Then what about censorship issues with anti-spam programs? If someone sends an offer for viagra to president@whitehouse.gov, and an anti-spam program stops it, is it an instance of anti-Consitutional censorship?
"Nothing in the Constitution compels us to listen to or view any unwanted communication, whatever its merit. We categorically reject the argument that a vendor has a right under the Constitution or otherwise to send unwanted material into the home of another. If this prohibition operates to impede the flow of even valid ideas, the answer is that no one has a right to press even 'good' ideas on an unwilling recipient. The asserted right of a mailer, we repeat, stops at the outer boundary of every person's domain." -- Chief Justice Warren Berger, U.S. Supreme Court
Above quote from UXN Spam Combat via the CF13 homepage, my comprehensive solution to unwanted email.
Case closed.
Besides, only dumb, clueless spammers would send their crap to.gov and.mil email addresses anyway....
Because Slashdot wasn't when I submitted my site as a newsworthy article some time ago.
In a nutshell, my program, CF13 uses a number of simple, non-mathematic, pattern-matching tests to make it virtually impossible to get English language spam past it. These tests do not require the overhead associated with Bayesian Filtering and its ilk.
I think the key feature to it is to treat as spam all email from unapproved senders that contain more than 'spaces' and alphabetic charaters.
This simple but powerful feature makes it IMPOSSIBLE to conveniently spell email addresses, URLs, postal addresses, prices, and phone numbers. These items are neccessary for e-commerce to take place. Without them, e-commerce is IMPOSSIBLE or at least extremely difficult to conduct. It also treats as spam email containing 'non-ASCII' characters. I have gotten quite a few such emails at another email address I use infrequently--all spam (sales pitches in foreign languages).
As an added benefit, CF13 makes it 100% IMPOSSIBLE to accidentally run malware sent by email provided a particular registry setting has not been compromised. It does this by treating all email and file attachments as 'text files' that can be scanned for malware and handeled safely. Thus, one's PC CANNOT be compromised by a malicious malware HTML webpage or worm/virus/trojan email file attachment.
It also detects 'mailbombing' and handles it a manner that makes it easy to clean up afterwards.
It is probably best to fight spam at the SMTP server level but I have heard it is best to fight spam at the end user level. Both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages so this issue appears to me to be a toss-up for the time being....
Seems the 'Slashcode' was smarter than I thought, oh well.
Below are the message IDs I modded up before they got modded down again by the 'Slashcode'.
Undoing moderation to Comment #8911464 Undoing moderation to Comment #8911481 Undoing moderation to Comment #8911656 Undoing moderation to Comment #8911713 Undoing moderation to Comment #8911827
Bryan
PS: Message to all: Could someone spin me a scenario of moderation abuse that would arise from posting to the same topics you moderate in? The scenario of 'modding up your own posts' does not count as that is obviously bad and should not be allowed by the current 'Slashcode' at all.
Logging out, posting as an Anonymous Coward, then logging back in again is a lot of effort to go through to posting to the same topics you moderate in in a sincere, nonfraudulent manner.
In the real world, companies can be sued for faulty tangible products such as the (in)famous Firestone tire lawsuits from a few years ago.
When the products in question are intangible, magnetically/optically encoded ones and zeroes loaded from tangible, intrinsically inexpensive media and executing in a computing environment not in the direct, complete control of the software vendor--all bets are off!
In other words, for example, should the software vendor be held responsible for damages caused by a virus-infected copy of their program installed on their customer's machine? I say 'no' unless it can be proven BEYOND A SHADOW OF A DOUBT that the software WAS infected on one of the software vendor's machines PRIOR to it being mass produced and sold to the customer.
I think this is how my PC got the troublesome Klez virus some time ago. After getting rid of it, I treat such system security as VERY IMPORTANT--taking such precautions as running an antivirus program and a software firewall at (pratically) ALL TIMES.
Very well, (re)program ALL mailservers to adhere 100% without exception to all pertinent SMTP-related RFCs in their entirety (such as rfc821).
Try to nail the spammer and discconnect him/her before you get to the DATA phase of the connection. Otherwise, the mailserver will have to either accept the message unconditionally or return
570 Command DATA Message rejected due to content
after spam analysing the message like a particular 'clueless' ISP listed at rfc-ignorant.org does....
In this manner, header forgeries become (almost) impossible, sender hosts are properly FQDNed and whatnot....
To address the second part of zerocool's comment, I offer the the following as some of the societal results of 'people as consumers -- not customers'. This has created a desparate, adversarial environment in which commerce and 'consumers' meet in an inevitable clusterfsck....
