When buying exteranl USB/firewire enclosures for archiving / off-site backup, it's important to pay attention to whether the box uses an internal power supply or an external power brick.
Brick - Enclosure is smaller and easier to carry, but you have to keep track of the power brick as well or it's useless. If you go this route for long-term archival, make sure you own at least 3 identical units with interchangeable power bricks and store at least one power brick offsite along with the back up drive.
Built-in - Larger enclosure (although the CA-405U2 is small enough). Big advantage is that since it only requires a standard PC power cord, you now have one less thing to keep track of.
I'll second the opinion that it's best to use 5400rpm drives for external enclosures. While the CA-405U2 enclosure has a fan, some USB enclosures don't and will cook most 7200rpm drives unless you work in a fully air-conditioned office. A 5400rpm drive is a lot more forgiving.
But when I get ~5 piece of printed real mail, well, doesn't anyone seem to mind that?
That's because we know that the sender paid the USPS to deliver that mail. Sure, they get bulk mail rates, but at least there are expenses involved. Spam has a much lower cost to the sender, and if the sender breaks the rules (hijacks other machines or uses an open-relay) the sender doesn't even have to pay for the bandwidth used to send the spam. I don't know of any USPS offices that would allow someone to drop off a million letters without being both a known customer and with proper postage affixed.
Secondly, I have yet to see printed bulk mail that has a "track back" feature to determine whether or not it was accepted, opened, acted upon.
I still haven't figured out why the car stereo I bought a few weeks ago came with a remote control... There isn't one spot from in my car that you can't reach the buttons from.
My JVC MP3 CD player came with one as well.
I guess it's for the folks who are using it in a van / RV, or who are into the "sound scene" where they fill the car with speakers and need to stand a bit away.
As banks produce better and better online banking systems, is there still a place for Money / Quicken?
Yes. Online Banking only services a particular type of customer (the ones living from paycheck to paycheck, who only have a single bank account, no investments, a single mortgage). It doesn't take much to exceed what Online Banking is capable of.
I do all of my banking through Quicken (used to use CheckFree for bill payments). All but one of my monthly bills is entirely automatic and online (and I'm just being lazy about that one), which saves me from having to keep a bunch of stamps around and hand-write checks every month. If I had direct-deposit it would be perfect. The end-result is a very low-maintenance situtation with regards to getting my monthly bills paid on time.
Also, there's more to managing your money then knowing what you have today (which is about all that an online bank statement will show you). Tracking that data locally allows you to see (with pretty pictures!) what your finances looked like a year ago compared to now. But the biggest feature, since I have all of my payments automatically entered up to 30 days ahead, is that I tend to plan my cash flow 30-60 days in advance.
Much nicer then living paycheck to paycheck, a lot less stress too. My paychecks are only entered when I actually get paid, and as long as I have enough money in the bank to show a positive balance 30 days from now, I'm doing well enough.
As banks try to differentiate themselves in the online marketplace, you can bet they'll expand their offerings until they compete with the offerings from Intuit and Microsoft. Perhaps those firms should stop trying to sell millions of copies to customers and instead try and sell server based software to the banks to produce a customer interface, or are they already doing thatas well?
Most banks around here who are trying to differentiate themselves offer copies of Quicken with online banking.
Mind you, that still leaves the door open for someone clever to put an entry in the HOSTS file and do some nifty DNS man-in-the-middle trick, sending the unaware user somewhere else and trusting that "fake" windowsupdate.microsoft.com.
Um, if they have access to the machine so that they can rewrite the HOSTS file... isn't the game already over?
Now, breaking into the DNS server, or doing a DNS spoof attack would work well.
If you want to change where your mydocs folder points to (a network share, or just a shorter folder path), just right-click on it and pick properties, and its staring you in the face.
Except that it's amazing how many applications break or fail to install if "My Documents" isn't on the C: in the standard location. (I used to point MyDocs at a server share point so that all of the PCs that I use had a common MyDoc folder.)
