I woke up this morning to urgent "my site is down" calls from clients on one of my old servers. It turns out that ClamAV was trying to update itself. It would download the update, fail to update, then download again and again until it filled up the hard drive. We don't even do email on this particular server, so it must have gotten turned on months/years ago and then never noticed. We've disabled it, but it was kind of an annoying way to be woken up.
The mid-hundreds is too expensive, it needs to be $100-200?
and the cries of...
The pad/tablet market is not viable and this will die...
Oh wait, those cries are saved for Apple products. Linux products of the same type and the same general price are brilliant!
Re:Let's review Firefox based on IE-only websites
on
iPad Review
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· Score: 1, Troll
I completely agree that his opinion of how Slashdot looks on an iPad would be relevant to *a* review, but that part of the review should be called "Slashdot Review", not "iPad Review".
As for the headers that the iPad sends, here they are:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B334b Safari/531.21.10
as documented on Apple's developer website. So maybe that part of the review could be pulled out into a post titled "Lazy Web Developers Review" or "Challenges in Web Design for Multiple Platforms Review" or "Documented Things Web Developers Should Pay Attention To Review".
Let's review Firefox based on IE-only websites
on
iPad Review
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· Score: 1, Troll
So wait, your review of the iPad was almost entirely how stuff other people have made shows up in it... isn't that kind of like basing a review of Firefox on how a "Made for IE 5.5" website displays in it?
News Flash: Apple doesn't have control of the HTML on Slashdot, therefore that information doesn't belong in an iPad "review". When a web designer has put special code to make a website display differently in an iPhone, and the website mistakes the iPad for an iPhone, that is on the web designer's shoulders... not Apple's. If Slashdot can say that they are sticking directly to W3C standards always, then you have something to base your criticism on... but my guess is, that like every web developer out there, they have done little work arounds here and there to make sure the site looks good to a wide audience. Once you do that for even one browser, then I say that you have made your own bed, so stop whining.
And as a web designer and as a Mac user that has Flash eat up my CPU constantly and crash at least twice a day, I say good riddance to Flash. Quick show of hands for all those that whine about no Flash on the iPad: How many of you run the plug-in for Firefox that prevents Flash from showing until you click on it? How many of you actually looked at the Flash ad in the upper right corner of the screen?
There are plenty of legitimate criticisms for the iPad, why waste a review trying to paint it with illegitimate ones?
As a designer, I can appreciate the results of other creative people without needing to know exactly how they got there. As I think about the other things in my life: art, music, furniture, car, food... in all of those cases I take the time to seek out people that have worked hard to develop their own creative processes to make something that I consider wonderful. In the vast majority of those case, I have never asked "how was this created," but instead simply accept that it was and that it adds to my life in a positive way. This very much mirrors how I would hope people would see what I create... so I think it make perfect sense for creative-types to enjoy the work of other creative-types without even considering the process.
Of course, that is not to say those that revel in the process shouldn't enjoy the things that they do... just don't mistake your way of experiencing the world with that of someone else.
Firefox has been playing catch-up to Webkit on many fronts, from size, to speed, to feature set, to embracing the upcoming standards. There have been many stories about how the (hopefully friendly) competition with Webkit has made Firefox developers rethink their approaches from time to time. While each of the browsers had different specific features before the others, looking at the overall average,there never was a gap between Firefox and Webkit based browsers. As a web developer, I have to say that the competition between browsers, the push towards standards and a better user experiences has been a massive boon to me as a developer and the users of the browsers. The Firefox fanboy claim in the story summary was, at the very least, uninformed.
There seems to be an assumption that cookies are almost entirely used for evil tracking of website visitors. People have brought up shopping carts and logins, but there are many, many other relatively minor uses for which cookies are useful. Are we to provide you with a disclaimer every time we want to make sure some little setting that you have clicked "sticks" as you jump between pages? Yes, there are other tools to do this job, but cookies are also a specific tool for a specific job.
I find it interesting to hear many people claim the evils of cookies are so bad that they need to be outlawed, when in the end, it is the user's choice if they want to accept them. Isn't this akin to saying that we need to ban content on television or the internet because sometimes it could be used for evil? If you can use the argument of "just turn the channel" or "just don't go to those websites" in those cases, then why isn't the same argument good for people to just turn off cookies? If enough people do that, then the web developers will use a different tool to get the job done, and cookies will fall by the wayside. You have an "off" button on your cookies. If you don't like them, then use it.
Years ago, at the release of D&D 3.0, my friends and I got fed up with the class/level approach in the tabletop games to the point where we decided to develop our own system. To us, it just didn't seem to make sense that you picked a class and then that class defined all that you could do. In real life, it would seem that your individual skills would come together to form your class (job), not the other way around. So, we took that model and developed a system from it. Our original goal was just to have a system that we could play ourselves that treated us like intelligent adults. Now, eight years and hundreds, or perhaps thousands of hours, later, the system has become pretty solid. We took a big cue from the old Fallout games, which did a good job of having the skill drive the character. The book-in-progress can be downloaded at pinwheels.org. We'd love to get some feedback on it.
