I signed up for the Do Not Call list when it went live.
Lucky for me, I find that I only get about 1 or 2 "dropped calls" recorded on my answering machine a day while I'm not home.
I think the Telezapper is helping to curb some of that.
The thing that *really* gets to me are those people who aren't covered by the Do Not Call restrictions. In my case, charities (Vets, State Police, local Firefighters, etc.).
You think they'd get the hint after asking them to not call any more and always saying "no thank you." But since they don't have to maintain a do not call list, they still call me back... every week, week in, week out.
For those people, I have the "Phone Butler" (which plays a pre-recorded message then hangs up on them), but I'm tired of getting those calls all the same.
Anyone else dealing with that sort of issue? Is there anything that can be done (really) to stop these repeated calls?
How is that any different except you have to update your aliases file (or whatever config) anytime you wish to create a new ID?
As least I can just log onto amazon and create me+amazon@myrealdomain.com without a thought.
Or, are you saying that mail to whomever1@whatever.com, whomever2@whatever.com will always forward on you you@myrealdomain.com?
It essentially is the same problem as having your "real" (final) e-mail address out there for the world to see... maybe worse, if you have it setup as a "catch-all." Filtered into a separate mailbox, you're still getting all the spam.
But, I think you'll agree, the solution isn't really in either of our setups... it is in nailing the spamming bastards to the walls. That would require better authentication/validation of sender identity and location. At least if we could trace the mail back to a real person, things would change in more of a hurry.
BTW, have you thought about implementing grey-listing in your postfix config? (Just in case you're not familiar: it associates a triplet with incoming mail... the sender, the receiver, and the originating IP). First time it sees a triplet, it logs it and rejects it with a 450 (temporary) error. Most spammers never bother with retries, so it can effectively bounce messages out. Real mail programs will retry... and on the second (and future) attempts, it'll just go through. Sure, it delays the mail a little, but it weeds out a *lot* of spam. 8)
One thing I can't recommend highly enough: address extensions.
You can turn them on in postfix easily. Then, it'll map anything that follows after the extension to your user mailbox. For instance, let's say you have stone@man.com
With address extensions, you could have (without changing a config file) stone+getlost@man.com, stone+slashdot@man.com, etc. Anything after the "extension" is dropped for delivery purposes, so all that mail would go into the "stone" user mailbox.
And if you start getting spam at, say, stone+spam_me_please@man.com, creation of clever forward file:.forward+spam_me_please
in your home directory with a single line:
"|exit 67"
will start bouncing all mails to that address as user not found.;)
Of course, it can be done more elegantly with the new Postfix content filtering (ie, bounce it *before* you fully accept the mail), but that's the stuff of advanced users (ie, you need to set some real time aside to do it properly).
Outside of mitigating your spam, if you use unique addresses at all locations, you can also figure out where the spammer picked it up! Nothing like having a finger to point at a real leak!;)
Spamassassin (with Bayesian filtering) is rocking sweet, too!
The heart of what I was trying to get at was that the quality would "most probably" be the lowest with little chance of improvement beyond that.
The reasoning why I say there's little chance of improvement is because if the company cared about longevity of the product, they'd build it themselves and keep the staff that has intimate knowledge of it around.
Trying to debug someone else's device drivers can be a rather time-consuming/difficult task. Why even get into that position when you can start with something you'll more likely be able to maintain because you built it yourself?
I hear ya' about the frustration with lack of driver support. 8P I'm all for something *anything* that will help build the base for support; I just think this approach will give us more drivers, but crappy quality (ie, the "well, it works 'most of the time' for 'most of the users' kind of crap).
And to your valid complaints about new devices not working under Linux, I have this to say: blame companies for buying into the Microsoft development mentality/toolset. Ironically, older hardware will more likely be supported under Linux not because it has been around longer, but because the "guts" aren't dependent on Windows DLL's. 8/
Assuming you have systems you want to backup, why not just put together a dedicated backup system?
