The best thing about this solution is that it is not passive filtration. It actively fights the spammer or spamming bot engine back. In fact, it is delightfully evil because it is fundamentally both an economic and technical solution. Spam has been a popular method of advertising because it is economical compared to mass market fliers, mailers, and faxes. The greytraps, tarpits, and the name of shame list takes the economics right out of sending spam. Better yet, it is not a solution that spammers can easily adapt to because their robots harvest addresses from web sites and a robot is unable to tell a good address from a bad one. Therefore, the OpenBSD Spamd solution is actually using the spammers' harvesting tools as a weapon in a fight against the spammer. This is essentially the most elegant way of fighting back as results are immediate, the cost of operation very, very low, and have none of the delays and dickering around of a legal solution.
No, this outrightly obscene. In this country, you are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. I honestly hope that they try to pass this as the US Supreme Court would strike it down and slap the hands that attempted such an overt slap in the face of the Constitution. The very thought of requiring DNA of an arrestee is downright wrong! I could understand for a convicted felon but nothing less.
This is the problem when government does not place restrictions on a bailout package. Our government wrote a blank check on us to bailout the results of extreme corporate greed and stupidity. It was incredibly assinine to think that trading mortgages like securities was a good idea. And, now, Uncle Sam turns around like the patient older parent and says, "Oh it's okay.... we forgive you.... here is an 820b allowance." This money should *not* have gone to corporations but should go towards keeping people in their homes. This is the key to beginning recovery. I must say that I am severely disappointed in Obama not seeing this fundamental fact. We should have let these greedy corporations fold under their own weight. We have set a dangerous precedence now for future troubled economic times wherein corporations can say, "Hey, you helped us before!", as an argument for more welfare.
Given M$'s reputation for problematic, buggy software, I remain unconvinced that it is a good idea to rush Windows 7 to market. Especially because in these economic, I don't think people will be rushing. Anyways, I haven't used Windows at home since Windows 98. I'll probably load a VM of Windows 7 just so I have some knowledge of it for the workplace.
It might be a great offer if you think the company is going places. I might even ask for 15% because it gives you a second source of income later on in life. It is almost certainly a different kind of counter offers. In most other times, accepting a counter offer is generally not a good as they will then be looking to replace you. However, this offer sounds like they really value your services and want you for the long haul.
This kind of research is quite alarmist and its objectivity is, at best, dubious. Michael Crichton pointed out that we don't fully understand our impact on the environment. That said, he also stated that reducing or eliminating carbon footprint is a good idea because human being weren't meant to breath CO2. His afterward section of State of Fear takes an intelligent, non-alarmist, and objective evaluation of the science of climate change. In it, he shows starting signs of subjectivity and potential influence from outside parties seeking a certain result.
What happens if your cell phone gets stolen? I am sure this idea would make the criminals here in the US salivate. This may work well in a culture such as Japan where crime rates are very low and heavy emphasis is paid on proper respect and saving face. To commit a crime in Japan is to bring shame onto oneself, one's family, and one's peer group. The family is a big focal point for crime prevention so large scale crime other than small, petty stuff is more uncommon.
No, not at all! There should be some advantages to being a US Citizen... i.e. being given job preference. Don't judge all US Citizens as mediocre. Are you an H1B?
I had a professor once try to do a similar thing. He demanded to keep the source code for anything we wrote while in class. Albeit he wasn't about to commit theft and assault. He also had this demand in writing so there was official documentation (not very smart for a professor.) A friend was taking the class too so we decided to license our code very, very restrictively; the polar opposites of GPL an BSD. After grades had been posted at the end of the semester, we went to student legal services with our issue. An actual lawyer heard our case, was absolutely incensed, and wrote a certified letter threatening monetary punishments. The professor decided to settle and immediately handed over all documentation, source code, and binaries back to the students. He even threatened to charge us with academic misconduct. The settlement he signed had a provision that he could not make any such accusations or face civil trial for breech of contract. The professor was given an administrative sanction which became a forced (four month sabbatical.)
