I'd say something like, "Hey, man! That sounds like an incredibly fun plan you got there! I sure hope it works out for you, cuz it didn't work out for me. But who knows, you're probably smarter than I was, and you probably don't mind pain as much as I did, so it'll probably work out better for you than me."
This is basically the same thing as, "You're screwing up, dude." But the difference is that it's delivered in a way that:
Puts me (the message deliverer) on the same side as my 12 year-old self. I'm saying, "I support your decision and I hope it's right", instead of "You're wrong".
Forces my 12yo self to think about his own decisions, instead of being angry at my imposed decisions." I'm saying, "You choose what you think will work for you", instead of, "This is what you MUST do".
Gives my 12yo self the freedom to enjoy/suffer the consequences of his decision. Which is what, at the time, I desperatly wanted. I'm saying "Here's freedom, along with the good and bad that comes with it", instead of "Here's an 18 year lecture series on all the bad things that will happen when you make bad decisions".
I'd *like* to think that if I thought an adult wasn't trying to control me, that I'd have a better shot at actually hearing what they were trying to say. Which is, "You're the primary one who's going to enjoy or suffer from your decisions, so choose wisely. If you have any questions, I'll be happy to take a run at them. If not, that's cool, too. Good luck." I'd like to think that this sort of message would get me to think about what I was doing instead of just blindly reacting to what an authority figure was telling me.
But who knows? In retrospect my parents were *MUCH* smarter than they seemed at the time, and they weren't able to get through.
Religion is based on faith, that's what defines it.
Once you start having to 'justify' your beliefs, you have lost faith, and most religions (esp. Judeo-Christian ones) would not consider you a member based on your 'lack of faith'. No one gets into heaven (if your religion happens to have one) if they don't have complete faith.
As a Christian, I can agree with you that I can't prove that there's a God. However, I think you might have a misunderstanding of what constitutes "faith". My faith is not based on nothing. I don't believe in God, despite the evidence. I believe in God because I think there's pretty good evidence to support such a belief. For example, I've had experiences that, try as I might, I can't explain without the existence of God. Of course, that's not particularly compelling to you, but just because I can't prove something to you does not make it unreasonable for me to believe it.
For example, my children this morning, woke up at about 6:45am. I let them jump around in their room until about 7:15am, when I finally dragged my tail out of bed and got them, fed them, and sent them off to school. Unfortunately, if I were asked to prove this, I would find it to be very difficult. I suppose that there may be some way to actually prove it, but I know of none, so I'm content in saying that I can NOT prove it to you. That doesn't make me any less certain that it's true. My experiences compell me to believe these things regardless of whether or not I can prove it to someone else.
CS Lewis, in "Mere Christianity", gave a much better description of how faith is not the thing that most people think it is. That faith is not an independant thing from reason and rationality. Here's an excerpt:
I MUST TALK IN THIS CHAPTER about what the Christians call Faith. Roughly speaking, the word Faith seems to be used by Christians in two senses or on two levels, and I will take them in turn. In the first sense it means simply Belief--accepting or regarding as true the doctrines of Christianity. That is fairly simple. But what does puzzle people--at least it used to puzzle me--is the fact that Christians regard faith in this sense as a virtue. I used to ask how on earth it can be a virtue--what is there moral or immoral about believing or not believing a set of statements? Obviously, I used to say, a sane man accepts or rejects any statement, not because he wants or does not want to, but because the evidence seems to him good or bad. If he were mistaken about the goodness or badness of the evidence that would not mean he was a bad man, but only that he was not very clever. And if he thought the evidence bad but tried to force himself to believe in spite of it, that would be merely stupid.
Well, I think I still take that view. But what I did not see then--and a good many people do not see still--was this. I was assuming that if the human mind once accepts a thing as true it will automatically go on regarding it as true, until some real reason for reconsidering it turns up. In fact, I was assuming that the human mind is completely ruled by reason. But that is not so. For example, my reason is perfectly convinced by good evidence that anaesthetics do not smother me and that properly trained surgeons do not start operating until I am unconscious. But that does not alter the fact that when they have me down on the table and clap their horrible mask over my face, a mere childish panic begins inside me. I start thinking I am going to choke, and I am afraid they will start cutting me up before I am properly under. In other words, I lose my faith in anaesthetics. It is not reason that is taking away my faith: on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other...
Now just the same thing happens about Christianity. I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it. That is not the point at which Faith comes in... Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.
The entire chapter expounds on this basic idea. Considering your hobby, I would encourage you to read it. Hope it's helpful.
