An unfortunate choice of words, considering what happened in Japan...
You're right. Let's begin using more sensitive terms for such things and then we won't have to check the news every day for disasters before we open our thoughtless mouths.
"Train wreck" could be "rail transport guidance mishap (RTGM)"
"Plane crash" could be "aeronautic ground avoidance exception (AGAE)"
"Tsunami" could be "exceptional aquatic waveform event (EAWE)"
"Earthquake" could be "sudden geological tension release event (SGTRE)"
"Flood" could be "unexpected hydrological intrusion (UHI)"
"Fire" could be "unwanted thermological surge cause by excessively rapid oxdidation of ambient combustibles (UTSCBEROOAC or UTSCEROAC)"
"Atomic attack" coule be "aggressive chain reaction event unfortunately proximate to valuable life or property (ACREUPTVLOP or ACREUPVLP)"
"Heart attack" could be "biogenic oxidant supply chain problem resulting in catastrophic system pump failure (BOSCPRICSPF)"
"Vomit" could be "retrograde migration of partially processed biological fuel mixture (RMOPPBFM or RMPPBFM)"
By using the abbreviations we could all pretend that nothing ugly happens or exists.
"Hey, be careful with that! You could have a BOSCPRICSPF!"
"What the fuck did you call me, pissbrain?"
I once found the Linux Adaptec driver maintainer's site. I was appalled to see a matrix of mostly unique drivers for combinations of Linxu kernels and Adaptec HBA models. I got the impression that every time Adaptec designs a new HBA they ignore everything they've done before.
Contrast that with Symbios SCSI HBAs (now LSI Logic). There has always been just one driver for all the Symbios HBAs that use a given SCSI chip, and more recently I think I've seen some integration into a driver that covers multiple 53Cxxx chip types.
I use Symbios / LSI Logix SCSI HBAs in RS/6000 AIX systems, Linux boxes and Win PCs, always without trouble, without driver nonsense, and without configuration or script bullshit. I wouldn't use an Adaptec HBA even if I got it as a gift.
Why? Pressure from the US. Same reason why non-US isps will take measures against their customers who break US copyright laws. Case in point, a frind of mines who lives in Switzerland got an MPAA form letter for shareing a movie. Now, while the MPAA has no hold there his isp asked him to remove it becuase they were being pressured by the uplinks to the US. It's like this "Oh you DON'T want to stop them? Fine, we are terminating your peering."
Correct. And that is a damning indictment of the fucked-up state of things as they presently are. No such threats are used to whip ISPs who host spammers and spam sites into line. On the contrary, if reports are correct, Global Crossing and Cox and probably other major interconnects actually went out of their way to block the Lycos spammer hammer screensaver while allowing billions of spam senders and thousands of spam ecommerce sites to flourish and operate unhindered through their networks.
Punctuation in English is enclosed within the quote marks, but in technical matters it often can't be when the quote marks enclose a precise character string the meaning of which would be altered by inclusion of punctuation necessary for the larger sentence structure.
For example, if followed precisely, this won't work:
To see a list of the files in the present working directory, type "ls."
while this will work:
To see a list of the files in the present working directory, type "ls".
Basically Vonage and Co are zombies and they will rot away in a the next 2-3 years. As Don Corleone used to say "Nothing personal, just business"
Not gonna happen.
The correct assumption is that the traffic is not blocked, but assigned to a low priority class and throttled.
That would be pretty stupid and neanderthal, too. It can't be done in secret. The first technician who is hauled before a Grand Jury is going to give up his managers in a heartbeat. The first manager hauled in will give up the droid suits in a heartbeat. The droid suits will be indicted. I imagine they're stupid enough to try it until a few of them have been consigned to the graybar hotel for a few years.
Vonage has over 350,000 "lines" and is adding them at 30,000 per month. The genie is well out of the bottle and can't be put back. VoIP growth is now running at 900% per year. Shipments of VoIP switch equipment have surpassed shipments of traditional switch equipment. The avalanche is well underway and people who have tasted affordable, flat rate VoIP service that works from almost anywhere on the planet are going to be out for blood if any politician, bureaurat or weasel telecom tries to get in the way.
I invite any telecom droid who wants his career to turn into a blackened, smoking pit to just try messing with VoIP traffic. Expect existing laws to be stretched to cover this and expect interference with VoIP traffic to be criminalized very soon.
Grandma to her congresscritter: "I don't know why, but as soon as my cable Internet company offered its own voice over Internet service, my Vonage service began to develop noise and dropped calls."
congresscritter: "We'll look into it, ma'am. We've had a lot of calls about this in the last week."
congresscritter to aide: "Harvey, get on the phone with FCC and the AG's office. These ISPs are fucking with my consituents' lives and safety. Find a law, and let's break their fucking legs with it."
"They'll drag in the Dumpster," says A. Michael Noll, a communications professor at the University of Southern California and former scientist with AT&T's Bell Labs in Murray Hill. "One thing we know about mergers -- the survivor has to destroy the DNA of the victim. They have to destroy that identity. You can't have people thinking they're still part of AT&T. They're part of SBC."
