Yes. So was the comma, and the apostrophe. (See "grammar nazi's".) I thought that would be obvious to grammar geeks. Apparently not.
I don't struggle with my native language. I can communicate just fine, which is the primary point of a language. I can't diagram a sentence, though. I don't know what a past participle is, and I don't really care about whether a word is an adverb or adjective or preposition. I just think it's silly for people to worry about unimportant details instead of what the words *mean*. Ideas are more important than grammar, IMO. In particular, in a forum such as this one, not everyone is a native English speaker, and few people other than grammar geeks take time to edit, spell check, etc. A slashdot post isn't the same as a school essay.
Whom cares? Only the grammer nazi's that don't want to think about anything important, and who prefer to bitch and whine because someone used a comma in the wrong spot, or said "Who" when it should have been "Whom".
Were this an english class, it might be important. This isn't, and it's not.
You call everyone else idiots and insult their intelligence, but if you were intelligent, you would understand one basic thing. My server, my rules.
If I get too many hack-attacks from one area (be it an IP, a country, or an ISP) then I have the right, and ability, to block them. If I run an online business, and find that almost all orders from a given country are bogus, then the chance of getting one or two real orders may not be worth the hassle in trying to get rid of the bogus ones - not to mention the risk that I'll ship on a bogus order. And protecting my server and my business is much more important to me that the rights of some twit in BFEgypt who says "Well I can't control what the other people over here do, but you have to let me do what I want anyway."
It's up to *me* to decide whether blocking those people is worthwhile, because it's my server, and my business, and if I don't protect them, then who will?
I live in Texas. Most businesses here have a sign saying "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone". The net has the same situation - and obviously, some people choose to excercise that right.
I have seen this with Wanadoo and UU.net went through this.
Add AGIS.net to that list. They decided that they would openly support spammers, back in 97 or so. Six-nine months (by my memory) later, they were backpeddelling, and dumping spammers. Did them no good - I think they went out of business, selling their backbone IP space to someone else. And I'll bet you that a lot of those IP's are still in various blacklists.
Out of the box experience, integration, convenience - everything you need is on the Linux install CDs. Be it word processing, graphic editing, software development, gaming, shell automation, web publishing, secure network connectivity, and on and on.
The last time I tried Linux (some time back, I must admit) I managed to get it installed - but only because I could use a windows machine to go online and ask questions. Once it was installed, I still couldn't get it online, or do anything remotely useful with it, because to get anything to work, I had to edit config files with what Linux geeks think is a text editor. Vi, I think it was. A stupid line editor very similar to Edlin, which Linux geeks think is top of the world.
Sorry, but after a week or two or getting frustrated because the learning curve to use a freaking TEXT EDITOR is too high to be worth the bother, I gave up on it. I can't imagine what idiot first thought a line editor was a good idea, or why years after Edlin had been replaced Linux was still expecting people to use VI to get everything going.
So that machine, which I'd bought to be a Linux learning box, got reformatted with Win98. Since then, it's been useful.
As I said, this was 3-4 years ago. (Using a Mandrake install CD if that matters.) But the experience then left me feeling that the people screaming "Linux is Better!" don't understand the basics - or one of them would have written a text editor that let you edit text without learning cryptic archaic commands to do so.
If the U.S. can justify blacklisting an entire country because of a minute security threat, do we, the rest of the world, not have more than sufficient justification to blacklist the entire United States?
I think that most Americans would answer that with "Go ahead, tear your ass". If Macedonia wants to block all access to US websites, I really doubt that the US is going to worry about it.
In that case, there is an unfair penalty to those of us who can't use SPF, and we risk getting our legitimate email blocked.
I don't think I said what you think I said.
If you send mail from a domain which says "Yes, we are SPF compliant" then systems receiving that mail can check, and toss any noncompliant mail, knowing it's forged. If your domain doesn't publish SPF records, nothing has changed - spammers (or anyone who wants) can still forge your domain at will, and systems are going to continue to accept your mail. The primary incentive is to make it harder for people to forge your domain, and easy for people receiving mail to tell if the mail from your domain is legitimate, or faked.
Eventually, *if* SPF gets a very wide user base, then mail servers (receiving mail) could just dump noncompliant mail - but that seems very unlikely unless essentially every legitimate domain was already SPF compliant. More likely, at that point antispam software would use that information as *one* data-point in deciding if it was spam or not. That wouldn't be the deciding factor, it would be one of many.