The capitalism model in use now works great when the items are 'noncreative', mass-produced commodities.
Once 'Interlectual Property' gets involved, all bets are off: Enter software/frivolous/overly broad patents, copyright terms that last nearly a century, Digital Millenium Copyright Act, copy-protected DVDs and music CDs which violates Phillips audio CD standard, etc.
ANY unauthorized intrusion into someone's computer is against the law
What does one do when the intruding IP addresses are, at face value, part of the United States Federal Government?
It happened to me not too long ago when my PC's copy of Agnitum's Outpost Firewall trapped four separate intrusion attemps from, at face value, a particular United States Federal Government agency.
It could have been nothing more than IP spoofery by anonymous Internet pranksters....But what if the intrusions were for real and came from (un)compromised computers from within said United States Federal Government agency?...
Better (download, install and) use a trustworthy hardware/software firewall before they get compromised to allow such activities to go undetected....
One could organize a boycott of the greedy, moneygrubbing corporations....
But for that to be successful, the organizers would have to overcome the inertia and complacency of the masses in order to mobilize them to their cause--a 'longshot' proposition I'm afraid....
Not classical per se--but clearly symphonic and often memorable.
My appreciation for his work began with STAR WARS. Though my filmusic appreciation spread to other composers and to real classical music, the output of Mr. Williams has truly earned a place in music history and should be preserved for future generations as have the works of Wagner, Mozart, and Beethoven have been preserved and passed down through the generations past to the present day.
CF13 does this by simply comparing all the 'words' in the subject line and body of an email against Grady Ward's Moby single word list and a second, smaller 'spamword' word list derived from the first word list by the user. Both word lists will deem email containing misspelled words or 'spammy' words as spam. Thus....
One more avenue to spam is denied usage by spammers.
By attacking this type of spam technique in this manner, all the overhead associated with Bayesian filtering is 100% completely unecessary.
The program I wrote and use, CF13 archives all email from unapproved senders as spam (for easy subsequent perusal and deletion) that uses more than 'space' characters and alphabetic characters. Since spammers needs @,.,:, and / to spell out email addresses and urls properly, it is impossible for them to communicate. < and > are 'suppressed' as well making HTML impossible for spammers to send. If such spam eludes my program's header analysis heuristics, the above content heuristic will catch such messages and deem them as spam.
If you want people to find out about your program, you'd be well advised to post the link, or even just the name of the program, in the actual body of your post.
(see link below, I've named the program CF13. One other feature of the program is that all spam it detects is funneled into 2 files for easy perusal/deletion. This also includes legitimate email from unapproved senders that violates the program's 'email policy' that makes it virtually impossible to spam.)
Me: http://www.cf13.com/ Slashdot: Not newsworthy. You decide. PS: Read first before emailing me.
Consider C, the weapon of choice for commercial-grade programming. It only has a handfull of control structures to 'hold' the rest of the program together. In the hands of an experienced programmer, C can be used to create programs that are almost as fast (yet readable), as an equivalent program coded in 100% hand written assembly language.
I could do this but I chose not to. I'd rather write lots of different programs in C and learn new stuff along the way rather than pampering the CPU with all the mind-numbing detail and preplanning a large-scale assembly language program would require.
I had a bit of experience with COBOL years and years ago. At the time I had several years of experience with Pascal (after making the radical pardigm shift from line numbered, GOTO-driven BASIC beforehand). Since Pascal and COBOL are both procedural languages, all I had to learn to get up to speed fast was the syntax and 'positioning' requirements of COBOL.
In a matter of days, I was writing somewhat sophisticated, nontrivial COBOL programs that did what they were supposed to do.
Gripe: Boy is COBOL verbose!!! (which fufills the self-documenting requirement of the language).
The Z-series will experience downtime if its power supply is cut and it doesn't have some form of backup power supply that can take over in a matter of nanoseconds. This can be anything from somebody unknowingly unplugging/disconnecting the thing all the way up to an EMP via a pinch or an exploding (thermo)nuclear device....
Of course, an EMP will ruin anything remotely electronic if it is not properly shielded from it....
The program I wrote and use (see sig) treats all email file attachments as 'text files'. This renders malware safe to handle and/or delete. For the 'zipped up' malware, one could patch the filename in the zip file to something harmless then extract it.
However, this approach hinges on the requirement that the registry setting for text file processing (.txt) remains uncompromised. Unfortunately, there is one known malware that 'hijacks' that setting when it runs....
On top of that, one must have some sort of firewall program running at all times.
About a week ago or so, my firewall program detected some intrusion attempts from some rather eye opening IP addresses!
I've been getting some 419 scam email from a network in India.
