IBM...can *almost* get away with just selling the hardware; if somebody starts having a problem, they can either fix it themselves, or else pay IBM consulting services a boatload of money to fix it.
IBM already gets away with just selling the hardware, because you also have to pay fees for the privilege of being allowed to run an operating system on the processors you bought. They also make large amounts of money by providing regular contract support to fix things, not consulting services. If you have a big system you'd be looney not to have support.
...if somebody is going to make money off of linux...
IBM is already making money from Linux by charging for the use of the processor. That's before they even begin to make money from Linux support or the very expensive components you will find don't come with Linux but are necessary to make robust use of the hardware. Now they're bringing the licensed processor model to what used to be called the RS/6000 line and is now the "pSeries eServer" line. Buy a machine with six processors, pay to "open" four of them for use with Linux, and the other two processors (that you actually already paid for) will act as spares to be swapped in at no charge should a covered processor fail, or for occasional paid use in the "capacity on demand" model.
It's a brilliant strategy but it doesn't bode well for the future of free Linux if it's possible that all the processors of the future will be controlled and licensed. See my comments on this.
Think it can't happen to the PC? Think again. "Trusted Computing" as the infrastructure for Digital Rights Management may be the shoehorn for inserting control over the BIOS and all operating systems and applications permitted to run on the PC. Want to run Linux? Sure! Just lease an enabling certificate...
I don't believe Lyons has a clue about what IBM has in store for Linux. The referenced comment is my own take on what may be brewing. I believe that the Linux community will react negatively to what could emerge as strategies to completely co-opt free, open-source Linux by controlling and licensing the platforms available for it to run on or by controlling and licensing obscure access mechanisms without which the platforms can't be used.
If I run a gravel yard I could charge you by weight or volume for the gravel you remove, or I could charge you an access fee measured by the type and size of truck you use, or any of a number of other schemes. If for any reason gravel is supposed to be "free," I wouldn't charge you for the gravel but for something essential you would need in order to remove, transport or use the gravel. I could rent you the shovel or backhoe while prohibiting the entry of "foreign" tools such as those you might wish to bring with you. I could charge you for using the road into the gravel pit. I could charge you for a license to breathe the air floating in and around my gravel pit. I could cover the pit and then charge you for light to work by. The are lots of ways to make the gravel seem to be "free" but to make money in direct or indirect consequence of you removing or using the gravel.
The model IBM is using seems to be analogous to a periodic "gate fee" to a sector of the yard. Usage is unlimited but the fee only gets you access to a certain resource area and you have to pay periodically.
Oddly, Andrew Odlyzko's new paper on network pricing, which unavoidably touches on canal, turnpike and other network toll and fee mechanisms in recent centuries, offers a lot of insight into how IBM can make money from free Linux and in fact how and why the computer industry could adopt a toll or fee model, although he doesn't take it that far.
Gravel can't easily be controlled after it leaves the gravel pit, but CPUs can be controlled after they leave the factory, most effectively by a cryptographic dependency that gives the CPU manufacturer continuing control over the software environment the CPU will be willing to run in.
It's no secret that Micro$leaze would very much like to move to a lease model for its software. It' such a pain for them to have to keep inventing new reasons for us to buy a new version of Windows every year. Intel might become interested in joining with Micro$loth to lease the privilege of using their CPU chips. Digital Rights Management could be the vehicle they will both use to close the BIOS and the CPU, publicly just to "protect the rights of IP owners," but ultimately to shift both Windows and the Intel CPU to a licensed, lease basis.
My referenced essay tried to point out that IBM is already doing this, not only with their traditional mainframe processors and operating systems, but now also with Linux in more than one of their platform product lines. I thought it was worth taking the time to write the essay because I haven't seen any discussion of this aspect of IBM embracing Linux. On the contrary, at least some in the Linux community seem to think IBM embraced Linux out of altruism or in admission of the defeat of proprietary software. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
So what if businesses have to pay per-CPU for their IBM mainframes in "serious production environments"?
I guess I failed utterly to communicate the point in my 2100-word essay. This time I'll type s-l-o-w-l-y.
It matters because it reveals IBM's strategy for making high margins on systems that run a "free" OS. IBM doesn't play in the commoditized markets. They may plan to enhance the Linux and non-OSS props and add-ons that will run in their controlled environments to the point at which the free Linux that you can run will become undesirable, just as Win 3.1 has become undesirable in the face of later, better offerings, or even unloadable on machines built to new standards that are right now being thrashed out.
Do you think that the PC can't follow, to become a closed environment in which a recurring license fee may be required just to use the CPU? Are you watching the evolving Trusted Computing initiative?
If the worst happens, yes, today's PC will still exist, just as the decade-old 386 still exists and even older 286 still exists and even the PC AT and XT still exist. DOS still exists, and you can get the license from IBM as PC-DOS even though MS has stopped licensing MS-DOS. And what good will any of that do you once the PC has moved beyond present technology and the future Wintel consortium charges you an annual fee for the privilege of running Linux on your Intel CPU? The point is that this is already happening in the business world and may show how IBM intends to make money from an otherwise "free" OS and how others, such as Wintel, could do the same with PCs.
Here's one way it could happen: Intel adds cryptographic validation of the BIOS to the CPU, making it impossible to use the CPU without a "trusted" BIOS approved by Intel. The BIOS is then made very selective about what it will run and what [paid-up] certificates it will require before running things. The standard pre-loaded Wintel box will come with an approved BIOS, an annually renewable cert for Windows tied to the CPU serial #, and consumers will see no difference except that Digital Rights Management will be built in and will enforce copyrights as the RIAA and MPAA and SBA view them, and it will be necessary to pay an annual lease fee to continue to use the PC they bought and paid for.
Linux users, though, may find it impossible to load and run Linux on such boxes, but will be offered a Linux-enablement cert for $xxx dollars per year. The xxx will offset the "loss" of Windows lease revenue and contain an annoyance factor to further discourage off-brand OSs.
If this happens, it will happen in the context of at least 5 or 10 GHz PCs with fast 32 or 128 GB memories or better, GB graphics, and lots of other goodies, such that the old PCs on which you will still be able to run ordinary, free Linux will look pretty sick, just as a PC XT looks pretty sick today. Gradually the older stuff will die off from lack of parts, support and desirability and with it will die the ability to load and run a completely free, unencumbered Linux.
Look, if you were really retro you could today still be using a DOS 286 PC and Blue Wave to do your BBS mail and group reading and replying. Nothing would prevent you from doing that except, perhaps, a few things like the lack of BBSs, the inadequacy of a BBS-style interface to today's world, relative isolation from the Internet, poor graphics, slow CPU speed, low memory limits, ISA slots, slow memory speed, inability to find replacement parts, etc. It would work in the context of the 1980s as long as you could keep the hardware going, but it would not work very well in the context of 2004.
Don't y'all just love people who whine and complain that we don't pay enough for gasoline?
Hey! Go look up the income tax rate in Norway and then come back here complaining that our taxes are subsidizing our taxes and that's why taxes are cheaper here than in other places and how we could be like the Europeans and pay two or three times as much in taxes, which I suppose you would think would be a Good Thing since you think we're getting off lightly or something.
Commercial programmers don't make the important quality decisions -- they are handed down by management to suit marketing needs and the bottom line. If there's any professional programmer here who hasn't written inferior code to satisfy arbitrary time and resource requirements imposed from above, speak now and be counted with your five or six other brethren.
If I have, it wasn't signicant enough to be able to remember now. But I haven't worked in the environments in which clueless marketing suits dictate features and release dates. An awful lot of the software I've designed and written was on my own initiative and sold to management on the basis that it was the best approach to accomplish the goals. In a lot of cases management was never brought into the loop, since I had considerable control over the tools I chose to adopt or write. When you invent new things in environments that are not rich in solutions, you may be able to do what you please.