When you say "those of us who can't use SPF", I'm not sure who you mean. I log on via SWBell DSL, in Dallas, using a dynamic IP. My domains mail server is run by a friend, out of state. When I send mail, I send it through that server, using SMTP-AUTH. SPF records will show that for my domain, the IP of my mailserver is the only legitimate IP. When spammers forge my domain, it's to my advantage if people can easily (automatically) check and dump the forgeries. They aren't good to anyone but spammers.
And what, as things stand, keeps your mail from being blocked as spam? People already use blacklists, antispam tools that essentially guess "Looks like spam" or "looks OK", and similar things. Your mail can already be blocked, even if it's legitimate.
BTW, forgeries aren't rare. They happen with my domain every day - usually by an online pharmacy. Currently, http://www.dslk1.com/ is forging my domain.
How is this supposed to stop spam, then?
It doesn't stop spam.
Paul Vixie posted a comment which can be found at the end of the article. In part, he says...
No "designated sender scheme" will ever be able to cut down the amount of spam that's sent, or received. All it can do is help domain holders avoid the brand dilution of having their domain name forged by spammers. This is a valuable contribution, but we must make it clear that none of these schemes will stop or even slow spam, and that their benefits accrue to domain holders, not to spam recipients.
I myself believe it will help, as any time spam tries to forge itself, if the SPF shows that it's fake, it can be tossed at will. Domains without SPF could be given higher "spam ratings" in spam detection software. Spammers, of course, can set up domains themselves, publish the SPF, and go that route - but they won't like that as it doesn't help them hide like the cockroaches they are. Their domains will quickly be blacklisted, too.
I figure anything we can do that makes it harder for them to hide, and easier for us to sort the legitimate email from the crap, the closer we are to a solution. This isn't a solution - it's a step towards a solution. But it's a good step.
A woman was sentenced recently after having fallen for a 419
scam, and then stealing money from her employer (and their
customers) to send to the scammers.
Some people have hobbies where they pretend to be falling for
the scam, just to see what kind of wierd nonsense they can
get the scammer to do. This site has some funny pictures...
I received email spam recently from PubPat. They've apparently added me to their mailing list, against my wishes. Prior to the email, I'd never heard of them.
According to the blurb, they are connected to the EFF in some way, and the EFF has a long history of supporting spam. (The EFF claims it's "Free Speech" which is BS.)
So far as I'm concerned, these are the bad guys. I'm all in favor of overhauling the patent system, but the fact that the first I heard about PubPat was when they added me to their spam list means that I consider them bad guys, not to be trusted. Honest people don't spam.
Just because I know how to get around it doesn't mean everyone does. There are thousands of people who have registered domains, do their mail through that domain, and use their ISP for nothing but an online connection. Many of them are small businessmen who don't know about ports, dns, and all that stuff. What you propose shuts their systems down. I'm sorry that the "kill everyone that doesn't know how to stop me" plan is the only thing you believe will work.
Why should my tax dollars go to help catch spammers when the real problem is its profitable to spam?
Why should my tax dollars go to help catch bank robbers when the real problem is it's profitble to rob banks?
I agree that the system is designed in a very open manner that makes it easy to spam, hard to stop, with easily spoofed headers, using an easily hacked system of delivery. But saying "since it's profitable it's OK" ignores a lot of other things that are "profitable", and yet still wrong.
Cable and DSL companies should block all port 25 traffic coming from their customers. If you want to send e-mail, you should have to use use their SMTP servers.
I own a domain, and an online friend runs the website/mailserver for it. My mail is sent via that domain. I get online using SWBell DSL. I don't use their mailserver, their website, or anything to do with them - they just get me online, and everything I do is done elsewhere. I'm not running my own mailserver, but I shouldn't be forced to move my entire domain to SWBell just because they give me net access, either. You want them to block things so that I can't reach the mail server that is being run specifically for my domain. That's a great plan - except for that fact that it sucks.
It also wouldn't change what I do much - I'd just have Steve set up an alternative port and go around it that way.
especially now that some brilliant judge decided to let customers keep IP blocks.
That's not what the judge decided at all. All he did was issue a TRO while he figures out what the heck is going on. He's not a geek, he doesn't know what DNS/IP/MAC stand for, or what they do, so he put things on hold so that he can figure out what is going on. He hasn't "decided" anything - he's looking into it.
spamming doesn't bother me nearly as much as popup windows on IE
http://www.opera.com/ will fix that. You apparently know about it, but prefer to continue to deal with the security issues of IE while bitching about them. Just get a decent browser and you can quit worrying about it. I've still got IE on this system, but I can't remember the last time I needed to use it.
