Re: Available consultant Vijay for Unix System Admin with sun Solories Expireance.
- From: ibuprofin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Moe Trin)
- Date: Tue, 01 Jul 2008 14:46:09 -0500
[posted last night - disappeared? re-post]
On 30 Jun 2008, in the Usenet newsgroup comp.unix.admin, in article
<slrng6h6q2.cb5.read_the_sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, jpd wrote:
Moe Trin <ibuprofin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
A contact at the local junior college tells me they had to block
access to all but the sanctioned Big Eight groups (using a proxy
server, and firewall) because of abuse, and malware infestations.
Probably could've easily left in alt.* without binaries too, but....
I'm not sure why they dropped everything. Their upstream peer is the
local university, and I've noted that most of the posts from there were
using google instead of the university news server.
Used to be, they'd allow the students to bring in their homework on
floppies that had to be malware inspected at the door. That's out, and
now they use plain text email - with a 25 kb quota on the mail.
See, it really pays to write emails to look like emails and not spam. :-)
Actually, they did it to block people mailing in binaries.
Four years ago, close to a third of my spam load came from zombies on
residential cable networks like comcast, rr, or verizon and the rest
of the former baby Bells.
Which is roughly the timeframe I was talking about.
It got to the point where I wrote a tool for home use that polled the
ISP mail servers regularly, and on finding there was mail grabbed the
headers and first ten lines of the body. There was a white-list, but
after that it got downright snarky. One reason for dropping mail was
the presence of "Received:" headers reporting the delivery source
having no PTR, a generic name that looked to contain the IP address,
or having the strings (cable|client|dial|dsl|dyn|pool|ppp|user|wiley)
in the PTR name. That eliminated a lot of the zombie crap.
Didn't they have a local sys-admin?
If they had they'd neglected to tell me about it. They were pretty good
at things like sending mails of the ``hey, could you give dave a mail
account?'' type, without bothering to explain whotf this dave guy was.
Aware of those situations. "Dave" was given the password originally
used by Frank - but everyone is using that account because there is no
need to have individual accounts (until Enrico fumble-fingers something
and trashes most of the files in that account). Our auditor (part of
the security group) likes to remind people that this type of activity
can get people fired. No one has been fired for this in several years,
but the message gets through.
Back then I knew everybody in the company (at least by face and login),
so introducing new overseas hires this way was a little bit grating.
Nevermind that for some of those I later learned that there shouldn't've
been an account at all. The people there apparently didn't communicate
much among themselves either.
We avoid some of this problem by requiring advanced written requests
from the department head before creating any accounts. HR gets a copy
of the request, and in the event of a person leaving or being
transferred, we get mail from HR (although the department head is
supposed to tell us this first).
Worse was unannounced registering of new domains and moving their
mailboxes to some local outsourced provider, while still expecting to
have entries in my namespace and system.
POP and IMAP is blocked at the perimeter, and we get stats of web
connections - that isn't a problem here.
As you're aware, most users think webmail is a perfect solution.
Most users fail to think about their own ergonomics, and if they did,
they'd lack knowledge of what else is available and feel helpless
because they don't have the means to change it.
I think this was already mentioned - the company expects all business
mail to go through the company mail servers, and attempting to do any
company business using a non-company mail account is grounds for
dismissal. It's simply not tolerated.
I also think most by far people are incapable to write readable
emails, nevermind effective ones. It does affect my willingness to
come up with a helpful answer.
Writing has become a lost art. Part of it is the changing educational
schemes and the dumbing down of the population. On job offers, you will
often see a "requirement" for "excellent communications skills" and I
am sure this is ignored by everyone because such skills are so rare now.
Since such emails often lack vital information I'm much more inclined
to give their homework (``write a good email'') back to them with the
instruction to try again until they get at least the content right.
Oh, you mean the idiots who think that "PowerPoint" is an email tool?
(Some time ago, my wife showed me a mail she had received - the whole
damn thing was a powerpoint style - except that it was from a government
entity who was replying to some state transportation ruling question.
What's worse is that the original mail was a URL to a powerpoint file on
some klowns computer, not an attachment or a text copy.)
I'll admit it would take extra effort on your part, but this would
satisfy the customers
Had I had the time, setting up such a thing as a courtesy for those
affected by their own provider for the express purpose of communicating
with our customer support (only), sure.
When the only other solution is snail-mail, this makes sense. Obviously
you'd restrict it - we don't need another open spam relay.
========================
So the fire truck comes up to the crash scene, extends this boom
([...]), pokes a hole through the side of the bird with the nozzle,
and turns on the foam deluge system. Whoopie!
Nice idea, and makes quite a lot of sense. Except for the minor point
of deliberately weakening the fuselage.
They aren't. That nozzle has the hardware necessary to pierce the skin.
Where it would run into a problem is if it hit a frame, rib, or
stiffener of some kind. With metal aircraft this is no problem, as you
can see the rivet lines even through paint. It's going to be more
difficult with composite materials. That's why they're experimenting.
Has to be strong enough to withstand passenger and weather abuse and
the daily wear and tear, yet still be weak enough to be easily poked
through within seconds.
Think of a big spear.
Also, what if there's a passenger sitting right next to it, waiting for
the rest of the crowd to disperse enough that he can move? Purely going
on numbers, one passenger kebab to save 500+ others would be acceptable.
For the individual, though, it's a different story.
Given the way people would be trying to leave (or already had left) by
the time the fire truck arrived (remember that bird is supposed to be
empty in 90 seconds, and it's going to take some amount of time to get
the fire truck in place) this is a comparatively small problem.
Old guy.
.
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