Spam-sewerage, WMD, AMD, RIAA

Dogs ate the WMD
Regarding the image of Terry Shannon by the weapon of mass destruction and associated headline, several appropriate captions could be.

"The dogs ate my Weapons of Mass Destruction."

"Closer to a nuke than Saddam ever was!"

"Later on Oprah, meet the Human Intelligence sources quoted by the CIA AND their handler!"

BC

Spam Sewerage One
I can't talk for the Yahoo Mails of the world, but I did work at a fairly large (75,000+ users) U.S. ISP several years ago and we had little to no problems blocking the propagation of viruses and blatant spam.

We did it by using mail proxies; redundant whitebox linux wintel machines dedicated to preproccessing mail. These machines used the RBL and ORBS to pre-filter known spammers and open mail relays. Sendmail rule sets were also used to identify and filter the autogenerated virus subjects and bodies. I also believe we had reverse DNS enabled; meaning that if the sending server's DNS IP didn't match the IP of the sending machine we refused delivery. This filters out a lot of the traffic from SMTP trojans and worms.

Was it easy? Well, it wasn't incredibly hard but it did take some practice and the willingness to say "Sorry, but you won't receive email from Aunt Harriet as long as her ISP is spamhaus.com.tw"

Likely that's the real reason why Yahoo and the like don't do it. Few executives are willing to irritate customers (excluding the RIAA and SCO). We had daily complaints about not receiving emails, though usually from the same 2 or 3 users we suspected of being spammers themselves. Most complainers shut up when one of the more brutal admins directed 1/75,000th of the filtered spam at the user's account and overloaded their account.

Perhaps if all the BT users forwarded their spam on to one of the executives? No, I'm sure they have filtering on their corporate email.

James

Spam Sewerage Two
Hi,

As a small ISP our relatively modest mail systems can cope with virus scanning and spam scanning email even when 50-60% of it is spam, dns blacklists also help to drop most of it before it's accepted, but for those big ISP's that are dealing with several hundred thousand or more messages a day, most of which are spam or virus laden it would take a quite mighty amount of resources to scan all those messages, when a spammer sends out thousands per minute, or the latest virus hits the net your systems need to deal with it, the overhead during these times is immense, even without scanning ISPs mail servers sometimes cannot cope.

Sure if you throw enough cash at the problem you might get somewhere but then you won't get £20 pm broadband, anyway the answers to your questions are it's beyond they ability to offer such cheap net access and at the same time provide e-mail filtering that copes with the deluge of crap they come under daily, if a provider you know of is managing this then the resources have been taken from another part of their service or are being subsidised.

Best regards

Chris Needham
Technical Systems Administrator
The Business Solutions Network

Watts it all about, AMD?
"They list the magic number, 89w, for all K8 based chips except for the mobile parts, which are all listed at a lower figure, but the same one for all clock grades. Come on AMD, how dumb do you think we are?"

Apparently some people are dumber then they should be, for if you _READ_ the documents correctly, you see that 89w is the Maximum power consumption for the entire Line of processors being discussed. Unlike Intel, AMD can't afford to validate heatsinks and cases for each new model of a processor that comes out, so they simply stated the Max power dissipation the line (Opteron, A64, etc) shall output, and will validate 3rd party heatsinks/case/etc based upon this number. Thus, a heatsink validated today, will still be qualified to run future Opteron and A64 processors as the heat dissipation increases with each new model released. This goes for all solutions based upon Opterons and A64s - AMD wants products designed Now to work with processors it deliver in 6 months. this is a Smart Move on AMD's part, especially in the enterprise market. Yes, it may suck for engineers who want current power dissipation numbers to base their solutions around - but AMD doesn't want products released for today's 60-67W max models that will be incompatible with future models.

This is really fairly easy and simple to understand, and from an enterprise point of a view, a very Good Thing (Enterprises like to deal with products with long lifecycles, and a motherboard that can only handle today's Opteron and not the ones coming out in 04Q1 is Not an enterprise class product).