Nonetheless, I doubt I'll be writing any more software in the years remaining to me, for the following reasons, among others:
The corporate world is no longer a viable place to work, having thoroughly betrayed employees over the last several decades
Short-sighted management is destroying the future of the nation by offshoring high-tech work and disemploying completely qualified Americans to replace them with lower-paid guest workers.
Corporate management has become incredibly brain dead and short-sighted of late. It's now common to see waste in the form of ill-conceived and badly done projects not just in six figures but in seven, even eight figures, with no consequences to the management responsible for the waste and lost time.
Age discrimination is now institutionalized. That's a big reason why all the job ads you see on the Internet are not by principals but by headhunters and contract houses -- there is an unwritten understanding between the hiring company and the agent that certain resumes, mostly of people who are "too old," will not be forwarded to the principal. Yet the difference between 3 years of programming experience and 20 or 30 years is huge, with productivity advantages of 10 times or more in favor of highly experienced programmers not unheard of.
Since its ascendancy, HR has helped to dumb down the hiring process to the point at which people are not infrequently expected to have 5 years of experience in a technology that was only invented two years ago.
"Reusable code" was apparently misunderstood, and taken to mean "Reuse everything, including a 100KB module when you only need one of its 3KB functions." Code bloat is now the rule and programming has gone all to hell.
Programming is now influenced by IT fashion trends more than anything else, witness client/server, C, Java, etc.
I got into programming many decades ago because it was fun, and I was able to become the guru in every shop I ever worked in. It's no longer fun, so I choose not to play in this game anymore. I might consider selling executive burial plans out of a sense of retributive poetic justice but there are other fields I find more interesting.
If that nightmare comes to pass it will be a license, not a cert, and it will more like having to have sex with an ill-tempered duckbilled platypus, complete with venomous barbs.
As a result it will select for people on some basis other than good programming, since a lot of good programmers wouldn't go near such a process. The eccentricities of many good programmers don't tend toward an affinity for senseless and stupid bureaucracy, and poison barbs are supposed to be on one's own tinfoil helmet, not on the hind legs of the furry animal with which one is trying to have sex.
Exactly right. "License" is permission to do that which would otherwise be a crime to do. If you come into my home as my guest, you are doing with permission what could send a burglar to prison.
Historically, license as a formal permission from the state stems from the general police power of the state to prohibit things that are deemed dangers to public health or safety -- such as cutting people open with knives allegedly to treat injuries or illnesses -- and then allow select people the permission to do those things under some set of conditions and qualifications, hence licensed doctors, who *are* allowed to cut people open without fear of being charged with assault with a deadly weapon, bodily injury, maiming, etc.
Where "license" goes bad is when, in complete ignorance of what it means and where it comes from, the public accepts "licensing" for purposes such as generating tax revenues. Every one of us has seen proposals to "license" something as a way to raise revenues in the form of license fees, but few people have understood that such proposals amount to "We want to make xxxx illegal so we can then turn around and collect fees for permitting just about anyone to do xxx." It's bass-ackward and contaminates the legal concept of "license."
So, yes, writing software can only be "licensed" if writing software is first made into a crime. Whether or not the proponents of such a thing can sell the idea that a vital state health or safety issue is at stake remains to be seen, but in today's climate of ignorance it probably isn't necessary to explain such reasons to sell "licensing" of anything.
I disagree that IBM will settle with SCO. That prediction is just plain silly.
I do agree that the Linux community will turn against IBM, not not for any reason Lyons would be able to see from his relatively technology-free writing cubicle.
The Linux community will turn against IBM after the SCO dragon has been laid waste and after the community figures out IBM's model for making money from Linux. There aren't too many mysteries in the former, but the latter seems little understood. Yet.
IBM is making money right now from Linux, not by charging for Linux itself (although they slipped recently and wrote of "licensing Linux" in the same terms as their oldline OSs, a Marketing brain fart, no doubt) but by charging the user for permission to use the CPU.
How can this be? Don't you own the CPU?
Well, yes and no. If it's a traditional IBM PC or pre-pSeries RS/6000, yes, you own the CPU(s) and you can run any free software you can manage to load. If you look carefully, though, you will notice that such straightforward platform designs are disappearing from the IBM landscape.
The trick lies in the mainframe-izing of unix and Intel chips as they are packaged and offered by IBM, following a very old model that has served them well since the 1950s. Imagine a PC for which you have to pay an annual proprietary BIOS license and you'll begin to see how this works. Sure, load any OS you want, but you can't load and run it without the help of the BIOS, and the license fee you'll pay for permission (and software) with which to do that will be based on the OS you want to run. IBM is not going to allow itself to be trapped into competing in the commodity server box market.
In the 1950s, when punch card machines were all the rage, IBM didn't sell them to customers -- they rented them. Your punch card machines would be delivered chock full of features, mostly in the form of expensive relays hidden under the skirts, but the Customer Engineer would install and remove jumpers to disable any of the features you weren't paying to use. The profit margins were so high that even in those days of super-expensive hardware the fact of millions of disabled relays sitting unused in customer machines was a cost IBM was easily able to absorb.
The way this translated to IBM's mainframe scheme, which they are now moving to the "new" RS/6000 -- the pSeries platforms -- and others, including the Intel-based "z" machines, is to surround the processor(s) with a complex of hardware and software such that you can't gain access to the CPU(s) without licensed IBM software that is separate and distinct from the OS. What it boils down to is that yes, you can buy the CPU(s) but no, you don't have permission to use the CPU(s) without paying recurring license fees exclusive of whatever, if anything, the OS may cost.
Right now you can run Linux on monster S/390 mainframes, but not for free. In the S/390 world you have to pay for a license to use each processor in a S/390. How much you pay depends on the value IBM has placed on the use to which you want to put the processor. It might cost $250,000 to "open" a processor for MVS but only $125,000 to "open" the same processor for Linux. To the Linux community member unfamiliar with IBM's mainframe business model this may seem like cause to retch and reach for the barf bag, but for mainframe customers well-accustomed to paying Big Bucks to IBM for everything, including the time of day, it's an incredible bargain.
With the introduction of the pSeries platforms ("pSeries" is not just a new name for the RS/6000 line), IBM's mainframe business model has arrived in the PowerPC unix server world. Same for IBM's Intel-based "z" platforms. The older RS/6000s will be orphaned as IBM drops support for them
Well death and destruction have always been more popular in this country than charity. It is always easier to beat someone else down than to build yourself up.
You don't get out much, do you? You're dead wrong on both points if by "this country" you mean the U.S. The U.S. is the most charitable country in the world, and if you think people here tear each other down you certainly haven't spent any time in other countries more than maybe superficial vacations. All through latin America, for example, the primary form of competition is finding ways to prevent the competition from entering into or doing business. One of the big reasons the U.S. is so far ahead of so many other nations economically is that it was established on some work and behavior ethics that are, exceptions and aberrations notwithstanding, constructive, not destructive. Many other countries have an entirely destructive ethos determining the behavior of their people.
That may be true for small projects with a limited set of users and a relatively low profile. Could you say the same thing for projects like Mozilla, KDE, GnuCash, OpenOffice, Scribus, KDevelop or even the kernel itself?
The Linux kernel is widely and highly regarded, and stories of Linux systems running without crash or reboot for 6 months, a year, even more, are common.
Mozilla? I turned to it when eBay dicked with their formats and brain-dead MSIE refused to save as HTML. Mozilla was able to save such pages (hey, if the browser can render the page, how can it claim not to be able to save the components it used to render it??), but only once. On the second save it would invariably crash. I had to close it and relaunch it for each save.
