Re: Blocking mail from bad places
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Here's what one of the messages my system produces: Apr 7 12:02:26 tongs postfix/smtpd[15229]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from mail.middreut.com[208.61.243.195]: 454 Service unavailable; Client host [208.61.243.195] blocked using dnsbl.cagreens.org; Whoops! Please see http://greens.org/delist and note your sending address is -- 208.61.243.195 --. Sorry.; from= to=[EMAIL PROTECTED] proto=ESMTP helo=exchange.middreut.local This provides a reasonable explanation... as long as you can read English. If you want to talk about hard to understand: every time I post to nanog, I get a bounce message from someone in Germany, in German. About as much use as my bounce message is to someone who doesn't read English. ... and why aren't bounce messages standardized in content and formatting?!? Thomas James R. Cutler wrote: At 4/5/2007 08:38 AM -0700, Thomas Leavitt wrote: One problem with the bounce solution is that snip/ == So, I (Cutler) add: And, even the best-intentioned bounce messages often give lots of data, but no information, thus increasing the noise to signal ratio. For example, Paul most likely knows what the following means to him. To me it just means I can't send mail to Paul. This message was created automatically by mail delivery software. A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed: [EMAIL PROTECTED] SMTP error from remote mailer after RCPT TO:[EMAIL PROTECTED]: host sa.vix.com [204.152.187.1]: 553 5.7.1 Service unavailable; Client host [209.86.89.61] blocked using reject-all.vix.com; created / reason -- This is a copy of the message, including all the headers. -- - James R. Cutler [EMAIL PROTECTED] -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mandriva - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFGF+WyNEK1jn5bsMsRAi1pAKDCXnIBmY7wTybhNyJIPAntAUBvMgCfSDBV goClCVhxinIMW/yQ8gfR/Do= =+pbd -END PGP SIGNATURE-
Re: Blocking mail from bad places
One problem with the bounce solution is that for those of us with multiple domains (some of them wildcarded) mapped to our mailboxes, the volume of backscatter makes it a real hassle to sort out the valid bounces from the noise. Even users with a single email address can be victimized often enough to dismiss this stuff as a form of spam, and automatically delete it without looking; \every few months, I get pained complaints from one friend or family member or another about someone using their address to spam, and thousands of bounce messages winding up in their mailbox as a result... another major problem, in my opinion, caused by spam that is leading to email becoming more and more of an unreliable medium - even when everything works perfectly according to protocol and RFC, and a person gets a bounce message because an address is out of date or typoed or otherwise invalid, they'll never know. Thomas Steven Champeon wrote: on Wed, Apr 04, 2007 at 06:25:18PM -0400, John L wrote: This technique works great to keep spam out of your mailbox. Inline rejection is a little dangerous for mailing lists And for anyone else who doesn't feel like jumping through your hoops. Providing a telephone number in the bounce is an effective way to deal with false positives. Only if you assume that everyone who writes to you is so desperate to send you mail that they are willing to make what may be an international call in the middle of the night. I have not found that to be a very realistic assumption. I have to agree with John here - I've been sending back 'email me at [EMAIL PROTECTED] if this in an error' for all rejections here since 2003 or so, and can count the legit mail to postmaster I've received in that time on one hand, maybe two; the stuff that gets rejected before the accept postmaster default gets a different error, containing a phone number. I've never had anyone call me there. Not that it bothers me much - I've done my part, I figure, and if they aren't willing to email a postmaster or call, then shrug? What can I do? I'll add that even if everyone were willing to email/call with problems, the hideous things that (e.g.) Exchange does to your carefully handcrafted rejection errors are enough to cripple the least tech-savvy of your likely audience, anyway.
