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Also mentioned on the page but not related is the fact that J.C. Penney will start sharing customer information from their catalog buyer file unless they call 1-800-204-3334 or e-mail privacy@jcpenneyeservices.com to opt-out.

Also mentioned on the page but not related is the fact that J.C. Penney will start sharing customer information from their catalog buyer file unless they call 1-800-204-3334 or e-mail privacy@jcpenneyeservices.com to opt-out.

The page you want to read is Junkbusters Telemarketing Headlines.

A quick how-to to reduce the amount of telemarketing calls you receive. Yes, I have followed these steps. Yes, over time (say, 90 days) they work.

Cheers,
-- RLJ

Yes, but not in the way that you think. Remember that part of XP is a GUID, which contains the MAC address of your NIC, plus any other unique serial numbers.
A few thing that a quick Google search turned up: GuUID Explorer and JunkBusters' web page on GUID and MS' software. The History and Advisory are good reads here.

A trip to junkbusters will remove the banner ads (or many other ways, of course -- that's the best solution I've found for opera.) Just let them know that we'll start allowing their ads back in after the editors clean up their act. Even a public statement admitting to censorship and abuse of editorial mod points would at least gain them a little respect in my eyes.

If you've asked to be put on their "do not call" list, then that's illegal under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991. Mention that to Qwest, and send them a bill if they do it again. Some companies will actually pay these bills to avoid possible lawsuits (if they call you more than once in a 12-month period, you can sue them for $500).

See http://www.junkbusters.com.

That's funny. I receive at most one or two SPAMs per month. (The handful that slip through onto the Debian mailing lists don't really count.) Maybe people are just becoming more stupid in how they give out their addresses. Oh yeah.. and then there are HTML tags that 'phone home,' supported by many popular mail clients. Of course, we can all thank MS for Hotmail: an endless supply of throw-away mail accounts.

For those who care to reduce spam and other online (and offline) annoyances, see Junkbusters web site, also home to the free (GPL) filtering proxy by the same name.

Junkbuster is your friend, it runs as a proxy on localhost to filter ads. So you can do more fine-tuning than just hostnames: filter out e.g. all directories named /ads/ on any host.

There's an outfit called "Private Citizen that helps you receive less (snail) junk mail and fewer telemarketing calls. The sell a book called So You Want To Sue A Telemarketer. I sure hope that they come out with the "Sue A Spammer" edition of this book soon. Even though I think too many people are quick to sue in this country, I can't think of anybody who deserves a lawsuit more than the spreaders of spam.

People too cheap (ok, "frugal") to spend money at Private Citizen can try following the advice at Junkbusters, and they even have a page concerning spam.

There's an outfit called "Private Citizen that helps you receive less (snail) junk mail and fewer telemarketing calls. The sell a book called So You Want To Sue A Telemarketer. I sure hope that they come out with the "Sue A Spammer" edition of this book soon. Even though I think too many people are quick to sue in this country, I can't think of anybody who deserves a lawsuit more than the spreaders of spam.

People too cheap (ok, "frugal") to spend money at Private Citizen can try following the advice at Junkbusters, and they even have a page concerning spam.

While we all probably get junk mail in our 'snail' mailboxes, it takes no time on our part to sort through it.

Nope, I only get junk mail from a few wierd companies (AT&T), and when the mailman just gets lazy and shoves the general stack of daily junk into my box instead of the apartment next to mine.

To really reduce the junk mail you get (in the U.S.A., anyways), follow the instructions at junkbusters.com-- costs some money to send all the letters out ($5 in postage?), but the amount of general crap I receive in the mail went down dramatically after doing so.

On the email side of things, yes, procmail is nifty, though a better place for such filters is in the MTA (currently done with heavy-handed arbitrary blackhole lists), so that mail can be rejected as spam before even coming near the local delivery agent. You can do this in a proper user-specified fashion with PerlMX, however, that's $$$...

Your experience and actions mirror mine strongly. Tossing Java, Javascript, animated gifs, and Flash, and adding Junkbuster, make browsing pleasureable. I also actually notice ads such as Google's keyword ads and the text-only ads that have started appearing in The New York Times's online site.

