You sound much more knowledgable than I on this subject, so I'll ask you this question: If it can be discerned by a server, then it should be dicernable further up the chain as well. Why haven't backbone providers implemented countermeasures?
Could you set up a network where only 2 incomplete TCP handshakes per minute are allowed, all other packets from that IP ignored for the remainder of the minute? Same basic idea with a starvation attack - if you don't receive traffic within a given timeframe, that IP is blocked for, say 10 seconds.
WHOAAA!!! spam is not a matter of frea speach, but a matter of THEFT OF SERVICES AND RESSOURCES.
I perfer the term "computer hijacking" (kinda gives it the "terrorist" flavor), and spam is only one of the things it is used for. Also, spam does not exclusively use this method. Therefore, spam is not a matter of theft/hijacking unless that particular method is the one being used for the given offense. Spam is a matter of harrassment.
IMNSHO, it is the arrogance of lawyers that leads to the assumption that more laws will solve the problem. Better filters, better security and responsible users are the only way the problem will be resolved.
We certainly had our share of the folks you're talking about, but not all of us were like that. We were also a higher j-board, mostly hearing appeals from the lower j-boards (like the dorm j-boards). IOW, we dealt with larger issues than some frat pledge getting caught with an airplane bottle of schnapps. I could easily see a revocation of an account being appealed to the board I served on. I could also see many of the members of the board wanting hard explanation from both sides about why the other side is wrong. I would just bet that our fellow slashdotter could give a firmer explanation than the opposition.
Besides, it's more about getting the story on the record. It's harder to ignore the facts when you have to sit in a room and have your ignorance unveiled in front of a bunch of people.
It all comes down to the culture you have at your school. I always thought mine was pretty apathetic until I saw how some other places operated.
When I was doing my undergrad, I was on a judical board. Any student who felt they were unduly punished could appeal their punishment to a judicial board for decision. This kept administrators from running amok handing out nonsense punishments out of ignorance/laziness/malice.
Our school even had a group of prelaw/political science majors that were certified by the school as "advocates" and could present your case for you. Check with your student government association and find out if such an option would be available to you. This may not solve the problem outright, but it would give you an opportunity to state the facts.
You can't argue with ignorance, but you can go on the record with the facts.
Productivity is determined more by the app than by the OS. The OS will naturally determine what apps are available, but it still depends on what your task is. If you're doing something that is command line shell intensive, *nix will serve you better whereas if you're looking for "off the shelf" type apps, Windoze or Mac would be the obvious choices. I am an outspoken critic of MS, but I definitely get more gaming done on Windoze than any other OS, and the longer I'm stuck running it at work, the more I tweak my 'doze box to provide unix-like functionality.
As with all laws, the authority comes from elected officials. So i recommend that you purchase an elected official. You can probably get one cheaper than you think.
Hit the sale rack at your software store of choice and and try out a few games of different genres. That way you won't waste a bunch of money on games you don't like, and you can nail down a genre that works well for you. Everyone here has been saying "forget FPS", but seriously- if you think you might like that kind of game, go pick one up off the sale rack for $5 and try it out. If it doesn't work for you, you've only lost $5, and that's assuming that you can't recycle it into a stocking stuffer for a friend down the road.
The main thing is that if you're trying to pick a genre, try some cheap ones before you go drop $50+ on the latest and greatest.
I'm surprised that nobody has been quoting the Sears decision. Taxing of interstate commerce is illegal by the federal constitution. Besides, wouldn't it be a "purchase" tax if the burden were on the consumer?
I loved using my Visor Prism, and when I bought it, it was top of the line. I have since transferred into a job where PDAs are banned from our work area due to "security" concerns. What it comes down to is a knee-jerk reaction to technology that is not understood by physical security people with little or no (current) technical training.
I have had many problems due to the removal of the PDA I had come to depend on.
Spam isn't necessarily bad. It does have a use. If over-aggressive surveilance is something you fear, the camoflage that spam offers should be a comfort.
Think of all the spam you receive at work that slips past the filters- do you really think that corporate security has the time to manually filter everything else for the inappropriate emails your girlfriend keeps sending?
I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to think about the implications that stegonography presents.
Having a better education doesn't necessarily make you a better employee. As far as CS degrees go, you may be able to figure out the Big-O analysis of the nastiest, ugliest function of them all, but that won't help you figure out where that wild pointer is that the someone (probably with some degree other than CS) buried 3 levels of indirection deep in global variables and forgot to add the appropriate goto's to set it.
No nonsense folks, I get told on a daily basis how CS people don't know nearly as much as "real" engineers about how to write software.
I'm graduating in a few weeks with a MS in CS from a school that is reputable in our area and I have 8+ years of experience in realtime software development. I am still routinely discounted by people with more experience, but no formal education in software development or software engineering.
