I work for an email provider that supplies email services to ISPs (as well as loads of SMBs directly). Most of them block port 25 and force the customers to relay mail through our SMTPauth servers for outbound mail, alternatively they can of course access web mail to send.
This does an AMAZING job of limiting spam from these ISPs, but it's not perfect, we still filter outbound mail using standard tools and have rules in place limiting the volume of mail customers may send per hour. That limit is really high for home users and we silently bump-up those limits when customers send loads of legit email, but hitting the limits with legit email is rare. We also restrict users from sending as anyone but themselves, with send-as restrictions.
Customers who need exceptions need only ask their ISP.
Those combined steps block the bots from reaching the internet, and it works really well. I don't believe we've been RBLed because of a bot on a customer's PC. In fact, I have some feedback scripts in place that alerts customers when they run afoul of the filters and it smells like their PC has a bot on it.
The biggest problem we have is scammers, 419ers, work-from-home check fraudsters and other scumbags signing up for those ISPs just to gain access to the SMTPauth and web servers for sending their filth. Short of a bayonette in the throats of these sleazeballs, the only thing we can do is filter on content. If we didn't filter for content, email simply wouldn't flow. SpamCop and all the rest would list our outbound IPs in minutes, and the entire customer base would suffer.
So... instead of just rejecting mail, we filter and hold, collect it, count it up, check the evidence and cancel accounts as they're caught. Normal customers email is filtered, and if held, delivered silently after examination. No warnings, no take-backs, no complaints. WE have had 0 false positives because of the human factor of checking the evidence before cancellation. And we're rarely blocked by RBLs. The only thing left are those gentle customers who decide they want to forward all their mail off to some other provider, and turn off antispam...
If every ISP blocked port 25, used smtpauth, restricted sending addresses and otherwise managed their customer base, the world would be a nicer place because the cost associated with sending massive amounts of spam would skyrocket.
Two fun facts about this project that were glossed over in the old school movies of these things in action are the NOISE and the short flight times.
The TV series Wings covered the first generation of these jet packs and broke my heart when they revealed the true story behind the promotional movies. The pilot wasn't flying for the whole movie, of course, the film crew filmed a few seconds of flight, the pilot would land, refuel and the whole process was repeated and pasted together in post-production. They also dubbed new sounds over the outrageous screech/howl the original packs made.
Watching the film as a kid, I clearly remember thinking there's no way the thing could fly for that long, but the excitement of seeing a guy fly through the woods overcame my skepticism. Clearly though, even with the new films and fuels, we have the same jet pack, the same limited range, the same ear shattering exhaust note. Nothing new IMO.
I like to think a single M1 would survive quite well against 150k light infantry armed with spears and clubs... though eventually the blood rivers would bog down the tank. maybe someone will put it on PayPerView only using spammers instead of Persians.
speaking of fry grease... I worked at a place where the sous chef dropped his watch into the fryer, then before he could think, reached in after it. Thankfully his hands were sloppy wet, and he didn't dip them in too far. Later that same day, the main chef deep fried the salad chef's panties in the same fryer. Nasty.
A few years later, my brother-in-law worked for a lab working on rhinovirus and caught a cold.
people with astigmatism wear weighted contact lenses, so they don't rotate around your eyeball when you roll your eyes when a coworker says something stupid... at least that's whay my eye dr told me.
i.e. they maintain a relatively constant position on the eye
it would be totally sweet if we could charge/convict/execute people for treason, but you better damned well be sure that it applies to _everyone_ who does it.
pushing charges against one side of the aisle is treason itself.
not just for hats anymore: use tinfoil, coat the walls, furniture and whatnot with it and be sure to crumple first, so all the surfaces are wrinkled.
Illuminate the room with multiple light sources that cast confusing shadows, then wrap yourself in it. Turn on strobe light. a sort of limited invisibility. Edge-detect functions in your victim's head won't be able to pick out your shape when you stop moving. When you do finally move, they freak out. Great fun for halloween time haunted house applications.