Ditto commercial TV (and I was also an L&O fan), and radio. I mostly listen to two NPR stations (one news, the other jazz). It's a poorly-kept secret that NPR is at or near the top of many media markets nationwide -- but the commercial ratings services don't mix "mainstream" and "alternative" radio ratings. Kudos to Doc Searls for tipping me off on this.

Commercial stations -- music or news -- just grates. I've largely abandoned the local Safeway with its pervasive advertising (carts, floor tiles, flashing coupon things) and customer profiling for Trader Joes (better food to boot).

I've also registered with the DMA through Junkbuster's opt-out letters -- within two weeks, my junkmail load had dropped tremendously. There are a few additional items I'll get checked off under anti-obscenity rules. Frankly it's a health measure: my apartment mailbox is so small that any substantial quantity of mail means things get folded or torn. Keep those envelopes intact.

When this war of escalation reaches the point at which all browsers except MSIE allow easy user tweaking of USER-AGENT, expect M$ to introduce something along the lines of "CUAAP," a.k.a. CU2AP or "Cryptographic User Agent Assurance Protocol." This will make it harder to spoof sites that lock out non M$ browsers, perhaps under penalty of law, and will dovetail nicely with their attempts to hijack the Internet with .net.

I also use Galeon, along with Junkbuster. Bypassing MSN's silly UserAgent filter is easy with Junkbuster: simply change the user-agent directive to something that will pass their test. I tried the following string first:

but apparently they check your operating system field as well. So I switched it to this, which passes their filter and allows me to view MSN content:

For the Debian Linux users out there, Junkbuster is available in Woody and Sid. You can grab a slightly antiquated tarball of my Junkbuster settings from my web page (or email me for a more recent snapshot).

You need to take advantage of the TCPA and extract $500 damages from them. Some people have extracted more than $40,000 from these people. To learn more, visit:

Junk Busters

Use Enigma to log the calls

See if the FCC is already after them

I have already been offered $250 from one telemarketing firm - but I want to go to trial. Also, since I have used the JunkBuster anti-telemarketing script, I am lucky to get any calls at all. The last call was from Qwest on last month - a month after I was sent a letter from one of their lawyers explaining I was on their "do not call list". That call will make me $500 to $1500 when we go to court :)

I actually signed up for it because of junk mail. I would get up to an inch thick of junk mail each week, and now I don't get anything. The site tells you how to be removed from the lists that companies pass around. If you follow the right proceedures, it's actually illegal for them to mail you

The same is true for telemarketing lists too. It's a great site, and it works.

Komi

From Junkbusters:

"No person may

-- Initiate any telephone call (other than a call made for emergency purposes or made with the prior express consent of the called party)...To the telephone line of any guest room or patient room of a hospital, health care facility, elderly home, or similar establishment; or
To any telephone number assigned to a paging service, cellular telephone service, specialized mobile radio service, or other radio common carrier service, or any service for which the called party is charged for the call."

It looks like you can also receive up to $500 in damages if they do call your cell phone (though I don't know if they can be held liable if you claim it is your home phone number.)

Junkbusters has an excellent page on stopping telemarketters. Before I read the Junkbusters script I always got annoyed at how telemarketters would keep pitching their product to me after I had politely said no and the only way I could get them to stop was to be less polite and just hang up on them. After reading the Junkbusters site and trying their script I discovered that the magic words "Can you please put this number on your do-not-call list?" almost always gets the telemarketter to immediately stop pitching to you (and it has the nice side effect that some might actually put you on their do-not-call list at some point). They are legally required to maintain a do-not-call list, so they pretty much have to stop bothering you when you ask - check out the Junkbuster site for more info.

Junkbusters has an excellent page on stopping telemarketters. Before I read the Junkbusters script I always got annoyed at how telemarketters would keep pitching their product to me after I had politely said no and the only way I could get them to stop was to be less polite and just hang up on them. After reading the Junkbusters site and trying their script I discovered that the magic words "Can you please put this number on your do-not-call list?" almost always gets the telemarketter to immediately stop pitching to you (and it has the nice side effect that some might actually put you on their do-not-call list at some point). They are legally required to maintain a do-not-call list, so they pretty much have to stop bothering you when you ask - check out the Junkbuster site for more info.