It's only a matter of time before such items will be tagged with some PC sounding label (i.e. boogeyman chip, RFID Jammer, etc.) and outlawed. The answer lies in passive measures, like keeping your passport in a lead bag (used for carrying film), or making sure your passport has an "accident" and promise to get it fixed as soon as you get stateside.
My worry is that RFIDs will be utilized by someone like a terrorist, who is looking for potential victims. That's it! Label any handeld scanner a "terroist's victim screener", or other such name.. Watcha think?
How about Opening products that MS no longer supports (DOS 6.2, Win 3.1, 3.11, '95, '98). This would allow them a swipe at the Linux customers that use Linux because of its open source qualities. (i.e. self support)
But really, I'd like to see the source for MS Bob.
(Assuming that they will be speaking English and have internet access)
Get etexts from Project Gutenberg.
OpenOffice
Mozilla
Some kind of IM client
Irfanview
there's a million different freeware implementations of checkers and chess out there
If you install Windoze, INSTALL SOLITARE. It's a great intro to computers game.
Do NOT install outlook in an unsafe config (remember the old versions had things like preview pane and autolaunch turned on by default) - we don't want them learning about malicious spam the hard way.
There's a difference between a software engineer and a programmer. You can go to trade school to be a programmer- maybe that's why you're seeing low offers. When I graduated (8 years ago) before the dot com boom, salaries were averaging just shy of $35k.
Seriously- if you think about it, spam may be our last hope for privacy on the net. The more legal measures we put against spammers, the more freedom we lose ourselves. So why not just accept spam as a fact of life and find some useful purpose for it, like camoflage for stego. I know there's several stego programs out there that disguise their transmissions as spam- if we get rid of the spam, no more camoflage. Don't get me wrong, I don't like getting ads for pr0n at work any more than anyone else, but I think there are other ways of dealing with it- without legally screwing ourselves in the end. (pun intended)
Too bad they won't really find out how much authority they don't have until one of the scumbag pirates decides to defend themselves. This also brings up an interesting point- it's always easier to start with doing this stuff to scumbags first- once it becomes common practice, then you can start doing it to other people.
IIRC from my intellectual property law class, raids must be conducted by law enforcement- the IP owner only gets to go along to identify what was not legit.
Taking the law into your own hands like this makes you just as much a criminal as the person you're after. (and the person you're after is probably a better criminal than the hack that's doing it for the first time)
Take a step onto the illegal side, and you can't expect the law to protect you.
Could you then wire up the microphone to some type of audio player? After all, you're not using the service, so you won't miss out on anything. You could then play for anyone listening an endless loop of things that sound like they're coming from someone else's car. Imagine the problems you could cause when they think they've got the wrong car. (or better yet, you could play a recording of someone having a severe gas attack or other similar problems that nobody would really want to listen to;-)
In reality, though, how hard would it be to put the mic, gps antenna, or other critical component on a toggle switch?
I felt like I was being a little paranoid when I demanded that my last contract - which stated that my "full productive capacity" belonged to my employer - be modified to make it clear that work I did on my time was my own.
What if you had written a virus, would the virus then be a product of the company?
Shouldn't authority come with an equal amount of responsibility?
As long as EULA's are allowed to cast away all responsability like a person wearing a T-shirt that says "not responsible for my actions", unsecure, buggy software will be the norm. However, if something were put into place that tied liability to the fact that you're making money (i.e. it's professinally designed, not amateur), that would leave room in the world for open source, and hold the "push crap out the door as long as it makes $$$" mentality to a minimum.
You could say this about anything. Now we've seen how quickly they can react when they want to. The question is: What button did we push to get this fast reaction, and how can we apply it to other pressing issues?
What I don't understand is why anyone needs this information. Have we lost the concept of needing justification to collect information on people? Have we lost the concept of "None Of Your Business"?
Statistical information is one thing, but when you create these databases, this is data collection on individuals, most of whom are not doing anything wrong and should not be subject to the scrutiny of investigation.
I find it quite disturbing that Anonymizer and the gubmint are in bed. Don't think that dubyah and co. aren't keeping tabs on what the Iranians are looking at, if for no other reason than to figure out where their "hearts and minds" are.
I may get flamed for proposing this, but on my way to work this morning, I thought of something: In the current climate of anti-privacy that we are experiencing, doesn't the flurry of spam make it harder for someone to spy on your email? I mean, if there's that much crap a potential spy has to dredge through, isn't it harder to pull out meaninful stuff? We have a hard enough time filtering the good stuff out of our own email, imagine what a privacy invader has to go through when they're looking at many people's email.
Slashdot Mirror
You sound much more knowledgable than I on this subject, so I'll ask you this question: If it can be discerned by a server, then it should be dicernable further up the chain as well. Why haven't backbone providers implemented countermeasures?
