That's first class for you. As you can tell, open source development pays so well, I can fly first class around the globe!
Hello Slashdot. The 2.6.1 release is a great release, a release that I'm very proud of, as I wrote it all myself. You'll find it's a distinct improvement on 2.6.0, but just wait for 2.6.2! That will be even better and blow you all away.
I can't wait to see Australia. People riding Kangaroos, those cuddly little Koalas and that Steve Irwin guy feeding babies to the crocodiles. Maybe even some sexy penguins!
This is a great idea. I'm all in favor of it. I would update my companies DNS to this new standard immediately. But, I envision these issues, correct me if I'm wrong:
1) Increased network traffic at all points - where one mail server gets the email, and the network of the domain being sent from or forged. Imagine how this might increase AOL's or hotmail's network traffic, while they gain nothing from it. Every mail server in the world could be trying to contact their dns servers to check if they allow the mail. I hope you like lag if you use AOL.
2) Spammers tend to use made up domains anyways. This is bad with this method for several reasons. The first being that you will have delayed email receiving times because your mail server will be trying to contact dns servers that don't exist. The timeout would have to be short for this to work.... then on the other hand, if the timeout is too short, and a busy mail server can't respond in time, the email is rejected, which is just as bad as a real email getting flagged as spam, aka a false positive.
While I agree in practice with this technology, I'd like to see how people can solve these issues before I would use it at my company.
Okay, I am not trolling here, I'm serious. This plan will be moderately successful at preventing joe-jobs [catb.org] on unwitting victims. If you control the DNS for a domain, you can say who is allowed to send mail for that domain. Therefore, if a spammer attempts uses your domain in the "From:" header then it will only be delivered to those hosts that are NOT checking the SPF records. That's an important distinction, because getting everybody on the planet to do something is very hard, so this will never completely wipe out the possibility of joe-jobs. And there are the possible negative effects here, for example employees not being able to send company email while on the road without hassle.
But that aside, how does it reduce spam? The spammers will always be able to find a domain to stick in the "From:" header. They can choose to use a domain that they do not control that has not yet added SPF to their DNS or they can choose to use a domain that they control. In either case it's trivial for them to get their mail from their system to yours, and that's all that they really care about anyway -- the "From:" header has always been meaningless to spammers anyway, it's not like they would be forfeiting the ability to receive replies or something.
Note that in the case of using a domain that they don't control, we're back to the issue of "until everyone on the planet does this, there will always be some domain somewhere that can be forged." And even should those run out, spammers can just register anything for $7 a year, or less for bulk registrations. (They already do this when they're playing hosting tricks, to bounce you around from one host to another.)
Now, you might say that at least with this implemented you could discover what those domains are that the spammer is registering for use with his spamming. That is true. But, we've had the concept of a blocklist for ages, that's nothing new. Everyone has ranges of IP addresses that they won't accept mail from, and some very kind organizations have even maintained lists of "bad IP addresses", so you might expect a similar thing to happen with domain names. But all you have to do is look at the current state of blocklists and you'll know this doesn't buy you much. We already have blocklists, and they're riddled with problems. You're back to playing whack-a-mole with the spammers. They make a spam run with example.com, you block example.com; they make another run with example.org, you block example.org. You're always one step behind, while the spam piles up in your inbox. You might make the point that this inconveniences them, but you have to realize how many domains there are out there that are available for forging. The SPF-protected domains will be the vast minority of all domains for the forseeable future.
So, in summary: This might be moderately effective at preventing joe-jobs. It will not make a significant change, however, until everyone on the face of the earth that's not a spammer both updates their DNS and updates their MTA software to check these records. The likelyhood of this happening any time soon is quite small. And even if this were to happen, the spammers would still be able to deliver piles and piles of garbage to your inbox though domains that they control. You're back to blocklisting, which we've had for quite some time now.
So, I ask seriously, what does this do to combat spam that is really all that significant? I applaud any developments on the antispam frontier, but let's not get too carried away with visions of this somehow "plugging the insecure SMTP hole", or anything remotely resembling it. But Aquaman, you cannot marry a woman without gills, you're from two different worlds...
This is good news, but we need to have cheaper spaceflight and cheaper vehicles. (I guess they go hand in hand, of course)
Manned spaceflight these days is not cost effective for the scientific knowledge gained. The shuttle costs 500 million dollars per flight, including upkeep, the shitloads of people at Cape Canaveral, etc. Considering that Mars probes have been launched for 250 million, it ain't such a good deal.
