuclear powered, you are contributing to the emission of tons of CO2 from power plants around the country. Or, are you one of those "I know what's good for all of you" types, who will never sacrifice anything of theirs to fix what they perceive as the problem?
No, I am not a climatologist. And I'm not a formally-trained scientist, either. But I know people who are... And, guess what? They aren't as convinced as you that man is solely responsible for anything regarding earth's climate. Man didn't cause the desertification of the Sahara region, but it happened... Same with many other things that we're told are about to happen to our planet, because we caused it.
"The ice is melting in Antarctica! And Greenland, too!" Of course, the word "again" is curiously absent from those proclaimations, because it has happened before, and will happen again, whether we drive SUVs or Vespas.
Hundreds of years ago, millions of buffalo, elk, and moose roamed what would become the United States, all being flatulant and putting methane into the air. Man replaced them with cows, doing the same thing. We've reduced the number of manure-generating horses (another methane source), replacing them with cars (potential methane consumers, CO2 emitters).
And, of course, let's not forget the methane-bearing deposits off our shores, which could collapse at any time, triggering a dramatic climate shift because a dolphin farted at the wrong time, wrong place...
I realize you've made your mind up and closed down the inbound information conduits, but others haven't. There may be things we can do to slow down the temperature increase, but Nature has been building up to this for a long, long time... and puny little man isn't going to get in the way.
So your position is to continue to rape the planet, full speed ahead?
Funny, I don't remember saying that. Hmm... Re-reading my words, I see that I did not say that. And I don't believe in that, in any case, because I'm too frugal a person to want to waste stuff.
But, I'm also a realistic person. There are things that can be changed, and things that can not be changed. Extending resources is not necessarily going to "fix" the planet's climate, but it will save me money... A big factor.
Spending some time relocating my data sources, I discovered I made an error in the periods of various factors affecting long-term climate. The wobble of the axis is on a 41,000 year period, our orbit oscillates closer to the sun every 22,000 years, and there's a 100,000 year period over which our orbit changes inclination relative to the solar plane... which changes the amount of solar dust and rocks we accumulate.
And a graph of temps since life evolved on the planet I found midway down this page shows that we're pretty close to the bottom (cool), working our way up to "average". I think that, if you check around, you'll find that man didn't evolve until pretty late in the scheme of things, and all of the really hot times on this planet came before bipeds started building cars and factories!
Excuse me, but.... The earth has been warming for several thousand years. And it is following a trend line that oscillates back and forth, and has for millions of years. Check some of the data from ice and ocean bottom cores taken by researchers the world over, which show how earth has been much hotter and much colder than man has recorded in all of our history.
There are dozens of major factors in determining what earth's mean temperature is. The cycles of these factors range from 22 years (sunspots) to 10,000+ years (wobble of the axis of rotation). The sun's radiation is far from constant, and our orbit moves around a bit as we're influenced by other planets over thousands of years. Sometimes these factors "conspire" to make ice ages, and sometimes they "conspire" to make hot ages. And sometimes, you just have periodic droughts and floods, while the temperature wanders all over the place.
Green house gasses can be a contributing factor... in fact, one of the theories for how earth pulled out of a catastrophic ice age that froze even the equator is that volcanos spewed out enought clorine and CO2 to warm things up enough to melt the ice, tipping things back towards a hot age. But, the surface of the planet is warming at a faster rate than the atmosphere, which shouldn't happen if it's "just" green house gasses trapping all the heat. In fact, last I heard, the surface is rising at twice the rate it should for atmospheric heat retention to be the cause.
Earth radiates heat into space as a "black body", and that rate is more constant than the amount of heat going in. Ever notice the reports of auroras seen in Texas? That's a sign of significantly increased solar activity... as well as a sign of a weakening electical field around the planet (signalling a probably [and overdue] magnetic pole reversal). Neither of these are Bush's fault, or your fault, or my fault, or anyone's fault... They just happen. But they're factors in earth's temperature.
As another poster pointed out - these peat bogs had to have been warm to have formed in the first place, and they're made of plants that removed the carbon they contain from the atmosphere thousands or millions of years before man was around. Did man cause the ice age that froze these lands in the first place? If not, why do you presume that we caused the re-melting of them?
