By the by, as funny as the parodies are ,what's with the original? The guy on the right looks like he's pointing to the ground and saying "Ah... look how close I am to the edge." And the others are just looking onward, as if to say, "Chan is a very brave man for walking so close to that edge. We should all be very proud of this very safe road that one can walk on the edge so close without falling over."

Nope. But they did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night...

to make sure that thousand dollar escort treated the Senator just right.

Probably all of them... it will just make it that much more fun to watch.

"Patty, get Tom on the line. My Word isn't working and I can't check my e-mail."
"Sorry Mr. Jamison, you fired Tom and replaced him with a BORG"

You discount the money hole syndrome. I a business dig's itself into a hole, you the only way to fill it back up it to pour more money into it.

Seriously though, there are a lot of executives happily looking forward to the day they get to fire that IT guy who keeps making him feel bad. I bet they could call it Office 256 and plenty of businesses would buy it.

I didn't really feel like going into details as it's not all that clever except it gets around spam filters easy enough. All the spammer does is generate a typical spam and break up the words. The user who brought this to my attention wanted an alias forwarded to his personal mailbox I host because Hotmail doesn't even try to catch it. The poor SOB gets about 17 a day, and on a netbook it can get hard to read your e-mail in a browser full of advertisements and such when the tiny little window that actually shows your inbox is full of spammy text like that.

And since this user is my father in law... erm, sure daddy whatever you want. It took a bit of work, and a ton of help, but I did manage to fanagle a rule that catches the broken words, and so far has had a 100% positive to false-positive rating. Good enough for me :P I thought about rejecting the mail outright with a polite message containing my rule's Regex expression, but I thought it would be rude to reject an auto-forwarded e-mail as spam.

The text in incomprehensible, but the message body has an link that always points to a yahoo group message that is nothing but an advertisement. Hotmail, in it's infinite wisdom, will automatically display that page inline for some reason. Oh well, problem solved. Inboxes are full of delicious ham, and junk boxes are full of tasteless spam.

I'm the paranoid sort though. I have a tin foil hat and everything :P

To be fair, it's a vanity domain for me, but several dozen other people seem to enjoy it as well. Years ago I used the typical one in a million freebie hosting for $5/month, but hours and days of "IMAP error" and "server could not connect" changed that tune. Now Google sounded like a great idea to me as well, and I was ready to make the plunge a couple months ago. But Google is $5/user for over 10 users and it just wasn't financially viable.

So we many not be Helen of Troy (IO.com), but I don't plan on leaving my buddies flapping in the wind either. MTA's are a hassle, I'll grant that, but I will not be going back to the unlimited e-mails for $5/month anytime soon.

That's what the guy said he was making. Hell if I know. I'm not trying to champion spam, but someone is doing it and I don't think it's because they like writing about free watches. One thing is for sure, over the last few years spam has gotten to the point were inboxes are mostly full of ham, and junk boxes are mostly full of spam. I'll not complain. But in a world where people will, and can, work for peanuts whose to say how valuable spam is and isn't?

That is totally possible. For example, I will outright reject mail that is 99.9999% guaranteed spam (10 times the "spam score" threshold) before even attempting to deliver it to my user's mailbox. It doesn't save on bandwidth or anything, but it cuts down on SPAM by close to 60%.

Most mail admins aren't going to do that by default however, because there is that one in a million chance it isn't SPAM.

The war is still ongoing, and I don't care what the "Spam King" says. Spammers from the 3rd world are perfectly happy to keep it up knowing they are making twice as much as some guy laying it on the line in a crummy factory.

No kidding. Could have fooled me about the decrease in SPAM.

I run my own MTA for my vanity domain. I check spam twice, once before accept to reject outright SPAM and once after accept to take into account user preferences. My aggressive ACL checks against forged and black addresses, I have an up to date spamassassin and custom rules, and use greylisting services and such. SPAM to my mailboxes has not declined by the massive amount Cisco is reporting. It has gown decreased slightly, about 7% since January, but no where near that 7x decrease. I wonder if this isn't just Cisco trying to sell some kind of spam filtering appliance.

Here's a perfect example of something that cropped up last week: "Pi ckOutYo urPr ef er enceTa bl etsEs sen ti alsWe bsto re" (Pick Out Your Preference Tablets Essentials Webstore) Writing a regex pattern to match those broken words and not tag things like eBay and iPod was a freaking PITA.

That $20 a day is a very good job in China. That's $7k a year (spam is a 24/7 business after all) compared to the $3k you'd get working in Foxconn, for example.

The ironic thing is I just completed a Living Will and Durable Power of Attorney using a template downloaded off a website hosted by my state, Ohio. Missouri has one too. I suppose I should sue my State for 3x damages. I'm sure some of my tax money went into that bandwidth.

Do you hear the ROFOLing
A ROFOLing we go...

