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I'm a lot less worried about the government than I am about multinational corporations.

Yes, I understand this is a fundamental difference of perspective that liberals have with libertarians.

The government has had my "personal information" since I was born and I haven't had any problems with them.

Consider yourself fortunate. US Census data was used to enable the FBI to round up US citizens and send them to concentration camps. Before that, Census data was used to plan Sherman's March to the Sea. It's also dangerous to assess the situation as safe based on the present government, because data in databases never dies: the Nazis used religious data from the census taken by the democratic Weimar Republic in order to round up Jews & Jehovah's Witnesses.

On the other hand, private corporations have had my personal information since the 1980s and I've had numerous situations where they have misused that information or used it in a way that made me unhappy.

Your anecdotal experience is unfortunate. My experience with businesses has been countervailing to yours. I imagine there is some ubiquitous, individual cognitive bias in terms of how we would both perceive identical situations. I have a fundamental distrust of the government, with their goal of having a monopoly on violence and their use of coercion. My relatively-lower concern regarding the practices of businesses is that I can understand and predict their motivation—to extract profit from me. With the government, they are not satisfied with merely obtaining money, they also want control over the lives of their population.

So, it is a fallacy consider my position to be a paean to "noble corporations". This is more of a "lesser of two evils" perspective here.

If you're really worried that the government is going to get its hands on your Social Security number, maybe it's time for you to step away from the AM radio, you know?

Nice strawman: deftly dodging directly discussing my example. Probably not worth it for us to discuss your strawman, because our disagreement is more fundamental; I don't believe the Social Security program should exist at all, and I doubt our positions on that debate could be reconcilable. More on topic, do you adjudge the yottabyte NSA data center being built in Utah to be a concern? I perceive your perspective on the government's possession of your personal data to be very close to the "If you've got nothing to hide..." argument. Do I infer correctly?

Oooh, look everyone: I made it all the way through a political post without disparaging the counterparty in the discussion. Just doing my part to try to alter the trajectory of political discourse in this country...

What are the alternatives?

2) The inventor builds an encryption product out of the invention. BigCorp Inc. reverses the code of the encryption program, and next version of their OS has encryption by modular exponentiation. The inventor gets a email saying "thanks for all the fish". Or a job offer, if lucky.

What happens now if you you publish an encryption product based on that algorithm:

• If the product supports network encryption, BigCorps 1, 2 and 3 sue you because they have patents on "network encryption"

• if the product supports file system encryption, BigCorp 4, BigCorp 5, Big Corp 6 or Big Corp 7 sue you depending on how you implemented it

• if the product just encrypts files, Big Corp 7 and Big Corp 8 will sue you (and Big Corp 9 if it's a symmetric key algorithm --so not modular exponentiation-- and you add support for using the encryption in zip files).

Now, those are results from just a quick google search, and obviously not all of those patents will be infringed by every implementation. However, how many small software have the resources to figure out which patents exist, whether or not they infringe on those patents (nobody likes being served with an injunction that prevents them from selling the software they designed and wrote all by themselves) and how to rewrite their software so that they won't on any currently filed patent, or patent that may be filed up to a year from now (grace period).

Indeed, good luck. I'll take my chances that someone else will reverse engineer what I did and try to duplicate my work, rather than that I have to watch out that nothing I did may have been patented within the last 17 years by at least one company.

Having an easy way to contact or locate any citizen is also important.

yes.

yes it is.

"The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
- John Gilmore, Co-Founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation

Technically the quote is "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." In the context used, "the Net" was intended to refer to USENET. You had the right meaning, just the wrong words.

I cannot believe no one has yet mentioned Gilmore's postulate:

The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

The potential for exposure of Internet traffic to US snooping creates a a very powerful regulatory force against a particular class of speech on the Internet. So the Internet follows the above rule, grows away from us, and very soon we're at the edge of the network.

Hopefully we'll bounce back once end-to-end encryption is ubiquitous for all Internet protocols and the whole point is moot. (Which will be pretty soon, thanks to a technological arms race being prosecuted by our reigning copyright regime!)

Incidentally, the recently published BGP flaw suggests that China could be routing our traffic through their servers almost undetectably at any time.

