Each account (internet access account, not email account) can only send 50 emails per day. More than sufficient for any normal user.
This is a bit too restrictive though - remember, we don't want to penalise ordinary internet users, most days I might only send 10 but some days I could quite happily send more than 50... why shouldnt I be allowed to send more? What if one of my emails was urgent and I wasn't allowed to send?
I also don't like the idea of reviewing people's email traffic (time-consuming for the ISP and a clear violation of privacy), and cutting someone's email off for 24 hours for sending a virus sounds like a Police State. What if I'm emailing a new virus to Sophos to analyse?
Far better we keep the net free as far as possible...
Obviously the "war on spam" needs to be fought on legally as well as technologically (and thanks to the fucked-up CAN-SPAM act some spammers are being given the green-light to annoy the hell out of us legally).
Assuming we ever have laws in place which state that genuine opt-in lists are the only valid way to advertise products then we still cannot sue the spammers who send junk to harvested addresses because of the problems involved with tracing them.
Tracing spammers is difficult/sometimes impossible because any computer on the internet can runs its own SMTP server to send mail to anywhere on the net. 10 years ago when the net was more innocent and less commercially corrup, this was fine, but nowadays this is just too powerful.
The problem is, if some clueless person (which probably accounts for 80% of net users) has their machine compromised by a virus or trojan than their computers are used to send out the spam, and as there are no log files the spammers are virutally impossible to trace.
Now imagine if the only way to send spam was via an approved mail server. For most of us this will be our ISPs, for the rest we will simply subscribe to one of the many official trusted ones.
Now the problem of reporting spam is a lot easier - complaints will be dealt with by the trusted mail servers who keep detailed logs of which customers have logged in to send mail, what IP address they used and at what time.
It doesn't matter if the customer deliberately sent out the spam or if they had been compromised by a trojan - the trusted mail servers can deny their customers the right to send more email until they have had an assurance from their customers that the problem has been fixed.
I'm not saying this is going to end spam altogether, but it should go a long way to curbing it.
What about all the spam which originates from, say, Nigeria or Amsterdam? Simple - unless the trusted mail server takes active steps to eradicating the spam they will no longer be trusted.
Sure, spammers claim that they make money, but just like intrusive telemarketers [slashdot.org] their days are numbered!
I really wish that were true, but I don't think we'll see an end for a long time, if ever. I cannot think of a way to ever eradicate spam... even if 99% of us installed and use mail filters, kept our machines as secure as possible so they couldnt get hijacked and refused to buy from the spamming arseholes it doesn't matter: the less-than-1% who do the opposite will ensure the spammers go on being retarded, deluded money-grabbing fuckwits.
Charging for emails won't work either, in fact they will make it worse - the spammers will use other people's computers to send email, resulting in other people being charged for the privilege!
The best thing IBM can do is to issue a general recall, offer generous replacement policies ("bring it in, we'll fix it on the spot")
But that's simply not good enough. If it was a graphics card or something then fair enough... it's just another piece of hardware and one is as good as another. But hard-drives are different as the data on them may not be replaceable if the unit fails, and even if you have it swapped for a new one for free then you have to transfer all the data over to the new one... which is a royal pain in the arse if you're multibooting different OSes.
I already get some spam with random puncutation yet PopFile still manages to classify it as spam.
Why? Because it knows which combination of words, used together make it more likely the mails are for me, eg spammers only have my email address, they do not know my name... therefore any emails containing either my first name or surname (or better still, both together, will make PopFile flag the message up as "high probability non-spam mail". Of course it looks for other clues.
Anyway, if spammers do find a way to circumvent my filters (and at the moment I'm filtering spam with 99.62% accuracy) then my filtering software will be updated and will check for stupid punctuation tricks.
Well the article mentions Paul Graham and Richard Stallman's personal websites... they obviously matter because they are huge icons in this industry, and they are also smart people with interesting ideas.
But I think many people have missed the point of personal websites. Just because they're on the Word Wide Web it doesn't mean your audience should be everybody in the world. Many people set up websites intended to be viewed by a small group of people (such as family photo albums who nobody but family or close friends would be interested in).
Also, how many people who design websites for a living today started off by knocking up a basic website? Most likely it was the equivalent of a "Hello World!" example, and the most readily available content was most likely all about you. Now, unless you were particularly eccentric its unlikely you ever intended this to be seen by thousands of people, but it was still a necessary stage in your learning process.
So stop being website snobs - there's enough room on the net for everyone!
Most people writing these things, thinks they have something interesting to say when most often, they do not.Reading about, to me, random people's thoughts and opinions are a complete waste of time
That was maybe acceptable in the infancy of the internet
And its no less acceptable now. The net gives you the freedom to do what you like and say what you like, so if you want to publish a page on a Geoshitties website full of animated christmas tree decorations and talk about your pet rabbit then I think that's a perfectly acceptable thing to do.
Thought I'd offer my opinions about the best MP3 player to use:
Although WinAmp2 is superb, it does have one big flaw... ie its as unstable as hell on my XP machines.