If I could turn spam off as easily as you can install a real browswer that will fix the problems you are complaining about, I'd be a pretty happy camper.
I don't understand why this was in a court. What use is this to the person that filed the suit.
You misunderstand how courts are used. You are thinking in terms of "fair", "honest", "legal" and "possible". Which would be great, if that was how things worked.
In practice, you have Person A, who wants something he can't have. But he has a lot of money, and he talks to a lawyer. The lawyer says "Sure, we can sue them, what the hell!", files some papers, sends him a bill. After that, the defendant ends up hiring another lawyer, the judge starts trying to figure out what an IP is and how it relates to the internet and what the law says about it. Since he doesn't know what the hell is going on (he's a judge, not a geek) then he uses standard judicial practice - a TRO. (I don't know what's going on, so lets slow things down while I figure it out.) When it's all said and done, he'll do what he should do, and Person A will lose the suit. In the meantime, the lawyer that told him "Yeah, we can sue" has made a lot of money - as has his friend who defended the suit. It is, sadly enough, the American way.
I'm afraid it rather is like taking your home address (or zip code) with you.
It's more like taking someone elses home address (or zip code) with you. After all, the IP doesn't belong to the website - the website rents the IP address.
The system is designed to handle this via DNS. If a company wants to move, they set up new systems, on new IP's, and redirect the DNS. Yes, for a period of time (short, usually, longer in some cases, especially when systems which do a lot of caching haven't figured out the new directions) then you either have to be redundant, or your old IP will quit responding. But you know that when you move, and with good planning, you can deal with that. It costs you some money to move.
The company in question doesn't own the IP's, but wants to act like they do. I don't own my IP either - I use DLS via SWBell. But I understand the limitations I'm under, and the company in question (and the courts) don't seem to.
Iraq had, at one time, blocked all internet access. A terrorist living in Dallas managed to get the.iq TLD registered under his name.
The people posting to this thread as if the US had done this on purpose are ignoring the facts - the US had nothing to do with it except to arrest the bastard when they caught him. The US doesn't control it, and never has.
The people who are asking why an "american company" is running the TLD should read the flaming article, then they would know the answer to that question.
See you in twenty or thirty years - after John Hinckley gets out.
I hate to be the one to tell you, but Hinckley is already out. He now gets to go on "unsupervised visits" to his parents and such, which means the nutball can start shooting at people again any time he wants.
In that case, why don't you call yourself an anarchist instead of a Libertarian? Because I don't think that is what most libertarians are looking for.
You (or libertarians reading this) can email me. I know we're off topic here - I'm trying to understand how you think things should work. Honestly, I don't see it, but 'splain it to me if you want.
Pretending that lockheed Martin doesn't make weapons is not going to change facts. They make the F22 fighter, missiles, and lots more. Their website is at http://www.lockheedmartin.com, and they make no pretense about it. You can hold your breath 'till you turn blue, but they'll still be making weapons.
and has falsely invaded two countries which had nothing to do with terrorism.
While I tend to agree with you on Iraq, you say two countries. Are you talking about Afghanistan? How can you claim they had nothing to do with terrorism?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. So was the comma, and the apostrophe. (See "grammar nazi's".) I thought that would be obvious to grammar geeks. Apparently not.
I don't struggle with my native language. I can communicate just fine, which is the primary point of a language. I can't diagram a sentence, though. I don't know what a past participle is, and I don't really care about whether a word is an adverb or adjective or preposition. I just think it's silly for people to worry about unimportant details instead of what the words *mean*. Ideas are more important than grammar, IMO. In particular, in a forum such as this one, not everyone is a native English speaker, and few people other than grammar geeks take time to edit, spell check, etc. A slashdot post isn't the same as a school essay.
As I said before - whom cares?
Whom cares? Only the grammer nazi's that don't want to think about anything important, and who prefer to bitch and whine because someone used a comma in the wrong spot, or said "Who" when it should have been "Whom".
Were this an english class, it might be important. This isn't, and it's not.
My server, my rules.
If I get too many hack-attacks from one area (be it an IP, a country, or an ISP) then I have the right, and ability, to block them. If I run an online business, and find that almost all orders from a given country are bogus, then the chance of getting one or two real orders may not be worth the hassle in trying to get rid of the bogus ones - not to mention the risk that I'll ship on a bogus order. And protecting my server and my business is much more important to me that the rights of some twit in BFEgypt who says "Well I can't control what the other people over here do, but you have to let me do what I want anyway."