John Gilmore already pushed for this to happen. Didn't get enough traction. However, maybe he didn't have a good enough threat model? Maybe now there is one? Here's John's URL:
http://www.toad.com/swan.html

There's a deeper flaw, not to mention one which he'll very likely encounter in the case that he ever run into the situation from a legal standpoint. Quoting his blog:

And yes, if someone did commit a crime using my network the police might visit, but what better defense is there than the fact that I have an open wireless network? If I enabled wireless security on my network and someone hacked it, I would have a far harder time proving my innocence.

Plausible deniability DOES NOT WORK IN COURT. Try the recent arrest of a German Tor server operator. That "I don't keep logs!" sure helped his case; he still was apprehended and taken down to the station, despite the police later letting him go. This will very likely keep happening over and over and over until finally the operator says "Is this really worth it? I spend 2 days a week at the police station, it's impacting my day job, tainting my resume, etc."

Another example is open relays and spammers. Back in 2002, Verio (ISP) shut off John Gilmore's internet access because he was *knowingly* running an open relay. Feigning innocence didn't help his defence any; and although I do respect what Gilmore was doing (in the sense that the Internet at one point had no concept of open/closed relay, because spam wasn't a problem) and I understand his logic, he still has to be held liable for what packets go out of his network.

The exact same logic applies here. Therefore, the instant someone does use Schneire's 802.11 network for deviant purposes and the cops show up, he *will* be going down to the station, he *will* need a lawyer, and he ABSOLUTELY will be held responsible for what goes out from his network. And although I hate 802.11's retarded security-through-absolute-annoyance implementation (WEP64, WEP128, WPA, WPA2, WUtterFuckingShitPack), and would much rather run an open wireless network myself *solely for the CONVENIENCE*, I can't -- and won't.

Like John Gilmore's site.

Simple and to the point.

BTW this is the guy who can't fly because he refuses to get a government issued ID. Interesting stuff.

Just as John Gilmore says, "How many of you have broken no laws this month?"

Also, the article mentions that most phone lines into and out of the country have been cut, the mobile network has been shut down, and so had the national ISP.

Ah. Remember that old phrase that goes, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."? I guess now we get to see if that's really true. Hopefully it is.

I hate the fact that the government over there has tried to cut Internet access, but I love the fact that it was a powerful enough tool for the people that they felt threatened by it.

The BSD developers were inspired to make their code free software by the example of the GNU Project, and explicit appeals from GNU activists helped persuade them, but the code had little overlap with GNU. BSD systems today use some GNU programs, just as the GNU system and its variants use some BSD programs; however, taken as wholes, they are two different systems that evolved separately.

Well, saying that is not enough, so let's look deeper: as I said before the first truely free BSD distribution was Net2:

After Net/1, BSD developer Keith Bostic proposed that more non-AT&T sections of the BSD system be released under the same license as Net/1. To this extent, he started a project to reimplement most of the standard Unix utilities without using the AT&T code. For example, vi, which had been based on the original Unix version of ed, was rewritten as nvi (new vi). Within eighteen months, all the AT&T utilities had been replaced, and it was determined that only a few AT&T files remained in the kernel. These files were removed, and the result was the June 1991 release of Networking Release 2 (Net/2), a nearly complete operating system that was freely distributable.

So, let's listen to Keith:

O'Reilly: You are the person who had the bright idea to rewrite all the utilities and the C library, to remove any taint from AT&T. What made you think at the time you could pull this off? Apparently, your colleagues at Berkeley didn't think this was possible. It's an amazing achievement. Bostic: I wouldn't say I had the idea. It's been an awfully long time, but I think that John Gilmore originally suggested it. And, of course, Richard Stallman had obviously been doing similar things for a long time, and he would periodically drop by CSRG to borrow a terminal and we'd argue back and forth about the why and how of free software. I can probably take the credit for making it happen at Berkeley, but like most things, it's hard to point to a single Eureka! moment or person who had the idea. I suppose if we'd truly understood how hard it would be, both in terms of time and legal hassles, we probably wouldn't have tried to do it. But there were lots of goals along the project path that were good in and of themselves, and so it was easy to gradually work our way to the point where we looked around and said "Hey, we're almost done."

The bold is mine in that. Since I suppose that RMS is well known, let's look at John Gilmore, who was a quite active part in developing Net2. From his homepage:

In the early days of computing, almost all software was free. IBM's operating systems, for example, came with source code and the right to copy and modify it. This gradually changed as software became more independent from hardware. Richard Stallman realized the loss to the industry from the change, and formalized the issue with the GNU General Public License and his project to re-implement Unix freely in 1983.

