BTW, you obviously never intend to learn any new skills for the rest of your life, or you wouldn't be so disparaging of novices in the internet arena.
I'm not disparaging of novices - far from it as I'm always conscious of the fact that we all start off knowing nothing about anything. But the fact is that some of us ask questions, take an interest and learn all of the time to get to become knowledgeable experts in areas like the Internet. Other people just don't bother.
Let me give you a real world example. I'm not a full-time technical trainer but I do some training of my peers within the scope of the job I do, usually on TCP/IP and Linux.
Having trained a number of technical people in those fields, one guy suggested I run some smaller "cut down" courses for non-technical (e.g. sales people).
So I wrote some material on email, covering basic functionality, how mail & DNS works together, virus setection, spam filtering, etc. I then advertised it waiting for attendees but apart from a few enquiries from non-technical people, no-one from that side was interested. I did do some classes but it was attended by genuinely interested technical people.
In summary, therefore, I'm *not* against the novice (we were all novices once) but most of them remain novices because they don't believe it's their problem or a just too damn lazy to go learn something new.
I'd be interested to know what Linux distributions you actually tested against Windows 2000?
Remembering that Windows 2000 was released in 1999, this would put it at the same time as RedHat 6.0-ish, Mandrake 6.0-ish, Gnome 1.x and KDE 1.x. Also a 2.2 kernel as opposed to 2.6 now.
By all means make the comparison but it would only be fair to make those comparisons with Linux distributions of around the same time.
IN terms of an e-mail address, this isn't so much of a problem.
I can't argue your other points but don't underestimate the importance of an email address - a few Google searches on that address might reveal forums that person has posted to, perhaps a bank web site...
It might be argued that using your real name as a portion of your email address might be viewed as very insecure; better to use the "name" part of the email address as something that cannot be immediately associated to you.
You know how you stop spam? You make it totally non profitable. You know how you do that? You stop using a 30 yr old e-mail protocol and add a hashcash or something.
You sound like an engineer (like me) and you've given the engineering solution to the problem.
Unfortunately, we engineers are in a much lower caste to the accountants who will only do something if there's money to be made from it.
You seem to forget that a certain amount of failure always get factored into everything we pay for in a capitalist society - for example, the interest rate you pay on your credit card includes a fraction of money to pay for the millions in fraud that credit card company will suffer in the future. When accountants rule the world, it's easier to collect money equating to the losses rather than to fix the core problem.
With email functionality changes, imagine the costs to businesses to change or update all their email servers rather than simply factoring in the costs of wasted bandwidth into their balance sheets? Add to that, the bickering between corporations as each one strives to get their standards accepted and licensed?
Sorry to "extinguish your firework with waste bodily fluids" but whilst your solution is a good one in theory, in reality it won't happen.
We have two options for the future of our Internet.
There's actually three options.
The first, and worst, option is to hand over your personal responsibility to corporations (like good old Microsoft). Doing that creates a market (= profit-making opportunity) for them and let's them erode away at your personal freedoms by tying you into their products and their ideals (see DRM as an example.
The second option is to let government legislation handle it. Almost as bad as the first but at least the great unwashed masses have the power of the vote to influence the politicians to a small degree.
Thirdly, and the best option, is to take the responsibility for your Internet safety on yourself. Unfortunately, as usual, the unwashed masses cannot be bothered to spend the time to do this and make things bad for everyone else as a result. However, at least the minority of us taking this option can at least do so knowing we were the last to "cave in" to corporate profiteering and corrupt politicians.
But I still don't accept vigilante justice is the answer - taking that stance makes you as bad as the perpetrators.
Intelligence and ingenuity, as demonstrated by the Open Source community (that has neither corporate or political interests at its heart) is the only way to counter this problem.
I agree with your points but what stops a spammer (or group of spammers) setting up a "dummy server" to collect these valid replies into and to harvest those?
The analogy to spam-fighting as a "war" is a good one - it's about an ever-escalating series of attacks and counter-attacks between each side, getting more and more time-consuming each time.
