I am very concerned that the next gen consoles will drain my money away through easily scratched polycarbonate game media. It's almost as if they designed them to disintegrate upon contact with children.
This is the reason I'm considering getting my Wii chipped. My kids (5 and 7) are extremely careful with DVD and Gamecube and Wii discs because we've brought them up that way, but accidents can still happen - especially if they're all bouncy and excited because their friends are visiting. It should be legal for me to make a copy for everyday use and keep the originals under lock and key, whether it's a DVD or computer software or music CDs or videogame console discs. Hell, I've even heard that it's possible to mod the Gamecube to play backups, so given my *huge* investment in those games and the fact that we still have a Gamecube in the house too I'll consider getting both consoles "criminalised". It's legal here (Australia) to get game consoles modded (region locks, homebrew s/w, etc) but it's still illegal for me to do something perfectly reasonable like only use copies and keep my originals under lock and key. No, the law is broken. Those who will commit piracy (whether it's to save themselves $20 to $100 per disc, or to make money selling bootleg copies) will do so anyway. Those who try to do what it's perfectly legal to do with computer software with their DVDs or videogames are automatically committing a crime - it's wrong, it shouldn't be that way.
Man, I wish I was born in the Victorian era. Sigh.
No antibiotics, no worthwhile heating or cooling, no domestic refrigeration, poor sanitation, no microwaveable popcorn... need I go on?
I, too, lament the current state of affairs - but I never lose sight of the fact that on the whole I have it FAR better than ANY of my ancestors, no matter how wealthy they may have been. No gold, no extensive land holdings, no fancy titles... but I have modern sanitation and heating and cooling, a 24-year-old car that takes me where I need to go, a refrigerator, a washing machine, a clothes dryer, a freezer, a dishwasher, a publicly-funded health system that does a decent job of looking after my basic needs, a big-screen TV, as many computers as I can pull off the garbage pile, a decent job, no fear of starvation, smart and loving children, a smart and loving spouse, a nice house that's still mostly owned by the bank, the ability and opportunity to find out about far more things at a surface-level in the comfort of my own home in ten minutes than I could have found in a whole week at the local Mechanics Institute, etc.
Maybe I've sold out, but the early 21st Century seems like a damn fine place to live if you're me.
any mail server that doesn't have an rDNS lookup, in this day and age, is imho not worth accepting messages from.
Oh, I agree wholeheartedly. So do AOL. So do a whole lot of other places.
The problem is, I work for a University. I can't do it. There are too many stupid admins out there, and they're ALL working for sites that are considered important "offshore partners". Hell, I have enough trouble dealing with offshore agents whose outbound mailservers are in dynamic dial-up ranges - I kid you not. I'd dearly love to tempfail any message from a server that doesn't have a PTR until it times out and bounces to the sender... unfortunately, it's not gonna happen because I like working where I do.
I block between one and two hundred thousand messages per day with a half-dozen RBLs for hard-rejects (with some local mitigating whitelistings, of course), greet_pause, SA blacklist and content checks and customised scores (we reject at 15, because Chinese webmail often accumulates 9 to 13 points just by being sent...) and the SANE Security custom ClamAV signatures. We typically accept between 20 and 30 thousand messages per day, and typically get between four and a dozen reports of blocked messages PER MONTH that the senders thought should have got through. Lately, around half of those "false-postives" are due to SPF, so they don't really count. This keeps spam down to a minor distraction for most users, and costs nothing apart from some bandwidth and the electicity for the servers and a little bit of admin time. We'd probably be looking at a quarter million to a million dollars to begin with and a quarter million per year thereafter if we had to get a commercial solution at least as effective as what we've got right now, and I just don't see that happening.
You know, call me strange, but I've always had a strange compulsion to hand back the extra whenever I've been given too much change. Could come from the fact that I used to be a shopmonkey and shopmonkey-wrangler, and it's not fun explaining overs or unders in the registers. Or it could be that deep beneath everything else, I'm a mostly-decent human being - there are still a few of us left, you know.
Thats why I use your AP to download porn. heheh you forgot to change the default password, it's all OK.
No no no no no... what you need to do is spoof your MAC address and download kiddieporn and bombmaking instructions through the AP belonging to the guy whose dog keeps crapping on your lawn. It's only acceptable to abuse open or poorly-secured APs for revenge - never for tittilation or personal gain. Jeez... what have you got next to *your* moral compass? (I've got a huge hunk of magnetite next to mine).
If 81% ended up in spam buckets, then of course that's just probably-overactive spam filters.
So long as the bucket's in his mailbox, like a spam folder, that's okay as far as I'm concerned. I'd only be worried if messages were silently discarded by the ISP. Once it's accepted, NOTHING should ever be dropped... I'd be lynched if I tried something like that.
The type (translates to "anything") and size (translates to "anything") of the attachments are mentioned in the vaguest terms, and nothing else is said about the messages. If all that was sent was a.jpg of under a couple of hundred kilobytes, for example, with no message body, from hotmail ffs, then it's no bloody wonder if it ended up in a spam folder at the receiving end. Same goes for that kind of crap message going into hotmail.