MiniDiscs haven't caught on simply because Sony is dedicated to DRM. SCMS prevents you from making a copy of a copy (eg. you can't copy the MiniDisc you mixed together from several CDs), and they've really been seriously limiting the MD hardware.
Don't forget about licensing fees.
Sony has a bad habit of NIH, believing that they are design gods, and doing everything possible to lock the end-user into proprietary solutions.
(For the record, I'm one of those people who would've loved a data-oriented MD drive. They could've kicked Iomega out of the market and we could've all ended up with a superior replacement for the floppy disc.)
I'm rather worried that Sony is going to mis-manage Blu-Ray into the ground as well.
SPF is not an anti-spam system. SPF is an anti-joe-job system.
Gads yes. That's probably one of the biggest issues with the entire SPF idea. People either mistakenly think that it's an anti-spam solution, or else they're mislead to think so by others.
(In fact, my biggest complaint about SPF and some of the extensions is that they stray too far from the anti-joe-job duty and are trying to do anti-spam stuff.)
Hell, it's rather obvious once you suffer from a joe-job attack. After all, if you're able to specify which servers are authorized to handle incoming mail, why shouldn't you be able to specify which outbound servers are authorized as well?
The devil, of course, lies in the details of the implementation and how corner-cases are handled. (Witness the problems figuring out how to break forwarding in a minimal manner.)
How is this supposed to stop spam, then? The spammers will simply make sure they use a domain that doesn't have SPF records.
Simply put, it won't stop spam. (There, I've said it.)
It's not supposed to. The goal of SPF (and the other reverse-MX proposals) is to allow a domain owner to put a dent in joe-jobbing by whitelisting all of the mail servers that are authorized to send e-mail on behalf of the domain. As a mail admin, it lets me say: "Don't bother accepting any e-mail purporting to be from my domain unless it comes from machines X, Y, and Z".
It's the natural mirror of the MX record (which specify what machines are authorized to accept incoming mail for my domain).
You should be VPN'ing into your work LAN and sending the work e-mails via your employer's SMTP server. If you're officially working from home, then the company is responsible for making sure that you are able to do so. (Such as being able to send e-mail out as an agent on behalf of the company.)
But that's only if your employer publishes restrictive SPF records for their domain. If they choose not to publish, well, nobody is forcing them to. Your company just won't get the benefits of being protected from joe-jobs (or being able to point at SPF records to disprove a job-job attack).
AOL and some of the other large ISPs already have rules in place requiring companies to whitelist their outbound e-mail servers. This is just a better system of doing so, where the information gets stored in DNS under your direct control, rather then having to register with every ISP on the planet.
Actually, you can fault the bus systems here in the U.S. for poor user-interface.
Go check out the mass-transit system in the Netherlands sometime. The town that we were staying in had maps and time schedules at every bus stop. Which meant that you could get around using the bus system as easily as using most major city Subway / Train systems.
Here in the U.S. (Philly, NYC), none of the bus stops have maps or timetables, so unless you know how the system works, you can't wing it. If you're lucky, you might be able to find route maps and schedules on a web site.
I bet people would be more on board with public transportation if US gas prices were raised to the level they are in Europe(something like 5.xx USD per gallon.)
Land would also have to get a lot more expensive as well. Right now, it's very cheap for Wal*Mart to build a huge, single-floor store, with a huge flat parking lot. All of those huge stores with huge parking lots, mean that you have to walk a long ways if you want to visit multiple stores.
If land cost about 5x what it did now, places like Wal*Mart would be more likely to build smaller footprint, multi-story stores and multi-level parking decks. Which allows you to fit more stores per square mile (making walking a more reasonable proposition). Which also helps with mass-transit because a single bus stop can service multiple stores.
However, nobody wants to live in a dense urban area (like the 5 boroughs of NY) unless they have to.
A flight would cost around $600-$700 round-trip, and I'd probably have to change planes in Pittsburg or BWI. Plus, with all of the flight rules since 9/11, I have to be at the airport about 2 hours early. Serious time, money and hassle unless you happen to live somewhere where JetBlue etc. have setup shop.