Those others I haven't used. I have done several Linux installs on very standard IBM brand PCs that failed to identify the graphic chipset and ended up giving me critical windows with both top and bottom off the screen. I also found the pop-up bar at the bottom amusing, because by default it came up behind open windows.
The nested dependency thing is something I had the displeasure to experience recently, trying to install SpamAssassin on an AIX system. It required several other things. I used CPAN, which was amazing and frightening -- amazing because I hadn't realized that so much work had been done to automate such things, and frightening because I had no idea what all it was installing on my system. It eventually crapped out several levels down, and the whole install failed, leaving God only knows what incomplete garbage lying around.
Some months ago I walked in on a friend who was straining over an IBM Intellistation and the O'Reilly Linux book complete with CD. The network stuff wouldn't configure following the explicit examples given in the book. Several days later, after countless hours on the Internet, he dug out the correct information from some obscure corner of the Net.
Sendmail was obviously written by malicious alien visitors. Try configuring it without using the shorthand m4 macros. IBM distributed sendmail in AIX 4.3.3 with sample m4 files and instructions, but not the m4 macro processor. I finally found one but couldn't get it to work according to examples in the sendmail documentation. Then I looked for sample sendmail configs on the Internet, and ran into one of those "What's wrong with this picture?" things -- there weren't any.
The Apache Web server distributed by IBM in AIX 4.3.3 conveniently has its "deny" by IP address feature completely broken. There's no question that Apache is a kickass piece of software, but jeez, a significant feature completely nonfunctional...
Being a serious hater of vi (which was obviously first written by someone who had never seen an editor UI before), I installed the Joe editor. It promptly destroyed the standard vt100 terminfo or termcap file used by the major app I run and still can't run right without its own special termcap in the user's home directory.
Have you ever seen the matrix of Linux drivers for Adaptec SCSI HBAs? It's a nightmare of a bad joke. There's a different driver for just about every combination of Linux point version and Adaptec card model. One guy has pretty much had to devote his life to just that one little corner of Linux. That's sick.
I follow the rs6kpreplinux list, where one person on the entire planet has done the work to provide for running Linux on RS/6000 43P 7043-140 machines. I still haven't tried the stuff because I'm waiting for the list to stop carrying mostly "I tried xxx and it didn't work" messages. "Oh," says the author, "Maybe I forgot to include the zzzz module in the kernel patches, let me go check..."
Virtually every Microsoft product on the shelves of stores in shrinkwrap is broken out of the box, requiring hours of downloading "service packs" and other doo-dads that are sometimes nearly impossible to find.
"...makes clear the notion that Open Source Software bears a mark of professionalism."
Oh. That must explain why so much of OSS is broken and has documentation that is incomplete and often actually erroneous, not to mention the almost endless nested dependencies that often break on install, making the install of the top-level item incomplete and hosed.
"Professionalism" my ass.
I detest closed software but professionalism is precisely what is lacking in OSS. The prevailing rule seems to be, "Close is good enough!"
I found the technical section of the Switch article didn't fully explain the encoding. After thinking that I should code up the RFC to figure it out...
Only look at that RFC if you want to become blind and brain damaged in a single sitting.
Almost everyone is missing the fact that laws, even when well written and targeted, are poor substitutes for economic solutions when the undesired activity is economically driven and economic solutions are available. And this law seems particularly badly written. It is pointless to whine and wring our hands over this, since it's fundamentally bad policy to wait for someone else to save us from things we're unwilling to deal with ourselves. Anti-spam legislation was bound, if not to fail utterly, at least to start very badly, like Billy Bob's Mail Order Plans For Home Fusion Power. If you'd like to empower yourself, read the remainder of this post. If you'd just like to gain the satisfaction that there is hope,, read this post.
Why does spam exist?
Most spam seeks to sell something, directly or indirectly. Most spam solicits visits to what might be called "beneficiary Websites" -- the Websites where the touted products are actually sold, usually via e-commerce. Some small percentage of spam solicits responses by phone or fax, a smaller percentage by snail mail, and a very tiny percentage advises you to come to Jesus or some such with no response solicited.
So almost all spam exists because someone hopes to make money from it, and almost all spam solicits responses to beneficiary Websites.
Forget who sends it: Who is responsible for it?
OK, so the largest percentage of spam solicits visits to product or service Websites. Follow the money. Other than the rare "Joe job," such spam is obviously sent either by the Website operator or by a contractor acting on behalf of the Website operator. No one else stands to benefit from the responses to the spam, so no one else will lift a finger to attract traffic to the Website except in some very rare scenarios.
So the true beneficiary of the spam, who is also the party who funded sending the spam, is generally readily visible and reachable. The true beneficiary is almost always also the true source of the spam. The question is: knowing this, what can one do that will be effective?
Counterattack the source
Paul Graham, the researcher and LISP expert who advanced Bayesian filtering a little over a year ago, followed up a few months ago with a paper on Filters that Fight Back (FFB).
The fatal weakness in spam that attempts to attract visits to beneficiary e-commerce Websites is just that: it invites us to visit, and explicitly so. When we accept the invitation and visit the beneficiary Websites, the additional traffic marginally increases the costs of operating the Websites. "So what?" you might ask.
Here's what: the Websites count on the millions of recipients of the spam who are not interested, not to visit the Websites. The flip side of the near-zero cost of sending spam is the near-zero cost of the unresponsive among the recipients. The Website operators send or cause to be sent millions and millions of spam emails but they only have to pay for the server capacity and bandwidth for the tiny response rate from the morons who actually buy stuff. While we can't easily change the low cost of sending spam, we certainly can change the low cost of hosting the servers that have to handle the Web visits that can result from spam. We can do that simply by accepting the invitations contained in spam, and not only accepting the invitations but clicking on every link they have, to make sure to navigate through all their pages.
But that sounds like too much work!
Sure. And dangerous, too, because your browser may not be configured for maximum security. If it were, you wouldn't be able to surf most of the major sites on the Web. But there's a completely legitimate set of tools for downloading Websites for offline browsing. WebWhacker is an old one that
First I made the Former Front Bedroom (TM) into my office. When that filled up I set up a PC in the Former Living Room and PC Anywhere'd to the original PC where all the email and files still are. The Former Living Room accumulation spread to the Former Dining Room. The kitchen counter is often the only clear space for working on the innards of computers and disk enclosures. The only places spared have been the master bedroom and the spare bedroom. The laundry area is full of boxes, too.
My Former Dining Room has made a terrific computer room, with two six-foot equipment and work tables, two 5-foot-tall 19" racks, 10KVA of 240V UPSs, a 21-inch Hitachi monitor and 8-port KVM, about a dozen computers of three different types, a parts bin arrangement, a cubbyhole arrangement that can hold many dozens of disk and tape drives, and three six-foot-tall shelf units.
Home Depot sells a storage unit billed as being a "shoe rack." It's made of chipboard, very sturdy (far too sturdy for shoes), is subdivided into 25 cubbyholes and is perfect for storing 5.25" devices when stood on a table or shelf.
The sturdy wire-frame shelf units someone mentioned earlier as being sold at Sam's Club in the wheeled version in chrome are also sold at Home Depot without wheels in chrome or black. The shelves can be substantially improved by cutting fiberboard to fit, either the thin stuff for just making the shelves solid for books and such, or the heavy fiberboard for holding massive items.
In my world, if it's out of sight, it may as well not exist, so I try to arrange things so that as much as possible is visible. Opaque boxes are bad, sometimes necessary, but always labelled. See-through bags and containers are good.
