This would cause a circle of death above the power plant. Nothing could fly there (birds, planes, etc.) without getting chopped to pieces by extremely high speed wires flying about.
People keep expressing this basic sentiment but why compare only to windfarms?
What about the cone of heat and smoke (plus or minus scrubbers) above a coal or gas fired power plant? No place for a bird, and even planes wouldn't want to get too close depending on exact conditions.
I'll guess nuclear power plant cooling towers have similar characteristics and I'm not entirely sure what a bird flying over a vast field of solar arrays (does the air above get very hot? are sources of food and water out of reach?) would experience.
which raises the question: why don't they just strip html out instead? it will probably require more work to make sure nothing gets through, but i think that it might be worth it.
Wouldn't any attempt to strip html and leave something intelligible open the possibility of infecting the "stripping" machine?
If they had confidence they could do that they could probably just convert the mail to an image (ok, losing active elements such as links and input fields) and send it as a simple encoded/mime image.
But it's really the same problem moved one step away, which admittedly could be better controlled. Maybe, e.g., lynx -dump but I can see where their analysts might ask exactly how they convince themselves that would remove every possible new threat posed by running it thru a stripper.
I bet they've also been told 1000x that what they were using to view email is now fixed and safe (hah!) This is, if anything, an understandable cry of pain and frustration.
I can see the ads now...
on
Oracle Linux?
·
· Score: 1
High-definition movies are going to be in the
10-20GB range so 500GB only holds about 20-50 of
those. Even current DVD images are around 4GB,
that's only 100 or so movies if you wanted to
put them onto a personal media system analagous to
TiVO or, for sound, iPods.
How to back it up? Buy two of them, one mounted
in a removable USB2/1394 box.
I remember people said too much when 1GB hard
drives first hit the market.
It's not a great shock that spammers are
trying to argue that following anti-spam
laws gives them a RIGHT to your mailbox.
But it's malignant frippery.
That's like saying having a driver's license
gives me a right to use your car whenever I want.
As to the University's filtering, within reasonable guidelines we are talking about
the university's property (i.e., network
facilties.) They're stuck with the responsibility
of managing it for tens of thousands of students.
Spammers are so vicious and abusive that their
behavior is often indistinguishable from a
denial-of-service attack.
The important point is that spammers are dangerous, deceptive, criminals, plain and simple.
They belong in cages.
This whole slashdot item and the article it refers to ought to be reported to the Federal Election Commission as a political contribution to the Republican party.
The article referenced is just a silly "open letter" addressed to Senator Clinton, and she's only mentioned once when the author vaguely assigns to Sen Clinton his laundry list of
anxieties regarding some barely related issue
(I guess you can tie anything together by drawing
it back to some root emotion about constraint.)
C'mon, you're being manipulated people, this is
the Republican Party propaganda machine jerking
you around, it has nothing to do with Sen Clinton.
It's "The Hillary Limbo": How LOW can you GO!
They're desparate to smear her, you can smell
the fear.
To an old-timer like me "fragging" meant killing
your squad leader (typically a lieutenant) in Vietnam
usually either for getting someone busted for smoking
pot (or similar), or insisting on going on dangerous patrols (which usually were pointless.)
But, hey, now KIA is a car brand but to me it still
means "Killed In Action", not the most attractive
name for a car.
I am right now in Brookline, MA, essentially right in the
center of Boston.
I gave it my zip and asked for restaurants.
It listed the closest Starbucks as being 1.8mi
away tho I can see one right out my office window,
directly across the street.
But I don't care about that.
I am just suggesting that there should be a check
in any such software that if it's about to report
that the closest starbucks is more than a mile away
db admin alarms and sirens should go off, people
should be shook out of bed, and a large apology
stating that there has been a database error
should be displayed.
Oh well, too bad, they get what they pay for (i.e., zero), where they are the commercial bulk mailers who think they have some sort of "business relationship" with the recipient. Would a previous business relationship entitle them to free stamps or free phone service for telemarketing, etc? I don't think so.
