I work for an email hosting company and our standard with ISP customers is they use IMAP or SMTP auth, worst case, POP before SMTP. It's amazing how much spam is blocked going from an open relay for an ISP to authenticated-only.
spambots are bad, but my biggest problem is with fraudsters, both 419ers and standard credit card fraud types.
These sleazebags cause more trouble than the bots, and it's illegal to kill them. I'm not sure why they cause more trouble, they send out less email than the bots, perhaps the scammer's email is better targetted to real people, as opposed to directory harvesting type attacks.
Anyway, definately agree with you there, smtp auth, imap or whatever, all piped through SSL or nothing at all.
yes, traffic shaping is effective in determining the nature of connections
I work for a small email company we process millions of emails an hour inbound, but only a few million a day outbound.
Our most effective filters are:
connect/HELO restrictions: you can only get email into the environment if your IP address resolves to a FQDN.
HELO restrictions: if you connect using X different HELO strings, you are blacklisted. Spambots often randomize the helos, this blocks those.
Spamassassin at the client side, filtering email into various folders based on the score.
antivirus server that filters the few viruses that make it in, and phishing is filtered too.
The problem? All this doesn't catch enough of the spam. We still have loads of CPU dedicated to filtering spam, but something like this technique at the border will help, and I'll predict (based on experience watching the traffic and spam filtering graphs) that we could cut spam another 30% just by watching the curves and tightening the restrictions during those peaks.
loved that book too, the imagry was second to none, and the fight scenes were just fantastic. from the talking bombs to forced-sleep hypnosis, all of would have made an awesome movie, instead we got that crap-fest...
amen to that, my amateur astronomer brother, who built a shed-sized observatory in the backyard, decided to look at sun spots one day, and just as his eye approached the lens, he reared back in pain.
He forgot the filter, and had a nice burn on the hollow of his cheek right below his eyeball, it was shaped like this: |
very lucky to get away with just a nasty burn on thin skin
the thrust is applied throughout the flight, the sound is pretty interesting, wooshing like too much air coming out of a too small nozzle. They don't coast during this test flight at all, it seems, if the sound indicates relative thrust, it's pretty constant, with maybe a few % reduction throughout the flight and a small increase at the end.
the nozzles adjust during the flight to maintain attitude, I believe the DCx did the same thing. IIRC the DCx also had a series of manuvering thrusters spaced around the ship.
I don't think that's a major roadblock, they'll adapt or die like anything else. Anecdotally, the mechanics I know tend to be geeky when it comes to new car technology, and take any changes in stride (after a few months of bitching about it first)
new models are certified for repair at the dealerships first, then repair shops outside the dealerships start to get people certified or more familiar with the product, and in a few years, as consumers are reeally starting to put serious numbers of these on the road, the average joe repairshop can rebuild a microturbine as easily as a VW engine
yahoo does if you pay $20/year (pop3 + smtpauth for outbound)
hotmail does but at a funky undefined level where they're pushing "outlook connectivity" which I suspect is pop, but they don't specifically say pop, and they charge $9.95/month for it.
doctor's office: various "health" magazines. 100% advertisments all the way through. Rate your sleep quality, followed by a page for a sleep aid. Rate your love life, followed by a page for an ED pill. Of course the story/ads are written with the slant that everyone who reads the ads will come away with the impression they need the drug advertised on the next page./sickening
new york state parks with pools have diving boards. use 'em all the time. Many private campgrounds I visit also have them. most schools have them, around here at least. the only place I see diving restricted is where the water is shallow, i.e. 4' pool.
