Slashdot Mirror
101 Ways To Save The Internet
captain igor writes "Wired news is running an editorial detailing 101 ways to save the Internet from spammers, crackers and smothering regulation. What does do Slashdot readers think of these suggestions, and what other options should be considered to keep the Internet from falling to evil forces?"
Simple: permit first posting on slashdot.
- Dark Helmet
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
Let's face it. We're past the "wild, wild west" stage of the internet. It's not the 1990s anymore and the mob is here and therefore regulation is required.
The owls are not what they seem
Sex red light district? I know where I'm spending my time for now on.
First, we need to get a big-ass spotlight.
Next, get a big piece of cardboard and make a cutout of Tux. Remove the cutout and place the remaining cardboard over the lens of the spotlight.
Wait for a cloudy night, flip on the light, and wave it randomly around. Viola!
The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer. - Albert Einstein
Is there no quality control there?
11 Larry Flynt, build a porn browser It should cover our tracks coming and going.
I think we all know that should read "coming and coming".
What do you mean "101 ways to save the Internet from spammers, crackers and smothering regulation"? I can list off twice as many as that without even taking off my socks.
24. Release Episode III on the Net It's going straight to video anyway.
Lets see how long it takes wired to get DOS'ed by the Star Wars geeks of doom.
And why did you staple the trout to the RAM?
2 Slash song prices charge 29 cents per download. You''ll make it up in volume.
No you won't. The labels take 70 cents from all of the "legitimate" services. At 29 cents, you want as little volume as possible because you'll lose money on every download.
The 101 things contain many loaded topics like rewarding hackers for finding security holes. The whole thing was stupid. Why not have a FEW points, and write a reasonable explanation with them.
The internet is a vast network of intellectual people who believe in distributing information (mostly) for free. The individual users and companies that most prolifically contribute to the internet will always be one step ahead of spammers and crackers, and two steps ahead of any regulations.
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
I'm surprised, how did I get to post this first?
RE: "Make email addresses portable"
So, I would get my bubba@toofless.com email delivered to my new yankee@stankee.com account?
Since email addresses contain the ISP's domain account, this would get truly messy. However, if we changed the way email addresses were constructed so that the ISP's domain name wasn't involved, then we might have a workable method of keeping them portable.
BN
Silly me.
The current tactic of ignoring spam "in the hope it will go away" just helps raise the spammers' signal-to-noise ratio when they look at their replies. If they had to go through a million bogus replies to get the 10 that are stupid enough to really want their crap, they'll become unprofitable quickly.
But that's what the SPEWS assholes keep telling us to do.
The owls are not what they seem
I would expect more than this from Wired, as there are several glaring inaccuracies.
"Make email addresses portable" - get your own domain name and move it from ISP to ISP as you please.
"Simplify Web publishing Why can't we post files from our desktop to a Web site in one drag-and-drop move?" - my home directory, including public_html, is accessible from Samba. I can copy any file there and it is live on the web instantly.
"Big music, follow the money 8 of 9 adults beyond student age still pay for songs instead of ripping them." - ripping them? That has nothing to do with whether you paid for it.
"Replace servers with P2P Too many network services - domain names, Web servers, email - rely on the old client-server model, which is vulnerable to attack." - uhhh.... eeyeah.
Oh well. I guess they have to match the dumbed down state of their readers.
Anyone else find it funny that "Just use Mozilla" would have taken care of over half of these?
40 Big music, follow the money 8 of 9 adults beyond student age still pay for songs instead of ripping them.
Some people do both. Way to keep your readers clued, Wired. Remember that the main objection of record labels to "Rip. Mix. Burn" was that they thought "rip" meant "steal" - and Wired seems to like to propagate this fallacy.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
Wait a minute, that has been done.
16 Simplify Web publishing Why can't we post files from our desktop to a Web site in one drag-and-drop move? This was done in Windows 98 and beyond. Ever heard of web folders? It works with both FTP and Webdav. I use it all the time, and it works flawlessly.
Face it, the Inet just isn't about the free exchange of information anymore. It's about the convenient exchange of your cash for their products.
;)
IMO, sad as it is, the Internet as we know it is dead. Personally, I'm looking forward to the underground, WiFi Internet that will replace it
Then again, I've never been known to make an accurate prediction...
The longer I'm a member of the Human Race, the more I believe Apocalypse is a valid solution.
10 Free the handsets
Right now, GSM does this for anybody who uses GSM. I walked into Gamestop, bought an N-Gage, changed the SIM from my old phone into it and was on the phone immediately.
Besides, GPRS is cool but dog slow and having more GPRS users won't enhance the Internet particularly.
I don't know about the 1.Unleash vigilante justice on spammers suggestion...imagine millions of machines in DDOS battles with quadrillions of bits...The Internet has enough problems already.
Seriously, if it ain't broke... Spammers represent a small problem, but "saving the internet" is an approach that's likely to do more harm than good.
Yes, yes, yes.
HTML email is an abomination that must be stopped. It's bigger than necessary, it's ugly and it's the spammer's friend.
John.
How about lower the result of the Slashdot Effect?
Cheers,
RoadkillBunny
101. Forget about RealPlayer
That is, technologists will figure out technical problems without legislative intervention. As in the Verisign com/net wildcard fiasco.
But the Internet regulatory issues will not take care of themselves.
The regulatory issues are what require our attention most, so if you're a voter, write your representatives whenever you can help further their understanding -- for issues on DRM, SPAM legislation, email and internet access taxation, ISP customer privacy issues etc. Support the EFF - visiting their pages will give you ideas - they make it easy through their Action Center to contact your elected representatives, and educate visitors on the fine points of the issues at hand.
Look at the pharmaceutical industry and its utter control of America's lawmaking process -- where ever there's a profit to be made you'll see some heavy lobbying done by corporations.
If we get the one about French military victories one more time, we're going to come over and unplug you personally.
Okay, I surrender! Please don't hurt me.
Well, why not crack down on it on multiple fronts. Target the morons buying into spam by advertisements showing how stupid it is and create an effective, international anti-spam effort.
The owls are not what they seem
Comment removed based on user account deletion
38 Simplify URLs Why can't http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail//03755 02904/qid=1068751824/sr=12-8/103-2810600-6302246?v =glance&s=books be amazon/wolf/wired?
This guy obviously hasn't done any web programming.
1. Bust up Microsoft -> Software Industry reborn -> Save Internet and technology in general
2. Bust up local telcos -> flat worldwide voice @ $10/mo & Korean-style (10+ mbps) unlimited data @ $20/mo -> Save Internet with new & exciting high bandwidth applications
3. Bust up large ISPs (and keep Tier 1 & 2 ISPs from merging any further) -> Save Internet from looming per-packet charges & built-in censorship, usage restrictions and AOLification
4. Bust up Big Cable & Big Telly -> abandon channel model in favor of net-borne VOD -> Save Internet with a great high-bandwidth application that everybody uses.
5. Bust up RIAA & MPAA -> Get more, better-quality content for AOD/VOD streaming.
Many the intention is to just allow porn in .sex and also in .com. This may lead to some sites duplicating content in both TLDs, but why would a porn site abandon .com for .sex voluntarily? What do they have from making their sites easier to block?
The internet should be a self regulatory entity else we will end with politicians doing stupid decisions for it, like Chirac banning muslims scarfs from schools or be a puppet like new Canada's prime minister (you can see the strings in his face), even Bush with dinosaurs politics telling him what to do, don't let anyone choose for you else you'll end buying .99 cent crap burgers because someone says is good for your health.
The internet is the last resource for freedom, don't defend it like it is and we will loose it.
My spare change...
The computer is not yet an appliance, don't treat it like a microwave
Your 2 GHz Athlon is not obsolete when the 2.1 GHz one comes out
The Microsoft is not the Internet
WWW is not the Internet
Nigerians are not that generous
MS' Passport is _not_ handy
A $300 rebate on 3 years of AOL is not "free"
The case of your computer is not "the CPU"
Downloading those MP3s from Kazaa is almost certainly illegal
MS Office is NOT the gold standard for Office Suites that some make it out to be
Save the Internet? That's like 'saving the Planet'. The Internet will be there regardless of the S/N ratio on it. Save the people FROM the Internet, the new, spammy, MSN-y, pointy-clicky Internet.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I believe that at this point, there is no way to "save" the Internet from spammers. And I would like to advance, perhaps now it is not the spammers we need to fear, but Corporate Borg Beings that have decided the Internet belongs to them. Perhaps it is time to build a "new" Internet, and define the rules of "ownership".
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
The biggest problem facing the Internet is the decline of direct peer-to-peer communication. Proxies, firewalls, NAT, cable modems, Microsoft, etc, all are working to break peer-to-peer communication. Perhaps IPv6 will help to fix the problem from a technological end. But what will fix the broken policy decisions by corporate service providers?
...or should I say Fremch?
Sorry to burst their bubble, but Ahhhnold will never be PotUS. He meets most of the requirements (citizenship, age, residency, marriage into political family) but fails the "where were you born" test. It would take a constitutional ammendment to open the doors of the White House to immigrants.
The only thing I can think of is the loss of anonymity. This coupled with logging of hops (from/to) would pretty much end most of these problems... IMHO.
www.thejulingtoncreekplantaion.com
"1 Unleash vigilante justice on spammers One activist has proposed filters that launch distributed denial-of-service attacks back at spammers. Great. Just make sure we have the right addresses first."
... continuing down list ...
Yeah, that's a real smart idea. *sigh* Do I dare even read the rest of the list if THAT is #1?
I think some of these things are ideas by someone who doesn't understand technology. Check this one out:
12 Make email addresses portable
Yeah, whatever. I've taken my email address with me through several ISPs. Are they suggesting something stupid like taking your @aol.com address with you to some other ISP? Ugh. There's so many things wrong with that one I won't even bother listing them.