3 year plan to institute a nation-wide algae based bio fuel farming and processing industry modeled after the rural farming unions and co-ops that drive our dairy industry. That is, anyone with the open land could create an algae farm with free seed algae from the gubermint, and cheap loans to build the infrastructure. Every so many days a truck from your local co-op fuel depot would pull up, siphon off your fuel and bring it to the distribution center, where the locals could then buy the fuel for their cars/trucks. Figure 250,000 fuel growing tanks, 1 acre each providing all the fuel the nation needs.
3 year plan to create thousands of small community owned pebble bed reactors situated in every army, marine, national guard and air-force armory in the nation. The reactors are small, the armories are (should be anyway) well guarded, so they do double-duty as power stations.
write huge incentive cheques to small inventors for producing commercially viable diesel electric hybrid cars running on the above two fuel sources.
Once those are in place, remove the IRS and current tax law, replace with a 3% flat tax. The huge increase in GDP caused by the above two will more than offset the taxes lost through the current corrupt system.
Jail many lawyers, politicians. Use them to feed the algae from #1 above.
Thanks for the good advice. I'll outfit myself until I can start the commute as the weather changes with the coming of spring. Can't commute on a bike in a foot of snow, I suppose.
I've done a little research since last week and realized the walking trail near our home, that we use quite often is really a linear park, an old railroad bed converted to a walking trail, that travels to within two miles of my office, it's level like crazy and through the woods and fields the whole way. I walked a long piece of it yesterday and it's Quiet. Cemetery at midnight quiet. Wild animals frolicing in the woods quiet. The next good day we have I'll take my bike along that route and see what sort of distance I can cover.
how long is your commute? Mine is 10.8 miles (google maps says) through mostly low-speed-limit back country roads, no sharp turns and little elevation change. I often see people biking on each leg of the journey. Are there any good FAQs out there for people switching over from motorized to pedal power commutes?
a DEER? forget it. If you hit even a tiny deer in one of these tiny cars, the deer is going to come through the windscreen and kill you.
1.5 million deer strikes in the US last I checked, average damage was enough to total this little thing for sure. Hell, the one I hit in November was 200 pounds, 8 points and thankfully on the downswing of a long leap over the road when I hit him or it would have likely been serious injury for me. I can't wait for the youtube video of this thing going through crash testing.
Very good point. All I need to know about my septic system I learned from Dirty Jobs, and it seems I forgot what I learned. In one episode Mike has this explained to him, WRT mentions methane is odorless.
Sulfur dioxide? rotten eggy smell? so if you can smell it, you can't necessarily burn it. Still, wonder if it's enough methane to be useful.
what if I have a 900 gallon septic tank releasing a metric butt load of methane every day, if you can smell it, you can burn it... can I use this system to recycle that exhaust into fuel for my diesel truck?
what about city/town septic systems, can this system provide fuel for the vehicle fleet? From TFA doesn't sound like it needs CO2 specifically.
i'm afraid to ask the voting public what they think on the issue, most of them (think boomers) would vote to extend it because that's what Sony Bono would have wanted us to do.
hard drives aren't cheap. RAID arrays aren't cheap (heck, 4 hard drives for the capacity of 3). Backups of all this data isn't cheap, especially when you want to have a year of it offsite, with mothly and weekly rotations worked in the mix. Offsite storage in secured storage facilities with automatic rotation and retention isn't cheap. Auditing the security of this data isn't cheap. Hiring people to manage all this shouldn't be cheap either.
want to be the next President of the USA? Make this same attitude your platform, carbon neutral energy independance using energy generated by a wide variety of sources and pimp it to the one side by saying how clean the air will be from using clean fuels, and how free we'll be by using bio fuels (from algae, none of this corn stuff) solar and "other" and how free we'll be of foreign energy by using home-grown fuels created by local family farm co-ops and fresh spring-scented nuclear power.
then see who complains about the setup and throw them in jail
(which is what the latest energy bill threatens by outlawing incandescent light bulbs)
While I see the point of your concern, and share it to some degree, all one has to do to dispell the concern is pick up a book, watch survivor man, join a living history organization, but their kid "The Dangerous Book for Boys" or join Boy Scouts etc etc.
