The company I work at has been struggling with VOIP for years now. They tried a Bell solution but it was far too expensive. They bought a huge 3COM solution but could never get it working correctly. Now they're jumping through hoops trying to get Cisco to work but it's taking about 1000% as long as they planned. When I mentioned Asterix to the head of IS, she said it wasn't even an option because "no company can be held accountable for failure".
Saying that commercial software is better than open source is BS. Which would you prefer - Foobar2000 audio player with a zillion features and a super clean interface, or Windows Media Player which displays ads every time you run it and tries to phone home behind the scenes?
Home PC users will generally try free software first, and if it doesn't meet their needs they'll shrug it off and try somethign else. Companies seem to be afraid of open source, though, because they need a hotline to call and a target at which to point their finger if something goes wrong.
Blue Frog had 100,000 new signups AFTER the DDoS attack! That's over 20% of their user base! It seems people are willing to recieve more spam if it means sticking it to the culprits!
My girlfriend's IP starts with 7 and it wasn't working for her! I figured it was a Rogers issue (since their internet stability is bollocks in a bag) but if you're not on the same ISP that would be a very odd coincidence. My GF is working with Skype to resolve the issue. They think it's a routing problem.
A friend and I tried counting to 5 together on Skypeout and he said there was less than half a second of lag. I called my mom and didn't tell her it was an internet call until the end and she was very surprised, though she said the first 10 seconds of the call sounded a little muddy. After every 10th (or so) Skypeout call a web survey pops up asking how the call quality was. Skype really wants to be a seamless service!
You hit the nail on the head. Not only is your story true of individual distros, but most of us like to try several distros before settling on one and have to go through this ordeal every damn time! I must have spent 5 hours trying to get my 802.11b NIC working on a distro for my laptop, only to decide that it was too clunky and the zillions of conf files were in nonstandard locations. So I installed another distro and all my previous tinkering was for naught! That's when I reinstalled XP.
The XGL Kororaa distro being taken offline for GPL violation really opened my eyes to this problem. They're being penalized for including drivers with the liveCD! Except for my NIC, that's the one distro that has given me OpenGL support out of the box, and now they're nerfing it! The GPL singlehandedly quashes the hopes of any prospective linux switcher!
I read an interview by an Office developer about the ridiculous HTML generated by word. He said that Word was never meant to be a web editor. It generates HTML in an overly descriptive fashion in an attempt to make it readable by as many applications and browsers as possible (circa 1995).
Frontpage is another story. Every time I click New in that program I have to erase like 8 lines of useless meta tags before even opening the HTML.
Gary McKinnon breaks into government and military computers with no passwords and the Bush administration holds 10 million American citizens under the magnifying glass. The government has done nothing in 10 years to prevent inconceivably simplistic IT invasions. How hard is it to enforce password creation?
It's my opinion that someone(s) in the US government profits from America being invaded on as many fronts as possible.
In the last story the server admin stated that he couldn't change the address because it would involve far too much work. Many people rely on his services and it was costing him enough out of pocket as is.
I don't think they'll be checking the 100,000 new accounts by hand. They'll send out confirmation addresses, and they'll probably take spam submissions from new users with a grain of salt until then.
And even if you only get 1 spam per week, submit it anyway! It takes one second to forward that email to your Blue Frog address, and it costs that spammer time and money to deal with the opt-out. Every little bit helps.
Games magazines sure have come a long way. I still have some old ones from the early 90s and they are written in such varying voices. Some magazines read like trade publications, others were for retail store owners, some were from pen-and-paper and play-by-mail fans... but as a 10 year-old I was only interested in the games and the technology. My potential IQ probably dropped 30 points when I started subscribing to Nintendo Power since the writing style was so juvenile in comparison, but that magazine treated me well too - I, like 30% of subscribers (so boasts one ad in the magazine), still have every single issue in my garage.