I don't have much of an opinion on whether or not GNOME's desire to remove bloat, or KDE's desire to increase flexibility are good or bad things. I don't know.
But I do know that the upgrade from GNOME 1.4 to 2.0 made me switch to KDE. The "upgrade" took away the ability to add some customizations that I had become dependant on, and I couldn't figure out how to get back. So I switched. Even though I had to learn something new (i.e. where in KDE I had to make those customizations) it was better than not being able to make them at all.
Yes, I could stick with gnome 1.4 forever. But that has no future. Sooner or later, it's not going to be able to support apps that I want to run. My current ranking of preferred environments is:
GNOME 1.4
KDE 3.x
KDE 2.x
GNOME 2.0
If GNOME 3.x allows me to make my customizations again (like it did in 1.4), then I'll probably switch back. But I use what works best for me. And it's no longer GNOME.
Ok... but doesn't the fact that you had to tell me about these yearly awards tell you something about the situation? My complaint isn't the fact that entertainers give themselves awards. It's with the fact that they seem to think their awards are more important than the plumbers' union awards, or the american welding society's awards. I'd like to see a humanitarian award show get 10% the amount of play as the least popular entertainment awards shows get.
I don't have a problem with people awarding themselves. I have a problem with the way that there's non-stop awards ceremonies for entertainers. And one set of awards isn't enough. Take movies for example: the academy awards, the golden globes, the people's choice, the MTV movie awards, and that's the list that I came up off the top of my head!
Of course, it's really all of us who make all of these awards shows overly important. We who choose to watch and buy into the hype, and go to movies and rent videos based on the results. We over inflate the importance of entertainers in lieu of teachers. We provide slave's wages to social workers and turn entertainers into millionaires. We do this. It just disappoints me.
And don't get me wrong. I enjoy movies and music and tv and plays and... It's just that I think we place too much importance on things we like often at the expense of things we need. And the overly glitzy nature of, and useless banter ("What did she wear?") surrounding the awards shows reminds me of this.
...because the entertainment industry is already overly self-congratulatory. How many different ways can the entertainment industry think of to pubically award themselves?
The Oscars
The Emmys
The Tonys
The Grammys ...
Best Male Lead
Best Male Supporting
Best Female Lead
Best Female Supporting ...
Best Donuts in trailer of supporting actor in an animated feature
Whilst it is true that if it doesn't work at all then it will be shunned, it is not so true if it doesn't work in the interest of the consumer.
If Microsoft start making 'agreements' with vendors like Dell and HP to sell only (or mainly) Palladium'd boxes then people will buy them. Especially if there's some sort of discount price incentive put in place.
The hook will probably be, "Buy this new, secure computer". They may even be able to get away with selling it at a premium as users are tired of the myriad of security bugs that happen all the freaking time.
The problem is this: when has microsoft ever made something that isn't horrendously buggy? When have they ever made something that didn't fail miserably under release 1.0? You think that the software formerly known as palladium will be any different? I don't.
The only question is whether or not the initial failure of the so called "secure computer" will be public enough to dissuade the consumer from believing it again.
I run most of my windows based apps in win4lin. There were huge complaints on the win4lin-users list about how TurboTax wouldn't work. And it turns out its because TT tries to write to the boot sector, and win4lin simply doesn't allow it. So, after seeing this, I used TaxCut, which didn't have any such problems.
If she gets delivered an unexpected heavy package with wires sticking out, a ticking sound, and a strange chemical smell, does she just automatically open that too?
That's not a very good analogy. Sticking to analogy, my wife's stance is to not open any package ever, because going and getting the knife to open it herself is too cumbersome, or whatever. Her policy is to always get me to go get the knife and open it. Or if I'm at work, she calls me and asks me what to do next every single time. And I got tired of it.
So I set it up so that any packages that come in get automatically opened. This is a pretty good policy 99% of the time. But failed miserably when she got reverse-spammed.
So really the problem stems from a combination of both her and my laziness. Her laziness in not being willing to commit to memory how to do this thing, and my laziness in not wanting to hand hold her everytime she wanted to look at a picture.
So my question is this: Since computers are supposed to be good at doing the rote mundane things in life, is there a way that we can automate it so that she and I can still both be lazy? "No" is certainly an acceptable answer. But are you not willing to think about it because you couldn't come up with an answer quickly?
That's probably a pretty effective confirm_request.txt. And while most of my family are on my whitelist, not all of them are. Some of them change email addresses pretty frequently, and I don't always have the most current updates. But I get your point.
Still, you didn't see some of the emails that came through. I'm pretty sure that there's no confirm_request.txt that would have kept all of them out. And short of 99.9% filtering of these emails, I think my wife would have been really offended by this. Offended enough to back completely out of the internet for some time.