Re: Blocking mail from bad places
That makes sense, and matches up with my experience... you also have amateur spammers just doing stuff manually (as well as spammers paying people pennies a page to input CAPTCHA responses). Another issue is that the unsolicited contact paradigm blurs a bit, when you have musicians and promoters and organizations with causes, etc. all asking to be added as a friend... the situation becomes one of those I know spam when I see it. ones... Ken Simpson wrote: Some of it is quite sophisticated: full blown instant profiles with fake comments ... the smarter spammers actually make the profile look real (often lifting material from legit user profiles), and then just ... At the MIT Spam Conference, I was talking to MySpace's anti spam researcher. He said that they see many profiles that look totally legit and which have been carefully nurtured for more than six months -- and then the formally legit profile suddenly becomes the drop site for a Phishing campaign or other spam repository. Captchas apparently help quite a bit to stem this kind of problem because they install a technical barrier that, while not impossible to break through programatically, at least delays things a bit and reduces the ROI for the spammer. Regards, Ken
Re: Blocking mail from bad places
The only practical way to handle the volume of spam email that was hitting my servers was to implement very very aggressive filtering at the server accept level (requiring valid HELO commands that match to an existing host, among other things - amazing how many servers from major sites that initiate a HELO using a non-existent hostname)... and a friend of mine who manages a whole series of servers, has taken it to the next level: he implements his spam blocking via firewall (the disadvantage is that the logging is much more sparse, and the error messages much less descriptive). The alternative is the absurdity that a local ISP has: a 14 way cluster for mail acceptance, and another 20 way cluster for mail storage and retrieval with terabytes of storage space, 90% of the resources (or more) of which are taken up accepting and storing as much spam as possible... and this is an ISP with a few thousand dial up and DSL customers, and a small datacenter with three rows of racks. ... and none of these resource usages are billed back to the customers... they're just overhead. The current situation with email is flat out insane. There is no other way to describe it. Email quaint? You betcha - my kids and their friends do email all the time: via MySpace and the equivalents, no SMTP required. They wouldn't know what an email client was if you hit them over the head with it. Thomas [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: You cannot mandate how hard somebody must work. It doesn't work. Make it 'expensive enough' to be wrong, and *then* they will make the necessary effort to be 'right'. Some people block mail from bad places in an attempt to hurt the bad place, i.e. in an etempt to make it expensive for them to be bad. But nowadays there are so many bad places, so much SPAM that leaks through filters, and so many missing emails, that it becomes harder and harder to hurt the bad places by blocking email. Nowadays it is normal for email to mysteriously bounce, to go missing, to get delivered days or months late. Soon Internet email will be like IRC, a quaint service for Internet enthusiasts and oldtimers, but not a useful tool for businesses or ordinary individuals. --Michael Dillon
Re: Blocking mail from bad places
I think there is definitely an adaptive factor... initially, vast quantities of spam disappeared (we have greylisting in as well), and my personal mailbox went from 100:1 spam to legit to 1:3 spam to legit... but over time, it has moved up to about a 1:1 spam to legit factor (and I get about 200-250 non-spam messages a day). Of course, we also have dozens of wildcarded domains and other legacy stuff that I wouldn't set up a site with today... Thomas Chris Owen wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On Apr 3, 2007, at 12:19 PM, Thomas Leavitt wrote: The current situation with email is flat out insane. There is no other way to describe it. I'd agree that the situation is bad but certainly not uncontrollable. We've had very good success keeping spam in check with a number of technologies while not really having too many problem with false positives. The last 6 months have been particularly nice. About that time we expanded our greylisting policy and that alone has made a dramatic difference. At one point before doing any greylisting we were accepting about 500,000 messages a day and delivering about 30,000. Now we accept about 80,000 and deliver about 25,000. That's a much, much more reasonable ratio. Really I don't think we are being very aggressive with our greylisting either. We currently greylist IP addresses on a handful of RBLs and ones that lack valid reverse DNS. The greylist only applies for 5 minutes and then we allow the mail through. That 5 minutes though makes all the difference in the world. We've had 2-3 senders complain (mostly about invalid reverse DNS) but really I'm fine with fix your shit for an answer to those people. If they can't then they can just wait the 5 minutes with all the other unwashed. Will spammers adapt? Sure. We've already seen stock spammers who are retrying at 5 minutes to the second. However, this is one of those issues where the cost of adapting may just be to high most of the time. Probably easier to just go after the weaker targets. My other theory on this is that if spammers really do adapt to greylisting, then they will have no choice but to actually start caring about bounces and clean their mailing lists. If they don't then they just won't be able to keep up with all the queued mail. Getting them to clean up their lists in itself would be a more than minor victory. Chris Chris Owen ~ Garden City (620) 275-1900 ~ Lottery (noun): President ~ Wichita (316) 858-3000 ~A stupidity tax Hubris Communications Inc www.hubris.net -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (Darwin) iD8DBQFGEpLRElUlCLUT2d0RAtDVAKCilqRm5LlGOu0z19Z+5PyWLA2QSgCfas+A bCbab8uLdYtPG9XT7FgbPBM= =U9Nw -END PGP SIGNATURE-
