It's arrogant from the point of view of "The Abusive Hosts Blocking List" (AHBL), however, who's to say how many ISPs actually use this list? Is this really a big problem in the world of the Internet? Does anyone have any comments on the level of respect this AHBL list has (or does not have)? If no one uses it, then it's irrelevant.
So "The Abusive Hosts Blocking List" organization has decided to block most address space coming from the largest ISP in Spain. Who cares?
Who does this even affect? Only the systems that use this list are going to be blocking this address space. It's unfortunate for anyone with an ISP that does implement filtering based on this list (I suspect the number is rather small), but irrelevant for the rest of the world.
If this technology is for real, then my first thought is to apply it to high-density storage devices. What is this "secure encryption and identification" mumbo-jumbo, as quoted from the article. Does this technology intrinsically lend itself to encryption? -- Or is it rather a new theoretical method of data storage?
What would be cool is to see someone launch a vehicle like this, but instead of pointlessly crashing something into the moon, do some fly-bys of various lunar landing sites and send some high quality pictures back.
From the standpoint of a private individual with some technical knowledge, the SPAM issue is merely an occasional nuisance. I don't really get any personal SPAM, but that is only a result of diligence on my part.
On the other hand when you are dealing with the public, most corporations feel they have little choice but to publicize e-mail addresses for their services. Unfortunately, all it takes is one nasty crawler to pickup an address from a webpage and then it spreads, seemingly exponentially.
I think the only way to successfully prevent most SPAM is to stop posting e-mail addresses. A lot of people figured this out a long time ago, and now interject various phrases into their e-mail addresses to throw off the crawlers. Yet companies still post generalized e-mail addresses on their websites (such as info@, or service@, etc.).
Why not just choose to require all Internet communication to be initated through the web. If you have a question, don't allow direct e-mail, just have them fill out a form. For the reply, the company can always generate a random return address that will only accept mail from the intended recipient. I would assume at least some companies already do this (as it's not exactly a revolutionary idea, in my opinion), but it surprises me that it is not widespread.
Performance aside, SCSI drives tend to win when it comes to reliability. Anything can change though.
Re:Combating SPAM is easy, if you have the technol
on
DSPAM v2.10 Released
·
· Score: 1
Yes, this is one of the exceptions to my argument, however I was only talking about how I personally managed SPAM for my private and privileged business mailboxes.
By no means do I change my primary e-mail addresses regularly, in fact I still have the same addresses from when I originally created my domains. I only make up a new address when I come across an untrusted site (ie: almost anyplace). Sure, if one of my contacts decided to be malicious and submitted my e-mail to some unscrupulous places, I would be in a world of hurt. So far I must have been only dealing with generally good people because evidently no one has done this.
I have also received very limited e-mail and snail-mail advertising on my published domain account registrations, but it amounts to almost nothing. Why? I don't really know. Most of it has come from the registrars for the individual domains. I have some domains which have been on file with the same registrar for at least 6-7 years, however, I do shop around a lot and switch often with new registrations because I have quite a few dozen domains and am always looking for a competetive price and the best service. Think about it, for example, 100 domains at VeriSign prices (NOW only $25/year; used to be $35) = $2500, vs. other providers at as little as $8/year = 800 (and even less, but I have not been pleased with the super cheap places I've tried so far, such as sub $7).
You cannot directly control SPAM if you have to publicize your address, although there are some not-so-eloquent solutions you can take to minimize the effect such as showing the address as an image, but this is of course not practical (at least today) when doing business on a large scale.
I don't think that most technogeeks who complain about all the SPAM in their inboxes need to publicize their e-mail address though. Even though larger entities have no choice but to do this, most individuals do not.
Re:Combating SPAM is easy, if you have the technol
on
DSPAM v2.10 Released
·
· Score: 1
No offense, and this may be a dumb question perhaps, but how is this Insightful?
Why not just enter "madeupname-neverwillexist12321@92843.32176321.not ", for example? This isn't even a valid email address. To my knowledge, ".not" is not a valid Top Level Domain (TLD), so therefore anything entered in that "domain" is not going to resolve anywhere. Now the argument could be made that the root servers have to pay the price for the initial lookup of this non-existent domain name and then VeriSign will want to pop up a for-sale page, but barring that, the cost to anyone is non-existent.