This network is listed at rfc-ignorant.org so complaining to the offending network directly is pointless.
Apart from deleting/archiving the spam scam (what I do with my program--see sig), what can one do in this situation to send a message that this sort of internet conduct is not acceptable?
My aim was to spark an honest discussion as to how to deal with terrorists and terrorism without (preferably) killing any innocent civillians in the process. The examples cited in my parent post illustrate what I believe to be an improper magnitude of difference in numbers in the groups of people killed during armed conflict.
To reiterate, my goal was not to be inflammitory and disruptive, but to start an honest discussion about viable solutions to the problem of terrorism and how to minimize--peferably eliminate--loss of life to all parties concerned....
Not long after 2001-09-11 attrocities, I saw the words 'NUKE 'EM' scrawled in the grime on the back of a semi truck trailer traveling down the highway.
That the USA didn't rain down instant death and destruction on the homeland(s) of those perceived responsible for the attacks shows a commendable measure of restraint on the USA's behalf not to 'replay' Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In a ghoulish(?) coincidence, the death toll at Pearl Harbor (1941-12-07) is about the same as that of '9/11'. Is it no wonder that the events of 2001-09-11 are now inextricably linked to the date 'which will live in infamy': 1941-12-07?
What a day '9/11' was....
The attacks were vivid, simple, and brutal.
THEY GOT THE WHOLE WORLD TO TAKE NOTICE--the hallmark of such activites.
As an 'encore' of sorts, we now have the terrible events of '3/11' in Madrid, Spain (2004-03-11).
How does one defend against such attacks by using 'the right tool for the right job' without the 'kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out' results one would get using nukes in retaliation against the homeland(s) of the perpetrators of such attacks? Take a look at what happened in the past:
Slashdot Mirror
Was it a mitsui 'golddisk'?
Was it dye side up during testing?
Did you leave it outside at all times during rain, snow, other bad weather?
Bottom line is:
Where can I get these Mitsui gold/MAM-A CD-Rs?
I still have a few of the Kodak's lying around ready for use but I want to get more CD-Rs with the same quality as the Kodak golds....
Above quote from UXN Spam Combat via the CF13 homepage, my comprehensive solution to unwanted email.
Case closed.
Besides, only dumb, clueless spammers would send their crap to
Because Slashdot wasn't when I submitted my site as a newsworthy article some time ago.
In a nutshell, my program, CF13 uses a number of simple, non-mathematic, pattern-matching tests to make it virtually impossible to get English language spam past it. These tests do not require the overhead associated with Bayesian Filtering and its ilk.
I think the key feature to it is to treat as spam all email from unapproved senders that contain more than 'spaces' and alphabetic charaters.
This simple but powerful feature makes it IMPOSSIBLE to conveniently spell email addresses, URLs, postal addresses, prices, and phone numbers. These items are neccessary for e-commerce to take place. Without them, e-commerce is IMPOSSIBLE or at least extremely difficult to conduct. It also treats as spam email containing 'non-ASCII' characters. I have gotten quite a few such emails at another email address I use infrequently--all spam (sales pitches in foreign languages).
As an added benefit, CF13 makes it 100% IMPOSSIBLE to accidentally run malware sent by email provided a particular registry setting has not been compromised. It does this by treating all email and file attachments as 'text files' that can be scanned for malware and handeled safely. Thus, one's PC CANNOT be compromised by a malicious malware HTML webpage or worm/virus/trojan email file attachment.
It also detects 'mailbombing' and handles it a manner that makes it easy to clean up afterwards.
It is probably best to fight spam at the SMTP server level but I have heard it is best to fight spam at the end user level. Both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages so this issue appears to me to be a toss-up for the time being....
The 'tip top' computer programmers in the world who are not working for the likes of IBM or Microsoft are likely working at/for the NSA.
As you can see, all three firms would undoubtedly treat such talent as a valuable proprietery resource to be held in the strictest of confidence.
Seems the 'Slashcode' was smarter than I thought,
oh well.
Below are the message IDs I modded up before they got modded down again by the 'Slashcode'.
Undoing moderation to Comment #8911464
Undoing moderation to Comment #8911481
Undoing moderation to Comment #8911656
Undoing moderation to Comment #8911713
Undoing moderation to Comment #8911827
Bryan
PS: Message to all: Could someone spin me a scenario of moderation abuse that would arise from posting to the same topics you moderate in?
The scenario of 'modding up your own posts' does not count as that is obviously bad and should not be allowed by the current 'Slashcode' at all.
Logging out, posting as an Anonymous Coward, then logging back in again is a lot of effort to go through to posting to the same topics you moderate in in a sincere, nonfraudulent manner.