Re: Blocking mail from bad places
I can personally testify that, as a proportion of the mail I get through it, there's quite a bit of spam on MySpace - phishing scams (Adult MySpace Viewer), fake profiles designed to draw you to adult dating / webcam / porn sites, etc. Lots of attractive women claiming to want you to be their friend for some mysterious reason. Some of it is quite sophisticated: full blown instant profiles with fake comments ... the smarter spammers actually make the profile look real (often lifting material from legit user profiles), and then just stick their spam in the comments (and of course, comment spam is quite prevalent too, as is spam that invites you to join groups that are front ends to other sites, etc.) or wait a few days and then spam you via bulletins. Sometimes, it is pretty hard to tell what is spam, and what is not... I have an acquaintance who specializes in documenting these scams and tracking down the sponsors of the affiliate programs funding some of them and getting affiliate accounts canceled (I've done this once in a while myself). Sometimes there's a strange mixture of sophistication and stupidity - plausible profiles, very credible on their face... all batched together, five or six friend requests at a time, coming within two or three minutes of each other at 4 a.m. Or two requests, from users with slightly different names, and an identical photo. MySpace does a fairly good job of responding to complaints and terminating accounts (sometimes within hours of their creation). I'm not a dedicated YouTube user, but I've seen plenty of spam in comments on YouTube as well... this is a generic problem, with levels of vulnerability dependent on the architecture of the communications system, and the scale within which it operates (how attractive it is). [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tue, 03 Apr 2007 15:18:36 PDT, Scott Weeks said: What I meant was: when only a few folks use email, the spammers will go away. They won't go away, they'll just go infest whatever the people are using. We're already seeing significant amounts of blog-comment spam, and as soon as the spammers find a good methodology, they'll be Myspace and YouTube spam (if they aren't already)
Re: For anyone who hasn't yet asked Ren for an explanation...
... and he doesn't even mention that SBC also acquired Pacific Telesis
(PacBell, Nevada Bell) and SNET (in addition to Ameritech) before it
merged with ATT and Bell South.
Thomas
Majdi S. Abbas wrote:
On Fri, Jan 19, 2007 at 10:55:53AM -0800, Bill Woodcock wrote:
...of how this whole ATT rebranding thing works, Stephen Colbert summs it
up:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bj1Mtv9cD0Ieurl=
Much along the lines of seeing how fast you can name the
states, or their capitals alphabetically, how fast can *YOU* name the
22 operating companies?
No cheating!
(The converse game is principally played by Bell executives;
how fast can you {rename|acquire} the operating companies?)
--msa
--
Thomas Leavitt - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - 831-295-3917 (cell)
*** Independent Systems and Network Consultant, Santa Cruz, CA ***
Comment spammers chewing blogger bandwidth like crazy
A friend of mine operates a blog at seeingtheforest.com, and he pays for traffic over a (fairly minimal) cap. He posted this comment recently: http://www.seeingtheforest.com/archives/2007/01/eating_bandwidt.htm Eating Bandwidth Last month something ate up a tremendous amount of bandwidth at Seeing the Forest, costing me a lot of money. So now I regularly check bandwidth use. Why has 209.160.72.10, HopOne in DC, been eating a HUGE amount of bandwidth? Gigabytes! What are they doing? (I banned them.) Why has 220.226.63.254, an IP in India, been eating a tremendous amount of bandwidth? What are they doing? Why has 195.225.177.46, an IP in Ukraine, been eating a tremendous amount of bandwidth? What are they doing? Why has 62.194.1.235 AND 83.170.82.35 AND 89.136.115.220 AND 62.163.39.183 AND 212.241.204.145, all from the /same company/ in Amsterdam, been eating a TREMENDOUS amount of bandwidth? What are they doing? Why is 206.225.90.30 and 69.64.74.56 and Abacus America Inc.eating a TREMENDOUS amount of my bandwidth, *** One of the comments said: Yeah, I've seen a huge bump in my blog's traffic, I haven't figured out what they're doing, but it ate like 4Gb of bandwidth last month. Now that you mention it, I checked last month's stats and yep, there's 209.160.72.10 producing 62% of my blog traffic. I did a little checking around the web and they're an obvious spam host. Banned. *** They also chew up a lot of CPU (comment filter code). At few times, myself, I've had to simply take code offline that was getting hit too heavily... seems like the IPs (and their ilk) listed above are good prospects for a bad behavior blacklist, at a level below that of collaborative spam filter (which doesn't prevent traffic or CPU cycles from being consumed). Given the volume of traffic mentioned, this must be a real problem for some hosts and networks... although, on the other hand, if their marginal use rates are high enough, they might actually be making money off this. Regards, Thomas Leavitt -- Thomas Leavitt - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - 831-295-3917 (cell) *** Independent Systems and Network Consultant, Santa Cruz, CA ***
Re: Network end users to pull down 2 gigabytes a day, continuously?
