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Ferris Research is one of the leading analyst firms covering email. They outsourced their OWN email to Google Apps, and I followed their example.

DDOS attacks are now a thing of the past for me. The spam filter has JUST enough false positives I sadly have to scan manually, but in fact I've never been greatly inconvenienced by one. The false negatives are fairly mild.

There is no such thing as anti-spam with 100% accuracy both ways.

And by the way, challenge/response is a TERRIBLE idea -- it causes huge amounts of backscatter spam pollution, and it also inconveniences potential customers trying to reach you.

CAM

Just as it would on the Internet, Tariff Rebate Passthrough would be a fix in the cell phone case as well. All the "decency" and noncompetition rules would be out the window, as would the socialism-style approval cycle. If anybody enforced "decency", it would be the FCC.

On the other hand, the cellular providers would still be allowed to rake in money hand over fist.

What's not to like about the idea?

One the one hand, Congress is more motivated to do the right thing in this area than in many others, perhaps for no other reason than that their own status is threatened.

On the other hand, they're REALLY clueless about technology and its implications.

I really think we can make a difference by driving the public policy debate in the right directions.

Besides the nasty tactics outlined in the article, the RIAA et al. are a serious menace in at least two other ways.

First, they are a prime mover behind laws mandating a long audit trail (e.g., two years) recording who accesses which web sites. (Child porn is the other common motivation.) To date, this has been more of an issue in Europe than the US.

Second, there's a huge threat going forward as Layer 7 inspection by ISPs becomes commonplace. At that point, it will be at least theoretically possible to harass somebody for ANYTHING they download, upload, whatever, because intermediaries such as ISPs will have complete access to that information.

The correct link was http://www.monashreport.com/2006/06/09/qui-custode t-ipso-custodes/

Richard Brandt argues with passion that Google will eclipse Microsoft. The idea is that all the reasons why Microsoft beat everybody else don't apply to Google. I disagree, however, because I don't see Google's advantage as having much sustainability.

On the other hand, I was fairly late to realizing how sustainable Microsoft's advantage would prove, back in my stock analyst days, so do consider the source ...

A lot of people seem to be overlooking two basic facts:

1. The amount of information government truly needs to gather to protect us is also sufficient to greatly threaten our liberty.
2. Governments will inevitably gather much more information than they really need.

As a result, it is necessary to design legal systems (and where possible to restrain the design of technical systems) so that even though government has the information, it doesn't commonly use it in nefarious ways. I've written a series of articles about that. Most of them can be found starting from the link http://www.monashreport.com/2006/06/06/freedom-eve n-without-data-privacy/, or more generally from http://www.monashreport.com/category/public-policy -and-privacy/privacy/

Examples of why we should expect government to gather huge amounts of information include, in no particular order:

A. All the call/e-mail/whatever connection information they're already getting, as documented in the news around NSA surveillance, AT&T's involvement, and so on.
B. Laws to require ISPs or information service providers to keep records of which IP addresses connect to which sites (so as to fight child porn, piracy, whatever).
C. Britain's moves towards complete video tracking of car movements (I get my reporting on this from The Register).
D. Credit card transaction records.
E. Forthcoming integrated electronic health records. (Those will have huge benefits to the saving of lives, quality of life, cost and efficiency of health care, etc. Whatever the privacy risks, they need to be managed so that health care is allowed to improve.)

And that's even without mentioning RFID.

What's slowing all this down is some political opposition, plus the huge technical difficulty of the required system integration projects. But in a small number of decades, it will all have happened. Our laws and oversight systems need to have evolved drastically by then. We have to start now.

I'm definitely not saying that we should cripple government in gathering and using information. Indeed, I'm an advisor to Cogito, a company with some of the most powerful relationship analysis software out there. http://www.dbms2.com/category/object-oriented-and- xml-technology/cogito/ But I think we need to radically upgrade our legal structures in response to these technological trends.

A lot of people seem to be overlooking two basic facts:

1. The amount of information government truly needs to gather to protect us is also sufficient to greatly threaten our liberty.
2. Governments will inevitably gather much more information than they really need.

As a result, it is necessary to design legal systems (and where possible to restrain the design of technical systems) so that even though government has the information, it doesn't commonly use it in nefarious ways. I've written a series of articles about that. Most of them can be found starting from the link http://www.monashreport.com/2006/06/06/freedom-eve n-without-data-privacy/, or more generally from http://www.monashreport.com/category/public-policy -and-privacy/privacy/

Examples of why we should expect government to gather huge amounts of information include, in no particular order:

A. All the call/e-mail/whatever connection information they're already getting, as documented in the news around NSA surveillance, AT&T's involvement, and so on.
B. Laws to require ISPs or information service providers to keep records of which IP addresses connect to which sites (so as to fight child porn, piracy, whatever).
C. Britain's moves towards complete video tracking of car movements (I get my reporting on this from The Register).
D. Credit card transaction records.
E. Forthcoming integrated electronic health records. (Those will have huge benefits to the saving of lives, quality of life, cost and efficiency of health care, etc. Whatever the privacy risks, they need to be managed so that health care is allowed to improve.)

And that's even without mentioning RFID.

What's slowing all this down is some political opposition, plus the huge technical difficulty of the required system integration projects. But in a small number of decades, it will all have happened. Our laws and oversight systems need to have evolved drastically by then. We have to start now.

I'm definitely not saying that we should cripple government in gathering and using information. Indeed, I'm an advisor to Cogito, a company with some of the most powerful relationship analysis software out there. http://www.dbms2.com/category/object-oriented-and- xml-technology/cogito/ But I think we need to radically upgrade our legal structures in response to these technological trends.