I ported Richard's GNU Emacs to the Sun Workstation that year. I started archiving the free software posted to the Usenet in 1981, and continued through 1987 or so. I started a project to "sift the sands of Berkeley Unix", collaborating with UCB and other Unix hackers to sort the nuggets of original, nonproprietary code out from the background of AT&T-licensed code. Ultimately this resulted in the Berkeley "Networking 2" release which didn't require the recipient to have an AT&T license. In 1985 I wrote the "pdtar" program,

Not according to me.

Physical property is a lot easier to adjudicate than IP because physical property cannot be easily duplicated at near zero cost... this is a huge, fundamental, significant difference.

This difference is manifest in the reasons behind physical property laws vs IP laws. Abstractly, both sets of laws were conceived to better the overall existence of mankind, but the ways in which they're intended to work are vastly different. Physical property laws are *not* intended to increase everyone's access to all physical property. Instead, physical property laws are intended to establish a concept of ownership to prevent the mayhem of everyone taking anything at any time. This doesn't achieve the ideal of everyone having enough, but I don't think there's much disagreement that it's better than a free-for-all.

By contrast, IP laws were intended to increase everyone's access to all ideas. The idea of granting a limited-time monopoly on ideas was solely a means to the end of incentivizing the development of ideas, with those ideas eventually becoming free for anyone's use, benefit, or enjoyment. This framework was established at a time when the printing press was cutting edge technology, and if there was any public debate about it then the public probably didn't figure it was giving up much. Now, everyone and their dog has the means to duplicate gigabytes of information and distribute around the world at near zero cost. Any benefits conferred by IP laws have long since been eclipsed by the hamstringing of innovation and creativity, and the villification of generosity. (Relevant read: John Gilmore's essay What's Wrong With Copy Protection.)

This distinction between physical property vs ideas is, I think, a lot easier to follow than the highly convoluted arguments put forth in furtherance of current IP laws (such as the argument you proposed which I originally responded to earlier in this thread.)

These losses of privacy and requiremens to "show our papers" has been ongoing, even within the US. It immediately reminds me of John Gilmore's protest against having to show his papers in order to take a domestic US flight (or travel on Amtrack or stay in a hotel). If he didn't have anything dangerous on his person, why did he have to prove his identity? This stuff is not really making anyone more secure, but it might make the airlines more money by preventing transference of tickts.

Perhaps people just feel more secure when they believe something is being done. even if nothing is, and even if it really sucks.

cause the more they harass "normal" people, the less the "normal" people will want to fly. soon the only ones left flying will be the terrorists (and weirdo hippies aiming to make trouble), then BAM! you've gottem!

What's Wrong With Copy Protection by John Gilmore. He explains how copy prevention technology prevents him from making proper copies of an original work that he created and owns to copyright to.

The government already does that much more frequently and accurately through taxes.

Don't know about other countries, but the last time the U.S. census rolled around, they sent me the "long" form. Had I filled it in, I would have given them much information that could not be deduced from my income taxes - racial heritage, schooling, work location, commute time...

Since it's none of their damn business, I filled in the box for how many people live here, and left the rest blank. The U.S. constitution (again, don't know about other countries) empowers the federal government to conduct an enumeration of citizens for the purpose of allocating representatives, not to pry into their lives. (And possibly make later oppression easier - see for example the round-up of Japanese-Americans during WWII. See also John Gilmore's page on the topic.)

Had they asked nicely, I might have been disposed to give more information. Their assertion that my response is compelled by law, however, generated in me the irrepressible urge that usually arises when confronted with blatantly irrational and unconstitutional laws - to tell them, "Up yours".

Can you point to the law that created these controls? PGP was published as a book for the purpose of export (see here, search for "State Department seems to think that books are exportable, while software is not"). There was no such rule at the time (at one time, Zimmerman was claimed to have uploaded pgp to a foreign mirror, but at no time was this book called into question), and as far as I know, since then encryption controls have become only more lax at the complaints of companies unable to compete with foreign companies who had no such restrictions.