What a great application for capital punishment! Destroy historical treasures, get fried. That might give the corporate assholes some pause.
Re:Great, they'll hire David Spade "No" Guys...
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eBay Begins A Change
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Maybe the next trend in outsourcing will be for India and other places to offer to act on our behalf in calling their brethren down the road, waiting on hold, etc.
1: (ring, ring) "(thick Indian accent) Hello. I am Bob. How may I hailp you?"
2: "(also thick Indian accent)Hello. I am (clickety-click...) Sandra Fleischmann. I have a problem with my (clickety-click...) eBay listing. I have been on hold for... 27 minutes and 32 seconds. Where are you located, if I may ask?"
1: "I'm very sorry. We are all very sorry here at (clickety-click...) eBay. I am located in (clickety-click...) Virginia, Pennsylvania. The weather here is (clickety-click) 62 degrees and overcast, with a 40% chance of precipitation. How is the weather where you are?"
2: "It is (clickety-click...) 26 degrees and snowing here in (clickety-click) Las Vegas, Michigan."
1: "That's very nice. What is the nature of your problem?"
2: "(clickety-click) My new auction listing doesn't come up in the eBay Search."
1: "Have you tried rebooting your PC?"
Re:I don't think its going to change a thing
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eBay Begins A Change
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No, it's apparent from the post that he/she thinks those phishing emails are actually coming from eBay.
Come to think of it I think they could make a ton of money and be a big hit by auctioning off the fraud artists for disposition by the winning bidder. "Bid now on Joey the credit card scammer and if you win you can torture him to death by the method of your choice!"
Here we go... eBay could auction off SPAMMERS... boy, oh boy, could they become overnight heros!
"Three day auction: Scott Richter, delivered bound and gagged to the undisclosed location of your choice by blind, deaf-mute delivery agents. S&H only $5,000."
When I hear 'Ebay' - I run for the hills. They are useless. Far too many retards and fraudsters.
Actually what you say only applies to consumer items. eBay is an excellent place to find exotic and niche technical gear and is probably the most active marketplace in the world for finding last year's serious non-consumer technology today for a fraction of its original price.
The fraudulent sellers concentrate on high-volume, easy to move consumer items, which are also often bought by clueless nitwits. The fraudulent buyers only want consumer stuff they can fence or resell easily. You won't find too many fraud artists buying or selling SCSI disk arrays or HD68-to-VHDCI SCSI cables.
And if I'm considering bidding in your hign S&H auction I discount my max bid by your excess S&H. And in my experience the high S&H auctions get far less bidding activity than the ones with more reasonable S&H and often close lower than the others or get no bids at all. So not only am I not affected by your policy of shifting part of the total away from the closing price, I often win such auctions at unusually low closing prices as a result of the reduced bidding competition. But, like many other bidders, I also often just skip on past the auctions that have something out of kilter like an excessively high S&H. I use a sniff test... if something smells "off" in an auction listing I generally don't consider bidding. That could be excessive S&H, absence of obviously crucial data on the item (model, part number, voltage, etc.), 10 times more text about terms and conditions than about the item being sold, strange terms, etc.
That's right. That happened to me, too. It's right there in their policy that sellers have to list S&H and can't invent new and non-customary charges after the close of the auction. But eBay ignores its own policy and sides with the sellers because the sellers pay the bills at eBay.
If eBay exercised more common sense they wouldn't piss so many people off. This last astounding email about improved customer relations landed in my mailbox, too, and I laughed when I read it. It's entirely PR. The purpose of Customer Disservice in many of today's numbers-driven organizations run by clueless suits who bring no redeeming skills to their positions is simply to make complaining customers shut up and go away. There is usually no way for real customer issues to ever feed back up to management because management never has any intention of paying attention to customer issues, and certainly not from Customer Disservice. In today's organizations management exists in a vacuum, setting policy and sending orders downward, convinced that nothing below them has anything to contribute that they don't already know. It's the theatre of the Conceit of the Clueless MBAs.
In the larger picture, though, I don't even think eBay is in business to run auctions. If they were, they would attend better to business, would do a much better job of keeping their "venue" clean of fraudsters, and would have competent IT instead of continually tinkering with and breaking things. The Auction Guild, which used to chronicle eBay outages and feature failures before its operator became very busy in her military duties, regularly published hair-raising reports of multiple daily problems in the eBay system, many of which were crippling to volume sellers. I subscribe to the belief that eBay does nothing more than it has to to keep the value of the insiders' stock options rising so they can cash out. Their auction system just has to function well enough to be plausible, not well enough to satisfy the participants. Once it became the visible online auction marketplace there was no possibility that anyone else could effectively compete. That's the nature of certain types of marketplaces -- once they exist, that's where everyone goes because only a moron would place his wares in a lesser marketplace.
eBay is so pervasive in the auction sector, what with its continual name-dropping in feature films, music videos and so forth that it can pretty much charge what it likes and know it'll still be regarded as the de facto auction site.