If you want a "man's hobby" for your childen, get into historical reenacting. They can learn to shoot a gun, dress in military uniforms, pretend to kill people, cook food over an open fire, and camp under the stars all in the same day. If you join something like a competitive target shooters club, they can fire live rounds at targets too. In fact, there are clubs that fire live artillery rounds. That's a real man's hobby. Forget bowling.
aside from that, my son came home with a paper card game from 1st grade the other day. It was basically "war" just with number cards no face cards, so they could recognize 0 through 10 dots in different configurations on a page, and learn to quickly tell the difference between the numbers. Anyway, he proceeds to divide up the cards equally, 2 number 10s for you, 2 for me, 2 number 9s for you, 2 for me etc. I immediately got angry and lept to the conclusion that the directions make the game attempt to be "fair" rather than "random" as you would expect, and that it was more soft-peddling the games to our kids, and started to blame the teacher... then I read the directions. The directions were war, shuffle the deck, hand out cards randomly etc. Infact he was stacking the deck so he would win, there were actually 5 of each card. He was keeping the extras to ensure victory.
I wasn't sure if I should be proud he had figured out how to stack the deck, or be mad he cheated, thankful our local school district hadn't softened to the point of game-neutrality or what to think. So I thought them all at the same time, and proceeded to kick his ass in cards after shuffling. Only, as any good random card game like war is, he won the 2nd game without difficulty.
Then we went downstairs and played missle command, to teach him that life isn't like random car games, you win a few you lose a few, in fact, you win win until your cities go up in smoke.
not used to the snow/ice? Where I'm from (stretch of New York State from Lake Erie, under Lake Ontario to Albany, basically along the Erie Canal) gets an average of over 3 meters of snow a year delivered in small blasts with some local zones averaging twice that much snow. This amount of snow isn't really that amazing and you'll acclimate to it pretty fast. Consider that the change in temps 15C down will take a few years to be noticed.
Your town will purchase more rugged plows, your shopping centers will purchase higher capacity front-end loaders, your councils will determine the best place to dump the extra snow (rivers, or directly into the sea) and your citizens will learn to slow down and conserve energy better while driving. It'll happen gradually over the course of a few decades. Seems like a good time to get into the snow removal business, perhaps start a small company selling and servicing snow blowers, truck mounted plows and selling contracts to clear snow from open areas and roads, maybe start importing better quality winter clothing from the Russians... There's opportunity in all that ice.
Wow, you are one seriously clever fellow. Original too, in the way you just wind up and let go on people. Why, I'm not sure I've ever read anything so clever and original in all my time. A rant like that concerning something hypothetical and ill-defined like an ultrasonic clotting weapon whose damage signature is as clear as text on a page as you pointed out, turned so elegantly on it's side used to point out the failures in today's education system. Surely a weapon like that, not existing and all, couldn't also be small enough and to apply to a target in sufficiently close proximity as to cause a problem. But, as you are obviously a doctor, one with experience working with tools-turned-into-weapons like this previously assumed to be hypothetical ultrasonic clotting weapon, clearly that's just not the case. An immaginary weaponized something that doesn't exist surely can't be used unless it's in constant contact with the skin for hours. But still, all that retort from such a smart guy, with a low UID too, I feel truly blessed to have been corrected by the best of the Internet. Little old me, the object of your attention and blood pressure for at least 15 seconds. Goodness. For the rest of my days, I'll keep the link to your reply in my.sig so the whole world will see how clever and justified you are in your response, and how wrong I was to dare suggest something quite obvious in a post in reply to something written by you. I know, I know, few are clever enough to follow your lead and I'm in way over my head even continuing the line of conversation, but I just have to take the chance that you'll smile upon me with your low ID number and your big brain. Thus continuing a thread well past it's time.
And we should all have jumped to that other website and looked up your posts, clearly we should have, then we would have all been 100% educated on the subject and been to the same conclusion as you reached so long ago.
I merely read your information-filled post, including the part where you say it is really obvious what caused the damage, then posted an example where the technology could be used offensively in an obviously far featched plot to kill a guy presumably many wouldn't mind seeing dead, even attempted to accomodate the various factors mentioned above, specifically in reference to close proximity and time (left out the icky gooey jelly part because frankly it's not needed for the purposes of this hypothetical weapon), and demonstrated how effective this would be paying particular attention to the place the craft would land. See, the post points out that it would take time for it to kill him, hours of sitting in one place or using multiple instances of the weapon based on his location in an airplane in motion, an executive airplane that is basically never out of control of the handlers, and someone would have to remove the equipment from various places he might sit upon landing at some random airport without mention of the task of installing the equipment in the first place. Even that's quite an assumption for me to make, surely the imaginary ultrasonic clotting weapon would be more effective than that? Surely you can make blood clot with just a few split seconds of application from such a thing as the imaginary ultrasonic clotting weapon.
