unclear on the spam problem
Sure, and get yourself a backpacker's water filter, that will keep BP from spilling oil in the ocean. If *I* can't see it, it doesn't exist!
Posts by Cameron 2
9 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Oct 2009
China, Russia called out as cyberspy hotbeds
Facebook security profiling doesn't like African log-ins
Tuesday 20th September 2011 00:27 GMT
duh
When was the last time your network got legitimate traffic from Kenya, Nigeria, or Ivory Coast?
Fraud is Nigeria's third largest source of foreign exchange, after oil and coffee. Same with Kenya, but they don't have much oil. Firewall any network segment belonging to domestic ISPs in those nations. It's best practice network security.
Carphone Warehouse has peachy Christmas quarter
Wednesday 19th January 2011 09:41 GMT 
spam problem == bad management
Is this the same company as Carphone Warehouse Broadband Services? I had to block SMTP contact from their network, 92.0.0.0/11. Tons of bot spam coming in from there, and their IETF RFC 2142 abuse address ignored complaints or didn't work. None of my users has ever complained about this block.
In general, I have found spam response to be a pretty good indicator of management quality. Well run companies do not have an outbound spam problem. Companies who refuse to control their outbound spam tend to have ethical and competence issues company-wide.
Diary of a Not-spot: The readers speak
Thursday 13th January 2011 01:23 GMT
hi potential isolation
The IEEE required 2 KV isolation in 10/100/1000 BASE-T links. That's enough to ward off the spike when the night cleaner plugs his floor polisher into the outlet strip in your cube, which is its intent. It was never intended to handle the surge induced in everything metallic when lightning strikes on your street. No surge suppressor or lightning arrestor is fast enough to consume these surges, the terminal equipment simply has to withstand them.
Running a signal between buildings, use fiber or radio. BTW, this is one reason "RS-232" went away. It's not isolated, nor differential, so it's not reliable nor safe to run down the hallway, much less from one floor to another in a large building. There's no such thing as "ground."
I was once responsible for CE and FCC testing of 3Com's desktop Ethernet cards. I've spent a lot of time measuring and testing that stuff. One of the ways we lost that market to the Chinese is we insisted on meeting the safety specs, while our white-box .TW competitors didn't see the need. More than once, safety-critical parts I'd disqualified would sneak back onto our Approved Vendor List. The sales reps and purchasing agents said everybody else was only doing 500 V.
Spam volumes double as Rustock botnet wakes
Thursday 13th January 2011 01:20 GMT 
why there's spam
When a kitchen's dirty, it gets cockroaches. That's not the cockroaches' fault, it's the fault of the lazy slob providing the habitat. We have spam because the vast majority of Internet companies are doing as little as they can get away with to keep spammers from using their equipment.
If Google's so smart, why can't they search out all those dropbox accounts? I see their domain in spam Reply-To more than any other! They could kill those things fast enough to chase the crooks back to Hotmail, but they can't be bothered.
Try reporting your spam for a while, and you'll notice that the vast majority of domains don't have a working abuse address. They may define it, but they don't bother to except it from content analysis, so "test" one-liners get through but spam reports containing samples don't.
Try reporting Yahoo.com dropboxes, you'll discover abuse@yahoo now requires a format which no known software generates.
If these companies were serious about stopping spam, spam would stop.
McNealy to Ellison: How to duck death by open source
Thursday 9th December 2010 10:12 GMT 
egomaniacs fail
Sun's big mistake was wasting about six years on a pissing contest with the other unix vendors.
It was Unix International (Sun, AT&T, and tiny Arix) versus Open Software Foundation (Digital, HP, Compaq, IBM...). They were too blinded by their own egos and Ayn Rand "free market" fantasies to realize that IBM had handed MSFT a monopoly that would destroy them all. That was the six years it took MSFT to get Windows and Office working well enough for the enterprise to tolerate it.
Shuttleworth heir opens up on Ubuntu biz
Comcast to pay $16m over BitTorrent busting
Telecoms reform tabled as EU plots spam clampdown
Monday 12th October 2009 23:47 GMT
empty hats
Spam will keep getting worse until the businesses that support it through gross negligence are made to pay. As far as I can tell, there's *nobody home* at abuse@telecomitalia.it, abuse@wanadoo.fr, or abuse@any telecom in Turkey. People act as if spam falls mysteriously from the sky. Ridiculous. Spam persists because transnationals starting with Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft *support* it.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