Again, my point is never ever give anyone any information about you unless you really have to - because personal information is worth a lot of money to someone.
Whilst I admire your company's ingenuity for coming up with a money-making scheme to help Joe Public in the fight against spam, you're really just a "Band-Aid" over the problem, not the solution to it.
The crux of the matter is that Joe Public users are playing with Internet services that have been sold to them as "the New Revolution" but were originally designed by geeks for geeks.
As far as I'm concerned, you go on the Internet then you "learn to fight with the big boys" or get shot down in flames - in just the same way that if you drive a fast car never having had a driving lesson, you can expect to end up in a car wreck.
What I'm trying to say here is that your energies would be much better used educating the ignorant masses about why they get spam and how they can defeat it rather than offering to take control of an issue that's their responsibility to deal with - but I guess there's probably less profit to be made from that.
My email server is receiving 25,000 junk emails a month, and that's only the ones that SpamAssassin detects as spam. I get about 30 a day in my inbox that make it past SpamAssassin.
You can't just leave it to SpamAssassin to detect spam, you need to apply some other filtering around it also like procmail recipes.
SpamAssassin has a deep look inside each email's contents for making spam determinations but you can apply some simple rules, even before you get to the SpamAssassin stage for deleting a lot of rubbish emails - in procmail, I look for patterns in headers such as:
1. Are any of my valid email addresses in the To: or CC: fields of the email?
2. Is there a valid Message-ID header field in each email?
3. If the email is sent to a number of addresses, are those addresses normally people I am associated with? Are there a lot of addresses to other people at my ISP domain?
30 emails per day equates to 900 out of 25,000 a month so you're probably detecting them at about the same success rate I do currently - but if these ones that do get through still annoy you, then it's a case of modifying filtering rules going forward to catch them.
The waste of bandwidth is an issue and one I cannot answer although I still suspect it's fairly minimal here.
What if each person who received spam fired back 10 unsubscribe messages, assuming the mail has a valid sender address.
For the simple fact that email addresses are harvested by spammers from web sites, news groups, etc. However, one thing more valuable to a spammer than an email address is a valid email address, the validity of it having been determined by your reply back to the spammer.
Your approach to any Internet service should always be the same - "run silent, run deep". If someone *thinks* you're there, don't do anything to let them *know* you are there...
I was getting about 10-20 spam emails per day in my Inbox on my ISP email accounts. Yes, the emails were annoying to the extreme & having to delete them was becoming annoying - however, each one of the emails was small in size (by design) and therefore the impact was minimal on my broadband connection.
My solution therefore was to simply filter it out and delete it - instead of downloading the email into an email client, my Linux server now filters it with procmail and SpamAssassin. Now I never see 95% of the spam I was getting - apart from an entry in procmail's log file to say particular messages were deleted.
As far as I am concerned now, that's my "victory" over the spammers and I consider it a "test of wills" to create or modify filtering rules to capture the spams that do occasionally get through.
I agree that spam is a big problem and big resource waster for corporates but they're the ones with the lawyers and budget to go after these spammers if it gets to that stage of proceedings.
For me, the little guy, it's about using my ingenuity against the spammers and, so far, I'm beating them because I detect and delete the majority of their trash before I ever get the opportunity to cast my eyes over it.
Sorry but as far as I am concerned, the people for whom spam is a problem are the people who refuse to simply go invest some time in learning about how the Internet and IP services actually *work* and actually do some "passive" combatting themselves.
At the end of it all, if most of us took some responsibility for our Internet life, viruses and worms would be a thing of the past and spamming would stop because no-one would ever see it and reply to it.
The sooner "newbie" users get off their backsides and stop treating their PC like a "closed box", the better it will be for all of us.
Let the legal system go after the spammers, life's far too short to worry about another crappy P2P application...
I'd agree with you if the record companies weren't involved as the "middle men".
