That's the neat thing with greylisting. When the bot connects to your server to send the message your server sends it a 451 error (temporary error). A real MTA will retry the message. A bot however does not retry the message. Your server never even looks at the actual message, just the sender, recpient, and the IP address of the sending machine. So you save bandwidth as well as blocking your system from having to waste disk space and processing time to look at the message. The only cost to this is a delay in receiving legitimate email. And for those you know about you can whitelist them so they are not delayed. And if it is a legit email after they retry the message your system auto-whitelists that server and sender/recpient combination for 24 hours, so any additional email is not delayed from that source.
The only way to stop it being sent is to make your congress critter handle his/her own email for a few months. Then they would see just how bad the spam is. Of course I would not be suprised if the damn congress critters click through on every viagra and porn spam they get. They probably need the help to keep it up in their office for the interns and at home for the wife.
So lets get the ISPs to implement greylisting and spamassassin on their servers. Greylisting would save them bandwidth as well as save their users having to wade through the crap.
But I suspect the ISPs are making a good percentage of their money from the spammers and as such have no insentive to take corrective actions.
I use my ISPs email servers and have implemented spamassassin on my home systems. I get about 5 to 8 spam in my inbox each week. The other 100 to 200 spam a week end up in a holding folder so I don't have to deal with them. So there are things individuals can do to stem the tide of spam. Of course I still have trouble believing that enough people actually buy the crap they push through spam to make it profitable.
Of course one sure way to get this problem resolved by our congress critters is to make them deal with their own email accounts for a month or two. Currently they are shielded by a host of assitants who pre screen all their email. Once they deleted the 5000th viagra ad they would get busy making the spammers life hell by creating a group to track them down and put them in jail.
The combination of the two is almost unbeatable. Bouncing messages just adds to the spam since most spam forges the senders address the bounce just clogs an innocents email box.
The ultimate solution for ISPs to implement these two solutions plus some others and spam would not get to those gulliable people that continue to click on this junk. Take away the monetary insentive and it will go away.
This problem could be virtually elimnated if AOL and the other ISPs implemented greylisting on thier inbound email servers. This would block receipt of 98 to 99 percent of the spam sent from compromised systems. Add in spamassassin and almost all spam would be blocked.
This might have the side effect of reducing the attempts at building bot armies of compromised systems for the purpose of sending spam. (probably to much to hope for).
Why don't the ISPs do this? I am sure it is because they are making some money on spam. Either indirectly by charging for the bandwidth or directly by selling customer lists to the spammers.
The most effective tool I have seen so far is greylisting. greylisting reduced the amount of spam from 3000 to 6000 a day to 5 to 10 spam a day. Include spamassassin and the spam that does get through greylisting gets nailed. spam problem solved.
Now if everyone greylisted the spammers would be out of business. But people here, which should be technologically knowledgable, seem to just complain about spam. Implement greylisting on your servers along with spamassassin! You will not regret it.
Since doing this I have actually been able to get back to real work instead of worrying about spam.
The reason is because there is big money involved. In the case of P2P the powers that be believe they are loosing money because of the file swapping.
In the case of spam the money is to be made by sending the messages out. So the powers that be will do everything in their power to make sure spam continues to be delivered.
The most effective defense against spam is a combination of greylisting and spamassassin. Greylisting will block 98 to 99% of the spam so your system never even receives the message. The remainder will be caught by spamassassin (or close enough so you only get maybe 1 or 2 a week that gets to your inbox.)
What they should have published in the article the list of IP addresses. We could then put those IP addresses in firewall block lists to cut them off at that point. But because there is money involved they would never publish such information.
"The pilots undergo extra training for this, of course."
Yeah, it is hard to teach a pilot to sit on his hands during the landing. For some reason they want to be in control of the plane for such critical operations.:)
Just hearing one once in awhile may not be bad. But if you had one for every flight that passed over head you would get tired of it pretty quickly.
When the shuttle was flying and they landed at Cape Canaveral I would hear the sonic booms as they would pass over Orlando. Was woken up a few time in the early morning hours as they went over at 30000 or 40000 feet and it was enough to make the windows rattle. In that case it was a double sonic boom, like two claps of thunder. BOOM BOOM!
Multiply that by a few hundred times and it would become unbearable as all those commercial flights passed over head. So that is the reason they limit super sonic flight over land.
When they outlaw music only outlaws will have music.
Sounds like the RIAA wants to be able to extort everyone even if they just hum a tune.
Damn, did not mean to give them yet another idea to get more money to continue feeding the lawyers.
New bumpter sticker coming to a beat up old dodge near you, "They can take my radio when they pry it from my cold dead hands."