I have a month-old business, personal-handout-only E-Mail address, and allready spam is rolling in.
Why should you be any different? I have an address that has never been published, has never sent an email, and was only established because the DSL "required" it. It had spam in it the first time I checked the mailbox!
A search of Amazon shows only 36 hits for "dvd-audio" in the music section, and several of those are actually SACD, not DVD-Audio. Wow. Think of the losses! It could run in the tens of thousands of Yen!
Silly slashdot reader, why don't you see it? People need a good backup system to save their important stuff for restoration after Norton AV blows it up big time!
And the protesters to whom you're referring are...? Have you ever been to a public demonstration? Or are you just toeing the party line, threatened by people who actually take to the streets to change things?
Primarily, people as depicted by a (largely sympathetic) press, but yes, I have encountered public demonstrations, and been involved with groups who decided it was the "way to get things done". In each case, the reality of why people decided to participate had little to do with how the protest was reported, because the agenda of the organizers didn't quite jibe with what the people were told.
By and large, the people involved in protests are sincere, if not exactly "up" on what is going on. Large protests are rarely going to portray what those people are there for - it's going to be usurped by a few who get the attention of the media. Do you, for example, know why the typical man attending the so-called "Million Man March" was there, or do you only know what various "leaders" of it claim they were there for? Have you noticed that the leaders have re-defined the purpose of the protest as their political needs changed?
But many of the issues I've seen protested like the World Bank, G7/G8 Summit, lumber clear cutting and strip mining operations have actually made a lot of sense, because the damage from some of these operations has been extensive, while the benefits have only helped a few.
"Lumber clear cutting" is a good one to work on. The protests aren't just about someone clearing a mountainside of trees, killing all the birds and frogs and ???. Some protest ALL lumber harvesting, even of trees planted specifically for harvesting, like a long-term corn crop. If the protesters aren't going to picket farmers for "clear cutting" their wheat and corn, why do they do it when lumber companies harvest their crop?
Some groups got the forestry agencies to stop doing preventative burns for years; it almost wiped out new growth of certain species of trees that couldn't grow without periodic thinning of competing species by fire. There were many protests when the burn policy was put back into effect... but the forest proved the protesters wrong.
About half the forest land leveled by Mt. St. Helens was privately owned, by lumber companies. The other half is federal. The federal lands have been left to natural restoration, while the evil lumber companies salvaged the wood they could and replanted. Guess where most of the animal life has returned to... yep, the "crop land".
Patrick Moore has a few things to say about these protests, since he used to partake in them.
Or would you prefer to continue separatism, child labor, or black lung?
Separatism doesn't seem to react as well to protests as it does to education and economic factors. Child labor has only been bannished from areas where economics made it possible to do so; it's still prevalent in poor parts of the world, where the picketing of Nike is only seen as the reason the factory providing jobs had to close. And the "cure" for black lung (better technology) also reduced the need for jobs in the mining industry... putting a lot of marginally-skilled people out of work in areas that didn't have other types of jobs to fall back upon.
Much as some people hate to admit it, economics moves the world. And many of the protesters are protesting that fact, directly or indirectly. But it is the prosperity that gives them the luxury of protesting.... Those who can't see beyond today's paycheck don't spend much time worrying about how the harvesting of the lumber for the house they live in affected the spotted owl's ability to make nests in KMart signs...
But we also need to put them under great scrutiny, or we'll have another DDT on our hands.
Yes, heaven forbid we allow a few mis-informed protesters contribute to the deaths of millions of people by advocating the knee-jerk banning something that could have prevented it.
The protesters are protesting something that isn't even nanotechnology
Sounds like any of thousands of protests going on world-wide. Protesters who haven't a clue about what they're protesting, but protesting it none the less. It makes them feel important. Facts don't enter into the equation.
A battery is an energy storage device, while fusion is supposed to be an energy source.
Could be said of just all matter... Gasoline is a form of energy storage, as is wood, trans uranic fissile elements, di-hydrogen oxide, etc. All store energy, and release (or absorb) it in certain ways.
There have been several German PHPBB users asking how to disable the storage of IPs with messages on their boards, because saving that information is a violation of German law. Personally, I think it is ridiculous, but they're very serious about it.