Figuring out how to shoe a horse? Not that complicated and anyone with time could redevelop this skill in a few days with a journeyman level blacksmith (those do still exist). Make a bow and arrow capable of felling a deer or a human? Again, not that complicated, and you could scrounge the parts from a broken society in hours.
Every concern about basic skills lost to history is opposed by pointing out the replacement skills, sources for knowledge to learn those skills, or even people who use those otherwise lost skills actively today.
In conversations on this subject, the biggest worry I have always shows up when you drill down in the manufacturing process to the raw materials. How do you flake a stone to make an arrow head? From where do you mine coal or iron ore and how do you refine it in your back yard? Even those questions have answers. You might not be able to mine iron ore, or even scrounge scrap metal, but if your survival depends on it, you can replace the iron with wood or stone.
If you can't compensate for lost basic skills? Then selection forces take out you and your family.
that sounds like a pretty clear solution to this town's problem, it would be cheap too. If we could vote on the solution though, mine would be to increase the power of the "light beams" so the truck is shaved down to an appropriate height so it can fit through the village. or simply replace the light beam with a nasty set of steel spikes that rake the top of whatever vehicle is too large for the roadway...
two chilling units each capable of putting out 100% of your current cooling needs is redundancy.
But when your manager decides to add racks full of blade servers and hard drives by the hundreds, this redundancy becomes "excess capacity". Much better to have excess capacity now (paid for up front) than to have to refit your data center with bigger ducting, higher power feeds, bigger chillers, bigger fans, bigger heat exchangers when you find "excess capacity" has changed to "cooling deficit".
for a guy with a closet full of PC class servers, yeah, get a cheap wall mounted AC unit and be done with it. For a guy trying to cool a whole raised floor full of machines, 200% capacity is just about right.
It's not really this simple, but a decent back of the napkin is to take the amperage the voltage and multiply, then multiply again to get btu/hour, divide to get tons.
20A x 110V = 2200 VA which doesn't directly translate to Watts, as someone will surely correct me, but for cooling purposes it's not a bad rule of thumb to directly translate the VA to Watts because you'll be including a built-in overhead into which you will surely grow your server space. Then go from Watts to BTU/hour.
2200 Watts x 3.412 BTU/Hour Watt = 7506 BTU/hr
12000 BTU/hr = 1 ton. Do that calculation for all possible hosts in your space, round up. Then purchase an additional, but portable, cooler for the space. Use that cooler for emergencies, like chilling beer, and if the main chillers break, you'll have nice cold beer to drink while the HVAC guys fix the big units and you wait for your less-essential machines to come up.
Most people will do the caclulaton and find their datacenter cooling systems are woefully under sized, running 100% whenever the outside air temperature is above 50F...
you wrote: Don't like the look of wind turbines? Don't live near them; there are plenty of people willing to take your place. I, for one, find them quite attractive. You can go live near a nice pretty coal power plant instead (that is, after all, what those turbines are displacing).
fuck that. The people complaining about the wind turbine farms are often the people who have to live under them, within eyesight of them, or have their lands stolen for their construction. When time comes to sell, they have to contend with the lowered value of their lands. A single coal power plant is a large ugly brick building stuck near a rail yard with a single or short series of tall smokestacks all located on the same campus, not a tens of miles long stretch of hideous moaning machines interrupting your previously uninterrupted property.
How come we don't wind turbine farms on the tops of buildings in large cities or in Central Park, Long Island Sound, off Martha's Vineyard etc etc It's not because there's no wind there and it's not because there's no demand for power there.
absolutely agree with you here, at the office, my web servers are my company's property and I'll log what the CEO tells me to log. We use the IP logs from web servers to stop 419ers and other jerks, not logging this information over the course of a few months would make our lives more difficult and let more spammers abuse our services.
just imagine what would happen if these freaks saw my mail logs, MONTHS of data gzipped with metaphorical tons of IP addresses in it. I'd get the chair.
Slashdot Mirror
I work for an email provider that supplies email services to ISPs (as well as loads of SMBs directly). Most of them block port 25 and force the customers to relay mail through our SMTPauth servers for outbound mail, alternatively they can of course access web mail to send.
