Since we're on slashdot I guess I should throw out a strawman here. What happens if a 17 year old streaks past the camera in a live newscast? Should the news outlet be prosecuted for child pornography, or be disallowed to keep that footage in their archive?
In that case, Sony, RCA, and Tivo get sued, because their TV's and DVR's showed the event. It's all nonsense.
Yeah right. And when a minor kills someone and the courts let them off easy 'cause their only 15, it's OK. They shouldn't be responsible for stealing the gun, shooting the victim, etc - they are just a minor.
She was 17 years old running around topless on a beach because she wanted people to look at her cute little titties. And now she's bitching and whining and suing over it.
You may believe that people should be able to do any damn fool thing they want with no repercussions, but that's an unreasonable belief. Real life doesn't work that way.
The very idea that one would be "tarnished forever" for running around partially nude is nonsense in and of itself.
In all, the materials for the project have cost him $15,000 so far. Not bad for a killing (or at least potentially flame-throwing, car-mashing) machine.
That's a lot less than the $50 million that the U.S. military, through its Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) division, has devoted to research into a smaller, lighter exoskeleton that can be used on the battlefield.
DARPA has been pursuing the idea of a "Starship Troopers"-inspired soldier at least since 2000, when it started its Exoskeletons for Human Performance Augmentation program.
You are advocating something that will not work, and which will harass innocent people. And you are cussing at people for telling you that it doesn't work. You probably won't understand this, as I'm saying it nicely instead of cussing at you. So here you go - in your own language.
You fucking idiot. You're a pissant shit-for-brains asswipe. You have no fucking clue about what you are talking about, and you are pissed off because everybody but you knows it. Now get the fuck out of my face.
Any respectable geek shouldn't be getting spam in the first place (snip) It is simply a matter of keeping your address clean.
In other words, hiding works very well for you. However, it doesn't work well for everyone. Register a domain? Must provide an address. Want people to be able to write you about the stuff on your website? Do you do business online? These kinds of things require making addresses public. Hiding isn't a solution, no matter how much you head-in-the-sand types like to claim "Spam isn't a problem, just don't let anyone know your address". Staying offline would also solve the spam problem, but that isn't an acceptable solution, any more than yours is.
I get 500 spams a day. The vast majority to addresses harvested from my website. Very few get to my inbox, of course, but if John Doe visits the site and wants to contact me, he will normally have no trouble doing so. (If he's never talked to me before, and his mail comes from known spam-sending IP space, then he may have trouble.)
You can immediately sort possible-spam by whether it offers an unsubscribe option.
Bullshit. I've seen normal email (from individual people, not mailing lists) get caught in spam filters.
I run a (very small, very specialized) mailing list myself. I've met almost everyone on it personally, and I used a confirmed opt in system so nobody is on it by accident. I don't put any "unsubscribe" instructions in it. On occassion, people want to be removed, or to have it sent to a different account. They simply hit reply and tell me what they want, and I do it. Your "it's definitely spam" fails in that case, just as it did with the person-to-person mail above.
On a related note, does anyone know why they keep sending these CI1IAS` emails? I mean, do people actually order pills from people who can't even spell properly?
They do it to get through spam filters. Obviously, if they spelled it correctly, spam filters would soon dump everything with cialis or viagra in the subject line.
I assume some asswipes do buy from them. I've always been amazed that spammers can lie in the header (forging other peoples domains, kludging Received From headers, and obvious to anyone, putting unrelated stuff in the subject line) and yet people still buy from them. I can't imagine sending a check or (worse) my credit card info to someone when the only thing I know about them is that they were dishonest when they first contacted me. But apparently many idiots do just that.
Yes, but a live address that isn't likely to respond well to spam. I find it remarkable that so many people love to try to look smart by repeating that old abiout unsubscribe just getting you more spam lists, while obviously noone has actually checked if it is the case.
You, sir, are a liar.
It's been tried, it's been tested. I did it myself - but I'm far from the only one. I used a previously unused address, and plugged it into a number of unsubsribe links. It started getting spam.
I also used "spamcomplaint@example.com" (using my domain, of course) to send spam complaints for awhile. (I rarely bother any more - too many spams, not enough time to file complaints.) I now get spam to the spamcomplaint@ address, due to ISP's forwarding complaints to their spammers and spammers harvesting addresses from there.
