You realize by using Mozilla, some sites written for IE (*cough*banks*cough*) may function improperly.
And this has annoyed me no end! I could use my bank with Mozilla, if only they made their fancy javascript popup menus a little more workable with Mozilla. As it is I'm forced to use IE to do my banking running its gauntlet of risks or *cough* go into a branch.:(
After reading the article I got the distinct impression that there are no patches available yet to fix this problem. In the part where they said there are no patches to fix this problem.
"This time, however, the flaws affect every user of Internet Explorer, because Microsoft has not yet released a patch."
must admit that I am not upto date on these new anti-spam software packages, which operate on the server side. However, what is the probability of real mail getting rejected by these things.
My ISP introduced SpamAssasin for their mail server, which each user could selectivly turn on and off on. If your mail was classified as SPAM by it it would insert a SPAM tag into the mail, which your local mail client could use to classify the mail and move it out of the inbox.
However I found that their configuration of it was too broad for it to be useful for my purposes. Most of my mail from mailing lists (HTML formatted, remove me links) would be classified as SPAM. Normally this wouldn't be such a bad thing as I still got my mail and I could train Mozilla to recognise this mail as legitimate mail.
However my mail looked like it was uuencoded before it was sent to me and all I got was a nice block of characters that I couldn't read. And its not like I was going to unencode every SPAM mail I wanted to read. So in the end it became absolutely useless to me.
Of course I contacted my ISPs support and was subsequently told that nothing was wrong and it was probably just me. Of course having actually done SMTP programming, I knew that was complete bollocks, but there was no point arguing any further. They weren't interested in my problem. I havn't used it since.
What was good for the masses wasn't good for a sophisticated mail user. If you wan't to call getting HTML mail from a mail list sophisticated:) Mozilla Junk Mail classification is good enough for me.
I hate florescent lighting. I've worked in exactly one office which had lighting that I liked. Basically there was enough ambient light to see by without tripping over things on the floor, and everyone had a desk lamp that they could turn on and off as it suits them, say to read a document. During the day most of the ambient light came from windows! A luxury in some offices I've worked in.
I'm a contract programmer and I always seem to end up in lighting hell, surrounded by florescent lights glaring off my monitor. The rare times when I did get into the office first I wouldn't turn on the lights, and of course everyone was wondering what I was doing sitting in the dark...:O
Let me first take out those words that you just stuffed into my mouth.
I never talked about ISPs not having to suffer the consequences of their actions. I was talking about the innocent parties that get involved in these kind of fights having to suffer through no fault of their own. My previous posts are in support of measures to stop SPAM but I argued that the methods should be reasonable to stop innocent parties from being hurt. I believe that no amount of harm done to innocent parties is acceptable.
As for your other reaction to my comments may I draw your attention to the fact that I said my analogy was unreasonable already. My analogy was merely constructed to show how a reasonable assertion that collateral damage is acceptable can turn into real world nightmares for the people caught up in said damage. Perhaps I should of made it clearer that I wasn't comparing the blocking of network traffic to the abuses happening in Iraq.
Thats the thing about collatoral damage. Those doing the damage have the arrogant assumption that it is acceptable because the greater good is served and do not think that they have to take responsibility for it. Those being damaged are left to pick up the pieces and accept what has happened to them because the greater good is being served.
As current events go, I can quite easily and unreasonably extend this analogy to the actions of coalition forces in Iraq, with such things as prisoner abuse. But I suppose we shouldn't go there. I better not as I wouldn't want to be labelled as a troll.
I'm not trolling, (and I'm not have a jab at every BL project out there) but these "vigilant individuals" also create problems of their own as they counter the problems of SPAM, blacklisting without accountability and the like. Their actions can also degrade the quality of the internet. I'm not saying do nothing but sometimes doing a knee-jerk reaction can be just as harmful. The word vigilant, is too close to vigilante for my comfort:)
I am pleased however that more proactive steps are being taken by organisations such as Spamhaus in addressing the problem by both a technology and policy driven approach in combatting the problem. And that more prosecutions are happening. But I don't see the tide being turned anytime soon.
As for the internet dying, I don't see it. There is now to much commercial interest in it for corporations to sit idly by and do nothing about SPAM and other problems we encounter on the internet. Even our governments misguided steps at regulation, show that the internet is here to stay. It may transform in the future but I don't see it dying just yet.