Many of the ideas contradict each other, also, which is interesting.
#92 should the the One Rule for Everyone who sends email. Everyone. Yes, this means YOU!
I thought "OH YEAH this sounds like my way of thinking"
Then the lame duck goes on to say: launch distributed denial-of-service attacks back at spammers
Sorry to rain on your parade, but REALLY PEOPLE? WTF are they going to do to such a mean, vicous attack? Use another open relay, that's what!
I say we get them where it really hurts, the upper limbs! Publish their home address, and I'll demonstrate my ideas of "vigilante justice" ! (I'm a nice geek, very nice, but my dark side Mr Hyde is conjured by email spam, shame it's not the hulk!)
couldn't help but try to ascertain why i had to have windose to run this 'linus' box?
This Linux operating system-based machine, at $499 for a 120-gigabyte model (and $399 for 80GB), is designed to be idiot-proof. I've tried earlier such inventions and they were frustratingly complex.
The Mirra's interface is uncluttered. And it works in the background, keeping all the folders you've marked for backup current even as you change their contents. (Mirra stores the eight most recent versions of each file.)
The initial version I tested wasn't fast -- the company admits it takes about 30 minutes to transfer a gigabyte of data, and I needed eight minutes to restore a 220MB file to a new location. But the Mirra didn't fail me in a month of testing.
And Mirra Inc. promises that version 1.1, due out Jan. 8, will be faster and even easier to use.
The basic requirements:
--A home network with a persistent high-speed Internet connection.
--Windows 2000 or Windows XP operating system.
--A network router or hub with an available Ethernet port.
After plugging in the Mirra, you install its software on the computers you want to back up. That can include any laptops you take on the road. This feature I loved, as Mirra worked fine over a Wi-Fi wireless connection.
Too bad more often than not its users who are social engineered to click "Ok" and authorise windows to install it.
This is a boring sig
Maybe this was supposed to be a joke. (They are so much easier to spot when they are funny.) If not, let's all try to recall where he was born . .
I'm sure I don't have to tell this croud why this is a bad idea. We, after all, know why the Internet (and all technology) was invented.
-Peter
data
not noise
Convert the whole internet to tokenring, then we could all filter anything we find objectionable. Never mind that ping latency would be measured in geological time.
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
#0. The internet works great! Don't touch it!
Unfortunately, morons won't learn (that's why they're morons). So, the goal is to just make spamming unprofitable. Imagine a bunch of perl scripts identifying spam, auto-composing semi-random replies, and getting spammers to the point where they'll have to develop anti-spam-reply software :-)
99% of all Spam, and malacious attacks can be stopped by anyone with a brain. Easiest way is to enforce a law that states if you don't run some approved method of controlling spam/malacious attacks and you complain about it, you're ass has to pay a fine.
It's not like it's all that difficult, just running a personal firewall blocks nearly any attack that anyone would bother to run against a personal computer. The people with the knowledge, skills, and motivation to exploit a computer at a regular home wouldn't bother with it, because there is very little worthwhile on most home computers.
As for spam, there are tons of options available to stop spam. If you don't want to go through the minor trouble to install your own software to stop spam, use a service like SpamInspector, where all your e-mail is routed through their servers which contain spam inspecint software. They judge whats spam and what isn't, and you get the non-spam, and if you think you're missing a e-mail because it was blocked, you can check your logs and have that sender be approved for sending you e-mail.
Finally, have a free AV program (unless you want to pay for the extra services that pay AV programs offer) set to auto-scan your machine on a daily schedule using background resources.
Literally, 30 minutes of work and you're nearly spam free with a nearly neglible chance of being hacked. It's not perfect, it's definitely not 100%, but it's incredibly easy and stops most problems.
some kind of corepirate nazi mindphuking/last gasper hostage grab?
The "Reset Safari" feature is your friend. Deletes everything.
It's sad how much bandwidth is wasted to both spam and politics. The system administrator at my university once told me that 70% of inbound email was being dropped as SPAM.
Another problem is politics. Napster back in the day didn't waste a whole lot of bandwidth since it used centralized servers. However, since they got shot down, people have moved to protocols like Gnutella which, although provide decentralization, are a horrible waste of bandwidth.
Now with the RIAA suing people, tacking them via Gnutella, programmers are trying to develop other protocols which attempt to preserve IP anonymity. Bitttorrent is actually one of the few new technologies that does an excellent job of this, however it's being used more as P2P software, something it really wasn't designed do it.
And before all you people start blaming Microsoft, remember it was the open computer community that didn't add security to SMTP as well as the mess that is the DNS protocol.
As far as "saving" the Internet is concerned, yes the commercialization of it has killed a lot of it's research usages, however the advent of things like weblogs and independent news sites (like slashdot) have helped add a level of depth and global community. The cost: lots of wasted bandwith from spam and lots of security issues.
Hopefully the Internet2 will have a better chance of utilizing bandwidth with it's QoS protocols, returning the Internet to what it was designed for: a high speed network between universities and government agencies from which to conduct research and relay information.
SumDog
That's a terrible idea. If you don't want to say something, don't say it. If you change your mind, say you've changed your mind. But being able to recall emails means implementing the sort of pervasive DRM that would only be good for the RIAA and John Ashcroft. Not to mention the chilling effects heavily covered here before on things like whistle-blowing and other essential tools for a properly-functioning democracy and capitalist economy.
You have a choice: tax and spend Democrats, or borrow and spend Republicans. Choose wisely.
Support your favorite websites like /. by subscribing. Also remember to donate to sites like EFF and Wikipedia. Real people work their asses off for you and your rights, so reward them.
Well, how about it?
yeah...I'm for that!
What?... oh...well, that's different...Nevermind...bitch
What?
That's the answer, Gates needs to just drop Windows completely and license Mac OS X, which with a little tweaking will run on Intel just fine. . . Then Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive's can continue to design the coolest products ever. . Everyone will be happy and the spammers and evil hackers will get honest work.
The internet won't get any better until we start havin' us some KILLIN'S! Start with the spammers, then the HTML email idiots, and then work our way down until we get to the ALL CAPS TWITS.
Once we're down to ten thousand or so people again, we'll be fine. And the others can go fix the rest of the world.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
"What does do Slashdot readers think of these suggestions,..."
Here's a suggestion: Use spell checker and possibly give the grammar a "once over" before posting. That'll surely save the internet.
Have a great day, drive through.
47 Upgrade phone booths to Wi-Fi
I disagree. During the big blackout in August, it was the phone booths in NYC that were still working. The push to make everything wireless would hurt, especially things like Emergancy services in these sort of situations.
indeed..
If you are linking to a page, you are effectively stating that it is significant in some way. Even if you hate it, that doesn't mean it's insignificant. An overriding goal for Google should be (is?) objectivity, and that means ignoring your bias as well as their own in delivering relevant results. If someone's searching for information on a given issue, ideally they would get results from both sides, which is as it should be. Nobody benefits from an echo chamber.
You have a choice: tax and spend Democrats, or borrow and spend Republicans. Choose wisely.
I'm not sure such an offensive can be maintained without governmental support.
Let's take the private anti-spam groups, for instance, How many of them were DDOSed to oblivion this year? Futhermore, it's become more and more evident that at least some spammers are joining forces with organized crime and professional mercenary crackers. Would you start a fight with spammers funded by the Russian mafia?
The owls are not what they seem
I was surprised that Wired could only come up with 5 good ideas for fixing the Internet.
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world. Those who understand binary, and those who don't.
In principio erat Verbum.
77 Create an email address directory
Yea I am sure google will do that. The spammers would be happy with all this easy access to email address'.
Looks like geeks over at the Wired offices started drinking early.
39 Upgrade to IPv6 The next-gen Internet protocol will improve security and add 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,427,473,244,16 0 IP addresses - enough for everything, ever.
6 0
/.
Ok, so how in the hell do you say 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,427,473,244,1
So I'm a little slow! That's why I come to
It makes me smrtr!
Seems to me that 75% of these suggestions are pure nonsense. Most are wishful thinking, are down to individuals (not the "powers that be") to amend their behaviour, or apply only to one part of the world. The rest seem to indicate a distinct lack of joined-up thinking. Take this one:
46 Free the Beeb The BBC is dragging its feet on a plan to put its vast archives online. Come on, chaps, it's your best idea since Monty Python.
Aunty really really wants to put it's archive online. But the legal issues are vast - it's going to take years to sort out. Yes, it's a pity, but we may as well wish for an end to copyright, the death of money, and world peace.
Do you mind, your karma has just run over my dogma.
And even if some of the morons learn, there are more where they came from. Remeber the spamers need a very small number of "hits" to make a profit. If out of 100,000 emails they get 50 sales they are making good money. I dare you to show me a pool of 100,000 people without 50 people who are stupid, clueless about the net or just plain suckers.
I like the idea of having my spam program send them junk mail back. If for each spam sent they get 50 back they will go under. But I don't think AOL etc wants to build a server farm that big.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
it's the greed/fear/ego life0cidal based behaviours of unprecedented evile et AL, that threaten yOUR well being, much more than we're informed about (no tin hat required, tell 'em robbIE?).
the planned 'rescue' of the 'net 101, is simply more&more failing megalomaniacal power&.controll hypenosys.
the 'net will outlast/outperform many of us. not too many we wholeheartedly intend. some of it apparently cannot be avoided. much of it can.
Tim Berners-Lee did not invent the browser. He cooked up HTML to make browsing possible. Big difference. Having used the Internet back before browsers and the widespread adoption of HTML, I must say the knighthood is a fair move. For heaven's sake, they knighted Sir Paul McCartney of Wings! BTW, check out "Weaving the Web" by Tim Berners-Lee.