I would love to have affordable RFID tags and some form of designed or de facto homing on desired tag numbers. I use barcoding to tie items back to a 100% complete purchasing and receiving database but often the problem is that I can't find things I know I have.
I'm assuming he'll be asking for a jury trial. How would you vote were you on the jury.
He would not be convicted.
It's call "jury nullification" when a jury cuts someone loose without regard to the facts of the case, usually for reasons larger than the case. It has *always* been within the power of the jury to judge both the law and the facts, but the legal system has warped things to the point at which juries are not informed of this and, in fact, they are misled to believe that they must follow the instructions of the judge. No juror ever has to vote "Guilty" in any case, for any reason, at any time, if he believes the defendant should be freed. It's best to confine one's reasons, though, to the facts of the case and simply not budge.
When the jury acquits, the protection against double jeopardy prevents the state from prosecuting that person on those specific charges. Thus, the law is said to have been nullified, at least in that case. When it happens in larger numbers, as happened in prosecutions in New England for violations of the Runaway Slave Act, and in Prohibition cases, the law can be generally nullified. When this happens, the power that be usually rush to change the law lest people catch on that they can do this for any and all obnoxious laws.
Jury nullification comes about when at least one person on the jury simply will not vote for conviction. It doesn't come about by talking about it, it comes about by doing it. "I'm sorry, I'm just not convinced he is guilty. It would be terribly wrong to convict this person." If that view prevails and the jury votes unanimously, "Not Guilty," then the person cannot be charged again. If the jury becomes hung, a mistrial is declared and the state can and usually does proceed again with a fresh new trial, sometimes doing it three or four times until getting a conviction. Many believe that any failure to get a unanimous conviction should be regarded equally with a verdict of "Not Guilty."
If jury nullification were to catch on in cases of revenge against spammers, it would effectively be open season on spammers. Despite the predictable objections of the prissy among us who intone darkly about any self defense of any kind, it would be a Good Thing(TM) and refreshing as all hell.
"We had the single-most power density for the smallest size booth they offer (380amps @ 208v in a 5U of rack space (look closely at the bottom of the middle rack containing all the cables and InfiniBand switches). Cooling was very nice too, we maxed out our Liebert HVAC when building it initially."
Let's see... 380A * 208V = 79,040 VA, call it 79 KW (106 HP), or an energy density, assuming 5U of 19" rack (17" net) by 27" deep, of 19.68 Watts/cubic inch. BTUs dissipated per hour would be 269,843, requiring at least 22.47 U.S. tons of refrigeration required to cool it, or about what would be required to cool seven average Texas homes in summer (12,600 sq ft total). That's pretty impressive, if correct.
Good points, actually. I wonder why you were modded to 0?
Thank you. It's nice to get a reply from someone who can deal with the facts and isn't a raving, foaming-at-the-mouth political nitwit.
My post wasn't modded down; my karma had been damaged earlier in the day by three politically-based attacks on two of my posts by one or more silly children who shouldn't have been entrusted with mod points. One, a post chock full of factual information, was first hit as being "Overrated" at 1, then as a "Troll" at 0, leaving it at -1.
Take a look at them and judge for yourself whether either deserved "Overrated" or the second one also deserved "Troll." Better yet, look at the posts to which they are replies and read mine in context.
Being modded down dropped my slashdot karma level to "Bad," which affected the starting score of any new messages I might post. While the nitwit was doing that, I was posting elsewhere in slashdot on the topic of spam, so if you find any value in my comments about spam and Filters that Fight Back (and as far as Paul Graham knows I am still the first and only person on the planet actually implementing FFB), you (and others) might be annoyed that the effect of the political moderation was to reduce the visibility of my messages about spam.
If you search for messages posted by me you will find at least several in which I make the case that Filters that Fight Back is presently the only effective way to carry costs back to those who pay for the spam to be sent. It's not my idea; it's Paul Graham's idea:
Paul Graham is the man who brought us Bayesian filtering in his August, 2002 paper, A Plan for Spam. Many software developers have since incorporated Bayesian filtering in one form or another into email clients and servers. This year he offered new thoughts Filters hat Fight Back, and I've been implementing them.
Along the way I concluded that I don't care whether or not I confirm that my email address is "active." The spammers are already sending me spam inviting me to visit their Websites. OK, I'll visit. I'll visit every URL they send me that looks like a spam Website, and for good measure I'll download the entire site for research purposes. Every URL, every time.
Thanks again for being a real person. BTW, my seppuku sig was not directed at you or at any particular poster. It's a general comment on the frequency of moronic posts. Being out of date or not having kept up to date on the latest in spam technology is not moronic.
That would let the spammer know your email address is active.
Dear ShitForBrains:
That's not the great big issue you think it is. What is an important issue is carrying back costs to the ones paying for the spam -- the website operators.
I don't think page hits are going to tank spammers, though it is a nice step toward making them pay some costs associated like postal junkmail.
The idea isn't to tank them. It is precisely to make them bear higher costs, eating into or wiping out their margins.
Syrrh also wrote:
Unfortunately, you still have to pay it too. Granted, it's not much out of my 20GB/mo quota, but it's only making the sender and receiver pay equally.
That would only be true if there were one spammer for every spam recipient. The reality is more like one spammer for every million recipients. So if we run software that retrieves pages from the spamsites, the cost is "shared" a million to one by the spammers or their clients. That is the point.
Syrrh also wrote:
I'd rather just directly kill any message that tries to open external HTML.
Use Pegasus Mail instead of Micro$hit Outfool or Outfool Express. Pegasus doesn't act on any JavaScript in HTML email, doesn't retrieve any files such as images from external servers, and doesn't execute any attachments.
If you want to carry costs back to the spammers' client websites, use a tool that downloads them, when such tools become available. Carrying costs back to the beneficiary websites bypasses all the bullshit about figuring out who is sending the spam, how they do it, etc. Follow the money. The money in spam comes from the beneficiary websites (or 800 numbers or snail mail marketers, as the case may be). Make it more expensive for those who presently benefit from and pay for spam and there will be less of it. A lot less.
Yeah, the filter checks out all spam sites nicely inflating their hit counters. Good idea.
You're hopelessly out of date. Anybody paying for click-through referrals today will quickly be parted from their money by spammers who can generate false clicks as easily as they generate spam. Referral payment today is only viable for completed sales.
In any case, anything that dilutes or distorts the reliability and accuracy of the metrics used to measure the effectiveness of spam is a Good Thing. A zillion extra, unproductive hits makes a hit counter meaningless in gauging the effectiveness of a spam campaign.
Unfortunately, this technique would encourage the "click this link" sort of spam, where the spammer gets paid as an affiliate of some website.
First, payments for "click-throughs" have pretty much died because the same people who would spam you would also generate false clicks with the same lack of scruples. Now and into the future, "click-throughs" will only generate fees or commissions if they result in completed sales.
Second, putting images and phony text into spam makes it all that much easier to identify and filter out.
druske also wrote:
I like Bayesion filtering as well, though it needs to be smarter about the insertion of HTML comments in the middle of words (Viagra), punctuation (V'i'a'g'r'a), additional spacing (V i a g r a), etc. to get around the latest bag of tricks.
Then you don't understand Bayesian filtering, at least not as it was proposed by Paul Graham, who brought it onto the scene 15 months ago. Bayesian filters, properly implemented, love peculiar constructs because those never occur in legitimate email.
I'm seeing a different tactic to get around the bayesian filtering. I've noticed large sections of text, totally unrelated to the product being sold in the body of the spam message, i.e. parts of books (I recongnized Dracula in one), space shuttle reports, etc. The spammers are trying to flood the message with non-spam text in order to slip by the filtering. It's most certainly an arms race out there, and there's no end in sight.