These actions would just be extending that to the ISPs themselves. If they have no need for the data, it must be disposed of, or not collected in the first place.
Of course, given that this means there is no accountability through the ISP for the actions of users, I know I won't be allowing random IPs from Germany to connect to my email servers!
I've never found anyone who cared about a report of someone trying to scam their customers, or about someone running an illegal operation on their network. My most recent attempt to make such a report made me think so highly of the company involved that I hope they're found to be complicite in any criminal cases that might come down the line from the scams...
There are two classes of scam IPs, in my experience. Those in SE Asia (Korea, China, etc), and those that are compromised machines here in the U.S. In March I found one of the latter - a church organization in Virginia's webmail server had had an extra script inserted into it, hidden in the graphics directory. It was a hosted service, from a big-name ISP, according to ARIN's records. I reported it to their security people, with details of what directory the script was in, which customer's site had been compromised, etc.
Just over a month passed, and I got an angry email from NaviSite.com's security department, claiming the company I'd sent the message to (dellhost.com) "is not a navisite company nor is it one of our customers nor is the ip address... assigned to, hosted by, routed by, or used in any way by NaviSite or any of the companies that we are affiliated with." They followed that with, "Misdirected spam complaints are not much better than actual spam."
Even though I'd not sent the complaint to NaviSite in the first place, I sent back, "Oh? You better tell ARIN (copy of ARIN record attached) and your own DNS servers (copy of reverse-DNS from their server, announcing that it was one of their customers) that it isn't your subnet, because they disagree with you!"
Let's see, I should get their "timely response" in about 20 more days...
About the most productive thing you can do with a scam mail like this is to find a convenient open proxy to hide behind, disable java and javascript in your browser so they can't use it to filter out bad entries, load the link, and start pumping fake information in. PINs with letters are great. If everyone did this, giving them 10 or 100 fake entries for every valid one, it would at least increase the chances of them getting caught, as they try to run scams with the bad info!
The link in the email is to a page that looks exactly like your bank's page, but the information you submit goes to the crooks.
Often, the sites even have Jen-You-Whine graphics from the banks/institutions being scammed, because the real site owners don't even take the precaution of checking the brower referrer header. If you request (say) a Citibank.com graphic and the referring page isn't one one that belongs to Citibank, then it should come up with a graphic that includes "NOT A LEGITIMATE CITIBANK SITE" across it. In many cases, the scammers creating the site would have the graphic cached, and never notice the difference themselves.
Sure, it's easy to fake a referrer, but why would an innocent user do so? They would simply be visiting the link in an email, not trying to hide their identity. The site itself couldn't cause your browser to send fake a referrer header, so it would at least make the scammers work harder.
it used to be easy to toss out the trawlers based on their spelling alone.
For me, it's still easy. If it says it is from any sort of "phinancial institution", it's a phishing exercise. Email is one thing that I do NOT give to banks, credit card companies, or other companies that deal with my money. If a bank ever tells me that I authorized something to be transfered via electronic means, they damn well better be ready to provide restitution, because I do not and will not authorize any such transfer, except while standing in a bank officer's office with photo ID and a signature check.
The two exceptions to the "no email" rule are eBay and PayPal... but they each have an unpublished, only-for-them address, so anything claiming to be from them that doesn't come to their special address is automatically tagged & bagged.
I also monitor our mail servers, and 90% of the time, as the phishers try a new bank (Regions.com is currently the most popular), their first target are several spam traps we have. So, we can add them to our "soft bounce" list within minutes, and very little gets through.
However, I will say that I've stopped reporting such emails to banks, eBay and PayPal, since they rarely seem interested. Most of the reports are bounced by their systems as spam!
The reserved mailbox name "postmaster" may be used in a RCPT command without domain qualification (see section 4.1.1.3) and MUST be accepted if so used.
That simply says, "if the sender says RCPT-TO:<postmaster>, rather than RCPT-TO:<postmaster@thisdomain.tld>, you must accept that.". I accept mail addressed to postmaster plus postmaster@ for our domains. That doesn't mean I have to accept the content of that mail, and can't reject it based upon content or sender. It is a valid and accepted address. It just doesn't accept spam.
No server should accept mail unless it knows it can forward it to a destination. Far to many accept just about anything for the domain, then decide whether or not they can deliver it later.