We've found that skills driven system are significantly more pleasing to play because they give the player flexibility to be an individual and not solely defined on what items they are carrying.
A lot of people here are bringing up "peeing on a bush" as an absurd sex crime, which it is, but I wanted to list a few more that are felonies in my state (Ohio):
Sex with your wife: If your wife has one drink of wine and you have sex with her, by the letter of the law here, that is rape (Felony 1) or at the very least, Sexual Battery (Felony 3).
Sex with a co-worker: Any time you date someone that is of a different power-level than you, and that could affect your power-level (boss/employee, teacher/student, etc.), even if both people are of legal age and consenting, it is a Felony 3 Sexual Battery.
Owning "Girls Gone Wild": If you bought a copy of Girls Gone Wild, and then later it was found that one of the girls was 17 (which has happened), you are committing a crime of owning child pornography (Felony 4 to 2, depending upon the nature of the content). Beyond this, ignorance is not an excuse. By the letter of the law, even if you thought that you were buying legal content and even if you never heard the report of the girl being underage, you are still guilty. The law is phrased so that it only questions the subject age, not the viewer's knowledge.
And while the idea of the victim needing to "press charges" is great for TV, none of these crimes (or any crime) actually requires it. If a prosecutor wants to prosecute you, then they can do so whether or not the victim "presses charges". In many ways, the prosecutor is the first judge -- they can deem you innocent or make your life a living hell.
One of the big keys to making money off of software is specialization. Great versions of most any type of general program can be found in open source form. However, projects that develop for very specific needs of many different industries are often perpetually stuck at a fledgling stage. When you address the very specific needs of a certain type of user, it is easy to find markets that can be profitable for commercial software, while at the same time not being widely interesting enough to be addressed by the open source community.
I always like how the "liberally biased media" claim is laid out there with no explanation. Yes, people who are more educated and more well read tend to be more liberal than those who pride themselves on ignorance. While, of course, there are people all over the spectrum at all education levels, those that seek to understand more actually have a better chance to build up compassion, which, despite being one of the main tenants of the Christian faith, somehow has earned the label "liberal". McCain's campaign, and especially the Palin portion of it, was one that celebrated ignorance, defining the most ignorant among us as heroes and creating campaigns of fear that prey on ignorance. Is it any surprise that there is more to write about knowledge than the absence of knowledge?
Some people have posted here and on the article that the img submit buttons do work, and then extend that into the author clearly must be wrong. Anyone that has done any web development, especially development with IE, knows that bugs can show their ugly little heads often as a result of completely unrated code. For example, perhaps the img inputs don't function when nested a certain way within other elements on the page, even though there is absolutely nothing technically wrong with the page's structure. IE has had similar issues pretty much forever. Tags would work when nested a certain way, but not when nested in a different, completely proper way.
As a web developer, I always develop in the more-standards-compliant browsers, such as Firefox, and then as a final step try to figure out how to get the sites to show up properly in IE. This process generally adds an extra day or so to development. Unfortunately my clients have to pay for this, when in reality Microsoft should probably suppliment some of these charges due to a fairly pervasive lack of competence.
When IE7 was first released, my company did a review of every site we handle and provided an issues list to our clients so that they have a choice whether or not they want to pay to have them fixed. There were many CSS issues, but one of the more annoying issues that I remember is that clicking on a link to a PDF document caused the browser to simply crash. This occured across several documents on many sites, including ones that we did not develop. Linking to a PDF document is a pretty basic thing on the web, so clearly IE7 is not ready for primetime... and is especially not ready for their users to be cajoled into using it.
Ok, as far as I am concerned, if you personally want to use a spam block list, great. Have fun. I have no problem with that.
What I have a problem with are the system admins and management of ISPs that are making the decision to use these blocklists to bounce email for all of their customers, including the ones that don't want their email blocked. Yes, it is easy to say that the customer should simply change ISPs, but in many areas, especially when it comes to high speed options, there are no other ISPs available.
Additionally, many of my clients have been with the same local internet provider for years and only recently has that provider started using the block lists. The cost of changing internet providers can be tremendous. Consider simple things like emails addresses printed on business cards and letterhead (they had their internet provider long before they had their own website).
I think many responses that put spam block lists in a positive light are not considering the huge costs they place on actual real businesses. Often times the effects are worst on small businesses that simply cannot afford the additional costs of trying to figure out how to get off the lists.