I wonder if anyone's ever labeled this type of literary device, using an imaginary object in an extreme example of hypothetical use contrary to what a presumed expert just said? Maybe you should coin the phrase since you're obviously the first one to discover it or see it in use.
How about it? Shall we call it the wowbagger farsi farse?
so... Ahmadinejad gets on his personal plane to fly to visit a terrorist buddy in North Korea, the flight is very long, having to avoid Afganistan and all that, so about 1/2 way into the flight, he starts stroking out, and after hours of crippling pain and degeneration... dies of massive clotting of the brain.
Of course, they never get the chance to check the headrest of his seat, his bed, or the floor by his feet as they are all carefully removed upon the emergency landing in Indonesia.
a pal from Duncanon PA used to say, "the way to make motorcycles safest is to arm them with a 500 pound shaped charge directed forward of the headlamp." Soccer Mom would think twice before cutting off a biker if the whole family was to be incinerated.
I know the topic is quite old now... but have you ever seen the unset-concrete dome building methods?
That's where a reinforced pad is laid on a foundation suitable to the climate, then a large diamater rubber bladder is laid on top, and another layer of reiforced concrete is added. As the concrete on top cures, the bladder is inflated. Believe it or not, you wind up with a 30+ foot diameter dome, a good 12 to 20 feet tall in the middle, made of several inch thick reinforced concrete you can then cover with sod. Since you're using seriously high pressure concrete, you don't get leaking.
I'm trying to convince my wife to go this route instead of the other.
Oh and the hobbit house could be roughed-in for just a few thousand bucks if you already owned the earth-moving equipment.
your dream home sounds like Bilbo's place. How about building such a thing with large diameter concrete drainage pipes?
you can pick them up relatively cheaply, have a dozer come in, trench out your home plan, lay the pipe, seal up the joints, cut the holes for solartubes, backfill.
every switch, every bulb, every fixture on a custom circuit that can be bound together in interesting and usefull ways
each room has a distinct sound system with connection to the media center for mp3/radio as well as telephony and internet through a touch screen that includes reprograming as well as TV and controls for the media center
touch screen flat panel in the kitchen for recipies and all that
voice activate the whole thing with access to any circuit from any room, "computer, turn on the lights in the basement and the garage" spoken from the car or the family room, for example. Or, "computer, dial ma fifedrum at 4pm on July 2nd if we're home" or "computer, call 911" or "computer, find Sarah Connor."
yeah, those damned conservatives and their drug killing sprees. Why, just 100 years ago they killed penisillin because it cured certain venereal diseases.
you are correct, knowing your flaws is a great strength for a software community to have. We're more responsive to problems, and often quicker with fixes, no?
I know it's circumstancial and anecdotal, but in my experience, the largest problem with mission critical machines is hardware, not software.
I made my own drums (rope tension snare drum/bass drum for "Ancient Fife and Drum" and reenacting stuff). I also sew pieces of uniforms, fix the children's torn or damaged clothing and do my own ironing. The best fitting shirt I own, I made myself.
And I don't live in my parent's basement, am married, and get laid on a regular basis.
Had to throw that last part to differentiate me from, ah, nevermind.
Slashdot Mirror
I work for an email hosting company and our standard with ISP customers is they use IMAP or SMTP auth, worst case, POP before SMTP. It's amazing how much spam is blocked going from an open relay for an ISP to authenticated-only.
spambots are bad, but my biggest problem is with fraudsters, both 419ers and standard credit card fraud types.
