I generally don't like the idea of ISP's interfering with the network, but port 25 is the exception. I like the idea of them blocking 25 by default, but this plan of keeping an eye on their customers is the next best thing. Most people don't realize how much spam comes from broadband accounts. There is some legitimate mail, yes, but those people need to find a new way of life, because it's mostly spam. I use Sendmail at work, and realizing how things have changed on the spam front I updated my/etc/mail/access file so it now starts like this:
And it goes on, and on, and on, for well over a thousand lines. After implementing this I did some calculation and determined that I was blocking about 22% of our incoming mail. There have been some hiccups, but in general I'm really glad I did this. A few people have contacted me to complain that they can't send mail to my users, and I usually tell them to get a static IP address for their mail server or send through a designated relay. This inconvenience to cheap-o owners of SMTP servers with DHCP-assigned addresses has been a real shame, but my users have commented on how much less spam theiy've been getting recently. Blocking broadband users and using Spamcop have been a great combination. Perhaps one day if more ISPs follow Comcast we'll be able to trust those domains again.
(sinister music) The Linux operating system has a dark secret - one its supporters don't want you to hear. It can be used by terrorists, and can be installed to operate machines that kill puppies. We don't know about you, but that doesn't sound so free and wonderful to us. What other secrets might Linux be hiding?
(happy, relaxing music) But Microsoft Windows won't stand for this. Its proven inefficiency helps thwart terrorist activities of every kind. By the time a terrorist installs Windows XP Home Edition on their computer, adds Service Pack 1, installs all of the many patches from Windows Update, implements an antivirus solution, removes the infection of the Welchia worm that was installed prior to downloading the RPC patches, as well as the Sasser worm that was installed prior to downloading the LSASS patches, the forces of good can save those puppies. And if the terrorist tries to share files with his fellow evildoers, no more than six of them will be able to access his machine at a time. Now that's security America can count on. "I'm Bill Gates, and I approve this message."
I don't think Darl's dream of prolonging the FID will come to any fruition. The court has replied to one of their attempts at delay, as reported
on Groklaw today:
"Court hears arguments and DENIES the motion due to lateness of the objection and inconvenience to the parties scheduled for deposition."
IBM had argued that SCO didn't need a delay because "two of the witnesses scheduled next week... are former employees of AT&T, not IBM..... Similarly, Mr. Rodgers was employed by Sequent, not IBM, and IBM does not have any of his documents. The final deponent, BayStar, is an investor in SCO, wholly unrelated to IBM, and that deposition apparently will not go forward." Today Judge Wells agreed and denied SCO's attempt to prolong the FUD. This guy really seems to understand the importance of getting these decisions out sooner rather than later, since the claims are enormous and the business impact could be huge. Their arguments to postpone the trial date are equally without merit, so expect more embarassing setbacks for SCO soon.
The DMA hates spammers (true)
on
NYT on Spam Cops
·
· Score: 4, Informative
In a twist of weirdness, the Direct Marketing Association is funding investigators who cooperate with the FBI on spam investigations.
Not much of a twist at all, despite many of the above comments. Just grok this: the DMA hates spammers. No, really. I know someone who works for a company that's part of the DMA, and spam is her biggest headache. While we all hate commercial e-mail in general, the DMA is made up of companies who want to play by the rules. True, they want to have a hand in writing the rules as well, but the rules are pretty good ones. No faking your source IP addresses or From: fields. Always have an Unsubscribe feature that actually works. And so forth.
Spammers make the DMA's life a living hell. It's impossible to have a conversation with most people about legitimate commercial e-mail because illegitmate spam is such a pain (I just deleted 20 spams, vs. three real messages in my Lycos mail). With an annoyance like spam, no one even wants to hear the DMA's side of the story. So the DMA's members get blocked from sending e-mail by many sysadmins (like me).
