It will be a huge relief in my spam load when @Home goes dark. My most recent attempt to report a spammer with a business-class account was bounced:
Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2001 22:52:21 -0800
To: Chip Rosenthal <chip@unicom.com>
Subject: Fwd: Newsletter Provided by The Black World Today [Evaluation - see full header]
From: AUP Enforcement Team <abuse@home.net>
Reply-To: AUP Enforcement Team <abuse@home.net>
Dear Chip Rosenthal,
Your message, including your pasted-in email message body, firewall log,
or newsgroup header, exceeded the maximum message size allowed by our
mail service. Please reduce the size of your email message and exclude
any excessive message body or MIME/UNICODE text.
For firewall users, usually one line detailing a system probe attempt
from an @Home user is sufficient for us to take action on the event.
Multiple lines detailing more than one event from the same user are not
necessary.
Thank you,
The @Home Network Policy Management Team
The message they refused was a whopping 50K.
Oh, and of course they fail to return the original report so that you can revise and resubmit it. That's a favorite trick of spam-friendly ISPs.
Pity @Home flushed all that money on the Excite portal. Otherwise, maybe they could afford another disk shelf for their mail server.
I'd like to propose a solution to the domain name confusion problem. I propose we reduce the DNS complexity by limiting the breadth and depth of the DNS. We can limit the number of top-level domains, and how deeply they can be divided. I also propose a numeric shorthand notation, to simplify host identification and entry.
We should fix the maximum number of top-level domains at 256, and identify each TLD with a number from 0 through 255. Further, up to 256 organizational domains may reside with each TLD, each identified by another decimal number.
Finally, we provide for 256 departmental subdomains, and up to 256 individual hosts within each subdomain.
We now have a simple sequence of four decimal integers to uniquely represent any host on the Internet. We can write down the host identify as a text string by contactenating the four integers with a period (dot).
This means only four numbers need to be remembered to idenfity any host on the Internet. This is much less confusing than a plethora of domain names.
The one downside of this scheme is that it will require significant changes to existing Internet applications, such as web browsers, to accommodate this new "dotted quad" address mechanism.
Folks familiar with the history Jamie recounted knew that TRUSTe was going to weasel out on this one. Still, their audacity is shocking.
TRUSTe declared the privacy violation "did not involve collection of data on the RealNetworks Web site" and so washed their hands of the whole sordid deal. Well, not so fast there, buster. TRUSTe is correct that the GUID -- a unique identifying number -- was transmitted by application software. The most intrusive danger, however, is that Real would correlate the GUID against user registration information. And user registration information is gathered -- you guessed it! -- on the RealNetworks Web site.
TRUSTe cannot be trusted to safeguard our privacy. In fact, TRUSTe may be the largest barrier the industry has created in the fight for consumer privacy.
Slashdot Mirror
Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2001 22:52:21 -0800
To: Chip Rosenthal <chip@unicom.com>
Subject: Fwd: Newsletter Provided by The Black World Today [Evaluation - see full header]
From: AUP Enforcement Team <abuse@home.net>
Reply-To: AUP Enforcement Team <abuse@home.net>
Dear Chip Rosenthal,
Your message, including your pasted-in email message body, firewall log,
or newsgroup header, exceeded the maximum message size allowed by our
mail service. Please reduce the size of your email message and exclude
any excessive message body or MIME/UNICODE text.
For firewall users, usually one line detailing a system probe attempt
from an @Home user is sufficient for us to take action on the event.
Multiple lines detailing more than one event from the same user are not
necessary.
Thank you,
The @Home Network Policy Management Team
The message they refused was a whopping 50K.
Oh, and of course they fail to return the original report so that you can revise and resubmit it. That's a favorite trick of spam-friendly ISPs.
Pity @Home flushed all that money on the Excite portal. Otherwise, maybe they could afford another disk shelf for their mail server.
Hey, somebody please mod that up. HastaLaVista is pretty funny.
I'd like to propose a solution to the domain name confusion problem. I propose we reduce the DNS complexity by limiting the breadth and depth of the DNS. We can limit the number of top-level domains, and how deeply they can be divided. I also propose a numeric shorthand notation, to simplify host identification and entry.
We should fix the maximum number of top-level domains at 256, and identify each TLD with a number from 0 through 255. Further, up to 256 organizational domains may reside with each TLD, each identified by another decimal number. Finally, we provide for 256 departmental subdomains, and up to 256 individual hosts within each subdomain.
We now have a simple sequence of four decimal integers to uniquely represent any host on the Internet. We can write down the host identify as a text string by contactenating the four integers with a period (dot).
This means only four numbers need to be remembered to idenfity any host on the Internet. This is much less confusing than a plethora of domain names.
The one downside of this scheme is that it will require significant changes to existing Internet applications, such as web browsers, to accommodate this new "dotted quad" address mechanism.
Folks familiar with the history Jamie recounted knew that TRUSTe was going to weasel out on this one. Still, their audacity is shocking.
TRUSTe declared the privacy violation "did not involve collection of data on the RealNetworks Web site" and so washed their hands of the whole sordid deal. Well, not so fast there, buster. TRUSTe is correct that the GUID -- a unique identifying number -- was transmitted by application software. The most intrusive danger, however, is that Real would correlate the GUID against user registration information. And user registration information is gathered -- you guessed it! -- on the RealNetworks Web site.
TRUSTe cannot be trusted to safeguard our privacy. In fact, TRUSTe may be the largest barrier the industry has created in the fight for consumer privacy.