Then there were filters. [junkbusters.com]

There were ads.

Then there were filters.

Then there were pop up ads, pop-under ads, and ads that pop up when you close the browser.

Then new filters were devised for these as well.

Now we have jumpthrough ads.

What we have is a continuing battle, geek against geek, for control of the eyes of the content-hungry Netizen.

Of course, all arms races are a bad thing. Eventually, this one will lead to more and more intrusive advertising and more and more destructive anti-advertising.

The solution is to de-escalate the arms race.

How do you do that?

Well, stop filtering the ads. Read them and click the ones that you are interested in as compared to the other ads.

Even if you are not interested in any of them, click the least offensive.

This will, eventually, lower the overall offensiveness level of advertising while helping to provide ad revenue to some of your computer-industry brethren out there.

Remember, advertising is a legitimate industry. Let's minimize the amount of social control it has over our lives by treating it as such.

Yeah, that's great. Sun and RealNetworks are the most trustworthy companies around. They'd never use the system for evil.

(Guidescope's Older Brother)
...which can be found at
http://www.junkbusters.com

Besides, look at all the junk snail mail you get every day, do you think that's going away any time soon?

Well, actually, yes -- a couple months ago I went to Junkbusters and sent out all the "take me off your mailing list" requests their site will generate for you. It has cut my paper junk mail volume way down. Not completely to zero, but now I rarely get any junk mail from businesses I'm not already dealing with.

Down here in Australia, nearly everyone is stuck on 56k. ADSL costs A$95 a month for 256kb/64kb with a 3GB a month cap. Ouch. Even worse, cable is only available in two cities in the entire country.

Firstly, I set up a junkbuster proxy on my box. Getting rid of all those stupid banners really does help, especially when I'm reading sites like *shudder* CNet or *shudder**shudder* ZDNet, with ther huge middle of the page Flash modem-killers. This feeds into a Squid caching proxy; it really does seem to help a fair bit. Thirdly, I run a BIND caching DNS server. Of course, there are plenty of other DNS servers around, but BIND is the one I saw first, so that's what I'm using.

Overall, with a bit of fiddling, it makes being stuck on a 56k suck slightly less.

I don't want any of the ads, so I use Bugnosis to detect the web bugs and the free WebWasher proxy with IE to scrub out the cruft, which is somehow available for free on Linux, though I'm told that Squid and Junkbusters can do the same. AdSubtract is another alternative that comes packages with the ZoneAlarm firewall these days, but I found it to not be as flexible as WebWasher. Unfortunately there are a few sites that do not work with WebWasher, most notably EBay and no matter how I tell it not to touch EBay's cookies and content, it still blocks something that keeps that site from working.

What is needed is some sort of plugin that works directly with the browser, sets all pages and cookies to be filtered out by default, and which lets you just right click on a page to tell it this site is OK to not filter and remember to let these cookies through. All browsers have the cookie feature, but management is usually a pain with what they provide and often left up to third party tools like all of the above. Sounds like Mozilla has some of this built it, so I'll give it a try...it may be time to make a switch. IE6 is supposed to have some of this cookie control, though I'm not sure if it's to that level of convenience.

I haven't seen an ad or a web bug on pages since I've made that change. I look forward to being popup/under and ad free in the future.

What is the solution? Well, the ideal mix of users includes a large majority who view the ads, and a small minority (this usually turns out to be the technically-inclined Slashdot crowd) who knows how to avoid them. Keep this mix, and everything is great for both groups. Let the balance get out of hand, and the result will disappoint us all.

The rise of PVRs can improve our enjoyment of TV, or it can destroy the content providers. And at this point, it could go either way.

-all dead homiez

With JunkBuster!

Sorry.. had to get my $.03 (adjusted for inflation) in.
---
nuclear presidential echelon assassination encryption virulent strain

Said the supreme court when they decided that the physical mailbox on the curb was part of a man's house, and that man had say over who could send mail to him or not. As a result, there is a Form 1500 that provides official notice to stop sending shit to a certain box, or face criminal penalties.

An e-mail box should be treated the same way, although I expect that a supreme court decision will be required to make this happen.

This isn't censorship, this is cutting through all the marketing bullshit.

This page explains the situation quite nicely.