In the real world, companies can be sued for faulty tangible products such as the (in)famous Firestone tire lawsuits from a few years ago.
When the products in question are intangible, magnetically/optically encoded ones and zeroes loaded from tangible, intrinsically inexpensive media and executing in a computing environment not in the direct, complete control of the software vendor--all bets are off!
In other words, for example, should the software vendor be held responsible for damages caused by a virus-infected copy of their program installed on their customer's machine? I say 'no' unless it can be proven BEYOND A SHADOW OF A DOUBT that the software WAS infected on one of the software vendor's machines PRIOR to it being mass produced and sold to the customer.
I think this is how my PC got the troublesome Klez virus some time ago. After getting rid of it, I treat such system security as VERY IMPORTANT--taking such precautions as running an antivirus program and a software firewall at (pratically) ALL TIMES.
Very well, (re)program ALL mailservers to adhere 100% without exception to all pertinent SMTP-related RFCs in their entirety (such as rfc821).
Try to nail the spammer and discconnect him/her before you get to the DATA phase of the connection. Otherwise, the mailserver will have to either accept the message unconditionally or return
570 Command DATA Message rejected due to content
after spam analysing the message like a particular 'clueless' ISP listed at rfc-ignorant.org does....
In this manner, header forgeries become (almost) impossible, sender hosts are properly FQDNed and whatnot....
Pertinent section of above post below:
The capitalism model in use now works great when the items are 'noncreative', mass-produced commodities.
Once 'Interlectual Property' gets involved, all bets are off:
Enter software/frivolous/overly broad patents,
copyright terms that last nearly a century,
Digital Millenium Copyright Act,
copy-protected DVDs and music CDs which violates Phillips audio CD standard,
etc.
ANY unauthorized intrusion into someone's computer is against the law
What does one do when the intruding IP addresses are, at face value, part of the United States Federal Government?
It happened to me not too long ago when my PC's copy of Agnitum's Outpost Firewall trapped four separate intrusion attemps from, at face value,
a particular United States Federal Government agency.
It could have been nothing more than IP spoofery by anonymous Internet pranksters....But what if the intrusions were for real and came from
(un)compromised computers from within said United States Federal Government agency?...
Better (download, install and) use a trustworthy hardware/software firewall before they get compromised to allow such activities to go undetected....
If the AC's number of 220,000,000 HIV 'active users' is correct, approximately 1 in 30 people WORLDWIDE are infected!
Again I say:
MOD DOWN! HIV/AIDS IS NO LAUGHING MATTER!
One could organize a boycott of the greedy, moneygrubbing corporations....
But for that to be successful, the organizers would have to overcome the inertia and complacency of the masses in order to mobilize them to their cause--a 'longshot' proposition I'm afraid....
Not classical per se--but clearly symphonic and often memorable.
My appreciation for his work began with STAR WARS. Though my filmusic appreciation spread to other composers and to real classical music, the output of Mr. Williams has truly earned a place in music history and should be preserved for future generations as have the works of Wagner, Mozart, and Beethoven have been preserved and passed down through the generations past to the present day.
CF13 does this by simply comparing all the 'words' in the subject line and body of an email against Grady Ward's Moby single word list and a second, smaller 'spamword' word list derived from the first word list by the user. Both word lists will deem email containing misspelled words or 'spammy' words as spam. Thus....
One more avenue to spam is denied usage by spammers.
By attacking this type of spam technique in this manner, all the overhead associated with Bayesian filtering is 100% completely unecessary.
Read it here.
The program I wrote and use, CF13 archives all email from unapproved senders as spam (for easy subsequent perusal and deletion) that uses more than 'space' characters and alphabetic characters. Since spammers needs @, ., :, and / to spell out email addresses and urls properly, it is impossible for them to communicate. < and > are 'suppressed' as well making HTML impossible for spammers to send. If such spam eludes my program's header analysis heuristics, the above content heuristic will catch such messages and deem them as spam.
If you want people to find out about your program, you'd be well advised to post the link, or even just the name of the program, in the actual body of your post.
(see link below, I've named the program CF13. One other feature of the program is that all spam it detects is funneled into 2 files for easy perusal/deletion. This also includes legitimate email from unapproved senders that violates the program's 'email policy' that makes it virtually impossible to spam.)
Me: http://www.cf13.com/ Slashdot: Not newsworthy. You decide. PS: Read first before emailing me.
Well, Microsoft Visual C++ (what I use) has an '_int64' data type which will give you over 18 decimal digits of precision positive or negative.
If that isn't enough for financial calculations, then one would have to code up a multiprecision integer package.