Why don't they just skip all this intermediate stuff and just strap everybody into a big cocoon and feed them their government required daily nutrients through a tube?
While your at it why not wire their brains up in the cocoon and feed them data to make them think they are living a normal life.
Oh, wait, that would be yet another Matrix like the one we are already in.
Actually the jobs that will be ripe for replacment by robots is not the burger flipper and such. It will be the accounts, lawyers, and such. It will cost way to much to put a robot in a job that uses the work force from the local high school. But as accounts a robot would be great, it would know every single accounting rule and law, and would be programmed to prevent a debacle like Enron from happening.
Or as a lawyer which knows all case law. I figure a robot will have more ethics than the current batch of lawyers so cases should go much quicker since the friviolous lawsuits would never make it to court.
I agree. I implemented spamassassin and it has worked wonders. We were seeing anywhere from 3000 to 7000 spam messages a day. Virtual all were tagged as spam by spamassassin.
This past week I implemented another tool called greylisting in the fight against spam.
Over a typical weekend for two days I would see something like 5000 to 8000 spam messages. Since implementing greylisting in the last two days we have seen 7 (yes seven) spam messages that were subsquently tagged as spam by spamassassin.
Next week we will find out the author of the Washington Post article never even saw a copy of Linux let alone install it on any computer. It was a made up story that he phoned in from home.
Or worse yet that this story was publish on slashdot three months ago.:)
I just saw an add for 250GB harddrives at Compusa for $129.99 a pop. Combine that with an inexpensive system (say for $400) and you could backup a terabyte of data each month for less than $1000 dollars a month. Just add another box each month and move the older one off site. Setup a an encrypted VPN to the offsite location and you have instant access to the backups.
If you don't need instant access then you can run the data off to DVDs at some point and reuse the harddrives and system.
I'm still waiting for a brightness knob that actually works. The vast majority of shows and channels in general are garbage.
And have you noticed that a lot of the ads are resembling on line spam more and more? How about a version of spamassassin for the tv?
Personally I believe there will be a fundamental change in tv in the next 10 years. Digital recorders will make it easier to capture just the shows you are interested in (hopefully with a nice feature to automatically eleminate any ads). As such the idea of a "channel" may start to disappear. Rarely are there two shows back to back that are worth watching. And for movies I usually wait for them to come out on DVD and buy that instead of going to the movies or waiting for it to come out on HBO or one of the other pay channels. This allows me to watch the movie when and where I want.
So with DVR's allowing us to record and view broadcast episodic shows at will and DVD's providing a better movie experience the standard broadcast TV stations will have to learn new tricks.
I can only hope that this will lead to actual higher quality shows (possibly with out ads) which enough people will be willing to pay for on a per episode basis. Almost like waiting to buy the DVD of your favorite TV show such as Stargate SG-1.
hmmm, does that mean java applets that get loaded on your system when you go to a web site would be illegal? Or will the web site have to ask you each time it does that?
Sounds like server side scripting will become the default standard.:)
But how long does it take for Visa to put YOUR money back in your checking account? Before your mortgage check bounces? Or the check you wrote to VISA? I envision a spirling set of late fees for some poor soul due to such policies.
I have yet to find some value add to having a debit card. The chances of it causing more harm that good seem to out weigh any perceived or made up benefits.
Apparently the majority of voters are pretty stupid since most of them can't seem to follow instructions well enough to mark a ballot in such a way that it is clear what they intended to vote.
I say if the mark on the ballot is not per the specification and it is un-clear what was intended then it is a non-vote.
Enough of this hanging chad business! There were millions of people that were able to vote with not problems the last go around. The few that seemed to have trouble voting will have to learn better next time. If you don't mark things correctly and don't know enough to ask for help then your vote won't be counted.
The best solution is not some kind of electronic voiting system that if not already hacked will be in some subsequent election. But simple paper and markers. You put a mark next to who you want to vote for and you are done. Mark it wrong then ask for help and get a new ballot. If you are to stupid to do that then you don't belong in a voting booth and should be voted off the planet.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the neat thing with greylisting. When the bot connects to your server to send the message your server sends it a 451 error (temporary error). A real MTA will retry the message. A bot however does not retry the message. Your server never even looks at the actual message, just the sender, recpient, and the IP address of the sending machine. So you save bandwidth as well as blocking your system from having to waste disk space and processing time to look at the message. The only cost to this is a delay in receiving legitimate email. And for those you know about you can whitelist them so they are not delayed. And if it is a legit email after they retry the message your system auto-whitelists that server and sender/recpient combination for 24 hours, so any additional email is not delayed from that source.
