Or so many plots that involve Cloe hacking the NSA/local police/DHS mainframes in a matter of seconds to get that vital piece of information.
Isn't that exactly what Willow did in Buffy, not so long ago?
More than once I remember her pulling things out of computers - though she did mention encryption at least a couple of times. Complete with "access granted" animations. Sigh.
For example I use the "System | Preferences | Keyboard Shortcuts" applet to set "Ctrl+Alt+T" to open a new terminal. That works fine, because "open terminal" is a predefined choice.
But to configure "Ctrl+Alt+E" to mean "Open emacs"? You cannot do that though the GUI, which is a real annoyance.
(I run a commercial mail filtering system - using these techniques and more I filter about 5 million spam messages a month.)
There are many more things you can do, from examining the "HELO" presented, looking for matching DNS, dropping mails without a "DATE" header (mandated by RFC).
Beyond that you can detect spoofed mails which have "From: you@you.com" + "oo: you@you.com" being sent by server1.foo.ru.
Similarly you can run greylisting (don't like that myself, but some people do), and be very strict on your domain recipients (ie. no wildcard addresses).
One final thing that is useful is to drop connections from machines that try to blurt an entire SMTP transaction without waiting for the opening SMTP banner to be sent
You're lucky - I have a few GMail accounts and I see way more than that.
That's the problem with anecdotes - somebody can always come up with an alternative.
I'd say, in general, most of the larger free mail providers are good with anti-spam - even given that most of it comes from their networks, or from compromised machines.
The end user doesn't see it, but it is still clogging up the network, and causing some of us real headaches.
When it comes to my personal mail I receive maybe 4-10 thousand spam mails a day. I see a couple of those, but the ones I don't? They still cost me bandwidth and processor overhead to filter.
The short version is basically "its easy to spot because we can reason". But to detect it programmatically is non-trivial.
As you say some bugs are easy to spot via simple analysis - and thats what tools such as "lint" do. They scan source looking for particular classes of bugs, but something like this bug isn't trivial.
I've used that a fair bit and enjoy it. On my blog each comment is parsed as an email - and then filtered via CRM114.
I could do more, but so far I don't need to. Each time I reject a spam comment (mail) I block the source address via the firewall for a few days to cut down on repeats from the same host.
Currently I'm running with about 300 active blocks.
Funny you should make that comment about charity shops - I'm exactly the same.
I do still buy books in charity shops, but not as often as I used to when their prices were lower.
Now we have charity shops combing through their donations looking for "rare" books, albums, and films to sell at even higher prices I've kinda lost interest even more. There are only a couple of local shops that I regularly visit. All the major charities such as Oxfam, Barnados, and similar have just priced themselves out of the market.
There are too many charities in the world to give to all of them - so I don't feel bad that I no longer frequent their shops. Instead I pick a couple of charities and donate to them directly, the only reason I visit charity shops is because I expect their books/stock to be cheap, and that is no longer as true as it used to be.
Last year my (then) girlfriend was in the states and she brought me back a Nintendo DS, along with a couple of games.
We played with it almost constantly thereafter, but we did decide we'd never buy another game until we'd completed one of the ones we already had.
We spent a good few months slowly playing games until we completed them, and each time we did we'd celebrate by going to a game shop and choosing a replacement game (used).
In the past I've had lots of games I'd never managed to complete, and usually that due to lack of time. These days I do like to get my moneys worth out of purchases, so unless a game is vile I'll always play it through to completion.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's the paper covering the migration of hotmail over to Windows 2000.
Interesting reading if you have the time for it.
Isn't that exactly what Willow did in Buffy, not so long ago?
More than once I remember her pulling things out of computers - though she did mention encryption at least a couple of times. Complete with "access granted" animations. Sigh.
Sadly you still need it at times.
For example I use the "System | Preferences | Keyboard Shortcuts" applet to set "Ctrl+Alt+T" to open a new terminal. That works fine, because "open terminal" is a predefined choice.
But to configure "Ctrl+Alt+E" to mean "Open emacs"? You cannot do that though the GUI, which is a real annoyance.
I had to resort to using gconf to setup a global GNOME shortcut.
And this is why fixed date-based releases often suffer.
Ubuntu seems to have been between a rock and a hard place with this kind of issue recently (e.g. GNOME dropping session support).
Either they don't have the latest-shiny and people complain, or they have to pull what is currently the best available and this isn't always complete.
Although Debian isn't perfect, and many might be frustrated by "slow" releases it does win in this kind of situation.
If you want the latest you use the unstable branch, and if you want stable/reliable you use the stable but older software.
The problem with Barracuda boxes is that they create backscatter.
I see tons of "Barracuda has rejected your message" bounces from them, and all of it is faked. Why they can't reject mail at SMTP time I don't know.
(I run a commercial mail filtering system - using these techniques and more I filter about 5 million spam messages a month.)
There are many more things you can do, from examining the "HELO" presented, looking for matching DNS, dropping mails without a "DATE" header (mandated by RFC).
