I don't know what you mean by a catchall system, but I like having my own domain name and my current ISP. I have had my domain name for ten years, and 5 or so as a uucp name before that. The ISP is a local, not some national bunch of nameless droids sending CDs all over the place, and I am not about to switch them either.
Qmail also can reject it as soon as it knows it is going to a non-existent user. But since my ISP collected almost all mail to me as secondary MX and forwarded it to me only when I was connected intermittently, rejecting it would usually mean just making trouble for the ISP, so I just received it into the bit bucket. I recently switched to a full time account, and now I can treate it appropriately.
Your two suggestions don't address the problem and would not solve anything. This spam comes to non-existent user names which instantaneously makes it spam; I don't need to check the sender, the content, white lists or any kind of lists. As soon as the sender says who it is for with the RCPT: command, I know it is spam, and can deal with it very simply, at least now that I have switched to a full time connection.
As for the spam that comes directly to the few real accounts, it is about 200 a day but very easy to deal with, since the idiots send several copies of each spam, which sticks out like a sore thumb. I probably spend 30 seconds a day dealing with it.
I didn't do anything for a long time because, being intermittent dialup, almost all mail came thru my ISP as secondary MX, and bouncing it would only cause them far more trouble than simply accepting it and diverting to the bit bucket. But I just switched to a full time account, and now I can tarpit it, reject it, drop the connection, whatever I want.
Try your own domain name on a dialup connection:-) My own account gets around 200 spams a day. It annoys me, but doesn't take long to delete, since so much of it is 5 or ten copies of the same thing, which sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb when viewed once or twice a day.
But starting last summer, maybe 9 months ago, some spammers realized they had an untapped (fools') gold mine to plunder, and my simple little home domain has been receiving more and more spam to accounts that don't exist, like bill123 and so on. My poor little dialup domain has been receiving around 50-60,000 spams a day to those bogus accounts. It hit 120,000 one day.
It's easy enough to deal with since it is known to be spam by definition of going to bogus accounts. I never see it unless I am curious. I collect stats daily on how many unique account names were used, around 3000. It just amazes me that those bozos would send so much pure crap with no hope of ever getting a response.
Here's something else for you to answer. An old fashioned low tech block system, as Britain presumably still has but not necessarily working very well, is priced on miles of track and number of switches. No matter how many trains are in the system, the cost is pretty constant.
Start putting GPS units and radios on every piece of rolling stock, and not only is the price variable, but the bandwidth goes up, the interference of transmitters grows, and costs mount further.
Can you explain how the already sunk cost of the primitive block system can be more expensive than new equipment per car? Don't pass it off as the old equipment wearing out -- all equipment wears out, but GPS units and radios wear out a lot faster than buried cables and signal lights.
Given that you have never admitted knowing anything at all other than how to spout off to people you know nothing about, you are the pontificator here. What's the matter, can't answer simple questions? Why waste time on GPS exact positioning when they can't even get basic stuff right like opening the right switches?
You have no knowledge of my knowledge of trains. You say GPS is cheaper, yet primitive countries run mechanical simple railways just fine, or at least better than Britain. Is it possible this embarasses you and you have to make false justifications about using more expensive more trouble-prone high tech systems?
Come to the point. Explain how GPS and transmitters and receivers and computers is cheaper and simpler than old fashioned block controls, which used to work in Britain, as they still do in some rather primitive countries. Explain how Britain is too technologically backwards to match third world railroads.
Sure high tech makes for better systems in the future. This system will make it possible to know exactly where trains are, they could have monitors at all sations, or web sites, showing expected arrival times down to the second, great stuff.
But when they can't even get basic block controls down right, and guarantee switches are in the right position, why waste time on this? It's like putting power windows in cars when you can't even keep the doors from falling off the hinges, or worrying about computerized anti-lock brakes back when they still had mechanical cable brakes.
Just like BART... they wasted so much money and trouble on their computerized train controls and forgot all the basics like double tracking to allow trains to pass and sidings to allow broken trains to get out of the way.
That's what's wrong here. If they can't get basic safety standards in place, high tech GPS position reporting and timely web sites aren't worth beans.
Why do fools insist on going to high tech solutions when they can't even get the low tech stuff right?
I have no personal experience with British rails, but I have read about the numerous nasty accidents they have had recently.
I do have experience with San Francisco's BART and the Tokyo subways about the same time, mid 1970s.