Of course, if the above is to be avoided, it looks like COBOL all the way....
How are the CPU(s) hot swapped?
I am genuinely curious about that.
That is to say, how can you put the computer in a 'safe' state to switch a dead CPU for a good one?
If the compter only has 1 CPU that dies, the computer crashes hard!
If not, I am deeply impressed by the hardware's 'Gene Krantz' attitude!
Need proof?
Consider C, the weapon of choice for commercial-grade programming. It only has a handfull of control structures to 'hold' the rest of the program together. In the hands of an experienced programmer, C can be used to create programs that are almost as fast (yet readable), as an equivalent program coded in 100% hand written assembly language.
I could do this but I chose not to. I'd rather write lots of different programs in C and learn new stuff along the way rather than pampering the CPU with all the mind-numbing detail and preplanning a large-scale assembly language program would require.
I had a bit of experience with COBOL years and years ago. At the time I had several years of experience with Pascal (after making the radical pardigm shift from line numbered, GOTO-driven BASIC beforehand). Since Pascal and COBOL are both procedural languages, all I had to learn to get up to speed fast was the syntax and 'positioning' requirements of COBOL.
In a matter of days, I was writing somewhat sophisticated, nontrivial COBOL programs that did what they were supposed to do.
Gripe: Boy is COBOL verbose!!! (which fufills the self-documenting requirement of the language).
Why write
add 1 to x giving x
when you can use C and say
x++;
?
The Z-series will experience downtime if its power supply is cut and it doesn't have some form of backup power supply that can take over in a matter of nanoseconds. This can be anything from somebody unknowingly unplugging/disconnecting the thing all the way up to an EMP via a pinch or an exploding (thermo)nuclear device....
Of course, an EMP will ruin anything remotely electronic if it is not properly shielded from it....
The program I wrote and use (see sig) treats all email file attachments as 'text files'.
This renders malware safe to handle and/or delete.
For the 'zipped up' malware, one could patch the filename in the zip file to something harmless then extract it.
However, this approach hinges on the requirement that the registry setting for text file processing (.txt) remains uncompromised. Unfortunately, there is one known malware that 'hijacks' that setting when it runs....
On top of that, one must have some sort of firewall program running at all times.
About a week ago or so, my firewall program detected some intrusion attempts from some rather eye opening IP addresses!
No kidding.
I use CF13 (see sig), a program I wrote to handle my spam problems once and for all.
The only 'false-positives' I got were from reputable senders that got subsequently whitelisted--problem solved.
I've been getting some 419 scam email from a network in India.
This network is listed at rfc-ignorant.org so complaining to the offending network directly is pointless.
Apart from deleting/archiving the spam scam (what I do with my program--see sig), what can one do in this situation to send a message that this sort of internet conduct is not acceptable?
My parent post was deemed a troll post.
My aim was to spark an honest discussion as to how to deal with terrorists and terrorism without (preferably) killing any innocent civillians in the process. The examples cited in my parent post illustrate what I believe to be an improper magnitude of difference in numbers in the groups of people killed during armed conflict.
To reiterate, my goal was not to be inflammitory and disruptive, but to start an honest discussion about viable solutions to the problem of terrorism and how to minimize--peferably eliminate--loss of life to all parties concerned....
Not long after 2001-09-11 attrocities, I saw the words 'NUKE 'EM' scrawled in the grime on the back of a semi truck trailer traveling down the highway.
That the USA didn't rain down instant death and destruction on the homeland(s) of those perceived responsible for the attacks shows a commendable measure of restraint on the USA's behalf not to 'replay' Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In a ghoulish(?) coincidence, the death toll at Pearl Harbor (1941-12-07) is about the same as that of '9/11'. Is it no wonder that the events of 2001-09-11 are now inextricably linked to the date 'which will live in infamy': 1941-12-07?
What a day '9/11' was....
The attacks were vivid, simple, and brutal.
THEY GOT THE WHOLE WORLD TO TAKE NOTICE--the hallmark of such activites.
As an 'encore' of sorts, we now have the terrible events of '3/11' in Madrid, Spain (2004-03-11).
How does one defend against such attacks by using 'the right tool for the right job' without the 'kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out' results one would get using nukes in retaliation against the homeland(s) of the perpetrators of such attacks? Take a look at what happened in the past:
Pearl Harbor: 2,403 dead. Source.
Hiroshima/Nagasaki: 350,000 dead. Source.
Take a look at what is happening now in Iraq:
US soldiers killed: 544 Source.
Iraqi civillians killed: 8,700-10,000+ Source.
The punishment(s) doesn't seem to fit the crime to me....