The only way to stop it being sent is to make your congress critter handle his/her own email for a few months. Then they would see just how bad the spam is. Of course I would not be suprised if the damn congress critters click through on every viagra and porn spam they get. They probably need the help to keep it up in their office for the interns and at home for the wife.
So lets get the ISPs to implement greylisting and spamassassin on their servers. Greylisting would save them bandwidth as well as save their users having to wade through the crap.
But I suspect the ISPs are making a good percentage of their money from the spammers and as such have no insentive to take corrective actions.
I use my ISPs email servers and have implemented spamassassin on my home systems. I get about 5 to 8 spam in my inbox each week. The other 100 to 200 spam a week end up in a holding folder so I don't have to deal with them. So there are things individuals can do to stem the tide of spam. Of course I still have trouble believing that enough people actually buy the crap they push through spam to make it profitable.
Of course one sure way to get this problem resolved by our congress critters is to make them deal with their own email accounts for a month or two. Currently they are shielded by a host of assitants who pre screen all their email. Once they deleted the 5000th viagra ad they would get busy making the spammers life hell by creating a group to track them down and put them in jail.
Greylisting is the best thing since spamassassin.
The combination of the two is almost unbeatable. Bouncing messages just adds to the spam since most spam forges the senders address the bounce just clogs an innocents email box.
The ultimate solution for ISPs to implement these two solutions plus some others and spam would not get to those gulliable people that continue to click on this junk. Take away the monetary insentive and it will go away.
This problem could be virtually elimnated if AOL and the other ISPs implemented greylisting on thier inbound email servers. This would block receipt of 98 to 99 percent of the spam sent from compromised systems. Add in spamassassin and almost all spam would be blocked.
This might have the side effect of reducing the attempts at building bot armies of compromised systems for the purpose of sending spam. (probably to much to hope for).
Why don't the ISPs do this? I am sure it is because they are making some money on spam. Either indirectly by charging for the bandwidth or directly by selling customer lists to the spammers.
The most effective tool I have seen so far is greylisting. greylisting reduced the amount of spam from 3000 to 6000 a day to 5 to 10 spam a day. Include spamassassin and the spam that does get through greylisting gets nailed. spam problem solved.
Now if everyone greylisted the spammers would be out of business. But people here, which should be technologically knowledgable, seem to just complain about spam. Implement greylisting on your servers along with spamassassin! You will not regret it.
Since doing this I have actually been able to get back to real work instead of worrying about spam.
The reason is because there is big money involved. In the case of P2P the powers that be believe they are loosing money because of the file swapping.
In the case of spam the money is to be made by sending the messages out. So the powers that be will do everything in their power to make sure spam continues to be delivered.
The most effective defense against spam is a combination of greylisting and spamassassin. Greylisting will block 98 to 99% of the spam so your system never even receives the message. The remainder will be caught by spamassassin (or close enough so you only get maybe 1 or 2 a week that gets to your inbox.)
What they should have published in the article the list of IP addresses. We could then put those IP addresses in firewall block lists to cut them off at that point. But because there is money involved they would never publish such information.
I believe you get two sonic booms, one from the nose of the shuttle and the other from the tail.
If you heard them down in South Florida you can imagine being directly under them here in Orlando.
"The pilots undergo extra training for this, of course."
:)
Yeah, it is hard to teach a pilot to sit on his hands during the landing. For some reason they want to be in control of the plane for such critical operations.
Just hearing one once in awhile may not be bad. But if you had one for every flight that passed over head you would get tired of it pretty quickly.
When the shuttle was flying and they landed at Cape Canaveral I would hear the sonic booms as they would pass over Orlando. Was woken up a few time in the early morning hours as they went over at 30000 or 40000 feet and it was enough to make the windows rattle. In that case it was a double sonic boom, like two claps of thunder. BOOM BOOM!
Multiply that by a few hundred times and it would become unbearable as all those commercial flights passed over head. So that is the reason they limit super sonic flight over land.
Free wifi is already available. Just connect to your neighbors wifi and surf the Internet over his cable connection. Works great and it is free.
At least until they catch on and setup encryption, but then that can be broken given a little time.
Already been done. Check out any mailing list. Things are debugged using what passes for english every day.
My name is Eliza. I am hear to help you with your problem. And how do you feel about that multithreaded perl app using perl 5.8.3?
When they outlaw music only outlaws will have music.
Sounds like the RIAA wants to be able to extort everyone even if they just hum a tune.
Damn, did not mean to give them yet another idea to get more money to continue feeding the lawyers.