No, eBay has the auction market because it is. There are certain markets that naturally tend to establish in only one place. Most big-city job markets have only ever had one newspaper where all the significant job ads appear. This is because once the marketplace has become established, only a moron would try to buy or sell in any lesser market.
Recently they made a stand [ebay.co.uk] about sellers enforcing a percentage rise for whenever a buyer paid using Paypal. Justifable really, since the seller loses out to the tune of ~3% otherwise.
I disagree. The closing price of an item often bears little or no relationship to the opening price or the seller's wished-for price. The closing price is, therefore, essentially an arbitrary as opposed to something determined in any predictable way by the seller. Therefore the seller loses nothing, since the auction could just as easily have closed 10 or 50 percent lower, or 100 percent higher, depending on the phase of the moon, the evening's sitcom or football schedule and any of thousands of other factors.
Further, any additional charge that is known to buyers tends to be discounted, often more than offsetting the charge. For example, sellers who have higher than normal S&H often get no bids or a much lower closing price than sellers who have customary S&H for the type of item being sold. When I want an item badly enough to consider bidding in an auction that has unreasonably high S&H I figure the max I'd normally be willing to pay then subtract the excess S&H and that's my actual max bid.
News Flash: The sellers on eBay are the only customers of eBay.
Exactly right. It's a flawed model for the universe of participants because eBay has no incentive to kick fraudulent sellers off. As long as they can remain at a distance, they stand to earn fees from all sellers, honest and dishonest. eBay is an equal opportunity facilitator.
I agree entirely with HeghmoH. I once bought a physically heavy item from cpu77 on eBay. It arrived in a lightweight carton, damaged, but it also had deep gouges in the steel housing with no corresponding holes in the carton -- damage that existed prior to shipping. I learned several things from the experience.
First was that the only thing that had any effect on the seller was my filing of a fraud affidavit with my bank. The instant the bank contacted cpu77 my money was credited back, but before that they had stonewalled me and steadfastly refused to do anything. So that's the real answer... pay direct by credit card, even by credit-enhanced "banking card", which gives you recourse through your cc company or bank, and the seller will pay attention.
But I learned some other interesting things before getting to that point:
The seller, cpu77, appeared to be in the business of acquiring large quantities of unwanted technical gear and disposing of everything piece by piece on eBay without regard to condition. Some people got extraordinary bargains while others received useless, broken junk. cpu77 used the "untested" or "as is" disclaimers as escapes, although anyone who pauses to think about it will realize that when the seller has the item in his hands and the buyer can't see or inspect it, "as is" is largely meaningless, and "untested" is similarly pregnant with abuse. If a seller is unscrupulous, every good item will be tested and claimed to be good to fetch a higher price and every bad item will be "untested" or "as is." The odd thing was that cpu77 didn't appear to discriminate -- they didn't care if one buyer got a real $10,000 item for $100 asd long as they could move everything out, including the complete junk.
I concluded that the cpu77 disposes of *everything*, good, indifferent or broken, and at least in my case boxed the pre-damaged item inadequately in order to make it look like shipping damage.
After cpu77 tried to tell me that it was my responsibility to "file a claim with UPS," I read the UPS fine print. While a recipient can report receiving a damaged item, only the shipper can actually file a claim.
Inadequate packing disqualifies a damaged item for insurance reimbursement. The UPS rule seems to be that if it was actually damaged in transit, the packing was inadequate. Barring UPS running the package over with a truck or spearing it with a forklift, etc., they are essentially right.
In the worst case you call UPS to report a damaged item, they come out and pick it up, they send it to an inspection location, and eventually return it to the shipper. If the shipper is a scammer he now has your money and the item, and can repeat the process, selling the pre-damaged item to someone else, having it reported, picked up, shipped back, selling it again, etc. ad infinitum.
UPS told me that cpu77 was shipping about 5,000 parcels per week and had almost no insurance claims. That told me that cpu77 had been successfully stonewalling buyers and even when merchandise was returned to them never followed through with claims. I concluded that they never followed through because they already knew that the claims would be denied for inadequate packing, and that that had been intentional in the case of my item to try to misdirect responsibility to UPS so they could stonewall me. If they actually filed claims in such cases UPS would deny them and also be onto them. With no claims, UPS didn't care and regarded them as a great customer.
I did the math and determined that cpu77 didn't need repeat business, that the birth rate in the U.S. was sufficient to allow them to alienate all 5,000 customers per week and never run out of new suck^H^H^H^Hcustomers. As long as they can successfully stonewall unhappy buyers most of the time and keep the money, they have little incentive to care whether their customers are pleased or pissed off.
And "In the face of increasing pressure from the likes of Google and MSN, America Online" has, just in the last couple of days, begun refusing email from mail servers that don't have matching reverse DNS entries, thus cutting off its subscribers from the growing number of small and medium businesses using fixed IP cable or DSL Internet service. It's nice to have matching reverse DNS and it's fastidious in an Internet purist sense, but it's in no way necessary. I host thirteen domains on fixed IP cable Internet and am instituting an SMTP block that will bounce email from the aol.com domain with a message advising senders that due to new AOL policies we cannot reply or send them email, so we recommend they drop AOL and get a real ISP. AOL is its own punishment and it's fitting that they are constricting the world in which their clueless subscribers can operate. AOL deserves to go bust and have its assets sold on eBay.