This is the solution I've gone for, and it works well for my modest network at home. I have one system dedicated to being the "dump box" that rsync's to my other systems on a regular basis (cygwin on Windows systems helps me out here).
This way, I'd need hardware in both systems to fail simultaneously to lose data.
I suppose one could call it "Network RAID1." 8) But, it is cheap and simple.
Even more to the point, you won't be driving *quality*, you'll be driving for early availability... which is almost the antithesis of quality; quality takes time, the very thing that's being cut.
No, I agree. I don't think this model will work, either. If I want to "win," then I need to develop ANY solution that works as quickly as possible, irrespective of how kludgey it might be. Maintainability? Extensibility? I'd be looking for as hard-coded as I can get!
OTOH, I doubt the driver will be any less stable than this company can produce itself internally.;)
the "correct" answer is easy: the one you know best.
Unless you have other considerations like maintainability, reuse by coworkers, etc. But those considerations are external to any language you might choose.
But if I follow point 4...
4) Don't give your friends your email address
Then really why do I have an email addy in the first place?
Most of my spam I get are actually those annoying bounce-back messages you get from anti-virus filters. "The email you sent had the virus W32.Blaster" etc etc. The problem is that I run a solely Linux household, so it's probably coming from a virus on someone else's computer.
More to the point, even when careful with an e-mail address, how many times have you had "mom" find an interesting article on Yahoo and used their "oh, it is EASY to send this article to someone. Just put their email address in here and..." feature?
I'm very careful with my e-mail address. Problem is that other people just aren't. 8P
Re:Too easy to send
on
NYT on Spam Cops
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Well, actually you don't need a fast connection.
As a matter of fact, it would be undesirable for these slime to leave that much of a trail back to themselves (ie, the IP they've connected to the internet would be included in mail they originated from themselves).
No, instead a lot of them look for open relay mailservers. For the uninitiated, an open relay is a mail server that will accept mail from anybody to anybody.
Then the spammer sends *one* mail to the relay with 10,000 bcc addresses. The victim relay then has the task of sending out the 10,000 messages while the spammer looks for another open relay to send more spam through.
This is where it is even scarier that spammers are "hooking up" with virus writers. Sure, it used to be the virus would just send copies of itself to your friends and family. But, now they're getting sophisticated enough to become open relays for spamming or even *hosting the website* that the spam points to (!).
You're right... it *is* far to easy, but much easier than you even thought. >8(
Why not get a voice-recorder that supports voice-to-text conversion?
Nothing simpler than just speaking your notes into a tiny electronic device, then have a speech-to-text converter "type" it into your favorite word processing program.
I use one from Olympus that has really good record time/battery life.
[sarcasm] This is a GREAT idea! What will be next? See how closely your fingerprints match the fingerprints of your favorite celebrities? See how well your password stacks up against other users? Just fill out this form, put in your SS#, mother's maiden name, US address, credit card numbers, and the last 3 tax returns, and we'll show you if you look like Fred Flintstone... and we won't do anything else with your information... HONEST! [/sarcasm]
(For the humor impaired, and there seems to be an inordinate number of you, I'M KIDDING!;) )
Given your scenario of 15 people (yes, I know you just picked a number at random, so I'm not picking on that), it might take 15 years.
However, how long would it take a community of crackers to find an exploit?
The news that Cisco has had its router software ripped-off is relatively old news (!). Cisco sued Huawei Technologies for ripping off their router. I'll give you a hint: if you're using a router from Huawei, you use the Cisco manual.
Nobody believes in the mythical "man-month" anymore (ie, throw twice as many people at a task and it'll get done in half the time... WRONG), but with 15 THOUSAND people looking at this, I think they'd be able to not only find flaws in the code, but find flaws in the underlying architecture of how the software works (ie, protocol weaknesses). And these people would be looking to "mess with the internet," not just rob Cisco. 8/
Well, the original experiment was done with sensitive equipment firing a single photon at the slits. Diffraction of the single photon was observed on the other side. Here's a link
So, while this is normal with light going through slits, it was assumed to be different photons going through each slit and diffracting.