It's up to *me* to decide whether blocking those people is worthwhile, because it's my server, and my business, and if I don't protect them, then who will?
I live in Texas. Most businesses here have a sign saying "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone". The net has the same situation - and obviously, some people choose to excercise that right.
Add AGIS.net to that list. They decided that they would openly support spammers, back in 97 or so. Six-nine months (by my memory) later, they were backpeddelling, and dumping spammers. Did them no good - I think they went out of business, selling their backbone IP space to someone else. And I'll bet you that a lot of those IP's are still in various blacklists.
The last time I tried Linux (some time back, I must admit) I managed to get it installed - but only because I could use a windows machine to go online and ask questions. Once it was installed, I still couldn't get it online, or do anything remotely useful with it, because to get anything to work, I had to edit config files with what Linux geeks think is a text editor. Vi, I think it was. A stupid line editor very similar to Edlin, which Linux geeks think is top of the world.
Sorry, but after a week or two or getting frustrated because the learning curve to use a freaking TEXT EDITOR is too high to be worth the bother, I gave up on it. I can't imagine what idiot first thought a line editor was a good idea, or why years after Edlin had been replaced Linux was still expecting people to use VI to get everything going.
So that machine, which I'd bought to be a Linux learning box, got reformatted with Win98. Since then, it's been useful.
As I said, this was 3-4 years ago. (Using a Mandrake install CD if that matters.) But the experience then left me feeling that the people screaming "Linux is Better!" don't understand the basics - or one of them would have written a text editor that let you edit text without learning cryptic archaic commands to do so.
I think that most Americans would answer that with "Go ahead, tear your ass". If Macedonia wants to block all access to US websites, I really doubt that the US is going to worry about it.
I don't think I said what you think I said.
If you send mail from a domain which says "Yes, we are SPF compliant" then systems receiving that mail can check, and toss any noncompliant mail, knowing it's forged. If your domain doesn't publish SPF records, nothing has changed - spammers (or anyone who wants) can still forge your domain at will, and systems are going to continue to accept your mail. The primary incentive is to make it harder for people to forge your domain, and easy for people receiving mail to tell if the mail from your domain is legitimate, or faked.
Eventually, *if* SPF gets a very wide user base, then mail servers (receiving mail) could just dump noncompliant mail - but that seems very unlikely unless essentially every legitimate domain was already SPF compliant. More likely, at that point antispam software would use that information as *one* data-point in deciding if it was spam or not. That wouldn't be the deciding factor, it would be one of many.
When you say "those of us who can't use SPF", I'm not sure who you mean. I log on via SWBell DSL, in Dallas, using a dynamic IP. My domains mail server is run by a friend, out of state. When I send mail, I send it through that server, using SMTP-AUTH. SPF records will show that for my domain, the IP of my mailserver is the only legitimate IP. When spammers forge my domain, it's to my advantage if people can easily (automatically) check and dump the forgeries. They aren't good to anyone but spammers. And what, as things stand, keeps your mail from being blocked as spam? People already use blacklists, antispam tools that essentially guess "Looks like spam" or "looks OK", and similar things. Your mail can already be blocked, even if it's legitimate.
BTW, forgeries aren't rare. They happen with my domain every day - usually by an online pharmacy. Currently, http://www.dslk1.com/ is forging my domain.
I figure anything we can do that makes it harder for them to hide, and easier for us to sort the legitimate email from the crap, the closer we are to a solution. This isn't a solution - it's a step towards a solution. But it's a good step.
You're a bit overly optimistic, IMO.
Some people have hobbies where they pretend to be falling for the scam, just to see what kind of wierd nonsense they can get the scammer to do. This site has some funny pictures...
http://tbp.berkeley.edu/forum/viewtopic.php?t=303
More scammer-baiting can be found at http://www.419eater.com. And if you want more, just click on their links page - their are lots.
According to the blurb, they are connected to the EFF in some way, and the EFF has a long history of supporting spam. (The EFF claims it's "Free Speech" which is BS.)
So far as I'm concerned, these are the bad guys. I'm all in favor of overhauling the patent system, but the fact that the first I heard about PubPat was when they added me to their spam list means that I consider them bad guys, not to be trusted. Honest people don't spam.
