True that. I've actually noticed many sites now have a notice saying "NO we will NOT port this to any other platform"! That's amazing stuff to me. I see an opportunity to "get in on the ground floor" of the commercial Linux software market, while these guys see a bunch of customers who won't quit bugging them. Linux is growing, Mac is growing, Windows is stagnating. Wake up app vendors, because if you don't get portable you're probably toast in a couple of years.
You don't "use" nukes either, well, not since you dropped two on Japan, but you certainly have all of the options at your disposal. If chemical or biological weapons were more effective for a given scenario I've no doubt the US would use them.
That's what I don't understand - the banks are paying some IT dudes serious coin for their "secure" online banking systems, yet these same clowns are happy to run an IE only system? Presumable it's justified for support reasons, but it strikes me as basically unethical. They KNOW Internet Explorer is junk, but they stipulate it's use anyway!
It's the IT equivilant of a doctor prescribing drugs with known bad side effects, when there's perfectly good alternatives. If anyone get's pwned on an IE only banking site, the bank had better be paying for it.
That's my point. It shouldn't be a salable item - an asset - and it's management shouldn't have been irrevocably given to a private company like InfoCom.
It's like delegating management of the +964 country code to a business that gets into legal trouble, then they decide they want to sell the area code back to the country it represents. They're effectively blocking access to that country through normal means. It ridiculous. ICANN should be able to redelegate the management of the TLD to someone capable of doing the job - and it should NOT be an asset to be profited from. Yes, I think the.tv scenario was a friggin bad joke.
That would be dependant on InfoCom persuing legal action though wouldn't it? I mean, if ICANN went ahead and did their thing, with a gentleman's agreement from the InfoCom guys this could be sorted out tomorrow. But as I posted previously, I don't think that will happen because now that Iraq is independant the.iq TLD has some market value - and it doesn't cost InfoCom anything to hold onto it.
Then why do it? It seems to me it's just implementing new technology for the sake of it. In situations like these I have to wonder who's got shares and interests in the companies involved...
So why can't they just take it back? ICANN should just forget InfoCom exists and pass the TLD to the Iraqi Goverment to do whatever they want with. Why is it even an issue? Oh right, because it's suddenly worth something now the country is free of Saddam and finally under it's own Government.
That used to work. It doesn't seem to any more. These days The Powers That Be would rather "clamp down" and have "zero tolerance" for those pesky law breakers. Actually amending the laws would be like admitted they were wrong or something, so they just make additional new ones instead.
No, it's worse than that. For us geeks, SMTP is about the extent of it, but for Joe and Jane Average the problem extends to their whole machine. Virus infected and malware ridden machines that are unusable aside from viewing porn popups. It's hitting the grassroots first-experience people, and it'll kill the consumer Windows market if nothing else. Maybe not such a bad thing in itself, but still, these are the people the spammers are trying to reach - the mythical "consumer". They're shitting in their own nests, and too dazzled by a few $ to realize it.
That said, how about setting up an anonymous spammer bounty fund?
"Advice" in political terms is usually another way of saying "veiled threat". Many of the companies pushing for software patents are American. Big EU software houses like SAP *don't want them*, but the US is trying to look after it's own big IT businesses. If EU doesn't bend over, there may be trade or policy repercussions.
I didn't RTFA, because the quote made my knee jerk and my brain think OFFS! "to suffer from willy-nilly software development by individuals who have not been screened, approved, and trained by corporate human resources professionals."
Firstly, what does HR know about software development? Secondly, have they forgotten that much of this IT stuff has started form individuals developing stuff willy-nilly in basements and sheds around the world?
I've had a gutsful of companies and governments sidelining the individual for the sake of a few large corporations. I was going to say I think it's about time we (the willy-nilly developers) stood up to be counted, but I don't think it would help. We'd have to storm the relevant summits or similar, and even then we'd be called terrorists. We're just consumers in their eyes, and the thought of the common people doing anything significant without their approval scares the shit out of them.
Hey cluemonger, go read my post again. We do have static IP. I don't give a shit how AOL runs their network, or how many sockets they hold open, as long as it doesn't affect me - and with their anal blocking policies, their 1337 email management skillz do affect me. And their customers who aren't getting email.
I estimate that the ratio of desireable email to spam+virus email being sent direct to mail exchangers from cable and DSL connections is on the order of 1 in 10000. That justifies dropping it all in the bit bucket.
