I was just reading the ZDNET story on the House passing the antispam bill. It says that "sexually oriented messages" must be clearly labeled, and email cannot have deceptive subject lines. If that's true, can't we filter them out more easily? Or can we configure mail servers so when such an email message does get sent, the DATA part of the transmission goes on for eternity + 1? Hang up the spamming mail servers, keeping their sending down?
Also, does this new law completely preempt citizen's rights? If the email does turn out to be fraud, can individuals still sue?
I'm with you. I have a spare domain I can sacrifice. I'll just post addresses in Usenet groups, wait for the spam to pour in, register my domain with the no spam list, and then redirect all mail to my domain into the NY attorney general's mailbox. And for good measure, I'll CC the email to all other state attorney generals, Ashcroft, and everyone important over at the FCC....
If that happens, I'm going to give the FCC a very hard time. I'm going to write up a quick program to generate every possible email address (i.e. aaaaaaaaaab@domain.com, aaaaaaaaaac@domain.com, etc), store the results on a 60 GB hard drive (Will that be enough? I have 8 domains to protect, plus one comcast acct) and send the entire thing to the FCC. Better yet, print out the entire thing, and ship it. How many boxes of paper will that be? Hundreds, at least.
You know, that sounds like a pretty good idea. I am so going to do that if the FCC doesn't exclude by domain. Anyone want to join me? Imagine 40 FedEx trucks unloading hundreds of boxes in front of a FCC building, while scared interns look on "Are we going to have to look through ALL those boxes?"
You are 100% correct. If they move all operations overseas, I'll block all foreign IP's, except perhaps Canada, Britain, and a few Western Europe nations. China wants to send me email? Forget it. Start cracking down on spammers as much as the Falun Gong, and then I'll consider it. Hell, if foreign countries are so lax, perhaps someone can buy a server in Indonesia or somewhere and DOS the spamming servers.
On the other hand, nuking Nigeria does have a certain visual appeal... imagine, no more Nigerian emails... Granted, they'll probably move to another African country, but I do believe the U.S. has plenty of nukes to go around. And the new tactical nukes the DoD is developing are to die for (pun intended)
Finally, we get an antispam bill. Only this time, it won't be delayed like the nocall list was. What spammer would object to it publicly? If he/she did, they'd be lynched (I'll be the one holding the 10 yr old motherboard; can't use the comp for anything else, so might as well go to a good cause).
First thing, I'm going and registering all the domains I own, and my comcast account. Then, for good measure, I'm going to see if I can pipe all emails through servers in California.
One question: does this federal law overrule the Calif law, and if so, is it for better or worse? What's CAUCE's opinion on this?
If you have spare bandwidth and a box to run the mailserver, try Apache James. Fast, efficient, easy to use, and well documented. Better yet, if you know Java, you can customize James to your heart's delight. If not, it's okay, because James offers a lot of features straight out of the box. I'm using James to test an email application I'm writing, and I just can't recommend it enough. Also, if you have any POP accounts with any other company, James can download them as well, and put them into one mailbox.
Because geeks always compete to see who can use the most austere interface.... Face it, geeks don't need user friendliness. They want something that works. And Linux does. Besides, you need to start bringing in outside people, artists, psychologists maybe, to rearrange interfaces and make stuff easier to use.
Painhope, my view of reasonable and your view of reasonable might be different. And I would like to take you up on your offer. Send me an e-mail and we will take you up on your offer. Keep in mind that we do not sell licenses. We sell subscriptions where the value of the bits are integrated with service levels.
How much is Redhat going to ask for per CPU? painehope gave an example of $50 per CPU for a 512 node machine, $35 per CPU for a 1024 CPU machine, etc. How much is his 4000 node machine going to cost?
All in all, a good interview. Szulik even runs a Linux cluster at home! very nice.
You know, it's not okay for the RIAA to sue college students and adults. But it's at least slightly morally acceptable. After all, these are adults you're suing, they know stuff has consquences.