When CDROM was on the horizon and everyone was drooling over juicy screenies of The 7th Guest and Myst, one magazine (PC Games and Computer Entertainment maybe?) actually split into two - one dedicated to CDROM titles - and were sold together in a plastic bag. Others started packing floppies, and later on, (gasp!) CDs. I requested some free sample CDs from advertisers which had demos of hundreds upon hundreds of games per disc which really whet my appetite for multimedia.
I'm glad the internet didn't become popular until well after the video game - and video game magazine - boom. The web is slowly killing the print medium, and I'm quite sure I won't have years worth of web archives in 10 years. I cherish and reread my old games magazines all the time and I wouldn't trade them for all the buckazoids on Xenon.
Was that the magazine where 3 revieweres would score each game? I loved that scheme! I remember they reviewed a flight sim that specialized in realtime commercial jet flight. 2 of the reviewers found it boring as hell and gave it around 50%, but one reviewer "got it" and gave it about 97%. All 3 viewpoints were perfectly valid and rounded out the review that much more.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned sports games yet. I used to be an avid fan of EA's NHL series but now I can't stomach it because of the AI. I understand that intuition is a big part of being an effective hockey player, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that if you and a teammate are charging the net in a 2 on 1, the other player should try to get in scoring position. EA's NHL AI is absolutely atrocious - it does what you wish it would do perhaps 10% of the time when you're in the opponent's zone.
I'm not even sure AI is required to solve this problem. Seems to me it could be resolved with a couple of IF statements. Apparently that's too much effort for EA's annual crap factory.
AMAZING to hear about 100k subscribers!! Their SMTP servers are being attacked so they're not sending any emails (though new accounts are valid), and some spam submissions are being bounced back. But keep at 'er!
How much *I* can do? Sure! I can print "Hello World" to the screen!
Howeever, McKinnon said in the BBC article that he just used a simple script to test blank and common passwords on a series of IPs and host names. Even I could do that, and since it succeeded that's not saying much about US military and government security practices.
McKinnon himself has admitted his "hacks" are low tech and utilitarian - a 2-line PERL script. Considering the lack of technical prowess of his intrusion methods, why should hackers take the side of the government on this one? Hackers are in favour of freedom of information over technological ability. I think the hacker community will remain in support of McKinnon because of his (claimed) motivation - curiosity and publicising of government secrets. In this respect I don't think this case is much different from Mitnick's.
Aside, doesn't/. have better news sources than some grammatically incorrect, 1 paragraph blog entry? What is this, Digg?
The client is only for convenience and is optional. You can sign up for an account and forward your spam (as body or attachment) to username@reports.bluesecurity.com.
New user accounts are working but their SMTP server is down so they can't send validations. I also hear that many people are getting their spam submissions bounced. Just give them time. Many prospective users know about Blue Frog due to this huge fiasco, so they must understand that it will take time and resources to fight the attacks while maintaining service.
That's very clever. I run my own email server for my family with a SpamCop filter. It does a very good job of trimming out most spam but they're getting smarter and smarter. Plus, mothers are real spam magnets with their forwards and e-coupons and stuff.
This ferocious attack on Blue Security as well as Typepad and TUCOWS is proof that Blue Security's tactics are working. Spammers are scared to death of Blue Frog because it forces them to comply with the spirit of CANSPAM (since it is worthless in practise). They are so desperate that they are damaging the internet backbone to slightly increase the limited time that spam will be profitable.
Do not listen to FUD-spreading ignoramuses who will no doubt leave many/. comments urging you to stay away from Blue Frog. Spammers do not have Blue Security's member lists - they are simply DIFFing their entire lists with the opt-outs sent by Blue Frog and sharing their filters with the "mailer community". Yes, some members (not me) have been threatened with, and temporarily recieved, more spam. However, this can't last since spammers who do this are simply fighting fire with gasoline! The more spam Blue Frog users get, the more opt-outs the spammer and client recieve which costs them time and money! Plus, regarding threats to leave Blue Frog, does it make sense that a spammer would remove ANY working email address for ANY reason?