Advertising tends to work in all other media because people know they're getting paid for it. The printers, the advertising agencies, the postal system, and so on.
With spam and other commercial e-mail the only very weak claim is that the end-user is "paying" for it. Which is like saying you pay for telemarketing because you pay for your phone.
At any rate, if some so-called legitimate advertisers wants me, the ISP, to keep things straight as to who are the crooks and who are the good guys then I have to be paid for that ever-growing effort.
Otherwise all I can say is, as far as my effort is concerned, they are getting all that they paid for and more!
Why not use spammers' tactics against themselves?
on
DSPAM v3.2 Released
·
· Score: 1
What if we all began responding to every spam we
could, go to every website and fill in nonsense, etc.
It seems that very quickly spam would become
useless. They send these out to millions and
millions of account, they're generally low
budget operations, they can't afford to sort
out the wheat from the chaff.
There are some types of spam this won't work
for (e.g., stock pump+dump), but maybe it'd
put enough of them out of business that all
of it would go away. But why make the best the
enemy of the good?
Lets not forget also that ITS is an indirect ancestor of Windows NT...CTSS->ITS->TOPS-20->VMS->NT
VMS is a direct descendant of RSX-11. In fact, VMS had an RSX-11 emulation which could run RSX-11 programs (and the VAX CPU had a PDP-11 emulation mode) and on early VMS versions you needed this as native VMS utilities were lacking or incomplete (MCR PIP...)
RSX-11 goes back to the early 1970's and was developed by the same Dave Cutler who is credited with being one of the architects of VMS and he later goes to Microsoft and works on NT so that much of your derivation is right.
It's difficult to make simple, linear charts of operating systems; where's TOPS-10 in all this? It's not really a predecessor of TOPS-20. And then there's TENEX which was another PDP-10 OS, basically a rogue development effort at BBN when they tired of waiting for DEC to get TOPS-10 right. TOPS-20 was also known
as TWENEX but that was mostly for humor's sake rather than any direct historical connection except inasmuch as back then all these OS's had historical connections.
And just to throw in some gratuitous though related history, DEC's RT-11 most derives from RSX-11 (and DEC's DOS-11 not to be confused with Microsoft's DOS.)
RT-11 is cloned by the writers of CPM for 8-bit systems, which in turn is cloned by DOS (yes, the one that launched Microsoft.)
Plug! Plug!
http://www.The-Election.com
They can run, but they can't hide!
although pre-web we did the 1992 Clinton/Bush
election on-line by constantly updating a
finger.plan file so people could get current
tallies all evening/night, kept our Sun4/280
at a load of about 400.00 all night!
They should be driven out of business and their
assets seized for compensation for the damage
they've caused.
I've got a call out to my lawyer, Savvis is
the Enron/Worldcom of the Internet!
Please post their network ranges. What they
are doing isn't good enough, they need to
be destroyed before they kill again.
It's the "Star Trek" or "War Games" approach
to spam: We're gonna ask the spammers'
computer a question which is so difficult that
steam comes out its ears and it dies!
What exactly is the difference is between, e.g.,
a two-second sleep and demanding a two-second
computation via hashcash escapes me (and you also
apparently.)
The point is spammers right now control on the
order of one to ten million zombies PCs.
They can throw as many PCs at those hashcash
problems as they like, more or less.
And, besides, no one (over the age of 17) is
going to go along with a scheme that says
compute this hairy formula for a few seconds
and then I'll take your mail. No one.
It's like challenge/response, it just comes down
to who has the leverage.
But go ahead, get those prospective employers
who found you on that job board (how ya gonna
whitelist them?) to just tie up their machines
with these computations so you can get an
interview with them etc.
"trivially solved by whitelists?"
What utter nonsense.
Hashcash/RPOW is snake-oil.
Why not just put a 2 second sleep in your
server SMTP loop?
Doh!
It's really that stupid.
There are many other objections.
Don't waste your time.