BART had fancy computer controlled trains which sometimes left the station without the operator in the cab. They actually stopped correctly at the next station, usually, but sometimes the trains stopped past the station, or shot off the end of the rails for the last station, and sometimes they opened doors on the wrong side of the train, right over the third rail. They were having one heck of a time even running the trains as close as 5 minutes apart.
Meanwhile, Tokyo's Ginza line, built just after the 1923 earthquake I believe, a completely manual system, had been running trains every minute or two without problems for years. That line was so funky that car lights would go off for a second or two as they crossed junctions; you could watch this light blanking travel down the train towards you.
Why do these idiots insist on spending a fortune on high tech solutions when low tech solutions have been around for a hundred years and yet they can't get it right, even with examples around the world of making them work? Is it just empire building?
This was subversion's dump program on Slackware Linux, to a single dump file, then restored via subversion on a Gentoo Linux system. I doubt Berkely DB or subversion is writing sparse files anywhere in that process, especially since it wrote all the repository files that went into the dump too.
It may have been perfectly normal, but I didn't like it, and didn't want to find out the hard way that it had made a boo-boo.
It's my understanding that the file system repository is also binary. I really like CVS's text repositories for two reasons. One, a vague sense of security, that if a file gets corrupted, I can at least make an attempt at manual repair. Two, I can do a quick read-only edit of a repository file to see some code, I don't have to waste time with checking it out, just go look. Grep also works on it. If I want to find some code that was put into Attic a long time ago, grep works wonders. I don't know how you'd do it with Subversion.
I also had a minor scare with moving subversion (with a Berkeley DB repository) from a Pentium to an Opteron system. The repository size, using dump and restore as recommended by the subversion docs, grew by (IIRC) a factor of around ten. I do not understand this. Merely going to a longer word size would have made no difference to a CVS or darcs repository, being text, and I could think of no reason to more than double for a binary repository. That is what prompted me to look for alternatives, and how I found darcs, and I won't go back to either CVS or Subversion.
I switched to subversion from CVS to get the file renaming, but disliked the binary repositories, whether as a Berkeley DB or binary files, so I tried darcs, and it is just fine. I don't see it as any mind boggling revolutionary change, but it is more of a change than CVS to Subversion. I also like it having ordinary repositories, no special binary format that hides everything. There is something refreshing and liberating about the way it works. I could not go back to CVS or Subversion without feeling like I had to wear a suit and tie again after having not worn one for 30 years.
I don't see darcs as being a big change from CVS and Subversion in how to use it, not in any way that requires a mind warp to use. Different, sure, but still just version control, only done better.
Seems to me it could be spoofed, but I Am Not An Expert. What if you have a small radio transmitter in your pocket to swamp the table's RFID transmitter? Maybe read the RFID at one table, and play it back later to spoof some other table?
Plus it would give the security personnel a false sense of security, and maybe more traditional ways of cheating would be easier.
I wonder if this is not just a publicity ploy, just make some noise to get more people in who would not otherwise come in.
For houses and cars, the worry is expensive side effects, like paying someone else's medical bills or their expensive car. Or for a house, if it burns down, that's a lot of money to come up with, especially since the bank probably owns more of the house than you do. House insurance also covers injuries on the property,like that handyman who falls off the ladder.
These aren't related to repairs. I would never get an extended warranty for a car, and my house came with a useless warranty bought by the realtor which I did not renew.
Of course, an extended warranty may be worth it for peace of mind, if the repairs covered would be a big blow, and if (this is the killer) the warranty is actually backed by a reputable company. But for, say, home stereos, cameras, computers, etc, extended warranties are useless.
The trick to realizing it is that warranties average out over many items. The sellers average it out over thousands or millions of the same item, whereas as Joe Consumer averages it out over dozens or hundreds of different items.
As happy as clams AT HIGH TIDE is the proper saying. Why do so many people think clams are happy all the time? It is when the tide comes in and keeps the predators from digging them up that they are happy.
That's even assuming clams can be happy, but I'll leave that for some other pedantic.
No business (except maybe SCO, as M$'s legal puppy) is in business to lose money. No matter how good a deal sounds, they are not interested in losing money to get your business. They are going to make money one way or the other.
So ask yourself, if an extended warranty makes them money, how does it do so, and what does that mean to you? They make money because the repair work they do, or the replacement they buy, plus the overhead of administering the warranty and work, is less than what you paid for the warranty. That difference is their magic ??? profit.
For the consumer, this means that on average, the extended warranty is a very bad deal. If you buy an extended warranty at, say, 10% of the purchase price, this means that they will spend far less than 10% on repair and replacement.