Who do you trust to solve your spam problem? Microsoft? Your government? If they really cared, wouldn't the problem have have been solved long before spam encompassed 90% of all email? Blue Security offers a realistic, fair, assertive, and EFFECTIVE means of hitting spammers where it hurts - in the database and in the pocketbook. They need your help to make spam an unprofitable, inconvenient vehicle for advertisers.
I urge each and every/.er to sign up for a Blue Frog account RIGHT NOW (or whenever they're not getting DOSed) and simply forward your spam to yourusername@reports.bluesecurity.com. You can wait a day or two and send many spams as attachments in one email, or you can let the resident client do it for you. It's so easy and the headlines prove that it really does make a difference.
Spammers are childishly thrashing around the internet like a bull in a china shop, having a flailing temper tantrum because people dare to stand up for their privacy. It is the duty of/.ers, as an informed userbase, to stand up for those internet users who don't know how to stand up for themselves.
We have the numbers and the motivation. Aren't you sick and tired of these rich criminals wasting our time, defrauding our elders, and endangering our children day after day? If we stand together, just as the spammers stand together to attack Blue Security, then we WILL win.
Sign up for a Blue Frog account ASAP and encourage your friends and family to do the same, as I have. And if you think it's possible to reason with spammers, check out this CastleCops forum thread that shows inside conversations from a spammer message board.
You may be interested to know that Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, one of two games PC Gamer has awarded a score of 98% (with Half Life 2), no longer appears on their top 50 games of all time list they do every year or two. They qualify their decision in terms of longevity - the game doesn't thrill them as much as the original Doom does. A lot of people had a problem with this, but I think it's a valid argument.
I think PC Gamer is one of very few reputable gaming publications, and always has been. I disagree with their decisions and statements from time to time, but for something as subjective as creative product review you have to allow a little room for personal tastes. Then again, there are those who would argue that games journalism is a completely worthless endeavour altogether. Those people are just as entitled to their opinion.
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The company I work at has been struggling with VOIP for years now. They tried a Bell solution but it was far too expensive. They bought a huge 3COM solution but could never get it working correctly. Now they're jumping through hoops trying to get Cisco to work but it's taking about 1000% as long as they planned. When I mentioned Asterix to the head of IS, she said it wasn't even an option because "no company can be held accountable for failure".
Saying that commercial software is better than open source is BS. Which would you prefer - Foobar2000 audio player with a zillion features and a super clean interface, or Windows Media Player which displays ads every time you run it and tries to phone home behind the scenes?
Home PC users will generally try free software first, and if it doesn't meet their needs they'll shrug it off and try somethign else. Companies seem to be afraid of open source, though, because they need a hotline to call and a target at which to point their finger if something goes wrong.
Blue Frog had 100,000 new signups AFTER the DDoS attack! That's over 20% of their user base! It seems people are willing to recieve more spam if it means sticking it to the culprits!
And they're not very stable!
My girlfriend's IP starts with 7 and it wasn't working for her! I figured it was a Rogers issue (since their internet stability is bollocks in a bag) but if you're not on the same ISP that would be a very odd coincidence. My GF is working with Skype to resolve the issue. They think it's a routing problem.
A friend and I tried counting to 5 together on Skypeout and he said there was less than half a second of lag. I called my mom and didn't tell her it was an internet call until the end and she was very surprised, though she said the first 10 seconds of the call sounded a little muddy. After every 10th (or so) Skypeout call a web survey pops up asking how the call quality was. Skype really wants to be a seamless service!
You hit the nail on the head. Not only is your story true of individual distros, but most of us like to try several distros before settling on one and have to go through this ordeal every damn time! I must have spent 5 hours trying to get my 802.11b NIC working on a distro for my laptop, only to decide that it was too clunky and the zillions of conf files were in nonstandard locations. So I installed another distro and all my previous tinkering was for naught! That's when I reinstalled XP.
The XGL Kororaa distro being taken offline for GPL violation really opened my eyes to this problem. They're being penalized for including drivers with the liveCD! Except for my NIC, that's the one distro that has given me OpenGL support out of the box, and now they're nerfing it! The GPL singlehandedly quashes the hopes of any prospective linux switcher!