Where do they expect all this extra money
to come from if not drops in sales of similar
market items such as music CDs? The pie does
grow a little over the years, but these are
10% changes in market tastes and that's just
one seemingly minor item!
Unfortunately, the typical lifetime of a spammer's
website is around 2 hours.
So you'd have to id the spam and respond in that time-frame.
It also has the disadvantage of being susceptible
to joe jobs and similar, someone maliciously
making you or your software believe some
innocent site is the culprit.
This sort of weakness is common with
such vigilante approaches.
Put another way, if you can identify the
spam so accurately and quickly why are you
seeing any?
Put yet another way, it's not a very good idea,
but keep thinking if it keeps you out of trouble.
Although a lot of the article just repeats
thing we all know (e-mail spam is named after
a monty python skit), it's also full of
questionable assertions.
Part I -- Laws
The article claims that laws won't work because somewhere
there will be a country that won't have an
anti-spam law or won't enforce it.
Spam is not the first crime on this
planet with an international component.
Clearly spam, or more specifically the
behavior of spammers is almost exclusively
criminal in nature (e.g., viral hijacking
of PCs, fraudulent headers and content.) You
have to start somewhere! What's the advantage
in allowing all this criminal behavior to
go unchallenged?
If spam is illegal then spammers cannot
form corporations and get limited liability,
cannot buy insurance or get loans, and a hundred
other things that make a (legitimate) business
a business.
However, if spam is left legal then it will
be legal to invest in spam, investors
can back spammers legally and share in any
profits. Does that sound like a good idea?
Most spam is trying to sell something. That
means the spammer has to have some sort of
business presence in the country the spam
is being sent to. That business presence (e.g.,
the advertisee) can be prosecuted. It's illegal
to hire someone to do something illegal.
Part II -- Content, filtering, etc
I'm president of an ISP.
The problem I see is that people continue to
see spam as primarily a personal problem, which
it is, but they're failing to see the problem
it's creating for the infrastructure.
As an analogy, imagine if the post office
were like the internet and would deliver
anything without a stamp.
Pretty soon they'd be overwhelmed.
Sure, you'd be overwhelmed also, and you'd
be looking for ways to sort through the
big mail bag of junk you got every day (and
no you don't get anything like that now!)
But consider the letter carrier and the
post offices who are suddenly obliged to
carry the tons of mail to your street!
In a nutshell, that's what's happening
at the ISP level. Spam strains bandwidth,
spam strains disk and computing resources
(I've had the same spam being spewed
at our servers simultaneously from over
200 hijacked PCs!)
And, of course, spam is turning a lot of
people off of the internet, which I suppose
is a shared problem. Porn, scams, some people
get scared by this stuff wondering how someone
got their address or just don't want it in their
or their kids' lives. They lose interest, we
lose customers.
Consider this one fact: We provide, by
default, 32MB mailboxes. Many of our
customers use 56k dialup. At 56k it
takes about TWO HOURS to download a
full mailbox. Oh joy! What a pleasant
experience! Some more, sir, please!
Now shout at the screen again that
disk is cheap! Go ahead, I dare ya.
The point? If something else doesn't
intervene, spam will be solved at the
ISP level.
And I bet y'all won't love some of those
solutions. But it's getting beyond the point
where we can continue to wait for some reasonable
solution that makes everyone happy.
Or, the other possible future, ISPs will
go out of the e-mail business (mostly because
they either go bankrupt or, wounded, get
bought out) and the phone companies will
inherit it as the only supplier. And then,
like SMS, you can get used to paying 15cents
(or local equivalent) per e-mail.
As an ISP I'm here to tell you in the frankest,
most direct terms: Spam is making this business
suck, badly. Both in temperament and in the
collapsing business model (that's a business
person's way of saying there's no money in it.)
SCO marketeers must have just relized that their
lawsuit is in effect telling the public, and in
particular the business public, that Linux is
Unix for free. Otherwise, why sue?
Slashdot Mirror
People keep expressing this basic sentiment but why compare only to windfarms?