So I wonder, if you were working for a company that was struggling a bit, and was affected by inaccurately being placed on SPEWS list, costing them thousands of dollars, how would you feel about taking a partial pay or time cut to make up that money? Would your reverence to the list stay so high? The reason I ask is because, as a business owner, I had to take a pay cut, at least temporarily, as a result of inaccurately being placed on SPEWS' list.
If an ISP wants to use an IP blacklist, fine, but they need to take responsibility for its use, use it in an intelligent way, and really consider the quality of the list that they are using. SPEWS has a reputation for being far from the highest quality list, and that reputation has grown from their own actions.
A very good friend of mine uses spamhaus and gives it very good marks. He also has some really horrible things to say about SPEWS. I agree that a well designed blocking system can actually be a benefit, but it has to be done with far more care than what SPEWS did.
It is really refreshing to hear someone who uses a list take responsibility for its use and that actually has thought his way through the process. I talked to one ISP that was using SPEWS and he had it as first line or defense with no possible way to whitelist anyone. It is nice to know that everyone out there is not blindly acting as they did.
Another friend of mine gives a very good review to Spam Assassin. I, myself, don't use any spam blocking on my server. I just rely on my mail client's spam blocking (mail.app on OSX) combined with a few word-specific rules. On any one day, I might have about 200 emails in my junk mail folder and may have to delete 5 or 6 spam from my inbox each day. For me, deleting a handful of spam is not that much of a pain. SPEWS just seems like such overkill when compared to hitting the delete button 5 or 6 times.
did it ever occur to you that spammers don't walk up to an ISP with a ballcap printed "I'm A Spammer"? Spammers buy service from an ISP, spam for 24 hours and then move on. By that time, it is too late to do anything. The whole IP block get slammed onto a list and then takes weeks to get it off.
No, you self-righteous crusaders are not part of the solution. You can't bomb an entire village to catch one bad guy and then expect the locals to think that you are doing them a favor.
I have been with my ISP for years. They have a strict spam policy. They get rid of spammers as soon as they are discovered. They also get rid of anyone that is generally causing any pain to their other subscribers. I know this because I have seen it happen a few times.
Did it ever occur to you that a spammer does not walk up to an ISP an annouce that they are a spammer? What exactly would you suggest an ISP do? Background checks? Get a note from the spammer's mom? This may come as a surprise, but spammers sometimes tell lies.
And again, how fricking presumptive of you to think that you can fight your war at any cost, including costs you force upon me. The big problem with spammers is that the email they send costs the world way more than it does themselves. The ironic thing is, the same goes for the blocklists.
I talked to my ISP indepth about this when it happened. The problem for them is that a spammer is a moving target. They come in and happily pay the setup fees for a server, get it set up in 24 hours, send millions of emails overnight, and then move on.
We all like things like cheap introductory rates, low setup fees and quick setup times... and spammers do too. How would you feel if an ISP told you that they had to run a background check on you before they set up your server? That ISP would have no business.
SPEWS and the rest of the blacklists like to point the finger at the ISP, but have you really ever put yourself in the shoes of an ISP that is just trying to run a business? My ISP has a strict spam policy and shuts down spammers as soon as they are discovered. Even so, they now have to battle on two fronts, fighting the spam block lists at the same time.
If SPEWS wants to do some real good, how about making some tools for ISPs to monitor servers that may be rented by spammers?
My point exactly. You hit me to get me to complain. Did you ever think that I don't want to take that active of a role in your war? Did you even bother to ask me if I wanted to participate? Are you, or anyone who uses the list offering to help me out with the costs of forcing me to be your soldier?
Here's the deal I am willing to make: if you are going to block an entire C block that I am part of, send me an email and let me know and then I will happily complain to my ISP until I am red in the face. I am willing to make that promise.
But... if you want to just slam me on a list without any regaurd for the costs it will incur for me, then don't expect me to be a happy little soldier. It's just not going to happen.
As someone who was blocked by both osirusoft and spews as part of their policy of blocking entire IP blocks, I feel no pity for them or for those who use them. In fact, I hope that at least some of them are learning their lessons.
The IP address of my server happened to fall a few dozen numbers away from that of a spammer. As a result, it cost me thousands of dollars in lost time and expenses to track down the issue, contact my isp and have them contact whoever it is on Mt. Self-Righteousness that takes you back off the list. Getting on the lists takes day(s), while getting off the lists takes weeks.
Blocking entire IP blocks is nothing short of techie-terrorism. In other words, you can't convince the real wrong doers to stop, so you harm the innocent bystanders to try to get them to revolt.
SPEWS and those that support them point the finger at the ISP while purposely hurting innocent small businesses like mine. It's time they take responsibility for the tools they provide, and in this way, they are no different than Microsoft.
I actually went over this issue with my host. It is against their poicilies (as posted on their website) to host for spammers and they shut them down "no questions asked" as soon as they are discovered. Like the other poster said, it is not like the spammer came in and announced that he would be spamming from the server.