Best deal for you is to self-finance your own extended warranty. Instead of buying the extended warranty, put the amount it costs into a savings account. As this account builds up (and it earns interest too), eventually your purchases will fail, and you will have to buy a replacement or pay for repairs. You will find that you still have money left over in your extended warranty account.
Of course, sometimes lucky streaks run against you, and you will break things earlier than average in the beginning. But on average, statistically speaking, your extended warranty account will be a much better deal for you than paying the store that same money.
Besides which... first, extended warranties usually don't kick in until the regular warranty expires, so that's interest in the store's pocket, not your bank account. Second, most things covered by an extended warranty are ripe for replacement by the time they come into effect. What will be available in a couple or three years will be better and cheaper than what you buy now.
How do you know you can get any resolution from the people who sold you the software, or developed it? Have you checked the contracts or EULAs? Most EULAs I've seen explicitly disclaim any responsibilty.
Your responsibility is to protect your company AND get it back on its feet after a breakin. You can't rely on a lawsuit to do that in any timely fashion, only after the company has gone out of business and everyone has long since gotten new jobs. Even then, you'd be lucky to get pennies on teh dollar in restitution. So what good does it to sue the developer or seller?
You have to get the company going again as quickly as possible. It just might be helpful to have sources to what failed to see how it failed and how the breakin occurred. Proprietary software is useless there.
I had been reading the Economist for several years, but it didn't dawn on me what a difference it made until I took a taxi ride and inquired about the driver's accent --- he was from Nigeria, I think, and we spent the rest of the ride (10-15 minutes) talking about Nigerian politics, and I was flat amazed at how much I knew without realizing it (I think he was too:-). That convinced me to keep the subscription going.
The value of the Economist is just absorbing general knowledge, not the specific details. What matters about the Nigerian example is that things are better, but still not good, it is no longer a dictatorship, but it is still corrupt. The exact stats and names don't matter.
Slashdot Mirror
Petrol, eh? I thought diesel was hot stuff over there. Or is that only Europe and fog in the channel has cut off the continent?
I'm from the Bush administration. Put that in terms of burning Libraries of Congress.
I thought Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister were documentaries.
I don't know what you mean by a catchall system, but I like having my own domain name and my current ISP. I have had my domain name for ten years, and 5 or so as a uucp name before that. The ISP is a local, not some national bunch of nameless droids sending CDs all over the place, and I am not about to switch them either.
Qmail also can reject it as soon as it knows it is going to a non-existent user. But since my ISP collected almost all mail to me as secondary MX and forwarded it to me only when I was connected intermittently, rejecting it would usually mean just making trouble for the ISP, so I just received it into the bit bucket. I recently switched to a full time account, and now I can treate it appropriately.
Your two suggestions don't address the problem and would not solve anything. This spam comes to non-existent user names which instantaneously makes it spam; I don't need to check the sender, the content, white lists or any kind of lists. As soon as the sender says who it is for with the RCPT: command, I know it is spam, and can deal with it very simply, at least now that I have switched to a full time connection.
As for the spam that comes directly to the few real accounts, it is about 200 a day but very easy to deal with, since the idiots send several copies of each spam, which sticks out like a sore thumb. I probably spend 30 seconds a day dealing with it.
I didn't do anything for a long time because, being intermittent dialup, almost all mail came thru my ISP as secondary MX, and bouncing it would only cause them far more trouble than simply accepting it and diverting to the bit bucket. But I just switched to a full time account, and now I can tarpit it, reject it, drop the connection, whatever I want.
Try your own domain name on a dialup connection :-) My own account gets around 200 spams a day. It annoys me, but doesn't take long to delete, since so much of it is 5 or ten copies of the same thing, which sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb when viewed once or twice a day.
But starting last summer, maybe 9 months ago, some spammers realized they had an untapped (fools') gold mine to plunder, and my simple little home domain has been receiving more and more spam to accounts that don't exist, like bill123 and so on. My poor little dialup domain has been receiving around 50-60,000 spams a day to those bogus accounts. It hit 120,000 one day.
It's easy enough to deal with since it is known to be spam by definition of going to bogus accounts. I never see it unless I am curious. I collect stats daily on how many unique account names were used, around 3000. It just amazes me that those bozos would send so much pure crap with no hope of ever getting a response.
Here's something else for you to answer. An old fashioned low tech block system, as Britain presumably still has but not necessarily working very well, is priced on miles of track and number of switches. No matter how many trains are in the system, the cost is pretty constant.