One of the big necessities we had when picking our current system was that it had to be able to validate an address during the SMTP exchange; it does this by having access to the same database the mail storage back-end uses for deciding where to stuff the message after it is accepted. If it isn't in the database, the message gets rejected before it enters the hard-working parts of the system.
That's just one of the gauntlets it passes through on our system, but it stops 20% of the traffic. Our internal block lists get another 50%, all with the speed of a few SQL queries. The 30% that's left do not impose much load on the other tests, and our whitelists jump over the later tests for recognized senders.
But, if you are like some universities and businesses, and can't reject ANYTHING due to policy, it's a moot point, anyway...
Their reasoning was that I was on a 'dynamic' IP address range.
You'd have a hard time convincing me to not block you, too, if your IP is truly dynamic. Yes, I know that not all "dynamic" IP blocks are really dynamic, and some ISPs (SBC comes to mind...) are real dicks when it comes to doing proper reverse-DNS for static IPs on business DSLs (SBC even refuses to accept mail from static IPs on SBC DSLs!)...
But over 99% of all DSL traffic to our servers is SPAM or WORMS, and that percentage includes the traffic from the DSL-based mail servers I maintain for clients.
If you've never sent something to us before and you're in an ISP's DSL block, you're going into a 451 bounce hold until I can gather more information. Your MX record better match the IP sending to me, or it's getting classified as an open proxy, and the bounce becomes a 554. Show signs of legitimacy (proper MX records, SPF is nice, etc.), and I'll add your IP to our whitelists, and it doesn't matter WHOSE RBL you're in, your mail will go through.
But don't feel bad. I do business in Mexico and Japan, plus have customers who deal with most of South America, but those countries are all in our "soft bounce" list, for the same sort of investigation.
Have you looked at AOL's SPF records? I recently did, because I was getting spoofed AOL mail through our SPF-checking server. Here it is, from their SPF page:
Therein lies your two parties, and the resulting "conspiracy".
Ah, so, in your world, you're a co-conspirator when you do what your boss asks you to do. The boss says, "Nail that board up there!", and, if you do it, you are part of a conspiracy to nail the board up. If the boss says, "Write a subroutine to extract email addresses from the database", you are conspiring with him to do it.
In my world, that's called "following the orders of the employer", not "engaging in a conspiracy to accomplish the goals of the company".
How is this different than a "conspiracy" between top executives, marketers, and various employees at Microsoft?
Well, let's see. If Bill Gates says, "Make MSN search favor our software", that's different in that Mr. Bill can do just about anything he damn well pleases, so long as it doesn't hurt the stock value.
On the other hand, if the local dog catcher gets a burr under his saddle about your poodle, he can't order the FBI to start an investigation into your online activites, because he doesn't have that power. He could conspire with a friend of his that has a friend in the governor's office who has a friend at the IRS who knows someone at the FBI to get them to "look into things".
Unless, of course, you're going to assign the description "conspiracy" to following your bosses order, there is a big difference. Oh, I see; it's conspiracy because there's the implied threat/benefit thing... "You know, if you do this for me, I'll continue to pay your wages."
Who says conspiracies require more than one party?
Um, let's see... The LAW, for one. Oh, and the DICTIONARY, for another.
If I decide to not sell you a car, and instruct my employees to not sell you a car, I am not conspiring to do/not do anything. I have decided to not do it. My employees are not part of any conspiracy; they're simply implementing a company policy to not sell a car to you.
On the other hand, if I convince (or try to convince) other dealers to not sell you a car, that would be "conspiring", since I'm soliciting others to do/not do something.
If you ass-u-me that there is only one "government", then yes, there would be no conspiracy.
But, last time I checked, there were hundreds of departments within most government "units", all under different levels of control. The FBI, for example, doesn't control the local library board, so a conspiracy between these two entities could exist to prevent you from borrowing a particular book.
But, if the FBI did things independent of the library's knowledge to keep that book from arriving at your library so that you could borrow it, it wouldn't be a conspiracy. Just as Microsoft favouring IIS sites without the knowledge of IIS operators doesn't make them part of some "conspiracy".
No, there is no conspiracy. There may be a company policy, but conspiracies require more than one party. MSN is part of Microsoft, so this isn't the case.
