A very restricted SPF TXT record that specifies _precisely_ which IP addresses an incoming SMTP for a given domain an email _must_ come from cannot hurt. At best, your IT admins have wasted a half hour, at best they have significantly improved the chance of your outgoing email being not treated as suspicious by bulk email handlers such as yahoo, gmail and hotmail (especially hotmail).

You want proof? Check your shit. http://postmaster.live.com/Services.aspx . And no, I don't work for MS, but damn they provide the best postmaster tools on the interweb for monitoring shit like email deliverability. Don't even talk to me about the pestilence that is Yahoo!, those pricks remind me of my evil DM who used to make up pointless forms just to pass the time.

Guy is a fucking turkey. iinet only took part in the trial to prove how idiotic it was, anyone who has a ssh tunnel to somewhere in the rest of the world can immediately bypass this foolish plan, and that has been pointed out to him. Repeatedly. Should I mention the turkey thing again? Not even to mention stenography, gpg encrypted emails, etc, etc, etc. This guy is without a doubt the biggest dumbfuck in the current Labour government.

Why don't we vote the other guys back in, I hear you ask? Why, because in Labour this kind of turkey is somewhat rare, whereas the Liberals/Nationals has a good half dozen or so wack jobs even loonier than him. Why are so many extremists attracted to politics in Aus? Because capable people stand to make way more in the private sector, and those very few capable people with a strong sense of ethics tend to join a party with an ethical basis, such as the Greens, who have yet to make enough traction to make useful changes to the fucked up political culture in this country.

And for what it is worth, the legislation is still just a twinkle in Conroy's eye, it hasn't even been tabled in the house of reps yet, let alone pass a hostile senate.

Believe me, our politicians have not been cool since the early to mid seventies.

Not saying the rest of us don't have some chops, but really, I don't know anyone who doesn't think Conroy is an unmitigated fool. He was elected because he was Labour, not because of the crazy shit he believes, and he got his cabinet position because of factional balance, despite what shit Rudd spouts about being above factional politics.

Yes, sadly so, we need to introduce a new law. Must be at least this technically literate to hold a ministerial position governing technology. Sadly, that would exclude essentially all currently elected politicians, as well as the vast bulk of the potential electoral fodder.

This is essentially the end result of having a technological society where technological education is not mandatory. They require you to learn English, so you can speak to people, but the don't require you understand technology, so that you can understand the society you live in.

As a consequence, at best, the pollies are neophytes, and at worst luddites.

I'm sure I can't be the only one who saw this and thought, "You told us this, what, a week ago?". Goddamn moderators.

I think these guys were trolling jaded /. readers for kicks

Oh man, the number of times I've heard one of the BD/marketing guys spouting off about some shit he has only been paid to sell, not understand and I've thought, man, seriously hope no one he is talking to has a clue, because, really, if they do, we are going to look like dicks right now.

This shit happens a hundred times a day all over the world, BD/marketing guys spout shit, what we pay them for, apparently, just happens this time someone wrote it down where people who know better could see.

Nothing MS specific about this, except this particular waste of space happens to work for them. Or at least, he did :)

Dude, 17C is shorts and t-shirt weather for me.

Shit, 15C is too. Admittedly when it was 11C with sideways rain the other day I doubted by apparel a little, but I still waited until the end of the game to go change.

I hereby nominate this as the most singularly stupid question added to AskSlashdot in the whole time I have been reading ./, and that is a long goddamn while encompassing some pretty dumb-arsed questions.

Short answer, "Did you recently find the internet?" shortly followed up by "what goddamned rock have you been living under?".

Of course verifying your email address with the guys who hope you are desperate enough for a larger wang will result in more wang-enlarging email being sent to that address.

Where the fuck do you think they get these addresses from? Trust me when I tell you the data in those lists is poorly verified. Even in "legitimate" opt-in lists a large percentage have either given something which doesn't even look like an email address and non-existent validation has allowed it in or something which could be an email address but was never double opt-ed in results in up to (in my experience) 30% of companys' mailing lists being non-existant.

So many of the companies in that space have been working in the fax spam business that it is impossible to make them understand the current environment. That said, I'm talking about Australia, in the US you can still pretty much spam with impunity.

Obama, you planning on replacing CAN-SPAM with something with teeth any time soon?

Obviously the whole redhat/debian/ubuntu thing is not simple. Personally, I have ubuntu on developers desktops, debian on servers except for the annoying centos servers we inherited from a merger.

There a few things about the default centos/redhat setup that shit me enormously, such as an idiotic umask that allows group writable perms by default. Can anyone spell unable to ssh to host due ownership permissions for 40 points? Twonk who decided that idea needs drowning and resuscitation repeatedly until it no longer works.

Same deal with the clear in .logout. If I care whether people see what I have been doing I will hit ctrl-L. I don't need some nanny twaping the clear screen key just because some turkey has logged out as root.

Red hat is synonymous with annoying defaults these days.

C'mon, clearly creationists are not about religion. Haven't you heard, they're scientists.

No, really

*guffaw*

That is one of the most succinctly stated reasons for opposing the mind control of the weak I have ever seen.

You, sir, haven't the slightest idea what you are talking about.

The state of Victoria has been in the grips of the worst drought in a century for the past 12 years, leaving the whole state tinder dry.

The day of Black Saturday the highest temperatures on record were observed in many parts of the state, and extremely hot, dry and high winds were blowing out of the semi-arid center of the country.

You didn't even have to RFTA, you just had to see from TFS that here in Australia we do control burns in the off season, fuel management is a critical part of fire management in this country, especially when you consider that many parts of the country have acclimatised to the fire-stick agriculture practiced by the aboriginal inhabitant of this country for over 40,000 years

If you seriously think that the already observed climatic changes are having no impact on the prevalence and severity of natural disasters around the globe you need to pull your head out of your arse and realise that's not coffee you've been smelling.