I support this point of view that when it comes to user identifiable data, some one has to be accountable for its use and misuse. Personally I am more comfortable keeping a.net Pasport at the moment than I would be with using a service like MyUID. Despite the evils that large corporations commit.
My.net Passport that is used to identify myself to Bungie.net, XBox/Live, Hoyts and nineMSN and it works seamlessly in Mozilla. I actually quite like the single sign on functionality that passport provides. It does make using the net easier.
Given the poor adoption of the MS Passport system I wouldn't be all that suprised if it some day integrated with an open standards version of this pasport system, or they started making the use of it alot more appealing to other websites.
For those of us that know that it can be disabled. Again its the lowest common denominator scenario, where preventitive measuers are in place that only affect those who do not know how to get past them, or that a CD that they are using is doing this to their computer.
From an ethical standpoint I have a problem with the way that they are going about this. I am a consumer, not a lawyer that can interpret EULA's and terms of agreements and can retrieve every consequence to their agreement out of them. Sure I can get most of the stuff, but not everything. And lets not forget that this stuff can be written in a point 4 font or something to make it hard to read. Well thankfully I have 20-20 vision but others may not have that luxury or carry a magnifying glass with them when they go shopping for music. Surely there should be a law about legal agreements being written in a easy to understand manner for consumers, and even more surely if that purchase is going to install software onto your computer without explicit consent and potentially damage it, that should be front and centre in the agreement and that they be liable to any damage done to your computer because of it.
Again its business that doesn't seem to be capable of treating their customers with common decency. They don't seem to realise that you can treat your customers decently AND make money at the same time. Sure it might not be easy but with a market climate of screwing consumers, I would imagine there is a market for those customers that don't like being screwed over.
If only all the sites referenced by this article weren't slashdotted, I might have something more to say.:) I might of even said something different if there was a copy of any agreements to look at.
After reading what I wrote, it sounds like a rant... well I can live with that.
Such as pressing the Shift Key...
But I won't say that, that was said in the article...
What amused me was this line "The companies say they have long been aware of the work-around but that they were not trying to create an unhackable protection."
I suppose that if they only stop the lowest common denominator from doing the unauthorized copying its good enough for them.
However the handling of the iPod issue leaves something to be desired...
While end user filters are a necessity, they should be the last line of defense, because by the time the SPAM has reached you, it has stolen the bandwidth, CPU cycles and disk space to get there.
I currently sit in the "email itself must change" camp to fix the problem of SPAM. Of course its an impractical camp to sit in at the moment, but things are moving along slowly.
I can't see that addressing the problem of SPAM on an international law basis is going to yield any results in the near and not so near future.
Thankfully WebSphere Studio Application Developer is based on Eclipse and of course IBM has a long history with Eclipse. I hope that IBM will send in its lawyers to help out if Eclipse is threatened.
There are of course more than 1 Eclipse based products out there.
So in this scenario you say that companies are spending money to get others to spam for no inherent return? Which would imply that any remotely smart person/company would stop paying the spammers to spam and thus the financial incentive to spam goes away. Otherwise it just doesn't make sense. Someone is making money from it, thats why we have it. Thus follow the money and see where it takes you. A bit of social engineering to fix the problem wouldn't go astray either...
The power to fix the problem is with the people. The power to destroy the RIAA and MPAA is with the people. If we could orgainse every comsumer in the world to simply stop buying anything from anyone that is trying to screw them over and take away our rights then we can bring them to finnacial ruin or they will change to suit our needs of what we want. Of course this is incredibly naive thinking, it just isn't possible to do this at the moment. Usually something really bad has to happen before people will become coordinated enough to pull something like this off. What I am trying to say is that we created the SPAM problem and now we must fix it, and no amount of blocking is going to come anywhere near fixing it.
If you take the blocking argument to its conclusion everyone would have to be blocked to sending to everyone else, thus removing the usefullness of email in the first place. Anyway back to the topic at hand...
I believe your comments support my position that educating people and removing financial gains from spamming will eradicate the problem.
As for Telstra, blocking an IP address will of course, temporarily reduce SPAM but once the spammers are being blocked they will just move on to some other ISP or country to start spamming again. Thus a ISPs/countries ability to send legitamate email is ruined as the spammers move on to some other poor ISP/country to do the same thing to. Rinse, repeat.