This does an AMAZING job of limiting spam from these ISPs, but it's not perfect, we still filter outbound mail using standard tools and have rules in place limiting the volume of mail customers may send per hour. That limit is really high for home users and we silently bump-up those limits when customers send loads of legit email, but hitting the limits with legit email is rare. We also restrict users from sending as anyone but themselves, with send-as restrictions.
Customers who need exceptions need only ask their ISP.
Those combined steps block the bots from reaching the internet, and it works really well. I don't believe we've been RBLed because of a bot on a customer's PC. In fact, I have some feedback scripts in place that alerts customers when they run afoul of the filters and it smells like their PC has a bot on it.
The biggest problem we have is scammers, 419ers, work-from-home check fraudsters and other scumbags signing up for those ISPs just to gain access to the SMTPauth and web servers for sending their filth. Short of a bayonette in the throats of these sleazeballs, the only thing we can do is filter on content. If we didn't filter for content, email simply wouldn't flow. SpamCop and all the rest would list our outbound IPs in minutes, and the entire customer base would suffer.
So... instead of just rejecting mail, we filter and hold, collect it, count it up, check the evidence and cancel accounts as they're caught. Normal customers email is filtered, and if held, delivered silently after examination. No warnings, no take-backs, no complaints. WE have had 0 false positives because of the human factor of checking the evidence before cancellation. And we're rarely blocked by RBLs. The only thing left are those gentle customers who decide they want to forward all their mail off to some other provider, and turn off antispam...
If every ISP blocked port 25, used smtpauth, restricted sending addresses and otherwise managed their customer base, the world would be a nicer place because the cost associated with sending massive amounts of spam would skyrocket.
Two fun facts about this project that were glossed over in the old school movies of these things in action are the NOISE and the short flight times.
The TV series Wings covered the first generation of these jet packs and broke my heart when they revealed the true story behind the promotional movies. The pilot wasn't flying for the whole movie, of course, the film crew filmed a few seconds of flight, the pilot would land, refuel and the whole process was repeated and pasted together in post-production. They also dubbed new sounds over the outrageous screech/howl the original packs made.
Watching the film as a kid, I clearly remember thinking there's no way the thing could fly for that long, but the excitement of seeing a guy fly through the woods overcame my skepticism. Clearly though, even with the new films and fuels, we have the same jet pack, the same limited range, the same ear shattering exhaust note. Nothing new IMO.
I like to think a single M1 would survive quite well against 150k light infantry armed with spears and clubs... though eventually the blood rivers would bog down the tank. maybe someone will put it on PayPerView only using spammers instead of Persians.
speaking of fry grease... I worked at a place where the sous chef dropped his watch into the fryer, then before he could think, reached in after it. Thankfully his hands were sloppy wet, and he didn't dip them in too far. Later that same day, the main chef deep fried the salad chef's panties in the same fryer. Nasty.
A few years later, my brother-in-law worked for a lab working on rhinovirus and caught a cold.
people with astigmatism wear weighted contact lenses, so they don't rotate around your eyeball when you roll your eyes when a coworker says something stupid... at least that's whay my eye dr told me.
i.e. they maintain a relatively constant position on the eye
it would be totally sweet if we could charge/convict/execute people for treason, but you better damned well be sure that it applies to _everyone_ who does it.
pushing charges against one side of the aisle is treason itself.
not just for hats anymore: use tinfoil, coat the walls, furniture and whatnot with it and be sure to crumple first, so all the surfaces are wrinkled.
Illuminate the room with multiple light sources that cast confusing shadows, then wrap yourself in it. Turn on strobe light. a sort of limited invisibility. Edge-detect functions in your victim's head won't be able to pick out your shape when you stop moving. When you do finally move, they freak out. Great fun for halloween time haunted house applications.
3 year plan to institute a nation-wide algae based bio fuel farming and processing industry modeled after the rural farming unions and co-ops that drive our dairy industry. That is, anyone with the open land could create an algae farm with free seed algae from the gubermint, and cheap loans to build the infrastructure. Every so many days a truck from your local co-op fuel depot would pull up, siphon off your fuel and bring it to the distribution center, where the locals could then buy the fuel for their cars/trucks. Figure 250,000 fuel growing tanks, 1 acre each providing all the fuel the nation needs.