If it's the artist making their songs available on a web site for the public to purchase themselves, that just mirrors what used to happen 20 years ago when you'd go see a small local band play and they'd sell you there own recorded tapes at the gig. That's good for both artist and listener.
However, throw the record companies in the middle and the whole thing changes. The listeners get their music downloads at a price dictated by the record companies and the musicians only get to record and release songs that are deemed "commercially viable" by the record companies.
And, of course, the record companies will fight to the bitter end to maintain this "middle man" status...
I don't take part in P2P music downloading simply because I'm old-fashioned and like CDs with covers and sleeve notes. I don't agree with the pricing of CDs but I shop around a lot, especially on Ebay & second-hand music stores.
However, music sharing is something that has always been done socially - it's the fact that P2P doesn't fit in with the modern laws of capitalism that's the problem.
Personally, I think the whole thing is overblown by the record companies. Giants like Sony need to remember that disposable income of people is not unlimited and for every Sony album sale they lose through P2P, they probably gain part of a PS2 sale .
Yes, there's a lot of greed involved but it's greed on the parts of both the downloaders and the record companies.
Bands make their money from live performance and T-shirt sales unless they are huge multi-platinum artists that can demand what they want from the record companies.
Downloadable music means destruction of the album format - this will result in bands having lower song output thus jeopardising the amount of material they have for live concert sets. This leads to less live concerts and less money to the bands.
Now we all know that most albums contain maybe 2 or 3 songs we want to listen to and the rest is filler.
Please don't make generalisations like this. This all depends on the type of music you listen to and the way you treat music.
I listen to a lot of fringe hard rock that gets no airplay here in the UK. It used to be I had to buy an album on "trust" simply by reading magazine reviews and just taking a risk - most of the time I got albums that had only 1 or 2 good tracks on them.
Nowadays, I download the album from Usenet as MP3s, if I like it then I buy the CD, otherwise I ditch it because it's just a waste of hard disk space. To me this is no different to taking a new car for a test drive before you buy it. The music industry gets less money from me because I'm more discerning but, on the other hand, I'm more happy with the overall product I buy because now I'm never disappointed.
I now own over 1200 legal music CDs - yes, a few of those (a minority) are albums with 1 or 2 good tracks on them but most are albums that I only play as albums from start to finish. Occasionally I burn a compilation CD for the car or separate tracks for my MP3 player at the gym but otherwise I'm an album listener.
I accept there is a demand for legal music downloading (I just don't understand why anyone would pay for music that's not on a CD with a nice cover and good sleeve notes) but, unfortunately, it's killing the way I listen to music, both on CD and live concerts.
Simply put, it's through albums that a band creates enough material to perform live for a decent length of time. Unfortunately, the future of music now is grim - if a band only goes into a studio to record one or two catchy songs for the downloaders, their output will be less, as will their back catalogue, this will jeopardise live performances in turn.
If downloading is the way music is going, who am I to stand in the way of progress? But it will kill the way most music is made today, both in the album format and in live performance - and I don't think that's going to be a good thing in the long term.
The copies were deliberately sold so it would make the news so that more mindless sheeple would end up queuing for their copies outside the bookshops at midnight on Saturday.
Before I saw this Slashdot posting, I had zero intention of reading the book - now, since the posting, I have 100 times that intention of reading the book...
I'm sure there are some true fans of the Harry Potter books but the majority of sheeple just let themselves be dragged mindlessly into the craze purely because it's a "cool" thing to do because everyone else does it.
The reality and sadness of the matter is had these people read any Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Philip Pullman, Roald Dahl or even Terry Pratchett, they'd realise that there's hardly a single iota of an original idea in any one of Rowling's books.
It's very clever manipulation by the corporations involved to use "oneupmanship" as the way of getting the sheeple to rush out and buy the book at the stroke of midnight next Saturday ("I must finish it before Johnny down the street does") but those of us with even a little common sense realise it's clever marketting wrapped around a sub-standard product.
Sorry, but much as I hold of a lot of pride in our BBC's reporting, this story is a complete fallacy and the BBC should be ashamed of itself.