And I disagree strongly. Tell me you would agree if one day, without warning, one of your customers couldn't contact you. Only he didn't know because it disappeared into the ether, and you didn't know because you don't run notifications due to the volume that gets junked. That email was a brief enquirey about a job he had in mind... that 2 years later was The Next Big Thing. Your justification just cost you millions. Or maybe it cost one of your customers instead, and he's just found out what happened... Hypothetical sure, but that's how it goes often enough.
The internet relies on cooperation. End users are not cooperating by keeping their machines secure and not under the control of spammers. Cable and DSL ISP's are not cooperating by stopping the flood of spam from their networks, for example comcast needs to have all their outgoing email blackholed until they get their house in order.
End users shouldn't need to know about that kind of thing. Honestly, if ISPs took their responsibility seriously, they'd block ports and be done with it. If one of their customers needs more access they can give it on request. But it won't happen here as long as we pay per MB...
They should be sending their outgoing email via their ISP's smtp servers, not direct-to-mx.
Why? The Internet is built on peer to peer networking. We have a registered domain, webservers, mailserver, and so on, and there's no reason that we should have to route through our upstream provider. We pay for a pipe, and that's all we need.
Cheers for the link. The problem is this - I contacted AOL and they didn't respond with the information you've just given me.
I'd whitelist with them, but for one crazy caveat they have "An organization's mail servers must send a minimum of 100 emails per month to maintain whitelist status." WTF? Makes it kinda hard for us foreign folks to get whitelisted when you only know 3 people on AOL accounts! 100 a month? I'd be lucky to send 100 a year.
I can route through my upstream provider, but a) I shouldn't have to, b) they are *really* painful to work with... For the few AOL accounts I'm in contact with, I'd rather use Hotmail. If business needs access to AOL (and others) we can look into re-routing, but for now it's just an irritation. Only seems to be a few US ISPs doing it so far...
Thanks for the lack of insight. As I'm sure you're aware, a lot of personal mail goes via work accounts, so it *is* a problem. Arrogantly calling AOL users clueless doesn't help anything either. I'm dealing with guys who like cars here, not computer geeks. When the average computer tool can build a 10 second car, I'll start worrying about car guys getting their IT clues sorted out.
I think you're wrong about that. As another AC posted, it seems that AOL is blocking generic netblocks. I don't run mailing lists, I don't have anything remotely close to spam going on, not even customer mailouts and such. Strickly low volume traffic (10s a day, at most), mostly to our distributors. There's no way we've sent an AOL member 200 messages or 400 to their network in a day.
However it seems that I share a netblock with home ADSL users, some of which are probably pwned, so I'm guessing that's why they've shut us out. Like I've posted already, mail from out machine to theirs disappears into the void, and is not bounced. At any rate, we are not in the US, so I suspect they apply different rules...
Yeh, but you shouldn't need to. The 'net is supposed to be open and flexible, not limited to some big name companies and service providers. There's not all that many communications companies out there, so how long before it's efectively a closed network? And then how long before you have to pay to route through your ISPs servers?
Seems like a good idea at first look, but it's not. Here's why: lots of small businesses run their systems on static IPs which ISPs allocate within their dynamic residential netblocks. Without *very* thorough checking it's a bad idea... but who cares right, I mean, you'll just be blocking some small time companies... nobody who matters, right?
I can't send email to *anyone* at AOL now, despite running an OpenBSD firewalled Linux server for our business. It's doesn't even bounce, just disappears into the void. There are *no* Windows worms or spam coming out of my network, but some ass at AOL decided to block the whole ADSL subnet anyway. Nice way to break the Internet guys. And THANKS AOL for replying to my question about it - NOT! The arrogance of IT geeks and uninformed management strikes again. How about thinking a little harder about it, and implementing reverse host checks based on sender address, or rate limiting with temporary blocking - a real email server can cope with that just fine. There's lots of alternatives other than just shutting yourself off from a chunk of the Internet.
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True that. I've actually noticed many sites now have a notice saying "NO we will NOT port this to any other platform"! That's amazing stuff to me. I see an opportunity to "get in on the ground floor" of the commercial Linux software market, while these guys see a bunch of customers who won't quit bugging them. Linux is growing, Mac is growing, Windows is stagnating. Wake up app vendors, because if you don't get portable you're probably toast in a couple of years.