I've long considered John Gilmore's whining about his service provider "censoring" his email (that is, actually enforcing the terms of service which prohibited open relays) to be a case in point. Bear in mind that this guy is a director of the EFF. I often sympathise with the EFF perspective on matters, but I'm reluctant to lend my support to ranting hyperbolic ideologues.

Unless John Gilmore wins his battle against the "show me your papers" police, you'll at least need ID to fly. But hell if I'll give them anything besides the mandatory info--I have no obligation to have a phone (cell or otherwise), email address, or emergency contacts. And right now, the address on my driver's license is over 1000 miles from where I currently live. (Don't tell the DMV--my old license doesn't expire for a few more years.)

Anyway, there is already plenty of proof that Microsoft is happy to abuse DRM.

Another nice presentation on free culture with lots of great examples.

Have you ever heard the saying, "The Internet views censorship as damage and routes around it"?

Originally in Time Magazine, December 1993, this is one of the most well known quotes of John Gilmore

I think the threat was that unapproved state IDs would not be accepted as valid federal ID for purposes such as entering federal buildings or being allowed to travel by air.
I don't know if this threat could actually be carried out.

By the way, here's a story about John Gilmore's experience with the secret law that requires you to show ID in order to travel by air. Another link.
After reading this, please forget everything about it. You are not allowed to know.

I think there are a lot of things wrong with how copy protection techologies are being foisted on an unsuspecting public. I'd like to hear from you a similar discussion. Being devil's advocate for a moment, why should self-interested companies be permitted to shift the balance of fundamental liberties, risking free expression, free markets, scientific progress, consumer rights, societal stability, and the end of physical and informational want? Because somebody might be able to steal a song? That seems a rather flimsy excuse.

http://www.toad.com/gnu/whatswrong.html

This writeup on Gilmore v. Ashcroft is kinda interesting too as is FreeToTravel.Org that includes an FAQ from John - all of this has been around for a while, but I guess the mainstream media just "re-discovered" John's story - don't think there has been any significant change in over a year (?)

...don't even pay attention to their crap and maybe it will go away.

Ignoring their efforts will not leave you unaffected. Now might be a good time to re-read What's Wrong With Copy Protection: http://www.toad.com/gnu/whatswrong.html

I'm sure these '3D copying machines' would become heavily regulated, much like handguns.

Quoting John Gilmore:

"If by 2030 we have invented a matter duplicator that's as cheap as copying a CD today, will we outlaw it and drive it underground? So that farmers can make a living keeping food expensive, so that furniture makers can make a living preventing people from having beds and chairs that would cost a dollar to duplicate, so that builders won't be reduced to poverty because a comfortable house can be duplicated for a few hundred dollars? Yes, such developments would cause economic dislocations for sure. But should we drive them underground and keep the world impoverished to save these peoples' jobs? And would they really stay underground, or would the natural advantages of the technology cause the "underground" to rapidly overtake the rest of society?"

Note that last sentence.

A brilliant post.

The anti smoking laws spreading like the cancer caused by smoking are a perfect example of conditioning, sheeple behaviour and the chattelization of the US public.

Banning smoking in bars violates your right to smoke, violates the bar owners right to control his own property in the way he sees fit, and represents yet another unjustifiable chip away from your rights.

Now all the smokers are whining "what are they going to do next, stop me from smoking in my own home?" Ummm yes you dimwit; thats what they already do to you by forbidding you to snort cocaine and smoke Mary Jane in your own house. Now its the turn of tobacco smokers; the laws are being rammed in and there is no one there to defend your right to smoke where and when you want.

In Iraq by the way, the imposed constitution guarantees the right to privacy. It is also legal to smoke in public. Iraqis have more rights than Americans do. Notice who the people that are taking away your rights; billionaires in government, like Mayor Bloomberg. They understand perfectly the character of the population (chattel), and they know how weak the understanding of rights is today. This is why he can demand that smoking is banned in public places, and get what he wants; billionaires get what they want every day, just by speaking on the phone, wether its banning smoking or ordering the illegal destruction of a country.

As for showing your ID card, just ask any South African what the pass laws did to that country, and then think about wether its a good idea or not that you should be required to have an ID card issued by the state. A poster above said that its a "problem" that there are 51 states all with many different driving licences. Thats actually a GOOD thing; a driving licence is only to show that you have passed a driving test, nothing more; if driving licences are standardized, there will be an explosion of feature creep turning them into de facto fully functioning national ID cards.