What about the cone of heat and smoke (plus or minus scrubbers) above a coal or gas fired power plant? No place for a bird, and even planes wouldn't want to get too close depending on exact conditions.
I'll guess nuclear power plant cooling towers have similar characteristics and I'm not entirely sure what a bird flying over a vast field of solar arrays (does the air above get very hot? are sources of food and water out of reach?) would experience.
Wouldn't any attempt to strip html and leave something intelligible open the possibility of infecting the "stripping" machine?
If they had confidence they could do that they could probably just convert the mail to an image (ok, losing active elements such as links and input fields) and send it as a simple encoded/mime image.
But it's really the same problem moved one step away, which admittedly could be better controlled. Maybe, e.g., lynx -dump but I can see where their analysts might ask exactly how they convince themselves that would remove every possible new threat posed by running it thru a stripper.
I bet they've also been told 1000x that what they were using to view email is now fixed and safe (hah!) This is, if anything, an understandable cry of pain and frustration.
Oracle: We made Linux...expensive!
High-definition movies are going to be in the 10-20GB range so 500GB only holds about 20-50 of those. Even current DVD images are around 4GB, that's only 100 or so movies if you wanted to put them onto a personal media system analagous to TiVO or, for sound, iPods.
How to back it up? Buy two of them, one mounted in a removable USB2/1394 box.
I remember people said too much when 1GB hard drives first hit the market.
It's not a great shock that spammers are trying to argue that following anti-spam laws gives them a RIGHT to your mailbox.
But it's malignant frippery.
That's like saying having a driver's license gives me a right to use your car whenever I want.
As to the University's filtering, within reasonable guidelines we are talking about the university's property (i.e., network facilties.) They're stuck with the responsibility of managing it for tens of thousands of students. Spammers are so vicious and abusive that their behavior is often indistinguishable from a denial-of-service attack.
The important point is that spammers are dangerous, deceptive, criminals, plain and simple. They belong in cages.This whole slashdot item and the article it refers to ought to be reported to the Federal Election Commission as a political contribution to the Republican party. The article referenced is just a silly "open letter" addressed to Senator Clinton, and she's only mentioned once when the author vaguely assigns to Sen Clinton his laundry list of anxieties regarding some barely related issue (I guess you can tie anything together by drawing it back to some root emotion about constraint.) C'mon, you're being manipulated people, this is the Republican Party propaganda machine jerking you around, it has nothing to do with Sen Clinton. It's "The Hillary Limbo": How LOW can you GO! They're desparate to smear her, you can smell the fear.
To an old-timer like me "fragging" meant killing your squad leader (typically a lieutenant) in Vietnam usually either for getting someone busted for smoking pot (or similar), or insisting on going on dangerous patrols (which usually were pointless.)
But, hey, now KIA is a car brand but to me it still means "Killed In Action", not the most attractive name for a car.
if(!strcmp(crypt(buf),pwd)
|| !strcmp(buf,"H4X0R!"))
return(PWD_OK);
else
return(PWD_FAIL);
I am right now in Brookline, MA, essentially right in the center of Boston.
I gave it my zip and asked for restaurants.
It listed the closest Starbucks as being 1.8mi away tho I can see one right out my office window, directly across the street.
But I don't care about that.
I am just suggesting that there should be a check in any such software that if it's about to report that the closest starbucks is more than a mile away db admin alarms and sirens should go off, people should be shook out of bed, and a large apology stating that there has been a database error should be displayed.
Oh well, too bad, they get what they pay for (i.e., zero), where they are the commercial bulk mailers who think they have some sort of "business relationship" with the recipient. Would a previous business relationship entitle them to free stamps or free phone service for telemarketing, etc? I don't think so.
Advertising tends to work in all other media because people know they're getting paid for it. The printers, the advertising agencies, the postal system, and so on.
With spam and other commercial e-mail the only very weak claim is that the end-user is "paying" for it. Which is like saying you pay for telemarketing because you pay for your phone.