Now, if Yahoo or Google were doing it, too, that could be a conspiracy.
Political contributions were judged by some people in Washington, often referred to as "The Supremes", to be a form of political speech, exercised by supporting those candidates whose views mirror your own. "Political speech" is what the First Amendment particularly protects.
Of course, another group in Washington decided to pass laws that impose limits upon how much political free speech you can do about any particular federal candidate, and later passed more laws saying you couldn't do so much free speaking when it comes to the party of your favourite candidates.
But they get around that by allowing you to send an unlimited amount of free speech to a licensed-by-the-government organization to spread it around TV and radio stations, so long as no one can tie the control of those organizations back to the political parties or candidates. Which is going to get very interesting here soon, since one of those organizations, MoveOn.org, is now claiming they're going to "take back control" of one of those parties...
And, of course, none of this takes into account money spent by people hiring relatives of political office holders to sit in Washington and lobby congress, getting very favourable legislation passed with the help of their personal Senator or Representative.
Slashdot Mirror
Your opinion, apparently, is "100%", and facts won't affect that. If you feel that way, why are you still using a computer, heating the atmosphere unnecessarily? Unless you're solar, wind, or nuclear powered, you are contributing to the emission of tons of CO2 from power plants around the country. Or, are you one of those "I know what's good for all of you" types, who will never sacrifice anything of theirs to fix what they perceive as the problem?
No, I am not a climatologist. And I'm not a formally-trained scientist, either. But I know people who are... And, guess what? They aren't as convinced as you that man is solely responsible for anything regarding earth's climate. Man didn't cause the desertification of the Sahara region, but it happened... Same with many other things that we're told are about to happen to our planet, because we caused it.
"The ice is melting in Antarctica! And Greenland, too!" Of course, the word "again" is curiously absent from those proclaimations, because it has happened before, and will happen again, whether we drive SUVs or Vespas.
Hundreds of years ago, millions of buffalo, elk, and moose roamed what would become the United States, all being flatulant and putting methane into the air. Man replaced them with cows, doing the same thing. We've reduced the number of manure-generating horses (another methane source), replacing them with cars (potential methane consumers, CO2 emitters).
And, of course, let's not forget the methane-bearing deposits off our shores, which could collapse at any time, triggering a dramatic climate shift because a dolphin farted at the wrong time, wrong place...
I realize you've made your mind up and closed down the inbound information conduits, but others haven't. There may be things we can do to slow down the temperature increase, but Nature has been building up to this for a long, long time... and puny little man isn't going to get in the way.
Funny, I don't remember saying that. Hmm... Re-reading my words, I see that I did not say that. And I don't believe in that, in any case, because I'm too frugal a person to want to waste stuff.
But, I'm also a realistic person. There are things that can be changed, and things that can not be changed. Extending resources is not necessarily going to "fix" the planet's climate, but it will save me money... A big factor.
Spending some time relocating my data sources, I discovered I made an error in the periods of various factors affecting long-term climate. The wobble of the axis is on a 41,000 year period, our orbit oscillates closer to the sun every 22,000 years, and there's a 100,000 year period over which our orbit changes inclination relative to the solar plane... which changes the amount of solar dust and rocks we accumulate.
And a graph of temps since life evolved on the planet I found midway down this page shows that we're pretty close to the bottom (cool), working our way up to "average". I think that, if you check around, you'll find that man didn't evolve until pretty late in the scheme of things, and all of the really hot times on this planet came before bipeds started building cars and factories!
There are dozens of major factors in determining what earth's mean temperature is. The cycles of these factors range from 22 years (sunspots) to 10,000+ years (wobble of the axis of rotation). The sun's radiation is far from constant, and our orbit moves around a bit as we're influenced by other planets over thousands of years. Sometimes these factors "conspire" to make ice ages, and sometimes they "conspire" to make hot ages. And sometimes, you just have periodic droughts and floods, while the temperature wanders all over the place.
Green house gasses can be a contributing factor... in fact, one of the theories for how earth pulled out of a catastrophic ice age that froze even the equator is that volcanos spewed out enought clorine and CO2 to warm things up enough to melt the ice, tipping things back towards a hot age. But, the surface of the planet is warming at a faster rate than the atmosphere, which shouldn't happen if it's "just" green house gasses trapping all the heat. In fact, last I heard, the surface is rising at twice the rate it should for atmospheric heat retention to be the cause.
