A long time ago there was only one choice - and that was Netscape's Communicator.
That was the only really useful graphical browser for the first few years when I started using Linux around 94.
(Binary only; and I'd start it with "-no-java" to avoid the machine stalling for 60+ seconds when it found an applet!)
I'm hazy on the commercial Unixes, because at that time I wasn't able to use them, but there was a ported version of IE for Solaris which seemed slightly popular, but most of the people I knew that had access to "big boxes" still used Netscape.
Personally I'm happy with Firefox, but I'm even happier that there are several reasonable choices. It'd suck to move from an IE monopoly to a Firefox-one.
I used to do it regularly, but even at my performance peak I'd have ignored mozilla as being "too big" to understand completely.
(Though I did report a couple of HTML bugs that could cause a crash, inspired by the "mangleme" program. Never did get my security-issue bounty, though I was promised it at least once!)
I've always heard good things about them (except for the speed of provisioning new accounts;)
I guess there was a brief moment, early on, when I thought about expansion, I just knew that I didn't want to deal with the support burden. Limiting myself to 5-8 users, and technical ones at that, has meant maybe two tickets opened every year - too much more than that and the pain would outweigh the cost-saving and "funness".
I originally setup xen-hosting selfishly because I wanted a decent root access level of hosting for myself, but didn't want to pay for a big machine.
Within a week I'd found enough users to bring the cost down to an acceptable level, primarily because a few people know me and trust me, but the intention was always there to document it fully and have people setting up similar things.
Two years on I'm not aware of anybody who's replicated the setup which is a real shame, I think there's a lot of space for a kind of "cooperative" hosting setup, each one with maybe 10 users.
This makes complete sense - but looking at it from the other side surely if you were going to be evil and do "bad things" you'd set it up before you resigned?
I've been in this position in the past, and having all access restricted, or degraded just makes it hard to do anything other than surf the net for fun.
(I've obviously got a perfect story here to recommend myself, and have done so, but it is genuinely flattering and suprising to see other people mention me/it).
That solution sounds interesting, but utterly unworkable.
Consider what happens if a spam mail comes from googlemail.com - happens a lot - just one report would be sufficient to stop the legitimite googlemail accounts.
(OK in practice big companies have multiple outgoing SMTP servers, so you'd still get it. But it sounds like a very big hammer approach..)
There is a fair amount of truth in your comment - speaking as somebody who has taken a bunch of open tools and made them play nice though it is harder than you'd expect.
My own solution is built upon the top of QPSMTPD exim4, and a Debian operating system.
Whilst you can come up with something similar there is a lot of benefit to scaling up and handling messages en masse. That's why Google's gmail has such a good reputation (until recently?).
If you have 1 million spam messages passing through your system at any given time and 50 people mark them as spam you've managed to collectively filter out the messages with no real overheard. (Sure you need to make sure they're not malicious reports; but basically getting a lot of users to report the 1/2/10 messages they see as spam helps out all your other users.)
Also, and I might be overemphasizing this because I find it hard personally, designing a good user interface, can be the difference between a "meh" service and a real winner. So it's not a good idea to write off that amount of effort!
More seriously there are many approaches that you can take, from the DNS-blased blacklists, bayasian filtering at SMTP time, and then any local content-filtering rules.
Spam is constantly evolving though, so you might find it more productive to just outsource it as others have suggested. (I couldn't recommend gmail though!)
Companies such MessageLabs, etc, exist and do a good job. There is even my own service which uses a nice configurable combination of DNS blacklists, bayasian filtering, valid user detection and more - the advantage to my service/system is that each rejected message is quarantined for a month so you can easily catch false positives.
You can certainly have an email in two places; but that works as you'd expect - there are two unrelated mails in two unrelated folders. There isn't a magic "This message is the same as that message" relationship stored.
i.e. If you copy a message into folders "TODO.Urgent", and "Customer Bob" there is no notion that these messages are the same.
Ideally the copied message should be treated as a symlink, or similar. If that were the case you'd be able to reply to the first message and the second would be updated to notice that it had been replied to - but that isn't the case.