Driving takes me around 5.5 hours door-to-door, and a lot of that driving is not pleasant (NJ Turnpike, Park Beltway). Company has to pay me around $100 for the mileage. However, I get the use of my car during the week that I'm up there.
If I take the train, it's about 6.5 hours door-to-door. But I get to spend 3.5 hours in one train, which lets me get at least some work done or catch a snooze. Then a 30-40 minute layover in NYC before I catch the 45 minute train out to the island. Cost for a round trip is around $120 and I have to depend on taxis / walking / friends to get around (not as difficult as it sounds).
In the NE corridor, passenger rail is almost competitive with the airlines. You just have to be going in the same direction as the rail lines are laid out. If I was commuting from upper VT to Long Island, I'd take the flight (the train trip is around 9 hours due to all the stops).
Not to jinx it, but what if some jerk starts spamming your abuse account?
That's what SpamBayes (or other client-side filtering) was invented for!
Seriously, our postmaster@, webmaster@, abuse@ addresses are all prime targets... all spammers do is take the list of all domain addresses in the world, prepend one of those 3 names on the front and then sell the list. Monitoring those accounts has always been an exercise in frustration.
I'm in the exact same boat. I use a laptop. I am on Telus' network during mornings and evenings, and during those times, access to port 25 is limited to one maching: smtp.telus.net. I *pay* for.Mac email (and webdav, and homepage) service, and they are denying me access to that service.
Which is a problem with the.Mac service not Telus. They need to add an alternative authenticated SMTP port to their service. Complain to them, because the better mail services (e.g. FuseMail) all have alternate ports (587, 2525) which do not fall victim to the port 25 block.
And if you didn't see the writing on the wall about port 25 blocking, then you haven't been paying close attention the last 2-3 years.
If you want unfettered internet access, it is called a T1. Look it up. You signed up for a less expensive service in exchange for a few restrictions. No consumer-level ISP is out to provide you 100% unfettered service. You should have checked your terms of service before you signed on, the ISPs I've seen have it pretty clear that subscribers are not allowed to run servers through that link.
(Or business-class DSL/cable. Unfortunately, my static IP falls into a dial-up block... sigh... but that's another battle.)
Exactly, if you want an unrestricted account then you need to be willing to pony up the monies to pay for the support costs associated with that account. Consumer-level service is cut-rate and anything that causes additional support costs will quickly be written out of the contract. To do anything else would quickly drive the ISP out of business. It's like complaining that you don't get first class service when you're flying in cattle class.
(I pay around 4x the going rate for my DSL service. When it goes down, I get to go to the head of the queue to get it fixed. They've never sent me an overusage notice or bothered me in any other way either.)
All they would need to to is smart-relay through the ISP's servers. Probably not all that hard to rewrite the zombies to do that, you know.
Which is good, because now the ISP has a central point where they can implement rate-limiting. Or at least maintain log files showing which users are sending large quantities of e-mail.
Even better, if the ISP forces SMTP authentication, it now becomes easy to tie a particular spam run back to an actual Comcast user account. Which gives the Comcast folks even more evidence for use if they decide to deactivate the customer's account.
(Most ISPs will probably install rate-limiting on their SMTP relay servers.)
My email account at work used to get about 100 spams/day earlier this year, now it's down to 60-70. (This is the spams that hits the spam filter, only 2-3 slips through each day).
I started the year at 100/day... now rapidly closing in on 200/day. The only thing we block at the mail gateway is executable attachments (anything that is typically used by virus/worm such as EXE, VBS, SCR).
But if you actually have a day job, are trying to get your personal laptop repaired, and have to rely on UPS residential service (or company depots) for this... Take a gun and shoot your laptop. It will be cheaper and less aggravating in the long run to buy a new one than to try to deal with UPS's poor residential service and their very limited depot hours.
Dunno about poor residential service... I'm on rather good terms with my regular UPS driver. It's the cover drivers that suck. (Fortunatlye I telecommute, so I'm almost always here to sign for packages.)
I'll agree 100% on their crappy customer counter hours at the local package centers. The one that delivers my packages is only open from 1pm to 5pm (I used to have to scoot out of work early to get there in time). I hated getting packages via UPS because they won't driver release stuff where I live and I always had to go to the customer counter.