These sleazebags cause more trouble than the bots, and it's illegal to kill them. I'm not sure why they cause more trouble, they send out less email than the bots, perhaps the scammer's email is better targetted to real people, as opposed to directory harvesting type attacks.
Anyway, definately agree with you there, smtp auth, imap or whatever, all piped through SSL or nothing at all.
yes, traffic shaping is effective in determining the nature of connections
I work for a small email company we process millions of emails an hour inbound, but only a few million a day outbound.
Our most effective filters are:
connect/HELO restrictions: you can only get email into the environment if your IP address resolves to a FQDN.
HELO restrictions: if you connect using X different HELO strings, you are blacklisted. Spambots often randomize the helos, this blocks those.
Spamassassin at the client side, filtering email into various folders based on the score.
antivirus server that filters the few viruses that make it in, and phishing is filtered too.
The problem? All this doesn't catch enough of the spam. We still have loads of CPU dedicated to filtering spam, but something like this technique at the border will help, and I'll predict (based on experience watching the traffic and spam filtering graphs) that we could cut spam another 30% just by watching the curves and tightening the restrictions during those peaks.
loved that book too, the imagry was second to none, and the fight scenes were just fantastic. from the talking bombs to forced-sleep hypnosis, all of would have made an awesome movie, instead we got that crap-fest...
so they never read the mythical man-month?
amen to that, my amateur astronomer brother, who built a shed-sized observatory in the backyard, decided to look at sun spots one day, and just as his eye approached the lens, he reared back in pain.
He forgot the filter, and had a nice burn on the hollow of his cheek right below his eyeball, it was shaped like this: |
very lucky to get away with just a nasty burn on thin skin
330ml is 12 ounces of soft drink, that's the standard sized can in the US/Canada
pretty funny to me anyway
the thrust is applied throughout the flight, the sound is pretty interesting, wooshing like too much air coming out of a too small nozzle. They don't coast during this test flight at all, it seems, if the sound indicates relative thrust, it's pretty constant, with maybe a few % reduction throughout the flight and a small increase at the end.
the nozzles adjust during the flight to maintain attitude, I believe the DCx did the same thing. IIRC the DCx also had a series of manuvering thrusters spaced around the ship.
I don't think that's a major roadblock, they'll adapt or die like anything else. Anecdotally, the mechanics I know tend to be geeky when it comes to new car technology, and take any changes in stride (after a few months of bitching about it first)
new models are certified for repair at the dealerships first, then repair shops outside the dealerships start to get people certified or more familiar with the product, and in a few years, as consumers are reeally starting to put serious numbers of these on the road, the average joe repairshop can rebuild a microturbine as easily as a VW engine
yahoo does if you pay $20/year (pop3 + smtpauth for outbound)
hotmail does but at a funky undefined level where they're pushing "outlook connectivity" which I suspect is pop, but they don't specifically say pop, and they charge $9.95/month for it.
AOL does it (IMAP/smtpauth) for free too.
google does pop+ssl and smtpauth+tls for free
so you're saying we should use the poor for biomass? /kidding, kidding
doctor's office: various "health" magazines. 100% advertisments all the way through. Rate your sleep quality, followed by a page for a sleep aid. Rate your love life, followed by a page for an ED pill. Of course the story/ads are written with the slant that everyone who reads the ads will come away with the impression they need the drug advertised on the next page. /sickening
anyone pointing out the lies disappears
online, or in real life
excellent suggestion. it teaches quite a bit of discipline too, and a different type of discipline than what's used elsewhere in life.
new york state parks with pools have diving boards. use 'em all the time. Many private campgrounds I visit also have them. most schools have them, around here at least. the only place I see diving restricted is where the water is shallow, i.e. 4' pool.