And thus the world with there black lists have to catch up again allowing SPAM to move in. It wasn't so long ago that Telstra's mail was crippled under the sheer load of SPAM that it was receiving and backlogs of mail lasting for over 24 hours had to be cleared before new mail could come through. Again the fact that SPAM is being received by anyone is proof that the blacklist approach doesn't work.
Will you be so bold as to tell me that not one Telstra customer is receiving SPAM at all anymore? If they could do that with such a broad range of customers then they should sell whatever they are doing a make some money...
But my major point is that the technical solutions to SPAM to date have done nothing to fix the SPAM problem at all... Do we have SPAM? Yes! Thus the problem is not solved. Sure I have my Mozilaa Baysien filtering doing a good job but still SPAM gets through and more training is done to block it.
Blocking entire countries is not the future of SPAM control it is the past, and your own statement proves that it doesn't work. The SPAM I receive proves it doesn't work. All the research and articles on the internet stating that SPAM is increasing proves that this doesn't work.
Let me be clear: THIS DOES NOT WORK. It is the combined greed of the spammers and the stupidity of people buying stuff or being scammed by them that has created the SPAM problem, and that is the problem that must be addressed to stop the SPAM. Not taking arbitrary vigilante actions that hurts more people than it helps.
Unless of course your firewall disables the mail attachment as it goes through as does mine
I'm not trying to be a troll, I'm just saying that some firewall products do more than just firewall. I have successfully used common sense and a firewall to protect myself from virus's and other threats that plague my familiy and friends. Oh, I also don't use Outlook or IE unless I damn well have to:)
ZoneAlarm Pro does annoy me every now and then, but I have yet to find a replacement that doesn't annoy me more.
Plus there are anti-virus products that won't let users run a infected attachement, (and alert tech support if you try) so if there are users out there punishing you by clicking on every infected attachment in a mail then a product like that may just be for you...
Personally I use signed email myself, that way those that communicate with me, will always know that any email I send actually does come from me, and not through any other system. (No bulk mailing virus has ever hit me either just in case you were wondering). Some of my other friends also sign their mail.
I wouldn't mind seeing signed email being a standard that all users must abide using, however there is a large infrastructure cost in implementing this, and the average users knowledge on certificate technology is greatly lacking making end user management a nightmare. Some easier tools in this area that a certificate novice could understand better would certainly help.
The big plus I see is the tracking and identification of abuses with email. However I would not like to see this leading to any vigilante style justice that has so predominated many current anti-SPAM techniques. Im sure those innocent people with domains that have been wrongly classified as SPAM originators out of mistakes or spite would agree.
My current SPAM intake is 50-100 emails a day with about 10 passing through Mozilla Bayesian filtering.
Those however require a pre-requisite of an intelligent perhaps sober/un-drugged thief, mugger, etc to know that the system cannot be bypassed so easily...
I wouldnt want to bet my fingers on that happening...:)
I am not apposed to genetically engineered animals/plants etc, hell we have been doing such things for a long long time.
However with the current approaches being used I am gravely concerned that the research into the enviromental impact of these new breeds may have is not been properly determined. I am concerned that the chase for big profits NOW is outweighing the proper environmental studies into what the true effect of introducing these genetically modified creations into the environment will have. Once released into the environment, they will be hard to remove from the environment.
I'm not a raving environmentalist, just a concerned citizen.
Dear me! Since when has email actually been private...? I mean when I encrypt mine there is some security but the majority of mine still goes out plain text for the world to see...
There are so many steps along the way to sending and delivering email that if you were concerned about privacy, then don't use email, or start encrypting it...
Would you also say that the level of integration between IE and the Windows operating system (and third party apps) is the same as that of Mozilla and Konqueror?
My Mozilla, I can happily say, is quite independant of most of the software I use. I have a Adobe Acrobat plugin, integration to a download manager and the other common integration points for browsers and mail applications.
But considering the architecture of IE and how it relates to the Windows OS, integration testing must be of a high priority for the scope of things that can go wrong. An architecture that no doubt contributes to the many security flaws that IE also possesses.
Rather than worrying about the amount of testing that is done, what is important is the type and appropriatness of the testing that is done. Testing, as with many things, is about quality no quantity.