Earth radiates heat into space as a "black body", and that rate is more constant than the amount of heat going in. Ever notice the reports of auroras seen in Texas? That's a sign of significantly increased solar activity... as well as a sign of a weakening electical field around the planet (signalling a probably [and overdue] magnetic pole reversal). Neither of these are Bush's fault, or your fault, or my fault, or anyone's fault... They just happen. But they're factors in earth's temperature.
As another poster pointed out - these peat bogs had to have been warm to have formed in the first place, and they're made of plants that removed the carbon they contain from the atmosphere thousands or millions of years before man was around. Did man cause the ice age that froze these lands in the first place? If not, why do you presume that we caused the re-melting of them?
Why should you be any different? I have an address that has never been published, has never sent an email, and was only established because the DSL "required" it. It had spam in it the first time I checked the mailbox!
A search of Amazon shows only 36 hits for "dvd-audio" in the music section, and several of those are actually SACD, not DVD-Audio. Wow. Think of the losses! It could run in the tens of thousands of Yen!
Silly slashdot reader, why don't you see it? People need a good backup system to save their important stuff for restoration after Norton AV blows it up big time!
Primarily, people as depicted by a (largely sympathetic) press, but yes, I have encountered public demonstrations, and been involved with groups who decided it was the "way to get things done". In each case, the reality of why people decided to participate had little to do with how the protest was reported, because the agenda of the organizers didn't quite jibe with what the people were told.
By and large, the people involved in protests are sincere, if not exactly "up" on what is going on. Large protests are rarely going to portray what those people are there for - it's going to be usurped by a few who get the attention of the media. Do you, for example, know why the typical man attending the so-called "Million Man March" was there, or do you only know what various "leaders" of it claim they were there for? Have you noticed that the leaders have re-defined the purpose of the protest as their political needs changed?
"Lumber clear cutting" is a good one to work on. The protests aren't just about someone clearing a mountainside of trees, killing all the birds and frogs and ???. Some protest ALL lumber harvesting, even of trees planted specifically for harvesting, like a long-term corn crop. If the protesters aren't going to picket farmers for "clear cutting" their wheat and corn, why do they do it when lumber companies harvest their crop?
Some groups got the forestry agencies to stop doing preventative burns for years; it almost wiped out new growth of certain species of trees that couldn't grow without periodic thinning of competing species by fire. There were many protests when the burn policy was put back into effect... but the forest proved the protesters wrong.
About half the forest land leveled by Mt. St. Helens was privately owned, by lumber companies. The other half is federal. The federal lands have been left to natural restoration, while the evil lumber companies salvaged the wood they could and replanted. Guess where most of the animal life has returned to... yep, the "crop land".
Patrick Moore has a few things to say about these protests, since he used to partake in them.
Or would you prefer to continue separatism, child labor, or black lung?
Separatism doesn't seem to react as well to protests as it does to education and economic factors. Child labor has only been bannished from areas where economics made it possible to do so; it's still prevalent in poor parts of the world, where the picketing of Nike is only seen as the reason the factory providing jobs had to close. And the "cure" for black lung (better technology) also reduced the need for jobs in the mining industry... putting a lot of marginally-skilled people out of work in areas that didn't have other types of jobs to fall back upon.
Much as some people hate to admit it, economics moves the world. And many of the protesters are protesting that fact, directly or indirectly. But it is the prosperity that gives them the luxury of protesting.... Those who can't see beyond today's paycheck don't spend much time worrying about how the harvesting of the lumber for the house they live in affected the spotted owl's ability to make nests in KMart signs...
Yes, heaven forbid we allow a few mis-informed protesters contribute to the deaths of millions of people by advocating the knee-jerk banning something that could have prevented it.
Sounds like any of thousands of protests going on world-wide. Protesters who haven't a clue about what they're protesting, but protesting it none the less. It makes them feel important. Facts don't enter into the equation.
Could be said of just all matter... Gasoline is a form of energy storage, as is wood, trans uranic fissile elements, di-hydrogen oxide, etc. All store energy, and release (or absorb) it in certain ways.