Beyond that you can detect spoofed mails which have "From: you@you.com" + "oo: you@you.com" being sent by server1.foo.ru.
Similarly you can run greylisting (don't like that myself, but some people do), and be very strict on your domain recipients (ie. no wildcard addresses).
One final thing that is useful is to drop connections from machines that try to blurt an entire SMTP transaction without waiting for the opening SMTP banner to be sent
You're lucky - I have a few GMail accounts and I see way more than that.
That's the problem with anecdotes - somebody can always come up with an alternative.
I'd say, in general, most of the larger free mail providers are good with anti-spam - even given that most of it comes from their networks, or from compromised machines.
Fine until you run a mailing list with a few hundred subscribers ..
But given that most spam comes from compromised machines the bill will go to the wrong person, even if you could magic up an implementation.
(Having said that if the bill went to the owner of a compromised machine it might encourage them to clean it up ..)
Indeed - I run a spam filtering proxy service - and I have fight daily with incoming spam.
The end user doesn't see it, but it is still clogging up the network, and causing some of us real headaches.
When it comes to my personal mail I receive maybe 4-10 thousand spam mails a day. I see a couple of those, but the ones I don't? They still cost me bandwidth and processor overhead to filter.
I guess it is meant to read "questionable beliefs" not "questionable believes".
I expect both my Desktop and my Servers to be secure - and to just work.
Thankfully they do, and I'm running Debian on both.
The short version is basically "its easy to spot because we can reason". But to detect it programmatically is non-trivial.
As you say some bugs are easy to spot via simple analysis - and thats what tools such as "lint" do. They scan source looking for particular classes of bugs, but something like this bug isn't trivial.
All you have to do first is solve the halting problem, and detecting these "clear" cases will be trivial.
I've used that a fair bit and enjoy it. On my blog each comment is parsed as an email - and then filtered via CRM114.
I could do more, but so far I don't need to. Each time I reject a spam comment (mail) I block the source address via the firewall for a few days to cut down on repeats from the same host.
Currently I'm running with about 300 active blocks.
Ubuntu stuff comes up every now and again, and its great for them and their page rank.
Here's what you do:
The end result is we have lots of people knowing how to do things under Ubuntu and barely understanding how to use Linux.
The last time I ran slackware was around the time of the RedHat 4.2 release.
At that time I had 8Mb of RAM and I remember that starting X and opening Netscape Navigator took many minutes..
Funny you should make that comment about charity shops - I'm exactly the same.
I do still buy books in charity shops, but not as often as I used to when their prices were lower.
Now we have charity shops combing through their donations looking for "rare" books, albums, and films to sell at even higher prices I've kinda lost interest even more. There are only a couple of local shops that I regularly visit. All the major charities such as Oxfam, Barnados, and similar have just priced themselves out of the market.
There are too many charities in the world to give to all of them - so I don't feel bad that I no longer frequent their shops. Instead I pick a couple of charities and donate to them directly, the only reason I visit charity shops is because I expect their books/stock to be cheap, and that is no longer as true as it used to be.
Thats pretty interesting.
Last year my (then) girlfriend was in the states and she brought me back a Nintendo DS, along with a couple of games.
We played with it almost constantly thereafter, but we did decide we'd never buy another game until we'd completed one of the ones we already had.
We spent a good few months slowly playing games until we completed them, and each time we did we'd celebrate by going to a game shop and choosing a replacement game (used).
In the past I've had lots of games I'd never managed to complete, and usually that due to lack of time. These days I do like to get my moneys worth out of purchases, so unless a game is vile I'll always play it through to completion.
I maintain a ssh probe blacklist which currently has about 4000 entries in it.
This is only seeded by the reports from a couple of servers I maintain, and could easily be contributed to be interested parties.
If you were super-paranoid you'd have to keep throwing out the ribbon - to avoid people being able to use it to replay everything you'd ever typed.
(Yes I've seen that done on crime shows on TV. So I can assume it has happened in real life at least once!)
I liked Ender's Game, I think mostly because I first read it when I was very young and genuinely didn't see the "twist" coming.
Over the years I've read a few more and the only one that I really liked was Ender's Shadow.
And real cost too.
I read between one and four books a week. I only buy them used, and a typical price would be 50p.
So to break even at that level of spending would take a lot longer. (Even more so if we include the price of electricity to charge the device).
I'd love a kindle-like device, with wireless access that worked in the UK. But the price is just not realistic for me.
The Tomb Raider films were great action/trash films. As were the various Resident Evil movies.
OK not hugely based on the relevant games, but still entertaining.
If you run M-x apropos you can search for "trailing-whitespace" and read the documentation.
The short version though is that you need to set a custom face. For example:
(custom-set-faces
'(trailing-whitespace
((((class color) (background dark)) (:background "blue")))))
There are a lot of things that you can do with Emacs, but I find the two simplest to share would be related to trailing whitespace:
(when (>= emacs-major-version 21)
(setq-default show-trailing-whitespace t))
(add-hook 'write-file-hooks
'delete-trailing-whitespace)