3 year plan to create thousands of small community owned pebble bed reactors situated in every army, marine, national guard and air-force armory in the nation. The reactors are small, the armories are (should be anyway) well guarded, so they do double-duty as power stations.
write huge incentive cheques to small inventors for producing commercially viable diesel electric hybrid cars running on the above two fuel sources.
Once those are in place, remove the IRS and current tax law, replace with a 3% flat tax. The huge increase in GDP caused by the above two will more than offset the taxes lost through the current corrupt system.
Jail many lawyers, politicians. Use them to feed the algae from #1 above.
Thanks for the good advice. I'll outfit myself until I can start the commute as the weather changes with the coming of spring. Can't commute on a bike in a foot of snow, I suppose.
I've done a little research since last week and realized the walking trail near our home, that we use quite often is really a linear park, an old railroad bed converted to a walking trail, that travels to within two miles of my office, it's level like crazy and through the woods and fields the whole way. I walked a long piece of it yesterday and it's Quiet. Cemetery at midnight quiet. Wild animals frolicing in the woods quiet. The next good day we have I'll take my bike along that route and see what sort of distance I can cover.
regards.
I'm interested in starting a bike commute.
how long is your commute? Mine is 10.8 miles (google maps says) through mostly low-speed-limit back country roads, no sharp turns and little elevation change. I often see people biking on each leg of the journey. Are there any good FAQs out there for people switching over from motorized to pedal power commutes?
Thanks for any info you can offer.
a DEER? forget it. If you hit even a tiny deer in one of these tiny cars, the deer is going to come through the windscreen and kill you.
1.5 million deer strikes in the US last I checked, average damage was enough to total this little thing for sure. Hell, the one I hit in November was 200 pounds, 8 points and thankfully on the downswing of a long leap over the road when I hit him or it would have likely been serious injury for me. I can't wait for the youtube video of this thing going through crash testing.
Thanks!
Very good point. All I need to know about my septic system I learned from Dirty Jobs, and it seems I forgot what I learned. In one episode Mike has this explained to him, WRT mentions methane is odorless.
Sulfur dioxide? rotten eggy smell? so if you can smell it, you can't necessarily burn it. Still, wonder if it's enough methane to be useful.
what if I have a 900 gallon septic tank releasing a metric butt load of methane every day, if you can smell it, you can burn it... can I use this system to recycle that exhaust into fuel for my diesel truck?
what about city/town septic systems, can this system provide fuel for the vehicle fleet? From TFA doesn't sound like it needs CO2 specifically.
i'm afraid to ask the voting public what they think on the issue, most of them (think boomers) would vote to extend it because that's what Sony Bono would have wanted us to do.
mod parent up.
hard drives aren't cheap. RAID arrays aren't cheap (heck, 4 hard drives for the capacity of 3). Backups of all this data isn't cheap, especially when you want to have a year of it offsite, with mothly and weekly rotations worked in the mix. Offsite storage in secured storage facilities with automatic rotation and retention isn't cheap. Auditing the security of this data isn't cheap. Hiring people to manage all this shouldn't be cheap either.
I guess?
so long as we're all moving through time together at the same rate, that's all that matters
hmmm, the same rate of what, time/time? delta time/ static time? So, I have this really nice cream stout at home, and I would really like to drink it.
want to be the next President of the USA? Make this same attitude your platform, carbon neutral energy independance using energy generated by a wide variety of sources and pimp it to the one side by saying how clean the air will be from using clean fuels, and how free we'll be by using bio fuels (from algae, none of this corn stuff) solar and "other" and how free we'll be of foreign energy by using home-grown fuels created by local family farm co-ops and fresh spring-scented nuclear power.
then see who complains about the setup and throw them in jail
(which is what the latest energy bill threatens by outlawing incandescent light bulbs)
is this further evidence that we're approaching a black hole? The whole, unverse appears to be accelerating away from us in all directions thing?
kinda freakin' me out here people, if time slows down too much, it'll be 2:45 Friday afternoon forever!
While I see the point of your concern, and share it to some degree, all one has to do to dispell the concern is pick up a book, watch survivor man, join a living history organization, but their kid "The Dangerous Book for Boys" or join Boy Scouts etc etc.