Anyone else think they've gone off the deep end with this crap?
No! My shirt buttons have a real need to communicate with my shoelaces. Don't yours?
Really, this could be a great thing for all those fashion-impaired geeks. Imagine, you pull on a pair of pants that happen to be handy. Then, when you reach for a shirt, the pants shout through your skull-implanted audio, "No! That shirt doesn't go with us at all! Eeeuuuwww! Blechhh! Barf!" You pull back your hand like you had touched fire, then tentatively reach for another shirt. "Uh, no, that's not too good. Try another." On the third or fourth try you hear, "Yessssssssssss! That rocks! Get it on and let's pick out some accessories..."
How about Bluetooth-synchronized morphing body parts? Just you wait and see...
For those who are interested, and those who visited the Spam Research Tool page (45,994 to date) and especially those who clicked through to the spamsite downloading page and/or have bookmarked and revisited it later (41,101 to date), this seems to have been pretty successful. In building a new URL list from the past day's spam we found that most of our recent spam now points to dark sites. Some apparently took down their web servers to save on bandwidth costs while a few actually took down their DNS records and can no longer be located. Loads/refreshes of the spamloader page continue at 1500-2500 per hour. Since the page autorefreshes twice a day, it wil automatically pick up the new day's URL list if left running.
All the attention focused on who sends the spam and how, and from where it comes, leads nowhere.
Filtering, if you get really good at it, keeps your inbox fairly clean but does nothing about the huge volumes of spam flying around the Internet.
The only tactics that have hurt spammers are those that have increased the costs of the sponsoring Websites. The Lycos screen saver was delicious but failed because it depended on a central server and because a bunch of complete nitwits clucked and wrung their hands over the appropriateness or lack of same in hammering spamvertized Websites. Meanwhile spam continues and those same whiners do nothing meaningful about it.
The one controlling fact that seems to have escaped most of the discussion about spamfighting tactics is that almost all spam contains explicit invitations to visit sponsors' URLs. It's really that simple. If a sponsoring Website hires a spammer to send out millions of emails advertising the Website, the sponsor can't complain if millions of people accept the invitations and visit. Visitors to a Website have no obligation to buy anything.
Active spamfighting was first articulated in 2003 by Paul Graham in Filters That Fight Back. Graham is the person who popularized Bayesian filtering in 2002, about a year before he suggested that filters might actively punish the spamvertized sites they identify. To date no good tools have emerged for independent, distributed spamfighting of this type although many individuals have built scripts for using curl or wget to download files from spamvertized sites.
Until an open source, personal spamfighter is developed and released, the best way to fight back against spam is to use one of the Web-based "vampire" pages, either as maintained by someone else or customized to hit the sponsors of the spam you receive. They are called "vampires" because the suck bandwidth from the spamsites, thus increasing the costs of running spamvertized businesses.
Any of the SpamVampire-type pages may be saved locally and modified. Once you have one of them running in your browser just right click and Save As to your desktop or other convenient place, then edit the list of sites/files at the end of the HTML page. The pages run just as well from your own hard drive as they do from servers.
Of course it's a pain in the butt to keep such an HTML page current, so there's something to be said for running someone else's updated page if it targets spamvertized sites of interest to you. LadVampire, for instance, targets fake bank sites that scam people out of millions. The Spam Research Tool is updated to target spamvertized sites and redirectors manually identified from spam received at its several hosted domains.
One of these days someone will build a bridge between the excellent URL de-obfuscation and identification contained in many of the filtering tools on the one hand and local spamsite downloaders like the SpamVampire genre. Then we'll be able to quickly and easily verify our own spamsite targets and pass the information to our own spammerhammers.
Look up the original of this, Spam Vampire. It appends a fake query to each URL, varying the number in the query, so each one looks unique and the browser cache and any network caches along the way are neatly bypassed.
Beware, though, of a couple of caveats with this type of spammerhammer:
Since it uses your browser, it is vulnerable to meta refresh redirection, which allows the spamsite to redirect requests to any other website.
It is vulnerable to DNS alterations that resolve the host/domain to an innocent IP address.
It doesn't properly manage either the Referer or the User-agent tag or both, such that some spamsites have added code to detect this type of attack and fail to deliver the requested images. Their server still either responds with an error reply or closes the connection after receiving the request bytes or risks leaving the TCP connection occupied, so as long as it's really the target site receiving the requests, it still costs them bandwidth.
Also, there is nothing magic about 16 images or URLs. If you get the Spam Vampire source and follow the sample and the format already present, you can add as many or as few base URLs and image filenames as you like. Extra path elements can be either with the base URL, ending in "/", or with the filenames.
I'm sure this will be some consolation to the poor slob that gets joe jobbed by your self-styled justice. Or are we to believe that it would never occur to a spammer to redirect their DNS to an anti-spam site when undergoing such an attack?