The Moon is a good destination. Low earth orbit is not a worthwhile place to bother sending people to anymore. We've done most useful experiments that justify the huge cost of launching somebody into space (ie, longterm effects of weightlessness on the human body) Now we're just finding excuses to keep people in the ISS or put launch people up in the space shuttle. The Columbia's main experiments with last week's mission included ant biology in space, and I believe biology of 2 other animals. Who the fuck cares?
Manned spaceflight is worthwhile. However, before we should resume manned spaceflight, we should get a practical way of launching people into space! IE, a way that doesn't cost $5000 per pound of payload. NASA should cancel the shuttle program, and parlay the money into development of a cheaper launch method, such as the cancelled X-33, a SCRAMJET-assisted launch vehicle, a low cost "big dumb booster," or a ribbon-style space elevator.
Also, we should discontinue manned spaceflights to LEO. We should focus on human habitation on Luna and Mars. Once we got a cheap launch method (~$500/lb or less, achievable with any of those methods listed above) we could build a relatively low cost moon base. Moon habitations could be simply constucted with an inflatable fiberglass stucture, which would be inflated and allowed to cure. After curing, several feet of rocks would be piled on top, shielding the inhabitants from radiation and extremes in temperature. An excellent inexpensive, low weight method of lunar construction. Anyway, if water ice is available on the moon, the ice could be used for growing crops, drinking water, and, perhaps most importantly, it could be electrolyzed into rocket fuel.
For the long, long term, I can envision Luna as kind of a shallow gravity well springboard to Mars and the rest of the solar system. Trips from Luna to Mars (although not necessarily from Earth to Luna) would be very inexpensive due to the plentiful electrolyzed rocket fuel and Luna's shallow gravity well. Mars could eventually become even more viable than luna. It has the advantage of a thin CO2 atmosphere, which could actually harbor special genetically engineered plants in the equatorial areas. In addition, water is widely available, both frozen in the ground and in the ice caps.
I'm not quite sure other places in the solar system will ever harbor more than a few scientists and researchers. To get people to move en masse, there would have to be some kind of economic opportunity in space. I can't see how it would ever be economically feasible to leave a planet with a breathable atmosphere, food, good climate, etc, to a planet which would kill an exposed human instananeosly.
Back in the 1970's the same global warming scaremongers were telling us that a new global ice age was coming. Now it is global warming. The prescription is the same though: immediate radical new government regulations, a reduction in industry, expensive new pollution control requirements, and forcing people to live lifestyles they haven't voluntarily chosen. And of course the sky is falling and if we don't do something NOW, we'll be in serious trouble.
Well, the global temperature did rise about 1 degree - in the first half of the century. The temperature of the earth and the surface climate have radically changed many times in the past, and without any any artificial greenhouse emmissions from humans. The effect of the sun's radition, volcanos, etc have long had an effect on the earth. There may also be long term cycles we know nothing about.
There is some evidence for the earth's warming, but the evidence is far from clean and many observations (such as (corrected) satellite data and weather balloons) show no warming. Most of the climate change predictions are based on computer models. Given our inability to forecast weather accurately at any interval, I doubt very much the computers can handle the much greater complexities of climate change. Certainly more research is warranted and we may yet find some links to human activity that need to be addressed.
But "Global warming" as such as is a political program not science. WHen the New York Times famously said "Blame global warming for the blizzard" (notwithstanding the huge number of major weather events throughtout human history) it has to make you wonder. I honestly believe that if the temperature and precipitation came in right at normal every day, we'd be told that this was a catastrophe caused by global warming and "robbing the earth of its critical climate diversity needed to support its fragile ecology".
There may be good reasons to cut emmissions of lots of chemicals, quite apart from global warming. But the use of hysteria and scaremongering to sell a political agenda is wrong IMO. Let's be honest about what we really want and debate these issues through the normal political process, not as another moral crusade. We've already got too many of those.
But I hope they make it even better. Here's my wish list for a few things:
Smarter Cop A.I. More Gang Wars More Vehicles More melee weapons Different behavior patterns First person support Ability to swim Longer and In Depth missions Every day events (i.e. some peds get in a fight and cops goto break them up, a bank robbery, drive bys, etc) Yeah, great world eh? Ability for more/less blood Multiplayer More indoor enviorments Ability to buy items such as matches, food, different clothes from a mall, etc More golf clubs! Fix alot of bugs in the models/maps Stuff totally changes from day to night, (gang activity, police activity, traffic, etc) More side missions.
And once the game is complete there should still be a continous stream of mini missions, such as sorting out rival gangs, sorting out police, getting protection money, close of deals with other gangs, etc. Basically keeping control of your whole gang empire. These jobs could be received by phone or a pink/blue/yellow or whatever marker in your HQ.
Slashdot Mirror
That's first class for you. As you can tell, open source development pays so well, I can fly first class around the globe!