My point is that while I like and use TMDA, it's not an effective tool for keeping real people out of your mailbox. It's not designed to do that. It's good for keeping forged email out, but not real email. In fact, it's specifically designed to make it easy for real people to get in. And in any sufficiently large population, some of those real people are going to be offensive and rude and barge into things no matter what.
So while I think TMDA can be leveraged, in the absense of something else, to attempt to stop this type of email, I'd like to think about the "something else". Are there other ways of dealing with this type of email that would overcome some of the limitations that TMDA (et al) have?
You know, I'd like to think so. And the mozilla mail client does exactly the same thing (which is what she's using). But when I had it set up so that she just clicked on the attachments, she'd never see them until I was available to help her.
I don't think it's that my wife can't learn how to do this. She doesn't want to.
Yeah, I know about TMDA. I already use it. You must have your settings set up to ignore/. signatures, because I've got a TMDA reference in my signature. It's precisely why I'm not afraid to give out my actual email address on/.
I think TMDA might help, but only a little. I could put something in the confirm_request.txt file (the one that gets automatically sent out when an unknown email address comes in) that would explain the whole thing. Unfortunately, that confirm_accept.txt would go out to everyone not already known. So it would have to explain to my grandmother, for example, that no, my wife really isn't into bestiality, etc. Which could lead to lots of unnecessary conversations. Figuring out what to put in there, I think, would be tricky.
But even if you figured that out, TMDA is not going to be very effective. TMDA's strength comes from making it easy for real people to get into my mailbox while making it real difficult for forged email to get in. The emails that my wife got were from real people. People who were motivated by the desire for sexual fulfillment. I suspect that these people would *not* be hindered by a simple confirm_request.txt that tried to explain they'd gone to the wrong place.
That's great. Except that the mail reader that my wife uses displays attached images automatically. I chose to set this up intentionally. My wife, for all of her wonderful qualities, would not be confused as computer literate. Without the automatic display, she'll never see any of the photos that I want her to be able to see and that she wants to see, unless she calls me up and asks me every single time.
This exact same thing happened to my wife. At the time, she had an email address "@iname.com". Someone posted something to alt.bestiality.something or another with the From and reply-to set to her email address. The actual email was talking about what Julia and her little sister liked to do, and encouraged suitors to respond in email.
Holy crap the email she got! Emails came from people all over the world. An incredibly rare number of them included clothing and were simply introductions. Most of them included an attached nude picture of (I assume) themself (either that or there is a cast of nude pictures of incredibly ugly people floating around somewhere). Some of them demonstrated their sexual experiences with animals. But every single one of them seriously pursuing some sort of sexual relationship with someone that
they had never met
wasn't actually my wife
This whole experience turned my wife off of the internet for a long time.
I was able to track down the original post to alt.bestiality.whatever it was, and tracked it to a posting through deja news. (This was about 5 years ago). But ironically, there was nothing in that post that included "go to this website" or anything like that. The only contact information in it was my wife's email address. At the time, I assumed that the person who did this wanted us to change email addresses so he/she could have the one that we had (which was simply my wife's first name@iname.com).
After tracking it down I sent deja the information and asked them to pursue it. And I changed my wife's email address. We have our own domain now. BUT I still, occasionally login to the iname.com account and empty it. I want that account to stay active forever so that whoever tried this doesn't win.
What would you do if this happened to you? What are the defenses for this kind of thing? The email that came in wasn't spam. It was real email from real people who had real mailboxes. How do you prevent this kind of thing? So most of the antispam techniques that I know of wouldn't have worked. Additionally, we occasionally get emails w/attachments from friends who want to show us pictures of their kids. So blocking all attachments won't work. What should be done?
If this is "news for nerds" site, was it really necessary to explain what TNG means? Or do I now have to stop imagining all my fellow/.ers posting in their klingon uniforms?
Well you certainly know your market better than I do.
Out of curiosity, if when they posted something to that read only mailing list, do you think you'd get any better response if the reply came back and said, "Oops, you sent this to the wrong place. You can send it to the right place by just hitting reply, and telling me again what it was you wanted"? (Or perhaps something less costic.)
The TMDA process is really that simple: you need to confirm, to do it, just hit reply. But I don't presume to know your customers. All I can say is that I've yet to encounter someone who couldn't handle it.
And all of that being said, I still think that TMDA (and other similar systems) should be part of the antispam discussion. If only because it might be better for others who have a different market than you.