The poster is right. Distopias are built incrementally. If you dont stand up for your fundamental rights, like John Gilmore does then they will all dissapear.

I'm disappointed that FreeS/WAN is not going to be developed. I guess John Gilmore has lost interest, or decided to stop funding it. Note: who really funds FreeS/WAN is not public (and I do not know), but John Gilmore is widely believed to be one of the major forces behind it.

John Gilmore? I can't deny he made a lot for freedom of speech - EFF and stuff. But look what he writes here

The blacklisters hate me, so they put me on their lists, even though I have never sent a single spam message. They don't like the way I administer my machine. (I don't like the way they administer their machines either.) It will often be hard to get your ISP to admit that they are censoring your incoming email -- but ask them why you can't get email from IP address 209.237.225.253 (new.toad.com). They will tell you that that address must be a scurrilous spammer because it's on the blacklist, but you will know better.

I know better. And it's not about hating John Gilmore. It's about hating those, who abuse and limit MY freedom.
Mr Gilmore has forgoten that freedom of speech includes the right not to listen, if not interested.

I tried to set up OE. In fact, I did have it working, sort of. The problem is that a box running OE presently needs to use another machine as it's nameserver (or at least, use another machine's nameserver in preference to a local process). There was talk of fixing this through a port 53 passthrough, but I don't think this ever happened.

Also, OE requires the use of the TXT field. There are many other projects also proposing to use this field (well, a few anti-SPAM proposals), so conflicts could arise in the future.

However, I hope that Ken Bantoff will be successful with Openswan. My company uses FreeS/WAN for a VPN solution to provide secure WAN access between international sites.

I suspect the SSL-based alternatives may have problems with the tcp-over-tcp problem is the link is not good.

"The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it," John Gilmore famously said.

Indeed, and this is exactly what FreeNet is designed to do:

http://freenet.sourceforge.net/

Perhaps the fear of every government everywhere, FreeNet allows for secure and anonymous communication.

That would be John Gilmore. He's still out there, still runs an Open Relay, and still insists everyone should do it too for the sake of free speech.
While I like Gilmore and appreciate some of the things he's done, this must be the most idiotic First-Speech related stand I've seen.
Disclaimer: I'm a mail admin, and I would gladly see all Open Relays crushed with a steamroller and dumped into the Atlantic.

Is that you, John? :)

This is not much different than feel that they should be allowed to run open relays. They will end up on DNS blacklists and others may choose not to accept mail from them. Their server, their rules. No one is forcing anyone to close open relays, and no one is forcing anyone to accept email from everyone.

Here's possibly one of the best sites on the net about the philosophy of designing shareware. Note that copy protection is not the answer!

http://semicolon.com/ShareSuccess/Shareware1.html

Basically, the author does triage. There are 3 types of people: those who will always pay, those who will never pay (pirates), and those who might pay. He focuses on trying to convince the latter group, and doesn't waste time with copy protection schemes that will just annoy the honest users and not stop the pirates.

What's wrong with copy protection:

http://www.toad.com/gnu/whatswrong.html

Some typical attack methods:

http://www.geocities.com/Pentagon/Barracks/3030/co pyfail.htm
http://fravia.anticrack.de/advanced.htm

You might want to read all of these before deciding if your efforts on copy protection are really worth it in the long run.

http://semicolon.com/ShareSuccess/SharewareLinks.h tml

The author of the first link has a page of more links that are also very good.

That "internet millionaire" is John Gilmore, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has been protecting techie rights from the get-go. If you're at all concerned about the stuff you mentioned (intellectual property issues, privacy...) you should consider sending them some money.

1. one of the authors, when they came to work at Amdahl, listed SMail as prior work in his inventions and disclosures form
2. SMail v3 (sharing no code with SMail v2) was a completely new code base that was created under the GPL
3. an important Amdahl customer requested that Amdahl ship SMail as part of their product, and did so knowing that SMail was under the GPL
4. a director, with the concurrence of the VP, approved our working on and contributing to SMail, under the terms of the GPL

Thanks to the support of John Gilmore and a very good lawyer, the case was resolved before we went to court. In the end, people were allowed to obtain source for the version of SMail that Amdahl shipped, and Amdahl agreed to follow the terms of the GPL (for SMail and any other GPL-ed code) from then on.