New bumpter sticker coming to a beat up old dodge near you, "They can take my radio when they pry it from my cold dead hands."
Why don't they just skip all this intermediate stuff and just strap everybody into a big cocoon and feed them their government required daily nutrients through a tube?
While your at it why not wire their brains up in the cocoon and feed them data to make them think they are living a normal life.
Oh, wait, that would be yet another Matrix like the one we are already in.
Actually the jobs that will be ripe for replacment by robots is not the burger flipper and such. It will be the accounts, lawyers, and such. It will cost way to much to put a robot in a job that uses the work force from the local high school. But as accounts a robot would be great, it would know every single accounting rule and law, and would be programmed to prevent a debacle like Enron from happening.
Or as a lawyer which knows all case law. I figure a robot will have more ethics than the current batch of lawyers so cases should go much quicker since the friviolous lawsuits would never make it to court.
No no no! People misunderstood Gates. Open source means a loss of jobs at Microsoft, not a loss of jobs in general.
And that is not his main problem. Gates is going to start losing money if he can not stop/buy up/put out of business/under sale open source software.
I agree. I implemented spamassassin and it has worked wonders. We were seeing anywhere from 3000 to 7000 spam messages a day. Virtual all were tagged as spam by spamassassin.
This past week I implemented another tool called greylisting in the fight against spam.
Over a typical weekend for two days I would see something like 5000 to 8000 spam messages. Since implementing greylisting in the last two days we have seen 7 (yes seven) spam messages that were subsquently tagged as spam by spamassassin.
I never expected it to work that well but it has.
Highly recommended in this fight against spam.
Wow, ignorance gets demonstrated in such amazing ways.
Next week we will find out the author of the Washington Post article never even saw a copy of Linux let alone install it on any computer. It was a made up story that he phoned in from home.
:)
Or worse yet that this story was publish on slashdot three months ago.
I just saw an add for 250GB harddrives at Compusa for $129.99 a pop. Combine that with an inexpensive system (say for $400) and you could backup a terabyte of data each month for less than $1000 dollars a month. Just add another box each month and move the older one off site. Setup a an encrypted VPN to the offsite location and you have instant access to the backups.
If you don't need instant access then you can run the data off to DVDs at some point and reuse the harddrives and system.
More channels?
I'm still waiting for a brightness knob that actually works. The vast majority of shows and channels in general are garbage.
And have you noticed that a lot of the ads are resembling on line spam more and more? How about a version of spamassassin for the tv?
Personally I believe there will be a fundamental change in tv in the next 10 years. Digital recorders will make it easier to capture just the shows you are interested in (hopefully with a nice feature to automatically eleminate any ads). As such the idea of a "channel" may start to disappear. Rarely are there two shows back to back that are worth watching. And for movies I usually wait for them to come out on DVD and buy that instead of going to the movies or waiting for it to come out on HBO or one of the other pay channels. This allows me to watch the movie when and where I want.
So with DVR's allowing us to record and view broadcast episodic shows at will and DVD's providing a better movie experience the standard broadcast TV stations will have to learn new tricks.
I can only hope that this will lead to actual higher quality shows (possibly with out ads) which enough people will be willing to pay for on a per episode basis. Almost like waiting to buy the DVD of your favorite TV show such as Stargate SG-1.
hmmm, does that mean java applets that get loaded on your system when you go to a web site would be illegal? Or will the web site have to ask you each time it does that?
:)
Sounds like server side scripting will become the default standard.
But how long does it take for Visa to put YOUR money back in your checking account? Before your mortgage check bounces? Or the check you wrote to VISA? I envision a spirling set of late fees for some poor soul due to such policies.
I have yet to find some value add to having a debit card. The chances of it causing more harm that good seem to out weigh any perceived or made up benefits.
It is the country of unlimited possibilities! That is why we can find so many creative ways to screw things up. :)
Apparently the majority of voters are pretty stupid since most of them can't seem to follow instructions well enough to mark a ballot in such a way that it is clear what they intended to vote.
I say if the mark on the ballot is not per the specification and it is un-clear what was intended then it is a non-vote.
Enough of this hanging chad business! There were millions of people that were able to vote with not problems the last go around. The few that seemed to have trouble voting will have to learn better next time. If you don't mark things correctly and don't know enough to ask for help then your vote won't be counted.
The best solution is not some kind of electronic voiting system that if not already hacked will be in some subsequent election. But simple paper and markers. You put a mark next to who you want to vote for and you are done. Mark it wrong then ask for help and get a new ballot. If you are to stupid to do that then you don't belong in a voting booth and should be voted off the planet.