Let's just say I set it up in my father's business and it rid us of 100% of SPAM without filtration. We have 0 false positives. I don't see how the spammers can adapt. The chances of you being the first recipient of a spam message are so incredibly small that a simple blacklist based on Bob Beck's traplist is good enough. Less than a tenth of a percent of the daily volume of email event make it to the grey lister.
A Technical solution is one that is needed. A good technical solution that takes the low cost economics of spam spewing out of the equation will work better than any law. If you make sending spam expensive and ineffective, it won't happen. You also need a technical solution that fights back. This is why I love OpenBSD Spamd. It does just that!
Make that strongly disagree. Spam is even more of a problem. Bill Gates should most likely not try to become the Nostradamus of the Internet because the problem is even more rampant. The problem is, we are combatting spam in the wrong way. Legally, the CAN SPAM Act is pointless. We need to make spam an uneconomical way of marketing and advertising. Spam filtration does not fight back because it does nothing to address the inexpensive economics of spamming. The only really effective method for fighting back has been developed by The OpenBSD Project. They have a spam deferral daemon that literally takes the wind right out of the spammer's sails. If a spammer attempts to send mail to an OpenBSD Spamd enabled machine, they are only able to send at 1 byte per second. This causes no problem for the reciever but could potentially wreck havoc on the spammer causing large queue backups and potentially crashing the spammer's server. That is a fight!
Finally, Bob Beck of the project creates and maintains a list of IP addresses of any machine that has attempted to send spam in the past 24 hours to the University of Alberta. This list is freely available to all. If more people took advantage of OpenBSD's Spamd and Bob's list, it'll be a TKO for the spammers.
"People often assume that such problems are much more malicious than they actually are. I'd check to make sure DMA is still active on your primary disk and grab a copy your manufacturer's disk check utility.
This is good advice as I have seen this behavior with HP d5500 PCs. All of a sudden performance will come to a grinding halt. Running an HD test revealed a Code 7 - Hard Drive Failure. Replacement recommended.
Off Topic Response: First of all, click the link. You'll find that it goes to http://www.livestation.com/ which simply provides news feeds. Secondly, before making blanket statements, do you have proof that Al Jazeera provides material and financial support to terrorist organizations? We are in a new era now where accusations are not enough to convict. I don't like Al Jazeera at all as it tends to be just as one sided as CNN and Fox News. But dislikes don't equate to criminality. I am sure George W. Bush would have loved to put a bunker buster right thru their front door,
I wonder if things really used to be much better. I would be more apt to say that the pace of change was slower so it seemed as if people held on to their jobs for the long haul and indeed some did. The information age has made it possible to make financial decisions at a pace previously unheard of. This is probably why layoffs are happening well before a company gets to bankruptcy. Still, when you here Microsoft going from profits above 4 billion to slightly below and they cut 5,000 jobs.... it has to make you a little angry. Obviously, Microsoft paid little heed to President Obama's plea for the country to be less self-centered and to realize that economic recovery will take people working together. It is more of a "We" approach vs. "I"
Try to take a long view. This crisis is ultimately a "good" thing for our country. It will shake our country to its foundation and force us to come to grips that regulated capitalism is not such a bad thing. Even Richard Nixon understood that regulations placed on the banking and financial sectors were necessary. The deregulation from Nixon thru Clinton and finally Bush helped lead to this meltdown. We are on the cusp of greatness yet again. This is a chance for us to come together to be even better.
I am as big a fan of Open Source as the next slashdotter, but there seems to be this feeling that because something is free or opensourced it is automatically better.