Hello Slashdot. The 2.6.1 release is a great release, a release that I'm very proud of, as I wrote it all myself. You'll find it's a distinct improvement on 2.6.0, but just wait for 2.6.2! That will be even better and blow you all away.
I can't wait to see Australia. People riding Kangaroos, those cuddly little Koalas and that Steve Irwin guy feeding babies to the crocodiles. Maybe even some sexy penguins!
Linus Torvald, signing out
This is a great idea. I'm all in favor of it. I would update my companies DNS to this new standard immediately. But, I envision these issues, correct me if I'm wrong:
1) Increased network traffic at all points - where one mail server gets the email, and the network of the domain being sent from or forged. Imagine how this might increase AOL's or hotmail's network traffic, while they gain nothing from it. Every mail server in the world could be trying to contact their dns servers to check if they allow the mail. I hope you like lag if you use AOL.
2) Spammers tend to use made up domains anyways. This is bad with this method for several reasons. The first being that you will have delayed email receiving times because your mail server will be trying to contact dns servers that don't exist. The timeout would have to be short for this to work.... then on the other hand, if the timeout is too short, and a busy mail server can't respond in time, the email is rejected, which is just as bad as a real email getting flagged as spam, aka a false positive.
While I agree in practice with this technology, I'd like to see how people can solve these issues before I would use it at my company.
Okay, I am not trolling here, I'm serious. This plan will be moderately successful at preventing joe-jobs [catb.org] on unwitting victims. If you control the DNS for a domain, you can say who is allowed to send mail for that domain. Therefore, if a spammer attempts uses your domain in the "From:" header then it will only be delivered to those hosts that are NOT checking the SPF records. That's an important distinction, because getting everybody on the planet to do something is very hard, so this will never completely wipe out the possibility of joe-jobs. And there are the possible negative effects here, for example employees not being able to send company email while on the road without hassle.
But that aside, how does it reduce spam? The spammers will always be able to find a domain to stick in the "From:" header. They can choose to use a domain that they do not control that has not yet added SPF to their DNS or they can choose to use a domain that they control. In either case it's trivial for them to get their mail from their system to yours, and that's all that they really care about anyway -- the "From:" header has always been meaningless to spammers anyway, it's not like they would be forfeiting the ability to receive replies or something.
Note that in the case of using a domain that they don't control, we're back to the issue of "until everyone on the planet does this, there will always be some domain somewhere that can be forged." And even should those run out, spammers can just register anything for $7 a year, or less for bulk registrations. (They already do this when they're playing hosting tricks, to bounce you around from one host to another.)
Now, you might say that at least with this implemented you could discover what those domains are that the spammer is registering for use with his spamming. That is true. But, we've had the concept of a blocklist for ages, that's nothing new. Everyone has ranges of IP addresses that they won't accept mail from, and some very kind organizations have even maintained lists of "bad IP addresses", so you might expect a similar thing to happen with domain names. But all you have to do is look at the current state of blocklists and you'll know this doesn't buy you much. We already have blocklists, and they're riddled with problems. You're back to playing whack-a-mole with the spammers. They make a spam run with example.com, you block example.com; they make another run with example.org, you block example.org. You're always one step behind, while the spam piles up in your inbox. You might make the point that this inconveniences them, but you have to realize how many domains there are out there that are available for forging. The SPF-protected domains will be the vast minority of all domains for the forseeable future.
So, in summary: This might be moderately effective at preventing joe-jobs. It will not make a significant change, however, until everyone on the face of the earth that's not a spammer both updates their DNS and updates their MTA software to check these records. The likelyhood of this happening any time soon is quite small. And even if this were to happen, the spammers would still be able to deliver piles and piles of garbage to your inbox though domains that they control. You're back to blocklisting, which we've had for quite some time now.
So, I ask seriously, what does this do to combat spam that is really all that significant? I applaud any developments on the antispam frontier, but let's not get too carried away with visions of this somehow "plugging the insecure SMTP hole", or anything remotely resembling it.
But Aquaman, you cannot marry a woman without gills, you're from two different worlds...
This is good news, but we need to have cheaper spaceflight and cheaper vehicles. (I guess they go hand in hand, of course)
Manned spaceflight these days is not cost effective for the scientific knowledge gained. The shuttle costs 500 million dollars per flight, including upkeep, the shitloads of people at Cape Canaveral, etc. Considering that Mars probes have been launched for 250 million, it ain't such a good deal.
