I don't understand what there is for the government to secure on the internet?
I've been on the internet in one incarnation or another for at least 15 years now and have yet to see anything that really needs to be secured. The one time I had a problem with a company, I just called VISA and they did a charge-back with no problems.
I'm still waiting for this "scary boogeyman internet" they keep talking about. You know, the one that rapes and kills your daughter, poisons your dog and makes you build pipe-bombs and steals your identity and robs your bank account.
People need to have a better idea of what is going on with their money. This includes uncle sam robbing you blind. I'll do my own taxes, thanks. No matter how simple.
I'll tell you a really good way to simply it for everyone. Stop giving out tax credits to promote people squatting out half a dozen kids. Stop giving out credits and incentives just because a couple of stupid kids get hitched. Stop giving out incentives, period. Next, stick in a flat tax. You don't have to be a genius to realize that 10% of $50,000,000 is a lot more than 10% of $40,000,000.
Your tax process could take place on a 3x5 index card. Subtract the flat rate from your income and pay the result. Simple!
You are speaking of a different situation. Blocking a network that is repeatedly found to be spam-friendly is completely different than blocking an entire network based on one single complaint, one time about that company.
I'm all for blasting chornic offenders, even if it takes out some innocents. But there needs to be some occasional leeway because even the best of hosts will wind up victims of a creative spammer every few years.
That's the point - it doesn't matter how fast you respond to a spammer. If you ditch the spammer instantly, you're still going to end up on the list indefinately. In the case I cited, the spammer was kicked off within hours. I'm sure he was off to some other unwitting place to spam from while the rest of us went weeks without being able to send from our servers.
How is it an incentive for admins to be "responsive" when dealing with spammers if you're going to punish everyone within a certain radius for days or weeks even if the problem was terminated within hours?
What exactly is so wrong with blocking an IP at a time? You do away with the innocent bystanders while still nailing the spammers. Anyway, the reason they block the entire subnet has NOTHING TO DO WITH PREVENTING SPAM. It's merely a way of pissing off enough legitimate people to force the bad person to be dealt with (even if they've already been dealt with or it was an honestly unavoidable situation or what have you).
If you've identified chronically spam-friendly hosts and want to widen your net for them, that's great. But don't take out the entire neighborhood because of one bad neighbor.
You, however, will gladly assume the role of telling peopel to fuck off on behalf of your tens of thousands or millions of mail users on the boxes you administer, though. And that's the point.
The shotgun approach is a terrible approach and the only people who act like dicks about it are those who have never been an innocent bystander victimized by it. Christ, a shotgun would at least be more precise.
1) They're based in the UK. 2) They're just "making a list". 3) Implementing the list to block mail is "voluntary".
You know - *cough* - It's sort of how it's okay to go around pointing fingers at people and shouting "CHILD MOLESTOR!" - because no matter how much you slander someone, it's up to the individual to believe it and the blame is on that person, not the finger-pointer.
Providers don't have a choice very often. It's incredibly easy for someone to use any number of credit cards (even stolen ones that haven't been reported) and various false identities to purchase hosting accounts. If a provider doesn't respond and just keeps letting the spammer have at it, that's fine. But if someone is cut off quickly, then restore their SBL credibility immediately. Duh.
Anyway, they shouldn't be blocking entire blocks of IPs. That doesn't even make sense. What does one guy on one IP out of hundreds or thousands who spammed for most of a day before he got caught have to do with my server which has run clean and reliable and secure and in good faith (including SPF and everything else) for the better part of a decade?
As Paul Graham already stated, this is just a strongarm tactic to harass as many innocent parties as possible. There's no other explanation for it. Are two spammers really worth denying tens of thousands of (in the case of Paul Graham) Yahoo customers?
There are bad-actors; rogue hosts. It's pretty clear when you're dealing with one who isn't. And if you were quick to put people on the SBL list, then take them down just as quickly. It is unacceptable that it took three weeks after the incident for them to finally remove them from the list.
The best solution is to not let your blacklist be the final word. I use SBL on my server (though I dislike them due to personal experiences when a network I was on had a spammer on it for a day and it took three weeks for my own mail from my own email server on my own rackmount to flow again) - but I don't block mail just because it's on the list. I count it in the final spamassassin score. So if you are on the list, but little or nothing about the content seems to be spam - no problem.