Or maybe he was cutting and pasting message bodies from representative items in his inbox, like:
Hello kind sir,
You do not know me, but my name is Mrs Maryam Abacha...
Yeah, but she only gets 20 Gb/s upload speed. Damn ISP's and their fancy marketing lingo.
...I hope they've got port 25 outbound blocked, for when the inevitable happens. You think the South Korean 100 mbit connections are a pain in the arse for mail admins? What 'til this becomes the norm.
Dell are hardly known for offering sane or consistent pricing across models or market segments - try browsing their website some time as a home user, then as various classes of business customer. Why should it come as any surprise that they've omitted a special offer from a machine with a non-standard OS?
Personally, I have no plans to upgrade to Vista any time soon - at least not at home. If faced with the prospect of getting a machine with Ubuntu at $X, or a machine with double the RAM and a bigger hard drive with Vista at $X, I'd take the machine with Vista, thank you very much. Shrink the partition as far as practical, install Ubuntu, and you're ahead - you've got the higher-spec machine, AND the ability to boot into something that the Dull PhoneMonkeys won't hang up over. Okay... that's a path a geek would take, not a regular consumer, but I doubt at this time that there would be very many non-geeks opting for Ubuntu over windows anyway on a new Dell.
Besides... if you're going to criticise Vista, you should at least have first-hand experience of what it is that you're criticising.
Fast, cheap and accurate enough in the context of solving the tests manually, then... and cheap enough in the realm of OCR solutions to make a moderately or even modestly accurate system cost-effective. If it's a system that can be deployed across thousands of bots, each of which can try many times per hour, it's worthwhile even if it only gets the test right ten percent of the time.
I wouldn't trust *my* systems to the outsourcing firms or freelancers, but there are situations in which it can make sense to do so. Unfortunately, IT Manglement can't always be trusted to correctly identify them.
How can it possibly duplicate the functionality of regular AV software that has hooks in the file system and email clients? It can't possibly do all that.
You're quite correct about the filesystem checks... it can't do those.
For email, though, it could be quite decent - provided the signatures are kept current, and/or are broad enough to pick up new variants of some of the more common varieties. Many AV products set up POP, IMAP and SMTP proxies (although this looks like it only does SMTP and POP)... your mail client talks to a proxy, which scans inbound and outbound traffic and works the appropriate voodoo in the event of something nasty being discovered. It looks like it also checks web traffic too. This offloads the scanning to a dedicated piece of hardware, which is less likely to get subverted if or when something nasty makes its way onto John Q. Shouldshowermore's computer - you know, the guy who doesn't really know what he's doing and goes out looking for warez or b00b13zp1cs and gets a nasty case of the Russian Mafia from a dodgy website? Um, your neighbour? Yeah, him.
Of course, I'd probably still recommend using at least a free AV product on the machine... belt AND braces AND duct tape are better than belt alone, and there's always a window of opportunity between when new malware is released and when it's picked up by various scanner... and it makes sense to have something on the machine that can clean up after something nasty gets in. Sure, it's a terrific idea, but I wouldn't recommend it INSTEAD of AV software on the PC... it'll be great at offloading mail and web traffic scanning, and providing anti-phishing functionality, but it can't replace the basic "Whoops, caught something nasty after looking at something I shouldn't have - clean it for me" functionality of desktop AV software.
That said... it's cool, and there's a niche. I can't wait for some Chinese manufacturer to start including that kind of functionality in network cards. Filtering in your router, filtering in your NIC, desktop AV software (with the mailscanning turned off) - sounds like a combination made in heaven for people who just want their stuff to work without having to think about it too much.
You see, the wholesaler the nuts are purchased from is a subisidiary of a company owned by CBS. It's really the same bags of nuts going around and around, extracting funds from the campaign and making CBS and the campaign's organisers (who are secretly employed by CBS) rich in the process. You can expect to see more of this kind of thing in the future, as increasingly cynical media companies realise that they can make more money milking public indignation than they can making content. When the boxes start to get a little ratty and look like they won't survive a few more truck trips, they're donated to charity - having already been paid for a dozen times over by concerned sheeple who jumped on a bandwagon because their favourite waste-of-spectrum got cancelled.
Now, I've got a REAL grassroots annoyance campaign - to bring Firefly back. It involves sending a herd of cattle to Fox headquarters every day until they relent and give Joss a huge bucket of money. I can promise that I'm not on Fox's payroll - Rupert hired me direc... no, don't type that. No, stop typing, or I'll get a new secretary. Don't you DARE click "Submit", or you're fired
Also copyrights should die immediately when the owner of the copyright dies.
Maybe some good can come from this idea.
Fast-forward ten years. You're a fly on the wall of the Executive Suite at the top of the Sony-Disney Building, colloquially referred to by some as the Tower of Babel.
Exec 1: "How are we going with the rights to [bestselling novel]?"