Why send the e-mail somewhere that is just going to dump it 5 hours later? What is the advantage, and why bother?
Re:Combating SPAM is easy, if you have the technol
on
DSPAM v2.10 Released
·
· Score: 1
Well first off/dev/null is no longer an issue for me since I now use [gasp!] Exchange server. Secondly you may have a point there. Perhaps Microsoft may have indirectly made my life easier because I could no longer accept any random alias at my domains by default without specifically adding it into my account. Food for thought, eh?
Re:Combating SPAM is easy, if you have the technol
on
DSPAM v2.10 Released
·
· Score: 1
Thanks for the tip. I'll try this modified approach out and see if I can get it working. Up until now I thought any wildcard aliases in Exchange would be ignored, as that has been my experience, at least with 2000 and prior. I'm still somewhat skeptical, but you never know!
Re:To mod or to post. Spam is the question.
on
DSPAM v2.10 Released
·
· Score: 1
Well I don't purport to have received e-mail for anywhere near 20 years, however, I own domains dating back to 1995. Not exactly the beginning of the Internet, but I think it does give me some credibility concerning my comments. So that gives me about 9 years of mostly SPAM free e-mail history. Sure, I have gotten some SPAM on some of those made-up addresses, but then I turn them off and the problem is gone. Perhaps I had the foresight, or just pure dumb luck and circumstance to use this methodology, but it has worked out rather well.
Honestly though I have never received anywhere near the volume of SPAM that some people are seeing; if I see a few messages per week I start to get annoyed. I can only imagine the nightmare it must be to see dozens or even hundreds per day that some people have reported.
My wife sees perhaps a dozen or more SPAM messages per day from Hotmail; she has used this same account for most of her correspondence over the last few years and was only semi-careful in choosing where to share her address. To contrast that, I have two Hotmail accounts (one for MSN, and one for eBay/PayPal) and have been thoroughly diligent as to where I type those addresses in. The only "SPAM" I get is from MSN Hotmail, eBay, and PayPal. Nothing else. Period.
I congratulate you on having your SPAM under control, and am very impressed that you can afford 10mbit broadband -- you must be a very successful person.
Now, reading your post I suspect you must manage the e-mail services for at least several companies. Considering that, I think I can see where you might be coming from. I have several clients with serious SPAM problems that cannot be resolved simply, especially not using the methods that I have found to work. When dealing with end-users and the "typical" computer user, it is never so simple. Telling someone to be careful seldom works. We employ many SPAM filters of various degrees to minimize the impact on our clients, but there is only so much you can do. Since this IS Slashdot, and we are all technogeeks at heart, I was simply trying to explain how I have personally defeated SPAM over the years.
Re:Combating SPAM is easy, if you have the technol
on
DSPAM v2.10 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The post above is mine, my login must have been dropped.
Combating SPAM is easy, if you have the technology
on
DSPAM v2.10 Released
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I don't get SPAM. I don't have SPAM filters.
How is this possible? Simple.
I create a different e-mail address for any new untrusted entity that I have to provide one for. In the beginning I took advantage of being able to alias all e-mail for non-existent mailboxes (basically, *) at my domain to my primary account. It seemed to me an obvious and simple approach. Whenever I needed to provide an e-mail address, I just made one up, and it was forwarded to my regular Inbox. In my opinion, at that time my ISP was more "sophisticated" than most.
Since then I have moved to hosting all of my domains on my own co-located server which runs Exchange 2000, thus complicating things. Now I have to actually add any new aliases that I want to use into my user account. I know of at least one product out there that can handle non-existent addresses and forward them to a specific account, but it is rather expensive for a feature that should have been built-in from the beginning (althought I'm not aware if the new Exchange can do this out of the box). Not to mention that someone with the proper knowledge and skills could make a similar add-on in relatively short order, but who ever has the time?
The point is that you have to consider when and where you give your e-mail address out, and the possible consequences therein. It's not altogether different from giving out your phone number (especially if you are unlisted) or even your SSN.
After reading the article all I have come away with is a sense of the CEO of SCO trying to redirect the issues at hand to matters of constitutionality in the US (never mind he later aligns his position with the EU).
I wonder what this is intended to accomplish. It reads as pure marketing and legalese fluff, especially considering all the USC (United States Code) references.