No, that is not the point at all. You're missing the point. Free/Open Source has the greatest potential to be better because it gets extensively peer reviewed and improved and thereby debugged and tested far more than any for profit company could ever afford to. Open source also means open standards. It means that you can watch streaming video without having to use MS Media Player but in a standards compliant MP4, AVI, or whatever other format. An open source website uses a browser agnostic and not requiring Internet Explorer in order to view it properly. Finally, and perhaps the largest advantage of open source is that hardware becomes open again. By forcing open source compliance, hardware will now be truely owned by the consumer. The consumer will not be forced into using Windows (or some NDIS wrapper) because a manufacturer, such as Broadcomm, deems open sourcing its drivers to be anti-competitive despite the fact that its drivers must be standards compliant to interoperate with other products. I hope Obama and his CIO will force the use of open source software. We are in a dawn of a new era now wherein it will take the collective effort of everyone to raise our country out of the ashes of our former president. Open source becomes one of the vehicles for large scale, rapid improvements not seen since the new deal.
I've always felt that contracts for cell service are a scam. Why? Setting up cell service is entirely computerized and there is almost no effort on the part of the sales or customer service people. Contracts are instead a replacement for good customer service. If you are in a contract and the service sucks it seems like the customer service rep and retention reps could care less. However, if there is nothing to prevent you from leaving, they actually have to work hard to keep you.
I think in the short term, nice people do finish last. However, when the jerk falls, he falls harder and has an even harder time getting back up. The nice guy in this story, while a short term victim, will have no shortage of excellent references and connections. The nice guy will have to worry about his reputation significantly less than the jerk. The jerk will have done so much backstabbing that he will have no one left around to support him. While a cliche, the saying, "What goes around, comes around," is quite a truism. The nice guy will really have the last laugh. I see this behavior going on in my workplace and I also have seen it backfire.... especially when the backstabbing victim involved a legally-protected, disabled employee. It cost the backstabber her job when it came full circle. Moral.... always be the bigger person
Yes, it is. This is precisely why we want it unbundled. So, that Microsoft must open up its "non standards-compliant" APIs so that other browsers can have the same website experience across the board,
If I were Microsoft I would simply stop licensing Windows for any computer sold in Europe. Why screw around anymore - if people are not smart enough to go out and download a browser of their choice why should the company go through any more time or hassle. This should bring computer sales to a screeching halt until software companies can manage to offer anywhere close to the depth of software that is available for Windows. I figure two or three years anyway. The really interesting part is that this is based on Opera whining. Opera is what? Number 4 in the browser market? Next up they will be whining that Google has to be shut down so they can try to out do Chrome.
Well, no, actually it is a good idea to forcibly unbundle IE and Windows because the IE APIs are closed up tight. You need certain IE APIs even for network browsing purposes. These APIs should be opened up so the Chrome and Opera can be used. It is not simply whining, as you suggest. There exists a legitimate business issue for the ubundling. Finally, Microsoft isn't going to stop selling in Europe nor is this a good idea at all. If you made that kind of decision, you'd be cutting off your nose to spite your face.
"My Russian connection has had Samba 4 running in production since last June and has discovered a few missing features. They also discovered that machines would stop working after 28 days which was something to do with password expiry."
Samba 4 is not really production ready yet. That is why it is labeled as an alpha version. Those using it in production, do so at their own risk. That said, I use it in a home network and it does run beautifully. However, I would be leery of using it in a business environment just yet.
Something to do with...". This is in every AD 101 book (machine accounts, password renewal,... thing). I would at least expect that the Samba developers have experience in installing, running and maintaining a "realistic" Active Directory environment (read: more than 1000 client machines) before delving into the real messy details. I am not sure I even want to know how they are going to handle disaster recovery (one of the fun parts of AD, rest assured).
Disaster recovery will be far easier on a Samba 4 DC because access to AD itself will be far less obscured and convuluded. A simple raw LDAP call could restore the entire database at the linux command line. I have seen countless problems restoring AD after a DC failure. I created a mock scenario with a Samba 4 DC wherein the entire database was wiped. I simply used Samba's own LDB toolset and had it up and running again in seconds.
And please, cost is not a reason for not going with Active Directory. The cost of a single Windows Server license is absolutely peanuts compared to what *you* cost your employer. The operational costs are what matter in long term and I am pretty confident that Microsoft's AD will do much better than that for the years to come.