Use mozilla firebird with the adblock extention, and run your email through popfile. Use a mail reader built with security in mind (doesn't automatically follow external urls in html email). 99% of your problems are solved.
12 Make email addresses portable
This would either require some kind of higher level directory of where to deliver email, or the user would have to trust their old provider to forward it, and not just accept the mail into a box they never read.
16 Simplify Web publishing Why can't we post files from our desktop to a Web site in one drag-and-drop move?>
Wake up Wired! I can do this already... and so can everyone else!
You cant make anything foolproof, they'll only invent better fools.
"None of these is a magic bullet. But together, they can force junk mail down to levels we can all live with.
Items 26-33"
I think they meant Silver Bullet, thanks to Fred Brooks' Mythical Man Month.
"I either want less corruption, or more chance
to participate in it." -- Ashleigh Brilliant
The is only one superhero by the internet, of the internet, and from the internet
Freakazoid!
"Super-teen extraordinaire
Freakazoid! Freakazoid!
Runs around in underwear
Freakazoid! Freakazoid!"
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
So please tell me how I send user friendly emails to my Mom with clickable references, embedded pictures and formatted for easy reading to accomodate aging eyes.
Help fight continental drift.
I have to expand the Wired article so that it covers most of my screen to make a single line of text visible without scrolling. You'd think that a geek publication like Wired would know better.
...
I'm getting sick of being forced to resize my browser window for nearly every new page.
Hey, Firebird guys, can you privide an option to disable the width= attribute on all tags? The height= attribute might go, too. Thanks in advance
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Load of crap. It'd be easier to just ban worm/bug/virus prone OS(s) from ever connecting to Internet.
I truly believe that there are no longer so many morons out there actually buying stuff. If you look at any of the major ISPs - even AOL, they all do a decent job of educating their users about spam. Can you honestly say that you think someone is going to respond to "INC`R_EASE YOUR DI;C_K WEIGHT u:" in the subject line?
I think the spam business now consists of mostly addresses being sold to other spammers.
I wonder if they're reading these forums now?
1 Unleash vigilante justice on spammers One activist has proposed filters that launch distributed denial-of-service attacks back at spammers. Great. Just make sure we have the right addresses first.
And for the love of God, make it devastating. Forget the annoying little "plug the pipes" attacks, find their homes and spray-paint "I send penis-enlargement spam mail" on the front or something in 300-point text. Let the neighbors know that they've got a spammer next door.
2 Slash song prices charge 29 cents per download. You''ll make it up in volume.
You'll also apparently more than make up for it in apostrophes.
4 Appoint Larry Lessig to the Supreme Court Is he a Democrat or a Republican? Who cares! Laws governing information flow are the new affirmative action, abortion, and gun control rolled into one.
Toss him, Linus, and RMS to the board and we've got a nice consortium. Of course, that nulls their free time for work on the kernel and projects and such, so it's a tradeoff.
5 Create the all-in-one inbox Email, phone calls, instant messages - they should all go into a single app.
Yeah. Now you'll have three times as much as spam. Telemarketers (despite the do-not-call registry), e-mail spam, and IM spam - Christ, all that in one app? Talk about bloat.
6 Triple our cable modem speed First step: Just turn off the Golf Channel and UPN.
While we're at it, how about any network that shows reality TV?
8 Declare spammers are terrorists And put Ashcroft, Ridge, and Rumsfeld on their tails.
Not that it matters, judging by their track record. Where's Osama?
11 Larry Flynt, build a porn browser It should cover our tracks coming and going.
There's already such a browser: Netscape 4.08. NS has it archived on their site:
http://wp.netscape.com/download/archive/client_a rc hive40x.html
However, that's Windows/Mac/Unix/Solaris only. There's no Linux version, sadly.
Combine that with a file shredder for the cache, and you're good to go.
14 Dump the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
Finally, someone in the mass media agrees, though Wired doesn't hit nearly as many people as CNN.
16 Simplify Web publishing Why can't we post files from our desktop to a Web site in one drag-and-drop move?
Erm, it's kind of easy to do in IE6. Modify the following URL to fit: ftp://username:password@servername.com/directory then treat it like a normal Windows Explorer window. Not hard to do; I've been doing that for months as I can't find a standalone WS-FTP LE installer. (Web installers suck.)
17 Let a thousand Wi-Fis bloom Open spectrum is the new open source.
This could be incredibly useful, especially for providing BitTorrent seeds. Now if we could all become anonymous in them, that would be even better.
19 Make privacy a personal asset Canada has it already: a law that prevents firms from consolidating all customer information after a merger.
The only way this will ever happen is if people get a clue about spyware/adware and start to learn to clean their boxes. This will never happen, though, as most people don't care, so...
21 Bring on the perp walks We want to see the next CEO whose company's servers leak 10,000 credit card numbers marched past TV cameras by the FBI.
We don't just want the CEO, we want the IT officers (if they failed to apply patches to the servers or did something utterly stupid), and after they're taken by the cameras, take them into the streets and videotape the people who had their numbers leaked beating them with Wiffle Bats.
23 Offer real RIAA amnesty Instead of telling us to delete MP3s or pay a fine, how about you let us pay a fair price to keep them.
But how many people are willing to pay for their MP3s when they can CD-swap with their friends and take what they want from them while giving in return?
25 Pass a White Hat Protection Act H
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
Besides, it would only take a few thousand people at best :-)
Beyond that, software will simply evolve to handle any problems such as SPAM; it's an emergent system.
--
Power to the Peaceful
Wired? This is the same Wired that gave us 101 Ways to Save Apple, with such great suggestions as "Admit it. You're out of the hardware game," "Sell yourself to IBM or Motorola," "Relocate the company to Bangalore," and "Invest heavily in Newton technology." Hilarious. Although there is one prescient thing in the article, which I'm not sure was intended seriously or was menat to be sarcastic (this was 1997 after all) - "It's Netscape we should really worry about."
'Mad crazy' shoutouts to GW-SEAS Senior Design and "Smartmail 4.0"! This is just such a project that's been worked on for a few years by different students. I'd like to see them release it open source, but who knows. P2P email, video, chat...lots of stuff. It's pretty impressive. It's in Java, though...
I'm still trying to figure out "Death to Verisign". On one hand, a lot of nifty things could be done if more people had smartcards and certificates. On the other it pretty swiftly does away with lots of anonimity, which the article seemed to be pretty big in to.
All in all, a half-decent article (Alright...'half in all'?). A few good suggestions, a few 'yeah, THAT's going to happen' suggestions. Lots of predictable things. A few 'Yeah, I'd work on that if a project were to materialize'. Maybe there's hope yet!
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
& why not? aren't we doing what we've been tolled/constantly trained to do?
way too much is never enough? yikes.
The top 50% of computer science majors at the top 500 CS universities in Canada and the US.
(I also think if you took a sampling from Mensa, you'd find an unusually large number of clueless morons -- these are people who pay an organization an annual fee to tell them they're smart).
We need more IIS!
This inane remark reveals the quality of the article as a whole.
Bring Back The Home Grown BBS!
Well, I'm not thinking that a dial-up BBS would be popular today, but I'm looking toward the future when this internet "fad" self-immoliates. Don't get me wrong, the concept and idea behind the internet is really sound and strong, but legislators and multinational conglomerates are hell bent on re-creating it into a bigger and bigger cash-cow pipeline that only serves their interests. Eventually the internet's usefullness will gradually fade to the same level as a black and white television, but not for lack of features or technology.
In fact it may become "over-technosized" so the major players can feel more secure in *their* control over the whole system. It may be a decade or so down the road, but eventually the "smart" people will start to peel away from it and seek a new medium to freely and openly exchange ideas (and other things) away from the prying eyes of government and corperate interests.
Abandoned notions such as the old-time BBS might just be what they will turn toward, but most likely there will be a new twist: You'll connect to a BBS that is web-browser enabled or developed using similar technology. Since the lan connection has replaced the com ports as a primary means of computer-to-computer communication, setting up multi-node systems won't be the problem they used to be, and even small networks may erupt with the individual owners of the BBS's making aliances to allow interconnectivity between one another, and to allow their users to have access to more and more resources.
Ultimately, we may actually end up with a system that works almost exactly like the current system, but where no single interest can inflict their ideology and legislation upon the masses.
A summary of all points in the article:
...and so on 98 more times.
1. Something discussed to death here and found to be counter-productive.
2. Something else discussed to death here and found to be ineffective.
3. Something ignorant.
Heh. If only...
The owls are not what they seem
get a throw-away address, and reply to every single spam we receive. This way, the spammers will spend so much time looking through our bogus replies
Another completely clueless message modded up as "interesting".
Most spam has a fake From: address. If you reply to it, your reply will either be undeliverable, or will go to the unlucky person whose email address was forged by the spammer. If the From: addresses were valid, getting rid of spam would be trivial.
and wasn't impressed. The writer is not a technical guru but tries to pass himself off as one to "the masses." Which is dangerous.
stuff like:
"Replace servers with P2P Too many network services - domain names, Web servers, email - rely on the old client-server model, which is vulnerable to attack."
really irked me.
articles like this add to the problem... a long whiny list of "problems," most of which are solved by education & training.
That has got to bet he worst idea I've ever heard, man.
We want MS to DIE, not to Flourish!
Stop making so many lists.
Whatever happened to the idea of tarpits to stop spam? I haven't found anything about tarpits being a bad idea, but they don't seem to be in widespread use.
So how the f**k do these spammers make money?
They sound like a bunch of annoying c**ts out there just to p!ss me off.
38 Simplify URLs Why can't [some long URL be simplified]
It's called an href tag.