Claiming it's untested is an outright lie. Claiming that spammers remove your address, and don't sell it to others, is an outright lie. I'm sure there are a few that do - but the bottom line is that honest people aren't in the spam business, and spammers will do anything they can to collect addresses. I'm sure they sort out "known good" addresses from the rest, that many of them try to put on a pretense of following the law by temporarily unsubscribing addresses (until they switch domains and start over), but they aren't going to stop spamming you just because you ask. They already know that people don't want spam.
There are two basic ways that spam gets bounced. In one method, they try to connect to your mail server, and they can't connect at all. That could be because your mail server is down, your IP address has changed and DNS hasn't propogated out, or because you've got them in a IP block list. In those cases, the sending machine knows right away that it was not able to send the mail. A well behaived mailer will wait, and try again later, usually several times over several days, before it actually gives up.
The other way is that the receiving mail server accepts the mail, but after receiving it, find that it can't deliver the mail. It then generates a bounce message. For a spam filter to send a bounce message, the mail server has to accept that mail, and pass it on to the spam filter. Once that has happened, the spammer is gone.
Bounce messages don't necessarily go to spammers, because spammers usually forge the headers in the spam they send. I get bounced spam to my domain quite often because the spammers forge my domain.
When spam filters send bounces, they aren't affecting the spammer, they are simply sending a bunch of crap to someone like me, who had nothing to do with the spam.
The rolex spammers have been forging my domain name in their spam. If you expect me to believe that they forge headers, yet are honest enough to follow unsubscribes, then you are nuts.
I think he's just trolling. Spammers ignore laws, forge domain names, and lie in the subject field. They don't give a shit if you click unsubscribe or not.
Even if they did, to follow their unsubscribe costs a lot of time, as you pointed out, and makes you visit every website they want you to visit. Those sites could be trying to hack your system (windows users beware!), or they could simply be selling "pay per view" advertising on their site and trying to drive as much traffic to the site as possible.
But one thing they are *not* going to do is stop spamming you simply because you don't like spam. Spammers don't care. They already know that hardly anyone wants spam, yet they still spam. Anyone telling you that they follow opt out requests is a bald faced liar.
Actually...I hate to tell you guys this, but most spammers use those unsubscribe requests all right. They use them to verify that the email address is active, and it goes into a higher priority hit list. Even if they're in the US where the law says they must honor your unsub request, there's nothing that says they can't sell the information to other spammers that this is an actively used email address with a real live person on the other end of it.
Did you read the post that you replied to? He's *counting* on them doing this. It gives him a steady supply of known spam, which he can then use to help his filters catch spam sent to his "real" address.
It doesn't help with the bandwidth problem, but I can see it helping a Bayesian Filter quite a bit.
So, after you go "You guys are wrong", you then explain how you have an "Intelligent Friend" who uses spam the exact same way - excpept apparently it's "Intelligent" if you do it by using hotmail and similar free services instead of just handling it on your own domain, on your own box.
You're just a crook with no morals who has found a way to make a buck. No different from a thief - screw the other guy as long as you get what you want.
I've worked in places that required the monthly password change. And of course, they won't let you use a password that you used recently.
But at one place, I also figured out that the system had a list of your 20 most recent passwords, and wouldn't let you use any of those. So every month, I'd change the password 21 times in a row, then change it back to what I wanted. That way I didn't have to memorize a new password every month, and I didn't have to leave a note with my password hidden under the keyboard (or wherever.)
Now, I'm trying to push Firefox over IE and I get the tried and true line, "well, as soon as Firefox becomes as proliferated as IE then it'll be just as bad." But, that's not proven yet, and there have been OSes, web browsers, that have been proliferated that have not suffered the same fate.
I'm all in favor of Firefox. But you just explained why your company doesn't listen to your suggestions. Your arguments are not rational.
When you tell them "Other web browsers have been proliferated that have not sufferred the same fate", anyone that knows diddly about it knows that you are making crap up. There are zero web browsers with anything approaching 50% of the number of IE users.
Try telling them that if they'll use Firefox now, it will protect them now, and that if, at some point in the future, it starts showing that it has the same kinds of security problems as IE, that they can get rid of Firefox then. And if it doesn't have those problems in the future, all the better.
And in the meantime, they would be protected.
Their current argument is like saying "We shouldn't buy a virus scanner, 'cause a new virus will come out that it doesn't detect" or "We shouldn't have locks on the doors 'cause a thief will be able to break in anyway". And the argument you give them in return is just as much BS as their argument is.