You're missing the point. It isn't about cost at all. The point of having an open source replacement for AD is to make it easier for software developers to take advantage of the largely undocumented protocols. This is designed to facilitate interoperability. Even Microsoft, from the light of the anti-trust lawsuit it lost, extended an olive branch to the Samba team to assist in providing documentation. Plus, the work that Samba does stands to benefit Microsoft as well because they might be able to see where the Samba team has had some really good ideas and legally incorporate them into mainstream AD. And, before you express such confidence, I would try using Samba 4 myself. Some parts of the code are very mature and work well.
Slashdot Mirror
The best thing about this solution is that it is not passive filtration. It actively fights the spammer or spamming bot engine back. In fact, it is delightfully evil because it is fundamentally both an economic and technical solution. Spam has been a popular method of advertising because it is economical compared to mass market fliers, mailers, and faxes. The greytraps, tarpits, and the name of shame list takes the economics right out of sending spam. Better yet, it is not a solution that spammers can easily adapt to because their robots harvest addresses from web sites and a robot is unable to tell a good address from a bad one. Therefore, the OpenBSD Spamd solution is actually using the spammers' harvesting tools as a weapon in a fight against the spammer. This is essentially the most elegant way of fighting back as results are immediate, the cost of operation very, very low, and have none of the delays and dickering around of a legal solution.
No, this outrightly obscene. In this country, you are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. I honestly hope that they try to pass this as the US Supreme Court would strike it down and slap the hands that attempted such an overt slap in the face of the Constitution. The very thought of requiring DNA of an arrestee is downright wrong! I could understand for a convicted felon but nothing less.
This is the problem when government does not place restrictions on a bailout package. Our government wrote a blank check on us to bailout the results of extreme corporate greed and stupidity. It was incredibly assinine to think that trading mortgages like securities was a good idea. And, now, Uncle Sam turns around like the patient older parent and says, "Oh it's okay .... we forgive you .... here is an 820b allowance." This money should *not* have gone to corporations but should go towards keeping people in their homes. This is the key to beginning recovery. I must say that I am severely disappointed in Obama not seeing this fundamental fact. We should have let these greedy corporations fold under their own weight. We have set a dangerous precedence now for future troubled economic times wherein corporations can say, "Hey, you helped us before!", as an argument for more welfare.
Given M$'s reputation for problematic, buggy software, I remain unconvinced that it is a good idea to rush Windows 7 to market. Especially because in these economic, I don't think people will be rushing. Anyways, I haven't used Windows at home since Windows 98. I'll probably load a VM of Windows 7 just so I have some knowledge of it for the workplace.
It might be a great offer if you think the company is going places. I might even ask for 15% because it gives you a second source of income later on in life. It is almost certainly a different kind of counter offers. In most other times, accepting a counter offer is generally not a good as they will then be looking to replace you. However, this offer sounds like they really value your services and want you for the long haul.
This kind of research is quite alarmist and its objectivity is, at best, dubious. Michael Crichton pointed out that we don't fully understand our impact on the environment. That said, he also stated that reducing or eliminating carbon footprint is a good idea because human being weren't meant to breath CO2. His afterward section of State of Fear takes an intelligent, non-alarmist, and objective evaluation of the science of climate change. In it, he shows starting signs of subjectivity and potential influence from outside parties seeking a certain result.
What happens if your cell phone gets stolen? I am sure this idea would make the criminals here in the US salivate. This may work well in a culture such as Japan where crime rates are very low and heavy emphasis is paid on proper respect and saving face. To commit a crime in Japan is to bring shame onto oneself, one's family, and one's peer group. The family is a big focal point for crime prevention so large scale crime other than small, petty stuff is more uncommon.
No, not at all! There should be some advantages to being a US Citizen ... i.e. being given job preference. Don't judge all US Citizens as mediocre. Are you an H1B?