No actually, it wasn't as obvious as that. I could start the system, get into the bios all day long, like nothing was wrong, start the boot process, but as soon as I got to checking the partition table on the hard drive, hard lock.
At first I thought it was the hard drive. Nope. It worked just fine in another computer. In fact it and the cables and everything are in the new xp1700+. I also thought it might have been the ide bus on the mobo. Nope. Stuck a seperate IDE card in and the exact same thing happened. Then I thought it might have been the power supply. Nope, not that either. Got an entirely new p/s and the exact same problem.
Now, to be truthful, I never found another slot 1 mobo. So I don't know if the problem was w/ the mobo or the cpu. But that combination was the only thing that consitantly broke stuff and in the exact same place everytime: while trying to read the disk's partition table.
But yeah, $250 later (new mobo, cpu, memory and case) it's working again.
They don't have to do the two step every time. Just the first time. And you can customize the response that you send so as to explain it to them in as clear of terms as you think necessary. From personal experience, the least technically saavy emailers I know (aunts, older cousins, and in-laws) have managed to navigate the system without having to call me. You can speculate as to what you're customers will/won't be able to understand, but experience suggests that even the least technically saavy people can handle it.
As far as what customers will and won't do? Have you ever used Voice Response Telephone Units (VRUs)? You know, those things that answer the phone and say "press 1 to speak to sales, 2 to speak to..." etc. Customers will engage in LOTS of extra effort if it means lower costs, better reliability, etc. TMDA (et al) translates very effectively into those metrics, and isn't anywhere near the extra effort associated with VRU's. A huge number of businesses already use a two step process when a customer requests a password change, or when a customer subscribes to a mailing list, or... Maybe it's just me, but I think customers can easily handle this process.
Still, even if you're 100% correct that these problems are insurmountable. That just means that TMDA (et al) have a non-zero false positive rate (certain customer's legitimate emails won't get delivered). But non-zero false positive rates haven't kept all kinds of other antispam techniques from being brought to the table for evaluation, comparison, etc.
And that's my point. TMDA (et al) merits some discussion w.r.t. its effectiveness in blocking spam. Especially, if we're going to say that having a real email address is an important tool in combating spam.
In practical terms, I think you're probably right. However, AMD is where they are entirely because at one point in their history, they actually beat intel on performance. That was the single thing that brought them to the competition table with intel. Prior to that they were fleabites on chipmunks scurrying around intel's elephant feet.
You can't forget that. They *MUST* remain at least somewhat competitive with intel on performance or they're going to be perpetually seen as offering the "Yugo" of processors: cheaper but requiring a performance compromise. And that will impact the effectiveness of their marketing - no matter what they say, customers won't believe them. They'll perpetually see them as the bargain hut. And that will influence sales.
Of course, you're right. However, I think that the CPU speeds are getting so rediculously high, and the software to actually take advantage of these speeds is so hideously far behind, that the effective obsolecense of current bottom of the barrel CPUs is much longer than it was say 10 years ago.
I recently upgraded my P3 600Mhz to an Athlon XP 1700+. I had a problem with my Slot 1 mobo, and couldn't find a reliable source for a working slot 1 mobo to replace it. So the only option was to upgrade to the cheapest available mobo/cpu combo that I could find.
I would have *loved* to have stayed with the P3 600. I wasn't anywhere near using up all of the power provided by that CPU. I only upgraded because of externally forced obselesense (no one sells slot 1 mobos anymore) not because the software I'm trying to make use of can no longer function effectively at those speeds... and yes, I do my "apt-get update && apt-get -u upgrade" under debian unstable, so I'm not just sitting on some really old software.
My point is that, except for a minority of applications (3d games, raytracing, et al), I'm having a difficult time figuring out why I need a CPU that measures its clock speed in GHz, much less multiple GHz.
For what it's worth, there's another antispam technique that might merit some of your consideration. The technique is effective because spammers want anonymity. They want to continue to use fake return addresses. And that can be exploited. I use one such system called TMDA. As a consequence, I'm not afraid to advertise my email address on slashdot (for example).
TMDA isn't really an antispam system, per se. It's an automated whitelist management system, with a bunch of really useful extra features thrown in for the heck of it. But at its heart, TMDA forces you to have a real working email address in order to get into my mailbox. Now of course, spammers might choose to respond by using real return email addresses. Personally, I think that would be a very positive development. In the mean time, it's a pretty effective technique.
TMDA has some competition, too. Active Spam Killer does similar things, although I haven't used it.
