Give them a whitelist

Post #333,247 by crazy 9/27/10 6:20:48 PM Reply	Give them a whitelist Boy, that was tough.
Post #333,251 by boxley 9/27/10 7:32:37 PM Reply	can we give the users your phone number for support? free of course, just like the rest of the stuff you'all want Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free American and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 55 years. meep
Post #333,256 by crazy 9/27/10 9:01:46 PM 9/27/10 9:08:04 PM Reply	Free? No But at what cost? The company is actively fighting, via the courts, the ability to block, without ANY REVIEW WHAT-SO-EVER, of any and all traffic that they choose, without even allowing for appeal for those they damage? And they call it SPAM? Those bastards. How much should it cost? 90% of their corporate earnings. But, just for you, here: I'll make it almost free: If the company that has been blocked wants to send to someone, then that someone has to agree to it. That someone has to actively go to a web site, or send an auth code from their phone to a database somewhere. Even BEFORE the 1st one shows up. It will be up to the sending company to hold their hand through the process. If the sending company is unwilling or unable, a secondary service company can help them out on the tech support side, but they will be responsible for paying for it, not the carrier. Happy? Wanna come up with a new excuse? Gonna tell me the database lookup is too costly or difficult? I'll be happy to help you with that. I'm not Beep, and these are easily addressable problems. They are direct measurable tech issues, and we are tracking all of 20 digits worth or information in this lookup table. The political issue is the real one (I'm working on it right now, see). I'll even code the lookup interface to the online database that people use to whitelist any cell number or text message source, plus pay for the 1st 1,000,000 people who register, (meaning support their hardware and bandwidth usage), without even thinking of a revenue stream. I'll code it for free, and put it into a supported production environment, just for you. But your company has to use it in order to give people a reason to put the numbers in. Your company would agree to some minuscule transaction cost each time you do a lookup. This stuff has to be near real time so caching will not help you. A phone user who just authorized a message wants to see it SOON. And when they said, STOP SENDING THOSE, they never want to see it again. I'll agree to maintain capabilities to support your guaranteed minimum usage, plus allow for on-demand scalability if there are any surges we need to accommodate (someone just did a TV advertisement and now they are all hitting the web site). All hardware will be COLOed at the location(s) of your choice, under your administrative love and care (if you wish). The design will allow for under 20 second multi-master replication between systems (if you need multiple server across multiple site due to your query requirements), but only if you can guarantee my server to server network traffic (your network). I'll need to know what your per message current transit time is, and then figure out a minimal intersect point for the lookup. Once we agree to a given per message allowable latency and a min message count required rate, I will maintain the equipment / and or system optimization level required to not drop below (and probably far exceed) the requirements. I'll treat those numbers as well as CC cards, with full PCI compliance in mind during design and coding. All system to system communication will be via encrypted channels, with IP lockdown and any other security requirements you want to throw at me, assuming they can be implemented on the Linux environment (of your choice). I just need yum or apt-get, and I'm good. Someone else here (or I'll track down a real web person near me if no one here wants the gig) has to volunteer (or name your price, or how much of the action you want) for the actual web site interface. Box: At minimal cost I've solved your dilemma, and you get to advertise your whiz-bang system against the competitors. Care to start an introduction to your execs for me? I'll dress nice and make sure everything is business appropriate. It'll be fun. If allowed, I'd use you as my sysadmin if it becomes a real business. And BTW: Thanks for putting me creation mode. The 1st step is finding someone to pay for it. But since I'll be working with a web guy, I can't go into full blown god mode. Edited by crazy Sept. 27, 2010, 09:08:04 PM EDT Expand All History
Post #333,286 by jake123 9/28/10 9:52:32 AM Reply	They have whitelists The support issues are very real, and costly.