If you want a "man's hobby" for your childen, get into historical reenacting. They can learn to shoot a gun, dress in military uniforms, pretend to kill people, cook food over an open fire, and camp under the stars all in the same day. If you join something like a competitive target shooters club, they can fire live rounds at targets too. In fact, there are clubs that fire live artillery rounds. That's a real man's hobby. Forget bowling.
aside from that, my son came home with a paper card game from 1st grade the other day. It was basically "war" just with number cards no face cards, so they could recognize 0 through 10 dots in different configurations on a page, and learn to quickly tell the difference between the numbers. Anyway, he proceeds to divide up the cards equally, 2 number 10s for you, 2 for me, 2 number 9s for you, 2 for me etc. I immediately got angry and lept to the conclusion that the directions make the game attempt to be "fair" rather than "random" as you would expect, and that it was more soft-peddling the games to our kids, and started to blame the teacher... then I read the directions. The directions were war, shuffle the deck, hand out cards randomly etc. Infact he was stacking the deck so he would win, there were actually 5 of each card. He was keeping the extras to ensure victory.
I wasn't sure if I should be proud he had figured out how to stack the deck, or be mad he cheated, thankful our local school district hadn't softened to the point of game-neutrality or what to think. So I thought them all at the same time, and proceeded to kick his ass in cards after shuffling. Only, as any good random card game like war is, he won the 2nd game without difficulty.
Then we went downstairs and played missle command, to teach him that life isn't like random car games, you win a few you lose a few, in fact, you win win until your cities go up in smoke.
not used to the snow/ice? Where I'm from (stretch of New York State from Lake Erie, under Lake Ontario to Albany, basically along the Erie Canal) gets an average of over 3 meters of snow a year delivered in small blasts with some local zones averaging twice that much snow. This amount of snow isn't really that amazing and you'll acclimate to it pretty fast. Consider that the change in temps 15C down will take a few years to be noticed.
Your town will purchase more rugged plows, your shopping centers will purchase higher capacity front-end loaders, your councils will determine the best place to dump the extra snow (rivers, or directly into the sea) and your citizens will learn to slow down and conserve energy better while driving. It'll happen gradually over the course of a few decades. Seems like a good time to get into the snow removal business, perhaps start a small company selling and servicing snow blowers, truck mounted plows and selling contracts to clear snow from open areas and roads, maybe start importing better quality winter clothing from the Russians... There's opportunity in all that ice.
Wow, you are one seriously clever fellow. Original too, in the way you just wind up and let go on people. Why, I'm not sure I've ever read anything so clever and original in all my time. A rant like that concerning something hypothetical and ill-defined like an ultrasonic clotting weapon whose damage signature is as clear as text on a page as you pointed out, turned so elegantly on it's side used to point out the failures in today's education system. Surely a weapon like that, not existing and all, couldn't also be small enough and to apply to a target in sufficiently close proximity as to cause a problem. But, as you are obviously a doctor, one with experience working with tools-turned-into-weapons like this previously assumed to be hypothetical ultrasonic clotting weapon, clearly that's just not the case. An immaginary weaponized something that doesn't exist surely can't be used unless it's in constant contact with the skin for hours. But still, all that retort from such a smart guy, with a low UID too, I feel truly blessed to have been corrected by the best of the Internet. Little old me, the object of your attention and blood pressure for at least 15 seconds. Goodness. For the rest of my days, I'll keep the link to your reply in my .sig so the whole world will see how clever and justified you are in your response, and how wrong I was to dare suggest something quite obvious in a post in reply to something written by you. I know, I know, few are clever enough to follow your lead and I'm in way over my head even continuing the line of conversation, but I just have to take the chance that you'll smile upon me with your low ID number and your big brain. Thus continuing a thread well past it's time.
And we should all have jumped to that other website and looked up your posts, clearly we should have, then we would have all been 100% educated on the subject and been to the same conclusion as you reached so long ago.