Stealing X from Bob deprives Bob of the use of X. Infringing Bob's copyright on X deprives Bob of potential profits from exclusive possession of X.

and why it's bad

Here's the rub: some people don't believe it's bad. Copyright infringement is illegal, but many people don't equate legality with morality. Distinguishing between the legal and moral uses of "bad" is therefor important.

Before the printing press, the cost of replicating an idea on a large scale was prohibitive. The printing press brought that cost down to something commercial feasible. The internet brings the cost down to nearly zero, which throws issues like the legality vs morality of copyright infringement into the spotlight.

Even before the printing press, an idea could be replicated through the simple act of describing it to another person. The replication of an idea has - per se - never cost the originator of the idea anything monetary except in the context of copyright where potential profits (from exclusivity of distribution rights) are reduced through free replication of the idea. But copyright was conceived as a way to increase the public's access to ideas, the notion being that the limited-time monopolies granted by copyright might spur people to create more useful or beautiful ideas. Given today's technology, a key question is: are we really getting greater access to works because of copyright, or is copyright resulting in fewer people getting access to works than otherwise would?

In his interesting essay What's Wrong With Copy Protection, John Gilmore raises these points:

The progress of science, technology, and free markets have produced an end to many kinds of scarcity. A hundred years ago, more than 99% of Americans were still using outhouses, and one out of every ten children died in infancy. Now even the poorest Americans have cars, television, telephones, heat, clean water, sanitary sewers -- things that the richest millionaires of 1900 could not buy. These technologies promise an end to physical want in the near future.

We should be rejoicing in mutually creating a heaven on earth! Instead, those crabbed souls who make their living from perpetuating scarcity are sneaking around, convincing co-conspirators to chain our cheap duplication technology so that it won't make copies -- at least not of the kind of goods they want to sell us. This is the worst sort of economic protectionism -- beggaring your own society for the benefit of an inefficient local industry. The record and movie distribution companies are careful not to point this out to us, but that is what is happening.

If by 2030 we have invented a matter duplicator that's as cheap as copying a CD today, will we outlaw it and drive it underground? So that farmers can make a living keeping food expensive, so that furniture makers can make a living preventing people from having beds and chairs that would cost a dollar to duplicate, so that builders won't be reduced to poverty because a comfortable house can be duplicated for a few hundred dollars? Yes, such developments would cause economic dislocations for sure. But should we drive them underground and keep the world impoverished to save these peoples' jobs? And would they really stay underground, or would the natural advantages of the technology cause the "underground" to rapidly overtake the rest of society?

Whining about this is almost as bad as the tool that got kicked off a British Airways flight for wearing a button that said "Suspected Terrorist."

John Gilmore has done more for personal freedoms and liberties on the net than anyone you know. He founded or helped found the EFF, the "alt" newsgroups, the Cypherpunks, and Cygnus Support, the first company that showed that you could make money supporting open source software. Cygnus was later bought by Red Hat for umpteen millions of dollars, but Gilmore was already rich, having been one of the first employees at Sun Microsystems.

He has steadily plowed his money back into causes designed to promote freedom online and in the physical world. He has funded the FreeS/Wan project designed to provide automatic link-based encryption. He's also funded efforts to add security to the DNS. He provided the money for the machine that proved once and for all that DES was insecure. He is presently suing the government over travel restrictions.

As for the button incident, his point is that we are all being treated as suspected terrorists under the current regulations. As long as people put up with that without a protest, nothing is going to change. We should all be grateful that someone with Gilmore's credentials and financial strength is doing something about the increasingly harsh restrictions that all of us face as the government cracks down.

Other EFF board members include John Perry Barlow [also associated w/the Grateful Dead] and John Gilmore, neither of whom would endorse systems that require DRM. Beyond that, the EFF's general vibe of promoting online privacy and the right to anonymity would make the EFF incompatible with DRM systems.

I think that this bad meme (that the EFF wants C.L.) got into Slashdot a few months ago when an article covered the talk an EFF staff member gave on compulsory licencing. Talking about it or listing it as one method of compensating artists != endorsing it, but that confusion was made.

why would any mail admin want to have an open relay?