If all commercial mail conformed to the rules that the DMA advocates, no one would complain to ISPs about commercial mail because the power to prevent it would be in the hands of the recipient. Just click Unsubscribe and you're free and clear. Until spammers go away, that's impossible because no one trusts Unsubscribe links. It shouldn't surprise us that the DMA will do anything they can to prevent spam.
Google should be able to do whatever they want, considering that the customers have agreed to it.
Of course this attempted regulation is not stupid per se - it's just stupid in the context of Google and its e-mail system. If Microsoft were to do this to Windows and implement an uninstallable system that could track your browsing, document editing and other activities in order to collect demographic data, I'd say throw the book at them. The difference? Google doesn't have a monopoly over anything. There are tons of alternatives, both for webmail and e-mail in general. (Of course there are also alternatives to Windows, but for better or worse the world is more dependent on Windows than it is on Gmail.)
Thanks for this info, Rob. Does this mean that I can download Helix and add the Real codecs to Helix as binary add-ons?
If so, this is pretty important information, and may be a make-or-break detail for many of your potential users. You'll want to make sure you state this right alongside "Download Helix for Linux," or some folks might be upset by a perceived lack of Real format support.
The RealPlayer 10 alpha is a superset of the Helix Player alpha, and adds support for RealAudio, RealVideo, MP3, and Flash.
Does this mean that Helix does not support RealAudio and RealVideo? I downloaded a development release a while back, and it's not a bad player. I used it to listen to a streaming radio station. If I can't do that with the new Helix Player, what's the point? I'd need to download the bulky RealOne (easier, yes, since they stopped HIDING it on their site, but not open source). Why wouldn't they add this basic codec support to it?
Can someone clarify this? I was kind of excited about this project, but now I'm starting to wonder...
Re:www.dieoff.org - depressing news for you
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Interestingly enough, someone did. In 1997. If you do a WayBack search for the site in this thread, dieoff.org, you'll find this tidbit:
Jay Hanson predicted a war in Iraq in 1997, and he thought that it would coincide with a peak in oil prices that could occur around 2005. Search on that page for the word Iraq and you'll find this:
CONSPIRACY THEORY
... After the Cold War was over, low oil prices made it difficult for the Saudis -- and oilman President George Bush's friends -- to make ends meet because OPEC members were cheating on quotas.
The obvious solution to OPEC cheating was to sequester an entire country: Iraq. In order for our scheme to work, Saddam would have to remain in power and the UN would have to embargo his oil. That's exactly what we did.
We only need to keep Saddam in power for a few years -- till the rest of the world's oil production "peaks"... It seems reasonable to assume that global production will soon be unable to keep up with surging worldwide demand, and that global oil production must peak by the year 2005.
SPECULATION
Once global oil peaks, and we NEED to start pumping Saddam's oil, I expect Americans to invade and OCCUPY Iraq... Obviously, once oil production peaks in a couple of years, the public will throw their total support behind an invasion of Iraq. There is simply no other way we can guarantee access to the oil patch.
Rather chilling, I think. A conspiracy theory, yes. And I had to don my tinfoil hat while reading it. But the prediction is thought provoking. He was right about the war, but he was wrong in that he predicted the American people would throw their support behind a war for oil. In fact we didn't go to war for oil, we went to war to find weapons of mass destruction. Which we haven't found.
You never know. The strength of the Internet has always been in providing access to information - more than in selling things or distributing media. Those things work, but getting information to the masses has always been the Internet's strong point. Who would have thought that this same medium would allow people to collaborate and build an operating system? Without the internet it wouldn't have happened, and now that operating system is a crucial part of what runs the Internet. We might look back on the development of the Linux kernel and other open source software as one of the strong points of the Early Internet.
So really they only chopped out one paragraph. Not a particularly bad paragraph, and in fact it showed an interesting contrast between their opening an office in Bangalore and getting criticized, and opening an office in Zurich and getting a pleasant reaction in Europe.