I have no doubt AMD _can_ publish the true dissipation numbers, but the second they do, some dumb schmuck is going to design a 1u server that can't handle a future processor's heat output, and then AMD looks bad because some poor customer will fry their servers by using too-fast Opterons. In the market AMD is entering, having one customer cry 'It melted! My Intel servers never melted!' would be a death-blow. And yes, I know a 'melt' scenario is very unlikely, but having your new shiny Opteron machines reboot every few minutes is just as bad.

In the end, you're making a mountain over a molehill, or more accurately, you're demonizing something AMD is doing to protect its customers... so its not really making a mountain out of a molehill, it's like complaining about how the Dyke is ugly and wanting it torn down - all the while ignoring the Bad Things(TM) that could happen if the Dyke was removed.

Jon Franz

Comparing Apples with Pairs
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInformation/0,,30_118_9485_9488^9494,00.html

I swear if you scratch that webpage it smells like apple!

karl

Black MaRIAA
This is in response to the comments by Charles Demerjian about online music sales.

I think there is another more fundamental reason why the record companies are terrified to give in to online sales, and this has to do with target markets. For years now, the recording industry has targeted young teens with pocket cash as their primary listeners, however when the market inevitably moves online, how will these children pay for the music they wish to listen to?

It's one thing to have a purse full of pounds and go to the local mall to get the latest boy band aria. It's totally another to expect a 13 year old to have a credit card in hand to purchase this music online.

This means that either a way must be found to enable children to have access to credit online, or the record companies target audiences must change. Either way the change will mean uncertainty as compared to the past.

Sincerely

Chuck Hunnefield
Technology Coordinator
Linden Hall School for Girls

The Vinyl Curtain
Hi Mike,

I found this article interesting, there were two things I just wanted to point out.

Vinyl seems to be having a bit of a renaissance, with sites like Simply Vinyl being able to reach a world audience and high quality pressing plants with good engineers coming online particularly in the Czech Republic. There are a number of technical reasons for this and I won't go into in depth and bore the socks off you, the primary one is the tactile feel for a DJ to use a turntable is kind of like the QWERTY keyboard, there is no other other better soluton out there which is why people like Denon, Pioneer and Technics try to ape it.

Another reason is that some non-dance orientated independent record companies have woken up to the fact that analogue recordings are harder to reproduce perfectly and the sleeve art is also part of the musical product (think Sergeant Peppers Lonely Heart Band or any of the Grateful Dead album sleeves). For instance, The White Stripes last album was circulated to potential reviewers as a vinyl double-pack. Vinyl is not dead, just a bit more esoteric (like BSD users).

Secondly, having the distributors in with the record companies doesn't guarantee that the distributors will not abuse their power in the same way that the record companies have done? They will have the same lawyers and possibly the 'creme' of the record industry execs to set best practice in signing artists. Dealing directly with Dell does not mean that you will be treated better than dealing with a distributor. It's a dirty game all over.

Kind regards
Ged CARROLL

More Sewerage
Fine in theory, but you are asking ISPs to filter on _content_. This is something they are very reluctant to do as then they have problems arguing "common carrier" status in court (and in the US they have constitutional problems to deal with as well.)

One thing that would work is to filter on message size. Swen for example is always greater than 140K bytes. I put a maximum size of 140K on all incoming email and that's 100% effective against Swen and many other viral payloads. I receive very few legitimate 24,000 word emails so for me this is a perfect solution (it helps of course that I run a real OS and use sendmail :-))

Geoff Lane

Yet more Sewerage
I agree with you entirely. The problems for the ISPs, however, include.

Such filtering requires some thought and skill, or spending money to outsource the problem to someone like Brightmail or MessageLabs. Given the ISPs seem to be regarded as a cash- cow business by most of the larger companies involved with them, this is hard.

"If none of the others do it, not doing it isn't a competitive disadvantage"

Customers. I'm a CIX customer and CIX offer Brightmail. But you should have seen the fuss put up by a couple of rotating- eyed customers when the prospect that CIX could "censor their personal e-mail" came up. So Brightmail is optional on a per-account basis, which makes it more complex to support. Given that the larger an ISP is, the dumber is its average customer, quailing at the prospect is only human.

best
John Dallman

[That's enough letters, Ed.]