Not exactly. It sets a cookie that the site's front page checks for. If you have it, you get the empty directory listing; if you don't, you get the normal site. Clever.
Press the button, see the results, then delete your totl.net cookies and reload.
You've obviously never seen the bicycle messengers dodging traffic in downtown San Francisco. I don't even like walking across the streets around here.
Although, to be fair, I've been nearly killed by bicycle messengers more often than I have cars. At least the cars have the decency to stay off the sidewalks and generally obey the traffic lights.
I don't know why not, if it's still more than an equivilent house in the country you move to.
I recently read that beachfront condos can be had for about $50k in Croatia. Fancy living on the Adriatic, a short hope from Italy, France, Greece, and more? I sure do.
You can find your answer in Getting Out. I just finished reading it last week and while I don't remember the specifics on Costa Rica, it's got a weath of info on those very things about more countries than I had ever thought about visiting, much less moving to.
No, but nice try. Look up universities offering advanced HCI degrees for a clue. Here's a list to get you started. You might recognized a few little schools like CMU, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, and so on.
I think you're talking about the ALF, not the ELF. The ALF is concerned with animal welfare and carries out actions against animal testing labs. The ELF is an environmental group that is also involved in direct action, but is focused on environmental damage, not amimal liberation (which is not to say they don't firebomb stuff, it just generally isn't laboratories).
While I'm sure there's a lot of crossover, they are two different organizations (as much as they could be said to be "organizations", anyway).
You obviously have no idea what the reality of this is like but I'll try anyway.
We absolutely did shut down the users sending the spam, but the largest offenders didn't care, because they weren't legitimate customers; they were large-scale spammers creating literally dozens of spam accounts daily, using stolen credit cards. Surely you've heard the expression "whack-a-mole"? That's what we were playing and the deck is stacked against us in a situation like this. These particular spammers were almost exclusively using overseas open relays to send spam from these fraudulent dialup accounts and implementing port 25 filtering got them almost entirely off our network in one fell swoop.
Once we reduced the load of that particular problem we were able to go after the smaller spammers, the ones spamming through our own mail servers. These were much easier to catch and we terminated the accounts on sight. We also charged a $200 "clean up" fee, but again, spamming and credit card fraud go hand-in-hand, so this had little effect as a deterrent.
We implemented port 25 filtering somewhere around 2000 or 2001. This was before the rise of the spam botnets we see today. Spam proxies are hard problems to solve because the vast majority of end users out there simple aren't able to understand what's happening, yet they are the ones who have to deal with it. Nonetheless, we gave them one warning, accompanied by loads of information on what software to download/buy or who to hire to fix the problem, and then terminated the accounts if they didn't fix it.
Tell me again how we left anyone alone to abuse the internet?
You're also talking about two different things here, I think. Outbound port 25 filtering does not result in mail being blocked. Anyone unable to send legitimate mail through other mail servers was given the available options: use our outbound mail servers or use the mail submission port (587) on their other server. Either of these are trivial and no mail was prevented from going out, ever.
If you're talking about blocking mail originating on dynamic IP address ranges, this is an entirely separate and unrelated thing. This can result in non-delivery of legit mail (obviously) but the senders got a helpful bounce telling them what the problem was. And again, mail servers running on dynamic IP address should smarthost their mail through another server. Problem solved.
I'm sorry if either of these things upsets your utopian vision of a free, wide open internet, but the reality is that there are very serious problems that cannot be dealt with without taking what may look to you like extreme measures. We had a small number of customers like you -- people who absolutely rejected the trivial changes required to work with our new policies -- and a business decision was made that we can't make 100% of the people happy 100% of the time, and we were ok with that. We had a far greater number of customers who made the changes they needed to, and then never thought of it again because in the end, it really wasn't a big deal to most people.
Well, first of all, congratulations on being responsible. Unfortunately, most people don't have the technical knowledge to be. That said, you shouldn't be running a mail server on a dynamic IP address anyway and if you are, you should smarthost your mail through a server that doesn't have one (eg, your ISP, a VPS somewhere, etc).
Finally, it should be obvious that port blocking, refusing acceptance of smtp connections originating from dynamic IPs, etc. simply hasn't been effective against spam.
I disagree. I used to work in the abuse department of a major US ISP and outbound port 25 filtering had an immediate and dramatic effect on the amount of spam that was going out via off-network open relays and allowed us to more efficiently track down the spammers that were using our own servers.
I'm sorry if this upsets you, but the benefit we (and by extension, the internet community as a whole) gained from this far outweighed the inconvenience to a tiny percentage of our customers who wouldn't work with it.