With a single photon, the conclusion was that, somehow, the photon was going through *both* slits simultaneously and interacting with itself on the other side... there was behavior of 2 photons.
The "conclusion" was that it was the different quantum possibilities interacting with each other that was being observed. Of course with a laser pointer, you have more than a single photon, so it doesn't drive home the perceived effect.
You might not buy it, but with that original experiment, the explanation seemed more plausible/better defended than in this guy's experiment. But, I think he was trying to do it to bring that concept into people's homes... not just "prove" the existence of parallel universes.
Because Comcast is saying they'll monitor/control your use of the WAP, does that mean they'll take responsibility if someone parks outside my house, cracks my WEP, and starts up a file-sharing service that gets the RIAA more pissed than hornets?
At least, that's the cover story I'd give when they came knocking on my door.;)
Rambus has some tasty royalty agreements with Intel. They tried to (together) strong-arm motherboard manufacturers into building boards with RDRAM support (and hence pay royalties to rambus and have Intel profit). That's why Intel was such an early adopter of the technology.
Thank goodness those manufacturers couldn't be strong-armed into paying those royalties.
At the time, RDRAM only provided 10% better performance over SDRAM and then only in limited applications (servers-type processing). Of course, it was also 4X the cost.
Once the world really refused to bite, even Intel cut their losses and started supporting DDR. It was quite the debacle!
This is *way* old-hat for this company.
Heck, they Sued Hitachi in 2000 for "patent infringement."
This company has only ever tried to make money from IP. And when that didn't work, well... they did it the old-fashioned American way: sue someone for it.
If it takes literally thousands of years to warm up enough that our coastlines change significantly from polar cap melting, I don't see the "rush" that would cause such carnage. Even if the change were to happen in hundreds of years... or even just fifty years, we're talking a mighty long time for people to slowly be pushed away from their living space.
More to your point, life will go on. 8) I'd be more concerned with loss of good growing land without adequate suppliment land coming available (ie, it becomes too hot in the "bread belt" regions, so core crops will need to be planted in other locations or different varieties that are heat/cold tolerant will need to be "engineered").
But as they say, won't we have a technical solution for all this by time it becomes an issue *IF* it ever does?
So what if I don't have to see the mail? That doesn't mean my mailserver isn't using cycles to talk to some originating server, transfer, store and eventually delete that spam. The only saving grace is I don't have to pay for bandwidth on a usage basis (cable modem is still, happily, "flat rate").
But what happens if that volume gets to be high enough that it starts to affect my ability to use the bandwidth for other things?
What we have available are basically work-arounds; we need a concrete solution that addresses the basic problem.
So what is the problem? People soliciting without you opting in? Deceitful mail designed to make you open it thinking it is from a friend? The sheer volume?
The real problem is we haven't found an effective way to trace this crap back to the people supposedly "making money" with these schemes.
Solve *that* issue... put a name, address, and bank account to that spam, and we'll clean this stuff up in a hurry!
Seems to me that the cable companies/media companies want you to purchase bundled products so they can justify higher prices.
To my subject, I'd equate it to record companies making you buy a whole CD of some artists songs when there's really only 1 or 2 hits on there that people want (I say "make" with respect to not offering just the one or two songs individually).
Sheesh... it *really* ticks me off that Disney is forcing cable companies to buy ESPN for big bucks if they want to carry the "kids" channels, especially since I have no interest in the sports channels (not a fan).
I don't know about you, but I'm sick of paying for channels I never watch.
Slashdot Mirror
I signed up for the Do Not Call list when it went live.
Lucky for me, I find that I only get about 1 or 2 "dropped calls" recorded on my answering machine a day while I'm not home.
I think the Telezapper is helping to curb some of that.
The thing that *really* gets to me are those people who aren't covered by the Do Not Call restrictions. In my case, charities (Vets, State Police, local Firefighters, etc.).