I explained my experience in my post. How can a simple description of my experience be ignorant? Don't displace your anger towards spam on me. Like I said, I deal with spam on an everyday basis too.
I don't think you understand that these blocklists do not coordinate with the hosts. They put an entire IP block on a list without even sending out one email to the ISP, and many make this policy clear on their websites. The only way you can tell that you are being blocked is to look at the bounced emails, and by that time it is too late.
They are also much quicker to put an IP block on the list than they are to take one off. SPEWS, for example, complains that they are simply too overworked to remove blocked servers from the list in any reasonable amount of time. If you don't have the time to upkeep such a harmful tool, then why offer the service in the first place? I would not have a problem with these lists if they would take the blocks off in a day or two, but we are talking about not having access to your outgoing emails for weeks.
I mean, if they can put an entire IP block on a list, then why not a single IP address, or a smaller range? The answer is clear -- in the own self-righteous crusade they want to hurt as many people as possible because, like you, they assume that the ISP is fully aware of the spammer when they are clearly not. By hurting many people, you create many complaints... but this is kind of like bombing an entire town of civilians to get them to revolt against their leaders. Perhaps effective, but is it really moral?
When anyone here wants to order a server, I am sure that they expect certain things: fast setup times, not having the server's email crippled, not having spyware installed on the server, being allowed to change their password, and on and on. If these are things the you expect from an ISP, then I wonder how you can expect an ISP to know when a spammer has signed up for the same service that you would order yourself. The best thing I could think of would be some program that would monitor the outgoing mail that is installed outside of the server. Perhaps the blocklists should post some advice about these kinds of programs if they really want to help.
But I don't really think that they want to help at all. They are kings of their hill. They have a crusade. This makes them feel powerful. And to them, that is all that matters.
Personally, I like to go through life harming as few people as possible. If that means I have to delete a few emails by hand, then so be it.
I just spent a few minutes writing up a response to you and then realized that you don't deserve it. It is easy to flame when you are not even willing to show your face. It is much more difficult to have a informed discussion about how the system itself is broken and costing innocent people money.
We go on everyday talking about how spammers cost the american companies so much money per day. So why are we willing to accept a solution that costs other companies, including small businesses like mine, so much time and money? In the end, Blocklists will not be the answer. They aren't even the best option from those available today.
I know that many system admins out there that may be looking at them as a very tempting answer to your problem (a problem I very much understand), but I beg you, please take a second look at other solutions before you place your trust in these lists. For as frustrating as spam is, these lists burn your fellow geeks, like me.
Over the past few months I have been through a lot fighting anti-spam ip lists, primarily relays.osirusoft.com and spews. For all those saying that false-positives are rare or not that much harm compared to the need to stop spam, I think if you were in my shoes, you would feel differently.
The whole thing started when a spammer signed up for service at the hosting company that I have been with for several years. I have a server there with many of my clients websites on it (I am a web designer). So, the spammer purchased service at the same host as me, and happened to fall within the same IP block as I did. He was soon discovered and shut down, but the damage had already been done... spews and relays.osirusoft.com both put the ENTIRE ip block in their system.
Think about it this way: what can the host really do? The spammers come in, pay the setup fees, get one good night of spamming in, and then move on.
It took me several days to track down why some of my emails were not going through and who I had to contact to get removed from these lists. relays.osirusoft.com had some tools that is supposed to re-check, but it did no good... as far as I know, the thing doesn't even work.
In reading through these two websites, the self-righteous bastards that put together these lists really don't take any responsibility for their actions. They are quick to add entire IP blocks and take weeks to remove them even after the host has contacted them to inform them that the spammer has been shut down. These anti-spam lists apply fault to the host or to the isp implementing the list, but never to themselves, while at the same time preacing the wonders of the services they provide. If they don't want to take responsibility, then they should print more warnings about the mass amounts of false-positives that actually happen.
In addition to the anti-spam lists, the isps really need stop relying on these lists as the first defense to stopping spam. I had a chance to talk to one of them that a client of mine was going through and they told me that there was no way they could add me as a trusted ip because the anti-spam list comes in front of the exceptions list as a first line of defense. Even after we finally got removed from the anti-spam lists, many ISPs did not update their copies of the lists for weeks afterwards, causing more blocked emails even after we were off the list.
So, after hours and hours of frustration, fielding support calls, yelling, long distance phone calls, writing emails, reading page after page of self-righteous dribble, and trying desparately to explain that I just happened to have an IP address that was a coupled dozen numbers off of that of a spammer, as far as I am concerned, the more anti-spam lists that die, the better the place the world will be.
I hate spam. I cuss every fifth time I have to delete one (making that about 20 or 30 nasty words a day)... but the people who have really cost me the most time, money, and headaches are the anti-spam lists. Good riddance.