I don't know when your story occured, but it's worth pointing out that Earthlink/Mindspring was in fact among the first handful of major ISPs to implement outbound port 25 filtering across most of their dynamically assigned address ranges.
Yes, it was a support nightmare (and I wasn't even on the support floor) but the drop in outbound spam was astounding.
I wonder what the price will be when it hits the streets. The VMWare rep at Macworld was quite elusive, basically demoing the software without actually giving anyone any concrete information about it. That stuck me as a particularly bad approach, considering the mindshare that Parallels already has. VMWare may be widely used elsewhere, but they're arriving very late to the OS X party.
There's also the goofy white plastic stuff. It may look "cool" but in an office it looks cheesy, and paying $200 extra for black?
While I agree that the price different between black and white MacBooks is stupid, I am also a little amazed that you're suggesting that white hardware is somehow not suitable "in the office". What does that even mean? What the hell does it matter what color a computer is?
How many large companies can you name that don't have Windows corporate site licenses? That's a well-known problem actually, that big companies pay for Windows twice: Once for the site license and once for the OEM copy installed on all their new Dell's that immediately wiped and replaced with the standard image.
All they have to do is replace the Ghost image they use for their PCs with a Parallels (or VMWare, when it's released later this year) image they can stick on a file server for people to copy. No license problems at all.
Then on the backend, the iPhone uses will get a special email account where all Office attachments are automatically converted to a PDF file before being sent to the phone. Fairly trivial thing to do.
Except for the part where you convert the Office file to PDF. Where is this supposed to happen again? My mail server won't do this, nor will any that I've ever used. Certainly you aren't suggesting that everyone forward their mail through a.Mac account before reading it from their iPhone? There's nothing transparent (ie, "on the backend") about that.
Indeed. I took a tour of the Scharffen Berger factory in Berkeley in late 2005 and the woman giving the tour said this is one of the most frequently asked questions. She said it made everyone a little nervous at first but they're allowed to operate exactly as they have been, but now they have as much money as they need. The chocolate hasn't suffered yet.
But then again, you don't really have a valid point there, either; as I was there, and you clearly weren't.
Ok, you've got me there (looks at the Crass tattoo that's adorned my arm since the '80s...)
This is a stupid argument. In any case, the people in the scene I was part of did call themselves and each other punks, but we also weren't too hung up on labels that we didn't see the absurdity of it. A sense of humor is vital in that type of scene.
my generalization is actually accurate
In the scene you ran with, maybe, but certainly not everywhere. It's a big world.
Slashdot Mirror
That works great if your site is just static HTML, but how many actually are these days?
Not exactly. It sets a cookie that the site's front page checks for. If you have it, you get the empty directory listing; if you don't, you get the normal site. Clever.
Press the button, see the results, then delete your totl.net cookies and reload.
You've obviously never seen the bicycle messengers dodging traffic in downtown San Francisco. I don't even like walking across the streets around here.
Although, to be fair, I've been nearly killed by bicycle messengers more often than I have cars. At least the cars have the decency to stay off the sidewalks and generally obey the traffic lights.
I don't know why not, if it's still more than an equivilent house in the country you move to.
I recently read that beachfront condos can be had for about $50k in Croatia. Fancy living on the Adriatic, a short hope from Italy, France, Greece, and more? I sure do.
You can find your answer in Getting Out. I just finished reading it last week and while I don't remember the specifics on Costa Rica, it's got a weath of info on those very things about more countries than I had ever thought about visiting, much less moving to.
You humorless bastard.
Whatever they teach, it's based on actual research rather than uninformed blather by someone who didn't even know the field existed.
No, but nice try. Look up universities offering advanced HCI degrees for a clue. Here's a list to get you started. You might recognized a few little schools like CMU, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, and so on.
I'd be interested in seeing your credentials as a usability expert.
I think you're talking about the ALF, not the ELF. The ALF is concerned with animal welfare and carries out actions against animal testing labs. The ELF is an environmental group that is also involved in direct action, but is focused on environmental damage, not amimal liberation (which is not to say they don't firebomb stuff, it just generally isn't laboratories).
While I'm sure there's a lot of crossover, they are two different organizations (as much as they could be said to be "organizations", anyway).
So you're saying you got the joke, but are correcting it as if you didn't anyway?
In what way is AAC a "locked format"?
You obviously have no idea what the reality of this is like but I'll try anyway.
We absolutely did shut down the users sending the spam, but the largest offenders didn't care, because they weren't legitimate customers; they were large-scale spammers creating literally dozens of spam accounts daily, using stolen credit cards. Surely you've heard the expression "whack-a-mole"? That's what we were playing and the deck is stacked against us in a situation like this. These particular spammers were almost exclusively using overseas open relays to send spam from these fraudulent dialup accounts and implementing port 25 filtering got them almost entirely off our network in one fell swoop.