Figuring out how to shoe a horse? Not that complicated and anyone with time could redevelop this skill in a few days with a journeyman level blacksmith (those do still exist). Make a bow and arrow capable of felling a deer or a human? Again, not that complicated, and you could scrounge the parts from a broken society in hours.
Every concern about basic skills lost to history is opposed by pointing out the replacement skills, sources for knowledge to learn those skills, or even people who use those otherwise lost skills actively today.
In conversations on this subject, the biggest worry I have always shows up when you drill down in the manufacturing process to the raw materials. How do you flake a stone to make an arrow head? From where do you mine coal or iron ore and how do you refine it in your back yard? Even those questions have answers. You might not be able to mine iron ore, or even scrounge scrap metal, but if your survival depends on it, you can replace the iron with wood or stone.
If you can't compensate for lost basic skills? Then selection forces take out you and your family.
that sounds like a pretty clear solution to this town's problem, it would be cheap too. If we could vote on the solution though, mine would be to increase the power of the "light beams" so the truck is shaved down to an appropriate height so it can fit through the village. or simply replace the light beam with a nasty set of steel spikes that rake the top of whatever vehicle is too large for the roadway...
bonus: sell the scrap that falls off for cash
you are right, it is excess.
two chilling units each capable of putting out 100% of your current cooling needs is redundancy.
But when your manager decides to add racks full of blade servers and hard drives by the hundreds, this redundancy becomes "excess capacity". Much better to have excess capacity now (paid for up front) than to have to refit your data center with bigger ducting, higher power feeds, bigger chillers, bigger fans, bigger heat exchangers when you find "excess capacity" has changed to "cooling deficit".
for a guy with a closet full of PC class servers, yeah, get a cheap wall mounted AC unit and be done with it. For a guy trying to cool a whole raised floor full of machines, 200% capacity is just about right.
It's not really this simple, but a decent back of the napkin is to take the amperage the voltage and multiply, then multiply again to get btu/hour, divide to get tons.
20A x 110V = 2200 VA which doesn't directly translate to Watts, as someone will surely correct me, but for cooling purposes it's not a bad rule of thumb to directly translate the VA to Watts because you'll be including a built-in overhead into which you will surely grow your server space. Then go from Watts to BTU/hour.
2200 Watts x 3.412 BTU/Hour Watt = 7506 BTU/hr
12000 BTU/hr = 1 ton. Do that calculation for all possible hosts in your space, round up. Then purchase an additional, but portable, cooler for the space. Use that cooler for emergencies, like chilling beer, and if the main chillers break, you'll have nice cold beer to drink while the HVAC guys fix the big units and you wait for your less-essential machines to come up.
Most people will do the caclulaton and find their datacenter cooling systems are woefully under sized, running 100% whenever the outside air temperature is above 50F...
you wrote: Don't like the look of wind turbines? Don't live near them; there are plenty of people willing to take your place. I, for one, find them quite attractive. You can go live near a nice pretty coal power plant instead (that is, after all, what those turbines are displacing).
fuck that. The people complaining about the wind turbine farms are often the people who have to live under them, within eyesight of them, or have their lands stolen for their construction. When time comes to sell, they have to contend with the lowered value of their lands. A single coal power plant is a large ugly brick building stuck near a rail yard with a single or short series of tall smokestacks all located on the same campus, not a tens of miles long stretch of hideous moaning machines interrupting your previously uninterrupted property.
How come we don't wind turbine farms on the tops of buildings in large cities or in Central Park, Long Island Sound, off Martha's Vineyard etc etc It's not because there's no wind there and it's not because there's no demand for power there.
absolutely agree with you here, at the office, my web servers are my company's property and I'll log what the CEO tells me to log. We use the IP logs from web servers to stop 419ers and other jerks, not logging this information over the course of a few months would make our lives more difficult and let more spammers abuse our services.
just imagine what would happen if these freaks saw my mail logs, MONTHS of data gzipped with metaphorical tons of IP addresses in it. I'd get the chair.
ah, Lenovo is owned by the Chinease government, IIRC, and Dell is not owned by the US government.