I had a professor once try to do a similar thing. He demanded to keep the source code for anything we wrote while in class. Albeit he wasn't about to commit theft and assault. He also had this demand in writing so there was official documentation (not very smart for a professor.) A friend was taking the class too so we decided to license our code very, very restrictively; the polar opposites of GPL an BSD. After grades had been posted at the end of the semester, we went to student legal services with our issue. An actual lawyer heard our case, was absolutely incensed, and wrote a certified letter threatening monetary punishments. The professor decided to settle and immediately handed over all documentation, source code, and binaries back to the students. He even threatened to charge us with academic misconduct. The settlement he signed had a provision that he could not make any such accusations or face civil trial for breech of contract. The professor was given an administrative sanction which became a forced (four month sabbatical.)
Let's just say I set it up in my father's business and it rid us of 100% of SPAM without filtration. We have 0 false positives. I don't see how the spammers can adapt. The chances of you being the first recipient of a spam message are so incredibly small that a simple blacklist based on Bob Beck's traplist is good enough. Less than a tenth of a percent of the daily volume of email event make it to the grey lister.
A Technical solution is one that is needed. A good technical solution that takes the low cost economics of spam spewing out of the equation will work better than any law. If you make sending spam expensive and ineffective, it won't happen. You also need a technical solution that fights back. This is why I love OpenBSD Spamd. It does just that!
Make that strongly disagree. Spam is even more of a problem. Bill Gates should most likely not try to become the Nostradamus of the Internet because the problem is even more rampant. The problem is, we are combatting spam in the wrong way. Legally, the CAN SPAM Act is pointless. We need to make spam an uneconomical way of marketing and advertising. Spam filtration does not fight back because it does nothing to address the inexpensive economics of spamming. The only really effective method for fighting back has been developed by The OpenBSD Project. They have a spam deferral daemon that literally takes the wind right out of the spammer's sails. If a spammer attempts to send mail to an OpenBSD Spamd enabled machine, they are only able to send at 1 byte per second. This causes no problem for the reciever but could potentially wreck havoc on the spammer causing large queue backups and potentially crashing the spammer's server. That is a fight!
Finally, Bob Beck of the project creates and maintains a list of IP addresses of any machine that has attempted to send spam in the past 24 hours to the University of Alberta. This list is freely available to all. If more people took advantage of OpenBSD's Spamd and Bob's list, it'll be a TKO for the spammers.
This is good advice as I have seen this behavior with HP d5500 PCs. All of a sudden performance will come to a grinding halt. Running an HD test revealed a Code 7 - Hard Drive Failure. Replacement recommended.
I agree with you there. Individual liberty *must* be preserved and I think Obama understands this.
Off Topic Response: First of all, click the link. You'll find that it goes to http://www.livestation.com/ which simply provides news feeds. Secondly, before making blanket statements, do you have proof that Al Jazeera provides material and financial support to terrorist organizations? We are in a new era now where accusations are not enough to convict. I don't like Al Jazeera at all as it tends to be just as one sided as CNN and Fox News. But dislikes don't equate to criminality. I am sure George W. Bush would have loved to put a bunker buster right thru their front door,
Try to take a long view. This crisis is ultimately a "good" thing for our country. It will shake our country to its foundation and force us to come to grips that regulated capitalism is not such a bad thing. Even Richard Nixon understood that regulations placed on the banking and financial sectors were necessary. The deregulation from Nixon thru Clinton and finally Bush helped lead to this meltdown. We are on the cusp of greatness yet again. This is a chance for us to come together to be even better.