Thats why having tags works so nicely, because there is only one message - it just has multiple means of locating it.
You're right about Pidgin, even though it's the only chat program I use, I sure do wish its developers would find someone with interface design knowledge.
The other examples I can understand; I'm not a gimp user and I do get confused when I use it. Blender looks awful, but again I don't use it and I know that heavy users do swear by it.
But Pidgin? I use it daily. I see nothing wrong with it.
I have a list of users, I double click on them and I get to chat - whilst it could be flashier I'm having a hard time seeing how the UI is bad.
Any comments would be welcome - so long as they're not about resizing the text entry part;)
Indeed they do need to be policed. But having looked over my logs I see hundreds of spam connections originating from that range - so now I know "something fishy" is going on I can block it!
For example random bounces from 134.174.120.81 and 134.174.140.200.
So now I've blocked it I'll have slightly less processing to do!
In the UK you're selected to become available for jury duty and the government covers your wages.
(ie. You can't be sacked, and your boss still pays you as before - your employer essentially claims the money back from the government if you're selected).
I had assumed it would work similarly in the USA - is that not the case? I can certainly see that if the choice is "Work + Earn" or "be on jury duty" few people would choose to volunteer themselves.
If you were the central point of failure, and your service was reasonable (I guess you'd be charging for access to the API?) then you'd be DOSed within a matter of days.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. I've setup a small mail filtering / anti-spam service, and the privacy is a big part of that.
Some people just don't, won't, and shouldn't trust google...
What you're saying is "Size isn't everything", right?
The parent was talking about using a salt to ensure that the hashes wouldn't be trivially reversible.
A long time ago there was only one choice - and that was Netscape's Communicator.
That was the only really useful graphical browser for the first few years when I started using Linux around 94.
(Binary only; and I'd start it with "-no-java" to avoid the machine stalling for 60+ seconds when it found an applet!)
I'm hazy on the commercial Unixes, because at that time I wasn't able to use them, but there was a ported version of IE for Solaris which seemed slightly popular, but most of the people I knew that had access to "big boxes" still used Netscape.
Personally I'm happy with Firefox, but I'm even happier that there are several reasonable choices. It'd suck to move from an IE monopoly to a Firefox-one.
Thank you - we need more people auditing code.
I used to do it regularly, but even at my performance peak I'd have ignored mozilla as being "too big" to understand completely.
(Though I did report a couple of HTML bugs that could cause a crash, inspired by the "mangleme" program. Never did get my security-issue bounty, though I was promised it at least once!)
http://ten.print.i.rock.twentygototen.org/
Genius!
well written code is easy on the eye. I think that is pretty much true of any language.
I like Perl, C, Ruby, and Lisp, and each of those can be written badly or well.
Still Ruby does seem neater than most languages and has a decent community. There are just a few problems that are unfortunate.
(things like Unicode support; forgivable in languages like perl which have been around forever, but almost inexcusable in new a language.)
I'm using a Nokia tablet with on-screen keyboard and it works perfectly well for quick ssh sessions - with one exception.
Typing passwords "blind" is damn hard.
Interesting to know , thanks.
I've always heard good things about them (except for the speed of provisioning new accounts ;)
I guess there was a brief moment, early on, when I thought about expansion, I just knew that I didn't want to deal with the support burden. Limiting myself to 5-8 users, and technical ones at that, has meant maybe two tickets opened every year - too much more than that and the pain would outweigh the cost-saving and "funness".
That's a great idea.
I originally setup xen-hosting selfishly because I wanted a decent root access level of hosting for myself, but didn't want to pay for a big machine.
Within a week I'd found enough users to bring the cost down to an acceptable level, primarily because a few people know me and trust me, but the intention was always there to document it fully and have people setting up similar things.
Two years on I'm not aware of anybody who's replicated the setup which is a real shame, I think there's a lot of space for a kind of "cooperative" hosting setup, each one with maybe 10 users.
This makes complete sense - but looking at it from the other side surely if you were going to be evil and do "bad things" you'd set it up before you resigned?