WinAmp3 is more stable, but its also bigger and bloatier... I don't want to wait an extra 3 seconds for it to load just so I can listen to a song or a short wav file.
Microsoft's Media player is ok if a little dull... it's pretty stable but looks a bit crappy (especially the visualisations) and also has DRM implications... I don't like being told what I can and can't do with music I've bought, thank you very much.
By far the best MP3 player I've used so far is the Quintessential Player which is very much like WinAmp2 but much more stable. Wiggys Rating: 5 out of 5; gold star and a tick.
Unfortunetely, the (mis)use of "could care less" goes back at least a century or two.
What irritates me more is when people refer to junk email as "SPAM" instead of "spam" (it's not an acronym... and speaking of acronyms, when did we stop putting dots between the letters? It used to be R.S.P.C.A, now RSPCA is ok. And when did we start saying "dot" instead of "full stop" or "period"? Maybe we can blame the web for this!)
Similarly, "Mac" refers to a compter sold by Apple, whereas "MAC" is a unique number found in network cards.
They have to pay "$0.77 CDN for a blank CD and.29 a blank tape, whether used for recording music or not."
So that means every time you buy a CD to backup your Word documents, or photos, or home movies etc you pay a $0.77 tax which ends up going to the music industry.
They give it with one hand and take it with the other.
Seriously, I wonder if my scenario will come true - life has this amazing survival instinct; you can find life on earth almost anywhere, from the deepest ocean to the highest mountain, from the coldest places to the hottest.
Faced with a problem so huge (a dying universe), the likely millions of intelligent species which remain will be working flat out for a solution to the problem. Do they somehow travel backwards through time to when the universe was just a few billion years old, or do they try to engineer another Big Bang and hence another universe?
Who knows, maybe each and every black hole in the universe creates its own universe, each with a different set of parameters... natural selection will produce universes more likely to create black holes, and therefore more universes, and the more universes the more the chances of life evolving.
Maybe the last "days" of the universe will consist of groups of highly advanced intelligent beings scavenging for matter in a dying universe to sustain them. They will still be looking for a way to create another universe, and therefore new life. If they succeed, they will no doubt create a universe with a slightly different set of parameters so that life evolves much earlier than it did in the present universe.
Perhaps they will find a way to teleport into the new universe they create, each life form becoming truly a God.
I don't know about you but this creeps me right out! I've just been reading this book (guy at work tells me its a transcript of a radio news bulletin) and I'm kinda scared right now.
Got the wife and kids in a truck, and we're gonna head to the hills for a while. Got meself a shotgun... just in case those Martians come for ME!
For starters Snopes show you what references they've used when hunting down the facts (makes it possible to check that Snopes are at least reporting the facts correctly, even if you don't like their conclusions).
I guess at the end of the day you make up your own mind. Snopes don't force their opinions down your throat, they simply present their findings and leave it up to you.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a bit too restrictive though - remember, we don't want to penalise ordinary internet users, most days I might only send 10 but some days I could quite happily send more than 50... why shouldnt I be allowed to send more? What if one of my emails was urgent and I wasn't allowed to send?
I also don't like the idea of reviewing people's email traffic (time-consuming for the ISP and a clear violation of privacy), and cutting someone's email off for 24 hours for sending a virus sounds like a Police State. What if I'm emailing a new virus to Sophos to analyse?
Far better we keep the net free as far as possible...
There's nothing stopping you encrypting your emails.
Obviously the "war on spam" needs to be fought on legally as well as technologically (and thanks to the fucked-up CAN-SPAM act some spammers are being given the green-light to annoy the hell out of us legally).
Assuming we ever have laws in place which state that genuine opt-in lists are the only valid way to advertise products then we still cannot sue the spammers who send junk to harvested addresses because of the problems involved with tracing them.
Tracing spammers is difficult/sometimes impossible because any computer on the internet can runs its own SMTP server to send mail to anywhere on the net. 10 years ago when the net was more innocent and less commercially corrup, this was fine, but nowadays this is just too powerful.
The problem is, if some clueless person (which probably accounts for 80% of net users) has their machine compromised by a virus or trojan than their computers are used to send out the spam, and as there are no log files the spammers are virutally impossible to trace.
Now imagine if the only way to send spam was via an approved mail server. For most of us this will be our ISPs, for the rest we will simply subscribe to one of the many official trusted ones.
Now the problem of reporting spam is a lot easier - complaints will be dealt with by the trusted mail servers who keep detailed logs of which customers have logged in to send mail, what IP address they used and at what time.
It doesn't matter if the customer deliberately sent out the spam or if they had been compromised by a trojan - the trusted mail servers can deny their customers the right to send more email until they have had an assurance from their customers that the problem has been fixed.
I'm not saying this is going to end spam altogether, but it should go a long way to curbing it.
What about all the spam which originates from, say, Nigeria or Amsterdam? Simple - unless the trusted mail server takes active steps to eradicating the spam they will no longer be trusted.