There's not much parallel between Bangalore and Zurich considering the difference in cost of living between those cities, but it's an interesting debate... and one that someone at Google thought they shouldn't comment on. I wonder how open and honest this Blog will really be. One thing is for sure: it Won't Be Evil.
Hey, the second comment on that page (dated May 10th) has changed in the past few minutes. In the original item, he mentioned outsourcing. Now it says:
When we announced the opening of our engineering office in Zurich, a lot of Europeans seemed pleased about the possibility of working for Google without a commute to California. Zurich draws Italians, French, Swiss, Germans, and other Europeans, and is easier to reach from most parts of the continent than the Amphitheatre Parkway exit off highway 101.
Originally he said something like, "But when we opened an office in Balgalore, suddenly we were knee-deep in the debate about outsourcing." They must have asked him to change it. Does anyone have the original blog item in their cache? I'd be interested to read it again, and compare!
Sun is such a mixed bag of bolts right now. Obviously they've caught on that the market for SPARC is shrinking, and that the popularity of GNU/Linux is going to further marginalize Solaris, regardless of their relative merits. But they're clearly taking Linux seriously and looking into using AMD64 as safety in case SPARC withers away. Smart moves. And Java is still pretty popular, plus their 3-D desktop is cool enough that everyone on the block will want to play with it when it comes out.
But Sun clearly needs to stretch their vision much further to survive. Java is still proprietary, and despite its open standards we're only able to use it thanks to their kindness. That's all well and good today, but Sun is a corporation, and a corporation's motivations can change with time. That's one of the points of open source - if they were to open source Java, we'd still like them, but we wouldn't be so dependent upon them. If their kindness ever runs out, Java developers will have a hard time moving elsewhere.
And as Pamela Jones noted on Groklaw this week, Sun may be trying to cater to a growing open source and free software community, but they clearly don't get it yet. Their execs still make Darlian public statements like "Linux is a great desktop, but not a server" and "Red Hat's distribution is proprietary." They don't get it. And until they grok free software and open source, and understand that ditching the lock-in model will make smart customers trust them, no one will respect them as a leader. And if casting aside their leadership potential by persuing lock-in is their only direction, then yes, they should just fold now.
When Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country came out, I remember that it left audiences thinking there was more to the Excelsior story coming along soon. Seeing the ship break off from Enterprise and fly into the sunset was pretty suggestive of future spin-off plans. But ten years on, we've seen nothing except a Voyager episode. Well done, but not a series or movie.
Sulu on the Excelsior is one of the great untapped resources of the Star Trek franchise. It's about time they considered it, especially after a lackluster Next Generation movie (lackluster in terms of box office gross, not quality).
There is a better version. Look around for the Helix Player. It's a free community-developed version of RealPlayer that is meant to be to RP what Mozilla is to Netscape, or what OpenOffice.org is to Star Office.
I've had good luck with it. It plays real video and audio streams quite well. And like the latest Real Player software there is no annoying spyware or ads.
I agree with you about the Linux Real Player 8 - it really sucked. But fortunately there's a good upgrade path.
One later poster seems informed: As for the origin of the group name: Yes, it came from the DECSystem-10/20 culture, where "wheel" was shorthand for "administrator."
GNU/Linux development can really benefit from observing what Apple did with OS X. It's easy to use for pretty much anyone, but it's similar to a Linux-based system under the hood. It's easy, yet has very few vulnerabilities.
One nice trick Apple discovered is to have the users be non-root, yet still administrative. (Did you hear that, Lindows?) They did this by creating tools that run as root, but which require authentication to run. For example, a mortal user who is an administator can't trash the whole filesystem by dragging and dropping important items, because they are not root. But they can run Software Update, an application for downloading patches, by supplying a username and password.
On Linux you can add users to the group "wheel" and make them sudoers with much the same effect.
Apple also made many important directories like/etc invisible from within the GUI, which I think is a great idea as long as power users can turn it off.