It seems to me that multi-cast is a technical solution for the bandwidth consumption problems precipitated by real-time Internet video broadcast, but it doesn't seem to me that the bulk of current (or even future) Internet video traffic is going to be amenable to distribution via multi-cast - or, at least, separate and apart from whatever happens with multi-cast, a huge and growing volume of video traffic will be flowing over the 'net... I don't think consumers are going to accept having to wait for a scheduled broadcast of whatever piece of video content they want to view - at least if the alternative is being able to download and watch it nearly immediately. That said, for the most popular content with the widest audience, scheduled multi-cast makes sense... especially when the alternative is waiting for a large download to finish - contrawise, it doesn't seem reasonable to be constantly multi-casting *every* piece of video content anyone might ever want to watch (that in itself would consume an insane amount of bandwidth). How many pieces of video content are there on YouTube? How many more can we expect to emerge over the next decade, given the ever decreasing cost of entry for reasonably decent video production? All of which, to me, leaves the fundamental issue of how the upsurge in traffic is going to be handled left unresolved. Thomas Simon Lockhart wrote: On Tue Jan 09, 2007 at 07:52:02AM +, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Given that the broadcast model for streaming content is so successful, why would you want to use the Internet for it? What is the benefit? How many channels can you get on your (terrestrial) broadcast receiver? If you want more, your choices are satellite or cable. To get cable, you need to be in a cable area. To get satellite, you need to stick a dish on the side of your house, which you may not want to do, or may not be allowed to do. With IPTV, you just need a phoneline (and be close enough to the exchange/CO to get decent xDSL rate). In the UK, I'm already delivering 40+ channels over IPTV (over inter-provider multicast, to any UK ISP that wants it). Simon -- Thomas Leavitt - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - 831-295-3917 (cell) *** Independent Systems and Network Consultant, Santa Cruz, CA *** begin:vcard fn:Thomas Leavitt n:Leavitt;Thomas org:Godmoma's Forge, LLC adr:Suite B;;916 Soquel Ave.;Santa Cruz;CA;95062;United States email;internet:[EMAIL PROTECTED] title:Systems and Network Consultant tel;fax:831-469-3382 tel;cell:831-295-3917 url:http://www.godmomasforge.com/ version:2.1 end:vcard
Re: Network end users to pull down 2 gigabytes a day, continuously?
back to NANOG content, I think video (not streamed but multi-path distributed video) is going to bring the networks down not by sheer bandwidth alone but by challenging the assumptions behind the engineering of the network. I don't think you need huge SANs per se to store the content either, since it is multi-source/multi-sink, the reliability is built-in. The SPs like Verizon ATT moving fiber to the home hoping to get in on the value add action are in for an awakening IMHO. Regards Bora ps. I apologize for the tone of my previous email. That sounded grumpier than I usually am. -- Thomas Leavitt - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - 831-295-3917 (cell) *** Independent Systems and Network Consultant, Santa Cruz, CA *** begin:vcard fn:Thomas Leavitt n:Leavitt;Thomas org:Godmoma's Forge, LLC adr:Suite B;;916 Soquel Ave.;Santa Cruz;CA;95062;United States email;internet:[EMAIL PROTECTED] title:Systems and Network Consultant tel;fax:831-469-3382 tel;cell:831-295-3917 url:http://www.godmomasforge.com/ version:2.1 end:vcard
Network end users to pull down 2 gigabytes a day, continuously?