Start putting GPS units and radios on every piece of rolling stock, and not only is the price variable, but the bandwidth goes up, the interference of transmitters grows, and costs mount further.
Can you explain how the already sunk cost of the primitive block system can be more expensive than new equipment per car? Don't pass it off as the old equipment wearing out -- all equipment wears out, but GPS units and radios wear out a lot faster than buried cables and signal lights.
Given that you have never admitted knowing anything at all other than how to spout off to people you know nothing about, you are the pontificator here. What's the matter, can't answer simple questions? Why waste time on GPS exact positioning when they can't even get basic stuff right like opening the right switches?
You have no knowledge of my knowledge of trains. You say GPS is cheaper, yet primitive countries run mechanical simple railways just fine, or at least better than Britain. Is it possible this embarasses you and you have to make false justifications about using more expensive more trouble-prone high tech systems?
Come to the point. Explain how GPS and transmitters and receivers and computers is cheaper and simpler than old fashioned block controls, which used to work in Britain, as they still do in some rather primitive countries. Explain how Britain is too technologically backwards to match third world railroads.
Sure high tech makes for better systems in the future. This system will make it possible to know exactly where trains are, they could have monitors at all sations, or web sites, showing expected arrival times down to the second, great stuff.
... they wasted so much money and trouble on their computerized train controls and forgot all the basics like double tracking to allow trains to pass and sidings to allow broken trains to get out of the way.
But when they can't even get basic block controls down right, and guarantee switches are in the right position, why waste time on this? It's like putting power windows in cars when you can't even keep the doors from falling off the hinges, or worrying about computerized anti-lock brakes back when they still had mechanical cable brakes.
Just like BART
That's what's wrong here. If they can't get basic safety standards in place, high tech GPS position reporting and timely web sites aren't worth beans.
Why do fools insist on going to high tech solutions when they can't even get the low tech stuff right?
I have no personal experience with British rails, but I have read about the numerous nasty accidents they have had recently.
I do have experience with San Francisco's BART and the Tokyo subways about the same time, mid 1970s.
BART had fancy computer controlled trains which sometimes left the station without the operator in the cab. They actually stopped correctly at the next station, usually, but sometimes the trains stopped past the station, or shot off the end of the rails for the last station, and sometimes they opened doors on the wrong side of the train, right over the third rail. They were having one heck of a time even running the trains as close as 5 minutes apart.
Meanwhile, Tokyo's Ginza line, built just after the 1923 earthquake I believe, a completely manual system, had been running trains every minute or two without problems for years. That line was so funky that car lights would go off for a second or two as they crossed junctions; you could watch this light blanking travel down the train towards you.
Why do these idiots insist on spending a fortune on high tech solutions when low tech solutions have been around for a hundred years and yet they can't get it right, even with examples around the world of making them work? Is it just empire building?
This was subversion's dump program on Slackware Linux, to a single dump file, then restored via subversion on a Gentoo Linux system. I doubt Berkely DB or subversion is writing sparse files anywhere in that process, especially since it wrote all the repository files that went into the dump too.
It may have been perfectly normal, but I didn't like it, and didn't want to find out the hard way that it had made a boo-boo.
It's my understanding that the file system repository is also binary. I really like CVS's text repositories for two reasons. One, a vague sense of security, that if a file gets corrupted, I can at least make an attempt at manual repair. Two, I can do a quick read-only edit of a repository file to see some code, I don't have to waste time with checking it out, just go look. Grep also works on it. If I want to find some code that was put into Attic a long time ago, grep works wonders. I don't know how you'd do it with Subversion.
I also had a minor scare with moving subversion (with a Berkeley DB repository) from a Pentium to an Opteron system. The repository size, using dump and restore as recommended by the subversion docs, grew by (IIRC) a factor of around ten. I do not understand this. Merely going to a longer word size would have made no difference to a CVS or darcs repository, being text, and I could think of no reason to more than double for a binary repository. That is what prompted me to look for alternatives, and how I found darcs, and I won't go back to either CVS or Subversion.
I switched to subversion from CVS to get the file renaming, but disliked the binary repositories, whether as a Berkeley DB or binary files, so I tried darcs, and it is just fine. I don't see it as any mind boggling revolutionary change, but it is more of a change than CVS to Subversion. I also like it having ordinary repositories, no special binary format that hides everything. There is something refreshing and liberating about the way it works. I could not go back to CVS or Subversion without feeling like I had to wear a suit and tie again after having not worn one for 30 years.