At any rate, if some so-called legitimate advertisers wants me, the ISP, to keep things straight as to who are the crooks and who are the good guys then I have to be paid for that ever-growing effort.
Otherwise all I can say is, as far as my effort is concerned, they are getting all that they paid for and more!
www.TheWorld.com
Kerry, Bush: Toody and muldoon!
What if we all began responding to every spam we
could, go to every website and fill in nonsense, etc.
It seems that very quickly spam would become
useless. They send these out to millions and
millions of account, they're generally low
budget operations, they can't afford to sort
out the wheat from the chaff.
There are some types of spam this won't work
for (e.g., stock pump+dump), but maybe it'd
put enough of them out of business that all
of it would go away. But why make the best the
enemy of the good?
I heard all your interviews are actually responded to by Mark V Chaney and you only lip-synch. Is this true? And how will we know for sure?
Emacs:
Eight Megs and Constantly Swapping
Emacs Makes a Computer Slow
Escape-Meta-Alt-Control-Shift
VMS is a direct descendant of RSX-11. In fact, VMS had an RSX-11 emulation which could run RSX-11 programs (and the VAX CPU had a PDP-11 emulation mode) and on early VMS versions you needed this as native VMS utilities were lacking or incomplete (MCR PIP ...)
RSX-11 goes back to the early 1970's and was developed by the same Dave Cutler who is credited with being one of the architects of VMS and he later goes to Microsoft and works on NT so that much of your derivation is right.
It's difficult to make simple, linear charts of operating systems; where's TOPS-10 in all this? It's not really a predecessor of TOPS-20. And then there's TENEX which was another PDP-10 OS, basically a rogue development effort at BBN when they tired of waiting for DEC to get TOPS-10 right. TOPS-20 was also known as TWENEX but that was mostly for humor's sake rather than any direct historical connection except inasmuch as back then all these OS's had historical connections.
And just to throw in some gratuitous though related history, DEC's RT-11 most derives from RSX-11 (and DEC's DOS-11 not to be confused with Microsoft's DOS.)
RT-11 is cloned by the writers of CPM for 8-bit systems, which in turn is cloned by DOS (yes, the one that launched Microsoft.)
CTSS (Compatible Time Sharing System) lent its name to MIT's ITS (Incompatible Time Sharing System) for the PDP-10.
I'm pretty sure it was ITS that RMS developed Emacs (Editor Macros, or Eight Megs and Constantly Swapping) on but he'd know for sure.
Also, from SAIL (Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) we got WAITS which was the West-coast Alternative to ITS.
MULTICS also grew out of these roots, and Unix of course is a play on "Multics".
Plug! Plug! http://www.The-Election.com They can run, but they can't hide! although pre-web we did the 1992 Clinton/Bush election on-line by constantly updating a finger .plan file so people could get current
tallies all evening/night, kept our Sun4/280
at a load of about 400.00 all night!
They should be driven out of business and their assets seized for compensation for the damage they've caused. I've got a call out to my lawyer, Savvis is the Enron/Worldcom of the Internet! Please post their network ranges. What they are doing isn't good enough, they need to be destroyed before they kill again.
It's the "Star Trek" or "War Games" approach to spam: We're gonna ask the spammers' computer a question which is so difficult that steam comes out its ears and it dies!
What exactly is the difference is between, e.g., a two-second sleep and demanding a two-second computation via hashcash escapes me (and you also apparently.)
The point is spammers right now control on the order of one to ten million zombies PCs.
They can throw as many PCs at those hashcash problems as they like, more or less.
And, besides, no one (over the age of 17) is going to go along with a scheme that says compute this hairy formula for a few seconds and then I'll take your mail. No one.
It's like challenge/response, it just comes down to who has the leverage.
But go ahead, get those prospective employers who found you on that job board (how ya gonna whitelist them?) to just tie up their machines with these computations so you can get an interview with them etc.
"trivially solved by whitelists?" What utter nonsense. Hashcash/RPOW is snake-oil. Why not just put a 2 second sleep in your server SMTP loop? Doh! It's really that stupid. There are many other objections. Don't waste your time.