And advertising is regulated, at least in my country.
How many adds do you see on television that are pornagrphic and targeted to children? How many penis enlargement adds do you see on television every day?
Thats right, in television there are standards to be upheld and when violated, there is usually a backlash against the individuals concerned, well at least in my country:)
Well it won't actually take much for the Australian Police to find them. Some people at a place I used to work ordered XBox mod chips from overseas, and before they were allowed to receive them through customs they had to give their name, residential address and I think drivers license number to ensure that they as recipients were properly identified.
At the time however it wasn't clear as to why this information was needed, other than the fact that they ordered mod chips of course. At the time they did this mod chips were considered legal.
I hope the ACCC in Australia does something for the Australian people, as we all know that the primary purpose of the "security" of consoles is to provide for the construction of artificial markets to decrease competition and raise prices for consumers and revenue for the companies that manufacture them.
The thing that that hacks me off, is that console makers bundle the region encoding along with their security. Region encoding has nothing to do with security and everything to do with creating false markets which is something that should not be tolerated. Its about high time that the manufactures of these devices were forced to abandon region encoding all together so that consumers have the choice of what to purchase and where. The same goes for DVDs.
I will of course freely admit that most peoples use of mod chips however is for piracy which is not an act that I condone or participate in. I would be more than happy to have a console with strong security and no region locking. Its high time that these companies realise thats whats good for consumers is good for them. Stuffing consumers around will only hurt these companies in the long run.
Slashdot Mirror
And this has annoyed me no end! I could use my bank with Mozilla, if only they made their fancy javascript popup menus a little more workable with Mozilla. As it is I'm forced to use IE to do my banking running its gauntlet of risks or *cough* go into a branch. :(
"This time, however, the flaws affect every user of Internet Explorer, because Microsoft has not yet released a patch."
Short of installing another browser that is...
My ISP introduced SpamAssasin for their mail server, which each user could selectivly turn on and off on. If your mail was classified as SPAM by it it would insert a SPAM tag into the mail, which your local mail client could use to classify the mail and move it out of the inbox.
However I found that their configuration of it was too broad for it to be useful for my purposes. Most of my mail from mailing lists (HTML formatted, remove me links) would be classified as SPAM. Normally this wouldn't be such a bad thing as I still got my mail and I could train Mozilla to recognise this mail as legitimate mail.
However my mail looked like it was uuencoded before it was sent to me and all I got was a nice block of characters that I couldn't read. And its not like I was going to unencode every SPAM mail I wanted to read. So in the end it became absolutely useless to me.
Of course I contacted my ISPs support and was subsequently told that nothing was wrong and it was probably just me. Of course having actually done SMTP programming, I knew that was complete bollocks, but there was no point arguing any further. They weren't interested in my problem. I havn't used it since.
What was good for the masses wasn't good for a sophisticated mail user. If you wan't to call getting HTML mail from a mail list sophisticated :) Mozilla Junk Mail classification is good enough for me.
I'm a contract programmer and I always seem to end up in lighting hell, surrounded by florescent lights glaring off my monitor. The rare times when I did get into the office first I wouldn't turn on the lights, and of course everyone was wondering what I was doing sitting in the dark... :O
I too am a fan of high ceilings...
I never talked about ISPs not having to suffer the consequences of their actions. I was talking about the innocent parties that get involved in these kind of fights having to suffer through no fault of their own. My previous posts are in support of measures to stop SPAM but I argued that the methods should be reasonable to stop innocent parties from being hurt. I believe that no amount of harm done to innocent parties is acceptable.
As for your other reaction to my comments may I draw your attention to the fact that I said my analogy was unreasonable already. My analogy was merely constructed to show how a reasonable assertion that collateral damage is acceptable can turn into real world nightmares for the people caught up in said damage. Perhaps I should of made it clearer that I wasn't comparing the blocking of network traffic to the abuses happening in Iraq.
As current events go, I can quite easily and unreasonably extend this analogy to the actions of coalition forces in Iraq, with such things as prisoner abuse. But I suppose we shouldn't go there. I better not as I wouldn't want to be labelled as a troll.
I am pleased however that more proactive steps are being taken by organisations such as Spamhaus in addressing the problem by both a technology and policy driven approach in combatting the problem. And that more prosecutions are happening. But I don't see the tide being turned anytime soon.