Why would the man not yet be named? He is 22 years of age, therefore not a minor and there is therefore no legal precedent (here in the UK) to stop him being named in the press.
This is quite clearly a Microsoft or ELSPA piece of propaganda, designed to put fear into those currently indulging in software piracy, nothing more.
I don't support piracy in any way but I am sick and tired of propaganda stories designed only to put fear into the general populace.
Please be assured that the Sender-ID change will in no way inhibit Outlook's existing ability to accept & run ever single harmful attachment possible without you ever knowing about it.
You can be certain that every user listed in your Outlook Address Book will continue to get their "Hi There" and "Please Read This" emails on a regular basis.
The impact of your more than adequate reasons would be further enhanced if he hits those same people over the head with a bit stick while he's telling them.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not disparaging of novices - far from it as I'm always conscious of the fact that we all start off knowing nothing about anything. But the fact is that some of us ask questions, take an interest and learn all of the time to get to become knowledgeable experts in areas like the Internet. Other people just don't bother.
Let me give you a real world example. I'm not a full-time technical trainer but I do some training of my peers within the scope of the job I do, usually on TCP/IP and Linux.
Having trained a number of technical people in those fields, one guy suggested I run some smaller "cut down" courses for non-technical (e.g. sales people).
So I wrote some material on email, covering basic functionality, how mail & DNS works together, virus setection, spam filtering, etc. I then advertised it waiting for attendees but apart from a few enquiries from non-technical people, no-one from that side was interested. I did do some classes but it was attended by genuinely interested technical people.
In summary, therefore, I'm *not* against the novice (we were all novices once) but most of them remain novices because they don't believe it's their problem or a just too damn lazy to go learn something new.
Remembering that Windows 2000 was released in 1999, this would put it at the same time as RedHat 6.0-ish, Mandrake 6.0-ish, Gnome 1.x and KDE 1.x. Also a 2.2 kernel as opposed to 2.6 now.
By all means make the comparison but it would only be fair to make those comparisons with Linux distributions of around the same time.
I can't argue your other points but don't underestimate the importance of an email address - a few Google searches on that address might reveal forums that person has posted to, perhaps a bank web site...
It might be argued that using your real name as a portion of your email address might be viewed as very insecure; better to use the "name" part of the email address as something that cannot be immediately associated to you.
You sound like an engineer (like me) and you've given the engineering solution to the problem.
Unfortunately, we engineers are in a much lower caste to the accountants who will only do something if there's money to be made from it.
You seem to forget that a certain amount of failure always get factored into everything we pay for in a capitalist society - for example, the interest rate you pay on your credit card includes a fraction of money to pay for the millions in fraud that credit card company will suffer in the future. When accountants rule the world, it's easier to collect money equating to the losses rather than to fix the core problem.
With email functionality changes, imagine the costs to businesses to change or update all their email servers rather than simply factoring in the costs of wasted bandwidth into their balance sheets? Add to that, the bickering between corporations as each one strives to get their standards accepted and licensed?
Sorry to "extinguish your firework with waste bodily fluids" but whilst your solution is a good one in theory, in reality it won't happen.
There's actually three options.
The first, and worst, option is to hand over your personal responsibility to corporations (like good old Microsoft). Doing that creates a market (= profit-making opportunity) for them and let's them erode away at your personal freedoms by tying you into their products and their ideals (see DRM as an example.
The second option is to let government legislation handle it. Almost as bad as the first but at least the great unwashed masses have the power of the vote to influence the politicians to a small degree.
Thirdly, and the best option, is to take the responsibility for your Internet safety on yourself. Unfortunately, as usual, the unwashed masses cannot be bothered to spend the time to do this and make things bad for everyone else as a result. However, at least the minority of us taking this option can at least do so knowing we were the last to "cave in" to corporate profiteering and corrupt politicians.
But I still don't accept vigilante justice is the answer - taking that stance makes you as bad as the perpetrators.