Slashdot Mirror
I woke up this morning to urgent "my site is down" calls from clients on one of my old servers. It turns out that ClamAV was trying to update itself. It would download the update, fail to update, then download again and again until it filled up the hard drive. We don't even do email on this particular server, so it must have gotten turned on months/years ago and then never noticed. We've disabled it, but it was kind of an annoying way to be woken up.
The mid-hundreds is too expensive, it needs to be $100-200?
and the cries of...
The pad/tablet market is not viable and this will die...
Oh wait, those cries are saved for Apple products. Linux products of the same type and the same general price are brilliant!
I completely agree that his opinion of how Slashdot looks on an iPad would be relevant to *a* review, but that part of the review should be called "Slashdot Review", not "iPad Review".
As for the headers that the iPad sends, here they are:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B334b Safari/531.21.10
as documented on Apple's developer website. So maybe that part of the review could be pulled out into a post titled "Lazy Web Developers Review" or "Challenges in Web Design for Multiple Platforms Review" or "Documented Things Web Developers Should Pay Attention To Review".
So wait, your review of the iPad was almost entirely how stuff other people have made shows up in it... isn't that kind of like basing a review of Firefox on how a "Made for IE 5.5" website displays in it?
News Flash: Apple doesn't have control of the HTML on Slashdot, therefore that information doesn't belong in an iPad "review". When a web designer has put special code to make a website display differently in an iPhone, and the website mistakes the iPad for an iPhone, that is on the web designer's shoulders... not Apple's. If Slashdot can say that they are sticking directly to W3C standards always, then you have something to base your criticism on... but my guess is, that like every web developer out there, they have done little work arounds here and there to make sure the site looks good to a wide audience. Once you do that for even one browser, then I say that you have made your own bed, so stop whining.
And as a web designer and as a Mac user that has Flash eat up my CPU constantly and crash at least twice a day, I say good riddance to Flash. Quick show of hands for all those that whine about no Flash on the iPad: How many of you run the plug-in for Firefox that prevents Flash from showing until you click on it? How many of you actually looked at the Flash ad in the upper right corner of the screen?
There are plenty of legitimate criticisms for the iPad, why waste a review trying to paint it with illegitimate ones?
to enjoy the results.
As a designer, I can appreciate the results of other creative people without needing to know exactly how they got there. As I think about the other things in my life: art, music, furniture, car, food... in all of those cases I take the time to seek out people that have worked hard to develop their own creative processes to make something that I consider wonderful. In the vast majority of those case, I have never asked "how was this created," but instead simply accept that it was and that it adds to my life in a positive way. This very much mirrors how I would hope people would see what I create... so I think it make perfect sense for creative-types to enjoy the work of other creative-types without even considering the process.
Of course, that is not to say those that revel in the process shouldn't enjoy the things that they do... just don't mistake your way of experiencing the world with that of someone else.
Firefox has been playing catch-up to Webkit on many fronts, from size, to speed, to feature set, to embracing the upcoming standards. There have been many stories about how the (hopefully friendly) competition with Webkit has made Firefox developers rethink their approaches from time to time. While each of the browsers had different specific features before the others, looking at the overall average,there never was a gap between Firefox and Webkit based browsers. As a web developer, I have to say that the competition between browsers, the push towards standards and a better user experiences has been a massive boon to me as a developer and the users of the browsers. The Firefox fanboy claim in the story summary was, at the very least, uninformed.
There seems to be an assumption that cookies are almost entirely used for evil tracking of website visitors. People have brought up shopping carts and logins, but there are many, many other relatively minor uses for which cookies are useful. Are we to provide you with a disclaimer every time we want to make sure some little setting that you have clicked "sticks" as you jump between pages? Yes, there are other tools to do this job, but cookies are also a specific tool for a specific job.
I find it interesting to hear many people claim the evils of cookies are so bad that they need to be outlawed, when in the end, it is the user's choice if they want to accept them. Isn't this akin to saying that we need to ban content on television or the internet because sometimes it could be used for evil? If you can use the argument of "just turn the channel" or "just don't go to those websites" in those cases, then why isn't the same argument good for people to just turn off cookies? If enough people do that, then the web developers will use a different tool to get the job done, and cookies will fall by the wayside. You have an "off" button on your cookies. If you don't like them, then use it.
Years ago, at the release of D&D 3.0, my friends and I got fed up with the class/level approach in the tabletop games to the point where we decided to develop our own system. To us, it just didn't seem to make sense that you picked a class and then that class defined all that you could do. In real life, it would seem that your individual skills would come together to form your class (job), not the other way around. So, we took that model and developed a system from it. Our original goal was just to have a system that we could play ourselves that treated us like intelligent adults. Now, eight years and hundreds, or perhaps thousands of hours, later, the system has become pretty solid. We took a big cue from the old Fallout games, which did a good job of having the skill drive the character. The book-in-progress can be downloaded at pinwheels.org. We'd love to get some feedback on it.