These actions would just be extending that to the ISPs themselves. If they have no need for the data, it must be disposed of, or not collected in the first place.
Of course, given that this means there is no accountability through the ISP for the actions of users, I know I won't be allowing random IPs from Germany to connect to my email servers!
There are two classes of scam IPs, in my experience. Those in SE Asia (Korea, China, etc), and those that are compromised machines here in the U.S. In March I found one of the latter - a church organization in Virginia's webmail server had had an extra script inserted into it, hidden in the graphics directory. It was a hosted service, from a big-name ISP, according to ARIN's records. I reported it to their security people, with details of what directory the script was in, which customer's site had been compromised, etc.
Just over a month passed, and I got an angry email from NaviSite.com's security department, claiming the company I'd sent the message to (dellhost.com) "is not a navisite company nor is it one of our customers nor is the ip address ... assigned to, hosted by, routed by, or used in any way by NaviSite or any of the companies that we are affiliated with." They followed that with, "Misdirected spam complaints are not much better than actual spam."
Even though I'd not sent the complaint to NaviSite in the first place, I sent back, "Oh? You better tell ARIN (copy of ARIN record attached) and your own DNS servers (copy of reverse-DNS from their server, announcing that it was one of their customers) that it isn't your subnet, because they disagree with you!"
Let's see, I should get their "timely response" in about 20 more days...
About the most productive thing you can do with a scam mail like this is to find a convenient open proxy to hide behind, disable java and javascript in your browser so they can't use it to filter out bad entries, load the link, and start pumping fake information in. PINs with letters are great. If everyone did this, giving them 10 or 100 fake entries for every valid one, it would at least increase the chances of them getting caught, as they try to run scams with the bad info!
Often, the sites even have Jen-You-Whine graphics from the banks/institutions being scammed, because the real site owners don't even take the precaution of checking the brower referrer header. If you request (say) a Citibank.com graphic and the referring page isn't one one that belongs to Citibank, then it should come up with a graphic that includes "NOT A LEGITIMATE CITIBANK SITE" across it. In many cases, the scammers creating the site would have the graphic cached, and never notice the difference themselves.
Sure, it's easy to fake a referrer, but why would an innocent user do so? They would simply be visiting the link in an email, not trying to hide their identity. The site itself couldn't cause your browser to send fake a referrer header, so it would at least make the scammers work harder.
For me, it's still easy. If it says it is from any sort of "phinancial institution", it's a phishing exercise. Email is one thing that I do NOT give to banks, credit card companies, or other companies that deal with my money. If a bank ever tells me that I authorized something to be transfered via electronic means, they damn well better be ready to provide restitution, because I do not and will not authorize any such transfer, except while standing in a bank officer's office with photo ID and a signature check.
The two exceptions to the "no email" rule are eBay and PayPal... but they each have an unpublished, only-for-them address, so anything claiming to be from them that doesn't come to their special address is automatically tagged & bagged.
I also monitor our mail servers, and 90% of the time, as the phishers try a new bank (Regions.com is currently the most popular), their first target are several spam traps we have. So, we can add them to our "soft bounce" list within minutes, and very little gets through.
However, I will say that I've stopped reporting such emails to banks, eBay and PayPal, since they rarely seem interested. Most of the reports are bounced by their systems as spam!
That simply says, "if the sender says RCPT-TO:<postmaster>, rather than RCPT-TO:<postmaster@thisdomain.tld>, you must accept that.". I accept mail addressed to postmaster plus postmaster@ for our domains. That doesn't mean I have to accept the content of that mail, and can't reject it based upon content or sender. It is a valid and accepted address. It just doesn't accept spam.
One of the big necessities we had when picking our current system was that it had to be able to validate an address during the SMTP exchange; it does this by having access to the same database the mail storage back-end uses for deciding where to stuff the message after it is accepted. If it isn't in the database, the message gets rejected before it enters the hard-working parts of the system.
That's just one of the gauntlets it passes through on our system, but it stops 20% of the traffic. Our internal block lists get another 50%, all with the speed of a few SQL queries. The 30% that's left do not impose much load on the other tests, and our whitelists jump over the later tests for recognized senders.