(begin rant)
But once those jackasses begin suing minors, that's where I draw the f***ing line. Doesn't the RIAA know that they're pushing away the people they need to make money? This girl's going to have her plight featured on the local news TV/newspaper, probably going to be the lead story. What effect is that going to have on her friends/classmates? Right, they're probably not going to log on to Kazaa. But I really doubt they're going to go out and buy the next Britney Spears CD or whatever they listen to. They'll probably ask a friend to buy it, then the CD will get passed, and everybody will rip a copy of the CD themselves. After all, it's not illegal to allow a friend to borrow/share a CD, is it? The RIAA might make $3500 in the short term, but I'm willing to bet they're going to lose a lot more than that in the future because the girl is not going to buy CDs, and her friends won't either. Say the average CD is $10. (Which is a bit on the low end). I would be willing to bet that the girl + friends + classmates would buy more than 350 cds over her lifetime ($350 * $10 = 3500, for you math illiterate). But those sales are now lost. Nice job RIAA. You might be filthy stinking rich in the short term, but long term, forget it.
And how long will it take for Ashcroft to realize that spam should be criminalized, and the minimum punishment should be the spammer being hit with a steel rod by every person who received the spam (the parents if the receiver is a minor), and the maximum punishment should be a long and painful death?
Yeah, I wanted to do the same thing as the grandparent post, but I never got around to researching it... Too bad.
Once you get down to it, though, all these people basically did is rip the components out of a laptop, discard the laptop case, and shove everything inside a picture frame, copy Linux and a webserver, and call it a digital picture frame.
1) Keep a low profile and do not divulge details on Linux deployments.
How is even a medium size company going to do this? A quick scan of company servers would be enough to see if they're running Linux or not. And even if you do change the servers to say they are Win 2003 or something, what about social engineering? Calling up the company, saying you're MS tech support, and you found a problem with the company's web servers. "But we run Linux." Gotcha! What about companies that have already said they run Linux? Yahoo, Google.
2) Until a judgment in a case would unequivocally warrant it, Linux users should not pay SCO the license fees it has asked for to settle its allegations of infringement of intellectual property rights.
Duh. All techies have been saying this for months.
3) Do not permit SCO to audit your premises without legal authorization.
Why the hell would you allow SCO (or any companies) people onsite for anything except if you're called them first?
4) For customers of SCO Open Server and UnixWare, an unfavorable judgment could cause SCO to cease operations or sell itself. That could harm future support and maintenance. Just in case, prepare a plan for migrating to another platform within two years.
Because you can rip out Gator using an antiad utility, or just configure the hosts file so when Gator attempts to connect to the net, it gets redirected to the wrong address. Besides, Kazaa's benefits outweigh it's negatives.
I think it's _slightly_ more complicated than that. If that was true, then the FSF would have beefs with Sun (the Java language does not have an independent steering committee, it's fully controlled by Sun, despite what Sun wants developers to think), IBM (makes lots and lots of proprietary software, pretty much any software firm in the world, including Red Hat (isn't the package manager or the install routine non free? I believe it's proprietary.)
How does SCO explain running Linux and Apache for it's web servers? If it loves MS so much, why doesn't it move to IIS on windows server 2003? At least in June, the Netcraft server listing shows Apache/1.3.14 (Unix), which I guess is some kind of in house branch of Apache, but the last few months, Netcraft just lists Apache on Linux. Can anyone do a more detailed scan of sco.com and see what it runs? Oh, by the way, allthesesitesarerunning Apache on Linux as well.
when do WE get it? This is great and all, but Internet1 is overflowing with stupid users, and maybe Internet2 will help weed out the stupider ones. The average Joe can keep Internet1, I'll move on to Internet2.
The argument that moron administrators forgot to do something misses the point.
Not to be flamebait or anything, but they're called "administrators" because of one tiny thing: They ADMINISTRATE! They should be reading up on the latest security vulns, read books, read/., etc. It's the same thing as saying The argument that moron end users forgot to do something misses the point. Shouldn't end users be at least know some stuff about a computer? So should admins
Seriously, if I can't get one I'll just write one. What's the harm in slowing down a net connection? Aren't there already server side spam tools that, if the connection is suspect, slow down the DATA command so it's like a byte/sec or something?
Slashdot Mirror
Try Ebay. There's one without a monitor for $10.49 and a complete one for $11
I was just reading the ZDNET story on the House passing the antispam bill. It says that "sexually oriented messages" must be clearly labeled, and email cannot have deceptive subject lines. If that's true, can't we filter them out more easily? Or can we configure mail servers so when such an email message does get sent, the DATA part of the transmission goes on for eternity + 1? Hang up the spamming mail servers, keeping their sending down?
Also, does this new law completely preempt citizen's rights? If the email does turn out to be fraud, can individuals still sue?