You think they'd get the hint after asking them to not call any more and always saying "no thank you." But since they don't have to maintain a do not call list, they still call me back... every week, week in, week out.
For those people, I have the "Phone Butler" (which plays a pre-recorded message then hangs up on them), but I'm tired of getting those calls all the same.
Anyone else dealing with that sort of issue?
Is there anything that can be done (really) to stop these repeated calls?
How is that any different except you have to update your aliases file (or whatever config) anytime you wish to create a new ID?
As least I can just log onto amazon and create me+amazon@myrealdomain.com without a thought.
Or, are you saying that mail to whomever1@whatever.com, whomever2@whatever.com will always forward on you you@myrealdomain.com?
It essentially is the same problem as having your "real" (final) e-mail address out there for the world to see... maybe worse, if you have it setup as a "catch-all." Filtered into a separate mailbox, you're still getting all the spam.
But, I think you'll agree, the solution isn't really in either of our setups... it is in nailing the spamming bastards to the walls. That would require better authentication/validation of sender identity and location. At least if we could trace the mail back to a real person, things would change in more of a hurry.
BTW, have you thought about implementing grey-listing in your postfix config? (Just in case you're not familiar: it associates a triplet with incoming mail... the sender, the receiver, and the originating IP). First time it sees a triplet, it logs it and rejects it with a 450 (temporary) error. Most spammers never bother with retries, so it can effectively bounce messages out. Real mail programs will retry... and on the second (and future) attempts, it'll just go through. Sure, it delays the mail a little, but it weeds out a *lot* of spam. 8)
I have my own mailserver running postfix.
.forward+spam_me_please
;)
;)
One thing I can't recommend highly enough: address extensions.
You can turn them on in postfix easily. Then, it'll map anything that follows after the extension to your user mailbox. For instance, let's say you have stone@man.com
With address extensions, you could have (without changing a config file) stone+getlost@man.com, stone+slashdot@man.com, etc. Anything after the "extension" is dropped for delivery purposes, so all that mail would go into the "stone" user mailbox.
And if you start getting spam at, say, stone+spam_me_please@man.com, creation of clever forward file:
in your home directory with a single line:
"|exit 67"
will start bouncing all mails to that address as user not found.
Of course, it can be done more elegantly with the new Postfix content filtering (ie, bounce it *before* you fully accept the mail), but that's the stuff of advanced users (ie, you need to set some real time aside to do it properly).
Outside of mitigating your spam, if you use unique addresses at all locations, you can also figure out where the spammer picked it up! Nothing like having a finger to point at a real leak!
Spamassassin (with Bayesian filtering) is rocking sweet, too!
Steven Manos... I guess the "fate" of fibre is in his "hands."
The heart of what I was trying to get at was that the quality would "most probably" be the lowest with little chance of improvement beyond that.
The reasoning why I say there's little chance of improvement is because if the company cared about longevity of the product, they'd build it themselves and keep the staff that has intimate knowledge of it around.
Trying to debug someone else's device drivers can be a rather time-consuming/difficult task. Why even get into that position when you can start with something you'll more likely be able to maintain because you built it yourself?
I hear ya' about the frustration with lack of driver support. 8P I'm all for something *anything* that will help build the base for support; I just think this approach will give us more drivers, but crappy quality (ie, the "well, it works 'most of the time' for 'most of the users' kind of crap).
And to your valid complaints about new devices not working under Linux, I have this to say: blame companies for buying into the Microsoft development mentality/toolset. Ironically, older hardware will more likely be supported under Linux not because it has been around longer, but because the "guts" aren't dependent on Windows DLL's. 8/
Assuming you have systems you want to backup, why not just put together a dedicated backup system?
This is the solution I've gone for, and it works well for my modest network at home. I have one system dedicated to being the "dump box" that rsync's to my other systems on a regular basis (cygwin on Windows systems helps me out here).
This way, I'd need hardware in both systems to fail simultaneously to lose data.
I suppose one could call it "Network RAID1." 8)
But, it is cheap and simple.