We don't care whether spamsites change their DNS because it's trivially easy to detect in a properly designed tool.
Joe-jobbing seems to be highly overrated. There never seem to be any real cases cited, only hand-wringing by people who have not been joe-jobbed but who seem more concerned with hypothetical joe-jobbing of unnamed, unknown others that no one can point to than with the stark, ugly reality that significant and increasing levels of Internet bandwidth are being eaten up by the billions of spam and worm/virus messages being propagated daily, not to mention the millions of person hours lost to weeding through and disposing of spam and disinfecting machines.
That's the reality. Your joe-jobbing fears are entirely speculative and not taken seriously by anyone familiar with the protocols and programming involved in designing and implementing something like the Lycos screen saver.
...and for the first time in some time there was a significant drop in the amount of spams...
Not a coincidence. I saw a dramatic drop in spam received here.
BTW, the challenge-response thing is really awful. I get zero spams in my New Mail folder simply by using SpamBayes as my proxy mail server and then a simple set of filters in my mail client (Pegasus). First are the whitelist entries, then the filing by SpamBayes headers ("ham," "spam," "unsure"). Anything that SpamBayes thinks is ham but is not on my whitelist is further checked for MIME, BASE64, HTML and any other elements used in most spam. The only things that will make it into my New Mail folder are the items from people on my whitelist and any straight text emails containing none of the elements commonly used in spam.
It works. I have zero false spam positives. I lose no legitimate mail. I pick up new, unannounced correspondents from the "unsure" and the fall-through buckets and add them to the whitelist. At no time do I have to open and examine actual spam to figure out what it is.
I love how they get quoted as "experts" when they are clearly just spouting stuff they pulled out of their ass.
Indeed. I was particularly amused by the widely quoted "brown" comments about the Lycos tool having crashed or taken down two spamsites. Uh, let's review the sequence:
Lycos releases screensaver with stated intention of driving spamsites out of business by breaking their business model by driving up their bandwidth costs,
Two spamsites on the Lycos target list vanish from the Internet,
The logical conclusion is that the two spamsites saw their bandwidth costs going sky high and took their servers out of operation by conscious decision,
Clueless "expert" observers conclude instead that the Lycos tool "crashed" or "disabled" or "took down" the two spamsites, thereby proving that Lycos was conducting a DDoS attack,
Even more severely moronic alleged "journalists" pick up and parrot the incorrect observations and conclusions of the "experts," spreading misinformation far and wide.
The one about the meta refresh tags and the suggestion that the Lycos tool may have been duped into attacking its own server was precious, too.
A few of those alleged network experts were apparently jumping into the news fray to promote their own names and imagined expertise. In doing so they revealed themselves to be clueless nitwits. I've put them on my list of people and organizations never to pay attention to in anything important.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right. Let's begin using more sensitive terms for such things and then we won't have to check the news every day for disasters before we open our thoughtless mouths.
"Train wreck" could be "rail transport guidance mishap (RTGM)"
"Plane crash" could be "aeronautic ground avoidance exception (AGAE)"
"Tsunami" could be "exceptional aquatic waveform event (EAWE)"
"Earthquake" could be "sudden geological tension release event (SGTRE)"
"Flood" could be "unexpected hydrological intrusion (UHI)"
"Fire" could be "unwanted thermological surge cause by excessively rapid oxdidation of ambient combustibles (UTSCBEROOAC or UTSCEROAC)"
"Atomic attack" coule be "aggressive chain reaction event unfortunately proximate to valuable life or property (ACREUPTVLOP or ACREUPVLP)"
"Heart attack" could be "biogenic oxidant supply chain problem resulting in catastrophic system pump failure (BOSCPRICSPF)"
"Vomit" could be "retrograde migration of partially processed biological fuel mixture (RMOPPBFM or RMPPBFM)"
By using the abbreviations we could all pretend that nothing ugly happens or exists. "Hey, be careful with that! You could have a BOSCPRICSPF!" "What the fuck did you call me, pissbrain?"I once found the Linux Adaptec driver maintainer's site. I was appalled to see a matrix of mostly unique drivers for combinations of Linxu kernels and Adaptec HBA models. I got the impression that every time Adaptec designs a new HBA they ignore everything they've done before.
Contrast that with Symbios SCSI HBAs (now LSI Logic). There has always been just one driver for all the Symbios HBAs that use a given SCSI chip, and more recently I think I've seen some integration into a driver that covers multiple 53Cxxx chip types.
I use Symbios / LSI Logix SCSI HBAs in RS/6000 AIX systems, Linux boxes and Win PCs, always without trouble, without driver nonsense, and without configuration or script bullshit. I wouldn't use an Adaptec HBA even if I got it as a gift.
Correct. And that is a damning indictment of the fucked-up state of things as they presently are. No such threats are used to whip ISPs who host spammers and spam sites into line. On the contrary, if reports are correct, Global Crossing and Cox and probably other major interconnects actually went out of their way to block the Lycos spammer hammer screensaver while allowing billions of spam senders and thousands of spam ecommerce sites to flourish and operate unhindered through their networks.
