With the RIAA pushing its political powers to force colleges to stop student access to P2P services, isn't it time to get the FCC involved. The FCC has already made a big deal about ISP's blocking the trafic. Why dont they protect college networks the same way. I sugest we send an email to fccinfo@fcc.gov and explain to them whats going on and ask them for help.

http://it.slashdot.org/~thank-u-for-sharing/journal/99528

I saw this in a comment, good read.

It is sad that the internet has become so hostile. At work I connected one of our servers to a connection on the outside of our firewall for some remote support (didn't have the VPN papers signed yet). The moment that I enabled the nic, the server informed me that the RPC Service has failed and the computer will shut down.

I was foolish for not checking the patch levels. I assumed that someone else was on top of that. A mistake I will not make again. But home users have problems of their own. They don't know they have to keep it up patched. If I had my grandma running Linux, I would be the one patching it. What about converting all my friends and family to Linux. I would be so overwhelmed keeping each one current.

As it stands, I format, install XP /w SP2, change their user accounts to limited access, install spyware detection, antivirus, leave the firewall and automatic updates on, and finally put firefox on the desktop.

At the same time, I have to explain why XP is better than the 98 or ME that came with the computer, what SP2 is and why it takes so long, what a firewall is, what firefox is, why I created a special admin account for them to install stuff with and why the should never surf the web while logged into admin with the red background.

And if you are a slashdot regular, I am not telling you anything new. I should release this as a news story, but as we all know, this is not news. Its just the way it is.

--
Kevin Marquette
antispyware

antispyware is a hot topic. I just started a weblog and as I see new antispyware related information, I just post it. I hope that by linking to important information, I will raise its visibility.

My personal blog is also starting to grow. I am trying to keep the antispyware blog to just refferences to content, and any actual comments or thought will go to my personal page. I do this so that my personal page gets some content and it might develop a personality. Only time will tell.

I decided to create a few new blogs. One is a colleciton of articles on spyware related information. I might add my own content, but at the moment I am just clipping other articles and linking to them.

Another topic that is popular at the moment is the North Korea Nuclear incident that every one has on their mind.

Wow, What a play by Microsoft. Halo 2 gets leaked a month early and everybody is talking about it. It happens all the time. Doom 3 was floating around in early alpha. I played Warcraft III the week before it was released and I still walked into a store and bought it when it released. Once a game gets out, little can be done to keep it underground.

Microsoft is different, Halo 2 is different. Because it is a month from release, A lot of buzz already surrounding Halo 2. Not to mention the ILoveBees marketing campaign that has attracted a lot of attention. And to top it off, Microsoft says yes it was leaked and do not download it. Then every media outlet covers the story. Now everyone is blogging about it and some suspect Microsoft of releasing it. What they say doesn't matter, as long as they don't link to the download or DVD 5 conversion kits, it becomes harder and harder to find. What has happened is a flood of references to the Halo 2 leak talking about it while the actual leaked files get lost in the mess.

Only Microsoft could pull this off. Every thing they do becomes news, good or bad. I have already preordered my copy of halo 2 so I don't care if I play it early or not. I am just doing my part to keep the chatter going.

I am done writing, any further reference to halo 2 download and to the dvd9 to dvd5 conversion kits or the negative buffer inverter or the French PAL version is mentioned to up the listing in search engines. Bungie did an excellent job with Halo. Halo 2 DVD9 PAL XBOXDVD DiFFUSiON, trust no one.

http://xbox.ign.com/objects/482/482228.html
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00008J7NZ/002-0235168-0435235?v=glance
http://www.bungie.net/
http://www.tnpsc.com/ssaver/halo.htm

http://www.solidrockgymnastics.com/home.htm?referal=kevmar
About Solid Rock Gymnastics Classes in Lincoln Ne
"Quality Gymnastics in a Positive Environment"
The Solid Rock Gymnastics Coaching Philosophy believes in attaining a balance of four components.

Our coaches focus on SAFETY. Our instructors are required to become safety certified by USA Gymnastics. We employ the safest training tools available and strive to use proper skill progression and development to ensure skill readiness.

Our classes are FUN. We believe children should enjoy class and always go home with a smile. We believe in promoting a positive, healthy lifestyle.