Exec 2: "Not so good. [the author] called us, well, what was it again?"
Underling 1, looking at palmtop: "I believe the phrase translated as 'pond-film-eating fatherless parasites who would sell their own mother's testicles to get a single arse into a cinema seat', or something very like that. Something about excrement too..."
Exec 3: "That's easily fixed. Rocky!"
Thug: "Yes, Boss?"
Exec 3: "Be a good lad, would you, and head off to Kinshasa - we need you to 'acquire some rights with extreme prejudice'".
Exec 2: "Very good. I don't suppose you have a similar approach that will work on corporate entities, do you?"
Exec 3: "As a matter of fact, since we managed to successfully lobby for full personhood for corporate entities, our lawyers inform us that a single tac-nuke directed at Time-Warner-McDonald's corporate HQ would open up the whole Harry Potter arena for exploitation... hey, what's that flying towards -"
this (in hat form) also works wonders to keep the secret reptilian-government streetlight cameras from reading my thoughts...but don't tell them i said so.
Also because of Toyota's battery recycling program paying $200 per battery (though I expect that would drop as the cost of the batteries get lower) you won't, or at least shouldn't, have any form of disposal charge.
Actually, I'd expect the bounty to either stay the same or perhaps even go up a little - especially if Toyota end up having to compete with other recyclers. Has anyone figured out what the scrap-nickel value of the batteries is likely to be, especially if demand for nickel goes through the roof due to increased demand for hybrids? In a few years $200 could be way below the market value for a dead battery pack.
... e.g. "substance abusers" who regularly steal box sets from retail stores and sell them to second-hand dealers (as was mentioned in a/. thread the other day, can't be stuffed linking...) may have problems unloading stolen discs. If the discs don't work, that's an extra impediment to them being bought by the dealer.
Of course, I expect two things to happen:
- Sudden availability bootleg unlockers, or development of homebrew techniques or equipment (I don't remember the last time I had to go back to the shop to have a security device that was left in/on a DVD or CD package removed - old hard drive magnets are useful)
- A sudden decrease in retail thefts, and an increase in home break-ins... because all the discs in private homes will be unlocked and easily saleable.
So, thank you very much for this technology... it has the potential to save retailers vast sums of money and generate new business for glaziers everywhere.
All the bot needs to do is find out what the user's SMTP server is and use that. That way it doesn't care which outbound ports are open and which are blocked.
Indeed. But it's still a good idea to block port 25 on business or educational networks unless it's absolutely needed - as it prevents one class of abusers, i.e. direct-to-mx sending malware, making use of that particular method on your network. There still seems to be a lot of direct-to-mx stuff in circulation, if the evidence in our logfiles is anything to go by. I can't think of many normal desktop users who would need unrestricted port 25 access, and anyone trying to tighten up their network in areas where it won't affect legitimate use ought to be applauded.
One of the things I was left wondering after reading TFA is "But does the Kodak software try to take over my computer and is it a resource hog?" That, not the cartridge gouging, is what made me swear never to buy another HP. I was already saying "cool" about actually buying the printer at a reasonable price and letting the ink be a normal price. If Kodak has decent, non-obtrusive software, I'm thoroughly sold.
I have two HP printers - a PSC15xx inkjet I bought because I needed a scanner and a cheap colour inkjet in a hurry for the occasional bit of colour that can't wait, and a Laserjet 3380 rescued from becoming landfill (yes, really... it was left out with a note saying "Free to good home"). In both cases, the HP software for Windows is quite bloated and obtrusive. However, I recently installed both Ubuntu Feisty and Debian Etch on an aged test box at home (P3-733, 256 meg) and was very pleasantly surprised by the fact that they both seemed to include VERY good support for both printing and scanning with these printers (at $Dayjob I work with debian systems all the time, but not the desktop end of their software offerings)
While Kodak's ink prices are absolutely outstanding, I suspect their Windows software will be just as obtrusive and hungry as HP's. Most home-users are likely to want bells-and-whistles - they'll want to install whatever's on the CD, they'll want the "Scan" button on the scanner to dump their scanned pictures into a save folder on their PC or open up an image-editing or OCR program, they'll want something comparable to the task-oriented "HP Solution Center" etc. Hopefully, Kodak will offer a decent choice about the amount of cruft that gets installed alongside the necessary input and output drivers, and hopefully those drivers will be fairly lightweight... but based on the direction manufacturers seem to be going in, as shown by my HP and a few different brands and models I've installed recently for other people, I suspect this is unlikely.
Seriously if a company can get hold of an exclusive technology to produce unlimited energy, it will offer to the public at near free cost, and perhaps charge "fees" for installation, support and services.
No, I think you've probably got that wrong.