I really wish that were true, but I don't think we'll see an end for a long time, if ever. I cannot think of a way to ever eradicate spam... even if 99% of us installed and use mail filters, kept our machines as secure as possible so they couldnt get hijacked and refused to buy from the spamming arseholes it doesn't matter: the less-than-1% who do the opposite will ensure the spammers go on being retarded, deluded money-grabbing fuckwits.
Charging for emails won't work either, in fact they will make it worse - the spammers will use other people's computers to send email, resulting in other people being charged for the privilege!
But that's simply not good enough. If it was a graphics card or something then fair enough... it's just another piece of hardware and one is as good as another. But hard-drives are different as the data on them may not be replaceable if the unit fails, and even if you have it swapped for a new one for free then you have to transfer all the data over to the new one... which is a royal pain in the arse if you're multibooting different OSes.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
And what if "your" too stupid not to spot the one they hid in the button of the shirt, or the sole of your shoes?
>Don't put your email address online, period
That's like saying "Don't go out after 9pm or you deserve to get beaten/raped".
Sorry, but my instincts are to fight the spamming bastards rather than give in to them.
I already get some spam with random puncutation yet PopFile still manages to classify it as spam.
Why? Because it knows which combination of words, used together make it more likely the mails are for me, eg spammers only have my email address, they do not know my name... therefore any emails containing either my first name or surname (or better still, both together, will make PopFile flag the message up as "high probability non-spam mail". Of course it looks for other clues.
Anyway, if spammers do find a way to circumvent my filters (and at the moment I'm filtering spam with 99.62% accuracy) then my filtering software will be updated and will check for stupid punctuation tricks.
But I think many people have missed the point of personal websites. Just because they're on the Word Wide Web it doesn't mean your audience should be everybody in the world. Many people set up websites intended to be viewed by a small group of people (such as family photo albums who nobody but family or close friends would be interested in).
Also, how many people who design websites for a living today started off by knocking up a basic website? Most likely it was the equivalent of a "Hello World!" example, and the most readily available content was most likely all about you. Now, unless you were particularly eccentric its unlikely you ever intended this to be seen by thousands of people, but it was still a necessary stage in your learning process.
So stop being website snobs - there's enough room on the net for everyone!
And its no less acceptable now. The net gives you the freedom to do what you like and say what you like, so if you want to publish a page on a Geoshitties website full of animated christmas tree decorations and talk about your pet rabbit then I think that's a perfectly acceptable thing to do.
Although WinAmp2 is superb, it does have one big flaw... ie its as unstable as hell on my XP machines.
WinAmp3 is more stable, but its also bigger and bloatier... I don't want to wait an extra 3 seconds for it to load just so I can listen to a song or a short wav file.
Microsoft's Media player is ok if a little dull... it's pretty stable but looks a bit crappy (especially the visualisations) and also has DRM implications... I don't like being told what I can and can't do with music I've bought, thank you very much.
By far the best MP3 player I've used so far is the Quintessential Player which is very much like WinAmp2 but much more stable. Wiggys Rating: 5 out of 5; gold star and a tick.
Makes sense... $50m is chickenfeed to MS... heck, I bet they'd pay 20 times that out if they could neutralise the Linux threat.
They've neutralised just about every other threat so far...
Eh? Surely ALL plants we see around us today are survivors from the Jurassic age. Sure, they are descendants, but so is the Wollemi Pine.
What irritates me more is when people refer to junk email as "SPAM" instead of "spam" (it's not an acronym... and speaking of acronyms, when did we stop putting dots between the letters? It used to be R.S.P.C.A, now RSPCA is ok. And when did we start saying "dot" instead of "full stop" or "period"? Maybe we can blame the web for this!)
Similarly, "Mac" refers to a compter sold by Apple, whereas "MAC" is a unique number found in network cards.
Oh for fuck's sake...
Hint: try reading the fucking article!
I'm not from Canada so I don't know, I was quoting from the article. RTFA RTFA RTFA. I thank you.
So that means every time you buy a CD to backup your Word documents, or photos, or home movies etc you pay a $0.77 tax which ends up going to the music industry.
They give it with one hand and take it with the other.
Never mind RTFA, what about this one:
RFTA = Really Fucked That Acronym!
...Armourgeddon outta here quickly!!
Seriously, I wonder if my scenario will come true - life has this amazing survival instinct; you can find life on earth almost anywhere, from the deepest ocean to the highest mountain, from the coldest places to the hottest.
Faced with a problem so huge (a dying universe), the likely millions of intelligent species which remain will be working flat out for a solution to the problem. Do they somehow travel backwards through time to when the universe was just a few billion years old, or do they try to engineer another Big Bang and hence another universe?
Who knows, maybe each and every black hole in the universe creates its own universe, each with a different set of parameters... natural selection will produce universes more likely to create black holes, and therefore more universes, and the more universes the more the chances of life evolving.
Blah, I need to stop taking those pills.
Perhaps they will find a way to teleport into the new universe they create, each life form becoming truly a God.
Got the wife and kids in a truck, and we're gonna head to the hills for a while. Got meself a shotgun... just in case those Martians come for ME!
I guess at the end of the day you make up your own mind. Snopes don't force their opinions down your throat, they simply present their findings and leave it up to you.