I have no memory of the blackout because I live in Massachusetts, the eastern bit of which was one of the few places with power. So I had the unusual experience of surfing the web and seeing stories on news sites claiming that the northeast was in a state of backout, but since I was on the web it was obvisously at least partly untrue.
Curiously, I work at a research hospital with a large collection of refrigerated brains (no kidding, honestly), so we have our own power backup and probably would have stayed up anyway. (Of course we pump out juice to the local town when they're low, so it's possible we would have been dragged down with them.)
I think those advocating a 100% tax are going a bit overboard. The UK government should start with something small, like 5%. On a typical Fedora or Debian distro, that comes to nil pounds UK ($0 US), which is fairly affordable, even for out of work geeks. Starting at a reasonable rate would help people get used to the idea of the tax.
Computer history IS IBM-centric
on
A History of PowerPC
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I don't see how computer history that goes back to the 1960s can fail to be "IBM-centric." Remember, these were the big guys Microsoft was afraid of pissing off in the 1970s and 1980s. No one ever got fired for buying IBM, because they pretty much wrote the book on chip design before Intel hit it big.
I just commented to my girfriend yesterday that if you could break into the cable market (ha!) offering a cable service in which you can pick the channels you want, you'd actually stand a chance of killing the cable monopolies.
My second idea is a variety channel cable companies could offer showing programming from the channels you don't get. That way even though you pick your own channel list, the provider can show you what you're missing.
All innovative ideas, but all pipe dreams unless there is some sort of legislation involved. The cable indistry is not really into innovation these days.
But they didn't. The virus was created by Jeff Goldblum's character, who was not among the team that had been studying the ship. He knew as much about their technology as you or I would.
Slashdot Mirror
I generally don't like the idea of ISP's interfering with the network, but port 25 is the exception. I like the idea of them blocking 25 by default, but this plan of keeping an eye on their customers is the next best thing. Most people don't realize how much spam comes from broadband accounts. There is some legitimate mail, yes, but those people need to find a new way of life, because it's mostly spam. I use Sendmail at work, and realizing how things have changed on the spam front I updated my /etc/mail/access file so it now starts like this:
And it goes on, and on, and on, for well over a thousand lines. After implementing this I did some calculation and determined that I was blocking about 22% of our incoming mail. There have been some hiccups, but in general I'm really glad I did this. A few people have contacted me to complain that they can't send mail to my users, and I usually tell them to get a static IP address for their mail server or send through a designated relay. This inconvenience to cheap-o owners of SMTP servers with DHCP-assigned addresses has been a real shame, but my users have commented on how much less spam theiy've been getting recently. Blocking broadband users and using Spamcop have been a great combination. Perhaps one day if more ISPs follow Comcast we'll be able to trust those domains again.
For all of you wondering what FID is, keep in mind that no one's a prefect tipyst.
I don't think Darl's dream of prolonging the FID will come to any fruition. The court has replied to one of their attempts at delay, as reported on Groklaw today:
IBM had argued that SCO didn't need a delay because "two of the witnesses scheduled next week ... are former employees of AT&T, not IBM. .... Similarly, Mr. Rodgers was employed by Sequent, not IBM, and IBM does not have any of his documents. The final deponent, BayStar, is an investor in SCO, wholly unrelated to IBM, and that deposition apparently will not go forward." Today Judge Wells agreed and denied SCO's attempt to prolong the FUD. This guy really seems to understand the importance of getting these decisions out sooner rather than later, since the claims are enormous and the business impact could be huge. Their arguments to postpone the trial date are equally without merit, so expect more embarassing setbacks for SCO soon.
Not much of a twist at all, despite many of the above comments. Just grok this: the DMA hates spammers. No, really. I know someone who works for a company that's part of the DMA, and spam is her biggest headache. While we all hate commercial e-mail in general, the DMA is made up of companies who want to play by the rules. True, they want to have a hand in writing the rules as well, but the rules are pretty good ones. No faking your source IP addresses or From: fields. Always have an Unsubscribe feature that actually works. And so forth.