If you are from a blacklist and your message has lots of chick-scratch in it or other spammer tricks and it generally looks like a piece of spam, it's more likely to be caught and blocked.
But using the SBL alone and giving it the final decision over accepting mail is just giving it way too much power.
Oh, NEAT. So you can afford the downtime of a service/site that must be available 99.999% of the time to find and move to another colo provider and deal with weeks of inavailability inbetween (due to the SBL block) every time SBL decides to block a slew of subnets around you just because some jerkoff decided to spam from it?
I'm glad you're so flexible. In the real world, most of us aren't.
John Reid of the SBL told me this wasn't true-- that the SBL was still clean, and that they only blacklisted hosting companies' mail servers when they were spam hosts who took on innocent users as camouflage:
He is right. That definitely is NOT how SBL actually operates. I have a site that is heavily trafficked (millions per month) and they blocked my email (from my own personal server) that has delivered mail for my site for seven years with absolutely no outgoing spam or relaying having ever occurred in its entire life.
However, a spammer with false credentials faked his way into a hosting account with my colo provider and as a result, SBL blocked multiple entire submnets, rendering my entire site and service useless for almost an entire month (we deal with auctions, meaning nobody was getting closed notices, won notices, outbid notices, addresses to send payment, registration emails, lost password emails - and when they complained, I couldn't respond to help them and explain it to them).
SBL couldn't have cared less. As far as they are concerned, if one IP is a source of spam, they all are. And they'll get to fixing it in their own damn sweet time.
But the defense of SBL fan-boys is typically "well it's VOLUNTARY!".
Yes, it would be a troll, if I hadn't clearly admitted I hadn't touched the distro in eight years.
And actually, I've been involved with RH a lot in the last few years professionally. But not hands-on.
If I were a corporation, I'd probably choose Red Hat. Especially if I needed a contract for support and such. But my post was clearly made as an individual who would be choosing distros for desktop/personal/private server usage. And in that regard, there are so many other great options out there that are not hindered or controlled in any way whatsoever. And I don't mean that in some RMS zealot sort of way, either (although I do use Debian almost exclusively).
I had considered going with RedHat as a desktop awhile back, but they dropped to the Fedora situation almost immediately after that and I decided I wasn't interested. Maybe that will change as things evolve more, but for the time being, it's too tied to RH as an enterprise entity for me to care for it.
Hey kids! Let's all go down to South California for the day! Michael Jackson is throwing a pool party and we can all skinny dip in his pool! And if we're lucky, he might share some jesus juice and duck-butter with us at the end of the day!
I have ordered my groceries online for the past five years and would never consider going back to a store again. I wish food was the same way. You can usually order pizza from ten different places, but only one is online (Papa Johns). Well, sometimes Pizza Hutt, but I think that's only in Kansas or something.
Most cities in the country, outside of maybe the very heart of Seattle and then LA, New York and Chicago - you can't really even order food by phone - much less the internet.
I've never lived in any place (including Portland) where you could have anything other than pizza delivered. It would be cool if you could have chinese, mexican, italian and other stuff delivered. Even better would be if you could have real food - not just some fast food el-cheapo crap.
But I guess there's no money in it so you still have to drive all over town for everything in the world. I guess it's still 1985.
I don't know . . . I think I still prefer my linux from a non commercial entity that isn't just throwing me bits and pieces to test as a guinea-pig for their corporate product.
I haven't used RedHat since 1997, but after the whole "enterprise" thing followed by the "fedora" program, I don't think I ever will.
Besides, there's so many other excellent distros out there, as long as you aren't hung-up with "but red hat is corporate, so we need to use it in our business!" thing.
Explorers die. Explorers take risk. But explore, we must. If our species doesn't get off this rock and expand, we put ourselves at the mercy whatever fate the rest of the cosmos throws at this planet.
As for nuclear power. What the fuck is wrong with that?! It's clean. It's safe. And there are plenty of developed nations that use it almost exclusively with astonishing success (Japan and France for two). Our problem is that a bunch of grieving mush-brained hippies only know that the word "nuclear" means "scary", because they saw some indian crying on TV as a kid or saw some little girl picking a flower in some retarded mushroom cloud commercial in the 60s.