Even more to the point, you won't be driving *quality*, you'll be driving for early availability... which is almost the antithesis of quality; quality takes time, the very thing that's being cut.
;)
No, I agree. I don't think this model will work, either. If I want to "win," then I need to develop ANY solution that works as quickly as possible, irrespective of how kludgey it might be. Maintainability? Extensibility? I'd be looking for as hard-coded as I can get!
OTOH, I doubt the driver will be any less stable than this company can produce itself internally.
the "correct" answer is easy: the one you know best.
Unless you have other considerations like maintainability, reuse by coworkers, etc. But those considerations are external to any language you might choose.
But if I follow point 4...
4) Don't give your friends your email address
Then really why do I have an email addy in the first place?
Most of my spam I get are actually those annoying bounce-back messages you get from anti-virus filters. "The email you sent had the virus W32.Blaster" etc etc. The problem is that I run a solely Linux household, so it's probably coming from a virus on someone else's computer.
More to the point, even when careful with an e-mail address, how many times have you had "mom" find an interesting article on Yahoo and used their "oh, it is EASY to send this article to someone. Just put their email address in here and..." feature?
I'm very careful with my e-mail address. Problem is that other people just aren't. 8P
Well, actually you don't need a fast connection.
As a matter of fact, it would be undesirable for these slime to leave that much of a trail back to themselves (ie, the IP they've connected to the internet would be included in mail they originated from themselves).
No, instead a lot of them look for open relay mailservers. For the uninitiated, an open relay is a mail server that will accept mail from anybody to anybody.
Then the spammer sends *one* mail to the relay with 10,000 bcc addresses. The victim relay then has the task of sending out the 10,000 messages while the spammer looks for another open relay to send more spam through.
This is where it is even scarier that spammers are "hooking up" with virus writers. Sure, it used to be the virus would just send copies of itself to your friends and family. But, now they're getting sophisticated enough to become open relays for spamming or even *hosting the website* that the spam points to (!).
You're right... it *is* far to easy, but much easier than you even thought. >8(
Soon this should be remedied (sorta) with FarCry for AMD64
Won't be much variety, but could be a good starting point for benchmarking.
"Yeah! How do I get on the white list?"
Oooo..... that sounds bad on so many levels...
Why not get a voice-recorder that supports voice-to-text conversion?
Nothing simpler than just speaking your notes into a tiny electronic device, then have a speech-to-text converter "type" it into your favorite word processing program.
I use one from Olympus that has really good record time/battery life.
[sarcasm]
;) )
This is a GREAT idea! What will be next? See how closely your fingerprints match the fingerprints of your favorite celebrities? See how well your password stacks up against other users?
Just fill out this form, put in your SS#, mother's maiden name, US address, credit card numbers, and the last 3 tax returns, and we'll show you if you look like Fred Flintstone... and we won't do anything else with your information... HONEST!
[/sarcasm]
(For the humor impaired, and there seems to be an inordinate number of you, I'M KIDDING!
Given your scenario of 15 people (yes, I know you just picked a number at random, so I'm not picking on that), it might take 15 years.
However, how long would it take a community of crackers to find an exploit?
The news that Cisco has had its router software ripped-off is relatively old news (!). Cisco sued Huawei Technologies for ripping off their router. I'll give you a hint: if you're using a router from Huawei, you use the Cisco manual.
Nobody believes in the mythical "man-month" anymore (ie, throw twice as many people at a task and it'll get done in half the time... WRONG), but with 15 THOUSAND people looking at this, I think they'd be able to not only find flaws in the code, but find flaws in the underlying architecture of how the software works (ie, protocol weaknesses). And these people would be looking to "mess with the internet," not just rob Cisco. 8/
Well, the original experiment was done with sensitive equipment firing a single photon at the slits. Diffraction of the single photon was observed on the other side. Here's a link
So, while this is normal with light going through slits, it was assumed to be different photons going through each slit and diffracting.