Could you set up a network where only 2 incomplete TCP handshakes per minute are allowed, all other packets from that IP ignored for the remainder of the minute? Same basic idea with a starvation attack - if you don't receive traffic within a given timeframe, that IP is blocked for, say 10 seconds.
WHOAAA!!! spam is not a matter of frea speach, but a matter of THEFT OF SERVICES AND RESSOURCES.
I perfer the term "computer hijacking" (kinda gives it the "terrorist" flavor), and spam is only one of the things it is used for. Also, spam does not exclusively use this method. Therefore, spam is not a matter of theft/hijacking unless that particular method is the one being used for the given offense. Spam is a matter of harrassment.
IMNSHO, it is the arrogance of lawyers that leads to the assumption that more laws will solve the problem. Better filters, better security and responsible users are the only way the problem will be resolved.
We certainly had our share of the folks you're talking about, but not all of us were like that. We were also a higher j-board, mostly hearing appeals from the lower j-boards (like the dorm j-boards). IOW, we dealt with larger issues than some frat pledge getting caught with an airplane bottle of schnapps. I could easily see a revocation of an account being appealed to the board I served on. I could also see many of the members of the board wanting hard explanation from both sides about why the other side is wrong. I would just bet that our fellow slashdotter could give a firmer explanation than the opposition.
Besides, it's more about getting the story on the record. It's harder to ignore the facts when you have to sit in a room and have your ignorance unveiled in front of a bunch of people.
It all comes down to the culture you have at your school. I always thought mine was pretty apathetic until I saw how some other places operated.
When I was doing my undergrad, I was on a judical board. Any student who felt they were unduly punished could appeal their punishment to a judicial board for decision. This kept administrators from running amok handing out nonsense punishments out of ignorance/laziness/malice.
Our school even had a group of prelaw/political science majors that were certified by the school as "advocates" and could present your case for you. Check with your student government association and find out if such an option would be available to you. This may not solve the problem outright, but it would give you an opportunity to state the facts.
You can't argue with ignorance, but you can go on the record with the facts.
Productivity is determined more by the app than by the OS. The OS will naturally determine what apps are available, but it still depends on what your task is. If you're doing something that is command line shell intensive, *nix will serve you better whereas if you're looking for "off the shelf" type apps, Windoze or Mac would be the obvious choices. I am an outspoken critic of MS, but I definitely get more gaming done on Windoze than any other OS, and the longer I'm stuck running it at work, the more I tweak my 'doze box to provide unix-like functionality.
As with all laws, the authority comes from elected officials. So i recommend that you purchase an elected official. You can probably get one cheaper than you think.
Here's the strategy I would suggest:
Hit the sale rack at your software store of choice and and try out a few games of different genres. That way you won't waste a bunch of money on games you don't like, and you can nail down a genre that works well for you. Everyone here has been saying "forget FPS", but seriously- if you think you might like that kind of game, go pick one up off the sale rack for $5 and try it out. If it doesn't work for you, you've only lost $5, and that's assuming that you can't recycle it into a stocking stuffer for a friend down the road.
The main thing is that if you're trying to pick a genre, try some cheap ones before you go drop $50+ on the latest and greatest.
See you on the battlefield....
I'm surprised that nobody has been quoting the Sears decision. Taxing of interstate commerce is illegal by the federal constitution. Besides, wouldn't it be a "purchase" tax if the burden were on the consumer?
I loved using my Visor Prism, and when I bought it, it was top of the line. I have since transferred into a job where PDAs are banned from our work area due to "security" concerns. What it comes down to is a knee-jerk reaction to technology that is not understood by physical security people with little or no (current) technical training.
I have had many problems due to the removal of the PDA I had come to depend on.
Has anyone else had this problem?
...and I'll say it again:
Spam isn't necessarily bad. It does have a use. If over-aggressive surveilance is something you fear, the camoflage that spam offers should be a comfort.
Think of all the spam you receive at work that slips past the filters- do you really think that corporate security has the time to manually filter everything else for the inappropriate emails your girlfriend keeps sending?
I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to think about the implications that stegonography presents.
Having a better education doesn't necessarily make you a better employee. As far as CS degrees go, you may be able to figure out the Big-O analysis of the nastiest, ugliest function of them all, but that won't help you figure out where that wild pointer is that the someone (probably with some degree other than CS) buried 3 levels of indirection deep in global variables and forgot to add the appropriate goto's to set it.
No nonsense folks, I get told on a daily basis how CS people don't know nearly as much as "real" engineers about how to write software.
I'm graduating in a few weeks with a MS in CS from a school that is reputable in our area and I have 8+ years of experience in realtime software development. I am still routinely discounted by people with more experience, but no formal education in software development or software engineering.
It's ugly out there. Choose your battles well.