Our coaches are POSITIVE. Our coaching staff believes in positive reinforcement. We strive to praise and encourage our participants and reward their effort. Each gymnast is treated with respect and we do not believe in yelling at or intentionally demeaning a student. We strive to be positive role models and we use incentive type programs to encourage participation and progression. All of our instructors were gymnasts themselves and have excellent knowledge of the sport, but best of all, our instructors love kids.

Our classes are PRODUCTIVE. We believe it is important to be able to see progress at all skill levels, in all classes. In addition to being fun, our classes are designed to help gymnasts reach their full potential. Each level focuses on teaching proper basic skills and progressions that lead to the next level. This is why we take great care to see that each class fits the age and skill level of the participants.
http://www.solidrockgymnastics.com/home.htm?location=Lincoln&state=NE

Not that I am surprised. syntache kevin marquette

I eventualy want to write dental software and link it back to here (syntache.com)

Why did I pick the term Syntache? I dont recall where I got the name, but when I google it, i would only get 28 results for it. If anyone is ever looking for syntache, they will find my site. ADA

So, I was playing with onenote today and started experimenting with their recording features. I thought about setting up the web cam but its been back in the box for so long, i dont know where to find it. the cool feature that I was playing with was I started recording a memo and typing various nodes at different places throughout the notebook and when you play back the recording, it synchronizes your various notes with where at in the recording you're speaking.

The tester that I am, I had an interesting idea I just had to try. I turned offices voice dictation on and started recording a memo. As I was dictating I would select different places so might notes would be at various places on the page. I initially didn't think I'd be able to do the voice dictation while I was recording a memo at the same time. It actually worked a lot better than I thought it would. When I replayed the memo it would highlight all the text I had dictated as they got to that point in the memo so that It actually followed my written notes along with my voice.

I am now somewhat impressed with how well this voice dictation works. in fact, I wrote this entire journal with my voice dictation. I did have to make minor corrections, but I'd never RE type any of the words.

How much crap in my inbox do I have to put up with? Paris Hilton, Fw;Re;Fw, reduce debt, porn, and enlargement crap. Any change to the email system will have to be universial.

Micropayments sound like a good idea, but I don't pay for email now and I don't like the idea of paying for somwthing that should be fundementaly free. And what about the posibility of mistakes or large mailing lists? what about a victom of a email worm? One way to shoot down a micropayment movement would be to unleash a worm that just kept sending messages and make charges add up.

Processing micropayments are another slight change in the idea. create a small puzzle and make the sender solve it. a spammer that sends a high volume of messages could collect and gather solutions over time or have enought partial solutions to give the puzzles no processing value, It then becomes a database lookup.

No mater what the solution is, we will have to make universial changes for it to work. As we transition into the new system, we will either remain backwards compatible or segment the market.

And if this is the case, should we look at starting from scratch?

How much trust should you give a spammer?

This one spammer sends me to a page that is a form requesting name, address, phone, and email information from me. I made a little script that fills the form with real looking random data and submits it. When the results page loads, I do it again, and again, and ... . I think I saw 2 links go off line in the past few days that I have been doing it.

Well today I get another spam and as I test the page before loading it into my script and I see a remove email address option.

Now I see this and ponder what just happened. Did I just make a spammer place a do not email me link on his site?

all I realy want is for the spam to stop. Can I trust that this spammer has suffered enough abuse and is willing to not send spam to those that do not want it? or is this just a new method for him to collect email addresses?

I have stopped my script for now and "unsubscribed" a new hotmail account that I just created. Lets see how quickly it gets hit.

So it does little good to attack the sender of spam. all the informatin is fake. replying to the abuse or postmaster accounts of fake domains just bounces.

But, the spammer is spamming you for a reason. they are either selling, scamming, or harvisting you email address. several repeat spammers do very little to change their messages, but it is their links that truly give them away. Links to addresses that have the same url structure or same query parameters. Little keys they use to validate your address once you click the link.

I like to explore the link patterns that I find in my mail box. if i see a url with ?email=my@address.com I like to see if the same link will show up for different email values. I might send random addresses for a week and i reaalize that every email address value gives me the same page. It took me 100,000 tries to figure that out.

I also see addresses like this:
domain1.com/bnr/03793284721
domain2.com/bnr/03793284721
domain3.com/bnr/03793284721
domain4.com/bnr/03793284721
domain5.com/bnr/03793284721

I tried this structure with random numbers and 100,000 tries latter, every page was the same. hmm,... go figure