I've wondered about this sort of thing. If you flip on Discovery Channel on your regular TV, are the previews playing, or is this something that is visable/recordable only to the Tivo? I'm guessing from your account that anyone who happens to stay up could see this, but I don't know. I remember one of the things it downloaded was a short film about some guy who had a meeting with Woody Allen. Anyway, at the beginning of that program it said "brought to you by BestBuy exclusively for TiVo owners". So is it really exclusive or can anyone, who's motivated to get up watch that stuff?
I've not yet been motivated enough to stay up until past 4am to find out.
... how do I get rid of them? And why aren't hiccups painful for children, but painful for many adults? And why do I get them after I've eaten too fast, but not after I've drank too fast?
If it turns out that this theory is correct, how will it help us get rid of them?
I'm so disappointed that it appears that the only point of the article/theory is to try and explain hiccups in utero.
asking admins to monitor their network more carefully is about one step semantically shy of asking them to keep up to date with patches.
Would you deposit your money in a bank with a vault that has no alarms around it? I sure wouldn't. In fact, I suspect that the FDIC would not offer its insurance to a bank that failed to do this. The amount of monitoring that needs to be done is segregated in such a way that the bank does NOT have to monitor the activities of every person who walks by the building. They monitor activity w/in the bank. They monitor people who get close to the vault, and they monitor activity in the vault.
It's not that hard to implement if you've got a systematic security architecture in place that takes defense in depth into account. If you have that, then you know exactly what traffic you should see on every segment and you can easily identify violations.
Most people don't do this. Most people simply follow the microsoft example of "install it with the least amount of pain and least amount of testing". If that's what you want to do, then fine for you. Just like you can get an alarm service for your home, you can also get one for your network. Counterpane sells one.
There's really no excuse for indadequate monitoring..
can anyone explain to me a better method, since even thy mighty god linux is subject to the need occassionally along with every other major OS i can think of?
Will Ximian give me back my view-ports and edge-flipping? Gnome2/metacity/sawfish2 in RedHat 8.0 totally pissed me off with their lack, and opposed stance to such features.
Yeah, I stuck with gnome for a long time simply because of that feature. But since it wasn't available, I saw no reason to keep from switching to the (IMHO) much prettier KDE.
And now that I'm here, I ain't going back until gnome gets a better integration with cups printing like KDE has.
Slashdot Mirror
This is basically the same thing as, "You're screwing up, dude." But the difference is that it's delivered in a way that:
I'd *like* to think that if I thought an adult wasn't trying to control me, that I'd have a better shot at actually hearing what they were trying to say. Which is, "You're the primary one who's going to enjoy or suffer from your decisions, so choose wisely. If you have any questions, I'll be happy to take a run at them. If not, that's cool, too. Good luck." I'd like to think that this sort of message would get me to think about what I was doing instead of just blindly reacting to what an authority figure was telling me.
But who knows? In retrospect my parents were *MUCH* smarter than they seemed at the time, and they weren't able to get through.
As a Christian, I can agree with you that I can't prove that there's a God. However, I think you might have a misunderstanding of what constitutes "faith". My faith is not based on nothing. I don't believe in God, despite the evidence. I believe in God because I think there's pretty good evidence to support such a belief. For example, I've had experiences that, try as I might, I can't explain without the existence of God. Of course, that's not particularly compelling to you, but just because I can't prove something to you does not make it unreasonable for me to believe it.
For example, my children this morning, woke up at about 6:45am. I let them jump around in their room until about 7:15am, when I finally dragged my tail out of bed and got them, fed them, and sent them off to school. Unfortunately, if I were asked to prove this, I would find it to be very difficult. I suppose that there may be some way to actually prove it, but I know of none, so I'm content in saying that I can NOT prove it to you. That doesn't make me any less certain that it's true. My experiences compell me to believe these things regardless of whether or not I can prove it to someone else.
CS Lewis, in "Mere Christianity", gave a much better description of how faith is not the thing that most people think it is. That faith is not an independant thing from reason and rationality. Here's an excerpt:
The entire chapter expounds on this basic idea. Considering your hobby, I would encourage you to read it. Hope it's helpful.
But I do know that the upgrade from GNOME 1.4 to 2.0 made me switch to KDE. The "upgrade" took away the ability to add some customizations that I had become dependant on, and I couldn't figure out how to get back. So I switched. Even though I had to learn something new (i.e. where in KDE I had to make those customizations) it was better than not being able to make them at all.
Yes, I could stick with gnome 1.4 forever. But that has no future. Sooner or later, it's not going to be able to support apps that I want to run. My current ranking of preferred environments is:
If GNOME 3.x allows me to make my customizations again (like it did in 1.4), then I'll probably switch back. But I use what works best for me. And it's no longer GNOME.
