fill out in response to stupid spam ideas. not written by me, shamelessly stolen.

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Your post advocates a

( ) technical
( ) legislative
( ) market-based
( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

My wife just got her biopsy results today: no cancer!

...it took 3 months to get the results. Let that be a lesson to those who think they want socialized medicine (she went to a state hospital). Grr...

In other news, I'm picking up a little work here and there, so we've got a little money coming in. I'm really hoping to start getting some new clients who are interested in putting Linux in their server rooms (and on their desktops, hey...) here in New Orleans.

To all those who sent their good wishes regarding my wife's ordeal, I am very grateful for the kindness you've shown to us. Thanks. I pray that when you get into a jam, the Lord helps you, as He has helped us.

Mr. C.
Last month my wife found out she might have cancer. We are awaiting test results, etc., but as of this point we don't really know anything. We are believing God that He will bring us through it, though. While Jesus was on this earth, He healed the sick everywhere He went. Please pray with us that He will stretch out His hand and grant healing to my wife.

Crash and Burn
My main server had been giving me trouble, and I had been looking for parts to put together a replacement (I can't afford new hardware at this point) for about 3 months. Last week I was given a motherboard and chip, and put them in a case I already had along with some RAM, etc., and put up the new box. I had everything copied over to the new box and had most of the services working correctly by Friday.

Friday evening, however, the building housing my server burned down, and all was lost, including my new server. Fortunately, I have the old box here at my house, and was able to secure another location having a fast enough connection to meet my needs, and I was able to commandeer their firewall box and press it into service as a host for all of my stuff on Monday. I've gotten most of the services working, but have been spending most of my time this week working with the business owner that lost all of his stuff in the fire, locating backups, purchasing a new server for his business, working with the telephone and data providers, etc. They are having to start their entire business over from scratch. At some point I'll have another box to put up at their new location. Possibly I will be able to fix the old box and reuse that one.

Whelp, I lost my job a month and a half ago. I don't know whether to laugh or cry. I was working for an ambulance chaser, and I'm certainly happy to be away from that scene, but on the other hand I'm dead broke.

I've been trying to rustle up some business selling PCs. An interesting angle I've come up with is a site I've been working on for a while now, a church directory portal for the New Orleans metro area. It's a LAMP site that's pretty useful, in my opinion, if you happen to be a churchgoer in New Orleans. If the site gets any kind of traffic, hopefully I'll get some click-through business from it. If nothing else, it's an opportunity to improve my PHP skills.

Another thing I've been doing is studying like mad to take a couple of the CompTia certification tests. I've always downed certs, but I figured out that the stuff that's covered on the I-Net+ test is the same stuff that I've been doing for 4 years now as a linux sysadmin. For the price of a book, a couple of months' reading it to make sure I fill in any knowledge gaps, and $185 (gaa...) for the test, I too can have a piece of paper to wave around in front of interviewers. The Network+ exam is my next planned conquest, and hopefully I can knock both of them out by summer's end. LPI (now that is a worthy goal, IMHO) by the end of the year, anyone?

Heh. I created a monster with this comment.

Whew!

I'm sure someone is going to read my post and jump to the conclusion that I am a racist. Of course, that's ludicrous.

I have a job.

I hate my job.

Actually, I love my job. I'm a network admin for a large law firm. We unfortunately have to support windows/novell users, but we (me and the other admin, my boss) have serveral linux servers, and use linux/oss whenever possible. I maintain the linux stuff, and all of the windows boxen. The people I work with are great, it's a lot of fun, etc. It's just the management that I hate. That and the fact that I work for lawyers.

I also do a little linux/networking/internet/whatever consulting on the side.

Other than that, I'm a preacher of the gospel. I do missions work and evangelism. I used to have a radio program (that's programme for all of my british friends), and will start it back up once my cashflow gets better.

I like to fish, plus I hunt some. I'm a patriotic American. I'm married. I'm bored (which i why I'm writing in a blog).

I'm one of the leaders at my local linux users group. Irc? I'm mmlj4 on EFnet, freeload and rhizomatic.

I'm a cajun, unfortunately living in the cesspool known as New Orleans at the moment.

I'm a trumpet player, although about all I do now is keyboards, thanks to TMJ; I also sing, and write a little.

Ok, that's enough about me. What about you? Oh yeah, that's right, I dont have comments enabled.

Lucky me :-)