Slashdot Mirror
IronPort Arms Both Sides In Spam War
securitas writes "We all know about IronPort's recent acquisition of SpamCop. What may not be common knowledge is that IronPort's Senderbase has 'the reputation as the fastest way to send millions of junk e-mail messages' and is popular with spam factories. Founded by two former Microsoft executives - Hotmail's Scott Weiss and ListBot founder Scott Banister - IronPort claims its customers are not spammers but legitimate marketers. Critics say that this is a clear conflict of interest. Playing spam from both sides might be likened to a pharmaceutical company enabling the spread of a disease in order to sell the cure. SpamCop founder Julian Haight - who had to sell the company in order to remain solvent - is quoted as saying of IronPort's anti-spam measures: "I am not sure all its standards are tough enough." The story was originally reported by the New York Times' Saul Hansell. Abbreviated mirror at IHT."
Which is why I support the Green Party.
Isn't that the correct phrase for Trolls?
Allow me to smash the fallacy of this argument one last time. All you self-correcting market folk, the market is not sentient, it doesn't think, display cognitive abilities, or even self-awareness. It is completely at the mercy of the thinking, scheming, self-aware and cognitively gifted operators who routinely abuse those who naively assign these qualitites to the market. The market has not been unfettered since the last crop of deceitful, thinking operators made a complete hash of the market. That problem was solved by the government regulating aspects of the market.
The utopian ideal of a self-correcting market is unattainable, because to attain it, you need to depend on another utopian ideal, rational consumers. Well we haven;t got rational consumers, and it is unlikely that we ever will have a homogenous group of rational consumers. This always opens the market to abuse by unethical vendors, consumers, and middlemen. Of these the biggest criminals are those who continue to ascribe traits to the market which itr patently cannot have, particularly in the face of overwhelming evidence that their assertions have never historically worked out, and (for good reason) have not been tried again.
Like any other ideal, or postulate, Adam Smith's ideas don;t work verbatim in the real world. Adam Smith's version of capitalism is no more viable than Marx's vision of communism. Adam Smith's idea has, as it's sole feature, the fact that the real world implementation of his ideals end up working out better than the real world implementations of Marx, Mussolini, Stalin and Hitler. But this is not prima facie evidence that Adam Smith's unabridged ideas are some type of gospel fact. Particularly in view of the fact that we have had far closer implementations of Adam Smith's ideas, and they have led directly to Railroad Barons and their abuses, and the Great Depression.
Even the political right, which often is the source of this mantra, does not naively leave the market to self-correct. When Ronald Reagan's administration was faced with a floundering economy, they didn't utter incantations over Adam Smith's grave, or invite Ayn Rand to minister in the National Cathedral. Nope, they helped the market along, they artificially created a demand for the market to fulfill. As the market returned to health, the need for that artifice was reduced. That this was necessary is manifest. Consider inflation, costs of oil, GNP, at the beginning and end of the Reagan years. Can anyone say that the governments actions in pushing the market did not have a beneficial effect? You can argue that you would rather have seen the money go elsewhere than holes in N. Dakota, but the need was real, and the effect of the governments 'meddling' in the market was equally real.
This is a real world we live in, ideals have their place, but they cannot usurp reality. Idealists have allways tried to make reality fit their nice little theories. At the small end of the scale, the idealist gets a rude awakeing. At the largest end of the scale, millions of kulaks in the Ukraine starve, or millions of innocents are shepherded into box cars and slaughtered like buffalo.
"Talk minus action equals nothing" - Joey Shithead, D.O.A.
"Talk minus action equals
i submitted that story weeks ago... the text of the story was so similar i seriously thought it was mine. but i guess securitas had more links than i did.
anyhow, ironport is not doing anything illegal according to any federal or state laws i'm aware of. as for ethics? it's a corporation, come on. remember when bertelsmann was suing napster which it had just purchased? or when fox news tried to sue the simpsons? or the krupp family selling weapons to every power in europe before and during ww1?
better yet look at our own federal government - "checks and balances" seems to have gotten a little out of hand.
the larger an entity the more likely you'll have conflicts of interest and in our world business and government entities are only getting larger, not smaller.
my book
Part of the SC "reasoning" was that if they didn't make their decision right away, if they actually allowed a valid recount, if they went to the trouble of ensuring Floridians weren't disenfranchised, the country would be left in the lurch. If they'd have ever read the Constitution, they'd have realized that that was a steaming load.
I don't understand why you ACs are so upset: your candidate is now the Selected President*.
The SC decided to overrule the Florida Supreme Court ignoring the fact that issues like this are States issues. They overrode the sovereignty of the state of Florida. The selected a President without knowing the actual count, thus invalidating all the votes in Florida.
The * means that W will have always have an asterisk next to his name in history books, because he is the only Selected President*, chosen by the SC. I would have thought that obvious by the context. Every other President got there through Constitutional proper methods.