Exactly. Imagine all of the amazing discoveries and accomplishments that would never have happened if we insisted on waiting until we could nearly gaurantee that not a single person would be killed or even hurt and that no property would be lost or destroyed or damaged.
Anyway, I'd rather die attempting to explore the universe outside of our little planet than die from cigerettes, cocaine or bigmacs.
The hair thing I don't get. I used to dye my hair all the time and if I felt like it, I'd do it now (I'm a software engineer, so I don't really deal face to face with customers). But I can understand outlandish stuff like disturbing piercings and other mods. Non-offensive tatts and hair color should not be a big deal, except in certain circumstances where you have to presend a very specific front to your clients. You know, you might not mind if the librarian or tech support chick has purple hair and twenty piercings - but you probably don't want the paralegal for your firm presenting herself (and your group) to customers with two spiked pink hair.
Except if you look at the product lineup of Hot Topic and Torrid, they're mostly preppy stuff now. Seriously, look at recent Torrid catalogues. It's all pretty-shiek. And CareBears are not goth/alt/whatever (yes, they actually sell those at hot topic).
No kidding. I'm all for individualism, but you still have to be presentable for the professional business environment. I don't feel sorry for people one bit if they stretch their ears down to their shoulders with various hoop guages or whatever, get insane amounts of tattoos all over, get very unconventional piercings that can't be covered up and so on and then whine about how they can't get a job anywhere but StarBucks and the record shop.
Look, you're an adult now. There are certain expectations put on you. If you don't want to adhere to the professional environment, start your own company or go work in a comic book shop.
Slashdot Mirror
This is computational clay. Not MAGIC clay.
I don't understand what there is for the government to secure on the internet?
I've been on the internet in one incarnation or another for at least 15 years now and have yet to see anything that really needs to be secured. The one time I had a problem with a company, I just called VISA and they did a charge-back with no problems.
I'm still waiting for this "scary boogeyman internet" they keep talking about. You know, the one that rapes and kills your daughter, poisons your dog and makes you build pipe-bombs and steals your identity and robs your bank account.
Sounds like a really bad idea, if you ask me.
People need to have a better idea of what is going on with their money. This includes uncle sam robbing you blind. I'll do my own taxes, thanks. No matter how simple.
I'll tell you a really good way to simply it for everyone. Stop giving out tax credits to promote people squatting out half a dozen kids. Stop giving out credits and incentives just because a couple of stupid kids get hitched. Stop giving out incentives, period. Next, stick in a flat tax. You don't have to be a genius to realize that 10% of $50,000,000 is a lot more than 10% of $40,000,000.
Your tax process could take place on a 3x5 index card. Subtract the flat rate from your income and pay the result. Simple!
You are speaking of a different situation. Blocking a network that is repeatedly found to be spam-friendly is completely different than blocking an entire network based on one single complaint, one time about that company.
I'm all for blasting chornic offenders, even if it takes out some innocents. But there needs to be some occasional leeway because even the best of hosts will wind up victims of a creative spammer every few years.
That's the point - it doesn't matter how fast you respond to a spammer. If you ditch the spammer instantly, you're still going to end up on the list indefinately. In the case I cited, the spammer was kicked off within hours. I'm sure he was off to some other unwitting place to spam from while the rest of us went weeks without being able to send from our servers.
How is it an incentive for admins to be "responsive" when dealing with spammers if you're going to punish everyone within a certain radius for days or weeks even if the problem was terminated within hours?
What exactly is so wrong with blocking an IP at a time? You do away with the innocent bystanders while still nailing the spammers. Anyway, the reason they block the entire subnet has NOTHING TO DO WITH PREVENTING SPAM. It's merely a way of pissing off enough legitimate people to force the bad person to be dealt with (even if they've already been dealt with or it was an honestly unavoidable situation or what have you).
If you've identified chronically spam-friendly hosts and want to widen your net for them, that's great. But don't take out the entire neighborhood because of one bad neighbor.
You, however, will gladly assume the role of telling peopel to fuck off on behalf of your tens of thousands or millions of mail users on the boxes you administer, though. And that's the point.