I've been in this position in the past, and having all access restricted, or degraded just makes it hard to do anything other than surf the net for fun.
That's primarily an issue with American carriers.
In the UK, where I am, & Europe, we pay to send messages, and make phone calls, but to receive either is free.
Thanks for the pimping!
(I've obviously got a perfect story here to recommend myself, and have done so, but it is genuinely flattering and suprising to see other people mention me/it).
That solution sounds interesting, but utterly unworkable.
Consider what happens if a spam mail comes from googlemail.com - happens a lot - just one report would be sufficient to stop the legitimite googlemail accounts.
(OK in practice big companies have multiple outgoing SMTP servers, so you'd still get it. But it sounds like a very big hammer approach..)
There is a fair amount of truth in your comment - speaking as somebody who has taken a bunch of open tools and made them play nice though it is harder than you'd expect.
My own solution is built upon the top of QPSMTPD exim4, and a Debian operating system.
Whilst you can come up with something similar there is a lot of benefit to scaling up and handling messages en masse. That's why Google's gmail has such a good reputation (until recently?).
If you have 1 million spam messages passing through your system at any given time and 50 people mark them as spam you've managed to collectively filter out the messages with no real overheard. (Sure you need to make sure they're not malicious reports; but basically getting a lot of users to report the 1/2/10 messages they see as spam helps out all your other users.)
Also, and I might be overemphasizing this because I find it hard personally, designing a good user interface, can be the difference between a "meh" service and a real winner. So it's not a good idea to write off that amount of effort!
They use me!
More seriously there are many approaches that you can take, from the DNS-blased blacklists, bayasian filtering at SMTP time, and then any local content-filtering rules.
Spam is constantly evolving though, so you might find it more productive to just outsource it as others have suggested. (I couldn't recommend gmail though!)
Companies such MessageLabs, etc, exist and do a good job. There is even my own service which uses a nice configurable combination of DNS blacklists, bayasian filtering, valid user detection and more - the advantage to my service/system is that each rejected message is quarantined for a month so you can easily catch false positives.
I loathed the usage of lotus notes so much that I managed to not notice!
In general, though, I had the impression it was more featureful than Outlook, etc.
Me? I use mutt for mail handling at home & work these day!
You can certainly have an email in two places; but that works as you'd expect - there are two unrelated mails in two unrelated folders. There isn't a magic "This message is the same as that message" relationship stored.
i.e. If you copy a message into folders "TODO.Urgent", and "Customer Bob" there is no notion that these messages are the same.
Ideally the copied message should be treated as a symlink, or similar. If that were the case you'd be able to reply to the first message and the second would be updated to notice that it had been replied to - but that isn't the case.
Thats why having tags works so nicely, because there is only one message - it just has multiple means of locating it.
The other examples I can understand; I'm not a gimp user and I do get confused when I use it. Blender looks awful, but again I don't use it and I know that heavy users do swear by it.
But Pidgin? I use it daily. I see nothing wrong with it.
I have a list of users, I double click on them and I get to chat - whilst it could be flashier I'm having a hard time seeing how the UI is bad.
Any comments would be welcome - so long as they're not about resizing the text entry part ;)
Yet still they came ..
Indeed they do need to be policed. But having looked over my logs I see hundreds of spam connections originating from that range - so now I know "something fishy" is going on I can block it!
For example random bounces from 134.174.120.81 and 134.174.140.200.
So now I've blocked it I'll have slightly less processing to do!
Interesting; I guess I was just lucky in the past then!
Thanks for the correction.
In the UK you're selected to become available for jury duty and the government covers your wages.
(ie. You can't be sacked, and your boss still pays you as before - your employer essentially claims the money back from the government if you're selected).
I had assumed it would work similarly in the USA - is that not the case? I can certainly see that if the choice is "Work + Earn" or "be on jury duty" few people would choose to volunteer themselves.
Dune - another example of fine work by an author being spoiled by the posthumous "sequels".
If you were the central point of failure, and your service was reasonable (I guess you'd be charging for access to the API?) then you'd be DOSed within a matter of days.
Sad but true.