I read an interview by an Office developer about the ridiculous HTML generated by word. He said that Word was never meant to be a web editor. It generates HTML in an overly descriptive fashion in an attempt to make it readable by as many applications and browsers as possible (circa 1995).
Frontpage is another story. Every time I click New in that program I have to erase like 8 lines of useless meta tags before even opening the HTML.
Gary McKinnon breaks into government and military computers with no passwords and the Bush administration holds 10 million American citizens under the magnifying glass. The government has done nothing in 10 years to prevent inconceivably simplistic IT invasions. How hard is it to enforce password creation?
It's my opinion that someone(s) in the US government profits from America being invaded on as many fronts as possible.
Support IT in India! Support unions in America!
Maybe it was a network bootable computer with a PXE card.
In the last story the server admin stated that he couldn't change the address because it would involve far too much work. Many people rely on his services and it was costing him enough out of pocket as is.
I don't think they'll be checking the 100,000 new accounts by hand. They'll send out confirmation addresses, and they'll probably take spam submissions from new users with a grain of salt until then.
And even if you only get 1 spam per week, submit it anyway! It takes one second to forward that email to your Blue Frog address, and it costs that spammer time and money to deal with the opt-out. Every little bit helps.
Games magazines sure have come a long way. I still have some old ones from the early 90s and they are written in such varying voices. Some magazines read like trade publications, others were for retail store owners, some were from pen-and-paper and play-by-mail fans... but as a 10 year-old I was only interested in the games and the technology. My potential IQ probably dropped 30 points when I started subscribing to Nintendo Power since the writing style was so juvenile in comparison, but that magazine treated me well too - I, like 30% of subscribers (so boasts one ad in the magazine), still have every single issue in my garage.
When CDROM was on the horizon and everyone was drooling over juicy screenies of The 7th Guest and Myst, one magazine (PC Games and Computer Entertainment maybe?) actually split into two - one dedicated to CDROM titles - and were sold together in a plastic bag. Others started packing floppies, and later on, (gasp!) CDs. I requested some free sample CDs from advertisers which had demos of hundreds upon hundreds of games per disc which really whet my appetite for multimedia.
I'm glad the internet didn't become popular until well after the video game - and video game magazine - boom. The web is slowly killing the print medium, and I'm quite sure I won't have years worth of web archives in 10 years. I cherish and reread my old games magazines all the time and I wouldn't trade them for all the buckazoids on Xenon.
Was that the magazine where 3 revieweres would score each game? I loved that scheme! I remember they reviewed a flight sim that specialized in realtime commercial jet flight. 2 of the reviewers found it boring as hell and gave it around 50%, but one reviewer "got it" and gave it about 97%. All 3 viewpoints were perfectly valid and rounded out the review that much more.
The Genesis came out years before the SNES but only amounted to a fraction of Nintendo's sales.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned sports games yet. I used to be an avid fan of EA's NHL series but now I can't stomach it because of the AI. I understand that intuition is a big part of being an effective hockey player, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that if you and a teammate are charging the net in a 2 on 1, the other player should try to get in scoring position. EA's NHL AI is absolutely atrocious - it does what you wish it would do perhaps 10% of the time when you're in the opponent's zone.
I'm not even sure AI is required to solve this problem. Seems to me it could be resolved with a couple of IF statements. Apparently that's too much effort for EA's annual crap factory.
AMAZING to hear about 100k subscribers!! Their SMTP servers are being attacked so they're not sending any emails (though new accounts are valid), and some spam submissions are being bounced back. But keep at 'er!
How much *I* can do? Sure! I can print "Hello World" to the screen!
Howeever, McKinnon said in the BBC article that he just used a simple script to test blank and common passwords on a series of IPs and host names. Even I could do that, and since it succeeded that's not saying much about US military and government security practices.