I'm with you. I have a spare domain I can sacrifice. I'll just post addresses in Usenet groups, wait for the spam to pour in, register my domain with the no spam list, and then redirect all mail to my domain into the NY attorney general's mailbox. And for good measure, I'll CC the email to all other state attorney generals, Ashcroft, and everyone important over at the FCC....
Writing a spam email: $3
Purchasing a list of 1 mil email addresses: $1,000
Computer and net connection to send 1 million emails: $900
Getting caught for spamming: Priceless
(Literally, see
unlimited damages for fraud and abuse."
I wonder if that includes cruel and unusual punishment?)
If that happens, I'm going to give the FCC a very hard time. I'm going to write up a quick program to generate every possible email address (i.e. aaaaaaaaaab@domain.com, aaaaaaaaaac@domain.com, etc), store the results on a 60 GB hard drive (Will that be enough? I have 8 domains to protect, plus one comcast acct) and send the entire thing to the FCC. Better yet, print out the entire thing, and ship it. How many boxes of paper will that be? Hundreds, at least.
You know, that sounds like a pretty good idea. I am so going to do that if the FCC doesn't exclude by domain. Anyone want to join me? Imagine 40 FedEx trucks unloading hundreds of boxes in front of a FCC building, while scared interns look on "Are we going to have to look through ALL those boxes?"
Priceless.
You are 100% correct. If they move all operations overseas, I'll block all foreign IP's, except perhaps Canada, Britain, and a few Western Europe nations. China wants to send me email? Forget it. Start cracking down on spammers as much as the Falun Gong, and then I'll consider it. Hell, if foreign countries are so lax, perhaps someone can buy a server in Indonesia or somewhere and DOS the spamming servers.
On the other hand, nuking Nigeria does have a certain visual appeal... imagine, no more Nigerian emails... Granted, they'll probably move to another African country, but I do believe the U.S. has plenty of nukes to go around. And the new tactical nukes the DoD is developing are to die for (pun intended)
Yes.
Maybe that'll start showing people they need to install firewalls and virusscanners. If a few examples are made, perhaps people will finally learn.
Finally, we get an antispam bill. Only this time, it won't be delayed like the nocall list was. What spammer would object to it publicly? If he/she did, they'd be lynched (I'll be the one holding the 10 yr old motherboard; can't use the comp for anything else, so might as well go to a good cause).
First thing, I'm going and registering all the domains I own, and my comcast account. Then, for good measure, I'm going to see if I can pipe all emails through servers in California.
One question: does this federal law overrule the Calif law, and if so, is it for better or worse? What's CAUCE's opinion on this?
If you have spare bandwidth and a box to run the mailserver, try Apache James. Fast, efficient, easy to use, and well documented. Better yet, if you know Java, you can customize James to your heart's delight. If not, it's okay, because James offers a lot of features straight out of the box. I'm using James to test an email application I'm writing, and I just can't recommend it enough. Also, if you have any POP accounts with any other company, James can download them as well, and put them into one mailbox.
Because geeks always compete to see who can use the most austere interface.... Face it, geeks don't need user friendliness. They want something that works. And Linux does. Besides, you need to start bringing in outside people, artists, psychologists maybe, to rearrange interfaces and make stuff easier to use.
Painhope, my view of reasonable and your view of reasonable might be different. And I would like to take you up on your offer. Send me an e-mail and we will take you up on your offer. Keep in mind that we do not sell licenses. We sell subscriptions where the value of the bits are integrated with service levels.
How much is Redhat going to ask for per CPU? painehope gave an example of $50 per CPU for a 512 node machine, $35 per CPU for a 1024 CPU machine, etc. How much is his 4000 node machine going to cost?
All in all, a good interview. Szulik even runs a Linux cluster at home! very nice.
You know, it's not okay for the RIAA to sue college students and adults. But it's at least slightly morally acceptable. After all, these are adults you're suing, they know stuff has consquences.
(begin rant)
But once those jackasses begin suing minors, that's where I draw the f***ing line. Doesn't the RIAA know that they're pushing away the people they need to make money? This girl's going to have her plight featured on the local news TV/newspaper, probably going to be the lead story. What effect is that going to have on her friends/classmates? Right, they're probably not going to log on to Kazaa. But I really doubt they're going to go out and buy the next Britney Spears CD or whatever they listen to. They'll probably ask a friend to buy it, then the CD will get passed, and everybody will rip a copy of the CD themselves. After all, it's not illegal to allow a friend to borrow/share a CD, is it? The RIAA might make $3500 in the short term, but I'm willing to bet they're going to lose a lot more than that in the future because the girl is not going to buy CDs, and her friends won't either. Say the average CD is $10. (Which is a bit on the low end). I would be willing to bet that the girl + friends + classmates would buy more than 350 cds over her lifetime ($350 * $10 = 3500, for you math illiterate). But those sales are now lost. Nice job RIAA. You might be filthy stinking rich in the short term, but long term, forget it.