It's only a matter of time before such items will be tagged with some PC sounding label (i.e. boogeyman chip, RFID Jammer, etc.) and outlawed. The answer lies in passive measures, like keeping your passport in a lead bag (used for carrying film), or making sure your passport has an "accident" and promise to get it fixed as soon as you get stateside.
My worry is that RFIDs will be utilized by someone like a terrorist, who is looking for potential victims. That's it! Label any handeld scanner a "terroist's victim screener", or other such name.. Watcha think?
How about Opening products that MS no longer supports (DOS 6.2, Win 3.1, 3.11, '95, '98). This would allow them a swipe at the Linux customers that use Linux because of its open source qualities. (i.e. self support)
But really, I'd like to see the source for MS Bob.
(Assuming that they will be speaking English and have internet access)
Get etexts from Project Gutenberg.
OpenOffice
Mozilla
Some kind of IM client
Irfanview
there's a million different freeware implementations of checkers and chess out there
If you install Windoze, INSTALL SOLITARE. It's a great intro to computers game.
Do NOT install outlook in an unsafe config (remember the old versions had things like preview pane and autolaunch turned on by default) - we don't want them learning about malicious spam the hard way.
Watch out for export restriction issues.
There's a difference between a software engineer and a programmer. You can go to trade school to be a programmer- maybe that's why you're seeing low offers. When I graduated (8 years ago) before the dot com boom, salaries were averaging just shy of $35k.
Try here
There's more to being a software engineer than just code slinging. If anyone tells you different, you probably don't want to work for them.
Seriously- if you think about it, spam may be our last hope for privacy on the net. The more legal measures we put against spammers, the more freedom we lose ourselves. So why not just accept spam as a fact of life and find some useful purpose for it, like camoflage for stego. I know there's several stego programs out there that disguise their transmissions as spam- if we get rid of the spam, no more camoflage. Don't get me wrong, I don't like getting ads for pr0n at work any more than anyone else, but I think there are other ways of dealing with it- without legally screwing ourselves in the end. (pun intended)
Too bad they won't really find out how much authority they don't have until one of the scumbag pirates decides to defend themselves. This also brings up an interesting point- it's always easier to start with doing this stuff to scumbags first- once it becomes common practice, then you can start doing it to other people.
IIRC from my intellectual property law class, raids must be conducted by law enforcement- the IP owner only gets to go along to identify what was not legit.
Taking the law into your own hands like this makes you just as much a criminal as the person you're after. (and the person you're after is probably a better criminal than the hack that's doing it for the first time)
Take a step onto the illegal side, and you can't expect the law to protect you.
Could you then wire up the microphone to some type of audio player? After all, you're not using the service, so you won't miss out on anything. You could then play for anyone listening an endless loop of things that sound like they're coming from someone else's car. Imagine the problems you could cause when they think they've got the wrong car. (or better yet, you could play a recording of someone having a severe gas attack or other similar problems that nobody would really want to listen to ;-)
In reality, though, how hard would it be to put the mic, gps antenna, or other critical component on a toggle switch?
I felt like I was being a little paranoid when I demanded that my last contract - which stated that my "full productive capacity" belonged to my employer - be modified to make it clear that work I did on my time was my own.
What if you had written a virus, would the virus then be a product of the company?
Shouldn't authority come with an equal amount of responsibility?
As long as EULA's are allowed to cast away all responsability like a person wearing a T-shirt that says "not responsible for my actions", unsecure, buggy software will be the norm. However, if something were put into place that tied liability to the fact that you're making money (i.e. it's professinally designed, not amateur), that would leave room in the world for open source, and hold the "push crap out the door as long as it makes $$$" mentality to a minimum.
Why can't they pass an anti-spam bill as quickly?
You could say this about anything. Now we've seen how quickly they can react when they want to. The question is: What button did we push to get this fast reaction, and how can we apply it to other pressing issues?
What I don't understand is why anyone needs this information. Have we lost the concept of needing justification to collect information on people? Have we lost the concept of "None Of Your Business"?
Statistical information is one thing, but when you create these databases, this is data collection on individuals, most of whom are not doing anything wrong and should not be subject to the scrutiny of investigation.
is that we have a regulatory body (who is unelected) being able, with help from the president, to pass laws over the heads of the legislature.
Would someone please tell me I'm missing something here.
I find it quite disturbing that Anonymizer and the gubmint are in bed. Don't think that dubyah and co. aren't keeping tabs on what the Iranians are looking at, if for no other reason than to figure out where their "hearts and minds" are.
I may get flamed for proposing this, but on my way to work this morning, I thought of something: In the current climate of anti-privacy that we are experiencing, doesn't the flurry of spam make it harder for someone to spy on your email? I mean, if there's that much crap a potential spy has to dredge through, isn't it harder to pull out meaninful stuff? We have a hard enough time filtering the good stuff out of our own email, imagine what a privacy invader has to go through when they're looking at many people's email.