This is normal in Dallas. (I can't speak for the rest of the US, though I suspect it's the same.) It's a legal liability issue. They don't want to encourage pedestrians to walk up to the window, 'cause when some other idiot runs over that idiot, the fast-food joint gets sued.
As best I can tell, bicycles are served/refused at about a 50/50 ratio, and motercycles are considered OK.
The reason they won't serve pedestrians isn't because they think pedestrians are more likely to rob them, it's because they don't want any liability for allowing pedestrians an excuse to stand in the middle of the road. I can't really blame them. It isn't there fault, it's the fault of the legal system, which allows any stupid asswipe to successfully sue over any stupid thing that they do.
A friend of mine rides a bicycle almost everywhere he goes. Some drive throughs always serve him, others never do, others go back and forth (apparently varying according to who is working the window that night.)
My employers DO honestly believe that their offer is better than all the rest.
Could you pass on a message for me? Tell them I said "Fuck off, you spamming bastards."
I also recommend posting their email addresses (and their wives, and their childrens) in several very public places.
I think that they want the best for the company
All spammers want what is best for their company, and they don't give a damn about what anyone else wants. Their justifications are no different from a burgler who says "But I make good money that way".
Slashdot Mirror
In that case, Sony, RCA, and Tivo get sued, because their TV's and DVR's showed the event. It's all nonsense.
She was 17 years old running around topless on a beach because she wanted people to look at her cute little titties. And now she's bitching and whining and suing over it.
You may believe that people should be able to do any damn fool thing they want with no repercussions, but that's an unreasonable belief. Real life doesn't work that way.
The very idea that one would be "tarnished forever" for running around partially nude is nonsense in and of itself.
From the article:
You are advocating something that will not work, and which will harass innocent people. And you are cussing at people for telling you that it doesn't work. You probably won't understand this, as I'm saying it nicely instead of cussing at you. So here you go - in your own language.
You fucking idiot. You're a pissant shit-for-brains asswipe. You have no fucking clue about what you are talking about, and you are pissed off because everybody but you knows it. Now get the fuck out of my face.
Fucker.
If it doesn't have it, it's definitely spam.
In other words, hiding works very well for you. However, it doesn't work well for everyone. Register a domain? Must provide an address. Want people to be able to write you about the stuff on your website? Do you do business online? These kinds of things require making addresses public. Hiding isn't a solution, no matter how much you head-in-the-sand types like to claim "Spam isn't a problem, just don't let anyone know your address". Staying offline would also solve the spam problem, but that isn't an acceptable solution, any more than yours is.
I get 500 spams a day. The vast majority to addresses harvested from my website. Very few get to my inbox, of course, but if John Doe visits the site and wants to contact me, he will normally have no trouble doing so. (If he's never talked to me before, and his mail comes from known spam-sending IP space, then he may have trouble.)
Bullshit. I've seen normal email (from individual people, not mailing lists) get caught in spam filters.
I run a (very small, very specialized) mailing list myself. I've met almost everyone on it personally, and I used a confirmed opt in system so nobody is on it by accident. I don't put any "unsubscribe" instructions in it. On occassion, people want to be removed, or to have it sent to a different account. They simply hit reply and tell me what they want, and I do it. Your "it's definitely spam" fails in that case, just as it did with the person-to-person mail above.
They do it to get through spam filters. Obviously, if they spelled it correctly, spam filters would soon dump everything with cialis or viagra in the subject line.
I assume some asswipes do buy from them. I've always been amazed that spammers can lie in the header (forging other peoples domains, kludging Received From headers, and obvious to anyone, putting unrelated stuff in the subject line) and yet people still buy from them. I can't imagine sending a check or (worse) my credit card info to someone when the only thing I know about them is that they were dishonest when they first contacted me. But apparently many idiots do just that.
You, sir, are a liar.
It's been tried, it's been tested. I did it myself - but I'm far from the only one. I used a previously unused address, and plugged it into a number of unsubsribe links. It started getting spam.
I also used "spamcomplaint@example.com" (using my domain, of course) to send spam complaints for awhile. (I rarely bother any more - too many spams, not enough time to file complaints.) I now get spam to the spamcomplaint@ address, due to ISP's forwarding complaints to their spammers and spammers harvesting addresses from there.
Claiming it's untested is an outright lie. Claiming that spammers remove your address, and don't sell it to others, is an outright lie. I'm sure there are a few that do - but the bottom line is that honest people aren't in the spam business, and spammers will do anything they can to collect addresses. I'm sure they sort out "known good" addresses from the rest, that many of them try to put on a pretense of following the law by temporarily unsubscribing addresses (until they switch domains and start over), but they aren't going to stop spamming you just because you ask. They already know that people don't want spam.