I've noticed that, too, but it's completely ineffective against Bayesian filters properly implemented per Paul Graham's research and experience. I have a growing impression that most of the implementors of so-called Bayesian filters ignore the valuable results Graham reports, which are based as much on his approach to tokenization and weighting as they are on the purely Bayesian calculation of spam probability. Graham, for instance, throws away all the token scoring results except the "most interesting" 15. Loading up an email with text copied from a book has little or no effect on Graham's techniques. In fact, anyone who bothers to RFTA will realize that almost anything the spammers do to try to obscure the spam content of their messages only serves to make identifying their spam easier and more certain. Graham writes:
When I did try statistical analysis, I found immediately that it was much cleverer than I had been. It discovered, of course, that terms like "virtumundo" and "teens" were good indicators of spam. But it also discovered that "per" and "FL" and "ff0000" are good indicators of spam. In fact, "ff0000" (html for bright red) turns out to be as good an indicator of spam as any pornographic term.
Anyone who implements Bayesian filtering without paying close attention to Graham is an idiot. Graham isn't just a theorist; he has implemented what he writes about and has an astonishing level of filter effectiveness with 0% false positives. Anyone who thinks he can "score" features in messages instead of using Bayesian probability calculation is an idiot. Of this, Graham writes:
But the real advantage of the Bayesian approach, of course, is that you know what you're measuring. Feature-recognizing filters like SpamAssassin assign a spam "score" to email. The Bayesian approach assigns an actual probability. The problem with a "score" is that no one knows what it means. The user doesn't know what it means, but worse still, neither does the developer of the filter. How many points should an email get for having the word "sex" in it? A probability can of course be mistaken, but there is little ambiguity about what it means, or how evidence should be combined to calculate it.
The world is full of idiots, though, and it's a sure bet that a lot of the stuff passing itself off as "Bayesian filtering" is crap thrown together by idiots who were too self-inflated to RTFA.
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t0ny wrote:
IBM already gets away with just selling the hardware, because you also have to pay fees for the privilege of being allowed to run an operating system on the processors you bought. They also make large amounts of money by providing regular contract support to fix things, not consulting services. If you have a big system you'd be looney not to have support.
IBM is already making money from Linux by charging for the use of the processor. That's before they even begin to make money from Linux support or the very expensive components you will find don't come with Linux but are necessary to make robust use of the hardware. Now they're bringing the licensed processor model to what used to be called the RS/6000 line and is now the "pSeries eServer" line. Buy a machine with six processors, pay to "open" four of them for use with Linux, and the other two processors (that you actually already paid for) will act as spares to be swapped in at no charge should a covered processor fail, or for occasional paid use in the "capacity on demand" model.
It's a brilliant strategy but it doesn't bode well for the future of free Linux if it's possible that all the processors of the future will be controlled and licensed. See my comments on this.
Think it can't happen to the PC? Think again. "Trusted Computing" as the infrastructure for Digital Rights Management may be the shoehorn for inserting control over the BIOS and all operating systems and applications permitted to run on the PC. Want to run Linux? Sure! Just lease an enabling certificate...
On that last, see my other comment.
slashdot_commentator wrote:
See my comment, IBM, Linux.
I don't believe Lyons has a clue about what IBM has in store for Linux. The referenced comment is my own take on what may be brewing. I believe that the Linux community will react negatively to what could emerge as strategies to completely co-opt free, open-source Linux by controlling and licensing the platforms available for it to run on or by controlling and licensing obscure access mechanisms without which the platforms can't be used.
If I run a gravel yard I could charge you by weight or volume for the gravel you remove, or I could charge you an access fee measured by the type and size of truck you use, or any of a number of other schemes. If for any reason gravel is supposed to be "free," I wouldn't charge you for the gravel but for something essential you would need in order to remove, transport or use the gravel. I could rent you the shovel or backhoe while prohibiting the entry of "foreign" tools such as those you might wish to bring with you. I could charge you for using the road into the gravel pit. I could charge you for a license to breathe the air floating in and around my gravel pit. I could cover the pit and then charge you for light to work by. The are lots of ways to make the gravel seem to be "free" but to make money in direct or indirect consequence of you removing or using the gravel.
The model IBM is using seems to be analogous to a periodic "gate fee" to a sector of the yard. Usage is unlimited but the fee only gets you access to a certain resource area and you have to pay periodically.
Oddly, Andrew Odlyzko's new paper on network pricing, which unavoidably touches on canal, turnpike and other network toll and fee mechanisms in recent centuries, offers a lot of insight into how IBM can make money from free Linux and in fact how and why the computer industry could adopt a toll or fee model, although he doesn't take it that far.
Gravel can't easily be controlled after it leaves the gravel pit, but CPUs can be controlled after they leave the factory, most effectively by a cryptographic dependency that gives the CPU manufacturer continuing control over the software environment the CPU will be willing to run in.
It's no secret that Micro$leaze would very much like to move to a lease model for its software. It' such a pain for them to have to keep inventing new reasons for us to buy a new version of Windows every year. Intel might become interested in joining with Micro$loth to lease the privilege of using their CPU chips. Digital Rights Management could be the vehicle they will both use to close the BIOS and the CPU, publicly just to "protect the rights of IP owners," but ultimately to shift both Windows and the Intel CPU to a licensed, lease basis.
My referenced essay tried to point out that IBM is already doing this, not only with their traditional mainframe processors and operating systems, but now also with Linux in more than one of their platform product lines. I thought it was worth taking the time to write the essay because I haven't seen any discussion of this aspect of IBM embracing Linux. On the contrary, at least some in the Linux community seem to think IBM embraced Linux out of altruism or in admission of the defeat of proprietary software. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Spy Hunter wrote:
I guess I failed utterly to communicate the point in my 2100-word essay. This time I'll type s-l-o-w-l-y.
It matters because it reveals IBM's strategy for making high margins on systems that run a "free" OS. IBM doesn't play in the commoditized markets. They may plan to enhance the Linux and non-OSS props and add-ons that will run in their controlled environments to the point at which the free Linux that you can run will become undesirable, just as Win 3.1 has become undesirable in the face of later, better offerings, or even unloadable on machines built to new standards that are right now being thrashed out.
Do you think that the PC can't follow, to become a closed environment in which a recurring license fee may be required just to use the CPU? Are you watching the evolving Trusted Computing initiative?
If the worst happens, yes, today's PC will still exist, just as the decade-old 386 still exists and even older 286 still exists and even the PC AT and XT still exist. DOS still exists, and you can get the license from IBM as PC-DOS even though MS has stopped licensing MS-DOS. And what good will any of that do you once the PC has moved beyond present technology and the future Wintel consortium charges you an annual fee for the privilege of running Linux on your Intel CPU? The point is that this is already happening in the business world and may show how IBM intends to make money from an otherwise "free" OS and how others, such as Wintel, could do the same with PCs.
Here's one way it could happen: Intel adds cryptographic validation of the BIOS to the CPU, making it impossible to use the CPU without a "trusted" BIOS approved by Intel. The BIOS is then made very selective about what it will run and what [paid-up] certificates it will require before running things. The standard pre-loaded Wintel box will come with an approved BIOS, an annually renewable cert for Windows tied to the CPU serial #, and consumers will see no difference except that Digital Rights Management will be built in and will enforce copyrights as the RIAA and MPAA and SBA view them, and it will be necessary to pay an annual lease fee to continue to use the PC they bought and paid for.
Linux users, though, may find it impossible to load and run Linux on such boxes, but will be offered a Linux-enablement cert for $xxx dollars per year. The xxx will offset the "loss" of Windows lease revenue and contain an annoyance factor to further discourage off-brand OSs.