Usually, they don't actually want it, they are just clueless. There's the odd individual who might claim to have justification for operating an open-relay, but in my experience, there is absolutely no reason for it these days

[Disclaimer : I have the highest regard and respect for John Gilmore; I just think he's wrong about this particular issue.]

It was John Gilmore, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Cypherpunks cryptography discussion list.

We could call it the Slashdot Twitch. That's when your knee starts jerking because you won't bother to look into the facts and context of a story before you leap to conclusions.

If those of you afflicted with the Slashdot Twitch at the moment actually read what John Gilmore has said about this episode all along, perhaps you will be able to alleviate your symptoms before they make you look foolish.
Especially those of you who shot your mouths off, called him names and blackholed toad.com without a second thought.

The point John was making all along, for those too lazy to actually read what he wrote, is that braindead ISP policies that are designed to address issues in a technically deficient but corporately convenient way, that get in the way of people who know what they are doing, are irrational and to be resisted.

I've known John for a long time and I have my (friendly) disagreements with him -- "please would you support getting FreeS/WAN going on FreeBSD" was my last one he didn't go for :) -- but really, John has done a terrific amount for the net and for our inherent right as human folks to communicate. And THAT is what the whole tussle with the Verio middle managers is all about.

--------------

On his web-site Mr Gilmore suggests contacting his provider (Verio) to let them know what you think. Sounds like a splendid idea to me. Here's the message that I sent (I don't believe in republishing other people's addresses, so I've anonymised them. The correct addresses are available from the toad.com URL linked below):
----

From: "Jeremy Howard" INVALID@fastmail.fm.INVALID
To: "Darren Grabowski" INVALID@verio.net.INVALID
Cc: "John Gilmore" INVALID@toad.com.INVALID,
"NOC Security" INVALID@noc.verio.net.INVALID,
" Vantive Updates" INVALID@vanwebserv.verio.net.INVALID
Subject: Comments on open relay at toad.com

Dear Darren,

John Gilmore suggests that people should contact you regarding the treatment of his open relay at toad.com:
http://www.toad.com/gnu/verio-censorship.html

I am a director of FastMail.FM, a popular email provider. I would like to applaud you for trying to help rid the Internet of open relays. We have
recently completed an analysis that suggested that for each 10,000 messages that arrives at our system from open relays, only one (on average) is valid email, while the remainder are unsolicated commercial email (UCE, or 'spam').

There is no valid reason to run an open relay SMTP server. There are many effective authentication mechanisms. For instance, at FastMail.FM we use SMTP AUTH, which our users have found to be a convenient and robust method for authenticating with our SMTP server. We also provide a web interface for sending email, which allows users without access to a client supporting SMTP AUTH (although most do) to compose messages, format text, spell check, maintain an address book, and so forth.

We block all messages from open relays, and we scan frequently used sending IP addresses for open relays automatically and send positive results to some DNSBLs such as ORDB.org. We would encourage you to do the same.

We have a very active user community that receives over a thousand posts a month by enthusiastic users. Every time open relay blocking has been discussed here by our users it has been overwhelmingly supported, as has the support of DNSBLs that list open relays.

We encourage you to maintain your stance on closing open relays. Furthermore, I hope that Verio will consider taking a more pro-active stance against "spammers" in the future--there are still numerous known spammers operating through Verio's network despite repeated emails to your abuse desk informing of the problem.

Thanks for you time,
Jeremy Howard
Director
FastMail.FM

To John's credit he acknowledges this problem with spam and also proposes a solution Grokmail. It looks like it will be an email reader that will use an intelligent agent to filter your mail. But as I see it his solution fails in two ways.

1) It is not yet a reality.
2) it doesn't address the burden on the network of masses of unsolicited mail. His solution will actually make this much, much, WORSE. If his system works and everyone uses it. Then it makes the most sense to send your commercial email to (quite literally) everyone! Those that don't want it won't even see it (though it will have been sent to them), those that do will. Win/win for everyone right? You don't see unwanted spam though occasionally you will get an unsolicited commercial email that actually interests you (hey, it could happen). The spammer gets his message in front of every single interested potential customer in the whole freakin' world! Yay!! But behind the scenes the network is transmitting EVERY SINGLE commercial message to EVERY SINGLE user. Masses of useless data that will never even be seen - probably many orders of magnitude a greater volume of data than that which is actually going to be seen and used. Perhaps technology will make this a viable system (seems outrageously inefficient though)