Punctuation in English is enclosed within the quote marks, but in technical matters it often can't be when the quote marks enclose a precise character string the meaning of which would be altered by inclusion of punctuation necessary for the larger sentence structure.
For example, if followed precisely, this won't work:
while this will work:
Not gonna happen.
That would be pretty stupid and neanderthal, too. It can't be done in secret. The first technician who is hauled before a Grand Jury is going to give up his managers in a heartbeat. The first manager hauled in will give up the droid suits in a heartbeat. The droid suits will be indicted. I imagine they're stupid enough to try it until a few of them have been consigned to the graybar hotel for a few years.
Vonage has over 350,000 "lines" and is adding them at 30,000 per month. The genie is well out of the bottle and can't be put back. VoIP growth is now running at 900% per year. Shipments of VoIP switch equipment have surpassed shipments of traditional switch equipment. The avalanche is well underway and people who have tasted affordable, flat rate VoIP service that works from almost anywhere on the planet are going to be out for blood if any politician, bureaurat or weasel telecom tries to get in the way.
I invite any telecom droid who wants his career to turn into a blackened, smoking pit to just try messing with VoIP traffic. Expect existing laws to be stretched to cover this and expect interference with VoIP traffic to be criminalized very soon.
Grandma to her congresscritter: "I don't know why, but as soon as my cable Internet company offered its own voice over Internet service, my Vonage service began to develop noise and dropped calls."
congresscritter: "We'll look into it, ma'am. We've had a lot of calls about this in the last week."
congresscritter to aide: "Harvey, get on the phone with FCC and the AG's office. These ISPs are fucking with my consituents' lives and safety. Find a law, and let's break their fucking legs with it."
What a great application for capital punishment! Destroy historical treasures, get fried. That might give the corporate assholes some pause.
A genuine Science Babe! I wanna marry her!
Maybe the next trend in outsourcing will be for India and other places to offer to act on our behalf in calling their brethren down the road, waiting on hold, etc.
1: (ring, ring) "(thick Indian accent) Hello. I am Bob. How may I hailp you?"
2: "(also thick Indian accent)Hello. I am (clickety-click...) Sandra Fleischmann. I have a problem with my (clickety-click...) eBay listing. I have been on hold for ... 27 minutes and 32 seconds. Where are you located, if I may ask?"
1: "I'm very sorry. We are all very sorry here at (clickety-click...) eBay. I am located in (clickety-click...) Virginia, Pennsylvania. The weather here is (clickety-click) 62 degrees and overcast, with a 40% chance of precipitation. How is the weather where you are?"
2: "It is (clickety-click...) 26 degrees and snowing here in (clickety-click) Las Vegas, Michigan."
1: "That's very nice. What is the nature of your problem?"
2: "(clickety-click) My new auction listing doesn't come up in the eBay Search."
1: "Have you tried rebooting your PC?"
No, it's apparent from the post that he/she thinks those phishing emails are actually coming from eBay.
Come to think of it I think they could make a ton of money and be a big hit by auctioning off the fraud artists for disposition by the winning bidder. "Bid now on Joey the credit card scammer and if you win you can torture him to death by the method of your choice!"
Here we go... eBay could auction off SPAMMERS... boy, oh boy, could they become overnight heros!
"Three day auction: Scott Richter, delivered bound and gagged to the undisclosed location of your choice by blind, deaf-mute delivery agents. S&H only $5,000."
Actually what you say only applies to consumer items. eBay is an excellent place to find exotic and niche technical gear and is probably the most active marketplace in the world for finding last year's serious non-consumer technology today for a fraction of its original price.
The fraudulent sellers concentrate on high-volume, easy to move consumer items, which are also often bought by clueless nitwits. The fraudulent buyers only want consumer stuff they can fence or resell easily. You won't find too many fraud artists buying or selling SCSI disk arrays or HD68-to-VHDCI SCSI cables.
And if I'm considering bidding in your hign S&H auction I discount my max bid by your excess S&H. And in my experience the high S&H auctions get far less bidding activity than the ones with more reasonable S&H and often close lower than the others or get no bids at all. So not only am I not affected by your policy of shifting part of the total away from the closing price, I often win such auctions at unusually low closing prices as a result of the reduced bidding competition. But, like many other bidders, I also often just skip on past the auctions that have something out of kilter like an excessively high S&H. I use a sniff test... if something smells "off" in an auction listing I generally don't consider bidding. That could be excessive S&H, absence of obviously crucial data on the item (model, part number, voltage, etc.), 10 times more text about terms and conditions than about the item being sold, strange terms, etc.
That's right. That happened to me, too. It's right there in their policy that sellers have to list S&H and can't invent new and non-customary charges after the close of the auction. But eBay ignores its own policy and sides with the sellers because the sellers pay the bills at eBay.