39 Upgrade to IPv6
Why? NAT works great. It is even arguably more secure than some flat space. IPV6 is pretty cool, but not because of the number of possible devices.
42 Replace servers with P2P
They mentioned something about servers being vulnerable to attack... I guess I should run Kazaa so that my machines become invulnerable.
We would have to keep it up, and each send a couple fake replies a week from different addresses. It's not like they would suddenly give up and never try again. And I'll bet the vast majority of spammers already have good anti-spam filters on their addresses -- after all, they're distributing them widely in cleartext.
Grassroots projects are fine and dandy, but one of the reasons we have a government is to enforce grassroots projects. Let's put down The Great Big Bathroom Book of Ayn Rand and wonder if we may not be able to solve this readily as a loose collection of autonomous agents.
Ignoring spam could work. If the signal/noise ratio is infinite, but a given spammer only gets one reply, they're still probably losing money. That's unlikely, but in principle I don't think it's any less likely than everyone spontaneously agreeing to consistently swamp smammers from a zillion throw-away addresses. (And have you thought about the bandwidth costs if we all did that?)
They forgot an important one..
102. Prevent broadband providers from prohibiting Cable/DSL routers in end users' homes. They do far more good than harm.
Intelligent Life on Earth
While some of their points are nice and insightful, some are not:
5 Create the all-in-one inbox Email, phone calls, instant messages - they should all go into a single app.
Riiight... since it will be written by the same guys who designed the Outlook Express security model, just try to imagine the next generation of viruses; you could get infected by simply answering the phone.
16 Simplify Web publishing Why can't we post files from our desktop to a Web site in one drag-and-drop move?
I don't know, why you can't; I can do exactly this with my MacOS X + dot Mac. Write a text file, save it as HTML to your desktop, drag'n'drop the icon to the "Sites" folder of your iDisk. Presto.
59 Make anonymous Net use easier
Nice idea - but how do you intend to fight the spammers then?
Number One:
Don't trust your domain to a professional troll.
More on Michael Sims' Fuckover of Censorware.org
censorware.net
Number Two:
Remember "journalists" who identify themselves with anti-censorship often are worse than those who they oppose.
Slashdot Censorship
[Original Thread]
I set up my filtering system to keep a list of spammers. Then, everytime I get a spam, I forward it to every address on that list. It might not be much, but at least it makes ME feel better.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
I know it's Wired magazine, but free wireless networks have a lot to offer and I reckon they should start replacing much of the Internet. By removing commercial entities from the loop, you make it harder for the Government to have any control over the Internet. IMHO, that's as it should be. Cuts down on the bandwidth down the wires too.
:v)
But even using local free wireless networks to share proxies (without letting anyone leach of your own Internet connection) would speed up web access for everyone. The outline for this is here if anyone is interested.
Vik
So now if everyone on the P2P network is not connected we can't get our email? Even then it was harder for people to get the email you sent by using packet sniffers. Now people can just intercept the email on their computer as setting themselves up as a hub. Also we would still need some sort of discovery server to handle all the IPs of the people connected to the network. This in turn is just like DNS lookup where we use a common name "www.slashdot.com" and the DNS server translate it to an IP address for our browser.
I rather keep email the way it is for now, less we open up a floodgate of more problems we didn't think about before moving to a P2P solution.
Remember, "the grass is always greener on the other side!"
Make me your friend. All my friends get +1 modifier and I need friends :)
That probably equates to more money lost than you've earned in your life. Let's see.... by my calculations, it's a little over seven million dollars of lost revenue, which almost entirely wipes out our yearly net profit. I can't share the numbers with you (sorry) but I'm actually being fairly conservative with the figures.
Luckily, we don't make end-users deal with spam, the postmaster does it, and it takes more hours than that on a yearly basis but does not affect productivity to that degree. Roughly, we figure it costs us $50,000 per year to deal with spam.
Even with an intelligent way to keep the encrypted mirror of my disk(s) up to date I would need to have a bit more bandwidth into my home than I do now, but that will be taken care of in the near future.
Is there a Freshmeat project like this?
12 Make email addresses portable
I don't know how this is supposed to work. If I have an address @yahoo.com, it's because Yahoo serves it. There's no reason for hotmail to save the same name.
38 Simplify URLs
I don't disagree (this should happen with computer hardware connectors, too), but there are places that can do it for you. Try TinyURL.
50 Add a broadband department to Wal-Mart
The fact that Wal-Mart dominates the market is a bad thing--for local ownership, competition, free speech, fair wages, environmental protection, and (oh yeah), the ability for America to manufacture anything domestically. Kick Wal-Mart's ass, don't try to expand it!
75 Let us link to a page we hate without boosting its ranking
The whole idea is: if a page is relevant, it's ranking should rise. Thus, if I want to read about something you hate, it's easier to find.
76 Add mobile numbers to the phone book
As if telemarketing at home wasn't bad enough. At least with a cell phone, even the exempt groups (charities and politicians) still can't find me.
77 Create an email address directory
Um, no. What the heck would I want that for? Email gives relative anonymity to those who don't know you. This is a GOOD THING. It also gives us a running start on spammers.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
These won't be popular but:
* Make net software hard to use, release as source code
* Make getting an internet connection tricky, do a criminal record check (Look at Ralsky, he was convicted of something).
* Overhaul SMTP and email.
No.
Besides the value of the songs as SONGS, there are at least two items of value which I now purchase when I purchase a CD for cash:
1. Privacy.
2. The ability to copy the songs.
These are integral elements in my decision to purchase. The RIAA et al like to compare the purchase of music to property laws, saying that we are only buying a few of a bundle of rights. (For example, we are buying only the CD medium, but are only LICENSING the music itself).
I like to take that analogy further. If we are buying a portion of a bundle of rights, then part of what I have been buying for all these many years is the privacy to enjoy the music wherever and whenever I please without tracking, and the ability to make copies.
So, lowering the price won't solve the problem, if at the same time you lower the price, you are not providing me with the same rights I previously had, i.e. the right to obtain the music for cash in privacy, and the right to copy the music any way I wish.
14. Do something creative with the design of the box and separate yourselves from the pack.
[...] We'd all feel better about shelling out the bucks for a Power Mac 9600 if we could get a tower with leopard spots.
Download security and virus patches at Microsoft.com/protect.
/bin or /usr/bin?
Ok. I did that. Now do I stick 'em in
KFG
57: Filter fake error messages
I havn't seen any of these in a while (popups turned off) but if I remember correctly, most I have seen in the past were images's of error screens inside a popup browser window. How exactly, without turning off popups, would you filter that in an efficient manner? The best solution I had was having my desktop colors set to something other than default. This makes it clear that the image is not really a window. It was interesting seeing a faked "blue screen of death" inside a popup window. That's one thing that might catch someone off guard.
90 Death to fax machines Send us an attachment instead.
/. article yesterday or the day before). Besides, I rarely get any junk fax, and a quick call to my lawyer shuts them down real quick.
I don't open attachments unless I have a good reason to. Email is a PITA compared to a good, solid fax machine (note previous
They usually send you a link to a website.
Stallone: "Hold it! The Schwarzenegger Library?"
Bullock: "Yes, the Schwarzenegger Presidential Library. Wasn't he an actor?"
Stallone: "Stop! He was President?"
Bullock: "Yes. Even though he was not born in this country, his popularity at the time caused the 61st Amendment..."
There are a TON of porn sites out there that WANT you to stumble across them by accident, knowing that they can hook a lot of people just by flashing a bunch of body parts in their faces.
.sex TLD, but would also keep their .com addresses, just in case. If the US passed a law that all sex sites must give up their .com TLD's, then the sites would just move to overseas web hosts.
.sex would just be a wasted effort.
What would happen is that every sex site would get a
Without a way to regulate content on the internet internationally,
22 Take back UHF We're tired of running our wireless network on the same frequency as the microwave, the cell phone, and the neighbor's baby monitor. Channel 83 is just sitting there.
... a lot are in the UHF band. So are Radio Telescopes (right in the middle. Channel 83... closer to the 800 Mhz range... in line with older 8-900 Mhz cordless phones.
420MHZ to 806MHZ... yeah cause nobody uses anything in there. Police, EMS, Fire
45 VeriSign must die
No issues...
Why worry? Each of us is wearing an unlicensed "nucular" accelerator on his back.
Sig changed for readability by G.W.
'Make email addresses portable" - get your own domain name and move it from ISP to ISP as you please" Someone doesn't understand the fundamentals of MX records.
Step one. Keep the goverment out of regulating the internet.
Step two. Hold network providers, colo's etc. responsible for harboring spammers.
Step three. Take responsibility for your system being broken into and quit blaming crackers for you lack of security.
Step four. Quit trying to save the internet.
Step five.
Step six. Profit.
I once got spam with my own address.
The owls are not what they seem
Who gets to make these decisions as to what is publishable and what isn't. I definitely don't want the government to censor content based on what's hip or useful. The Macarena was part of our culture and I hope that in 25 years I can go to Kelly's page and laugh about how stupid we were.
How about P2P for as much as possible? There is a ridiculous amount of wasted processing power in the world. Why not harness it? All we need is a new spec for email and others. Eventually, every email client will join this worldwide network when it's loaded.
Hhmmm.. I'm taking a software design class next semester and we'll have a semester-long project of our choosing. Perhaps I can convince my buddies to work on it with me.
What is your penile percentile?
That's why it is funny :)
====
Crudely Drawn Games
Very funny, but your username makes this comment even better.
1) Make idiots whose unpatched PCs are spam zombies liable for $250 in damages per incident from anyone spammed by that PC. Very publicly make examples out of a few people, and everyone else will quickly learn to use Windows Update, a firewall and antivirus software.