Once we reduced the load of that particular problem we were able to go after the smaller spammers, the ones spamming through our own mail servers. These were much easier to catch and we terminated the accounts on sight. We also charged a $200 "clean up" fee, but again, spamming and credit card fraud go hand-in-hand, so this had little effect as a deterrent.
We implemented port 25 filtering somewhere around 2000 or 2001. This was before the rise of the spam botnets we see today. Spam proxies are hard problems to solve because the vast majority of end users out there simple aren't able to understand what's happening, yet they are the ones who have to deal with it. Nonetheless, we gave them one warning, accompanied by loads of information on what software to download/buy or who to hire to fix the problem, and then terminated the accounts if they didn't fix it.
Tell me again how we left anyone alone to abuse the internet?
You're also talking about two different things here, I think. Outbound port 25 filtering does not result in mail being blocked. Anyone unable to send legitimate mail through other mail servers was given the available options: use our outbound mail servers or use the mail submission port (587) on their other server. Either of these are trivial and no mail was prevented from going out, ever.
If you're talking about blocking mail originating on dynamic IP address ranges, this is an entirely separate and unrelated thing. This can result in non-delivery of legit mail (obviously) but the senders got a helpful bounce telling them what the problem was. And again, mail servers running on dynamic IP address should smarthost their mail through another server. Problem solved.
I'm sorry if either of these things upsets your utopian vision of a free, wide open internet, but the reality is that there are very serious problems that cannot be dealt with without taking what may look to you like extreme measures. We had a small number of customers like you -- people who absolutely rejected the trivial changes required to work with our new policies -- and a business decision was made that we can't make 100% of the people happy 100% of the time, and we were ok with that. We had a far greater number of customers who made the changes they needed to, and then never thought of it again because in the end, it really wasn't a big deal to most people.
I disagree. I used to work in the abuse department of a major US ISP and outbound port 25 filtering had an immediate and dramatic effect on the amount of spam that was going out via off-network open relays and allowed us to more efficiently track down the spammers that were using our own servers.
I'm sorry if this upsets you, but the benefit we (and by extension, the internet community as a whole) gained from this far outweighed the inconvenience to a tiny percentage of our customers who wouldn't work with it.
I don't know when your story occured, but it's worth pointing out that Earthlink/Mindspring was in fact among the first handful of major ISPs to implement outbound port 25 filtering across most of their dynamically assigned address ranges.
Yes, it was a support nightmare (and I wasn't even on the support floor) but the drop in outbound spam was astounding.
I wonder what the price will be when it hits the streets. The VMWare rep at Macworld was quite elusive, basically demoing the software without actually giving anyone any concrete information about it. That stuck me as a particularly bad approach, considering the mindshare that Parallels already has. VMWare may be widely used elsewhere, but they're arriving very late to the OS X party.
Well, no, because it isn't available yet. On the other hand, Parallels works great for this type of thing.
While I agree that the price different between black and white MacBooks is stupid, I am also a little amazed that you're suggesting that white hardware is somehow not suitable "in the office". What does that even mean? What the hell does it matter what color a computer is?
How many large companies can you name that don't have Windows corporate site licenses? That's a well-known problem actually, that big companies pay for Windows twice: Once for the site license and once for the OEM copy installed on all their new Dell's that immediately wiped and replaced with the standard image.
All they have to do is replace the Ghost image they use for their PCs with a Parallels (or VMWare, when it's released later this year) image they can stick on a file server for people to copy. No license problems at all.
mSQL? What year is this?
(yes, I know it was a typo)
Except for the part where you convert the Office file to PDF. Where is this supposed to happen again? My mail server won't do this, nor will any that I've ever used. Certainly you aren't suggesting that everyone forward their mail through a
Indeed. I took a tour of the Scharffen Berger factory in Berkeley in late 2005 and the woman giving the tour said this is one of the most frequently asked questions. She said it made everyone a little nervous at first but they're allowed to operate exactly as they have been, but now they have as much money as they need. The chocolate hasn't suffered yet.
Jesus, that story about your grandfather gave me chills. How terrible that anyone would have to live with that.
Ok, you've got me there (looks at the Crass tattoo that's adorned my arm since the '80s...)
This is a stupid argument. In any case, the people in the scene I was part of did call themselves and each other punks, but we also weren't too hung up on labels that we didn't see the absurdity of it. A sense of humor is vital in that type of scene.
In the scene you ran with, maybe, but certainly not everywhere. It's a big world.