If this happens, it will happen in the context of at least 5 or 10 GHz PCs with fast 32 or 128 GB memories or better, GB graphics, and lots of other goodies, such that the old PCs on which you will still be able to run ordinary, free Linux will look pretty sick, just as a PC XT looks pretty sick today. Gradually the older stuff will die off from lack of parts, support and desirability and with it will die the ability to load and run a completely free, unencumbered Linux.
Look, if you were really retro you could today still be using a DOS 286 PC and Blue Wave to do your BBS mail and group reading and replying. Nothing would prevent you from doing that except, perhaps, a few things like the lack of BBSs, the inadequacy of a BBS-style interface to today's world, relative isolation from the Internet, poor graphics, slow CPU speed, low memory limits, ISA slots, slow memory speed, inability to find replacement parts, etc. It would work in the context of the 1980s as long as you could keep the hardware going, but it would not work very well in the context of 2004.
Yes, thank you.
Don't y'all just love people who whine and complain that we don't pay enough for gasoline?
Hey! Go look up the income tax rate in Norway and then come back here complaining that our taxes are subsidizing our taxes and that's why taxes are cheaper here than in other places and how we could be like the Europeans and pay two or three times as much in taxes, which I suppose you would think would be a Good Thing since you think we're getting off lightly or something.
Angst Badger wrote:
If I have, it wasn't signicant enough to be able to remember now. But I haven't worked in the environments in which clueless marketing suits dictate features and release dates. An awful lot of the software I've designed and written was on my own initiative and sold to management on the basis that it was the best approach to accomplish the goals. In a lot of cases management was never brought into the loop, since I had considerable control over the tools I chose to adopt or write. When you invent new things in environments that are not rich in solutions, you may be able to do what you please.
Nonetheless, I doubt I'll be writing any more software in the years remaining to me, for the following reasons, among others:
I got into programming many decades ago because it was fun, and I was able to become the guru in every shop I ever worked in. It's no longer fun, so I choose not to play in this game anymore. I might consider selling executive burial plans out of a sense of retributive poetic justice but there are other fields I find more interesting.
If that nightmare comes to pass it will be a license, not a cert, and it will more like having to have sex with an ill-tempered duckbilled platypus, complete with venomous barbs.
As a result it will select for people on some basis other than good programming, since a lot of good programmers wouldn't go near such a process. The eccentricities of many good programmers don't tend toward an affinity for senseless and stupid bureaucracy, and poison barbs are supposed to be on one's own tinfoil helmet, not on the hind legs of the furry animal with which one is trying to have sex.
Exactly right. "License" is permission to do that which would otherwise be a crime to do. If you come into my home as my guest, you are doing with permission what could send a burglar to prison.
Historically, license as a formal permission from the state stems from the general police power of the state to prohibit things that are deemed dangers to public health or safety -- such as cutting people open with knives allegedly to treat injuries or illnesses -- and then allow select people the permission to do those things under some set of conditions and qualifications, hence licensed doctors, who *are* allowed to cut people open without fear of being charged with assault with a deadly weapon, bodily injury, maiming, etc.
Where "license" goes bad is when, in complete ignorance of what it means and where it comes from, the public accepts "licensing" for purposes such as generating tax revenues. Every one of us has seen proposals to "license" something as a way to raise revenues in the form of license fees, but few people have understood that such proposals amount to "We want to make xxxx illegal so we can then turn around and collect fees for permitting just about anyone to do xxx." It's bass-ackward and contaminates the legal concept of "license."
So, yes, writing software can only be "licensed" if writing software is first made into a crime. Whether or not the proponents of such a thing can sell the idea that a vital state health or safety issue is at stake remains to be seen, but in today's climate of ignorance it probably isn't necessary to explain such reasons to sell "licensing" of anything.
I disagree that IBM will settle with SCO. That prediction is just plain silly.
I do agree that the Linux community will turn against IBM, not not for any reason Lyons would be able to see from his relatively technology-free writing cubicle.
The Linux community will turn against IBM after the SCO dragon has been laid waste and after the community figures out IBM's model for making money from Linux. There aren't too many mysteries in the former, but the latter seems little understood. Yet.
IBM is making money right now from Linux, not by charging for Linux itself (although they slipped recently and wrote of "licensing Linux" in the same terms as their oldline OSs, a Marketing brain fart, no doubt) but by charging the user for permission to use the CPU.
How can this be? Don't you own the CPU?
Well, yes and no. If it's a traditional IBM PC or pre-pSeries RS/6000, yes, you own the CPU(s) and you can run any free software you can manage to load. If you look carefully, though, you will notice that such straightforward platform designs are disappearing from the IBM landscape.
The trick lies in the mainframe-izing of unix and Intel chips as they are packaged and offered by IBM, following a very old model that has served them well since the 1950s. Imagine a PC for which you have to pay an annual proprietary BIOS license and you'll begin to see how this works. Sure, load any OS you want, but you can't load and run it without the help of the BIOS, and the license fee you'll pay for permission (and software) with which to do that will be based on the OS you want to run. IBM is not going to allow itself to be trapped into competing in the commodity server box market.
In the 1950s, when punch card machines were all the rage, IBM didn't sell them to customers -- they rented them. Your punch card machines would be delivered chock full of features, mostly in the form of expensive relays hidden under the skirts, but the Customer Engineer would install and remove jumpers to disable any of the features you weren't paying to use. The profit margins were so high that even in those days of super-expensive hardware the fact of millions of disabled relays sitting unused in customer machines was a cost IBM was easily able to absorb.
The way this translated to IBM's mainframe scheme, which they are now moving to the "new" RS/6000 -- the pSeries platforms -- and others, including the Intel-based "z" machines, is to surround the processor(s) with a complex of hardware and software such that you can't gain access to the CPU(s) without licensed IBM software that is separate and distinct from the OS. What it boils down to is that yes, you can buy the CPU(s) but no, you don't have permission to use the CPU(s) without paying recurring license fees exclusive of whatever, if anything, the OS may cost.
Right now you can run Linux on monster S/390 mainframes, but not for free. In the S/390 world you have to pay for a license to use each processor in a S/390. How much you pay depends on the value IBM has placed on the use to which you want to put the processor. It might cost $250,000 to "open" a processor for MVS but only $125,000 to "open" the same processor for Linux. To the Linux community member unfamiliar with IBM's mainframe business model this may seem like cause to retch and reach for the barf bag, but for mainframe customers well-accustomed to paying Big Bucks to IBM for everything, including the time of day, it's an incredible bargain.
With the introduction of the pSeries platforms ("pSeries" is not just a new name for the RS/6000 line), IBM's mainframe business model has arrived in the PowerPC unix server world. Same for IBM's Intel-based "z" platforms. The older RS/6000s will be orphaned as IBM drops support for them
AC wrote:
You don't get out much, do you? You're dead wrong on both points if by "this country" you mean the U.S. The U.S. is the most charitable country in the world, and if you think people here tear each other down you certainly haven't spent any time in other countries more than maybe superficial vacations. All through latin America, for example, the primary form of competition is finding ways to prevent the competition from entering into or doing business. One of the big reasons the U.S. is so far ahead of so many other nations economically is that it was established on some work and behavior ethics that are, exceptions and aberrations notwithstanding, constructive, not destructive. Many other countries have an entirely destructive ethos determining the behavior of their people.
The One KEA wrote:
The Linux kernel is widely and highly regarded, and stories of Linux systems running without crash or reboot for 6 months, a year, even more, are common.
Mozilla? I turned to it when eBay dicked with their formats and brain-dead MSIE refused to save as HTML. Mozilla was able to save such pages (hey, if the browser can render the page, how can it claim not to be able to save the components it used to render it??), but only once. On the second save it would invariably crash. I had to close it and relaunch it for each save.