The shotgun approach is a terrible approach and the only people who act like dicks about it are those who have never been an innocent bystander victimized by it. Christ, a shotgun would at least be more precise.
Because:
1) They're based in the UK.
2) They're just "making a list".
3) Implementing the list to block mail is "voluntary".
You know - *cough* - It's sort of how it's okay to go around pointing fingers at people and shouting "CHILD MOLESTOR!" - because no matter how much you slander someone, it's up to the individual to believe it and the blame is on that person, not the finger-pointer.
Providers don't have a choice very often. It's incredibly easy for someone to use any number of credit cards (even stolen ones that haven't been reported) and various false identities to purchase hosting accounts. If a provider doesn't respond and just keeps letting the spammer have at it, that's fine. But if someone is cut off quickly, then restore their SBL credibility immediately. Duh.
Anyway, they shouldn't be blocking entire blocks of IPs. That doesn't even make sense. What does one guy on one IP out of hundreds or thousands who spammed for most of a day before he got caught have to do with my server which has run clean and reliable and secure and in good faith (including SPF and everything else) for the better part of a decade?
As Paul Graham already stated, this is just a strongarm tactic to harass as many innocent parties as possible. There's no other explanation for it. Are two spammers really worth denying tens of thousands of (in the case of Paul Graham) Yahoo customers?
There are bad-actors; rogue hosts. It's pretty clear when you're dealing with one who isn't. And if you were quick to put people on the SBL list, then take them down just as quickly. It is unacceptable that it took three weeks after the incident for them to finally remove them from the list.
By "more well-behaved" they, of course, mean "DRM capable"... Innovation is taking everyone else's great ideas and adding "DRM capable" to the name.
(Yes, I know there is a bit more to their proposal.)
The best solution is to not let your blacklist be the final word. I use SBL on my server (though I dislike them due to personal experiences when a network I was on had a spammer on it for a day and it took three weeks for my own mail from my own email server on my own rackmount to flow again) - but I don't block mail just because it's on the list. I count it in the final spamassassin score. So if you are on the list, but little or nothing about the content seems to be spam - no problem.
If you are from a blacklist and your message has lots of chick-scratch in it or other spammer tricks and it generally looks like a piece of spam, it's more likely to be caught and blocked.
But using the SBL alone and giving it the final decision over accepting mail is just giving it way too much power.
Oh, NEAT. So you can afford the downtime of a service/site that must be available 99.999% of the time to find and move to another colo provider and deal with weeks of inavailability inbetween (due to the SBL block) every time SBL decides to block a slew of subnets around you just because some jerkoff decided to spam from it?
I'm glad you're so flexible. In the real world, most of us aren't.
John Reid of the SBL told me this wasn't true-- that the SBL was still clean, and that they only blacklisted hosting companies' mail servers when they were spam hosts who took on innocent users as camouflage:
He is right. That definitely is NOT how SBL actually operates. I have a site that is heavily trafficked (millions per month) and they blocked my email (from my own personal server) that has delivered mail for my site for seven years with absolutely no outgoing spam or relaying having ever occurred in its entire life.
However, a spammer with false credentials faked his way into a hosting account with my colo provider and as a result, SBL blocked multiple entire submnets, rendering my entire site and service useless for almost an entire month (we deal with auctions, meaning nobody was getting closed notices, won notices, outbid notices, addresses to send payment, registration emails, lost password emails - and when they complained, I couldn't respond to help them and explain it to them).
SBL couldn't have cared less. As far as they are concerned, if one IP is a source of spam, they all are. And they'll get to fixing it in their own damn sweet time.
But the defense of SBL fan-boys is typically "well it's VOLUNTARY!".
Yeah. Whatever. Fuck off.
Yes, it would be a troll, if I hadn't clearly admitted I hadn't touched the distro in eight years.
And actually, I've been involved with RH a lot in the last few years professionally. But not hands-on.
If I were a corporation, I'd probably choose Red Hat. Especially if I needed a contract for support and such. But my post was clearly made as an individual who would be choosing distros for desktop/personal/private server usage. And in that regard, there are so many other great options out there that are not hindered or controlled in any way whatsoever. And I don't mean that in some RMS zealot sort of way, either (although I do use Debian almost exclusively).