They'd offer it to the power distribution and oil companies - probably on terms that guarantee a revenue stream well past the expiration of any patents on the technology. Why handle the messy details of dealing with the Great Unwashed one-on-one, when others who could be your customers already have the billing systems and the customer bases in place? And with unlimited clean near-free electicity to play with, the oil companies would find ways to produce hydrocarbons from sea water and atmospheric carbon dioxide pretty damn fast - they've got the storage and distribution expertise, and from a storage and usage perspective you have to admit that fossil hyrdocarbons are pretty damn convenient (if not particularly good for the environment). Synthetic hydrocarbon fuels would be carbon-neutral - the waste products are the same as the raw materials, water and carbon dioxide.
This is absolutely false. Blocking spam from compromised domains, absolutely. I agree with you 100% that blocking those emails is a service to the consumer, and so does the author. But blocking the user from navigating to a website in that IP block, an action which they have explicitly initiated, is another thing entirely.
But DID the user explicity initiate the connection? Or was it due to something installed on their computer without their knowledge? Additionally, what's the difference between blocking known spam sources, and blocking connections to an IP address recognised as delivering nasty payloads?
A few IPs in that range were mentioned in an AUSCERT notification relating to trojan activity last week. Examination of my proxy logs indicated rather a lot of other unwanted activity for various other IP addresses throughout that range - typical "phone home" zombie stuff. As a result, I've put a blanket ban on web access to that range. The stuff on installing trojans appears to have been added to the SpamHaus listing this week - when I last looked, it was all about spam that originated from that range. This suggests that those who used to spam from these kind of ranges now do so from compromised machines and use their address space to host command/control machines and serve up browser exploits. The original purpose of the SpamHaus data was to indicate spam sources, but the abusers of many of those listed networks may have changed their strategy in response to being listed there.
Further examination of my proxy logs revealed something else - a significant number of connections to numeric addresses that turned out to be listed in various dynamic/dial-up RBLs, and had similar "phone home" or botnet-participant markers.
Now, we're a.edu.TLD, and as such a certain amount of openness and "academic freedom" is required... so I suspect that a blanket-ban on machines on our network establishing connections to web services on dynamic IP addresses won't fly - students and
staff will set up home servers, hobbyists will run stuff off dynamic connections, etc. It's something that could be VERY important and useful to corporate or government IT departments, though, and I can see no reason why I wouldn't be able to get away with blocking web access to IPs listed in the SBL/XBL if I ran it past management and could find an easy and reliable way to implement it and monitor/whitelist anything that probably shouldn't be blocked that accidentally slips in... or until the site owners can get a legitimate listing resolved if I don't think there's a risk to my users from such a whitelisting, in much the same way as I can and do whitelist around email blocks.
I agree that it's an area with many questions unresolved and many grey areas, and I welcome the fact that people are starting to discuss this seriously. There is room for abuse in this kind of blocking, which is why transparency and accountability - and maybe a shitload of logging, too - are needed if it happens. I don't expect ISPs to capriciously block sites that they don't agree with politically or which compete with them commercially, and would kick up a stink if I found one had done that to me... but by the same token, if they knew another network was a source of abusive traffic and did nothing to stop that abusive traffic traversing their network I'd want to know why not.
This longer chain devalues your old car, keeps it in use for a long period of time and leads to the output of harmful emissions. You can stop the chain from growing by maintaining an older car.
I drive a Holden Camira, which is an early-80's GM J-platform car... almost identical in many respects to the Vauxhaul Cavalier of the same vintage.
Currently, it has around 330,000km on the clock. The engine was replaced with a later-model second-hand unit at around 260,000, after a freak incident in which a spark plug disintegrated and lovely bits of ceramic scoured one cylinder and ate some piston rings. Cost of that incident? About AU$1400, including a replacement set of CV joints and engine mounts. The engine's the 1.8l from the following model. It has an automatic transmission that, so long as the fluid is kept topped off and the filter replaced occasionally, just keeps going. I've replaced the clutch on a few RWD drive cars myself, but it's not something I'd be able to tackle on a FWD vehicle with my limited mechanical resources, and some of us had a track record for chewing out clutches... so even with the energy savings of a manual, it may well still be cheaper for me to drive an automatic.
It's not the leanest car to run - I'm currently getting around 9l/100km out of it on my commute - but it's reasonably economical. I've had it for 12 years, and it cost me around $6000 when we bought it second-hand. Over its life, it's had (apart from things like servicing and tyres and hoses, which have to be considered regular consumables):
$800 worth of engine work on the previous engine (warped head - that model was notorious for it)
$1400 engine replacement (which uses next to no oil, and blows no smoke)
$400 exhaust replacement (which will probably outlast the rest of the car)
Miscellaneous bits I couldn't put a dollar figure on (replacement cooling fan, a little radiator work, replacement drivers seat, etc)
So, apart from things like servicing and tyres and consumables like fluids (all of which apply to any car) it's cost me between eight and nine thousand dollars. Let's call that $9000, over 12 years, which is $750 a year - assuming it gets written off tomorrow, which it won't. All those costs are fully sunk, and although I drive an "asset" worth effectively less than my Nintendo Wii it's costing me NOTHING apart from the costs associated with keeping it on the road. No interest payments, no further rapid depreciation of a costly asset, nothing. Fuel, fluids, parts, whatever mechanical work I need to outsource, registation, insurance - and that's it.