(end rant)
Isn't there supposed to be an anti-domain-squatting law or something? Can't find it on Google, but I thought there was something along those lines.
;-)
By the way, you tried to reg that domain yerself, didn't you?
How long until Ashcroft rules porn is a crime?
And how long will it take for Ashcroft to realize that spam should be criminalized, and the minimum punishment should be the spammer being hit with a steel rod by every person who received the spam (the parents if the receiver is a minor), and the maximum punishment should be a long and painful death?
As Julius Ceasar said after his assasination, "infamy! infamy! they've all got it in fer me!"
;-)
After his assassination, huh? Did he use some kind of heaven - earth phone system? If so, how do I get an account with THAT phone company..
Yeah, I wanted to do the same thing as the grandparent post, but I never got around to researching it... Too bad.
Once you get down to it, though, all these people basically did is rip the components out of a laptop, discard the laptop case, and shove everything inside a picture frame, copy Linux and a webserver, and call it a digital picture frame.
1) Keep a low profile and do not divulge details on Linux deployments.
How is even a medium size company going to do this? A quick scan of company servers would be enough to see if they're running Linux or not. And even if you do change the servers to say they are Win 2003 or something, what about social engineering? Calling up the company, saying you're MS tech support, and you found a problem with the company's web servers. "But we run Linux." Gotcha! What about companies that have already said they run Linux? Yahoo, Google.
2) Until a judgment in a case would unequivocally warrant it, Linux users should not pay SCO the license fees it has asked for to settle its allegations of infringement of intellectual property rights.
Duh. All techies have been saying this for months.
3) Do not permit SCO to audit your premises without legal authorization.
Why the hell would you allow SCO (or any companies) people onsite for anything except if you're called them first?
4) For customers of SCO Open Server and UnixWare, an unfavorable judgment could cause SCO to cease operations or sell itself. That could harm future support and maintenance. Just in case, prepare a plan for migrating to another platform within two years.
SCO will die in the next 2 years.
Because you can rip out Gator using an antiad utility, or just configure the hosts file so when Gator attempts to connect to the net, it gets redirected to the wrong address. Besides, Kazaa's benefits outweigh it's negatives.
I think it's _slightly_ more complicated than that. If that was true, then the FSF would have beefs with Sun (the Java language does not have an independent steering committee, it's fully controlled by Sun, despite what Sun wants developers to think), IBM (makes lots and lots of proprietary software, pretty much any software firm in the world, including Red Hat (isn't the package manager or the install routine non free? I believe it's proprietary.)
How does SCO explain running Linux and Apache for it's web servers? If it loves MS so much, why doesn't it move to IIS on windows server 2003? At least in June, the Netcraft server listing shows Apache/1.3.14 (Unix), which I guess is some kind of in house branch of Apache, but the last few months, Netcraft just lists Apache on Linux. Can anyone do a more detailed scan of sco.com and see what it runs? Oh, by the way, all these sites are running Apache on Linux as well.
when do WE get it? This is great and all, but Internet1 is overflowing with stupid users, and maybe Internet2 will help weed out the stupider ones. The average Joe can keep Internet1, I'll move on to Internet2.
The argument that moron administrators forgot to do something misses the point.
/., etc. It's the same thing as saying The argument that moron end users forgot to do something misses the point. Shouldn't end users be at least know some stuff about a computer? So should admins
Not to be flamebait or anything, but they're called "administrators" because of one tiny thing: They ADMINISTRATE! They should be reading up on the latest security vulns, read books, read
How is it illegal, and where can I get one?
Seriously, if I can't get one I'll just write one. What's the harm in slowing down a net connection? Aren't there already server side spam tools that, if the connection is suspect, slow down the DATA command so it's like a byte/sec or something?
Andrew Leung at Telus has an excellent report on the economics of spam
The link seemed to be slow, so here's mirror: Go ahead, slashdot it to your heart's content