FedEx has much nicer hours (and nicer/cleaner customer areas to boot). Even if I missed the delivery attempt, I could go up to the local package center after 6pm and get my package the same day. (Their customer counter was open until at least 8pm.)
Hopefully, if the Supreme Court doesn't overturn this decision, then at least people will get outraged enough that they will write to their lawmakers to quickly remedy this problem. It's not just Slashbots that worry about privacy in email, this is a clear enough danger that I'm sure the non-IT public would be shocked if they heard about what was going on.
Ha ha ha ha!
You want to know how lawmakers will "fix" it? Go look at what happened with analog cell phones and radio scanners. Instead of forcing the cell companies to protect their customer's voice traffic via encryption, they outlawed the devices which were able to eavesdrop on the plaintext transmissions.
Now, imagine them applying that same tortured logic to SMTP and e-mail.
This keeps coming up again and again, and every time I tell people: use https://www.hushmail.com!
Except that you're putting your keys (and trust) into the hands of a 3rd party. (Which is the problem with a lot of encryption systems, who holds the keys?)
Schneier reviewed their security and gave it the OK, so you know it's secure.
Slashdot Mirror
When buying exteranl USB/firewire enclosures for archiving / off-site backup, it's important to pay attention to whether the box uses an internal power supply or an external power brick.
Brick - Enclosure is smaller and easier to carry, but you have to keep track of the power brick as well or it's useless. If you go this route for long-term archival, make sure you own at least 3 identical units with interchangeable power bricks and store at least one power brick offsite along with the back up drive.
Built-in - Larger enclosure (although the CA-405U2 is small enough). Big advantage is that since it only requires a standard PC power cord, you now have one less thing to keep track of.
I'll second the opinion that it's best to use 5400rpm drives for external enclosures. While the CA-405U2 enclosure has a fan, some USB enclosures don't and will cook most 7200rpm drives unless you work in a fully air-conditioned office. A 5400rpm drive is a lot more forgiving.
But when I get ~5 piece of printed real mail, well, doesn't anyone seem to mind that?
That's because we know that the sender paid the USPS to deliver that mail. Sure, they get bulk mail rates, but at least there are expenses involved. Spam has a much lower cost to the sender, and if the sender breaks the rules (hijacks other machines or uses an open-relay) the sender doesn't even have to pay for the bandwidth used to send the spam. I don't know of any USPS offices that would allow someone to drop off a million letters without being both a known customer and with proper postage affixed.
Secondly, I have yet to see printed bulk mail that has a "track back" feature to determine whether or not it was accepted, opened, acted upon.
Best story of the bunch.
I'm amazed he didn't smell the plastic burning.
I still haven't figured out why the car stereo I bought a few weeks ago came with a remote control... There isn't one spot from in my car that you can't reach the buttons from.
My JVC MP3 CD player came with one as well.
I guess it's for the folks who are using it in a van / RV, or who are into the "sound scene" where they fill the car with speakers and need to stand a bit away.
I think openbsd already does that, when you look at the shadow file there you see something like $1$salt$md5sum ...
Looking at my fresh copy of "Practical Unix Internet Security" (O'Reilly), page 88:
That's a modular cyrpt format (MCF) for the password, with the sections delineated by '$':
First section: 1 = MD5, 2 = Blowfish
Second: Salt (limited to 16 characters)
Third: Encrypted password (sans salt)
For MD5, the salt is treated as a literal string, possibly base64 encoded. For Blowfish, it's a number indicating how many iterations. Some confustion about whether blowfish is indicated by "$2" or "$2a" or "$5" (may be implementation dependent).
As banks produce better and better online banking systems, is there still a place for Money / Quicken?
Yes. Online Banking only services a particular type of customer (the ones living from paycheck to paycheck, who only have a single bank account, no investments, a single mortgage). It doesn't take much to exceed what Online Banking is capable of.