Post #333,380 by crazy 9/29/10 5:58:59 PM 9/29/10 6:15:17 PM Reply	See above Also, let me inform you of a very simple term. Cost of doing business. If you say you are providing a service, then you have to provide it. Very simple. If you can't afford to provide it based on the cost structure that does not include a mechanism for getting people what they paid for (requested message, not spam), then don't FUCKING PRETEND to provide it. Tell people you are going to filter their messages based on any content you don't approve of. Very simple. Do it in VERY LARGE TYPE on the contract though, with simple to understand examples. Edited by crazy Sept. 29, 2010, 06:15:17 PM EDT Expand All History
Post #333,394 by boxley 9/29/10 8:35:50 PM Reply	Re: See above http://www.t-mobile....itions&print=true We use filters to block spam messages, but we do not guarantee that you will not receive spam or other unsolicited messages, and we are not liable for such messages. Additional blocking options are available at www.my.T-Mobile.com. snip "spamming" or engaging in other abusive or unsolicited communications, or any other mass, automated voice or data communication for commercial or marketing purposes; last sentence covers it and the user had agreed to abide by the term of service. Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free American and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 55 years. meep
Post #333,399 by drook 9/29/10 11:27:44 PM Reply	Which is it? The way I read it, there are three types of prohibited messages, any one of which can get you blocked: 1. abusive 2. unsolicited 3. mass, automated voice or data communication for commercial or marketing purposes In this case the users requested the messages. So it can't be unsolicited. It's theoretically possible someone could see the actual content as abusive, but I doubt it, and certainly haven't heard anyone claim it. That leaves the third case, which seems to require all of three conditions to apply: 1. mass 2. automated 3. for commercial or marketing purposes Automated? Yes. Commercial or marketing purposes? Yes. Mass? Not by any definition I can think of. One person requests it, one person gets it. If I've mis-read the ToS, please show me how. -- Drew
Post #333,418 by boxley 9/30/10 7:38:59 AM Reply	Mass, one or more automated messages no thumbs thumbing involved Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free American and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 55 years. meep
Post #333,428 by folkert 9/30/10 8:43:32 AM Reply	So... me sending... Sending My Phone Cron'd messages from my host in Troy, Michigan at specific hours are automated. What about my Nagios Pages from my monitoring system? I can get HUNDREDS in 15 minutes from it on bad days. What about Notices I get sent from our notification system... What about Google sending me notifications about meetings or Facebook sending me SMS on status updates? Ummm, a little bit more help defining prohibited items... and how come my stuff works, Google's, Facebook's and other? They are all automated... and 3 out of the 4 deliver huge amounts of messages. Explain it to me better Master Shredder.
Post #333,435 by boxley 9/30/10 9:57:40 AM Reply	just because the carrier allows you to abuse their TOS doesnt mean they cannot enforce it later Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free American and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 55 years. meep
Post #333,441 by beepster 9/30/10 11:28:10 AM Reply	If he pays for the service of sending and receiving unlimited text, why would getting any amount be an abuse of their TOS? Sure, understanding today's complex world of the future is a little like having bees live in your head. But...there they are.
Post #333,447 by folkert 9/30/10 3:10:49 PM Reply	And I do pay for unlimited.
Post #333,449 by boxley 9/30/10 3:12:39 PM Reply	Re: If he pays for the service unlimited "non automated" text. Currently they have the bandwidth to carry what he is sending and receiving. If it becomes problematical like ATT they will start lowering the boom Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free American and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 55 years. meep
Post #333,448 by folkert 9/30/10 3:11:30 PM Reply	Selective enforcement... This is exactly the issue.
Post #333,450 by drook 9/30/10 3:34:59 PM Reply	Technical solution that proves this is bogus They clearly have the ability to flag "automated" messages, which you're (Box, not Greg) now saying is the issue. Just flag them as automated in the queue. "SELECT * FROM queue ORDER BY flag, timestamp" Presto, all non-automated messages go before any non-automated messages. Bandwidth problem becomes a non-issue. Buyers and senders of automated messages decide whether the delay makes the service unusable or not. Choosing specific senders and specific messages to completely block takes them out of safe harbor provisions. -- Drew
Post #333,474 by folkert 9/30/10 7:09:05 PM Reply	I don't have a problem with... reducing priority of the mass of messages... But he keeps saying they CAN block what the hell ever they want even if the people subscribed to the message service. Personally, since SMS is still effectively free for transmission for the Cellphone companies... (maybe not handling and queuing)
Post #333,475 by boxley 9/30/10 8:39:17 PM Reply	whats this free shyte? http://www.developer...tewayProvComp.asp to get from a computer to you phone you need a gateway, they are not cheap to buy or run. Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free American and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 55 years. meep
Post #333,527 by folkert 10/1/10 10:32:18 AM Reply	Ok jackass... I said the handling and queuing. That is indeed where the Gateways are. Please READ. The transmission costs are ultimately nil. The costs buy AND run them have come down by orders magnitude. Think back to pagers gateways... one of those... cost a few million dollars for a 64 channel, 120 phone line system, just to get the messages onto the network. Nowadays the effective cost (based on numbers of message being sent and bandied around as costs for gateways) has dropped to about 0.005% of the cost per message handling from 1999.
Post #333,460 by jake123 9/30/10 5:35:03 PM Reply	Speaking of Nagios I've personally blocked quite a few hosts that have poorly configured nagios systems that have sent notifications just as fast as the computer(s) can send them. To be sure, we tend to do so for a short length of time, but they fit the definition mooted above and were completely responsible for denying the use of the service by others because they've attempted to mail us several hundred times a minute. Are we supposed to not do this, despite the fact that I'm sure the subscriber(s) in question probably became very relieved when their phone stopped ringing every couple of seconds?