I had considered going with RedHat as a desktop awhile back, but they dropped to the Fedora situation almost immediately after that and I decided I wasn't interested. Maybe that will change as things evolve more, but for the time being, it's too tied to RH as an enterprise entity for me to care for it.
You're thinking of transexual transylvania, you dope! ;)
Gee, I don't care for Fedora/Redhat. I must be a troll!
Someone mentioned in another thread that "most slashdotters are over the age of six". Clearly not an accurate statement.
There needs to be a "-1, Doesn't Support My Favorite Distro" mod.
Hey kids! Let's all go down to South California for the day! Michael Jackson is throwing a pool party and we can all skinny dip in his pool! And if we're lucky, he might share some jesus juice and duck-butter with us at the end of the day!
And with the money he saved, he can finally afford a maid.
I have ordered my groceries online for the past five years and would never consider going back to a store again. I wish food was the same way. You can usually order pizza from ten different places, but only one is online (Papa Johns). Well, sometimes Pizza Hutt, but I think that's only in Kansas or something.
Most cities in the country, outside of maybe the very heart of Seattle and then LA, New York and Chicago - you can't really even order food by phone - much less the internet.
I've never lived in any place (including Portland) where you could have anything other than pizza delivered. It would be cool if you could have chinese, mexican, italian and other stuff delivered. Even better would be if you could have real food - not just some fast food el-cheapo crap.
But I guess there's no money in it so you still have to drive all over town for everything in the world. I guess it's still 1985.
I don't know . . . I think I still prefer my linux from a non commercial entity that isn't just throwing me bits and pieces to test as a guinea-pig for their corporate product.
I haven't used RedHat since 1997, but after the whole "enterprise" thing followed by the "fedora" program, I don't think I ever will.
Besides, there's so many other excellent distros out there, as long as you aren't hung-up with "but red hat is corporate, so we need to use it in our business!" thing.
And that's exactly why we will stagnate.
Explorers die. Explorers take risk. But explore, we must. If our species doesn't get off this rock and expand, we put ourselves at the mercy whatever fate the rest of the cosmos throws at this planet.
As for nuclear power. What the fuck is wrong with that?! It's clean. It's safe. And there are plenty of developed nations that use it almost exclusively with astonishing success (Japan and France for two). Our problem is that a bunch of grieving mush-brained hippies only know that the word "nuclear" means "scary", because they saw some indian crying on TV as a kid or saw some little girl picking a flower in some retarded mushroom cloud commercial in the 60s.
Exactly. Imagine all of the amazing discoveries and accomplishments that would never have happened if we insisted on waiting until we could nearly gaurantee that not a single person would be killed or even hurt and that no property would be lost or destroyed or damaged.
Anyway, I'd rather die attempting to explore the universe outside of our little planet than die from cigerettes, cocaine or bigmacs.
The hair thing I don't get. I used to dye my hair all the time and if I felt like it, I'd do it now (I'm a software engineer, so I don't really deal face to face with customers). But I can understand outlandish stuff like disturbing piercings and other mods. Non-offensive tatts and hair color should not be a big deal, except in certain circumstances where you have to presend a very specific front to your clients. You know, you might not mind if the librarian or tech support chick has purple hair and twenty piercings - but you probably don't want the paralegal for your firm presenting herself (and your group) to customers with two spiked pink hair.
Except if you look at the product lineup of Hot Topic and Torrid, they're mostly preppy stuff now. Seriously, look at recent Torrid catalogues. It's all pretty-shiek. And CareBears are not goth/alt/whatever (yes, they actually sell those at hot topic).
No kidding. I'm all for individualism, but you still have to be presentable for the professional business environment. I don't feel sorry for people one bit if they stretch their ears down to their shoulders with various hoop guages or whatever, get insane amounts of tattoos all over, get very unconventional piercings that can't be covered up and so on and then whine about how they can't get a job anywhere but StarBucks and the record shop.
Look, you're an adult now. There are certain expectations put on you. If you don't want to adhere to the professional environment, start your own company or go work in a comic book shop.
Slashdot Dorks saw the words "date tree". Got the wrong idea. Thought, momentarily, they may still have hope! ;)