If eBay exercised more common sense they wouldn't piss so many people off. This last astounding email about improved customer relations landed in my mailbox, too, and I laughed when I read it. It's entirely PR. The purpose of Customer Disservice in many of today's numbers-driven organizations run by clueless suits who bring no redeeming skills to their positions is simply to make complaining customers shut up and go away. There is usually no way for real customer issues to ever feed back up to management because management never has any intention of paying attention to customer issues, and certainly not from Customer Disservice. In today's organizations management exists in a vacuum, setting policy and sending orders downward, convinced that nothing below them has anything to contribute that they don't already know. It's the theatre of the Conceit of the Clueless MBAs.
In the larger picture, though, I don't even think eBay is in business to run auctions. If they were, they would attend better to business, would do a much better job of keeping their "venue" clean of fraudsters, and would have competent IT instead of continually tinkering with and breaking things. The Auction Guild, which used to chronicle eBay outages and feature failures before its operator became very busy in her military duties, regularly published hair-raising reports of multiple daily problems in the eBay system, many of which were crippling to volume sellers. I subscribe to the belief that eBay does nothing more than it has to to keep the value of the insiders' stock options rising so they can cash out. Their auction system just has to function well enough to be plausible, not well enough to satisfy the participants. Once it became the visible online auction marketplace there was no possibility that anyone else could effectively compete. That's the nature of certain types of marketplaces -- once they exist, that's where everyone goes because only a moron would place his wares in a lesser marketplace.
No, eBay has the auction market because it is. There are certain markets that naturally tend to establish in only one place. Most big-city job markets have only ever had one newspaper where all the significant job ads appear. This is because once the marketplace has become established, only a moron would try to buy or sell in any lesser market.
I disagree. The closing price of an item often bears little or no relationship to the opening price or the seller's wished-for price. The closing price is, therefore, essentially an arbitrary as opposed to something determined in any predictable way by the seller. Therefore the seller loses nothing, since the auction could just as easily have closed 10 or 50 percent lower, or 100 percent higher, depending on the phase of the moon, the evening's sitcom or football schedule and any of thousands of other factors.
Further, any additional charge that is known to buyers tends to be discounted, often more than offsetting the charge. For example, sellers who have higher than normal S&H often get no bids or a much lower closing price than sellers who have customary S&H for the type of item being sold. When I want an item badly enough to consider bidding in an auction that has unreasonably high S&H I figure the max I'd normally be willing to pay then subtract the excess S&H and that's my actual max bid.
Exactly right. It's a flawed model for the universe of participants because eBay has no incentive to kick fraudulent sellers off. As long as they can remain at a distance, they stand to earn fees from all sellers, honest and dishonest. eBay is an equal opportunity facilitator.
No they aren't. It's part of the tacky eBay culture. There are much better ways to recognize the bad players than merely overstatement in feedback.
I agree entirely with HeghmoH. I once bought a physically heavy item from cpu77 on eBay. It arrived in a lightweight carton, damaged, but it also had deep gouges in the steel housing with no corresponding holes in the carton -- damage that existed prior to shipping. I learned several things from the experience.
First was that the only thing that had any effect on the seller was my filing of a fraud affidavit with my bank. The instant the bank contacted cpu77 my money was credited back, but before that they had stonewalled me and steadfastly refused to do anything. So that's the real answer... pay direct by credit card, even by credit-enhanced "banking card", which gives you recourse through your cc company or bank, and the seller will pay attention.
But I learned some other interesting things before getting to that point:
And "In the face of increasing pressure from the likes of Google and MSN, America Online" has, just in the last couple of days, begun refusing email from mail servers that don't have matching reverse DNS entries, thus cutting off its subscribers from the growing number of small and medium businesses using fixed IP cable or DSL Internet service. It's nice to have matching reverse DNS and it's fastidious in an Internet purist sense, but it's in no way necessary. I host thirteen domains on fixed IP cable Internet and am instituting an SMTP block that will bounce email from the aol.com domain with a message advising senders that due to new AOL policies we cannot reply or send them email, so we recommend they drop AOL and get a real ISP. AOL is its own punishment and it's fitting that they are constricting the world in which their clueless subscribers can operate. AOL deserves to go bust and have its assets sold on eBay.
No! My shirt buttons have a real need to communicate with my shoelaces. Don't yours?
Really, this could be a great thing for all those fashion-impaired geeks. Imagine, you pull on a pair of pants that happen to be handy. Then, when you reach for a shirt, the pants shout through your skull-implanted audio, "No! That shirt doesn't go with us at all! Eeeuuuwww! Blechhh! Barf!" You pull back your hand like you had touched fire, then tentatively reach for another shirt. "Uh, no, that's not too good. Try another." On the third or fourth try you hear, "Yessssssssssss! That rocks! Get it on and let's pick out some accessories..."
How about Bluetooth-synchronized morphing body parts? Just you wait and see...
For those who are interested, and those who visited the Spam Research Tool page (45,994 to date) and especially those who clicked through to the spamsite downloading page and/or have bookmarked and revisited it later (41,101 to date), this seems to have been pretty successful. In building a new URL list from the past day's spam we found that most of our recent spam now points to dark sites. Some apparently took down their web servers to save on bandwidth costs while a few actually took down their DNS records and can no longer be located. Loads/refreshes of the spamloader page continue at 1500-2500 per hour. Since the page autorefreshes twice a day, it wil automatically pick up the new day's URL list if left running.