2) For every internet-crippling and/or mailserver-crippling incident attributed to a hole in Microsoft software, Microsoft must donate $5M (in cash, not bullshit software vouchers) to an organization devoted to furthering open source software.
Flooding spammers with bogus replies will have no effect. The goal of spam is almost always to direct the recipient to a website and towards traffic counters or order forms.
Also, the return addresses on the spam currently filling your inbox are bogus. Responding will flood someone else's inbox, not the spammers.
Even after the new law goes into affect, forcing spammers to identify themselves, it is unlikely that your reply will reach the spammer's inbox or ever be read by anyone.
You may have been kidding, but I don't think the way to reduce traffic on the net is to increase spam fiftyfold. I just moved off a Linksys back to a Linux-based firewall for added functionality and found a continuous load of 3kbps on the wire 24x7. And that's with ports 25, 80, and 135 blocked. I can't imagine what an idle, unblocked line looks like.
Intelligent Life on Earth
Good god nooooOOOOOooo!
That's all we need. Is more information polution.
The one nice thing about cell phones is telemarketers don't call them. It may happen someday, but hopefully not while I am alive.
And you don't think the terrorists have already won?
96 Blanket airports with Wi-Fi There are more Centrino ads than hot spots. How about covering check-in lines, gates, baggage claim, and the restrooms.
Airports would become so much fun if we had WiFi in the restrooms!
Stop blaming everyone else for your security problems.
.. Instead, how about posting your picture on the net with a "most wanted" caption after you open a virus laden attachment...
Peer pressure can be a bitch.
C'mon. If someone gets out of their car with it running and it gets stolen, the news doesn't talk about the guy who stole it... they show pictures of the moron who left the keys in it.
The new spammers would hopefully see the trap and stay away. Once there are no new spammers to sell to, the established spammers will miss their payments to the Mafia loanshark, and we won't have to deal with them anymore.
The world can be wrong today for once.
No.
Word would spread quickly and I think you'll see a total wipeout of spam in your inbox. I should become World Leader. God I am good.
So if some spammer spams me, I can legally send a bazillion emails to them since their initial spamming of me would have set up a "business realtionship", right? (even though, their initial contact was prior to any business relationship between us)
However at what point would I be considered a "spammer" by those who own the data lines and servers and not be able to send out email? an email every minute surely wouldn't generate obscene amounts of traffic. what about every second? 10 every second? 100? Having record of the spammer contacting me, and my messages simply being replies to that spammer should be enough to get my account unsuspended if that's what the ISP did, or atleast I would hope.
Would I be considered as sending spam if I had a program automatically generating responses for that spammer?
I think you're right about this being a potentially good thing to give a headache to a spammer, but it would be nice to do it well within the legal realms.
The simple solution is to mimick what is done on ICQ. It's just a simple whitelist with a method to request permission to be on that. I get 0 spam through ICQ. (Trillian, more specifically.)
I really hope one day email 'version 2' is implemented with this type of security in mind. Seems like a better effort than filtering.
"Derp de derp."
Those sites make money from people with credit cards. Having .sex would make it easier for the clients with the credit cards to find them.
.sex address. But new sites would, in my opinion, opt for the .sex instead of the .com or .net or .org addresses because that's where the customers will be going.
.com addresses, simply prosecute any company that allows minors to view porn that isn't marked .sex. This includes US companies, Canadian, Europe, etc.
.sex, it will be up to the parents or whatever to filter those addresses.
.com and move to other countries, but their connections will be slower than the US based ones so they will dwindle anyway.
A lot of the existing sites would still keep their current address because their current customers use it, and they would sign up for a
Now, to clean up the
For those companies with
Nice, simple and fairly easy to implement.
Sure, some companies will have
Can you imagine the field day that the spammers would have with this one?
#77 Create an email address directory
It's amazing how such conflicting "make it better" ideas can co-exist in a single copyrighted work...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Heh. Mozilla is the best! :)
If you see any extra bits laying around on the floor, swept them up and turn give them back to your ISP.
in the first paragraph he refers to /. as a virus.
Finally, it's good to see someone agree with me that spam (I take it a step further and say all unsolicited advertising/direct marketing) is a form of terrorism. Not all terrorism involves a guy named mohammed with a bomb strapped to his chest. Destroying bridges, buildings, or more ephemeral things like email are all terrorist actions and should be dealt with accordingly -- death with due process.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
If this website is all Opt-In Email Addresses how did they get my address and how do I Opt-Out now?
This is where it hurts them the most: (From the front page on thier site)
"Email (serious inquiries only)"
Isn't the Slashdot crowed begging for anti-spam legislation and long prison terms for spammers? Yet they say they don't want legislation? How confusing! I guess a lot of Slashdotters aren't really for a free and open Internet, where technology rules.
:'D It's just lame that Slashdotters don't understand that you can't legislate only part of the Internet you don't like without inviting every special interest group to legislate the part *they* don't like. The Slashdot crowd is helping lay the foundations for a restricted Internet, along with the Religious Right, world governments, and the film and music industry, etc.
Developing filters, implementing security patches, and otherwise pushing technology to new frontiers is what Slashdot should be about. Not whining about spam. Sorry, no sympathy here.
Btw, yes, I am NOT a spammer!
Is it just me, or are the majority of the technical solutions things that only Microsoft could make wide-spread enough to 'save the Internet'? Aside from the solutions directed at Redmond itself, many are things that need to be on every [desktop, email client, web browser, etc] on the planet in order to be effective. Or, in the case of common-sense solutions, implanted into the minds of the Windows-bound users of the world.
The sad implication is that the fate of the Internet is in the hands of Microsoft and The Teeming Million. I therefore propose this Item One Hundred and One (with appologies to the other #101's that people already put forth).
#101. Bring Free and Open Source Software to the Windows platform, and I don't mean just Cygwin.
Maybe it's horribly obvious. Maybe it's been done, and I don't know (not being a windows user, I'm not on the lookout for windows software!). Maybe the barriers are too high (especially things like libraries and API), but it seems like it might help out. The most difficult would be development and build tools suitable for the Average Home User. Installshield (tm), but it's building the software in the background. Configure and make, but with an animated mascot that suggests --enable switches. Or not. Distribute shiny packaged binaries and supply source.
Our Windows-bound brethren, sistren, and grand-motheren need to see that there is a world of software out there besides the spy- and nag-ware ridden stuff of download.com.com.com.
Here comes the punchline: Migration away from Windows will be that much easier if their favorite [P2P, email, grandchild-photo-sharing, etc] software is already waiting for them on the Linux side. Yes, ignoring the complication of cross-platform applications or source trees...it's still a decent idea! See also: x-chat, gaim, OpenOffice. It can be done.
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
With KDE, you can! Whomever posted point 16 never used KDE, and not just insecure FTP but also sftp, webdav, you name it. I have a folder on my desktop called sftp://user@remotehost.com/var/www/user/html guess where files go when i drop em on that one. I bet when Apple does this itll be 'the app of the year' and when Ms does it its another 'innovation'....
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
looking like u does do having goodest new year....
New happy yeay
The lunatic is in my head
From: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.01/internet. html?pg=2&topic=&topic_set=
5 02904/qid=1068751824/sr=12-8/103-2810600-6302246?v =glance&s=books be amazon/wolf/wired?
38 Simplify URLs
Why can't http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail//0375
98 Add a "Skip All Flash Intros" option to Macromedia players
Mozilla Firebird has an extension called Flash Click To Play that stops flash from loading unless you click on it.
1. It would be fun, but vigilante justice is no way to run a society.
2. I'm happy with 99 cents. Cheaper would be nice, but 29 cents doesn't sound viable.
3,4. No comment
5. I have to ask, why? Phone calls and instant messaging do belong together. But why e-mail?
6. My cable modem download speeds are just fine. I get better than 300 kilobytes/sec at times. How about boosting the upload though?
7. No comment
8. Please, no. If a spammer is breaking the law, just charge him under the existing laws. Please please please stop using the T-word for every villain of the week.
9. Peer to peer calls are by nature impossible to regulate, without adding a massive burden to the current internet infrastructure. It would be nice if voip was never regulated at all, but if it interfaces with the old system, it's probably going to happen.
10, 11. No comment
12. This one is ridiculous. It's technically infeasible and defeats the point of an e-mail address defining "where" you are. Try a free e-mail forwarding service if you want to keep the same address.
13. No comment.
14, 15. Hallelujah! Preach it, brother!
16. Maybe you should investigate available software and hosting services more carefully. I CAN do this. The question is, why can't you?
17. No comment
18. Eh...sure, why not?
19. If companies want to treat my privacy like a commodity, then they better pay me for the privilege of using it.
20. Roll out wha?
21. It would be about time. Surely somebody has a conscience and is willing to look past the money and dispense justice.
22. Take back UHF? Oh yeah...I never did return it to Blockbuster...
23. No comment
24. I still wouldn't watch it.
25. Nope. To go along with this, you would need to have some kind of licensing (private or public), and the hacker would need liability insurance. Even if you go into a system with good intentions, there's a very good chance you could screw something up. If a hacker causes damage, the hacker should pay.
26. This may sound strange, but I believe telemarketers actually have some integrity. I don't believe spammers do. I'm afraid a Do Not Spam list would increase the amount of spam I get. It's a free list of addresses! The kind of thing spammers normally pay big bucks for. Thanks, but no thanks.
27. Claims must be investigated by hand. An automated system can break or be abused.
28. ????
29. Spot on
30. Pointless. Spammers somehow have some pretty smart people on their side. Any scrambling scheme will be broken in time.
31. Been there. Done that. Go download GnuPG.
32. Sounds suspiciously like a web of trust. See above...
33. You can do this already. All you need is an always on connection and a domain name.
34. I once ran AdAware on a Windows PC. I'm not sure where since I don't usually use Windows, but I seem to remember it telling what probably installed the spyware.