Now I will come out and say that I am NOT necessarily an advocate of open source software. Although I have no problem with OSS, I make my living off of building custom software for specific industries and organizations. I would never give up my source code to the public purely for the purposes of sharing (can you say communism).
On the other hand I do believe that these 'obvious' software patents are completely unfounded in the context of innovation. Over my many years in the software and electronics industries I have "invented" many concepts that I could have surely successfully patented at the USPTO. To my way of thinking though these were not really "inventions", but rather just new ways to present information using existing tools, development environments and operating systems.
It's more like 13 and a half hours later (AM vs. PM). In all seriousness though, it does really make you wonder. I usually laugh off all the ridiculousness on Slashdot because it is after all a community run information site (does anyone actually get paid to do this?), and you can only expect so much. Usually I just scan the headlines for any interesting articles and only occasionally read the comments because of that assumption.
The post I am replying to has been moderated as Offtopic. It is difficult to understand why it could be considered Offtopic.
The article submission states "Also of note: the website has 44 gigs of photos so far, runs on solar power, and is Microsoft Free."
The article poster made the specific point that the website is "Microsoft Free". They obviously felt that this was an important and relevant comment regarding the article we all (or many; or some; or a few) decided to read before posting our own comments. Therefore it is perfectly legitimate and on-topic to comment on the original summary.
Many of us would like to eliminate television commercials for a multitude of reasons and there are numerous solutions for replacing the revenue streams that would disappear as a result.
I would like to ask, however, what about the advertisers? Sure, some advertisements are more effective than others, and people buy brand A for reason X and avoid brand B for reason Y. Unless consumers even know about the existence or significance of brand A or B why would they have any reason to buy either, beyond random chance?
How many outlets do organizations have for getting the word out on their products and services? Aside from word of mouth, it must be some form of advertising.
Ultimately what this might come down to is the simple fact that companies and industries feel that television advertising is a valuable asset to them. Billboards are great. Spam e-mail is great (uhh...). Television is also a great medium for selling your wares (arguably a little more class in the ads would be to their benefit in may instances).
How many options are there when it comes to advertising?
It struck me as odd that upon reading just the beginning of the patent (the Abstract) a couple of typos were immediately evident:
"Such can be conventional or can be parse according to ad hoc"......"perhaps at the expense of reduce efficiency but so as to maximum currency and accuracy."
So this makes me wonder: were these errors part of the original patent application as written, or were they simply a result of data entry inaccuracies? Either way, what are the implications of this?
Slashdot Mirror
It's arrogant from the point of view of "The Abusive Hosts Blocking List" (AHBL), however, who's to say how many ISPs actually use this list? Is this really a big problem in the world of the Internet? Does anyone have any comments on the level of respect this AHBL list has (or does not have)? If no one uses it, then it's irrelevant.
So "The Abusive Hosts Blocking List" organization has decided to block most address space coming from the largest ISP in Spain. Who cares? Who does this even affect? Only the systems that use this list are going to be blocking this address space. It's unfortunate for anyone with an ISP that does implement filtering based on this list (I suspect the number is rather small), but irrelevant for the rest of the world.
If this technology is for real, then my first thought is to apply it to high-density storage devices. What is this "secure encryption and identification" mumbo-jumbo, as quoted from the article. Does this technology intrinsically lend itself to encryption? -- Or is it rather a new theoretical method of data storage?
What would be cool is to see someone launch a vehicle like this, but instead of pointlessly crashing something into the moon, do some fly-bys of various lunar landing sites and send some high quality pictures back.
I agree, almost completely.
From the standpoint of a private individual with some technical knowledge, the SPAM issue is merely an occasional nuisance. I don't really get any personal SPAM, but that is only a result of diligence on my part.
On the other hand when you are dealing with the public, most corporations feel they have little choice but to publicize e-mail addresses for their services. Unfortunately, all it takes is one nasty crawler to pickup an address from a webpage and then it spreads, seemingly exponentially.
I think the only way to successfully prevent most SPAM is to stop posting e-mail addresses. A lot of people figured this out a long time ago, and now interject various phrases into their e-mail addresses to throw off the crawlers. Yet companies still post generalized e-mail addresses on their websites (such as info@, or service@, etc.).
Why not just choose to require all Internet communication to be initated through the web. If you have a question, don't allow direct e-mail, just have them fill out a form. For the reply, the company can always generate a random return address that will only accept mail from the intended recipient. I would assume at least some companies already do this (as it's not exactly a revolutionary idea, in my opinion), but it surprises me that it is not widespread.