If this application takes off, I have to presume that everyone's baseline network usage metrics can be tossed out the window... Thomas From: David Farber [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Using Venice Project? Better get yourself a non-capping ISP... Date: Fri, 5 Jan 2007 11:11:46 -0500 Begin forwarded message: From: D.H. van der Woude [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: January 5, 2007 11:06:31 AM EST To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Using Venice Project? Better get yourself a non-capping ISP... I am one of Venice' beta testers. Works like a charm, admittedly with a 20/1 Mbs ADSL2+ connection and a unlimited use ISP. Even at sub-DVD quality the data use is staggering... Venice Project would break many users' ISP conditions http://www.out-law.com/page-7604 OUT-LAW News, 03/01/2007 Internet television system The Venice Project could break users' monthly internet bandwith limits in hours, according to the team behind it. It downloads 320 megabytes (MB) per hour from users' computers, meaning that users could reach their monthly download limits in hours and that it could be unusable for bandwidth-capped users. The Venice Project is the new system being developed by Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, the Scandinavian entrepreneurs behind the revolutionary services Kazaa and Skype. It is currently being used by 6,000 beta testers and is due to be launched next year. The data transfer rate is revealed in the documentation sent to beta testers and the instructions make it very clear what the bandwidth requirements are so that users are not caught out. Under a banner saying 'Important notice for users with limits on their internet usage', the document says: The Venice Project is a streaming video application, and so uses a relatively high amount of bandwidth per hour. One hour of viewing is 320MB downloaded and 105 Megabytes uploaded, which means that it will exhaust a 1 Gigabyte cap in 10 hours. Also, the application continues to run in the background after you close the main window. For this reason, if you pay for your bandwidth usage per megabyte or have your usage capped by your ISP, you should be careful to always exit the Venice Project client completely when you are finished watching it, says the document Many ISPs offer broadband connections which are unlimited to use by time, but have limits on the amount of data that can be transferred over the connection each month. Though limits are 'advisory' and not strict, users who regularly far exceed the limits break the terms of their deals. BT's most basic broadband package BT Total Broadband Package 1, for example, has a 2GB monthly 'usage guideline'. This would be reached after 20 hours of viewing. The software is also likely to transfer data even when not being used. The Venice system is going to run on a peer-to-peer (P2P) network, which means that users host and send the programmes to other users in an automated system. OUT-LAW has seen screenshots from the system and talked to one of the testers of it, who reports very favourably on its use. This is going to be the one. I've used some of the other software out there and it's fine, but my dad could use this, they've just got it right, he said. It looks great, you fire it up and in two minutes you're live, you're watching television. The source said that claims being made for the system being near high definition in terms of picture quality are wide of the mark. It's not high definition. It's the same as normal television, he said. -- Private where private belongs, public where it's needed, and an admission that circumstances alter cases. Robert A. Heinlein, 1969 -- Thomas Leavitt - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - 831-295-3917 (cell) *** Independent Systems and Network Consultant, Santa Cruz, CA *** begin:vcard fn:Thomas Leavitt n:Leavitt;Thomas org:Godmoma's Forge, LLC adr:Suite B;;916 Soquel Ave.;Santa Cruz;CA;95062;United States email;internet:[EMAIL PROTECTED] title:Systems and Network Consultant tel;fax:831-469-3382 tel;cell:831-295-3917 url:http://www.godmomasforge.com/ version:2.1 end:vcard
Re: Home media servers, AUPs, and upstream bandwidth utilization.