35. I don't care. I don't see what this has to do with saving the internet either.
36. OK, if you don't mind companies charging each other for bandwidth usage and increasing your bill.
37. Yes, please! I prefer DSL over cable, but requiring a $25 a month phone line I don't need or want kills the deal for me.
38. Because in order to maintain functionality you would have to move the variables in the URL to a cookie, but then if you visit that URL again, it wouldn't look the same. You want a dynamic web page to have a static URL? Not gonna happen.
39. Who do I have to kill to make this happen?
40. No comment
41. Please, no. Unlimited copyright, regardless of what it requires, is still a bad idea. Disney does not deserve to keep Mickey forever.
42. What are you smoking? P2P is not a magic wand that will make everything on the internet better. P2P is *different* from Client-Server, not *better*. P2P has its own points of failure, which can be exploited just as easily as a client-server's failures can. If you want to make any changes to the infrastructure of the internet, start encouraging multicast first.
43. No comment....
psst... we're allowed to swear here, ya fuckin wanker.
"Verbing weirds language." -- Calvin
No, they don't manually process anything... They just let a script go through it, and add all those email addresses as active.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Well one way to not get rid of spammers was the article's item #77 for google:
Let's get google to do our email address harvesting for us. That'd be porn for spammers.
Four fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear if we would just sit down and keep still. -C. Coolidge
On the off chance that the spam contains a valid replyto address?
Seems like what you would need to do is bring down whatever website they're linking to, removing the motivation for spamming. Of course, that brings up the problem of people using spam as a DDOS trigger, as well as being of questionable legality...
Twenties Retirement
Actually that is a really good idea. Spam generate s replies at a rate of about 1/10th of one percent If your junk mail filter had a random from address gererater and an auto reply function along with a good variety of different but Fake come ones filling in random text from the original spam so that it becomes differcult to counter filter the replies then it will cost spammers tons of time/money to filter though the anit-spam noise destroying there buisiness model. We just got to get this to be a standard feature of mozilla mail and spam is dead.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
In other news today...
Anti-Spam Suit Dismissed; AOL May Re-File
Some things never change do they
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
Honestly only about 10% of these ideas are realistic. A lot of them almost make me angry because they're just stupid.
Replace servers with P2P Too many network services - domain names, Web servers, email - rely on the old client-server model, which is vulnerable to attack.
C'mon, P2P is vulnerable to attack as well, mostly contamination of bad data/files. Yes P2P is good for some services, but not everything. File downloading it's great for. Even if we had some sort of automated server mirroring setup, where servers would mirror each other and a download client would get the file from multiple RELIABLE TRUSTWORTHY sources closest to that person. That's not exactly P2P, but it's along the middle road.
Point being this list is largely crap made up for news.
"90 Death to fax machines Send us an attachment instead."
Oh come on. Now I know this list isn't of the best quality, but email attachments are awfull. If you want me to see an image, find some place that hosts websites for free and put it up there. If you need me to watch a stupid flash movie of something else, send the URL in plain text. Don't ever send me 10 100k photos of your wedding in one email message.
The occasional PDF is ok *sometimes* but even those can get pretty hefty. Send me a URL and I'll download it when I can plan for my connection speed to drop for everything else I'm doing.
a simple interface to a combination of a webserver and email would be nice. something that lets you "attach" something but the "attachment" is just a reference to the file you wanted attached. That file then gets uploaded automagically to your "attachment space" and the reference to it is sent in the email. the webserver having authorization requirements so only the intended person gets it. doesn't seem too hard really. a response saying the person succesfully downloaded the attachment would be nice too so you can have them automatically expire.
Hmm, yet another project to work on. Too few hours in the day.
A woman named Nicola Pellow invented it under the direction of Tim Berners-Lee. Do you want me to start arguing that Thomas Edison didn't invent the iridescent lightbulb for similar reasons?
No one help the helpless until they leave. Then we won't have to worry about regulation to protect us from ourselves? Yeah I'm a flamer, whatever.. sorry I value my freedom however mundane the restriction seems.
free != restricted
A list of names, office numbers, email, phone numbers and so on was mailed out a couple months ago. It should have been a tiny text file (especially in csv format), but ended up being about a megabyte. Even in Excel format it would have been more usable.
I can't agree more. I was just about to post the same thing.
:)
.Mac. :/
"17: Let a thousand Wi-Fis bloom Open spectrum is the new open source"
Soooo. Who wants to pay for my broadband
Other sad thing to note are:
"16: Why can't we post files from our desktop to a Web site in one drag-and-drop move?"
I think Apple calls that
"50 Add a broadband department to Wal-MartYou've put every local hardware store out of business. How about the cable guy and the phone company next?"
$#%^ Walmart.
"54 Ship antivirus wizard. Why can't the paper clip guy tell us something important, like "This message is infected with Sobig"?"
First off... all Wizards must die. Secondly, what does one do when their Microsoft antivirus software becomes infected before definitions update?
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
These suggestions are great!!
8. Buy a song. Last year, it would have been "Respect" by Aretha Franklin. This year, maybe it's "Ain't too Proud to Beg."
Thats IT! Buy a song!!
#38, 42: What is the obsession with P2P? It's not a panacea.
#52-72: Replace these with "Go away, Bill."
#70: Why the hell is this where it is?
#101: How do you possibly use "Madonna" and "EFF" in the same sentence?
Finally, I am absolutely opposed to #18; after all, what would we do with goatse.cx?
Here's a bitter annoyance of mine. I type something in google and the first 30 responses are links to other fake search engines. They probably stay on top because everyone clicks on them thinking they are ligitimate hits.
This extends out of google though. Those damn web pages that exist for no reason drive me nuts. They should put a penny tax on these uneeded pages to stop these assholes that have a webpage that just says "Click here for Recipes"
Evil forces? Wow. Isn't that a little harsh? Why is your perspective good and their's evil? Is Spamming really evil? Or cracking? Obviously hacking is evil of course.... :)
We have to be tolerant of others' viewpoints you know...can't have any of this "evil" language...in fact, because you obviously wounded the self image of those who live an alternate internet morality in which spamming is good and anti-spamming is evil, I think we should declare a Day of Amnesty for Spammers, crackers, and Anna Kournikova. Let them all gather in one place and rejoice.....now where's that pocket nuke....
this is the only way to save the internet from itself. anyone pedaling shit should be executed as a traitor to good faith.
If Microsoft is not willing to take responsibility
for the fuck ups that their software causes
then they should leave people alone to use it any
way the hell they want.
It's bad enough people use your software so
Don't lie to them.... just keep your mouth shut.
Valar: I set up my filtering system to keep a list of spammers. Then, everytime I get a spam, I forward it to every address on that list.
:)
:)
October_30th: You do realize that most spam headers are forged?
Valar: That's why it is funny
I guess people who actually buy stuff from spammers aren't the only morons...
Us network engineers have already solved all security issues in the network layer: https://www1.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3514.txt?number=3514 Simply comply and we will all be safe and happy.
Well, you don't want to see SW-III...
The owls are not what they seem
I must say... that sucked... like an idiot I read all 101 of them, and 75% of them are either inaccurate or illogical, and the remaining 25% are poorly formed/thought-out.
http://brandonbloom.name
Memory bound functions are the answer to spam, hands down. http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~naor/PAPERS/mem_ abs.html
#101: stop using it.
Do not try to read step five, for that is impossible. Instead, try to realize the truth. There is no step five.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Start adding SMTP servers to DNS as an MTA record. It adds the ability for exchangers to reject invalid SMTP servers. This is a simple step that would nearly be an answer to spam.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
Here's one mistake that I noticed, in the "Microsoft To-Do List" section:
56 Enable automatic file encryption We've heard the promises for years. But even Apple offers this already - what's the holdup?
That's been available since at least Win2K - select a folder, right click, Properties, Advanced, "Encrypt contents to secure data", answer the questions. Select the correct options, and all files moved to/created in that directory will be automatically encrypted. Perhaps that's not simple enough for them, but it's there, and it works.
Some of the other points, there and elsewhere, are similarly wrong, or just plain nonsensical.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Save it from what?
I don't get any spam because I use a Hotmail account for anything public. I don't get pop-ups because I use Opera. I don't get hacked because I keep my patches up to date (which means not bitching about an RPC hole that was patched two months before that the government warned twice about).
Internet is just fine for me.
"Sufferin' succotash."
73. Add a search for legal music downloads
This is absolutely brilliant. People here like to talk about killing the RIAA; this one Google feature, properly implemented (Pagerank-like setup to locate the best music) would literally do so overnight. Apple have demonstrated that they want to stay as far from non-RIAA music as possible; CDbaby tried to make arrangements with them - and failed. Perhaps Google will be able to do what Apple wouldn't, or couldn't
I made a PHP/MySQL library that prevents SQL injection & makes coding easier!
If you actually do this you're an asshole. You can never trust the From: line in spam. You're just clogging up some innocent person's inbox. Don't be a dick.
Another completely clueless message modded up as "interesting".
Most spam has a fake From: address. If you reply to it, your reply will either be undeliverable, or will go to the unlucky person whose email address was forged by the spammer. If the From: addresses were valid, getting rid of spam would be trivial.
Okay, I'm conflicted here because I tend to agree with you, and yet you insinuate that the post/poster to which you were replying was "clueless" - and then you proceed to make vague and quantifiable declarations without quantifying or citing anything/body - specificially, you claim that 'Most spam has a fake From: address' yet cite no statistics to back this up. Is this anecdotal, from your own personal experience with YOUR inbox, or did you see in a credible study that 51% or better of spam had invalid From: fields? If so, which one/where/by whom? I didn't think so...