Intelligence and ingenuity, as demonstrated by the Open Source community (that has neither corporate or political interests at its heart) is the only way to counter this problem.
The analogy to spam-fighting as a "war" is a good one - it's about an ever-escalating series of attacks and counter-attacks between each side, getting more and more time-consuming each time.
Again, my point is never ever give anyone any information about you unless you really have to - because personal information is worth a lot of money to someone.
The crux of the matter is that Joe Public users are playing with Internet services that have been sold to them as "the New Revolution" but were originally designed by geeks for geeks.
As far as I'm concerned, you go on the Internet then you "learn to fight with the big boys" or get shot down in flames - in just the same way that if you drive a fast car never having had a driving lesson, you can expect to end up in a car wreck.
What I'm trying to say here is that your energies would be much better used educating the ignorant masses about why they get spam and how they can defeat it rather than offering to take control of an issue that's their responsibility to deal with - but I guess there's probably less profit to be made from that.
You can't just leave it to SpamAssassin to detect spam, you need to apply some other filtering around it also like procmail recipes.
SpamAssassin has a deep look inside each email's contents for making spam determinations but you can apply some simple rules, even before you get to the SpamAssassin stage for deleting a lot of rubbish emails - in procmail, I look for patterns in headers such as:
1. Are any of my valid email addresses in the To: or CC: fields of the email?
2. Is there a valid Message-ID header field in each email?
3. If the email is sent to a number of addresses, are those addresses normally people I am associated with? Are there a lot of addresses to other people at my ISP domain?
30 emails per day equates to 900 out of 25,000 a month so you're probably detecting them at about the same success rate I do currently - but if these ones that do get through still annoy you, then it's a case of modifying filtering rules going forward to catch them.
The waste of bandwidth is an issue and one I cannot answer although I still suspect it's fairly minimal here.
For the simple fact that email addresses are harvested by spammers from web sites, news groups, etc. However, one thing more valuable to a spammer than an email address is a valid email address, the validity of it having been determined by your reply back to the spammer.
Your approach to any Internet service should always be the same - "run silent, run deep". If someone *thinks* you're there, don't do anything to let them *know* you are there...
My solution therefore was to simply filter it out and delete it - instead of downloading the email into an email client, my Linux server now filters it with procmail and SpamAssassin. Now I never see 95% of the spam I was getting - apart from an entry in procmail's log file to say particular messages were deleted.
As far as I am concerned now, that's my "victory" over the spammers and I consider it a "test of wills" to create or modify filtering rules to capture the spams that do occasionally get through.
I agree that spam is a big problem and big resource waster for corporates but they're the ones with the lawyers and budget to go after these spammers if it gets to that stage of proceedings.
For me, the little guy, it's about using my ingenuity against the spammers and, so far, I'm beating them because I detect and delete the majority of their trash before I ever get the opportunity to cast my eyes over it.
Sorry but as far as I am concerned, the people for whom spam is a problem are the people who refuse to simply go invest some time in learning about how the Internet and IP services actually *work* and actually do some "passive" combatting themselves.
At the end of it all, if most of us took some responsibility for our Internet life, viruses and worms would be a thing of the past and spamming would stop because no-one would ever see it and reply to it.
The sooner "newbie" users get off their backsides and stop treating their PC like a "closed box", the better it will be for all of us.
Let the legal system go after the spammers, life's far too short to worry about another crappy P2P application...
If it's the artist making their songs available on a web site for the public to purchase themselves, that just mirrors what used to happen 20 years ago when you'd go see a small local band play and they'd sell you there own recorded tapes at the gig. That's good for both artist and listener.
However, throw the record companies in the middle and the whole thing changes. The listeners get their music downloads at a price dictated by the record companies and the musicians only get to record and release songs that are deemed "commercially viable" by the record companies.
And, of course, the record companies will fight to the bitter end to maintain this "middle man" status...
However, music sharing is something that has always been done socially - it's the fact that P2P doesn't fit in with the modern laws of capitalism that's the problem.