I merely read your information-filled post, including the part where you say it is really obvious what caused the damage, then posted an example where the technology could be used offensively in an obviously far featched plot to kill a guy presumably many wouldn't mind seeing dead, even attempted to accomodate the various factors mentioned above, specifically in reference to close proximity and time (left out the icky gooey jelly part because frankly it's not needed for the purposes of this hypothetical weapon), and demonstrated how effective this would be paying particular attention to the place the craft would land. See, the post points out that it would take time for it to kill him, hours of sitting in one place or using multiple instances of the weapon based on his location in an airplane in motion, an executive airplane that is basically never out of control of the handlers, and someone would have to remove the equipment from various places he might sit upon landing at some random airport without mention of the task of installing the equipment in the first place. Even that's quite an assumption for me to make, surely the imaginary ultrasonic clotting weapon would be more effective than that? Surely you can make blood clot with just a few split seconds of application from such a thing as the imaginary ultrasonic clotting weapon.
I wonder if anyone's ever labeled this type of literary device, using an imaginary object in an extreme example of hypothetical use contrary to what a presumed expert just said? Maybe you should coin the phrase since you're obviously the first one to discover it or see it in use.
How about it? Shall we call it the wowbagger farsi farse?
so... Ahmadinejad gets on his personal plane to fly to visit a terrorist buddy in North Korea, the flight is very long, having to avoid Afganistan and all that, so about 1/2 way into the flight, he starts stroking out, and after hours of crippling pain and degeneration... dies of massive clotting of the brain.
Of course, they never get the chance to check the headrest of his seat, his bed, or the floor by his feet as they are all carefully removed upon the emergency landing in Indonesia.
Not all weapons are distance weapons.
a pal from Duncanon PA used to say, "the way to make motorcycles safest is to arm them with a 500 pound shaped charge directed forward of the headlamp." Soccer Mom would think twice before cutting off a biker if the whole family was to be incinerated.
that book left it's mark in my brain too, funny how the scenes in the orion vehicle are still so clearly etched. That and the mulch pile...
I know the topic is quite old now... but have you ever seen the unset-concrete dome building methods?
That's where a reinforced pad is laid on a foundation suitable to the climate, then a large diamater rubber bladder is laid on top, and another layer of reiforced concrete is added. As the concrete on top cures, the bladder is inflated. Believe it or not, you wind up with a 30+ foot diameter dome, a good 12 to 20 feet tall in the middle, made of several inch thick reinforced concrete you can then cover with sod. Since you're using seriously high pressure concrete, you don't get leaking.
I'm trying to convince my wife to go this route instead of the other.
Oh and the hobbit house could be roughed-in for just a few thousand bucks if you already owned the earth-moving equipment.
your dream home sounds like Bilbo's place. How about building such a thing with large diameter concrete drainage pipes?
you can pick them up relatively cheaply, have a dozer come in, trench out your home plan, lay the pipe, seal up the joints, cut the holes for solartubes, backfill.
hmmm...
every switch, every bulb, every fixture on a custom circuit that can be bound together in interesting and usefull ways
each room has a distinct sound system with connection to the media center for mp3/radio as well as telephony and internet through a touch screen that includes reprograming as well as TV and controls for the media center
touch screen flat panel in the kitchen for recipies and all that
voice activate the whole thing with access to any circuit from any room, "computer, turn on the lights in the basement and the garage" spoken from the car or the family room, for example. Or, "computer, dial ma fifedrum at 4pm on July 2nd if we're home" or "computer, call 911" or "computer, find Sarah Connor."
stuff like that
yeah, those damned conservatives and their drug killing sprees. Why, just 100 years ago they killed penisillin because it cured certain venereal diseases.
you are correct, knowing your flaws is a great strength for a software community to have. We're more responsive to problems, and often quicker with fixes, no?
I know it's circumstancial and anecdotal, but in my experience, the largest problem with mission critical machines is hardware, not software.
I made my own drums (rope tension snare drum/bass drum for "Ancient Fife and Drum" and reenacting stuff). I also sew pieces of uniforms, fix the children's torn or damaged clothing and do my own ironing. The best fitting shirt I own, I made myself.
And I don't live in my parent's basement, am married, and get laid on a regular basis.
Had to throw that last part to differentiate me from, ah, nevermind.