Post #333,464 by drook 9/30/10 5:58:53 PM Reply	Preventing use of the service by others is covered in ToS It's a DOS attack. Intentional or not, I don't hear anyone opposed to blocking that. -- Drew
Post #333,473 by folkert 9/30/10 7:05:49 PM Reply	We are not using the ... direct to SMS delivery. We use the SMTP gateway, which is a "natural" throttle.
Post #333,489 by jake123 9/30/10 10:33:56 PM Reply	Yes, that is the part of the infrastructure that I run and it amounted to a DoS attack on it when a Canadian uni had a badly configured set of Nagios boxes run wild last week. Sure, it's a natural throttle, but when the mail server is throttling it, it's throttling everybody else using it as well.
Post #333,531 by folkert 10/1/10 10:43:23 AM Reply	I'm sorry... I should have said... MY outbound mail server for our nagios system (it delivers it locally to the machine's SMTP Agent) does not do batch mode. It also does not send out 150 messages, using 150 connections at the same time to the same MX records. Its purposely setup to do them all serially. Sure, I sometimes get a few hundred messages in 15 minutes. But every single one of them is sent ... singly and one at a time to the same MX record. Now, if my nagios server needs to send out messages to a few AT&T recipients, a few Verizon recipients, a few T-Mobile recipients and a few Rogers recipients all at once, there will be multiple mail drops happening at the same time to each MX, but serially for those MX records. I guess, I thought through this a bit more than others, as I am the recipient of some Denial of Service attacks... I didn't want to be a perp. Many people don't test and just assume things are good. I also, once I have an incident... I turn off notifications... until the event is past. I guess I'm not the norm.
Post #333,472 by folkert 9/30/10 6:58:09 PM Reply	We only send to those that are supposed to... And they are definitely responsible for the systems they are notified for. We use the SMTP gateways to not overwhelm the services. (10digitnum@vtext.com... etc... 1234567890@rogers.com) and we deliver singly, not in batch mode. Verizon delivers in mere seconds. AT&T delays up to 30 minutes. T-Mobile doesn't delay more than a minute. Rogers is also near instantaneous. Dunno. But this is not that tough.
Post #333,478 by drook 9/30/10 9:42:35 PM Reply	Possible SES? That's "Shit's Easy Syndrome". You obviously know way more about it than I do, but Box does do this for a living. Easy for you doesn't necessarily mean easy for him, and I don't like making promises on other people's efforts. However ... I still say if you can prioritize it, and they can, that that's all you need to do. Automated messages always get last priority, problem solved. Here's my assumption, by the way: Once the hardware and software is in place to do this at all (including the gateway Box mentions), I assume that the incremental cost of each message approaches zero until you reach saturation of some part of the system and have to increase capacity. Is that a valid assumption? -- Drew
Post #333,487 by boxley 9/30/10 10:00:55 PM Reply	headcount doesnt approach zero Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free American and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 55 years. meep
Post #333,492 by jake123 9/30/10 10:37:35 PM Reply	Actually, prioritizing automated messages last would be a terrible idea. Automated messages make up the majority of all legitimate messages we handle... and they are generally considered very important by the customers that use them. We get to hear about it sometimes when they're delayed by ten minutes; some very major Canadian inet services use us to notify their employees of problems.
Post #333,490 by jake123 9/30/10 10:34:47 PM Reply	Heh Rogers is the smtp gateway that I actually admin.
Post #333,533 by folkert 10/1/10 10:46:50 AM Reply	Look at the post where I explained... My setup to not become a DoS. http://iwt.mikevital....iwt?postid=36671
Post #333,625 by jake123 10/3/10 2:33:52 PM Reply	Just did read that and no, you're not the norm. Well, semi norm? I guess most people have it set up alright, but the ones that don't end up causing us huge problems, so we really get to notice those ones.
Post #333,461 by jake123 9/30/10 5:38:01 PM Reply	You've missed the other key point Entry points into a wireless network are neither infinitely available, nor free. To be sure, you can have a LOT of shortcodes available, but they're not infinite. The problem here is that the TOS with the party offering the short codes to third parties explicitly signed a contract saying they needed approval from T-Mobile for any new services they'd offer on one of the short codes they have assigned to them. They did not do so, so T-Mobile cut them off. I'm not sure why this is a problem here.
Post #333,463 by boxley 9/30/10 5:43:23 PM Reply	freetards is the problem Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free American and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 55 years. meep
Post #333,601 by crazy 10/2/10 11:42:33 PM Reply	The problem is box miscategorised it Which then became the focus point. Not "freetards". I don't expect shit for free, I expect to get what I pay for. And in this case, maybe the source of the message is subject to the contract, which in turn means I can't ask for the message via the shortlist code. Fine. According to box, he should be able to block ANY automated commercial message. Like Facebook's text to your phone to confirm a password reset. Or any other automated list request. And they also want to pick and choose on political speech. The answer to that is no. And it has nothing to do with wanting something for nothing.

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