I agree, secure communications are secure communications. Either you are, or you aren't. Yet I don't really see the advantage of a censorship free city for business use as presumably the censorship still exists for Chinese citizens. Thus what's the point in mirroring super-cool-democracy.com (TM 20111) in China if the Chinese can't read it and the cost savings are 'nill compared to domestic options here in N. America. I suppose there could be a political reason to do so, perhaps in the hope that it would lead to broader strokes and all that.

And I can't forget to mention the security concerns of the virtualization layer. Who cares if your data is encrypted with the latest AES when anyone who has access to the I/O stack can read it. I have enough problems trusting domestic hosts with this stuff, let alone somebody I've never met in a nation that has been less than trustworthy in this respect.

No, I still have to say that for the true purpose of Cloud Servers (near instant instances that can easily share data across the cloud platform) this is a non-starter and will probably do more harm than good. For big multinationals looking into virtualization, it's still just a dedicated box under lock and key. You can do that anywhere in China. I used to work for a large multinational, well a subsidiary of one, and all communications go through the various master nodes via VPN. Thus censorship has never been a problem for companies that really do have a presence in China.

Or more importantly, why would they? I hate the 'cloud' moniker, but I gotta be honest, after switching my dedicated box (vanity domain/email) to cloud services I'm basically about half for 2 servers instead of 1, hosted with different companies at different locations. So why would I ever want to host anything a zillion miles away in China if my clients (payed or otherwise) are located here in the U.S and the costs are next to 'nill. That doesn't even consider the privacy issues. I may be a fool to trust Cloud Company A with my data here in the U.S... but I'd be a damn fool to trust Cloud Company Z with my data over there in China.

That is what the article states, but after reading the actual patent I disagree. The application explicitly states it is a router on the network of one of the session's end. That is just one of the methods, which is required to enforce your patent should someone come out with an appliance/router, for example, that records Skype sessions.

And I'd love to record Skype video, but I've never been able to figure out how. If it is supported in the client, I'm a idiot. And I have never trusted the Skype security, and legally can not for classified work, but it is dang useful for my work.

I'm confused. And I hate the law. What I'm really saying is, Microsoft is not patenting an "intercept any Skype session and copy to Microsoft servers" They are patenting an "intercept your Skype session and copy it to your server(router, device, exec)." The summary, OT, and comments are all confused by the 'interception' patent speak and keep alluding to the notion that this is some big brother thing. The only way the FBI, TSA, or Post Office will ever see these recorded calls is if they get a warrant to search your servers AND you happened to have enabled the recording feature, should that be implemented in Skype. There is no secret squirrel eavesdropping going on here.

Now, whether it's legal to record your phone call or Skype session in your State is one thing. But other than writing the software, Microsoft has nothing to do with it. In other words, this is not some mechanism to circumvent encryption, to prevent privacy, or to record every single Skype session that is ever made in the whole world in order to find dissidents who are afraid of giant rats.. It's simply a method to intercept a session already established between two, or more, parties and silently route it in order to record the session, instead of some hackish solution to divert every call to a black-box (video capture window, dedicated capture server, tuner card) that must be manually toggled via managers or users, and also waste resources.

This is just the Skype equivalent of hitting *1 on your work phone to record a conversation, or recording a phone call for 'quality assurance purposes'... and last time I checked that doesn't get uploaded to Ma Bell for guys in white lab coats to analyze. In other words, this is not a patent to circumvent Skype's SSL encryption. It is not a patent for unanimous wiretapping. Nor is it a patent to disable features that we have all come to love and enjoy. I'm not saying Microsoft wont kill off Skype by doing something stupid, but this isn't it. In fact, I'd love to be able to record conversations between myself and colleagues with the push a button. I use it a lot to pass 'visual' data such as white-boarding and other experiments, and would love to look back at those without having to open a video capture card and hope the system doesn't crash.

Eavesdropping does not equate recording, I can listen to someone's private conversation without recording it, and it's still eavesdropping. Likewise, it's not eavesdropping if I listen to a conversation I'm apart of, regardless of recording it or not. Now it may be illegal to record a conversation I'm a part of with or without notification depending on local laws, however in either case, this patent has nothing to do with the summary and link that says, in not so many words, "Microsoft filed for a patent that allows them to eavesdrop and record private conversations of Skype users. The Internet is DOOMED and we should all watch out for the Feds because I hear the helicopter's buzzing overhead. Where's my open source tin foil hat, I need to apt-get update!"

POTS/VOIP PBXs have always supported call recording. It's up to the user to use it legally, but they do not, and will not, upload recorded phone calls to the AT&T master server. Neither is Microsoft going to upload recorded Skype calls to themselves, or the FBI, or Taco Bell.

  Correct me if I've misinterpreted the summary and following comments.

No kidding? From the comments you'd think this patent wasn't a method for one or more parties to record their video conversation, but some Orwellian upload to big-brother.Microsoft-1984.server. Ground Control to Major Tom... it's not eavesdropping if I'm 1/2 of the conversation.