I do all of my banking through Quicken (used to use CheckFree for bill payments). All but one of my monthly bills is entirely automatic and online (and I'm just being lazy about that one), which saves me from having to keep a bunch of stamps around and hand-write checks every month. If I had direct-deposit it would be perfect. The end-result is a very low-maintenance situtation with regards to getting my monthly bills paid on time.
Also, there's more to managing your money then knowing what you have today (which is about all that an online bank statement will show you). Tracking that data locally allows you to see (with pretty pictures!) what your finances looked like a year ago compared to now. But the biggest feature, since I have all of my payments automatically entered up to 30 days ahead, is that I tend to plan my cash flow 30-60 days in advance.
Much nicer then living paycheck to paycheck, a lot less stress too. My paychecks are only entered when I actually get paid, and as long as I have enough money in the bank to show a positive balance 30 days from now, I'm doing well enough.
As banks try to differentiate themselves in the online marketplace, you can bet they'll expand their offerings until they compete with the offerings from Intuit and Microsoft. Perhaps those firms should stop trying to sell millions of copies to customers and instead try and sell server based software to the banks to produce a customer interface, or are they already doing thatas well?
Most banks around here who are trying to differentiate themselves offer copies of Quicken with online banking.
Mind you, that still leaves the door open for someone clever to put an entry in the HOSTS file and do some nifty DNS man-in-the-middle trick, sending the unaware user somewhere else and trusting that "fake" windowsupdate.microsoft.com .
Um, if they have access to the machine so that they can rewrite the HOSTS file... isn't the game already over?
Now, breaking into the DNS server, or doing a DNS spoof attack would work well.
Slashdot should slow down with these articles until the freaks cool down....
You must be new here. (I kid!)
Slashdot depends on ad revenue to survive. Flamebait stories get higher page views, thus more revenue.
If you want to change where your mydocs folder points to (a network share, or just a shorter folder path), just right-click on it and pick properties, and its staring you in the face.
Except that it's amazing how many applications break or fail to install if "My Documents" isn't on the C: in the standard location. (I used to point MyDocs at a server share point so that all of the PCs that I use had a common MyDoc folder.)
MiniDiscs haven't caught on simply because Sony is dedicated to DRM. SCMS prevents you from making a copy of a copy (eg. you can't copy the MiniDisc you mixed together from several CDs), and they've really been seriously limiting the MD hardware.
Don't forget about licensing fees.
Sony has a bad habit of NIH, believing that they are design gods, and doing everything possible to lock the end-user into proprietary solutions.
(For the record, I'm one of those people who would've loved a data-oriented MD drive. They could've kicked Iomega out of the market and we could've all ended up with a superior replacement for the floppy disc.)
I'm rather worried that Sony is going to mis-manage Blu-Ray into the ground as well.
SPF is not an anti-spam system. SPF is an anti-joe-job system.
Gads yes. That's probably one of the biggest issues with the entire SPF idea. People either mistakenly think that it's an anti-spam solution, or else they're mislead to think so by others.
(In fact, my biggest complaint about SPF and some of the extensions is that they stray too far from the anti-joe-job duty and are trying to do anti-spam stuff.)
No it isn't really a new idea.
Hell, it's rather obvious once you suffer from a joe-job attack. After all, if you're able to specify which servers are authorized to handle incoming mail, why shouldn't you be able to specify which outbound servers are authorized as well?
The devil, of course, lies in the details of the implementation and how corner-cases are handled. (Witness the problems figuring out how to break forwarding in a minimal manner.)
How is this supposed to stop spam, then? The spammers will simply make sure they use a domain that doesn't have SPF records.
Simply put, it won't stop spam. (There, I've said it.)
It's not supposed to. The goal of SPF (and the other reverse-MX proposals) is to allow a domain owner to put a dent in joe-jobbing by whitelisting all of the mail servers that are authorized to send e-mail on behalf of the domain. As a mail admin, it lets me say: "Don't bother accepting any e-mail purporting to be from my domain unless it comes from machines X, Y, and Z".
It's the natural mirror of the MX record (which specify what machines are authorized to accept incoming mail for my domain).
but some of them have my work from-address.