Just because I know how to get around it doesn't mean everyone does. There are thousands of people who have registered domains, do their mail through that domain, and use their ISP for nothing but an online connection. Many of them are small businessmen who don't know about ports, dns, and all that stuff. What you propose shuts their systems down. I'm sorry that the "kill everyone that doesn't know how to stop me" plan is the only thing you believe will work.
Why should my tax dollars go to help catch bank robbers when the real problem is it's profitble to rob banks?
I agree that the system is designed in a very open manner that makes it easy to spam, hard to stop, with easily spoofed headers, using an easily hacked system of delivery. But saying "since it's profitable it's OK" ignores a lot of other things that are "profitable", and yet still wrong.
I own a domain, and an online friend runs the website/mailserver for it. My mail is sent via that domain. I get online using SWBell DSL. I don't use their mailserver, their website, or anything to do with them - they just get me online, and everything I do is done elsewhere. I'm not running my own mailserver, but I shouldn't be forced to move my entire domain to SWBell just because they give me net access, either. You want them to block things so that I can't reach the mail server that is being run specifically for my domain. That's a great plan - except for that fact that it sucks.
It also wouldn't change what I do much - I'd just have Steve set up an alternative port and go around it that way.
That's not what the judge decided at all. All he did was issue a TRO while he figures out what the heck is going on. He's not a geek, he doesn't know what DNS/IP/MAC stand for, or what they do, so he put things on hold so that he can figure out what is going on. He hasn't "decided" anything - he's looking into it.
http://www.opera.com/ will fix that. You apparently know about it, but prefer to continue to deal with the security issues of IE while bitching about them. Just get a decent browser and you can quit worrying about it. I've still got IE on this system, but I can't remember the last time I needed to use it.
If I could turn spam off as easily as you can install a real browswer that will fix the problems you are complaining about, I'd be a pretty happy camper.
You misunderstand how courts are used. You are thinking in terms of "fair", "honest", "legal" and "possible". Which would be great, if that was how things worked.
In practice, you have Person A, who wants something he can't have. But he has a lot of money, and he talks to a lawyer. The lawyer says "Sure, we can sue them, what the hell!", files some papers, sends him a bill. After that, the defendant ends up hiring another lawyer, the judge starts trying to figure out what an IP is and how it relates to the internet and what the law says about it. Since he doesn't know what the hell is going on (he's a judge, not a geek) then he uses standard judicial practice - a TRO. (I don't know what's going on, so lets slow things down while I figure it out.) When it's all said and done, he'll do what he should do, and Person A will lose the suit. In the meantime, the lawyer that told him "Yeah, we can sue" has made a lot of money - as has his friend who defended the suit. It is, sadly enough, the American way.
The system is designed to handle this via DNS. If a company wants to move, they set up new systems, on new IP's, and redirect the DNS. Yes, for a period of time (short, usually, longer in some cases, especially when systems which do a lot of caching haven't figured out the new directions) then you either have to be redundant, or your old IP will quit responding. But you know that when you move, and with good planning, you can deal with that. It costs you some money to move.
The company in question doesn't own the IP's, but wants to act like they do. I don't own my IP either - I use DLS via SWBell. But I understand the limitations I'm under, and the company in question (and the courts) don't seem to.
The people posting to this thread as if the US had done this on purpose are ignoring the facts - the US had nothing to do with it except to arrest the bastard when they caught him. The US doesn't control it, and never has.
The people who are asking why an "american company" is running the TLD should read the flaming article, then they would know the answer to that question.
I hate to be the one to tell you, but Hinckley is already out. He now gets to go on "unsupervised visits" to his parents and such, which means the nutball can start shooting at people again any time he wants.
Story available here.
In that case, why don't you call yourself an anarchist instead of a Libertarian? Because I don't think that is what most libertarians are looking for. You (or libertarians reading this) can email me. I know we're off topic here - I'm trying to understand how you think things should work. Honestly, I don't see it, but 'splain it to me if you want.
Pretending that lockheed Martin doesn't make weapons is not going to change facts. They make the F22 fighter, missiles, and lots more. Their website is at http://www.lockheedmartin.com, and they make no pretense about it. You can hold your breath 'till you turn blue, but they'll still be making weapons.
While I tend to agree with you on Iraq, you say two countries. Are you talking about Afghanistan? How can you claim they had nothing to do with terrorism?
Lockheed Martin doesn't make weapons. Sure - got it. Your credibility is now lower than the Iraqi information minister.