China's obvious censorship goal -- quasi-permanent suppression of the citizens' desire to be able to throw their rulers out of office. (Which is the one big advantage democracies have over other forms of government. Even if you usually replace the bums with guys equally bad, the fact that you can get rid of them certain limits how bad they can get.) This should be fought at almost any cost, both on moral grounds and for enlightened self-interest. And so I'll again shamelessly plus my proposal of how WE -- yes, WE -- can make a difference. http://www.monashreport.com/2006/04/17/how-to-beat -chinese-censorship-operation-peking-duck/

India's apparent censorship goal -- well, like the anti-Nazi free speech limitations in Europe, India's political censorship seems to be focused on defusing (and diffusing) racial, religious, or ethnic tensions, so that they don't erupt into violence or worse. This censorship is certainly something we should carefully monitor and worry about, but it could yet turn out to be relatively benign. E.g., as another poster suggested, it could be the work of an overzealous bureaucrat, or some incompetent ISPs panicking in the face of a sensibly limited directive and blocking much more than they were told to. Either way, the whole thing might and hopefully will soon be reverse.

And just to be clear -- I think ALL this censorship is stupid. I just think that some of it is bad enough to be my problem and yours, while some of it is benign enough it should be left to the people of the affected countries themselves to deal with as they see fit.

Let's be real. Government WILL wind up with huge amounts of information about us, and the technological means to filter it. Financial transactions, electronic communications, travel -- all of those are trackable in theory, and anything trackable can be stored and mined. Over the next couple of decades, that theory will increasingly become fact.

We need laws that protect us DESPITE this inevitable progression. I.e., since freedom will lose on the battlefield of what information government has access to, we need to find ANOTHER battlefield where freedom can win. And the only viable candidate I see is to greatly strengthen laws controlling what government can DO with data, even if it possesses same.

This winds up being a system design issue, as tough as the flip-side problem of "How will government integrate all that information to get at it anyway." So we need to start solving it right away, just like the integration problem is already being worked on, then get that solution out into the public consciousness.

I think I've made a good start at http://www.monashreport.com/2006/06/06/freedom-eve n-without-data-privacy/, but it's just a start. A lot more is needed.

I say again -- beating Chinese censorship is easy in the short term, very hard in the long term, but probably also doable in the long term. But it needs a lot of smart techie brainpower from the outside to beat. http://www.monashreport.com/2006/04/17/how-to-beat -chinese-censorship-operation-peking-duck/ is my idea of a good place to start.

Many things are wrong with the political process, in this instance as in all others. But the particular one that is burning me up right now is that both sides of the net neutrality issue are positing a false dichotomy.

As I've documented elsewhere -- I hope convincingly (http://www.monashreport.com/category/public-polic y-and-privacy/net-neutrality/) -- it is possible to design a system whereby:

* Telcos get to charge for QOS
* Consumers may have to pay for QOS
* Information providers can subsidize consumers' QOS payments
* Even so, there is very little risk of information providers being discriminated against by telcos

In fact, it's a really simple to design such a system conceptually (http://www.monashreport.com/2006/06/26/simple-leg islative-language-for-tariff-rebate-passthrough/), and the technical requirements aren't forbidding either.

Many things are wrong with the political process, in this instance as in all others. But the particular one that is burning me up right now is that both sides of the net neutrality issue are positing a false dichotomy.

As I've documented elsewhere -- I hope convincingly (http://www.monashreport.com/category/public-polic y-and-privacy/net-neutrality/) -- it is possible to design a system whereby:

* Telcos get to charge for QOS
* Consumers may have to pay for QOS
* Information providers can subsidize consumers' QOS payments
* Even so, there is very little risk of information providers being discriminated against by telcos

In fact, it's a really simple to design such a system conceptually (http://www.monashreport.com/2006/06/26/simple-leg islative-language-for-tariff-rebate-passthrough/), and the technical requirements aren't forbidding either.

Both sides are lying, somewhat, although one is indeed a lot worse than the other. The (relatively) good guys want enhanced QOS to be free. The bad guys want to use the legitimate need to charge for enhanced QOS as an excuse to turn the whole Internet into AOL.

I propose calling the bluffs of both sides, via Tariff Rebate Passthrough. The essence of the idea is:

• Pricing of internet services to consumers will be based wholly on technical characteristics such as volume and quality of service, and not on the identity of the information provider, the content of the information, or the equipment (hardware or software) used by the consumer to consume it.
• Pricing of "last-mile" delivery to information providers will be based on those same factors only, and be in the form of standard per-byte tariffs only. Pricing will not discriminate in any way among information providers, nor among types of application.
• Telecom service vendors can't charge two parties for delivering the same byte.

Discussion of this idea can be found at http://www.monashreport.com/category/public-policy -and-privacy/net-neutrality/

I'm going to take a very strong position here in my first-ever Slashdot post -- China absolutely should be hacked, on a systematic and worldwide-basis. Their desire to censor a whole country should be opposed on both moral and enlightened-self-interest grounds. But it will be tough at best to beat.

Ironically, the situation is a kind of reverse spam-antispammer set up, in which the folks trying to get through the defenses are the good guys. Amnesty International's Irrepressible.info, while terribly primitive, is at least a start, and I think everybody with a web site should play along and see what happens. A more advanced idea may be found at http://www.monashreport.com/2006/04/17/how-to-beat -chinese-censorship-operation-peking-duck/.

And if the censoring can be used for some kind of DOS, so much the better. Make it as expensive and difficult for the oppressors as ever possible.