It looks like the majority of /.ers are siding with Verio on this one. I read Gilmore's web site and he has some interesting views on a lot of things. His opinons on SMTP blacklisting and list operators control over ISP's is a very good read. I think Gilmore makes some valid points and raises some valid concerns. For example, The current list of anti-spam restrictions is not written down anywhere that I could find; you only find out when a blacklist notice appears in your inbox, telling you that you are going to be thrown off the Internet unless you immediately change. Next week they could demand that any ISP which is also a phone company must cut off phone service to alleged spammers; the following month demand that every ISP turn over credit card and/or customer address information on demand. (Some people claim that thir "fee" for reading a spam is $50 or $500; I'm sure they would like to immediately charge somebody's credit card for it,and let the details and legalities sort themselves out later).

One thing that is being missed is he was once the co-founder of this ISP which over time and various mergers is now Verio. When he founded his ISP their policy was to give the subscribers the ability to do what they wanted. My ISP has changed hands several times in the last three years. With each change of hands there is a new TOS agreement. What is acceptable use today might not be acceptable use by the owners of tomorrow. As it stands my service is getting cut down one port at a time. Rather than educate its customers about viruses and exploits my ISP would rather just block the ports that are exploited. In their mind as long as they provide a portal web site to thier subscribers they are providing service.

I'm glad there are people like Gilmore who have the resources to challenge ISP's. Who else is there who stand up for the rights of the customers? Surely its not our government who passes laws like the DMCA which strips away our privacy when it comes to the internet. Today Gilmore's battle is with SMTP relays and blacklist operators. Tomorrow it might very well be the RIAA and ISP's blocking ports of known P2P clients.

Call the guy crazy if you want but I think his fight is a good one. Its about freedom, something which is slowly dying on the internet.

No, actually, Verio doesn't. It's bound by the terms under which it (indirectly) acquired The Little Garden (tlg.net), which very clearly specified that there was to be no blocking of service on grounds of content.

Remember this, if you're ever tempted to business with Verio: It breaks its commitments. Accordingly, you can't believe a word it says.

Yes, TLG's contracts with its customers eventually became contracts between Verio and its new customers. However, the original contract, which you linked to, states that the terms can be changed with 60 days notice. I find it implausible that in that string of three buyouts, nobody sent the customers new terms of service. In any case, if that wasn't done, that is a technical problem that Verio can surely remedy.

• The gentleman in question has a home page here

Please mod the parent up. You have to read some of Gilmore's own words to believe how aggressively and unreasonably stubborn he is on this issue. Gilmore has done some wonderful things, but he flat out refuses to ignore the changing realities of living on the 'net, calling anti-spammers "extortionists", "thugs", "blackmailers", and asserting that this is an "antitrust" issue. Regarding spam itself, Gilmore says: "I don't even want a "tyranny of the majority", if the majority happens to prefer to smash spammers (and suspected spam-sympathizers). I don't want a rerun of Joe McCarthy's witch- hunt, with spammers in place of Communists. I want to have everyone's right to communicate with each other protected, whether or not they disagree with the majority."

Which is all well and good. Gilmore argues that any censorship is reprehensible. OK, then why did Gilmore voluntarily censor mail passing through his gateway in a token attempt to appease Verio? He argues on a point of principle, then breaks that principle quite cynically so as to create an appearance of having offered a reasonable compromise (when the real solution is much simpler: authorisation). He is a very jolly, persuasive and genial old hypocrite. Harsh comment, but judge him by his actions, not his protestations.

Gilmore is an extremely confused man, well intentioned, but in severe denial that the world has changed around him. He has found a cause to fight (using EFF lawyers) and is enjoying playing hardball on an issue of principle (while breaking that principle himself) when there's good grounds for believing that the real issue is that he's just pissed at Verio for buying up the ISP he founded and imposing terms of usage on him. Any terms. Gilmore is pro-free speech in the shouting-fire-in-a-crowded-theatre-is-OK way. Information doesn't just want to be free, it wants to be thrown out of the door and helped along with a cattle prod. While he's done a lot of good in his life, I believe that this extremist stance actually damages the EFF and the free-speech lobby.

Before you judge him, go and read his specific thoughts on this issue, and decide for yourself whether he deserves contempt or pity. I'm rather leaning towards the latter.