We've found that skills driven system are significantly more pleasing to play because they give the player flexibility to be an individual and not solely defined on what items they are carrying.
A lot of people here are bringing up "peeing on a bush" as an absurd sex crime, which it is, but I wanted to list a few more that are felonies in my state (Ohio):
Sex with your wife: If your wife has one drink of wine and you have sex with her, by the letter of the law here, that is rape (Felony 1) or at the very least, Sexual Battery (Felony 3).
Sex with a co-worker: Any time you date someone that is of a different power-level than you, and that could affect your power-level (boss/employee, teacher/student, etc.), even if both people are of legal age and consenting, it is a Felony 3 Sexual Battery.
Owning "Girls Gone Wild": If you bought a copy of Girls Gone Wild, and then later it was found that one of the girls was 17 (which has happened), you are committing a crime of owning child pornography (Felony 4 to 2, depending upon the nature of the content). Beyond this, ignorance is not an excuse. By the letter of the law, even if you thought that you were buying legal content and even if you never heard the report of the girl being underage, you are still guilty. The law is phrased so that it only questions the subject age, not the viewer's knowledge.
And while the idea of the victim needing to "press charges" is great for TV, none of these crimes (or any crime) actually requires it. If a prosecutor wants to prosecute you, then they can do so whether or not the victim "presses charges". In many ways, the prosecutor is the first judge -- they can deem you innocent or make your life a living hell.
God bless America.
One of the big keys to making money off of software is specialization. Great versions of most any type of general program can be found in open source form. However, projects that develop for very specific needs of many different industries are often perpetually stuck at a fledgling stage. When you address the very specific needs of a certain type of user, it is easy to find markets that can be profitable for commercial software, while at the same time not being widely interesting enough to be addressed by the open source community.
I always like how the "liberally biased media" claim is laid out there with no explanation. Yes, people who are more educated and more well read tend to be more liberal than those who pride themselves on ignorance. While, of course, there are people all over the spectrum at all education levels, those that seek to understand more actually have a better chance to build up compassion, which, despite being one of the main tenants of the Christian faith, somehow has earned the label "liberal". McCain's campaign, and especially the Palin portion of it, was one that celebrated ignorance, defining the most ignorant among us as heroes and creating campaigns of fear that prey on ignorance. Is it any surprise that there is more to write about knowledge than the absence of knowledge?
Some people have posted here and on the article that the img submit buttons do work, and then extend that into the author clearly must be wrong. Anyone that has done any web development, especially development with IE, knows that bugs can show their ugly little heads often as a result of completely unrated code. For example, perhaps the img inputs don't function when nested a certain way within other elements on the page, even though there is absolutely nothing technically wrong with the page's structure. IE has had similar issues pretty much forever. Tags would work when nested a certain way, but not when nested in a different, completely proper way. As a web developer, I always develop in the more-standards-compliant browsers, such as Firefox, and then as a final step try to figure out how to get the sites to show up properly in IE. This process generally adds an extra day or so to development. Unfortunately my clients have to pay for this, when in reality Microsoft should probably suppliment some of these charges due to a fairly pervasive lack of competence. When IE7 was first released, my company did a review of every site we handle and provided an issues list to our clients so that they have a choice whether or not they want to pay to have them fixed. There were many CSS issues, but one of the more annoying issues that I remember is that clicking on a link to a PDF document caused the browser to simply crash. This occured across several documents on many sites, including ones that we did not develop. Linking to a PDF document is a pretty basic thing on the web, so clearly IE7 is not ready for primetime... and is especially not ready for their users to be cajoled into using it.
Ok, as far as I am concerned, if you personally want to use a spam block list, great. Have fun. I have no problem with that.
What I have a problem with are the system admins and management of ISPs that are making the decision to use these blocklists to bounce email for all of their customers, including the ones that don't want their email blocked. Yes, it is easy to say that the customer should simply change ISPs, but in many areas, especially when it comes to high speed options, there are no other ISPs available.
Additionally, many of my clients have been with the same local internet provider for years and only recently has that provider started using the block lists. The cost of changing internet providers can be tremendous. Consider simple things like emails addresses printed on business cards and letterhead (they had their internet provider long before they had their own website).
I think many responses that put spam block lists in a positive light are not considering the huge costs they place on actual real businesses. Often times the effects are worst on small businesses that simply cannot afford the additional costs of trying to figure out how to get off the lists.