The Moon is a good destination. Low earth orbit is not a worthwhile place to bother sending people to anymore. We've done most useful experiments that justify the huge cost of launching somebody into space (ie, longterm effects of weightlessness on the human body) Now we're just finding excuses to keep people in the ISS or put launch people up in the space shuttle. The Columbia's main experiments with last week's mission included ant biology in space, and I believe biology of 2 other animals. Who the fuck cares?
Manned spaceflight is worthwhile. However, before we should resume manned spaceflight, we should get a practical way of launching people into space! IE, a way that doesn't cost $5000 per pound of payload. NASA should cancel the shuttle program, and parlay the money into development of a cheaper launch method, such as the cancelled X-33, a SCRAMJET-assisted launch vehicle, a low cost "big dumb booster," or a ribbon-style space elevator.
Also, we should discontinue manned spaceflights to LEO. We should focus on human habitation on Luna and Mars. Once we got a cheap launch method (~$500/lb or less, achievable with any of those methods listed above) we could build a relatively low cost moon base. Moon habitations could be simply constucted with an inflatable fiberglass stucture, which would be inflated and allowed to cure. After curing, several feet of rocks would be piled on top, shielding the inhabitants from radiation and extremes in temperature. An excellent inexpensive, low weight method of lunar construction. Anyway, if water ice is available on the moon, the ice could be used for growing crops, drinking water, and, perhaps most importantly, it could be electrolyzed into rocket fuel.
For the long, long term, I can envision Luna as kind of a shallow gravity well springboard to Mars and the rest of the solar system. Trips from Luna to Mars (although not necessarily from Earth to Luna) would be very inexpensive due to the plentiful electrolyzed rocket fuel and Luna's shallow gravity well. Mars could eventually become even more viable than luna. It has the advantage of a thin CO2 atmosphere, which could actually harbor special genetically engineered plants in the equatorial areas. In addition, water is widely available, both frozen in the ground and in the ice caps.
I'm not quite sure other places in the solar system will ever harbor more than a few scientists and researchers. To get people to move en masse, there would have to be some kind of economic opportunity in space. I can't see how it would ever be economically feasible to leave a planet with a breathable atmosphere, food, good climate, etc, to a planet which would kill an exposed human instananeosly.
Back in the 1970's the same global warming scaremongers were telling us that a new global ice age was coming. Now it is global warming. The prescription is the same though: immediate radical new government regulations, a reduction in industry, expensive new pollution control requirements, and forcing people to live lifestyles they haven't voluntarily chosen. And of course the sky is falling and if we don't do something NOW, we'll be in serious trouble.
Well, the global temperature did rise about 1 degree - in the first half of the century. The temperature of the earth and the surface climate have radically changed many times in the past, and without any any artificial greenhouse emmissions from humans. The effect of the sun's radition, volcanos, etc have long had an effect on the earth. There may also be long term cycles we know nothing about.
There is some evidence for the earth's warming, but the evidence is far from clean and many observations (such as (corrected) satellite data and weather balloons) show no warming. Most of the climate change predictions are based on computer models. Given our inability to forecast weather accurately at any interval, I doubt very much the computers can handle the much greater complexities of climate change. Certainly more research is warranted and we may yet find some links to human activity that need to be addressed.
But "Global warming" as such as is a political program not science. WHen the New York Times famously said "Blame global warming for the blizzard" (notwithstanding the huge number of major weather events throughtout human history) it has to make you wonder. I honestly believe that if the temperature and precipitation came in right at normal every day, we'd be told that this was a catastrophe caused by global warming and "robbing the earth of its critical climate diversity needed to support its fragile ecology".
There may be good reasons to cut emmissions of lots of chemicals, quite apart from global warming. But the use of hysteria and scaremongering to sell a political agenda is wrong IMO. Let's be honest about what we really want and debate these issues through the normal political process, not as another moral crusade. We've already got too many of those.
Anyway, isn't extinction temporary?
But I hope they make it even better. Here's my wish list for a few things:
Smarter Cop A.I.
More Gang Wars
More Vehicles
More melee weapons
Different behavior patterns
First person support
Ability to swim
Longer and In Depth missions
Every day events (i.e. some peds get in a fight and cops goto break them up, a bank robbery, drive bys, etc) Yeah, great world eh?
Ability for more/less blood
Multiplayer
More indoor enviorments
Ability to buy items such as matches, food, different clothes from a mall, etc
More golf clubs!
Fix alot of bugs in the models/maps
Stuff totally changes from day to night, (gang activity, police activity, traffic, etc)
More side missions.
And once the game is complete there should still be a continous stream of mini missions, such as sorting out rival gangs, sorting out police, getting protection money, close of deals with other gangs, etc. Basically keeping control of your whole gang empire. These jobs could be received by phone or a pink/blue/yellow or whatever marker in your HQ.
Just a few ideas...