I intend to drive it until it becomes uneconomical to repair it further, which will probably be when parts start to become scarce and/or the dreaded tinworm burrows too many holes in it. At that point, it'll end up at the wreckers and I'll start the cycle all over again with something that costs me a hell of a lot less to buy this time around than $6000... although I'd consider spending three to five all up, including mechanical work shortly after purchase, to get something that is likely to last.
It costs me vastly less to keep this car running than it would cost me to buy a tiny little 6l/100km 2-door commuter car - I can't easily get my hands on 12K-15K, and I'm not fond of paying interest on something that's not a necessity. It runs very nicely on 95 octane e10, and from experimenation it seems capable of running nicely on straight ethanol (dark night, broken fuel pump - ten feet of clear poly tubing hooked to the heater vacuum port on the carbie an a bottle of metho got me home) so I'd have no hesitation whatsoever using greener fuels like e85 if they were available here (or if I could easily get straight ethanol reasonably economically).
I hate seeing otherwise useable equipment go to waste... I'm not sure whether I hate the wastefulness of our consumer culture, or love it because it makes it so much easier for me to turn garbage or scrap into a useable home computer or a working motor vehicle. Maybe I just have a higher tolerance for inconvenience than others of my species do, although many of them seem to go "Baaa" a lot more than I think higher primates should.
Ah yes, you seem to be right, I seem to have misread that. They do, however, still seem intent on licencing the technology to companies in countries where you might still be able to register something with the crash-protection of a golf buggy for road use. If this kind of propulsion proves as viable as it looks, there may be reasons for larger existing car manufacturers who are prepared to jump through all the crash-test hoops to consider licencing and adapting it for western markets too... or for Tata or others to consider doing this themselves, if the potential export markets were attractive enough and they can come up with a way to produce a lightweight and inexpensive body that meets western safety requirements.
You are kidding right ? Do you know anything about the Tata group?
Oh, I know EXACTLY who the Tata group are. I wasn't talking about them. The people I suspect "don't have or can't raise the capital to take on the large manufacturers toe-to-toe" in this case are the owners of the technology, the French company that licences the tech and provides the turn-key manufacturing equipment.
Tata has purchased a franchise from the French developers, and for Tata it's definitely pocket change. My point still stands - the developers of this technology would face a whole lot of obstacles in trying to manufacture this themselves and sell it into Western markets. The smart thing to do in cases like this is to make it as easy as possible for the technology to be deployed by others in markets that mightn't have the same entry-barriers as developed nations, and make money off the necessary manufacturing equipment and the technology licencing fees. Tata wins - they get to sell low-environmental-impact urban runabouts, and explore new technological directions. The french company wins too - they have another customer who they can point to when they make more sales calls on manufacturers in China or Vietnam or Brazil or wherever.
Is there a reason for that? That seems to be the way things like this go. We have a world changing invention thats super cheap and safe! We'll make a couple of 'em and see how it works out. . . Or maybe theres some validity to the theories that 'the powers that be' keep this kind of thing under wraps and prevent it from really taking off, because something like this could really upset the balance of power in the world currently.
Based on a new concept of local vehicle production and sales, MDI promote
regional manufacturing license rights in the form of franchised turnkey factory
systems. Such a turnkey factory will have a normal production capacity of
2000-4000 vehicles per year and will employ some 130 people. A model factory is
being constructed in Brignoles, France.
My guess is that they don't have or can't raise the capital to take on the large manufacturers toe-to-toe, and are hoping their technology can get a toe-hold on places where local regulations for things like crash-safety won't kill a lightweight chassis and a fibreglass body... which sounds exactly like what they've done with the proof-of-concept fleet in Mexico and what they're doing through licencing the technology to Tata. Any idea what it costs to produce and certify a vehicle to meet European, US or Australian crash-safety standards? No, I don't know exactly how much either, but it has to be a lot. I'd imagine that it'd be relatively easy to build a vehicle like this that would be survivable if you flipped it - hell, the lack of weight would probably work in your favour. But cabin intrusion protection, in the event of some crazy SUV driver trying to occupy the same piece of road you do? That's hard enough to do with steel boxes smaller than another SUV, let alone something with something like this.
Slashdot Mirror
I, too, lament the current state of affairs - but I never lose sight of the fact that on the whole I have it FAR better than ANY of my ancestors, no matter how wealthy they may have been. No gold, no extensive land holdings, no fancy titles... but I have modern sanitation and heating and cooling, a 24-year-old car that takes me where I need to go, a refrigerator, a washing machine, a clothes dryer, a freezer, a dishwasher, a publicly-funded health system that does a decent job of looking after my basic needs, a big-screen TV, as many computers as I can pull off the garbage pile, a decent job, no fear of starvation, smart and loving children, a smart and loving spouse, a nice house that's still mostly owned by the bank, the ability and opportunity to find out about far more things at a surface-level in the comfort of my own home in ten minutes than I could have found in a whole week at the local Mechanics Institute, etc.