There are two basic ways that spam gets bounced. In one method, they try to connect to your mail server, and they can't connect at all. That could be because your mail server is down, your IP address has changed and DNS hasn't propogated out, or because you've got them in a IP block list. In those cases, the sending machine knows right away that it was not able to send the mail. A well behaived mailer will wait, and try again later, usually several times over several days, before it actually gives up.
The other way is that the receiving mail server accepts the mail, but after receiving it, find that it can't deliver the mail. It then generates a bounce message. For a spam filter to send a bounce message, the mail server has to accept that mail, and pass it on to the spam filter. Once that has happened, the spammer is gone.
Bounce messages don't necessarily go to spammers, because spammers usually forge the headers in the spam they send. I get bounced spam to my domain quite often because the spammers forge my domain.
When spam filters send bounces, they aren't affecting the spammer, they are simply sending a bunch of crap to someone like me, who had nothing to do with the spam.
Outlooks Express is in second place only to Internet Explorer in adding security holes to your windows system. Why people use it, I have no idea.
Not true. I'm writing this as their stupid video plays.
The rolex spammers have been forging my domain name in their spam. If you expect me to believe that they forge headers, yet are honest enough to follow unsubscribes, then you are nuts.
Even if they did, to follow their unsubscribe costs a lot of time, as you pointed out, and makes you visit every website they want you to visit. Those sites could be trying to hack your system (windows users beware!), or they could simply be selling "pay per view" advertising on their site and trying to drive as much traffic to the site as possible.
But one thing they are *not* going to do is stop spamming you simply because you don't like spam. Spammers don't care. They already know that hardly anyone wants spam, yet they still spam. Anyone telling you that they follow opt out requests is a bald faced liar.
Did you read the post that you replied to? He's *counting* on them doing this. It gives him a steady supply of known spam, which he can then use to help his filters catch spam sent to his "real" address.
It doesn't help with the bandwidth problem, but I can see it helping a Bayesian Filter quite a bit.
So, after you go "You guys are wrong", you then explain how you have an "Intelligent Friend" who uses spam the exact same way - excpept apparently it's "Intelligent" if you do it by using hotmail and similar free services instead of just handling it on your own domain, on your own box.
You're just a crook with no morals who has found a way to make a buck. No different from a thief - screw the other guy as long as you get what you want.
There are few other companies that make as much money as them at anything. What's your point?
But at one place, I also figured out that the system had a list of your 20 most recent passwords, and wouldn't let you use any of those. So every month, I'd change the password 21 times in a row, then change it back to what I wanted. That way I didn't have to memorize a new password every month, and I didn't have to leave a note with my password hidden under the keyboard (or wherever.)
I'm all in favor of Firefox. But you just explained why your company doesn't listen to your suggestions. Your arguments are not rational.
When you tell them "Other web browsers have been proliferated that have not sufferred the same fate", anyone that knows diddly about it knows that you are making crap up. There are zero web browsers with anything approaching 50% of the number of IE users.
Try telling them that if they'll use Firefox now, it will protect them now, and that if, at some point in the future, it starts showing that it has the same kinds of security problems as IE, that they can get rid of Firefox then. And if it doesn't have those problems in the future, all the better.
And in the meantime, they would be protected.
Their current argument is like saying "We shouldn't buy a virus scanner, 'cause a new virus will come out that it doesn't detect" or "We shouldn't have locks on the doors 'cause a thief will be able to break in anyway". And the argument you give them in return is just as much BS as their argument is.
(Somone mod him up. Cool, but time consuming puzzle game at the URL.)
That URL is 404 - but at least it's a *funny* 404. :^)
As best I can tell, bicycles are served/refused at about a 50/50 ratio, and motercycles are considered OK.
A friend of mine rides a bicycle almost everywhere he goes. Some drive throughs always serve him, others never do, others go back and forth (apparently varying according to who is working the window that night.)
Could you pass on a message for me? Tell them I said "Fuck off, you spamming bastards."
I also recommend posting their email addresses (and their wives, and their childrens) in several very public places.
I think that they want the best for the company
All spammers want what is best for their company, and they don't give a damn about what anyone else wants. Their justifications are no different from a burgler who says "But I make good money that way".
If you did enough email to matter, you would soon learn that a web interface is a lousy way to handle a large amount of email.