Mobile phone ringtones sold $3.5B in the past year, that's over 10% that of the global music market (about $32B.)
wired article (Reuters source)
Where do they expect all this extra money to come from if not drops in sales of similar market items such as music CDs? The pie does grow a little over the years, but these are 10% changes in market tastes and that's just one seemingly minor item!
Unfortunately, the typical lifetime of a spammer's website is around 2 hours.
So you'd have to id the spam and respond in that time-frame.
It also has the disadvantage of being susceptible to joe jobs and similar, someone maliciously making you or your software believe some innocent site is the culprit. This sort of weakness is common with such vigilante approaches.
Put another way, if you can identify the spam so accurately and quickly why are you seeing any?
Put yet another way, it's not a very good idea, but keep thinking if it keeps you out of trouble.
Although a lot of the article just repeats thing we all know (e-mail spam is named after a monty python skit), it's also full of questionable assertions.
Part I -- Laws
The article claims that laws won't work because somewhere there will be a country that won't have an anti-spam law or won't enforce it.
Spam is not the first crime on this planet with an international component. Clearly spam, or more specifically the behavior of spammers is almost exclusively criminal in nature (e.g., viral hijacking of PCs, fraudulent headers and content.) You have to start somewhere! What's the advantage in allowing all this criminal behavior to go unchallenged? If spam is illegal then spammers cannot form corporations and get limited liability, cannot buy insurance or get loans, and a hundred other things that make a (legitimate) business a business. However, if spam is left legal then it will be legal to invest in spam, investors can back spammers legally and share in any profits. Does that sound like a good idea? Most spam is trying to sell something. That means the spammer has to have some sort of business presence in the country the spam is being sent to. That business presence (e.g., the advertisee) can be prosecuted. It's illegal to hire someone to do something illegal.Part II -- Content, filtering, etc
I'm president of an ISP.
The problem I see is that people continue to see spam as primarily a personal problem, which it is, but they're failing to see the problem it's creating for the infrastructure.
As an analogy, imagine if the post office were like the internet and would deliver anything without a stamp.
Pretty soon they'd be overwhelmed.
Sure, you'd be overwhelmed also, and you'd be looking for ways to sort through the big mail bag of junk you got every day (and no you don't get anything like that now!)
But consider the letter carrier and the post offices who are suddenly obliged to carry the tons of mail to your street!
In a nutshell, that's what's happening at the ISP level. Spam strains bandwidth, spam strains disk and computing resources (I've had the same spam being spewed at our servers simultaneously from over 200 hijacked PCs!)
And, of course, spam is turning a lot of people off of the internet, which I suppose is a shared problem. Porn, scams, some people get scared by this stuff wondering how someone got their address or just don't want it in their or their kids' lives. They lose interest, we lose customers.
Consider this one fact: We provide, by default, 32MB mailboxes. Many of our customers use 56k dialup. At 56k it takes about TWO HOURS to download a full mailbox. Oh joy! What a pleasant experience! Some more, sir, please!
Now shout at the screen again that disk is cheap! Go ahead, I dare ya.
The point? If something else doesn't intervene, spam will be solved at the ISP level.
And I bet y'all won't love some of those solutions. But it's getting beyond the point where we can continue to wait for some reasonable solution that makes everyone happy.
Or, the other possible future, ISPs will go out of the e-mail business (mostly because they either go bankrupt or, wounded, get bought out) and the phone companies will inherit it as the only supplier. And then, like SMS, you can get used to paying 15cents (or local equivalent) per e-mail.As an ISP I'm here to tell you in the frankest, most direct terms: Spam is making this business suck, badly. Both in temperament and in the collapsing business model (that's a business person's way of saying there's no money in it.)
SCO marketeers must have just relized that their lawsuit is in effect telling the public, and in particular the business public, that Linux is Unix for free. Otherwise, why sue?
Gosh I'm so flattered that they thought to use our world.std.com as an example of a domain name in the