Those others I haven't used. I have done several Linux installs on very standard IBM brand PCs that failed to identify the graphic chipset and ended up giving me critical windows with both top and bottom off the screen. I also found the pop-up bar at the bottom amusing, because by default it came up behind open windows.
The nested dependency thing is something I had the displeasure to experience recently, trying to install SpamAssassin on an AIX system. It required several other things. I used CPAN, which was amazing and frightening -- amazing because I hadn't realized that so much work had been done to automate such things, and frightening because I had no idea what all it was installing on my system. It eventually crapped out several levels down, and the whole install failed, leaving God only knows what incomplete garbage lying around.
Some months ago I walked in on a friend who was straining over an IBM Intellistation and the O'Reilly Linux book complete with CD. The network stuff wouldn't configure following the explicit examples given in the book. Several days later, after countless hours on the Internet, he dug out the correct information from some obscure corner of the Net.
Sendmail was obviously written by malicious alien visitors. Try configuring it without using the shorthand m4 macros. IBM distributed sendmail in AIX 4.3.3 with sample m4 files and instructions, but not the m4 macro processor. I finally found one but couldn't get it to work according to examples in the sendmail documentation. Then I looked for sample sendmail configs on the Internet, and ran into one of those "What's wrong with this picture?" things -- there weren't any.
The Apache Web server distributed by IBM in AIX 4.3.3 conveniently has its "deny" by IP address feature completely broken. There's no question that Apache is a kickass piece of software, but jeez, a significant feature completely nonfunctional...
Being a serious hater of vi (which was obviously first written by someone who had never seen an editor UI before), I installed the Joe editor. It promptly destroyed the standard vt100 terminfo or termcap file used by the major app I run and still can't run right without its own special termcap in the user's home directory.
Have you ever seen the matrix of Linux drivers for Adaptec SCSI HBAs? It's a nightmare of a bad joke. There's a different driver for just about every combination of Linux point version and Adaptec card model. One guy has pretty much had to devote his life to just that one little corner of Linux. That's sick.
I follow the rs6kpreplinux list, where one person on the entire planet has done the work to provide for running Linux on RS/6000 43P 7043-140 machines. I still haven't tried the stuff because I'm waiting for the list to stop carrying mostly "I tried xxx and it didn't work" messages. "Oh," says the author, "Maybe I forgot to include the zzzz module in the kernel patches, let me go check..."
Virtually every Microsoft product on the shelves of stores in shrinkwrap is broken out of the box, requiring hours of downloading "service packs" and other doo-dads that are sometimes nearly impossible to find.
Oh. That must explain why so much of OSS is broken and has documentation that is incomplete and often actually erroneous, not to mention the almost endless nested dependencies that often break on install, making the install of the top-level item incomplete and hosed.
"Professionalism" my ass.
I detest closed software but professionalism is precisely what is lacking in OSS. The prevailing rule seems to be, "Close is good enough!"
LinuxParanoid wrote:
Only look at that RFC if you want to become blind and brain damaged in a single sitting.
Almost everyone is missing the fact that laws, even when well written and targeted, are poor substitutes for economic solutions when the undesired activity is economically driven and economic solutions are available. And this law seems particularly badly written. It is pointless to whine and wring our hands over this, since it's fundamentally bad policy to wait for someone else to save us from things we're unwilling to deal with ourselves. Anti-spam legislation was bound, if not to fail utterly, at least to start very badly, like Billy Bob's Mail Order Plans For Home Fusion Power. If you'd like to empower yourself, read the remainder of this post. If you'd just like to gain the satisfaction that there is hope,, read this post.
Why does spam exist?
Most spam seeks to sell something, directly or indirectly. Most spam solicits visits to what might be called "beneficiary Websites" -- the Websites where the touted products are actually sold, usually via e-commerce. Some small percentage of spam solicits responses by phone or fax, a smaller percentage by snail mail, and a very tiny percentage advises you to come to Jesus or some such with no response solicited.
So almost all spam exists because someone hopes to make money from it, and almost all spam solicits responses to beneficiary Websites.
Forget who sends it: Who is responsible for it?
OK, so the largest percentage of spam solicits visits to product or service Websites. Follow the money. Other than the rare "Joe job," such spam is obviously sent either by the Website operator or by a contractor acting on behalf of the Website operator. No one else stands to benefit from the responses to the spam, so no one else will lift a finger to attract traffic to the Website except in some very rare scenarios.
So the true beneficiary of the spam, who is also the party who funded sending the spam, is generally readily visible and reachable. The true beneficiary is almost always also the true source of the spam. The question is: knowing this, what can one do that will be effective?
Counterattack the source
Paul Graham, the researcher and LISP expert who advanced Bayesian filtering a little over a year ago, followed up a few months ago with a paper on Filters that Fight Back (FFB).
The fatal weakness in spam that attempts to attract visits to beneficiary e-commerce Websites is just that: it invites us to visit, and explicitly so. When we accept the invitation and visit the beneficiary Websites, the additional traffic marginally increases the costs of operating the Websites. "So what?" you might ask.
Here's what: the Websites count on the millions of recipients of the spam who are not interested, not to visit the Websites. The flip side of the near-zero cost of sending spam is the near-zero cost of the unresponsive among the recipients. The Website operators send or cause to be sent millions and millions of spam emails but they only have to pay for the server capacity and bandwidth for the tiny response rate from the morons who actually buy stuff. While we can't easily change the low cost of sending spam, we certainly can change the low cost of hosting the servers that have to handle the Web visits that can result from spam. We can do that simply by accepting the invitations contained in spam, and not only accepting the invitations but clicking on every link they have, to make sure to navigate through all their pages.
But that sounds like too much work!
Sure. And dangerous, too, because your browser may not be configured for maximum security. If it were, you wouldn't be able to surf most of the major sites on the Web. But there's a completely legitimate set of tools for downloading Websites for offline browsing. WebWhacker is an old one that
...take over the house.
First I made the Former Front Bedroom (TM) into my office. When that filled up I set up a PC in the Former Living Room and PC Anywhere'd to the original PC where all the email and files still are. The Former Living Room accumulation spread to the Former Dining Room. The kitchen counter is often the only clear space for working on the innards of computers and disk enclosures. The only places spared have been the master bedroom and the spare bedroom. The laundry area is full of boxes, too.
My Former Dining Room has made a terrific computer room, with two six-foot equipment and work tables, two 5-foot-tall 19" racks, 10KVA of 240V UPSs, a 21-inch Hitachi monitor and 8-port KVM, about a dozen computers of three different types, a parts bin arrangement, a cubbyhole arrangement that can hold many dozens of disk and tape drives, and three six-foot-tall shelf units.
Home Depot sells a storage unit billed as being a "shoe rack." It's made of chipboard, very sturdy (far too sturdy for shoes), is subdivided into 25 cubbyholes and is perfect for storing 5.25" devices when stood on a table or shelf.
The sturdy wire-frame shelf units someone mentioned earlier as being sold at Sam's Club in the wheeled version in chrome are also sold at Home Depot without wheels in chrome or black. The shelves can be substantially improved by cutting fiberboard to fit, either the thin stuff for just making the shelves solid for books and such, or the heavy fiberboard for holding massive items.
In my world, if it's out of sight, it may as well not exist, so I try to arrange things so that as much as possible is visible. Opaque boxes are bad, sometimes necessary, but always labelled. See-through bags and containers are good.