You should be VPN'ing into your work LAN and sending the work e-mails via your employer's SMTP server. If you're officially working from home, then the company is responsible for making sure that you are able to do so. (Such as being able to send e-mail out as an agent on behalf of the company.)
But that's only if your employer publishes restrictive SPF records for their domain. If they choose not to publish, well, nobody is forcing them to. Your company just won't get the benefits of being protected from joe-jobs (or being able to point at SPF records to disprove a job-job attack).
AOL and some of the other large ISPs already have rules in place requiring companies to whitelist their outbound e-mail servers. This is just a better system of doing so, where the information gets stored in DNS under your direct control, rather then having to register with every ISP on the planet.
Actually, you can fault the bus systems here in the U.S. for poor user-interface.
Go check out the mass-transit system in the Netherlands sometime. The town that we were staying in had maps and time schedules at every bus stop. Which meant that you could get around using the bus system as easily as using most major city Subway / Train systems.
Here in the U.S. (Philly, NYC), none of the bus stops have maps or timetables, so unless you know how the system works, you can't wing it. If you're lucky, you might be able to find route maps and schedules on a web site.
I bet people would be more on board with public transportation if US gas prices were raised to the level they are in Europe(something like 5.xx USD per gallon.)
Land would also have to get a lot more expensive as well. Right now, it's very cheap for Wal*Mart to build a huge, single-floor store, with a huge flat parking lot. All of those huge stores with huge parking lots, mean that you have to walk a long ways if you want to visit multiple stores.
If land cost about 5x what it did now, places like Wal*Mart would be more likely to build smaller footprint, multi-story stores and multi-level parking decks. Which allows you to fit more stores per square mile (making walking a more reasonable proposition). Which also helps with mass-transit because a single bus stop can service multiple stores.
However, nobody wants to live in a dense urban area (like the 5 boroughs of NY) unless they have to.
Try Lancaster PA to NYC to Long Island sometime.
A flight would cost around $600-$700 round-trip, and I'd probably have to change planes in Pittsburg or BWI. Plus, with all of the flight rules since 9/11, I have to be at the airport about 2 hours early. Serious time, money and hassle unless you happen to live somewhere where JetBlue etc. have setup shop.
Driving takes me around 5.5 hours door-to-door, and a lot of that driving is not pleasant (NJ Turnpike, Park Beltway). Company has to pay me around $100 for the mileage. However, I get the use of my car during the week that I'm up there.
If I take the train, it's about 6.5 hours door-to-door. But I get to spend 3.5 hours in one train, which lets me get at least some work done or catch a snooze. Then a 30-40 minute layover in NYC before I catch the 45 minute train out to the island. Cost for a round trip is around $120 and I have to depend on taxis / walking / friends to get around (not as difficult as it sounds).
In the NE corridor, passenger rail is almost competitive with the airlines. You just have to be going in the same direction as the rail lines are laid out. If I was commuting from upper VT to Long Island, I'd take the flight (the train trip is around 9 hours due to all the stops).
Not to jinx it, but what if some jerk starts spamming your abuse account?
That's what SpamBayes (or other client-side filtering) was invented for!
Seriously, our postmaster@, webmaster@, abuse@ addresses are all prime targets... all spammers do is take the list of all domain addresses in the world, prepend one of those 3 names on the front and then sell the list. Monitoring those accounts has always been an exercise in frustration.
I'm in the exact same boat. I use a laptop. I am on Telus' network during mornings and evenings, and during those times, access to port 25 is limited to one maching: smtp.telus.net. I *pay* for .Mac email (and webdav, and homepage) service, and they are denying me access to that service.
.Mac service not Telus. They need to add an alternative authenticated SMTP port to their service. Complain to them, because the better mail services (e.g. FuseMail) all have alternate ports (587, 2525) which do not fall victim to the port 25 block.
Which is a problem with the
And if you didn't see the writing on the wall about port 25 blocking, then you haven't been paying close attention the last 2-3 years.