Check the AUP and TOS for that EVDO connection - my guess is that by viewing stuff from your Slingbox, you're risking termination of service. I don't have an EVDO connection myself (still toodling along with my Sidekick's GPRS), and part of the reason why is that they have a lot of what I think are unreasonable restrictions on how these services can be used -- this is based on what I've read on the various mailing lists I'm on (Dave Farber's IP, Declan McCullagh's Politech, and Dewayne Hendrick's Dewayne-Net). I don't know how significant restrictions like this are from a competitive perspective, but my broadband ISP also has a very liberal TOS... and that's one of the reasons I use them. I suspect that as items like the Slingbox become more common, folks will start paying more attention to what they're permitted to do with their upstream bandwidth. Thomas Roland Dobbins wrote: I recently purchased a Slingbox Pro, and have set it up so that I can remotely access/control my home HDTV DVR and stream video remotely. My broadband access SP specifically allow home users to run servers, as long as said servers don't cause a problem for the SP infrastructure nor for other users or doing anything illegal; as long as I'm not breaking the law or making problems for others, they don't care. The Slingbox is pretty cool; when I access it, both the video and audio quality are more than acceptable. It even works well when I access it via EVDO; on average, I'm pulling down about 450kb/sec up to about 580kb/sec over TCP (my home upstream link is a theoretical 768kb/sec, minus overhead; I generally get something pretty close to that). What I'm wondering is, do broadband SPs believe that this kind of system will become common enough to make a signficant difference in traffic paterns, and if so, how do they believe it will affect their access infrastructures in terms of capacity, given the typical asymmetries seen in upstream vs. downstream capacity in many broadband access networks? If a user isn't doing something like breaking the law by illegally redistributing copyrighted content, is this sort of activity permitted by your AUPs? If so, would you change your AUPs if you saw a significant shift towards non-infringing upstream content streaming by your broadband access customers? If not, would you consider changing your AUPs in order to allow this sort of upstream content streaming of non-infringing content, with the caveat that users can't caused problems for your infrastructure or for other users, and perhaps with a bandwidth cap? Would you police down this traffic if you could readily classify it, as many SPs do with P2P applications? Would the fact that this type of traffic doesn't appear to be illegal or infringing in any way lead you to treat it differently than P2P traffic (even though there are many legitimate uses for P2P file-sharing systems, the presumption always seems to be that the majority of P2P traffic is in illegally-redistributed copyrighted content, and thus P2P technologies seem to've acquired a taint of distaste from many quarters, rightly or wrongly). Also, have you considered running a service like this yourselves, a la VoIP/IPTV? Vidoeconferencing is somewhat analogous, but in most cases, videoconference calls (things like iChat, Skype videoconferencing, etc.) generally seem to use a less bandwidth than the Slingox, and it seems to me that they will in most cases be of shorter duration than, say, a business traveler who wants to keep up with Lost or 24 and so sits down to stream video from his home A/V system for 45 minutes to an hour at a stretch. Sorry to ramble, this neat little toy just sparked a few questions, and I figured that some of you are dealing with these kinds of issues already, or are anticipating doing so in the not-so-distant future. Any insight or informed speculation greatly appreciated! --- Roland Dobbins [EMAIL PROTECTED] // 408.527.6376 voice All battles are perpetual. -- Milton Friedman -- Thomas Leavitt - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - 831-295-3917 (cell) *** Independent Systems and Network Consultant, Santa Cruz, CA *** begin:vcard fn:Thomas Leavitt n:Leavitt;Thomas org:Godmoma's Forge, LLC adr:Suite B;;916 Soquel Ave.;Santa Cruz;CA;95062;United States email;internet:[EMAIL PROTECTED] title:Systems and Network Consultant tel;fax:831-469-3382 tel;cell:831-295-3917 url:http://www.godmomasforge.com/ version:2.1 end:vcard
Re: Home media servers, AUPs, and upstream bandwidth utilization.