Yes it's rather misleading. They use Linux to run the servers, woohoo.
Try holding down the Shift key when you right-click. This is a built-in feature and should work on both executables and shortucts to executables.
Performance aside, SCSI drives tend to win when it comes to reliability. Anything can change though.
Yes, this is one of the exceptions to my argument, however I was only talking about how I personally managed SPAM for my private and privileged business mailboxes.
By no means do I change my primary e-mail addresses regularly, in fact I still have the same addresses from when I originally created my domains. I only make up a new address when I come across an untrusted site (ie: almost anyplace). Sure, if one of my contacts decided to be malicious and submitted my e-mail to some unscrupulous places, I would be in a world of hurt. So far I must have been only dealing with generally good people because evidently no one has done this.
I have also received very limited e-mail and snail-mail advertising on my published domain account registrations, but it amounts to almost nothing. Why? I don't really know. Most of it has come from the registrars for the individual domains. I have some domains which have been on file with the same registrar for at least 6-7 years, however, I do shop around a lot and switch often with new registrations because I have quite a few dozen domains and am always looking for a competetive price and the best service. Think about it, for example, 100 domains at VeriSign prices (NOW only $25/year; used to be $35) = $2500, vs. other providers at as little as $8/year = 800 (and even less, but I have not been pleased with the super cheap places I've tried so far, such as sub $7).
You cannot directly control SPAM if you have to publicize your address, although there are some not-so-eloquent solutions you can take to minimize the effect such as showing the address as an image, but this is of course not practical (at least today) when doing business on a large scale.
I don't think that most technogeeks who complain about all the SPAM in their inboxes need to publicize their e-mail address though. Even though larger entities have no choice but to do this, most individuals do not.
No offense, and this may be a dumb question perhaps, but how is this Insightful?
t ", for example? This isn't even a valid email address. To my knowledge, ".not" is not a valid Top Level Domain (TLD), so therefore anything entered in that "domain" is not going to resolve anywhere. Now the argument could be made that the root servers have to pay the price for the initial lookup of this non-existent domain name and then VeriSign will want to pop up a for-sale page, but barring that, the cost to anyone is non-existent.
Why not just enter "madeupname-neverwillexist12321@92843.32176321.no
Why send the e-mail somewhere that is just going to dump it 5 hours later? What is the advantage, and why bother?
Well first off /dev/null is no longer an issue for me since I now use [gasp!] Exchange server. Secondly you may have a point there. Perhaps Microsoft may have indirectly made my life easier because I could no longer accept any random alias at my domains by default without specifically adding it into my account. Food for thought, eh?
Thanks for the tip. I'll try this modified approach out and see if I can get it working. Up until now I thought any wildcard aliases in Exchange would be ignored, as that has been my experience, at least with 2000 and prior. I'm still somewhat skeptical, but you never know!
Well I don't purport to have received e-mail for anywhere near 20 years, however, I own domains dating back to 1995. Not exactly the beginning of the Internet, but I think it does give me some credibility concerning my comments. So that gives me about 9 years of mostly SPAM free e-mail history. Sure, I have gotten some SPAM on some of those made-up addresses, but then I turn them off and the problem is gone. Perhaps I had the foresight, or just pure dumb luck and circumstance to use this methodology, but it has worked out rather well.
Honestly though I have never received anywhere near the volume of SPAM that some people are seeing; if I see a few messages per week I start to get annoyed. I can only imagine the nightmare it must be to see dozens or even hundreds per day that some people have reported.
My wife sees perhaps a dozen or more SPAM messages per day from Hotmail; she has used this same account for most of her correspondence over the last few years and was only semi-careful in choosing where to share her address. To contrast that, I have two Hotmail accounts (one for MSN, and one for eBay/PayPal) and have been thoroughly diligent as to where I type those addresses in. The only "SPAM" I get is from MSN Hotmail, eBay, and PayPal. Nothing else. Period.
I congratulate you on having your SPAM under control, and am very impressed that you can afford 10mbit broadband -- you must be a very successful person.