Ok... but doesn't the fact that you had to tell me about these yearly awards tell you something about the situation? My complaint isn't the fact that entertainers give themselves awards. It's with the fact that they seem to think their awards are more important than the plumbers' union awards, or the american welding society's awards. I'd like to see a humanitarian award show get 10% the amount of play as the least popular entertainment awards shows get.
I don't have a problem with people awarding themselves. I have a problem with the way that there's non-stop awards ceremonies for entertainers. And one set of awards isn't enough. Take movies for example: the academy awards, the golden globes, the people's choice, the MTV movie awards, and that's the list that I came up off the top of my head!
Of course, it's really all of us who make all of these awards shows overly important. We who choose to watch and buy into the hype, and go to movies and rent videos based on the results. We over inflate the importance of entertainers in lieu of teachers. We provide slave's wages to social workers and turn entertainers into millionaires. We do this. It just disappoints me.
And don't get me wrong. I enjoy movies and music and tv and plays and... It's just that I think we place too much importance on things we like often at the expense of things we need. And the overly glitzy nature of, and useless banter ("What did she wear?") surrounding the awards shows reminds me of this.
The hook will probably be, "Buy this new, secure computer". They may even be able to get away with selling it at a premium as users are tired of the myriad of security bugs that happen all the freaking time.
The problem is this: when has microsoft ever made something that isn't horrendously buggy? When have they ever made something that didn't fail miserably under release 1.0? You think that the software formerly known as palladium will be any different? I don't.
The only question is whether or not the initial failure of the so called "secure computer" will be public enough to dissuade the consumer from believing it again.
I run most of my windows based apps in win4lin. There were huge complaints on the win4lin-users list about how TurboTax wouldn't work. And it turns out its because TT tries to write to the boot sector, and win4lin simply doesn't allow it. So, after seeing this, I used TaxCut, which didn't have any such problems.
That's not a very good analogy. Sticking to analogy, my wife's stance is to not open any package ever, because going and getting the knife to open it herself is too cumbersome, or whatever. Her policy is to always get me to go get the knife and open it. Or if I'm at work, she calls me and asks me what to do next every single time. And I got tired of it.
So I set it up so that any packages that come in get automatically opened. This is a pretty good policy 99% of the time. But failed miserably when she got reverse-spammed.
So really the problem stems from a combination of both her and my laziness. Her laziness in not being willing to commit to memory how to do this thing, and my laziness in not wanting to hand hold her everytime she wanted to look at a picture.
So my question is this: Since computers are supposed to be good at doing the rote mundane things in life, is there a way that we can automate it so that she and I can still both be lazy? "No" is certainly an acceptable answer. But are you not willing to think about it because you couldn't come up with an answer quickly?
That's probably a pretty effective confirm_request.txt. And while most of my family are on my whitelist, not all of them are. Some of them change email addresses pretty frequently, and I don't always have the most current updates. But I get your point.
Still, you didn't see some of the emails that came through. I'm pretty sure that there's no confirm_request.txt that would have kept all of them out. And short of 99.9% filtering of these emails, I think my wife would have been really offended by this. Offended enough to back completely out of the internet for some time.
My point is that while I like and use TMDA, it's not an effective tool for keeping real people out of your mailbox. It's not designed to do that. It's good for keeping forged email out, but not real email. In fact, it's specifically designed to make it easy for real people to get in. And in any sufficiently large population, some of those real people are going to be offensive and rude and barge into things no matter what.
So while I think TMDA can be leveraged, in the absense of something else, to attempt to stop this type of email, I'd like to think about the "something else". Are there other ways of dealing with this type of email that would overcome some of the limitations that TMDA (et al) have?
You know, I'd like to think so. And the mozilla mail client does exactly the same thing (which is what she's using). But when I had it set up so that she just clicked on the attachments, she'd never see them until I was available to help her.
I don't think it's that my wife can't learn how to do this. She doesn't want to.
Yeah, I know about TMDA. I already use it. You must have your settings set up to ignore /. signatures, because I've got a TMDA reference in my signature. It's precisely why I'm not afraid to give out my actual email address on /.
I think TMDA might help, but only a little. I could put something in the confirm_request.txt file (the one that gets automatically sent out when an unknown email address comes in) that would explain the whole thing. Unfortunately, that confirm_accept.txt would go out to everyone not already known. So it would have to explain to my grandmother, for example, that no, my wife really isn't into bestiality, etc. Which could lead to lots of unnecessary conversations. Figuring out what to put in there, I think, would be tricky.