Please note - I'm ignorant of facts in this area; again, I think you may be correct, but it's awfully assholish to lambast somebody (and the folks who agreed with him/her/it) for all the wrong reasons - ie, disagreeing with 'statistics' you've appparantly made up.
for those of us who are just plain to busy o surf through all the crap anymore..
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
You can only do that if the spammers have correct return addresses to reply to. Most don't. If they did actually post REAL e-mail addresses, the problem could be solved vigilante-style with the backlash they would receive in spam back to them.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
The "morons" buying into spam advertisements are making quite a bit of money. They bow down to the Almighty Buck.
Think about it...
"Your message sent to 65 million valid email addresses for only $150!"
Okay, so, now say, you get a 0.005% hit rate (As described by , and a 0.001% actual sale rate and your product sells for a profit of $50. That's 3250 people giving the spam a second thought, and 650 actually buying your product. Which equates to $32,500 in your pocket, or a $32,350 profit on your advertising revenues... That's over 21,500 percent gain on cost of advertising.
Now, you go tell those folks who buy these advertisements that they are stupid to pay $150 to help them make $32K, and see how they respond.
Different methods are definitely needed.
@Whee
Just give the RIAA some funding and tell them to stop spamming. They seem to love lawsuits, let'em attack something that really matters.
OR
Just leave the internet the way it is, and release Internet2 to the public, but make it complicated as hell to use and don't let people dumb it down. I could stand having to work a little bit to get online if i could avoid all the BS that fills the current system.
...for the First Citywide Change Bank, which only gives change (and for free). The manager says, "Some people may ask, how can we possibly make money off of this? The answer is simple. Volume."
Funny thing -- when I RTFA about saving the Internet, I noticed the leading banner ad was touting the "new Microsoft Office System"...
My email address got hijacked by a spammer once. Getting all the undeliverable notices was annoying but people replying to my address cursing at me bummed me out.
A new e-mail protocol maybe could solve the problem...I can't exactly imagine how, but that's up to the tech people to find out.
unsolicited commando As I understand it, it fills out the forms that are linked to in spam with credible info so that the spammer gets paid for a load of information which the marketing company can't follow up, result: company thinks spammer is forging info and no longer uses his services OR company pays spammer on results only, spammer gives company loads of info but company says info faked, spammer does not believe them, thinking instead that they made up any old excuse and took his data with out paying him
looking at my UC interface it has sent bogus data to betterspot liensale and ecom-universe
Oh come on. One does not need to do a study to figure this out -- nor does one need to cite scientific journals to post one's observations on slashdot. The reason to lambast this suggestion is dead on, even without precise numbers.
In fact, *any* significant amount of spam with forged from addresses, regardless of the overall percentage, is enough to make this a terribe, terrible idea. A spammer used an address at a friend's domain hosted on a box I own, and cleaning up the bounces and flames was a nightmare for several days. Urgh. That's enough evidence for me, thank you very much.
The interior of the network continues to be "dumb", although we know there is much that could be done to reduce congestion by putting smarter nodes/uber-routers in place of the dumb boxes there now. From that perspective you can see routers as a P2P type appliance - at least via BGP. Replacing these with boxes that also cache content, block spam, etc might be a good idea. I'm not sure though if that is what the author meant.
You forgot Reverse MX records would also make it even more trivial.
Who needs WiFi when we can have Packet Over Sheep! http://datacomm.org/PoS-InternetDraft.txt
I've thought the same thing for years. It's similar to the online porn industry. The little guy throws up a website and gets into a few affiliate programs and thinks the traffic and money is just going to come rolling in. In reality, it's incredibly difficult to get your little porn site noticed amid the thousands of others.
The ones making the money are those selling porn hosting services, content, etc. and these turn out to be mostly a handful of large companies. There was a really good story on Kuro5hin about this about a year ago from someone who actually tried, and sort of succeeded, to make money in the porn industry. My observations regarding the spam industry are that it's just about the same.
Don't think I haven't thought about going over to the dark side and starting to spam either, if not for a living, then at least part-time to make beer and hardware money. I mean, if you are honest with yourself, who wouldn't? It's the allure of easy money. What could be easier than sending out half a million e-mails for a $50 product and having just a 5% of a percent (.0005) sales rate. It's hard to think of an easier way to make $12,500. Alas, it can't be that easy because if it was, everybody would be doing it.
I was getting a dozen or so spam a day. I started filtering based on the links in the e-mail (which can't be obfuscated or they don't work) and now I find myself checking my mail server just to make sure it's actually working.
Spammers like to use images because that gets them past filters based on words. But images take up a large amount of bandwidth. 25 million messages sent with a 25KB image will take 667GB of transfer. So I simply filter out the domain that's hosting that image.
If you look at spam, spammers use affiliate programs. So although you're getting spam from hundreds or thousands of spammers, there are only a handful of domains they're wanting you to click on or are linking images from.
So you can try to block those thousands of spammers or you can block that handful of domains they're linking to.
And since I'm only filtering links that only spammers use, it's 100% effective and 100% accurate.
Nobody I know is going to be sending me e-mails with a link to www.2004hosting.org but dozens of spammers have and now that I've filtered it, dozens are trying and failing regardless of who they are. So I've effectivly blocked dozens of spammers by filtering a single company.
Lots of spammers also use common click-thru sites to claim their commission. By blocking that handful of domains I've just blocked thousands of spammers.
I now get a spam maybe once every few days and I simply VNC into my server and block the domain used to host the image and I'll never get a spam from any spammer who's using that domain to host their ad pics.
Simple. Effective. I also block mail domains as possible because there is no silver bullet. You have to attack on as many fronts as you can. I've just found blocking companies to be the best out of the bunch. But it's litter and every little measure helps.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
Out of the 101 ways.. There are about 3-5 that are applicable and would help... The rest are trash ideas that a grade 3 class could have come up with as they are either unaplicable or so bad they will not work.. For the most part it It should be labeled 101 Bandaids we can help to put on the internet.. And just like bandaids They are nothing more than a temporary fix and don't actually cure the Cause of "The Cut/Wound".. FOr the most part most of them are bad enough its like putting a bandaid on a broken leg.. Will it help? No!
Sorry if it seems to be a bit of a troll but his list of 101 things we can do to help fix the internet are 101 solutions to 3 or 4 problems. What would you do if you took your car to a mechanic beacuse It wasn't starting properly and he gave you a list of 23 things you can do to help it start better without lifting a wrench to fix whats wrong with your car.
Who needs WiFi when we can have Packet Over Sheep! http://datacomm.org/PoS-InternetDraft.txt
1. stop slashdotting helpless websites. :)
The list is not to bad, but there's a few that really stick out as incredibly stupid. Here's my list:
5 02904/qid=1068751824/sr=12-8/103-2810600-6302246?v =glance&s=books be amazon/wolf/wired?
Create the all-in-one inbox Email, phone calls, instant messages - they should all go into a single app.
Why do people think a single app is the solution to problems? Massive apps that try to do everything are bloated, hard to maintain, and have make compromises that hurt all the other functions. Mozilla has wisely decided to split the mail reader and the internet browser into firebird and mozilla. Make applications seperate, but able to communicate with one another.
8 Declare spammers are terrorists And put Ashcroft, Ridge, and Rumsfeld on their tails.
Ugh. This is mostly tongue in cheak I'm assuming,
but the last thing we need to do is water down the definition of "terrorist"
10 Free the handsets We should be able to buy any cell phone and match it with any service plan.
Just what I want, a bloated, expensive phone that supports the 5-10 different mobile phone standards/frequencies, of which I use one. Providers already give you a free phone if you sign up for them. The phone itself is already a commodity, why is making it more expensive/bloated necessary?
12 Make email addresses portable
Huh? If you want a "portable" email address just register a domain, and forward your email to the provider of the week. The situation just isn't analogous to phone numbers, where you've never been able to own what amounts to an exchange.
38 Simplify URLs Why can't http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail//0375
Because a lot of information needs to be conveyed in a URL. I suspect the real complaint is it's hard to exchange a URL unless you do it via
email, etc.
42 Replace servers with P2P Too many network services - domain names, Web servers, email - rely on the old client-server model, which is vulnerable to attack.
Wired is smoking crack. There's a place for p2p, but it isn't in replacing webservers, dns, and email. The reasons should be fairly obvious (not fast or reliable enough, etc).
58 Take the blame Software license agreements that absolve you of, oh, deleting three years' worth of email are irresponsible. Bugs are negligence, and negligence should cost you, not us.
And kill off open source, single programmers, and anyone else that can't afford million dollar lawsuits. Software is unreliable, shouldn't be guaranteed unless you require it. Anything that puts someones life on the line is different of course (there's an example of a cancer irradiating machine that comes to mind), but it's your responsiblity to back up your data from being wiped out.
75 Let us link to a page we hate without boosting its ranking
Why are you linking to sites you hate? Why create the link at all, and not just mention the site in text? If you create the link, it's probbably interesting. If lots of people hate it, maybe I want to know why?
76 Add mobile numbers to the phone book
77 Create an email address directory
Good god no. The last thing I want is more spammers finding my email address, and people calling up my cell phone I don't know. If I _want_ people calling/emailing me, I give out that information.
AccountKiller
We were bombarded by those gay Mac commercials...
"98. Testimonials. Create commercials featuring real-life people in situations where buying a Mac (or switching to a Mac) saved the day."
This was also the South by Southwest Interactive Question of the day on December 23. They referenced the Wired article and asked for opinions from SXSW Interactive presenters.
I've been getting these in my email every day for a few weeks since I'm on a panel on accessible web navigation on behalf of Knowbility and Omniscient Turtle. Sadly, nobody gave me the iSight I wanted for Christmas (as published in the first question of the day), so I ordered one for myself.