Maybe I've sold out, but the early 21st Century seems like a damn fine place to live if you're me.
The problem is, I work for a University. I can't do it. There are too many stupid admins out there, and they're ALL working for sites that are considered important "offshore partners". Hell, I have enough trouble dealing with offshore agents whose outbound mailservers are in dynamic dial-up ranges - I kid you not. I'd dearly love to tempfail any message from a server that doesn't have a PTR until it times out and bounces to the sender... unfortunately, it's not gonna happen because I like working where I do.
I block between one and two hundred thousand messages per day with a half-dozen RBLs for hard-rejects (with some local mitigating whitelistings, of course), greet_pause, SA blacklist and content checks and customised scores (we reject at 15, because Chinese webmail often accumulates 9 to 13 points just by being sent...) and the SANE Security custom ClamAV signatures. We typically accept between 20 and 30 thousand messages per day, and typically get between four and a dozen reports of blocked messages PER MONTH that the senders thought should have got through. Lately, around half of those "false-postives" are due to SPF, so they don't really count. This keeps spam down to a minor distraction for most users, and costs nothing apart from some bandwidth and the electicity for the servers and a little bit of admin time. We'd probably be looking at a quarter million to a million dollars to begin with and a quarter million per year thereafter if we had to get a commercial solution at least as effective as what we've got right now, and I just don't see that happening.
No no no no no... what you need to do is spoof your MAC address and download kiddieporn and bombmaking instructions through the AP belonging to the guy whose dog keeps crapping on your lawn. It's only acceptable to abuse open or poorly-secured APs for revenge - never for tittilation or personal gain. Jeez... what have you got next to *your* moral compass? (I've got a huge hunk of magnetite next to mine).The type (translates to "anything") and size (translates to "anything") of the attachments are mentioned in the vaguest terms, and nothing else is said about the messages. If all that was sent was a
Or maybe he was cutting and pasting message bodies from representative items in his inbox, like:
Dell are hardly known for offering sane or consistent pricing across models or market segments - try browsing their website some time as a home user, then as various classes of business customer. Why should it come as any surprise that they've omitted a special offer from a machine with a non-standard OS?
Personally, I have no plans to upgrade to Vista any time soon - at least not at home. If faced with the prospect of getting a machine with Ubuntu at $X, or a machine with double the RAM and a bigger hard drive with Vista at $X, I'd take the machine with Vista, thank you very much. Shrink the partition as far as practical, install Ubuntu, and you're ahead - you've got the higher-spec machine, AND the ability to boot into something that the Dull PhoneMonkeys won't hang up over. Okay... that's a path a geek would take, not a regular consumer, but I doubt at this time that there would be very many non-geeks opting for Ubuntu over windows anyway on a new Dell.
Besides... if you're going to criticise Vista, you should at least have first-hand experience of what it is that you're criticising.
Fast, cheap and accurate enough in the context of solving the tests manually, then... and cheap enough in the realm of OCR solutions to make a moderately or even modestly accurate system cost-effective. If it's a system that can be deployed across thousands of bots, each of which can try many times per hour, it's worthwhile even if it only gets the test right ten percent of the time.
I wouldn't trust *my* systems to the outsourcing firms or freelancers, but there are situations in which it can make sense to do so. Unfortunately, IT Manglement can't always be trusted to correctly identify them.
Indians are fast, accurate and cheap:
s sing-Data-Entry/Data-Entry-Solve-CAPTCHA.html
h oo-ocr-bypass-captcha.157160.html
http://www.getafreelancer.com/projects/Data-Proce
Of course, there are those who seek to use the IT talent of the sub-continent for a more direct attack:
http://www.getafreelancer.com/projects/PHP-ASP/ya
And as an upstream poster pointed out, there's always the old "Free Porn - solve this CAPTCHA for access" approach.
For email, though, it could be quite decent - provided the signatures are kept current, and/or are broad enough to pick up new variants of some of the more common varieties. Many AV products set up POP, IMAP and SMTP proxies (although this looks like it only does SMTP and POP)... your mail client talks to a proxy, which scans inbound and outbound traffic and works the appropriate voodoo in the event of something nasty being discovered. It looks like it also checks web traffic too. This offloads the scanning to a dedicated piece of hardware, which is less likely to get subverted if or when something nasty makes its way onto John Q. Shouldshowermore's computer - you know, the guy who doesn't really know what he's doing and goes out looking for warez or b00b13zp1cs and gets a nasty case of the Russian Mafia from a dodgy website? Um, your neighbour? Yeah, him.
Of course, I'd probably still recommend using at least a free AV product on the machine... belt AND braces AND duct tape are better than belt alone, and there's always a window of opportunity between when new malware is released and when it's picked up by various scanner... and it makes sense to have something on the machine that can clean up after something nasty gets in. Sure, it's a terrific idea, but I wouldn't recommend it INSTEAD of AV software on the PC... it'll be great at offloading mail and web traffic scanning, and providing anti-phishing functionality, but it can't replace the basic "Whoops, caught something nasty after looking at something I shouldn't have - clean it for me" functionality of desktop AV software.