Interesting suite of services and features at a price that makes our domestic wireless broadband look sick... however, look at their AUP: http://www.three.co.uk/xseries/fair_use_policy.omp * Mobile access to Orb or Slingbox does not include using your mobile as a modem. -- so this isn't true wireless broadband * When using the internet, you can’t use some websites (including adult websites) and some websites aren’t compatible with all mobiles. -- so big brother company gets to decide what you can and cannot view * Fair Use Limit: 1 GB each month -- it says this right under Unlimited Data ... and they'll cut off your access to data till the following month if you don't voluntarily do so yourself, once that's been exceeded * for some screwy reason (maybe just so they don't have to figure out who is a spammer and not) they limit you to 10,000 Windows Live Messenger messages (like these are going to suck bandwidth), which amounts to 300 a day... reasonable, unless you're a heavy user: that's a message a minute for five hours * 5,000 minutes of Skype to Skype calls * Slingbox and Orb usage is limited to 80 hours a month... ... all of these are listed under Unlimited usage headers. All of them are subject to being cut off for the month if you exceed them. Did someone change the definition of Unlimited in the dictionary? I'm not saying these are unreasonable limits, but it is rather deceptive to advertise services as Unlimited while applying limits that a reasonable person, using them in the fashion intended, could easily exceed (my kids, mobile television, more than eighty hours if I let them, no sweat... yap on IM from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. 7 days a week? you betcha.) These limitations, applied to services here in the U.S., make wireless broadband access very unattractive to me... even at $60/mo., it'd be doable, except for the restrictions... I spend well over $200/mo. between my company cell, landline/DSL, and the supplementary services associated with each. I'd be totally willing to go out on the bleeding edge, kill my wireline Internet access and my cell services, and go with a pure wireless data/VOIP solution... but not with the restrictions typically placed on them. I want to be able to have my wireless data connection backended to my office and home networks... I want to be able to download ISOs for Linux distributions, and upload AVIs and WMVs to my in house server... I want to be able to run the home media server of my own choice and access it from anywhere. Etc. I wish someone in the marketplace would emerge to serve folks like me. Thomas Alexander Harrowell wrote: UK UMTS operator 3 (a Hutchison division) is advertising its so-called X-Series service, which provides unlimited data service (plus various lumps of steam telephony) for £25 rising to £40 a month. Skype is being bundled with the devices involved, and here's the kicker - 3 is offering Slingboxen thrown in for £99 extra. 3 has just begun HSDPA Class 5 upgrades in metro areas (claimed maximum 3.6 Mbits/s) and plans to launch HSUPA in the uplink next spring, with a claimed max of 1.4Mbits/s. On 12/25/06, *Thomas Leavitt* [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Check the AUP and TOS for that EVDO connection - my guess is that by viewing stuff from your Slingbox, you're risking termination of service. I don't have an EVDO connection myself (still toodling along with my Sidekick's GPRS), and part of the reason why is that they have a lot of what I think are unreasonable restrictions on how these services can be used -- this is based on what I've read on the various mailing lists I'm on (Dave Farber's IP, Declan McCullagh's Politech, and Dewayne Hendrick's Dewayne-Net). I don't know how significant restrictions like this are from a competitive perspective, but my broadband ISP also has a very liberal TOS... and that's one of the reasons I use them. I suspect that as items like the Slingbox become more common, folks will start paying more attention to what they're permitted to do with their upstream bandwidth. Thomas Roland Dobbins wrote: I recently purchased a Slingbox Pro, and have set it up so that I can remotely access/control my home HDTV DVR and stream video remotely. My broadband access SP specifically allow home users to run servers, as long as said servers don't cause a problem for the SP infrastructure nor for other users or doing anything illegal; as long as I'm not breaking the law or making problems for others, they don't care. The Slingbox is pretty cool; when I access it, both the video and audio quality are more than acceptable. It even works well when I access it via EVDO; on average, I'm pulling down about 450kb/sec up to about 580kb/sec over TCP (my home upstream link is a theoretical
Re: today's Wash Post Business section
Jeff Shultz wrote: Google and Yahoo (and their toolbars) have replaced the address line. Which can lead to some confusion when you think the customer has just gone to your homepage, but instead has gone to the Google search page for the URL... and then you just hope your homepage is the first hit on it. What blows my mind is that from what I've seen the default install of IE7 doesn't include the Menu Bar displayed. :( Yes, and I anticipate many very annoying support issues with my clients as a result... Microsoft is apparently determined to eliminate the Menu Bar as an interface characteristic (I've heard that the latest version of Office also eliminates it)... one very annoying example of what disappears as a result is the Find in page feature (Cntl-F). The first thing I do when I upgrade someone to IE7 is turn on the Menu Bar... and I've noticed that almost every other computer I've touched with IE7 has it turned back on... Thomas