Spammers make the DMA's life a living hell. It's impossible to have a conversation with most people about legitimate commercial e-mail because illegitmate spam is such a pain (I just deleted 20 spams, vs. three real messages in my Lycos mail). With an annoyance like spam, no one even wants to hear the DMA's side of the story. So the DMA's members get blocked from sending e-mail by many sysadmins (like me).
If all commercial mail conformed to the rules that the DMA advocates, no one would complain to ISPs about commercial mail because the power to prevent it would be in the hands of the recipient. Just click Unsubscribe and you're free and clear. Until spammers go away, that's impossible because no one trusts Unsubscribe links. It shouldn't surprise us that the DMA will do anything they can to prevent spam.
Google should be able to do whatever they want, considering that the customers have agreed to it.
Of course this attempted regulation is not stupid per se - it's just stupid in the context of Google and its e-mail system. If Microsoft were to do this to Windows and implement an uninstallable system that could track your browsing, document editing and other activities in order to collect demographic data, I'd say throw the book at them. The difference? Google doesn't have a monopoly over anything. There are tons of alternatives, both for webmail and e-mail in general. (Of course there are also alternatives to Windows, but for better or worse the world is more dependent on Windows than it is on Gmail.)
I hope silly uses of our government's time like this one don't serve to prevent us from doing useful things with government regulation - like forcing Microsoft to refund your money if you return your unused copy of Windows, or preventing public companies from inflating their stock values for executive sell-offs. There is such a thing as regulation that serves the public good, regardless of what Religious Republicans try to tell you. This just ain't it.
Actually Lucas's plan is to replace the ROTL cast with Gungans, not Ewoks. Replacing them with Ewoks would be silly.
Mesesa see aspses - muy danger! Yousa go first, Indy-Indy.
This is a great idea - I've been checking spam headers and e-mailing Comcast (and other broadband ISPs) for a while now.
... but it would help a lot more if China and Korea were Comcast customers.
It will help to cut down spam
Thanks for this info, Rob. Does this mean that I can download Helix and add the Real codecs to Helix as binary add-ons?
If so, this is pretty important information, and may be a make-or-break detail for many of your potential users. You'll want to make sure you state this right alongside "Download Helix for Linux," or some folks might be upset by a perceived lack of Real format support.
Right, what does this mean?
Does this mean that Helix does not support RealAudio and RealVideo? I downloaded a development release a while back, and it's not a bad player. I used it to listen to a streaming radio station. If I can't do that with the new Helix Player, what's the point? I'd need to download the bulky RealOne (easier, yes, since they stopped HIDING it on their site, but not open source). Why wouldn't they add this basic codec support to it?
Can someone clarify this? I was kind of excited about this project, but now I'm starting to wonder ...
Interestingly enough, someone did. In 1997. If you do a WayBack search for the site in this thread, dieoff.org, you'll find this tidbit:
http://web.archive.org/web/19980113194457/dieoff.o rg/page128.htm
Jay Hanson predicted a war in Iraq in 1997, and he thought that it would coincide with a peak in oil prices that could occur around 2005. Search on that page for the word Iraq and you'll find this:
Rather chilling, I think. A conspiracy theory, yes. And I had to don my tinfoil hat while reading it. But the prediction is thought provoking. He was right about the war, but he was wrong in that he predicted the American people would throw their support behind a war for oil. In fact we didn't go to war for oil, we went to war to find weapons of mass destruction. Which we haven't found.
Tin foil had still on ...
You never know. The strength of the Internet has always been in providing access to information - more than in selling things or distributing media. Those things work, but getting information to the masses has always been the Internet's strong point. Who would have thought that this same medium would allow people to collaborate and build an operating system? Without the internet it wouldn't have happened, and now that operating system is a crucial part of what runs the Internet. We might look back on the development of the Linux kernel and other open source software as one of the strong points of the Early Internet.