Now, reading your post I suspect you must manage the e-mail services for at least several companies. Considering that, I think I can see where you might be coming from. I have several clients with serious SPAM problems that cannot be resolved simply, especially not using the methods that I have found to work. When dealing with end-users and the "typical" computer user, it is never so simple. Telling someone to be careful seldom works. We employ many SPAM filters of various degrees to minimize the impact on our clients, but there is only so much you can do. Since this IS Slashdot, and we are all technogeeks at heart, I was simply trying to explain how I have personally defeated SPAM over the years.
The post above is mine, my login must have been dropped.
I don't get SPAM. I don't have SPAM filters. How is this possible? Simple. I create a different e-mail address for any new untrusted entity that I have to provide one for. In the beginning I took advantage of being able to alias all e-mail for non-existent mailboxes (basically, *) at my domain to my primary account. It seemed to me an obvious and simple approach. Whenever I needed to provide an e-mail address, I just made one up, and it was forwarded to my regular Inbox. In my opinion, at that time my ISP was more "sophisticated" than most. Since then I have moved to hosting all of my domains on my own co-located server which runs Exchange 2000, thus complicating things. Now I have to actually add any new aliases that I want to use into my user account. I know of at least one product out there that can handle non-existent addresses and forward them to a specific account, but it is rather expensive for a feature that should have been built-in from the beginning (althought I'm not aware if the new Exchange can do this out of the box). Not to mention that someone with the proper knowledge and skills could make a similar add-on in relatively short order, but who ever has the time? The point is that you have to consider when and where you give your e-mail address out, and the possible consequences therein. It's not altogether different from giving out your phone number (especially if you are unlisted) or even your SSN.
After reading the article all I have come away with is a sense of the CEO of SCO trying to redirect the issues at hand to matters of constitutionality in the US (never mind he later aligns his position with the EU).
I wonder what this is intended to accomplish. It reads as pure marketing and legalese fluff, especially considering all the USC (United States Code) references.
Now I will come out and say that I am NOT necessarily an advocate of open source software. Although I have no problem with OSS, I make my living off of building custom software for specific industries and organizations. I would never give up my source code to the public purely for the purposes of sharing (can you say communism).
On the other hand I do believe that these 'obvious' software patents are completely unfounded in the context of innovation. Over my many years in the software and electronics industries I have "invented" many concepts that I could have surely successfully patented at the USPTO. To my way of thinking though these were not really "inventions", but rather just new ways to present information using existing tools, development environments and operating systems.
Evidently my sarcasm was a little too subtle.
It's more like 13 and a half hours later (AM vs. PM). In all seriousness though, it does really make you wonder. I usually laugh off all the ridiculousness on Slashdot because it is after all a community run information site (does anyone actually get paid to do this?), and you can only expect so much. Usually I just scan the headlines for any interesting articles and only occasionally read the comments because of that assumption.
The post I am replying to has been moderated as Offtopic. It is difficult to understand why it could be considered Offtopic.
The article submission states "Also of note: the website has 44 gigs of photos so far, runs on solar power, and is Microsoft Free."
The article poster made the specific point that the website is "Microsoft Free". They obviously felt that this was an important and relevant comment regarding the article we all (or many; or some; or a few) decided to read before posting our own comments. Therefore it is perfectly legitimate and on-topic to comment on the original summary.
Many of us would like to eliminate television commercials for a multitude of reasons and there are numerous solutions for replacing the revenue streams that would disappear as a result.
I would like to ask, however, what about the advertisers? Sure, some advertisements are more effective than others, and people buy brand A for reason X and avoid brand B for reason Y. Unless consumers even know about the existence or significance of brand A or B why would they have any reason to buy either, beyond random chance?
How many outlets do organizations have for getting the word out on their products and services? Aside from word of mouth, it must be some form of advertising.
Ultimately what this might come down to is the simple fact that companies and industries feel that television advertising is a valuable asset to them. Billboards are great. Spam e-mail is great (uhh...). Television is also a great medium for selling your wares (arguably a little more class in the ads would be to their benefit in may instances).
How many options are there when it comes to advertising?
It struck me as odd that upon reading just the beginning of the patent (the Abstract) a couple of typos were immediately evident: "Such can be conventional or can be parse according to ad hoc"... ..."perhaps at the expense of reduce efficiency but so as to maximum currency and accuracy."
So this makes me wonder: were these errors part of the original patent application as written, or were they simply a result of data entry inaccuracies? Either way, what are the implications of this?