Re: today's Wash Post Business section
Many people don't understand anything about how they access the Internet, they have a vague idea that they need to type a domain name into a box somewhere... so they type www.myspace.com into the Google search box, the result set pops up, and then they click on the first result to get to the web site in question... I've seen it more than once. Thomas Robert E. Seastrom wrote: Edward Lewis [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: The #10 google search in the Who Is category (leading off with Borat, Hezbollah, EU, hot, ...) is IP Who Is. I'm not sure what to make of that. Has google replaced the whois client? Well, the article talks about people using myspace as a search term, when their goal is apparently to get to a web site. This seems to be a case of the same thing. I just tried a few variants of search to get whois data for a block that's assigned but not been used publicly (so as to avoid mail header hits etc) out of Google - no dice. If you search (literally) for ip who is, though, the top hit is for the ARIN web-based whois, the second is for someone I'm not familiar with, the third for RIPE, the 7th for APNIC, etc. ARIN employee lurkers on the list would be better suited to giving us the stats, but my impression has been that the great unwashed masses have used the web forms in preference to the command line client for years now. ---Rob
Re: dns - golog
What would a query result for a non-functioning domain look like? Or would this only apply to unregistered domains? Would a common user be able to distinguish between a domain that was registered, but for which DNS was not functioning, and one that was unregistered? If I were a user, and forgot to renew a domain, would it immediately go into this pool when it expired - thus presenting all of the potential viewers not with an DNS error message, but someone else's advertising? If I ran utilities and services which expected to obtain a different response, depending on whether a DNS query was successfully resolved, what would happen to them? How would, say, SMTP servers which rejected hosts for which no valid DNS could be determined, behave as a result of this set up - would mail no longer be rejected if it came from [EMAIL PROTECTED] How about programs designed to time out when DNS lookups failed... etc. etc. There are a whole host of issues that emerge when you deliberately and consciously break DNS this way... if golog has answers to these questions, it might be interesting to hear them... ... finally, why go through all this hassle for what has to be an utterly trivial amount of money resulting from people being presented with something totally unexpected and clicking on a link therein... how valuable are these people as customers? I can't imagine much... Thomas Martin Hannigan wrote: * From: Luke Besson * Date: Thu Oct 19 08:54:47 2006 I work for a big French ISP and I manage the DNS architecture (based on Linux+Bind); Golog proposed to our society the DNS redirect service (redirect all the not existant domains according to marketing criteria). Even if our marketing team would like to join this solution, our technical team opposes hardly to such a not-standard implementation of the DNS. Can you suggest me any objective reason in order to invalidate this proposal? This is a network autonomy issue. What occurs inside the provider edge related to routing and applications is the responsibility of the provider and they have the right to modify answers or routes in their networks, even if they are not theirs. There is some holy grail you should consider, like making sure that etrade.com is etrade.com, the legitimate IP/trademark holder. The questions to ask yourself as an organization are something like this: a) is there enough revenue here to consider? b) is someone else going to capture revenue between my customer and myself if I don't? c) will this break my network or the networks of others? If you can answer the first two yes, the third is worth trying to make no. -M -- Martin Hannigan(c) 617-388-2663 Renesys Corporation(w) 617-395-8574 Member of Technical Staff Network Operations [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: ICANN ordered by Illinois court to suspend spamhaus.org
Here's an excerpt from the blog entry: Instead of badmouthing the judge, what I would imagine is far more productive are letters from ISPs around the world attesting to the importance of Spamhaus as an organization and emphasizing how it is the individual ISP, not Spamhaus, making the affirmative choice to stop e360s messages from entering your servers and your property. The author also says: Maybe counsel for one of the larger ISPs would be willing to act as a clearinghouse and file the letters, en masse, with the court. I hope folks take these comments to heart. I posted my own experience to the blog. I encourage others to do so. Thomas Gadi Evron wrote: This is a really good perspective on the subject, from an Illinois bar lawyer: http://blogs.securiteam.com/index.php/archives/664 On Fri, 6 Oct 2006, Gadi Evron wrote: Information about this court ruling can be found on Spamhaus.s web site, here: http://www.spamhaus.org/archive/legal/e360/kocoras_order_6_10.pdf Apparently, at this stage, it is only a proposed ruling. But I am no lawyer. Gadi.
