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I just came back from a film, in Montreal. At theatres it's common to have staff check your bags (especially at downtown theatres) for camcorders etc, and of course there are warnings everywhere about how it's a crime to film a movie in the theatre (even if it isn't). These measure I support - hey, it's their theatre - but the big studios coming out with this FUD just as the government seeks to change the Copyright Act is way over the top. And so are their statistics. Unfortunately, these obvious tactics have been know to work, let's make sure this time it doesn't: Inform yourself and don't just sign a petition, but sign up and write your MP. Visit the CPPIC for more.

As far as the threat to delay movie releases, please do! It may give the small domestic film industry a little opportunity when some moviegoers arriving at the theatre choose to see a Canadian film, instead of the delayed American crud that they thought was out.

Heh we did this in 2003 and our VoIP implementation with NAT compatibility outperformed Skype at the time, had much better audio quality. (Old news).

To whatever extent a technical solution can be effective here, it will probably need to be one like you describe. Spammers will surely try to degrade such systems as much as they can though, with tactics like complaint floods, bogus certifying authority injection attempts, etc.

This guy has a good idea that could probably be paired with a Certified Email system to enhance its effectiveness:
Design of a DDoS Attack-Resistant Distributed Spam Blocklist -
http://www.sysdesign.ca/archive/blocklist-presenta tion.pdf

If in addition to blacklists, you could enhance that sort of system with various subscribable whitelists, trust lists, and ranking reports for certifying authorities, etc., then maybe we'd have a viable technical solution -- derisive form letter nothwithstanding.

There has been an arms race between spammers and admins, in many senses of the word. Spammers learned long ago that they will have an edge if they operate anonymously, either relaying through insecure relays in the old days, or more recently taking control of insecure PCs and servers and operating a fleet of zombie nodes. Their origin is masked. Or they might purchase services through dirty middlemen who then purchase services through dirty ISPs. Either way, spammers try to hide.

But the admins who fight spam often do not hide, usually because they are part of a reputable organization and are well respected by the community, and proud of their work. Also, the way blacklist technology is used (RBL, DNSBL) makes it difficult to conceal who you are. Unfortunately this makes organizations like Spamhaus vulnerable to DoS attacks, harassment, and frivolous lawsuits (remember that spammers call themselves 'internet marketers' and pretend they are legit businessmen). Other organizations like SPEWS are somewhat better at hiding their operation.

There are ideas floating around, however, on ways to harden blacklists agaist attacks of various sorts. The idea proposed in that 2004 paper would conceal the blacklist publisher, and use distributed resources to serve the list, kind of like how spammers use a fleet of zombies (except spammers steal those resources).

Spammers are a dirty bunch, they fight dirty. Maybe it's time we look more seriously at protecting the blacklists and their operators from various types of 'attacks'.

Though not implementing this law would mean violating the WIPOs rulings

I've been working pretty hard against this for years. I have phoned up my government representative and tried to talk to them about the issue but realistically, people in government do not understand the issue and are voting blindly. I have documented the proposed changes to law in this Q and A (no surprise, the background is in US legislation). There was a lot of interest from concerned Canadians, including a petition (with thousands of signatures).

Personally, I will never again buy music or media that originates from an artist under the membership of one of the industry associations (CRIA, RIAA, MPAA) that has lobbied governments and fooled our politicans. From now on it's rentals and second-used (used) media only for me. Please help keep your money out of the hands of these associations; they are already dying, let's finish them off.

I will not shed a tear for them. These ridiculous laws are not in the best interest of citizens or consumers, at all. You can't convince me otherwise no matter how you spin it.

Here is some background on WIPO, DMCA and the legislative monkey work that got American legislation that could not make it through Congress into an international treaty. Dirty.

Here is an article describing the proposed changes to Canadian copyright law, as well as the background -- industry lobby from the USA. This article is pulled from the Digital Copyright Canada web site which is trying to organize citizens feedback to politicians, with respect to the DMCA in Canada.

I absolutely adore the use of terms like "privacy officer" when describing these people. I see the irony but I'm starting to become concerned that the public may not anymore. People, the Orwellian world is here now and it's so obvious that it's worth reflecting on it for a moment. doublespeak is the twisting of language such that a phrase really means something quite different. Such terms become generally accepted by the public. Invading countries: war, invasion == spreading democracy. War is peace. See? Increasing monitoring of citizens in America, skyrocketing budgets for spy agencies and we are told that everyone is enjoying increasing freedom. Police state == freedom. It's quite beautiful in a way, the way ideas are twisted. Perhaps language is becoming a weapon...

Well I've known about it since November 2003, dunno about you.

So it started with technological innovation, and saw rapid development through the cooperation of governments and universities. It was refined and improved thanks to the effort of a bunch of awfully dedicated academics to the point where it could merge with mainstream technologies (talking PPP over analog phone modems). The new worldwide resource gave us the ability to communicate like never before.

Things were going so well, until the marketers came on board and started flooding people with ads and junk whatever way they could find. Spam was funny at first; now it's a serious waste of bandwidth and resources, with business people resorting to purely criminal activities in order to flood their advertising and harm benevolent volunteer organizations. Thanks to dirty business the Internet has become a battle ground. Spyware and even viruses are directly linked to immoral advertising/spam.

Now, I don't hate marketing people (I run a businses, and am a student in Management) but it's safe to say that immoral marketers are f*cking up the Internet.

Skype claims P2P but the voice has to go through at least one hop, so the latency is pretty poor and you need other (hijacked) nodes. Check out this VoIP system, which has low latency, direct peer to peer communications even through NAT on both sides. Oh, and blowfish for encryption so good... it may be illegal in your country!

I think it means very little that the worm launches an attack against SCO. The primary purpose of this worm, like the Mimails that preceded it, is the wide-spread distribution of a zombie network for the purpose of propagating spam. You see, spammers hire programmers to do this coding for them (read up a bit on Mimail and spam) in order to help their spam biz. While the hired programmer was at it, he probably threw in the SCO bit for shits and giggles. Or maybe he's a younger programmer and just kind of immature. Either way, the spammers (the people commissioning the construction of the worm) don't care.

To me this sounds like the most likely scenario -- remember that spam and viruses are linked. The SCO thing is just throwing people off track.

A simple answer is a bittorrent solution to the blacklists or other data, or a p2p type of app to get the lists or data out tot he servers/customers.

Spam is profitable, and this is becoming a huge underground business. Spammers regularly compromise other systems and install sophisticated software to allow easier spamming. Here's a document that describes the link between spam and viruses

Just you wait, there's more in store. Except it seems now that virus authors have major financial backing (spammers) and are establishing a sophisticated zombie infrastructure running on Windows machines that will cause years of serious trouble. Time to start seriously prosecuting these a$$holes (spammers, virus authors, or Microsoft... you decide!)

Many of the people writing newer viruses (those that relate to spam) are of a different breed entirely. I personally believe the people responsible for modern Internet spamming worms are more malicious than teenage hackers would ever want to be. These menaces to society consider themselves businessmen. You wish we were dealing with teenage hackers. Read up on Internet spam and viruses, and see this less technical article along the same lines.

When are we going to do a distributed blacklist

Check out this draft of a distributed server blocklist system. Spammers are increasingly using P2P technology to gain a one-up on the spam fighters; they use a distributed base from which to launch spam and DDoS attacks against popular blocklists such as monkeys.com, SPEWS, and relays.osirusoft.com.

The dhttp-bl system as described could use a secure and easily deployable P2P system to establish strong blacklists/blocklists that are not vulnerable to DDoS attacks.