You don't "use" nukes either, well, not since you dropped two on Japan, but you certainly have all of the options at your disposal. If chemical or biological weapons were more effective for a given scenario I've no doubt the US would use them.
That's what I don't understand - the banks are paying some IT dudes serious coin for their "secure" online banking systems, yet these same clowns are happy to run an IE only system? Presumable it's justified for support reasons, but it strikes me as basically unethical. They KNOW Internet Explorer is junk, but they stipulate it's use anyway!
It's the IT equivilant of a doctor prescribing drugs with known bad side effects, when there's perfectly good alternatives. If anyone get's pwned on an IE only banking site, the bank had better be paying for it.
That's my point. It shouldn't be a salable item - an asset - and it's management shouldn't have been irrevocably given to a private company like InfoCom.
.tv scenario was a friggin bad joke.
It's like delegating management of the +964 country code to a business that gets into legal trouble, then they decide they want to sell the area code back to the country it represents. They're effectively blocking access to that country through normal means. It ridiculous. ICANN should be able to redelegate the management of the TLD to someone capable of doing the job - and it should NOT be an asset to be profited from. Yes, I think the
That would be dependant on InfoCom persuing legal action though wouldn't it? I mean, if ICANN went ahead and did their thing, with a gentleman's agreement from the InfoCom guys this could be sorted out tomorrow. But as I posted previously, I don't think that will happen because now that Iraq is independant the .iq TLD has some market value - and it doesn't cost InfoCom anything to hold onto it.
Well, boo hoo. This is about Iraq, not the US legal system. If InfoCom wants to get pissy about it who cares?
So the only limits are on AFP? One question then - does netatalk work with OS-X server?
Then why do it? It seems to me it's just implementing new technology for the sake of it. In situations like these I have to wonder who's got shares and interests in the companies involved...
So why can't they just take it back? ICANN should just forget InfoCom exists and pass the TLD to the Iraqi Goverment to do whatever they want with. Why is it even an issue? Oh right, because it's suddenly worth something now the country is free of Saddam and finally under it's own Government.
That used to work. It doesn't seem to any more. These days The Powers That Be would rather "clamp down" and have "zero tolerance" for those pesky law breakers. Actually amending the laws would be like admitted they were wrong or something, so they just make additional new ones instead.
No, it's worse than that. For us geeks, SMTP is about the extent of it, but for Joe and Jane Average the problem extends to their whole machine. Virus infected and malware ridden machines that are unusable aside from viewing porn popups. It's hitting the grassroots first-experience people, and it'll kill the consumer Windows market if nothing else. Maybe not such a bad thing in itself, but still, these are the people the spammers are trying to reach - the mythical "consumer". They're shitting in their own nests, and too dazzled by a few $ to realize it.
That said, how about setting up an anonymous spammer bounty fund?
Why not? I mean, it's not we've got anything to hide, right? They'll only get the bad people, right? Right?
Can you think of a better reason?
Or even Firewire or USB or something...
I agree, and I'll still agree when we're both sent to prison.
"Advice" in political terms is usually another way of saying "veiled threat". Many of the companies pushing for software patents are American. Big EU software houses like SAP *don't want them*, but the US is trying to look after it's own big IT businesses. If EU doesn't bend over, there may be trade or policy repercussions.
I didn't RTFA, because the quote made my knee jerk and my brain think OFFS! "to suffer from willy-nilly software development by individuals who have not been screened, approved, and trained by corporate human resources professionals." Firstly, what does HR know about software development? Secondly, have they forgotten that much of this IT stuff has started form individuals developing stuff willy-nilly in basements and sheds around the world?
I've had a gutsful of companies and governments sidelining the individual for the sake of a few large corporations. I was going to say I think it's about time we (the willy-nilly developers) stood up to be counted, but I don't think it would help. We'd have to storm the relevant summits or similar, and even then we'd be called terrorists. We're just consumers in their eyes, and the thought of the common people doing anything significant without their approval scares the shit out of them.
Perhaps anything you post too? Does this mean all my comments are belong to Slashdot now?
Hey cluemonger, go read my post again. We do have static IP. I don't give a shit how AOL runs their network, or how many sockets they hold open, as long as it doesn't affect me - and with their anal blocking policies, their 1337 email management skillz do affect me. And their customers who aren't getting email.