If you want unfettered internet access, it is called a T1. Look it up. You signed up for a less expensive service in exchange for a few restrictions. No consumer-level ISP is out to provide you 100% unfettered service. You should have checked your terms of service before you signed on, the ISPs I've seen have it pretty clear that subscribers are not allowed to run servers through that link.
(Or business-class DSL/cable. Unfortunately, my static IP falls into a dial-up block... sigh... but that's another battle.)
Exactly, if you want an unrestricted account then you need to be willing to pony up the monies to pay for the support costs associated with that account. Consumer-level service is cut-rate and anything that causes additional support costs will quickly be written out of the contract. To do anything else would quickly drive the ISP out of business. It's like complaining that you don't get first class service when you're flying in cattle class.
(I pay around 4x the going rate for my DSL service. When it goes down, I get to go to the head of the queue to get it fixed. They've never sent me an overusage notice or bothered me in any other way either.)
All they would need to to is smart-relay through the ISP's servers. Probably not all that hard to rewrite the zombies to do that, you know.
Which is good, because now the ISP has a central point where they can implement rate-limiting. Or at least maintain log files showing which users are sending large quantities of e-mail.
Even better, if the ISP forces SMTP authentication, it now becomes easy to tie a particular spam run back to an actual Comcast user account. Which gives the Comcast folks even more evidence for use if they decide to deactivate the customer's account.
(Most ISPs will probably install rate-limiting on their SMTP relay servers.)
My email account at work used to get about 100 spams/day earlier this year, now it's down to 60-70. (This is the spams that hits the spam filter, only 2-3 slips through each day).
I started the year at 100/day... now rapidly closing in on 200/day. The only thing we block at the mail gateway is executable attachments (anything that is typically used by virus/worm such as EXE, VBS, SCR).
SpamBayes lets 1-2 slip through every few days.
2003-10 2950 - 94/day
2003-11 3225 - 108/day
2003-12 3775 - 122/day
2004-01 3250 - 105/day
2004-02 3600 - 124/day
2004-03 4150 - 134/day
2004-04 5150 - 172/day
2004-05 5450 - 176/day
2004-06 6250 - 208/day
Oops, we just crossed the 200/day mark. And that's just my own work e-mail address, which doesn't count all of the other users.
We won't truly see the impact of the Comcat move until at least the end of July.
But if you actually have a day job, are trying to get your personal laptop repaired, and have to rely on UPS residential service (or company depots) for this... Take a gun and shoot your laptop. It will be cheaper and less aggravating in the long run to buy a new one than to try to deal with UPS's poor residential service and their very limited depot hours.
Dunno about poor residential service... I'm on rather good terms with my regular UPS driver. It's the cover drivers that suck. (Fortunatlye I telecommute, so I'm almost always here to sign for packages.)
I'll agree 100% on their crappy customer counter hours at the local package centers. The one that delivers my packages is only open from 1pm to 5pm (I used to have to scoot out of work early to get there in time). I hated getting packages via UPS because they won't driver release stuff where I live and I always had to go to the customer counter.
FedEx has much nicer hours (and nicer/cleaner customer areas to boot). Even if I missed the delivery attempt, I could go up to the local package center after 6pm and get my package the same day. (Their customer counter was open until at least 8pm.)
Hopefully, if the Supreme Court doesn't overturn this decision, then at least people will get outraged enough that they will write to their lawmakers to quickly remedy this problem. It's not just Slashbots that worry about privacy in email, this is a clear enough danger that I'm sure the non-IT public would be shocked if they heard about what was going on.
Ha ha ha ha!
You want to know how lawmakers will "fix" it? Go look at what happened with analog cell phones and radio scanners. Instead of forcing the cell companies to protect their customer's voice traffic via encryption, they outlawed the devices which were able to eavesdrop on the plaintext transmissions.
Now, imagine them applying that same tortured logic to SMTP and e-mail.
This keeps coming up again and again, and every time I tell people: use https://www.hushmail.com!
Except that you're putting your keys (and trust) into the hands of a 3rd party. (Which is the problem with a lot of encryption systems, who holds the keys?)
Schneier reviewed their security and gave it the OK, so you know it's secure.
Show me the link or point me to the article.