No, that is not the point at all. You're missing the point. Free/Open Source has the greatest potential to be better because it gets extensively peer reviewed and improved and thereby debugged and tested far more than any for profit company could ever afford to. Open source also means open standards. It means that you can watch streaming video without having to use MS Media Player but in a standards compliant MP4, AVI, or whatever other format. An open source website uses a browser agnostic and not requiring Internet Explorer in order to view it properly. Finally, and perhaps the largest advantage of open source is that hardware becomes open again. By forcing open source compliance, hardware will now be truely owned by the consumer. The consumer will not be forced into using Windows (or some NDIS wrapper) because a manufacturer, such as Broadcomm, deems open sourcing its drivers to be anti-competitive despite the fact that its drivers must be standards compliant to interoperate with other products. I hope Obama and his CIO will force the use of open source software. We are in a dawn of a new era now wherein it will take the collective effort of everyone to raise our country out of the ashes of our former president. Open source becomes one of the vehicles for large scale, rapid improvements not seen since the new deal.
Not at all. Wolf in sheep's clothing
I've always felt that contracts for cell service are a scam. Why? Setting up cell service is entirely computerized and there is almost no effort on the part of the sales or customer service people. Contracts are instead a replacement for good customer service. If you are in a contract and the service sucks it seems like the customer service rep and retention reps could care less. However, if there is nothing to prevent you from leaving, they actually have to work hard to keep you.
I am free! Sprint's service in the Greater Phoenix Metro area is abyssmal. Calls drop as often as they go through.
I think in the short term, nice people do finish last. However, when the jerk falls, he falls harder and has an even harder time getting back up. The nice guy in this story, while a short term victim, will have no shortage of excellent references and connections. The nice guy will have to worry about his reputation significantly less than the jerk. The jerk will have done so much backstabbing that he will have no one left around to support him. While a cliche, the saying, "What goes around, comes around," is quite a truism. The nice guy will really have the last laugh. I see this behavior going on in my workplace and I also have seen it backfire .... especially when the backstabbing victim involved a legally-protected, disabled employee. It cost the backstabber her job when it came full circle. Moral .... always be the bigger person
Yes, it is. This is precisely why we want it unbundled. So, that Microsoft must open up its "non standards-compliant" APIs so that other browsers can have the same website experience across the board,
Well, no, actually it is a good idea to forcibly unbundle IE and Windows because the IE APIs are closed up tight. You need certain IE APIs even for network browsing purposes. These APIs should be opened up so the Chrome and Opera can be used. It is not simply whining, as you suggest. There exists a legitimate business issue for the ubundling. Finally, Microsoft isn't going to stop selling in Europe nor is this a good idea at all. If you made that kind of decision, you'd be cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Never seen this issue.
Samba 4 is not really production ready yet. That is why it is labeled as an alpha version. Those using it in production, do so at their own risk. That said, I use it in a home network and it does run beautifully. However, I would be leery of using it in a business environment just yet.
Something to do with...". This is in every AD 101 book (machine accounts, password renewal, ... thing). I would at least expect that the Samba developers have experience in installing, running and maintaining a "realistic" Active Directory environment (read: more than 1000 client machines) before delving into the real messy details. I am not sure I even want to know how they are going to handle disaster recovery (one of the fun parts of AD, rest assured).
Disaster recovery will be far easier on a Samba 4 DC because access to AD itself will be far less obscured and convuluded. A simple raw LDAP call could restore the entire database at the linux command line. I have seen countless problems restoring AD after a DC failure. I created a mock scenario with a Samba 4 DC wherein the entire database was wiped. I simply used Samba's own LDB toolset and had it up and running again in seconds.
And please, cost is not a reason for not going with Active Directory. The cost of a single Windows Server license is absolutely peanuts compared to what *you* cost your employer. The operational costs are what matter in long term and I am pretty confident that Microsoft's AD will do much better than that for the years to come.
You're missing the point. It isn't about cost at all. The point of having an open source replacement for AD is to make it easier for software developers to take advantage of the largely undocumented protocols. This is designed to facilitate interoperability. Even Microsoft, from the light of the anti-trust lawsuit it lost, extended an olive branch to the Samba team to assist in providing documentation. Plus, the work that Samba does stands to benefit Microsoft as well because they might be able to see where the Samba team has had some really good ideas and legally incorporate them into mainstream AD. And, before you express such confidence, I would try using Samba 4 myself. Some parts of the code are very mature and work well.