As for the internet dying, I don't see it. There is now to much commercial interest in it for corporations to sit idly by and do nothing about SPAM and other problems we encounter on the internet. Even our governments misguided steps at regulation, show that the internet is here to stay. It may transform in the future but I don't see it dying just yet.
My .net Passport that is used to identify myself to Bungie.net, XBox/Live, Hoyts and nineMSN and it works seamlessly in Mozilla. I actually quite like the single sign on functionality that passport provides. It does make using the net easier.
Given the poor adoption of the MS Passport system I wouldn't be all that suprised if it some day integrated with an open standards version of this pasport system, or they started making the use of it alot more appealing to other websites.
Yes, it was a typo and it was so good of you to pick up on it for me, cheers :)
From an ethical standpoint I have a problem with the way that they are going about this. I am a consumer, not a lawyer that can interpret EULA's and terms of agreements and can retrieve every consequence to their agreement out of them. Sure I can get most of the stuff, but not everything. And lets not forget that this stuff can be written in a point 4 font or something to make it hard to read. Well thankfully I have 20-20 vision but others may not have that luxury or carry a magnifying glass with them when they go shopping for music. Surely there should be a law about legal agreements being written in a easy to understand manner for consumers, and even more surely if that purchase is going to install software onto your computer without explicit consent and potentially damage it, that should be front and centre in the agreement and that they be liable to any damage done to your computer because of it.
Again its business that doesn't seem to be capable of treating their customers with common decency. They don't seem to realise that you can treat your customers decently AND make money at the same time. Sure it might not be easy but with a market climate of screwing consumers, I would imagine there is a market for those customers that don't like being screwed over.
If only all the sites referenced by this article weren't slashdotted, I might have something more to say. :) I might of even said something different if there was a copy of any agreements to look at.
After reading what I wrote, it sounds like a rant... well I can live with that.
What amused me was this line "The companies say they have long been aware of the work-around but that they were not trying to create an unhackable protection."
I suppose that if they only stop the lowest common denominator from doing the unauthorized copying its good enough for them.
However the handling of the iPod issue leaves something to be desired...
Becuase of the comment on its design, can we mark the submitted article itself as a troll ? :)
I currently sit in the "email itself must change" camp to fix the problem of SPAM. Of course its an impractical camp to sit in at the moment, but things are moving along slowly.
I can't see that addressing the problem of SPAM on an international law basis is going to yield any results in the near and not so near future.
Just random opinions on my part...
There are of course more than 1 Eclipse based products out there.
The power to fix the problem is with the people. The power to destroy the RIAA and MPAA is with the people. If we could orgainse every comsumer in the world to simply stop buying anything from anyone that is trying to screw them over and take away our rights then we can bring them to finnacial ruin or they will change to suit our needs of what we want. Of course this is incredibly naive thinking, it just isn't possible to do this at the moment. Usually something really bad has to happen before people will become coordinated enough to pull something like this off. What I am trying to say is that we created the SPAM problem and now we must fix it, and no amount of blocking is going to come anywhere near fixing it.
If you take the blocking argument to its conclusion everyone would have to be blocked to sending to everyone else, thus removing the usefullness of email in the first place. Anyway back to the topic at hand...
I believe your comments support my position that educating people and removing financial gains from spamming will eradicate the problem.
As for Telstra, blocking an IP address will of course, temporarily reduce SPAM but once the spammers are being blocked they will just move on to some other ISP or country to start spamming again. Thus a ISPs/countries ability to send legitamate email is ruined as the spammers move on to some other poor ISP/country to do the same thing to. Rinse, repeat.
And thus the world with there black lists have to catch up again allowing SPAM to move in. It wasn't so long ago that Telstra's mail was crippled under the sheer load of SPAM that it was receiving and backlogs of mail lasting for over 24 hours had to be cleared before new mail could come through. Again the fact that SPAM is being received by anyone is proof that the blacklist approach doesn't work.
Will you be so bold as to tell me that not one Telstra customer is receiving SPAM at all anymore? If they could do that with such a broad range of customers then they should sell whatever they are doing a make some money...