With a single photon, the conclusion was that, somehow, the photon was going through *both* slits simultaneously and interacting with itself on the other side... there was behavior of 2 photons.
The "conclusion" was that it was the different quantum possibilities interacting with each other that was being observed. Of course with a laser pointer, you have more than a single photon, so it doesn't drive home the perceived effect.
You might not buy it, but with that original experiment, the explanation seemed more plausible/better defended than in this guy's experiment. But, I think he was trying to do it to bring that concept into people's homes... not just "prove" the existence of parallel universes.
Because Comcast is saying they'll monitor/control your use of the WAP, does that mean they'll take responsibility if someone parks outside my house, cracks my WEP, and starts up a file-sharing service that gets the RIAA more pissed than hornets?
;)
At least, that's the cover story I'd give when they came knocking on my door.
Rambus has some tasty royalty agreements with Intel. They tried to (together) strong-arm motherboard manufacturers into building boards with RDRAM support (and hence pay royalties to rambus and have Intel profit). That's why Intel was such an early adopter of the technology.
Thank goodness those manufacturers couldn't be strong-armed into paying those royalties.
At the time, RDRAM only provided 10% better performance over SDRAM and then only in limited applications (servers-type processing). Of course, it was also 4X the cost.
Once the world really refused to bite, even Intel cut their losses and started supporting DDR. It was quite the debacle!
This is *way* old-hat for this company. Heck, they Sued Hitachi in 2000 for "patent infringement."
This company has only ever tried to make money from IP. And when that didn't work, well... they did it the old-fashioned American way: sue someone for it.
Sheesh... shoot for tongue-in-cheek...
;) )
I think I need a Total Care Package to go with my Internet Protocol statement.
(still too subtle?
(From the article)
...the company is looking at problematic Internet-protocol addresses and finding ways to block them
;)
What's this new "Internet-protocol address," and how do I get one?!?
What ensuing chaos?
If it takes literally thousands of years to warm up enough that our coastlines change significantly from polar cap melting, I don't see the "rush" that would cause such carnage. Even if the change were to happen in hundreds of years... or even just fifty years, we're talking a mighty long time for people to slowly be pushed away from their living space.
More to your point, life will go on. 8) I'd be more concerned with loss of good growing land without adequate suppliment land coming available (ie, it becomes too hot in the "bread belt" regions, so core crops will need to be planted in other locations or different varieties that are heat/cold tolerant will need to be "engineered").
But as they say, won't we have a technical solution for all this by time it becomes an issue *IF* it ever does?
Filtering doesn't mitigate the problem.
So what if I don't have to see the mail? That doesn't mean my mailserver isn't using cycles to talk to some originating server, transfer, store and eventually delete that spam. The only saving grace is I don't have to pay for bandwidth on a usage basis (cable modem is still, happily, "flat rate").
But what happens if that volume gets to be high enough that it starts to affect my ability to use the bandwidth for other things?
What we have available are basically work-arounds; we need a concrete solution that addresses the basic problem.
So what is the problem? People soliciting without you opting in? Deceitful mail designed to make you open it thinking it is from a friend? The sheer volume?
The real problem is we haven't found an effective way to trace this crap back to the people supposedly "making money" with these schemes.
Solve *that* issue... put a name, address, and bank account to that spam, and we'll clean this stuff up in a hurry!
Read the article, but didn't see if the statute was broad because it focused on "wiring" or the "networking" side.
Would going wireless be a work-around if they kept the laws intact?
Seems to me that the cable companies/media companies want you to purchase bundled products so they can justify higher prices.
To my subject, I'd equate it to record companies making you buy a whole CD of some artists songs when there's really only 1 or 2 hits on there that people want (I say "make" with respect to not offering just the one or two songs individually).
Sheesh... it *really* ticks me off that Disney is forcing cable companies to buy ESPN for big bucks if they want to carry the "kids" channels, especially since I have no interest in the sports channels (not a fan).
I don't know about you, but I'm sick of paying for channels I never watch.