McKinnon himself has admitted his "hacks" are low tech and utilitarian - a 2-line PERL script. Considering the lack of technical prowess of his intrusion methods, why should hackers take the side of the government on this one? Hackers are in favour of freedom of information over technological ability. I think the hacker community will remain in support of McKinnon because of his (claimed) motivation - curiosity and publicising of government secrets. In this respect I don't think this case is much different from Mitnick's.
/. have better news sources than some grammatically incorrect, 1 paragraph blog entry? What is this, Digg?
Aside, doesn't
The client is only for convenience and is optional. You can sign up for an account and forward your spam (as body or attachment) to username@reports.bluesecurity.com.
New user accounts are working but their SMTP server is down so they can't send validations. I also hear that many people are getting their spam submissions bounced. Just give them time. Many prospective users know about Blue Frog due to this huge fiasco, so they must understand that it will take time and resources to fight the attacks while maintaining service.
That's very clever. I run my own email server for my family with a SpamCop filter. It does a very good job of trimming out most spam but they're getting smarter and smarter. Plus, mothers are real spam magnets with their forwards and e-coupons and stuff.
Signups are working but their SMTP server is down, so they're not sending any validation emails. Just be patient.
This ferocious attack on Blue Security as well as Typepad and TUCOWS is proof that Blue Security's tactics are working. Spammers are scared to death of Blue Frog because it forces them to comply with the spirit of CANSPAM (since it is worthless in practise). They are so desperate that they are damaging the internet backbone to slightly increase the limited time that spam will be profitable.
/. comments urging you to stay away from Blue Frog. Spammers do not have Blue Security's member lists - they are simply DIFFing their entire lists with the opt-outs sent by Blue Frog and sharing their filters with the "mailer community". Yes, some members (not me) have been threatened with, and temporarily recieved, more spam. However, this can't last since spammers who do this are simply fighting fire with gasoline! The more spam Blue Frog users get, the more opt-outs the spammer and client recieve which costs them time and money! Plus, regarding threats to leave Blue Frog, does it make sense that a spammer would remove ANY working email address for ANY reason?
/.er to sign up for a Blue Frog account RIGHT NOW (or whenever they're not getting DOSed) and simply forward your spam to yourusername@reports.bluesecurity.com. You can wait a day or two and send many spams as attachments in one email, or you can let the resident client do it for you. It's so easy and the headlines prove that it really does make a difference.
/.ers, as an informed userbase, to stand up for those internet users who don't know how to stand up for themselves.
Do not listen to FUD-spreading ignoramuses who will no doubt leave many
Who do you trust to solve your spam problem? Microsoft? Your government? If they really cared, wouldn't the problem have have been solved long before spam encompassed 90% of all email? Blue Security offers a realistic, fair, assertive, and EFFECTIVE means of hitting spammers where it hurts - in the database and in the pocketbook. They need your help to make spam an unprofitable, inconvenient vehicle for advertisers.
I urge each and every
Spammers are childishly thrashing around the internet like a bull in a china shop, having a flailing temper tantrum because people dare to stand up for their privacy. It is the duty of
We have the numbers and the motivation. Aren't you sick and tired of these rich criminals wasting our time, defrauding our elders, and endangering our children day after day? If we stand together, just as the spammers stand together to attack Blue Security, then we WILL win.
Sign up for a Blue Frog account ASAP and encourage your friends and family to do the same, as I have. And if you think it's possible to reason with spammers, check out this CastleCops forum thread that shows inside conversations from a spammer message board.
You may be interested to know that Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, one of two games PC Gamer has awarded a score of 98% (with Half Life 2), no longer appears on their top 50 games of all time list they do every year or two. They qualify their decision in terms of longevity - the game doesn't thrill them as much as the original Doom does. A lot of people had a problem with this, but I think it's a valid argument.
I think PC Gamer is one of very few reputable gaming publications, and always has been. I disagree with their decisions and statements from time to time, but for something as subjective as creative product review you have to allow a little room for personal tastes. Then again, there are those who would argue that games journalism is a completely worthless endeavour altogether. Those people are just as entitled to their opinion.