But my major point is that the technical solutions to SPAM to date have done nothing to fix the SPAM problem at all... Do we have SPAM? Yes! Thus the problem is not solved. Sure I have my Mozilaa Baysien filtering doing a good job but still SPAM gets through and more training is done to block it.
Thus ends my ranting and blog like mind dump.
Let me be clear: THIS DOES NOT WORK. It is the combined greed of the spammers and the stupidity of people buying stuff or being scammed by them that has created the SPAM problem, and that is the problem that must be addressed to stop the SPAM. Not taking arbitrary vigilante actions that hurts more people than it helps.
I'm not trying to be a troll, I'm just saying that some firewall products do more than just firewall. I have successfully used common sense and a firewall to protect myself from virus's and other threats that plague my familiy and friends. Oh, I also don't use Outlook or IE unless I damn well have to :)
ZoneAlarm Pro does annoy me every now and then, but I have yet to find a replacement that doesn't annoy me more.
Plus there are anti-virus products that won't let users run a infected attachement, (and alert tech support if you try) so if there are users out there punishing you by clicking on every infected attachment in a mail then a product like that may just be for you...
I wouldn't mind seeing signed email being a standard that all users must abide using, however there is a large infrastructure cost in implementing this, and the average users knowledge on certificate technology is greatly lacking making end user management a nightmare. Some easier tools in this area that a certificate novice could understand better would certainly help.
The big plus I see is the tracking and identification of abuses with email. However I would not like to see this leading to any vigilante style justice that has so predominated many current anti-SPAM techniques. Im sure those innocent people with domains that have been wrongly classified as SPAM originators out of mistakes or spite would agree.
My current SPAM intake is 50-100 emails a day with about 10 passing through Mozilla Bayesian filtering.
I cannot actually recall the last time that I saw popup ads, and that I am thankfull for.
I wouldnt want to bet my fingers on that happening... :)
However with the current approaches being used I am gravely concerned that the research into the enviromental impact of these new breeds may have is not been properly determined. I am concerned that the chase for big profits NOW is outweighing the proper environmental studies into what the true effect of introducing these genetically modified creations into the environment will have. Once released into the environment, they will be hard to remove from the environment.
I'm not a raving environmentalist, just a concerned citizen.
There are so many steps along the way to sending and delivering email that if you were concerned about privacy, then don't use email, or start encrypting it...
Would you also say that the level of integration between IE and the Windows operating system (and third party apps) is the same as that of Mozilla and Konqueror? My Mozilla, I can happily say, is quite independant of most of the software I use. I have a Adobe Acrobat plugin, integration to a download manager and the other common integration points for browsers and mail applications. But considering the architecture of IE and how it relates to the Windows OS, integration testing must be of a high priority for the scope of things that can go wrong. An architecture that no doubt contributes to the many security flaws that IE also possesses. Rather than worrying about the amount of testing that is done, what is important is the type and appropriatness of the testing that is done. Testing, as with many things, is about quality no quantity.
And advertising is regulated, at least in my country.
How many adds do you see on television that are pornagrphic and targeted to children? How many penis enlargement adds do you see on television every day?
Thats right, in television there are standards to be upheld and when violated, there is usually a backlash against the individuals concerned, well at least in my country :)
Well it won't actually take much for the Australian Police to find them. Some people at a place I used to work ordered XBox mod chips from overseas, and before they were allowed to receive them through customs they had to give their name, residential address and I think drivers license number to ensure that they as recipients were properly identified.
At the time however it wasn't clear as to why this information was needed, other than the fact that they ordered mod chips of course. At the time they did this mod chips were considered legal.
I hope the ACCC in Australia does something for the Australian people, as we all know that the primary purpose of the "security" of consoles is to provide for the construction of artificial markets to decrease competition and raise prices for consumers and revenue for the companies that manufacture them.
The thing that that hacks me off, is that console makers bundle the region encoding along with their security. Region encoding has nothing to do with security and everything to do with creating false markets which is something that should not be tolerated. Its about high time that the manufactures of these devices were forced to abandon region encoding all together so that consumers have the choice of what to purchase and where. The same goes for DVDs.
I will of course freely admit that most peoples use of mod chips however is for piracy which is not an act that I condone or participate in. I would be more than happy to have a console with strong security and no region locking. Its high time that these companies realise thats whats good for consumers is good for them. Stuffing consumers around will only hurt these companies in the long run.
Rant over