Basically, a group of people involved in junk snailmailing claimed the same First Amendment right to spam. But in U.S. Supreme Court Appeal 397 U. S. 728, the Supreme Court ruled the exact opposite way. They said that "a man's home is his castle" and that if he doesn't want to receive junk mail, he has the right not to.

Sure, this ruling applied to snail mail, but it is similar enough to email that it is very likely that the Supreme Court would rule the same way here.

---
DOOR!!

Pop-up ads annoy the hell out of a lot of online users, but they're impossible to ignore

...until you learn to run a filtering proxy such as Junkbusters or Proxomitron

It get's better than that. First, keep track of the variations in your name, for examle, use an alphabetic code as your middle name, storing information on which code corresponds to which company signup. Then include (when dealing with snailmail) a form letter requiring the company not to disclose your contact information to 3rd parties, then, sit back and wait for the junkmail, then start sending collection letters to the companies that failed to comply with the disclosure you included with each signup. This technique and others are detailed on a really nifty website JunkBusters.com. Particularly amisung is their Anti-Telemarketing Script.

Thankfully, I have more important things to do with my time than pursue these endevours, but There are people who do these sorts of things (for a living maybe...).

--CTH


---

It get's better than that. First, keep track of the variations in your name, for examle, use an alphabetic code as your middle name, storing information on which code corresponds to which company signup. Then include (when dealing with snailmail) a form letter requiring the company not to disclose your contact information to 3rd parties, then, sit back and wait for the junkmail, then start sending collection letters to the companies that failed to comply with the disclosure you included with each signup. This technique and others are detailed on a really nifty website JunkBusters.com. Particularly amisung is their Anti-Telemarketing Script.

Thankfully, I have more important things to do with my time than pursue these endevours, but There are people who do these sorts of things (for a living maybe...).

--CTH


---

Junkbusters now recommends a newer, more user-friendly proxy called Guidescope. See Junkbusters' Guidescope FAQ. I've been using Guidescope betas for 6 months with few complaints. They say they will release the source code 8 months after the 1.0 binary release.

--

...try JunkBuster!
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nuclear presidential echelon assassination encryption virulent strain

Somebody does.

--
I hit the karma cap, now do I gain enlightenment?

The EU is setting an example that the US should've been setting long ago. Personally I think the whole issue is only being demonized by a media and a government that both have a vested interest in the globalization of businesses that routinely ignore privacy guidelines, and profit from it.

I'm not money hungry, but I do detest spam.

KACHING!
They owe you $500/call. It is illegal to telemarket cell phones. See Junkbusters

--Tom Geller, Suespammers.org Founder and Administrator

For email, the recipient pays, so email is "no different" from junk faxes (which are already illegal).

However, email is substantially different from telemarketing and direct (paper) mail. Email's cost-shifting nature makes all the difference.

--Tom Geller, Suespammers.org Founder and Administrator

While we're talking about IBM's dirty tactics, Here is a nice advertisement. (For the goatse.cx weary, it's http://www.geocities.com/zekester1945/) I recommend WebWasher for Windows users and JunkBuster for Linux users to eliminate GeoCities popup ads.

JUNKBUSTERS Junk Mail Headlines: How you can gain control of your mailbox

JUNKBUSTERS Junk Mail Headlines: How you can gain control of your mailbox

I agree with you 100%, although its no excuse for governments to justify private monitoring of our lives. But, concerning public monitoring, I'm all for it. Let's bust the criminals.


You're tired of Slashdot ads? Get junkbuster now!

Or make a script along the lines of: for i in host1 host2 host3 ssh root@$i "scp someserver:/keyslist keyslist" end

There is this nice Microsoft Timeline, covering 1975 till 2000, right over here. It is not exactly what you asked for, but its a M$ Timeline. Enjoy.



You're tired of Slashdot ads? Get junkbuster now!

Ok, this whole monitoring is very bad. But the point here is the damage - I, too, think these vandals should be punished for the whole damaged they caused over such a stupid thing - I mean, if it was for some noble cause, I'd be upset, but people who just cause major problems for no reason at all must pay for their crimes. The cameras were there just like cops could be there - it's technology in service of the law.

You're tired of Slashdot ads? Get junkbuster now!