That said... it's cool, and there's a niche. I can't wait for some Chinese manufacturer to start including that kind of functionality in network cards. Filtering in your router, filtering in your NIC, desktop AV software (with the mailscanning turned off) - sounds like a combination made in heaven for people who just want their stuff to work without having to think about it too much.
Now, I've got a REAL grassroots annoyance campaign - to bring Firefly back. It involves sending a herd of cattle to Fox headquarters every day until they relent and give Joss a huge bucket of money. I can promise that I'm not on Fox's payroll - Rupert hired me direc... no, don't type that. No, stop typing, or I'll get a new secretary. Don't you DARE click "Submit", or you're fired
Fast-forward ten years. You're a fly on the wall of the Executive Suite at the top of the Sony-Disney Building, colloquially referred to by some as the Tower of Babel.
Exec 1: "How are we going with the rights to [bestselling novel]?"
Exec 2: "Not so good. [the author] called us, well, what was it again?"
Underling 1, looking at palmtop: "I believe the phrase translated as 'pond-film-eating fatherless parasites who would sell their own mother's testicles to get a single arse into a cinema seat', or something very like that. Something about excrement too..."
Exec 3: "That's easily fixed. Rocky!"
Thug: "Yes, Boss?"
Exec 3: "Be a good lad, would you, and head off to Kinshasa - we need you to 'acquire some rights with extreme prejudice'".
Exec 2: "Very good. I don't suppose you have a similar approach that will work on corporate entities, do you?"
Exec 3: "As a matter of fact, since we managed to successfully lobby for full personhood for corporate entities, our lawyers inform us that a single tac-nuke directed at Time-Warner-McDonald's corporate HQ would open up the whole Harry Potter arena for exploitation... hey, what's that flying towards -"
Mind you, I suppose incineration is a lot better than the alternative.
Of course, I expect two things to happen:
- Sudden availability bootleg unlockers, or development of homebrew techniques or equipment (I don't remember the last time I had to go back to the shop to have a security device that was left in/on a DVD or CD package removed - old hard drive magnets are useful)
- A sudden decrease in retail thefts, and an increase in home break-ins... because all the discs in private homes will be unlocked and easily saleable.
So, thank you very much for this technology... it has the potential to save retailers vast sums of money and generate new business for glaziers everywhere.
While Kodak's ink prices are absolutely outstanding, I suspect their Windows software will be just as obtrusive and hungry as HP's. Most home-users are likely to want bells-and-whistles - they'll want to install whatever's on the CD, they'll want the "Scan" button on the scanner to dump their scanned pictures into a save folder on their PC or open up an image-editing or OCR program, they'll want something comparable to the task-oriented "HP Solution Center" etc. Hopefully, Kodak will offer a decent choice about the amount of cruft that gets installed alongside the necessary input and output drivers, and hopefully those drivers will be fairly lightweight... but based on the direction manufacturers seem to be going in, as shown by my HP and a few different brands and models I've installed recently for other people, I suspect this is unlikely.
They'd offer it to the power distribution and oil companies - probably on terms that guarantee a revenue stream well past the expiration of any patents on the technology. Why handle the messy details of dealing with the Great Unwashed one-on-one, when others who could be your customers already have the billing systems and the customer bases in place? And with unlimited clean near-free electicity to play with, the oil companies would find ways to produce hydrocarbons from sea water and atmospheric carbon dioxide pretty damn fast - they've got the storage and distribution expertise, and from a storage and usage perspective you have to admit that fossil hyrdocarbons are pretty damn convenient (if not particularly good for the environment). Synthetic hydrocarbon fuels would be carbon-neutral - the waste products are the same as the raw materials, water and carbon dioxide.
In my day we had Yoko Ono, five cats, a chainsaw, and tube of K-Y Jelly.
Take a look at, for example, http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/sbl.lasso?query=SBL434 89
A few IPs in that range were mentioned in an AUSCERT notification relating to trojan activity last week. Examination of my proxy logs indicated rather a lot of other unwanted activity for various other IP addresses throughout that range - typical "phone home" zombie stuff. As a result, I've put a blanket ban on web access to that range. The stuff on installing trojans appears to have been added to the SpamHaus listing this week - when I last looked, it was all about spam that originated from that range. This suggests that those who used to spam from these kind of ranges now do so from compromised machines and use their address space to host command/control machines and serve up browser exploits. The original purpose of the SpamHaus data was to indicate spam sources, but the abusers of many of those listed networks may have changed their strategy in response to being listed there.
Further examination of my proxy logs revealed something else - a significant number of connections to numeric addresses that turned out to be listed in various dynamic/dial-up RBLs, and had similar "phone home" or botnet-participant markers.