I would love to have affordable RFID tags and some form of designed or de facto homing on desired tag numbers. I use barcoding to tie items back to a 100% complete purchasing and receiving database but often the problem is that I can't find things I know I have.
argent wrote:
We have it. It's called NSA. The only problem is that it's a write-only archive except for a small circle of select people who can access it.
cbiltcliffe wrote:
You're probably not qualified. You may be A) competent, and B) not possessed of an H1B or L1 visa.
m0nkyman wrote:
He would not be convicted.
It's call "jury nullification" when a jury cuts someone loose without regard to the facts of the case, usually for reasons larger than the case. It has *always* been within the power of the jury to judge both the law and the facts, but the legal system has warped things to the point at which juries are not informed of this and, in fact, they are misled to believe that they must follow the instructions of the judge. No juror ever has to vote "Guilty" in any case, for any reason, at any time, if he believes the defendant should be freed. It's best to confine one's reasons, though, to the facts of the case and simply not budge.
When the jury acquits, the protection against double jeopardy prevents the state from prosecuting that person on those specific charges. Thus, the law is said to have been nullified, at least in that case. When it happens in larger numbers, as happened in prosecutions in New England for violations of the Runaway Slave Act, and in Prohibition cases, the law can be generally nullified. When this happens, the power that be usually rush to change the law lest people catch on that they can do this for any and all obnoxious laws.
Jury nullification comes about when at least one person on the jury simply will not vote for conviction. It doesn't come about by talking about it, it comes about by doing it. "I'm sorry, I'm just not convinced he is guilty. It would be terribly wrong to convict this person." If that view prevails and the jury votes unanimously, "Not Guilty," then the person cannot be charged again. If the jury becomes hung, a mistrial is declared and the state can and usually does proceed again with a fresh new trial, sometimes doing it three or four times until getting a conviction. Many believe that any failure to get a unanimous conviction should be regarded equally with a verdict of "Not Guilty."
If jury nullification were to catch on in cases of revenge against spammers, it would effectively be open season on spammers. Despite the predictable objections of the prissy among us who intone darkly about any self defense of any kind, it would be a Good Thing(TM) and refreshing as all hell.
Let's see... 380A * 208V = 79,040 VA, call it 79 KW (106 HP), or an energy density, assuming 5U of 19" rack (17" net) by 27" deep, of 19.68 Watts/cubic inch. BTUs dissipated per hour would be 269,843, requiring at least 22.47 U.S. tons of refrigeration required to cool it, or about what would be required to cool seven average Texas homes in summer (12,600 sq ft total). That's pretty impressive, if correct.
junkgoof wrote:
Thank you. It's nice to get a reply from someone who can deal with the facts and isn't a raving, foaming-at-the-mouth political nitwit.
My post wasn't modded down; my karma had been damaged earlier in the day by three politically-based attacks on two of my posts by one or more silly children who shouldn't have been entrusted with mod points. One, a post chock full of factual information, was first hit as being "Overrated" at 1, then as a "Troll" at 0, leaving it at -1.
Re:Tax systems
Re:I'd rather have a sales tax than an income tax
Take a look at them and judge for yourself whether either deserved "Overrated" or the second one also deserved "Troll." Better yet, look at the posts to which they are replies and read mine in context.
Being modded down dropped my slashdot karma level to "Bad," which affected the starting score of any new messages I might post. While the nitwit was doing that, I was posting elsewhere in slashdot on the topic of spam, so if you find any value in my comments about spam and Filters that Fight Back (and as far as Paul Graham knows I am still the first and only person on the planet actually implementing FFB), you (and others) might be annoyed that the effect of the political moderation was to reduce the visibility of my messages about spam.
If you search for messages posted by me you will find at least several in which I make the case that Filters that Fight Back is presently the only effective way to carry costs back to those who pay for the spam to be sent. It's not my idea; it's Paul Graham's idea:
Paul Graham
Paul Graham is the man who brought us Bayesian filtering in his August, 2002 paper, A Plan for Spam. Many software developers have since incorporated Bayesian filtering in one form or another into email clients and servers. This year he offered new thoughts Filters hat Fight Back, and I've been implementing them.
Along the way I concluded that I don't care whether or not I confirm that my email address is "active." The spammers are already sending me spam inviting me to visit their Websites. OK, I'll visit. I'll visit every URL they send me that looks like a spam Website, and for good measure I'll download the entire site for research purposes. Every URL, every time.
Thanks again for being a real person. BTW, my seppuku sig was not directed at you or at any particular poster. It's a general comment on the frequency of moronic posts. Being out of date or not having kept up to date on the latest in spam technology is not moronic.
Tirel wrote:
Dear ShitForBrains:
That's not the great big issue you think it is. What is an important issue is carrying back costs to the ones paying for the spam -- the website operators.
HAND
Syrrh wrote:
The idea isn't to tank them. It is precisely to make them bear higher costs, eating into or wiping out their margins.
Syrrh also wrote:
That would only be true if there were one spammer for every spam recipient. The reality is more like one spammer for every million recipients. So if we run software that retrieves pages from the spamsites, the cost is "shared" a million to one by the spammers or their clients. That is the point.
Syrrh also wrote:
Use Pegasus Mail instead of Micro$hit Outfool or Outfool Express. Pegasus doesn't act on any JavaScript in HTML email, doesn't retrieve any files such as images from external servers, and doesn't execute any attachments.
If you want to carry costs back to the spammers' client websites, use a tool that downloads them, when such tools become available. Carrying costs back to the beneficiary websites bypasses all the bullshit about figuring out who is sending the spam, how they do it, etc. Follow the money. The money in spam comes from the beneficiary websites (or 800 numbers or snail mail marketers, as the case may be). Make it more expensive for those who presently benefit from and pay for spam and there will be less of it. A lot less.
junkgoof wrote:
You're hopelessly out of date. Anybody paying for click-through referrals today will quickly be parted from their money by spammers who can generate false clicks as easily as they generate spam. Referral payment today is only viable for completed sales.
In any case, anything that dilutes or distorts the reliability and accuracy of the metrics used to measure the effectiveness of spam is a Good Thing. A zillion extra, unproductive hits makes a hit counter meaningless in gauging the effectiveness of a spam campaign.
druske wrote:
First, payments for "click-throughs" have pretty much died because the same people who would spam you would also generate false clicks with the same lack of scruples. Now and into the future, "click-throughs" will only generate fees or commissions if they result in completed sales.
Second, putting images and phony text into spam makes it all that much easier to identify and filter out.
druske also wrote:
Then you don't understand Bayesian filtering, at least not as it was proposed by Paul Graham, who brought it onto the scene 15 months ago. Bayesian filters, properly implemented, love peculiar constructs because those never occur in legitimate email.
RFTA:
berzerke wrote:
I've noticed that, too, but it's completely ineffective against Bayesian filters properly implemented per Paul Graham's research and experience. I have a growing impression that most of the implementors of so-called Bayesian filters ignore the valuable results Graham reports, which are based as much on his approach to tokenization and weighting as they are on the purely Bayesian calculation of spam probability. Graham, for instance, throws away all the token scoring results except the "most interesting" 15. Loading up an email with text copied from a book has little or no effect on Graham's techniques. In fact, anyone who bothers to RFTA will realize that almost anything the spammers do to try to obscure the spam content of their messages only serves to make identifying their spam easier and more certain. Graham writes:
Anyone who implements Bayesian filtering without paying close attention to Graham is an idiot. Graham isn't just a theorist; he has implemented what he writes about and has an astonishing level of filter effectiveness with 0% false positives. Anyone who thinks he can "score" features in messages instead of using Bayesian probability calculation is an idiot. Of this, Graham writes:
The world is full of idiots, though, and it's a sure bet that a lot of the stuff passing itself off as "Bayesian filtering" is crap thrown together by idiots who were too self-inflated to RTFA.