But even if you figured that out, TMDA is not going to be very effective. TMDA's strength comes from making it easy for real people to get into my mailbox while making it real difficult for forged email to get in. The emails that my wife got were from real people. People who were motivated by the desire for sexual fulfillment. I suspect that these people would *not* be hindered by a simple confirm_request.txt that tried to explain they'd gone to the wrong place.
That's great. Except that the mail reader that my wife uses displays attached images automatically. I chose to set this up intentionally. My wife, for all of her wonderful qualities, would not be confused as computer literate. Without the automatic display, she'll never see any of the photos that I want her to be able to see and that she wants to see, unless she calls me up and asks me every single time.
Holy crap the email she got! Emails came from people all over the world. An incredibly rare number of them included clothing and were simply introductions. Most of them included an attached nude picture of (I assume) themself (either that or there is a cast of nude pictures of incredibly ugly people floating around somewhere). Some of them demonstrated their sexual experiences with animals. But every single one of them seriously pursuing some sort of sexual relationship with someone that
This whole experience turned my wife off of the internet for a long time.
I was able to track down the original post to alt.bestiality.whatever it was, and tracked it to a posting through deja news. (This was about 5 years ago). But ironically, there was nothing in that post that included "go to this website" or anything like that. The only contact information in it was my wife's email address. At the time, I assumed that the person who did this wanted us to change email addresses so he/she could have the one that we had (which was simply my wife's first name@iname.com).
After tracking it down I sent deja the information and asked them to pursue it. And I changed my wife's email address. We have our own domain now. BUT I still, occasionally login to the iname.com account and empty it. I want that account to stay active forever so that whoever tried this doesn't win.
What would you do if this happened to you? What are the defenses for this kind of thing? The email that came in wasn't spam. It was real email from real people who had real mailboxes. How do you prevent this kind of thing? So most of the antispam techniques that I know of wouldn't have worked. Additionally, we occasionally get emails w/attachments from friends who want to show us pictures of their kids. So blocking all attachments won't work. What should be done?
If this is "news for nerds" site, was it really necessary to explain what TNG means? Or do I now have to stop imagining all my fellow /.ers posting in their klingon uniforms?
Well you certainly know your market better than I do.
Out of curiosity, if when they posted something to that read only mailing list, do you think you'd get any better response if the reply came back and said, "Oops, you sent this to the wrong place. You can send it to the right place by just hitting reply, and telling me again what it was you wanted"? (Or perhaps something less costic.)
The TMDA process is really that simple: you need to confirm, to do it, just hit reply. But I don't presume to know your customers. All I can say is that I've yet to encounter someone who couldn't handle it.
And all of that being said, I still think that TMDA (and other similar systems) should be part of the antispam discussion. If only because it might be better for others who have a different market than you.
No actually, it wasn't as obvious as that. I could start the system, get into the bios all day long, like nothing was wrong, start the boot process, but as soon as I got to checking the partition table on the hard drive, hard lock.
At first I thought it was the hard drive. Nope. It worked just fine in another computer. In fact it and the cables and everything are in the new xp1700+. I also thought it might have been the ide bus on the mobo. Nope. Stuck a seperate IDE card in and the exact same thing happened. Then I thought it might have been the power supply. Nope, not that either. Got an entirely new p/s and the exact same problem.
Now, to be truthful, I never found another slot 1 mobo. So I don't know if the problem was w/ the mobo or the cpu. But that combination was the only thing that consitantly broke stuff and in the exact same place everytime: while trying to read the disk's partition table.
But yeah, $250 later (new mobo, cpu, memory and case) it's working again.
They don't have to do the two step every time. Just the first time. And you can customize the response that you send so as to explain it to them in as clear of terms as you think necessary. From personal experience, the least technically saavy emailers I know (aunts, older cousins, and in-laws) have managed to navigate the system without having to call me. You can speculate as to what you're customers will/won't be able to understand, but experience suggests that even the least technically saavy people can handle it.
..." etc. Customers will engage in LOTS of extra effort if it means lower costs, better reliability, etc. TMDA (et al) translates very effectively into those metrics, and isn't anywhere near the extra effort associated with VRU's. A huge number of businesses already use a two step process when a customer requests a password change, or when a customer subscribes to a mailing list, or ... Maybe it's just me, but I think customers can easily handle this process.
As far as what customers will and won't do? Have you ever used Voice Response Telephone Units (VRUs)? You know, those things that answer the phone and say "press 1 to speak to sales, 2 to speak to
Still, even if you're 100% correct that these problems are insurmountable. That just means that TMDA (et al) have a non-zero false positive rate (certain customer's legitimate emails won't get delivered). But non-zero false positive rates haven't kept all kinds of other antispam techniques from being brought to the table for evaluation, comparison, etc.