There's not much parallel between Bangalore and Zurich considering the difference in cost of living between those cities, but it's an interesting debate ... and one that someone at Google thought they shouldn't comment on. I wonder how open and honest this Blog will really be. One thing is for sure: it Won't Be Evil.
Originally he said something like, "But when we opened an office in Balgalore, suddenly we were knee-deep in the debate about outsourcing." They must have asked him to change it. Does anyone have the original blog item in their cache? I'd be interested to read it again, and compare!
But Sun clearly needs to stretch their vision much further to survive. Java is still proprietary, and despite its open standards we're only able to use it thanks to their kindness. That's all well and good today, but Sun is a corporation, and a corporation's motivations can change with time. That's one of the points of open source - if they were to open source Java, we'd still like them, but we wouldn't be so dependent upon them. If their kindness ever runs out, Java developers will have a hard time moving elsewhere.
And as Pamela Jones noted on Groklaw this week, Sun may be trying to cater to a growing open source and free software community, but they clearly don't get it yet. Their execs still make Darlian public statements like "Linux is a great desktop, but not a server" and "Red Hat's distribution is proprietary." They don't get it. And until they grok free software and open source, and understand that ditching the lock-in model will make smart customers trust them, no one will respect them as a leader. And if casting aside their leadership potential by persuing lock-in is their only direction, then yes, they should just fold now.
Sulu on the Excelsior is one of the great untapped resources of the Star Trek franchise. It's about time they considered it, especially after a lackluster Next Generation movie (lackluster in terms of box office gross, not quality).
I've had good luck with it. It plays real video and audio streams quite well. And like the latest Real Player software there is no annoying spyware or ads.
I agree with you about the Linux Real Player 8 - it really sucked. But fortunately there's a good upgrade path.
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-chat/20 03-December/001746.html
TGFG (Thank God for Google).
One later poster seems informed: As for the origin of the group name: Yes, it came from the DECSystem-10/20 culture, where "wheel" was shorthand for "administrator."
One nice trick Apple discovered is to have the users be non-root, yet still administrative. (Did you hear that, Lindows?) They did this by creating tools that run as root, but which require authentication to run. For example, a mortal user who is an administator can't trash the whole filesystem by dragging and dropping important items, because they are not root. But they can run Software Update, an application for downloading patches, by supplying a username and password.
On Linux you can add users to the group "wheel" and make them sudoers with much the same effect.
Apple also made many important directories like /etc invisible from within the GUI, which I think is a great idea as long as power users can turn it off.
Seems easy and secure to me...
Curiously, I work at a research hospital with a large collection of refrigerated brains (no kidding, honestly), so we have our own power backup and probably would have stayed up anyway. (Of course we pump out juice to the local town when they're low, so it's possible we would have been dragged down with them.)
I think those advocating a 100% tax are going a bit overboard. The UK government should start with something small, like 5%. On a typical Fedora or Debian distro, that comes to nil pounds UK ($0 US), which is fairly affordable, even for out of work geeks. Starting at a reasonable rate would help people get used to the idea of the tax.
I don't see how computer history that goes back to the 1960s can fail to be "IBM-centric." Remember, these were the big guys Microsoft was afraid of pissing off in the 1970s and 1980s. No one ever got fired for buying IBM, because they pretty much wrote the book on chip design before Intel hit it big.
My second idea is a variety channel cable companies could offer showing programming from the channels you don't get. That way even though you pick your own channel list, the provider can show you what you're missing.
All innovative ideas, but all pipe dreams unless there is some sort of legislation involved. The cable indistry is not really into innovation these days.
I can easily do it in less words. For example, take this:
and change it to this:
That's down to 99 words right there. And yes, I was an English major.
But they didn't. The virus was created by Jeff Goldblum's character, who was not among the team that had been studying the ship. He knew as much about their technology as you or I would.