I don't see darcs as being a big change from CVS and Subversion in how to use it, not in any way that requires a mind warp to use. Different, sure, but still just version control, only done better.
Wish I could say you fell into my trap, but ... heck, now I have to go look that up!
Those were the two words Bill Gates did not want to hear on his honeymoon ...
...what kind of defense the spammers are erecting?
Seems to me it could be spoofed, but I Am Not An Expert. What if you have a small radio transmitter in your pocket to swamp the table's RFID transmitter? Maybe read the RFID at one table, and play it back later to spoof some other table?
Plus it would give the security personnel a false sense of security, and maybe more traditional ways of cheating would be easier.
I wonder if this is not just a publicity ploy, just make some noise to get more people in who would not otherwise come in.
For houses and cars, the worry is expensive side effects, like paying someone else's medical bills or their expensive car. Or for a house, if it burns down, that's a lot of money to come up with, especially since the bank probably owns more of the house than you do. House insurance also covers injuries on the property,like that handyman who falls off the ladder.
These aren't related to repairs. I would never get an extended warranty for a car, and my house came with a useless warranty bought by the realtor which I did not renew.
Of course, an extended warranty may be worth it for peace of mind, if the repairs covered would be a big blow, and if (this is the killer) the warranty is actually backed by a reputable company. But for, say, home stereos, cameras, computers, etc, extended warranties are useless.
The trick to realizing it is that warranties average out over many items. The sellers average it out over thousands or millions of the same item, whereas as Joe Consumer averages it out over dozens or hundreds of different items.
been happy as clams with the TV
As happy as clams AT HIGH TIDE is the proper saying. Why do so many people think clams are happy all the time? It is when the tide comes in and keeps the predators from digging them up that they are happy.
That's even assuming clams can be happy, but I'll leave that for some other pedantic.
No business (except maybe SCO, as M$'s legal puppy) is in business to lose money. No matter how good a deal sounds, they are not interested in losing money to get your business. They are going to make money one way or the other.
... first, extended warranties usually don't kick in until the regular warranty expires, so that's interest in the store's pocket, not your bank account. Second, most things covered by an extended warranty are ripe for replacement by the time they come into effect. What will be available in a couple or three years will be better and cheaper than what you buy now.
So ask yourself, if an extended warranty makes them money, how does it do so, and what does that mean to you? They make money because the repair work they do, or the replacement they buy, plus the overhead of administering the warranty and work, is less than what you paid for the warranty. That difference is their magic ??? profit.
For the consumer, this means that on average, the extended warranty is a very bad deal. If you buy an extended warranty at, say, 10% of the purchase price, this means that they will spend far less than 10% on repair and replacement.
Best deal for you is to self-finance your own extended warranty. Instead of buying the extended warranty, put the amount it costs into a savings account. As this account builds up (and it earns interest too), eventually your purchases will fail, and you will have to buy a replacement or pay for repairs. You will find that you still have money left over in your extended warranty account.
Of course, sometimes lucky streaks run against you, and you will break things earlier than average in the beginning. But on average, statistically speaking, your extended warranty account will be a much better deal for you than paying the store that same money.
Besides which
The problem is not copying, it is linking and sucking up bandwidth.
Besides which, disabling javascript defeats your trick, and it's in the browser cache anyway. If it's on someone's screen, it's in their computer.
... than being a public dick ....
How do you know you can get any resolution from the people who sold you the software, or developed it? Have you checked the contracts or EULAs? Most EULAs I've seen explicitly disclaim any responsibilty.
Your responsibility is to protect your company AND get it back on its feet after a breakin. You can't rely on a lawsuit to do that in any timely fashion, only after the company has gone out of business and everyone has long since gotten new jobs. Even then, you'd be lucky to get pennies on teh dollar in restitution. So what good does it to sue the developer or seller?
You have to get the company going again as quickly as possible. It just might be helpful to have sources to what failed to see how it failed and how the breakin occurred. Proprietary software is useless there.
I had been reading the Economist for several years, but it didn't dawn on me what a difference it made until I took a taxi ride and inquired about the driver's accent --- he was from Nigeria, I think, and we spent the rest of the ride (10-15 minutes) talking about Nigerian politics, and I was flat amazed at how much I knew without realizing it (I think he was too :-). That convinced me to keep the subscription going.
The value of the Economist is just absorbing general knowledge, not the specific details. What matters about the Nigerian example is that things are better, but still not good, it is no longer a dictatorship, but it is still corrupt. The exact stats and names don't matter.