So I wonder, if you were working for a company that was struggling a bit, and was affected by inaccurately being placed on SPEWS list, costing them thousands of dollars, how would you feel about taking a partial pay or time cut to make up that money? Would your reverence to the list stay so high? The reason I ask is because, as a business owner, I had to take a pay cut, at least temporarily, as a result of inaccurately being placed on SPEWS' list.
If an ISP wants to use an IP blacklist, fine, but they need to take responsibility for its use, use it in an intelligent way, and really consider the quality of the list that they are using. SPEWS has a reputation for being far from the highest quality list, and that reputation has grown from their own actions.
A very good friend of mine uses spamhaus and gives it very good marks. He also has some really horrible things to say about SPEWS. I agree that a well designed blocking system can actually be a benefit, but it has to be done with far more care than what SPEWS did.
It is really refreshing to hear someone who uses a list take responsibility for its use and that actually has thought his way through the process. I talked to one ISP that was using SPEWS and he had it as first line or defense with no possible way to whitelist anyone. It is nice to know that everyone out there is not blindly acting as they did.
Another friend of mine gives a very good review to Spam Assassin. I, myself, don't use any spam blocking on my server. I just rely on my mail client's spam blocking (mail.app on OSX) combined with a few word-specific rules. On any one day, I might have about 200 emails in my junk mail folder and may have to delete 5 or 6 spam from my inbox each day. For me, deleting a handful of spam is not that much of a pain. SPEWS just seems like such overkill when compared to hitting the delete button 5 or 6 times.
did it ever occur to you that spammers don't walk up to an ISP with a ballcap printed "I'm A Spammer"? Spammers buy service from an ISP, spam for 24 hours and then move on. By that time, it is too late to do anything. The whole IP block get slammed onto a list and then takes weeks to get it off.
No, you self-righteous crusaders are not part of the solution. You can't bomb an entire village to catch one bad guy and then expect the locals to think that you are doing them a favor.
I have been with my ISP for years. They have a strict spam policy. They get rid of spammers as soon as they are discovered. They also get rid of anyone that is generally causing any pain to their other subscribers. I know this because I have seen it happen a few times.
Did it ever occur to you that a spammer does not walk up to an ISP an annouce that they are a spammer? What exactly would you suggest an ISP do? Background checks? Get a note from the spammer's mom? This may come as a surprise, but spammers sometimes tell lies.
And again, how fricking presumptive of you to think that you can fight your war at any cost, including costs you force upon me. The big problem with spammers is that the email they send costs the world way more than it does themselves. The ironic thing is, the same goes for the blocklists.
I talked to my ISP indepth about this when it happened. The problem for them is that a spammer is a moving target. They come in and happily pay the setup fees for a server, get it set up in 24 hours, send millions of emails overnight, and then move on.
We all like things like cheap introductory rates, low setup fees and quick setup times... and spammers do too. How would you feel if an ISP told you that they had to run a background check on you before they set up your server? That ISP would have no business.
SPEWS and the rest of the blacklists like to point the finger at the ISP, but have you really ever put yourself in the shoes of an ISP that is just trying to run a business? My ISP has a strict spam policy and shuts down spammers as soon as they are discovered. Even so, they now have to battle on two fronts, fighting the spam block lists at the same time.
If SPEWS wants to do some real good, how about making some tools for ISPs to monitor servers that may be rented by spammers?
My point exactly. You hit me to get me to complain. Did you ever think that I don't want to take that active of a role in your war? Did you even bother to ask me if I wanted to participate? Are you, or anyone who uses the list offering to help me out with the costs of forcing me to be your soldier?
Here's the deal I am willing to make: if you are going to block an entire C block that I am part of, send me an email and let me know and then I will happily complain to my ISP until I am red in the face. I am willing to make that promise.
But... if you want to just slam me on a list without any regaurd for the costs it will incur for me, then don't expect me to be a happy little soldier. It's just not going to happen.
As someone who was blocked by both osirusoft and spews as part of their policy of blocking entire IP blocks, I feel no pity for them or for those who use them. In fact, I hope that at least some of them are learning their lessons.
The IP address of my server happened to fall a few dozen numbers away from that of a spammer. As a result, it cost me thousands of dollars in lost time and expenses to track down the issue, contact my isp and have them contact whoever it is on Mt. Self-Righteousness that takes you back off the list. Getting on the lists takes day(s), while getting off the lists takes weeks.
Blocking entire IP blocks is nothing short of techie-terrorism. In other words, you can't convince the real wrong doers to stop, so you harm the innocent bystanders to try to get them to revolt.
SPEWS and those that support them point the finger at the ISP while purposely hurting innocent small businesses like mine. It's time they take responsibility for the tools they provide, and in this way, they are no different than Microsoft.
I actually went over this issue with my host. It is against their poicilies (as posted on their website) to host for spammers and they shut them down "no questions asked" as soon as they are discovered. Like the other poster said, it is not like the spammer came in and announced that he would be spamming from the server.