And that's my point. TMDA (et al) merits some discussion w.r.t. its effectiveness in blocking spam. Especially, if we're going to say that having a real email address is an important tool in combating spam.
In practical terms, I think you're probably right. However, AMD is where they are entirely because at one point in their history, they actually beat intel on performance. That was the single thing that brought them to the competition table with intel. Prior to that they were fleabites on chipmunks scurrying around intel's elephant feet.
You can't forget that. They *MUST* remain at least somewhat competitive with intel on performance or they're going to be perpetually seen as offering the "Yugo" of processors: cheaper but requiring a performance compromise. And that will impact the effectiveness of their marketing - no matter what they say, customers won't believe them. They'll perpetually see them as the bargain hut. And that will influence sales.
Of course, you're right. However, I think that the CPU speeds are getting so rediculously high, and the software to actually take advantage of these speeds is so hideously far behind, that the effective obsolecense of current bottom of the barrel CPUs is much longer than it was say 10 years ago.
I recently upgraded my P3 600Mhz to an Athlon XP 1700+. I had a problem with my Slot 1 mobo, and couldn't find a reliable source for a working slot 1 mobo to replace it. So the only option was to upgrade to the cheapest available mobo/cpu combo that I could find.
I would have *loved* to have stayed with the P3 600. I wasn't anywhere near using up all of the power provided by that CPU. I only upgraded because of externally forced obselesense (no one sells slot 1 mobos anymore) not because the software I'm trying to make use of can no longer function effectively at those speeds... and yes, I do my "apt-get update && apt-get -u upgrade" under debian unstable, so I'm not just sitting on some really old software.
My point is that, except for a minority of applications (3d games, raytracing, et al), I'm having a difficult time figuring out why I need a CPU that measures its clock speed in GHz, much less multiple GHz.
For what it's worth, there's another antispam technique that might merit some of your consideration. The technique is effective because spammers want anonymity. They want to continue to use fake return addresses. And that can be exploited. I use one such system called TMDA. As a consequence, I'm not afraid to advertise my email address on slashdot (for example).
TMDA isn't really an antispam system, per se. It's an automated whitelist management system, with a bunch of really useful extra features thrown in for the heck of it. But at its heart, TMDA forces you to have a real working email address in order to get into my mailbox. Now of course, spammers might choose to respond by using real return email addresses. Personally, I think that would be a very positive development. In the mean time, it's a pretty effective technique.
TMDA has some competition, too. Active Spam Killer does similar things, although I haven't used it.
I've wondered about this sort of thing. If you flip on Discovery Channel on your regular TV, are the previews playing, or is this something that is visable/recordable only to the Tivo? I'm guessing from your account that anyone who happens to stay up could see this, but I don't know. I remember one of the things it downloaded was a short film about some guy who had a meeting with Woody Allen. Anyway, at the beginning of that program it said "brought to you by BestBuy exclusively for TiVo owners". So is it really exclusive or can anyone, who's motivated to get up watch that stuff?
I've not yet been motivated enough to stay up until past 4am to find out.
... how do I get rid of them? And why aren't hiccups painful for children, but painful for many adults? And why do I get them after I've eaten too fast, but not after I've drank too fast?
If it turns out that this theory is correct, how will it help us get rid of them?
I'm so disappointed that it appears that the only point of the article/theory is to try and explain hiccups in utero.
Would you deposit your money in a bank with a vault that has no alarms around it? I sure wouldn't. In fact, I suspect that the FDIC would not offer its insurance to a bank that failed to do this. The amount of monitoring that needs to be done is segregated in such a way that the bank does NOT have to monitor the activities of every person who walks by the building. They monitor activity w/in the bank. They monitor people who get close to the vault, and they monitor activity in the vault.
It's not that hard to implement if you've got a systematic security architecture in place that takes defense in depth into account. If you have that, then you know exactly what traffic you should see on every segment and you can easily identify violations.
Most people don't do this. Most people simply follow the microsoft example of "install it with the least amount of pain and least amount of testing". If that's what you want to do, then fine for you. Just like you can get an alarm service for your home, you can also get one for your network. Counterpane sells one.
There's really no excuse for indadequate monitoring..
I can't. But Bruce Schneier can
Yeah, I stuck with gnome for a long time simply because of that feature. But since it wasn't available, I saw no reason to keep from switching to the (IMHO) much prettier KDE.
And now that I'm here, I ain't going back until gnome gets a better integration with cups printing like KDE has.
$.02