Now, we're a .edu.TLD, and as such a certain amount of openness and "academic freedom" is required... so I suspect that a blanket-ban on machines on our network establishing connections to web services on dynamic IP addresses won't fly - students and
staff will set up home servers, hobbyists will run stuff off dynamic connections, etc. It's something that could be VERY important and useful to corporate or government IT departments, though, and I can see no reason why I wouldn't be able to get away with blocking web access to IPs listed in the SBL/XBL if I ran it past management and could find an easy and reliable way to implement it and monitor/whitelist anything that probably shouldn't be blocked that accidentally slips in... or until the site owners can get a legitimate listing resolved if I don't think there's a risk to my users from such a whitelisting, in much the same way as I can and do whitelist around email blocks.
I agree that it's an area with many questions unresolved and many grey areas, and I welcome the fact that people are starting to discuss this seriously. There is room for abuse in this kind of blocking, which is why transparency and accountability - and maybe a shitload of logging, too - are needed if it happens. I don't expect ISPs to capriciously block sites that they don't agree with politically or which compete with them commercially, and would kick up a stink if I found one had done that to me... but by the same token, if they knew another network was a source of abusive traffic and did nothing to stop that abusive traffic traversing their network I'd want to know why not.
Currently, it has around 330,000km on the clock. The engine was replaced with a later-model second-hand unit at around 260,000, after a freak incident in which a spark plug disintegrated and lovely bits of ceramic scoured one cylinder and ate some piston rings. Cost of that incident? About AU$1400, including a replacement set of CV joints and engine mounts. The engine's the 1.8l from the following model. It has an automatic transmission that, so long as the fluid is kept topped off and the filter replaced occasionally, just keeps going. I've replaced the clutch on a few RWD drive cars myself, but it's not something I'd be able to tackle on a FWD vehicle with my limited mechanical resources, and some of us had a track record for chewing out clutches... so even with the energy savings of a manual, it may well still be cheaper for me to drive an automatic.
It's not the leanest car to run - I'm currently getting around 9l/100km out of it on my commute - but it's reasonably economical. I've had it for 12 years, and it cost me around $6000 when we bought it second-hand. Over its life, it's had (apart from things like servicing and tyres and hoses, which have to be considered regular consumables):
$800 worth of engine work on the previous engine (warped head - that model was notorious for it)
$1400 engine replacement (which uses next to no oil, and blows no smoke)
$400 exhaust replacement (which will probably outlast the rest of the car)
Miscellaneous bits I couldn't put a dollar figure on (replacement cooling fan, a little radiator work, replacement drivers seat, etc)
So, apart from things like servicing and tyres and consumables like fluids (all of which apply to any car) it's cost me between eight and nine thousand dollars. Let's call that $9000, over 12 years, which is $750 a year - assuming it gets written off tomorrow, which it won't. All those costs are fully sunk, and although I drive an "asset" worth effectively less than my Nintendo Wii it's costing me NOTHING apart from the costs associated with keeping it on the road. No interest payments, no further rapid depreciation of a costly asset, nothing. Fuel, fluids, parts, whatever mechanical work I need to outsource, registation, insurance - and that's it.
I intend to drive it until it becomes uneconomical to repair it further, which will probably be when parts start to become scarce and/or the dreaded tinworm burrows too many holes in it. At that point, it'll end up at the wreckers and I'll start the cycle all over again with something that costs me a hell of a lot less to buy this time around than $6000... although I'd consider spending three to five all up, including mechanical work shortly after purchase, to get something that is likely to last.
It costs me vastly less to keep this car running than it would cost me to buy a tiny little 6l/100km 2-door commuter car - I can't easily get my hands on 12K-15K, and I'm not fond of paying interest on something that's not a necessity. It runs very nicely on 95 octane e10, and from experimenation it seems capable of running nicely on straight ethanol (dark night, broken fuel pump - ten feet of clear poly tubing hooked to the heater vacuum port on the carbie an a bottle of metho got me home) so I'd have no hesitation whatsoever using greener fuels like e85 if they were available here (or if I could easily get straight ethanol reasonably economically).
I hate seeing otherwise useable equipment go to waste... I'm not sure whether I hate the wastefulness of our consumer culture, or love it because it makes it so much easier for me to turn garbage or scrap into a useable home computer or a working motor vehicle. Maybe I just have a higher tolerance for inconvenience than others of my species do, although many of them seem to go "Baaa" a lot more than I think higher primates should.
Tata has purchased a franchise from the French developers, and for Tata it's definitely pocket change. My point still stands - the developers of this technology would face a whole lot of obstacles in trying to manufacture this themselves and sell it into Western markets. The smart thing to do in cases like this is to make it as easy as possible for the technology to be deployed by others in markets that mightn't have the same entry-barriers as developed nations, and make money off the necessary manufacturing equipment and the technology licencing fees. Tata wins - they get to sell low-environmental-impact urban runabouts, and explore new technological directions. The french company wins too - they have another customer who they can point to when they make more sales calls on manufacturers in China or Vietnam or Brazil or wherever.