All the attention focused on who sends the spam and how, and from where it comes, leads nowhere.
Filtering, if you get really good at it, keeps your inbox fairly clean but does nothing about the huge volumes of spam flying around the Internet.
The only tactics that have hurt spammers are those that have increased the costs of the sponsoring Websites. The Lycos screen saver was delicious but failed because it depended on a central server and because a bunch of complete nitwits clucked and wrung their hands over the appropriateness or lack of same in hammering spamvertized Websites. Meanwhile spam continues and those same whiners do nothing meaningful about it.
The one controlling fact that seems to have escaped most of the discussion about spamfighting tactics is that almost all spam contains explicit invitations to visit sponsors' URLs. It's really that simple. If a sponsoring Website hires a spammer to send out millions of emails advertising the Website, the sponsor can't complain if millions of people accept the invitations and visit. Visitors to a Website have no obligation to buy anything.
Active spamfighting was first articulated in 2003 by Paul Graham in Filters That Fight Back. Graham is the person who popularized Bayesian filtering in 2002, about a year before he suggested that filters might actively punish the spamvertized sites they identify. To date no good tools have emerged for independent, distributed spamfighting of this type although many individuals have built scripts for using curl or wget to download files from spamvertized sites.
Until an open source, personal spamfighter is developed and released, the best way to fight back against spam is to use one of the Web-based "vampire" pages, either as maintained by someone else or customized to hit the sponsors of the spam you receive. They are called "vampires" because the suck bandwidth from the spamsites, thus increasing the costs of running spamvertized businesses.
Any of the SpamVampire-type pages may be saved locally and modified. Once you have one of them running in your browser just right click and Save As to your desktop or other convenient place, then edit the list of sites/files at the end of the HTML page. The pages run just as well from your own hard drive as they do from servers.
Of course it's a pain in the butt to keep such an HTML page current, so there's something to be said for running someone else's updated page if it targets spamvertized sites of interest to you. LadVampire, for instance, targets fake bank sites that scam people out of millions. The Spam Research Tool is updated to target spamvertized sites and redirectors manually identified from spam received at its several hosted domains.
One of these days someone will build a bridge between the excellent URL de-obfuscation and identification contained in many of the filtering tools on the one hand and local spamsite downloaders like the SpamVampire genre. Then we'll be able to quickly and easily verify our own spamsite targets and pass the information to our own spammerhammers.
Look up the original of this, Spam Vampire. It appends a fake query to each URL, varying the number in the query, so each one looks unique and the browser cache and any network caches along the way are neatly bypassed.
Beware, though, of a couple of caveats with this type of spammerhammer:
Also, there is nothing magic about 16 images or URLs. If you get the Spam Vampire source and follow the sample and the format already present, you can add as many or as few base URLs and image filenames as you like. Extra path elements can be either with the base URL, ending in "/", or with the filenames.
We don't care whether spamsites change their DNS because it's trivially easy to detect in a properly designed tool.
Joe-jobbing seems to be highly overrated. There never seem to be any real cases cited, only hand-wringing by people who have not been joe-jobbed but who seem more concerned with hypothetical joe-jobbing of unnamed, unknown others that no one can point to than with the stark, ugly reality that significant and increasing levels of Internet bandwidth are being eaten up by the billions of spam and worm/virus messages being propagated daily, not to mention the millions of person hours lost to weeding through and disposing of spam and disinfecting machines.
That's the reality. Your joe-jobbing fears are entirely speculative and not taken seriously by anyone familiar with the protocols and programming involved in designing and implementing something like the Lycos screen saver.
Not a coincidence. I saw a dramatic drop in spam received here.
BTW, the challenge-response thing is really awful. I get zero spams in my New Mail folder simply by using SpamBayes as my proxy mail server and then a simple set of filters in my mail client (Pegasus). First are the whitelist entries, then the filing by SpamBayes headers ("ham," "spam," "unsure"). Anything that SpamBayes thinks is ham but is not on my whitelist is further checked for MIME, BASE64, HTML and any other elements used in most spam. The only things that will make it into my New Mail folder are the items from people on my whitelist and any straight text emails containing none of the elements commonly used in spam.
It works. I have zero false spam positives. I lose no legitimate mail. I pick up new, unannounced correspondents from the "unsure" and the fall-through buckets and add them to the whitelist. At no time do I have to open and examine actual spam to figure out what it is.
Indeed. I was particularly amused by the widely quoted "brown" comments about the Lycos tool having crashed or taken down two spamsites. Uh, let's review the sequence:
The one about the meta refresh tags and the suggestion that the Lycos tool may have been duped into attacking its own server was precious, too.
A few of those alleged network experts were apparently jumping into the news fray to promote their own names and imagined expertise. In doing so they revealed themselves to be clueless nitwits. I've put them on my list of people and organizations never to pay attention to in anything important.