Personally, I think the whole thing is overblown by the record companies. Giants like Sony need to remember that disposable income of people is not unlimited and for every Sony album sale they lose through P2P, they probably gain part of a PS2 sale .
Yes, there's a lot of greed involved but it's greed on the parts of both the downloaders and the record companies.
Downloadable music means destruction of the album format - this will result in bands having lower song output thus jeopardising the amount of material they have for live concert sets. This leads to less live concerts and less money to the bands.
Please don't make generalisations like this. This all depends on the type of music you listen to and the way you treat music.
I listen to a lot of fringe hard rock that gets no airplay here in the UK. It used to be I had to buy an album on "trust" simply by reading magazine reviews and just taking a risk - most of the time I got albums that had only 1 or 2 good tracks on them.
Nowadays, I download the album from Usenet as MP3s, if I like it then I buy the CD, otherwise I ditch it because it's just a waste of hard disk space. To me this is no different to taking a new car for a test drive before you buy it. The music industry gets less money from me because I'm more discerning but, on the other hand, I'm more happy with the overall product I buy because now I'm never disappointed.
I now own over 1200 legal music CDs - yes, a few of those (a minority) are albums with 1 or 2 good tracks on them but most are albums that I only play as albums from start to finish. Occasionally I burn a compilation CD for the car or separate tracks for my MP3 player at the gym but otherwise I'm an album listener.
I accept there is a demand for legal music downloading (I just don't understand why anyone would pay for music that's not on a CD with a nice cover and good sleeve notes) but, unfortunately, it's killing the way I listen to music, both on CD and live concerts.
Simply put, it's through albums that a band creates enough material to perform live for a decent length of time. Unfortunately, the future of music now is grim - if a band only goes into a studio to record one or two catchy songs for the downloaders, their output will be less, as will their back catalogue, this will jeopardise live performances in turn.
If downloading is the way music is going, who am I to stand in the way of progress? But it will kill the way most music is made today, both in the album format and in live performance - and I don't think that's going to be a good thing in the long term.
Move along, nothing to see here...
"Not Falling For Practical Jokes For Dummies" possibly?
Before I saw this Slashdot posting, I had zero intention of reading the book - now, since the posting, I have 100 times that intention of reading the book...
I'm sure there are some true fans of the Harry Potter books but the majority of sheeple just let themselves be dragged mindlessly into the craze purely because it's a "cool" thing to do because everyone else does it.
The reality and sadness of the matter is had these people read any Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Philip Pullman, Roald Dahl or even Terry Pratchett, they'd realise that there's hardly a single iota of an original idea in any one of Rowling's books.
It's very clever manipulation by the corporations involved to use "oneupmanship" as the way of getting the sheeple to rush out and buy the book at the stroke of midnight next Saturday ("I must finish it before Johnny down the street does") but those of us with even a little common sense realise it's clever marketting wrapped around a sub-standard product.
Why would the man not yet be named? He is 22 years of age, therefore not a minor and there is therefore no legal precedent (here in the UK) to stop him being named in the press.
This is quite clearly a Microsoft or ELSPA piece of propaganda, designed to put fear into those currently indulging in software piracy, nothing more.
I don't support piracy in any way but I am sick and tired of propaganda stories designed only to put fear into the general populace.
Morris Worm
The Morris Worm needed a very specific architecture to spread itself on. Today that would represent a tiny proportion of all UNIX Internet hosts.
You can be certain that every user listed in your Outlook Address Book will continue to get their "Hi There" and "Please Read This" emails on a regular basis.
All My Love
Your Dear Uncle William
But Slashdot is the site for all things hardly newsworthy...
Foam Bat for Opera users, Spiked Concrete Baseball Bat for the Microsofties...
For having to having to chase payment defaulting customers - 150 rupees.
For handing over personal bank information - priceless.
For everything else, there's "EmbezzleCard".
The impact of your more than adequate reasons would be further enhanced if he hits those same people over the head with a bit stick while he's telling them.