I estimate that the ratio of desireable email to spam+virus email being sent direct to mail exchangers from cable and DSL connections is on the order of 1 in 10000. That justifies dropping it all in the bit bucket.
And I disagree strongly. Tell me you would agree if one day, without warning, one of your customers couldn't contact you. Only he didn't know because it disappeared into the ether, and you didn't know because you don't run notifications due to the volume that gets junked. That email was a brief enquirey about a job he had in mind... that 2 years later was The Next Big Thing. Your justification just cost you millions. Or maybe it cost one of your customers instead, and he's just found out what happened... Hypothetical sure, but that's how it goes often enough.
The internet relies on cooperation. End users are not cooperating by keeping their machines secure and not under the control of spammers. Cable and DSL ISP's are not cooperating by stopping the flood of spam from their networks, for example comcast needs to have all their outgoing email blackholed until they get their house in order.
End users shouldn't need to know about that kind of thing. Honestly, if ISPs took their responsibility seriously, they'd block ports and be done with it. If one of their customers needs more access they can give it on request. But it won't happen here as long as we pay per MB...
They should be sending their outgoing email via their ISP's smtp servers, not direct-to-mx.
Why? The Internet is built on peer to peer networking. We have a registered domain, webservers, mailserver, and so on, and there's no reason that we should have to route through our upstream provider. We pay for a pipe, and that's all we need.
Cheers for the link. The problem is this - I contacted AOL and they didn't respond with the information you've just given me.
I'd whitelist with them, but for one crazy caveat they have "An organization's mail servers must send a minimum of 100 emails per month to maintain whitelist status." WTF? Makes it kinda hard for us foreign folks to get whitelisted when you only know 3 people on AOL accounts! 100 a month? I'd be lucky to send 100 a year.
I can route through my upstream provider, but a) I shouldn't have to, b) they are *really* painful to work with... For the few AOL accounts I'm in contact with, I'd rather use Hotmail. If business needs access to AOL (and others) we can look into re-routing, but for now it's just an irritation. Only seems to be a few US ISPs doing it so far...
Thanks for the lack of insight. As I'm sure you're aware, a lot of personal mail goes via work accounts, so it *is* a problem. Arrogantly calling AOL users clueless doesn't help anything either. I'm dealing with guys who like cars here, not computer geeks. When the average computer tool can build a 10 second car, I'll start worrying about car guys getting their IT clues sorted out.
I think you're wrong about that. As another AC posted, it seems that AOL is blocking generic netblocks. I don't run mailing lists, I don't have anything remotely close to spam going on, not even customer mailouts and such. Strickly low volume traffic (10s a day, at most), mostly to our distributors. There's no way we've sent an AOL member 200 messages or 400 to their network in a day.
However it seems that I share a netblock with home ADSL users, some of which are probably pwned, so I'm guessing that's why they've shut us out. Like I've posted already, mail from out machine to theirs disappears into the void, and is not bounced. At any rate, we are not in the US, so I suspect they apply different rules...
Doesn't work perfectly if the host accepts the mail and then discards it. It appears that AOL "manages" unwanted mail this way.
Yeh, but you shouldn't need to. The 'net is supposed to be open and flexible, not limited to some big name companies and service providers. There's not all that many communications companies out there, so how long before it's efectively a closed network? And then how long before you have to pay to route through your ISPs servers?
Seems like a good idea at first look, but it's not. Here's why: lots of small businesses run their systems on static IPs which ISPs allocate within their dynamic residential netblocks. Without *very* thorough checking it's a bad idea... but who cares right, I mean, you'll just be blocking some small time companies... nobody who matters, right?
I can't send email to *anyone* at AOL now, despite running an OpenBSD firewalled Linux server for our business. It's doesn't even bounce, just disappears into the void. There are *no* Windows worms or spam coming out of my network, but some ass at AOL decided to block the whole ADSL subnet anyway. Nice way to break the Internet guys. And THANKS AOL for replying to my question about it - NOT! The arrogance of IT geeks and uninformed management strikes again. How about thinking a little harder about it, and implementing reverse host checks based on sender address, or rate limiting with temporary blocking - a real email server can cope with that just fine. There's lots of alternatives other than just shutting yourself off from a chunk of the Internet.