I explained my experience in my post. How can a simple description of my experience be ignorant? Don't displace your anger towards spam on me. Like I said, I deal with spam on an everyday basis too.
I don't think you understand that these blocklists do not coordinate with the hosts. They put an entire IP block on a list without even sending out one email to the ISP, and many make this policy clear on their websites. The only way you can tell that you are being blocked is to look at the bounced emails, and by that time it is too late.
They are also much quicker to put an IP block on the list than they are to take one off. SPEWS, for example, complains that they are simply too overworked to remove blocked servers from the list in any reasonable amount of time. If you don't have the time to upkeep such a harmful tool, then why offer the service in the first place? I would not have a problem with these lists if they would take the blocks off in a day or two, but we are talking about not having access to your outgoing emails for weeks.
I mean, if they can put an entire IP block on a list, then why not a single IP address, or a smaller range? The answer is clear -- in the own self-righteous crusade they want to hurt as many people as possible because, like you, they assume that the ISP is fully aware of the spammer when they are clearly not. By hurting many people, you create many complaints... but this is kind of like bombing an entire town of civilians to get them to revolt against their leaders. Perhaps effective, but is it really moral?
When anyone here wants to order a server, I am sure that they expect certain things: fast setup times, not having the server's email crippled, not having spyware installed on the server, being allowed to change their password, and on and on. If these are things the you expect from an ISP, then I wonder how you can expect an ISP to know when a spammer has signed up for the same service that you would order yourself. The best thing I could think of would be some program that would monitor the outgoing mail that is installed outside of the server. Perhaps the blocklists should post some advice about these kinds of programs if they really want to help.
But I don't really think that they want to help at all. They are kings of their hill. They have a crusade. This makes them feel powerful. And to them, that is all that matters.
Personally, I like to go through life harming as few people as possible. If that means I have to delete a few emails by hand, then so be it.
I just spent a few minutes writing up a response to you and then realized that you don't deserve it. It is easy to flame when you are not even willing to show your face. It is much more difficult to have a informed discussion about how the system itself is broken and costing innocent people money.
We go on everyday talking about how spammers cost the american companies so much money per day. So why are we willing to accept a solution that costs other companies, including small businesses like mine, so much time and money? In the end, Blocklists will not be the answer. They aren't even the best option from those available today.
I know that many system admins out there that may be looking at them as a very tempting answer to your problem (a problem I very much understand), but I beg you, please take a second look at other solutions before you place your trust in these lists. For as frustrating as spam is, these lists burn your fellow geeks, like me.
Over the past few months I have been through a lot fighting anti-spam ip lists, primarily relays.osirusoft.com and spews. For all those saying that false-positives are rare or not that much harm compared to the need to stop spam, I think if you were in my shoes, you would feel differently.
The whole thing started when a spammer signed up for service at the hosting company that I have been with for several years. I have a server there with many of my clients websites on it (I am a web designer). So, the spammer purchased service at the same host as me, and happened to fall within the same IP block as I did. He was soon discovered and shut down, but the damage had already been done... spews and relays.osirusoft.com both put the ENTIRE ip block in their system.
Think about it this way: what can the host really do? The spammers come in, pay the setup fees, get one good night of spamming in, and then move on.
It took me several days to track down why some of my emails were not going through and who I had to contact to get removed from these lists. relays.osirusoft.com had some tools that is supposed to re-check, but it did no good... as far as I know, the thing doesn't even work.
In reading through these two websites, the self-righteous bastards that put together these lists really don't take any responsibility for their actions. They are quick to add entire IP blocks and take weeks to remove them even after the host has contacted them to inform them that the spammer has been shut down. These anti-spam lists apply fault to the host or to the isp implementing the list, but never to themselves, while at the same time preacing the wonders of the services they provide. If they don't want to take responsibility, then they should print more warnings about the mass amounts of false-positives that actually happen.
In addition to the anti-spam lists, the isps really need stop relying on these lists as the first defense to stopping spam. I had a chance to talk to one of them that a client of mine was going through and they told me that there was no way they could add me as a trusted ip because the anti-spam list comes in front of the exceptions list as a first line of defense. Even after we finally got removed from the anti-spam lists, many ISPs did not update their copies of the lists for weeks afterwards, causing more blocked emails even after we were off the list.
So, after hours and hours of frustration, fielding support calls, yelling, long distance phone calls, writing emails, reading page after page of self-righteous dribble, and trying desparately to explain that I just happened to have an IP address that was a coupled dozen numbers off of that of a spammer, as far as I am concerned, the more anti-spam lists that die, the better the place the world will be.
I hate spam. I cuss every fifth time I have to delete one (making that about 20 or 30 nasty words a day)... but the people who have really cost me the most time, money, and headaches are the anti-spam lists. Good riddance.