But, if you are like some universities and businesses, and can't reject ANYTHING due to policy, it's a moot point, anyway...
You'd have a hard time convincing me to not block you, too, if your IP is truly dynamic. Yes, I know that not all "dynamic" IP blocks are really dynamic, and some ISPs (SBC comes to mind...) are real dicks when it comes to doing proper reverse-DNS for static IPs on business DSLs (SBC even refuses to accept mail from static IPs on SBC DSLs!)...
But over 99% of all DSL traffic to our servers is SPAM or WORMS, and that percentage includes the traffic from the DSL-based mail servers I maintain for clients.
If you've never sent something to us before and you're in an ISP's DSL block, you're going into a 451 bounce hold until I can gather more information. Your MX record better match the IP sending to me, or it's getting classified as an open proxy, and the bounce becomes a 554. Show signs of legitimacy (proper MX records, SPF is nice, etc.), and I'll add your IP to our whitelists, and it doesn't matter WHOSE RBL you're in, your mail will go through.
But don't feel bad. I do business in Mexico and Japan, plus have customers who deal with most of South America, but those countries are all in our "soft bounce" list, for the same sort of investigation.
Have you looked at AOL's SPF records? I recently did, because I was getting spoofed AOL mail through our SPF-checking server. Here it is, from their SPF page:
The "?all" at the end says, "if it isn't from one of our approved servers, don't block it anyway."
Ah, so, in your world, you're a co-conspirator when you do what your boss asks you to do. The boss says, "Nail that board up there!", and, if you do it, you are part of a conspiracy to nail the board up. If the boss says, "Write a subroutine to extract email addresses from the database", you are conspiring with him to do it.
In my world, that's called "following the orders of the employer", not "engaging in a conspiracy to accomplish the goals of the company".
Well, let's see. If Bill Gates says, "Make MSN search favor our software", that's different in that Mr. Bill can do just about anything he damn well pleases, so long as it doesn't hurt the stock value.
On the other hand, if the local dog catcher gets a burr under his saddle about your poodle, he can't order the FBI to start an investigation into your online activites, because he doesn't have that power. He could conspire with a friend of his that has a friend in the governor's office who has a friend at the IRS who knows someone at the FBI to get them to "look into things".
Unless, of course, you're going to assign the description "conspiracy" to following your bosses order, there is a big difference. Oh, I see; it's conspiracy because there's the implied threat/benefit thing... "You know, if you do this for me, I'll continue to pay your wages."
Um, let's see... The LAW, for one. Oh, and the DICTIONARY, for another.
If I decide to not sell you a car, and instruct my employees to not sell you a car, I am not conspiring to do/not do anything. I have decided to not do it. My employees are not part of any conspiracy; they're simply implementing a company policy to not sell a car to you.
On the other hand, if I convince (or try to convince) other dealers to not sell you a car, that would be "conspiring", since I'm soliciting others to do/not do something.
But, last time I checked, there were hundreds of departments within most government "units", all under different levels of control. The FBI, for example, doesn't control the local library board, so a conspiracy between these two entities could exist to prevent you from borrowing a particular book.
But, if the FBI did things independent of the library's knowledge to keep that book from arriving at your library so that you could borrow it, it wouldn't be a conspiracy. Just as Microsoft favouring IIS sites without the knowledge of IIS operators doesn't make them part of some "conspiracy".
No, there is no conspiracy. There may be a company policy , but conspiracies require more than one party. MSN is part of Microsoft, so this isn't the case.
Now, if Yahoo or Google were doing it, too, that could be a conspiracy.
Of course, another group in Washington decided to pass laws that impose limits upon how much political free speech you can do about any particular federal candidate, and later passed more laws saying you couldn't do so much free speaking when it comes to the party of your favourite candidates.
But they get around that by allowing you to send an unlimited amount of free speech to a licensed-by-the-government organization to spread it around TV and radio stations, so long as no one can tie the control of those organizations back to the political parties or candidates. Which is going to get very interesting here soon, since one of those organizations, MoveOn.org, is now claiming they're going to "take back control" of one of those parties...
And, of course, none of this takes into account money spent by people hiring relatives of political office holders to sit in Washington and lobby congress, getting very favourable legislation passed with the help of their personal Senator or Representative.