Simplify Web publishing Why can't we post files from our desktop to a Web site in one drag-and-drop move?
I suppose opening an ftp connection from the browser is just oh-so-hard?
sig not found
1 Unleash vigilante justice on spammers One activist has proposed filters that launch distributed denial-of-service attacks back at spammers. Great. Just make sure we have the right IP addresses first.
What does nailing their tounges to fast-growing trees have to to with IP addresses?
7 Demand truth in advertising for software updates C'mon, AOL 9.0 is really AOL 8.0 with the version number increased 1.0.
How about "Demand truth in advertising." ? I've been drinking <beverage> for years and I'm yet to be attacked to bikini-clad supermodels!
8 Declare spammers are terrorists And put Ashcroft, Ridge, and Rumsfeld on their tails.
That's not fair! If the US govt is going to go after them as terrorists, they should at least train them first like they do to all the other terrirists out there.
14 Dump the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
If you're going to do that then it's only fair to re-inburse all the people who bought it. I'll chip in!!
Step 68 Write to President Schwarzenegger When he gets to Washington in, oh, 2012, maybe he can terminate the legislation that mandates insane fixes for digital piracy.
Ah-nuld cannot become President without a Constitutional Amendment. Look it up.
Step 12 Make email addresses portable
Uh-huh. Right. Like there isn't already a jsmith on every server in the world. This won't work at all, so why put it in there? I take that back, it would work, but it would require everyone that wants an email address to just give up on having something cute and useful and take the twelve-digit alphanumeric one they are given. Riiiiight.
Step 28 Simplify disposable addresses
What the fuck does this mean?
Step 50 Add a broadband department to Wal-Mart
Thanks for waving the flag for America's largest wage slave taskmaster.
Step 75 Let us link to a page we hate without boosting its ranking
Let us know when you've worked that one out
That's just a brief review of the ones that are just wasting space in the article. Overall, there are some good ideas in there, but most of them are just pipe dreams.
The internet was created to be a heaving, surging, chaotic mass of mess. The only problem is the surge of people online now who aren't educated enough to protect themselves from that chaos. Well, guess what? Trying to get the government or the corporations to step up and protect those people will only screw over those of us with some clue as to how things work. And why, then, should we pay penalties because someone bought their 70-year old grandmother a computer this Christmas and she opened an email that brought down the backbone?
The only way to save the internet is to just let it run the way it always has.
sig not found
Frankly, I think it really is as simple as it seems to be a profitable spammer, and the only legitimate hurdle I can see is obtaining clients who wish their product advertised in such a manner. In fact, the reason why everyone isn't doing it is because it's so deceptively simple. Either that, or moral objections, but those tend to fall away in the minds of many when there's easy money to be had.
Computers and the Internet are still very much a "black box" affair to the average consumer, and they almost certainly figure that sending a few million e-mails is something only that nerd kid next door could be clever enough to pull off. I have no desire to kill this falsehood, for the sake of my inbox if nothing else.
-
Inventor of the term 'pardon my French'.
Another completely clueless message modded up as "interesting".
And one modded up as "insightful" as well...
If we all went to the referred website or whatever, and told them that we were interested in their product but never gave them money, it would have the same effect.
There are ways to reply to spam other than via the return address.
me neither.
-=tonyt=-
I run a mail server that gets 100K+ messages a day.
All the spam that bounces back to the sender bounces back to me.
Nuff said.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
'prescient.'
hah hah hah.
You realize most people selling alcohol during prohibition were either unstable morons or people you wouldn't want to know you existed as well?
It's nothing but crumpled porno and Ayn Rand.
Well, a lot of them are interesting, some are amusing, and a few seem actually potentially useful. But some of them I take issue with.
12 Make email addresses portable Email addresses *are* portable... just pony up for a domain name. Anyway, that's like saying "Make home addresses portable." If I live on Green Avenue, my mail shouldn't say 1234 Brown Street. the domain is *where* your email goes.
Now, if they'd said "Require all paid email providers to forward your email for free for 90 days when you cancel your account" that would make sense.
16 Simplify Web publishing Why can't we post files from our desktop to a Web site in one drag-and-drop move? Maybe you can't, but I can. Type ftp://username:password@ftp.domain.com/public_html into the Windows Explorer address bar, and have fun. But usually I use Filezilla, which works just dandy too.
If you're trying to "publish" via some stupid HTML composer, then I'd rather it be *harder* than easier. Then we wouldn't have government agencies building websites in MS Word (tried to get the link, but it's broken... but LADOT did have one of these up as recently as last week).
28 Simplify disposable addresses This is actually a suggestion for *cutting down* on spam. Make it easier for any 13-year-old to send email that they don't actually care about. This seems like an excellent idea.
53 Give away a good spam filter Mozilla.org is already doing this. Hm, maybe they could sue MS for an anticompetitive action if they enter this market.
54 Ship antivirus wizard Why can't the paper clip guy tell us something important, like "This message is infected with Sobig"? Again, is this MS's job? And how long would it take folks to turn it off if it was Clippy?
59 Make anonymous Net use easier Because, when Microsoft says I'm anonymous, I believe them. What kind of a suggestion is this? How is this remotely a job for MS? And why on earth would we trust them to do it?
61 Create a security advisory board Appoint some outsiders (hello, Dan Geer?) to decide which security upgrades should be auto-pushed to consumers' PCs - then make it happen. NO--- don't auto-push *anything* to *my* computer. That's why it's *mine*. Not yours. I don't care how many "advisors" you get or how far "outside" they are. How about they beta test the product, so they can say "Hey, MS, before this goes gold, you might want to turn off the 'allow any random idiot to connect to your computer from anywhere on the Internet' service..."
63 Offer more language translation We want to read those Iranian blogs. Again, this is MS's job how? I'm thinking they meant something besides "translation," like maybe character sets. And yeah, sure, add more of those. But before you publish an article in a slick magazine, find the right word.
67 End phone subsidies A byzantine maze of hidden revenue transfers - universal service, excise tax, TTY/TDD access, 911, et cetera - discourages innovations like Vonage that don't fit the regulatory format. Pay for all this stuff from general taxes instead of sneaking it onto the phone bill. Phone taxes should be simplified, and explained better. But paying for things out of general revenues is a terrible idea. Systems that rely on user fees are better maintained and offer better service than those paid for out of general revenues. Which do you count on more... getting a dialtone when you pick up the phone or getting from point A to point B on the freeway in a reasonable amount of time? Could be because only 1/3 of highway and road maintenance (at least in California) is paid for by gas taxes, vehicle registration fees, and truck fees... the rest they have to beg from the same pot as education, health care, and parks.
68 Write to President Schwarzenegger When he gets to Washington in, oh, 2012, maybe he can
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
#1 Change SMTP so that it needs verification to send an email. Spammers can be identified by the verification placed in the headers. Of course any program or script that sends SMTP mail will have to be changed as a downside to this.
#2 Require Spammers to include a "Spam" tag in the headers of the mail they send. That way email programs can filter them out better. It would be hard to enforce this.
#3 Every ISP must have an Anti-Spam program in place like Spam Assasin to filter out Spam.
#4 There should be a national Anti-Spam registry that Spam can be forwarded to in order to be identified so the senders of said Spam can be punished. Let experts track them down.
#5 Change Email programs to use GNUPG or some other encryption to sign emails. Any email not being signed gets moved to a "Suspected Spam" folder. This would require email programs to be rewritten, as well as SMTP sending scripts and programs. Signed Spam can have the key checked and verified who sent it from a global key server.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I see no way to effectively regulate spammers; at least not without government control at every level of the network layer.
If it comes to that much government interference and a few hundrew pieces of spam, I'll hold my nose and stick with the spam.
Honestly, you're giving too much control of every to a proven dishonest government simply so SPAM won't bother you any more?
Cripes.
Umm, how about a Linux version of iTunes. What's holding that back? Duh!
" I walked into Gamestop, bought an N-Gage"
I'll bet you had to fight the hordes off from the N-Gage counter.
They've sold what.... 10K of these worldwide? You must be very discriminating.
Sorry to insert a serious comment in a hilarious thread, but it's 2:30am and I'm a little drunk and finding something to do until the bedroom is... available. Happy new year, by the way. :-)
Did anyone else notice that, contrary to point 59 of the 101, you could in fact fix almost everything wrong with the Internet simply by removing the ability to be completely anonymous (even to administration/law enforcement agencies)? Obviously anonymity can be useful for a small number of legitimate purposes, but the vast majority of the time, we could live without it. In exchange for tracking down and punishing all but the very best spammers, crackers, virus distributers, credit card fraudsters, publishers of defamatory comments, fake doctors giving dangerous medical advice, and numerous other parasites, there must be a better compromise than what we have today...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Lots and lots of blank floppy disks.
I was just thinking the other day, an MP3 player like an iPod or iRiver would be nice. However I download a lot of music videos from P2P and I think they are way cooler than plain old mp3s. A video iPod or somesuch would be ideal. If I don't want to watch the video I can simply listen to the music.
"I just can't sit while people are saying nonsense in a meeting without saying it's nonsense" J Watson, Sci Am 288:(4)51
However, if spammers have genuine "remove-me" addresses (at least genuine enough to be collecting your address so they can resell it as "validated", if not necessarily genuine enough to stop spamming you), then certainly you could sent them large email addresses, such as an MPEG of you telling them why you don't want any more spam, in case they didn't get the hint. Do make sure you tell their ISP's abuse department as well (which suggests your MPEG should _not_ include a demonstration of why you don't need their herbal expander pills... :-) If you can send mail directly, rather than using your ISP's SMTP relay, certainly sending any spammer 10-50 times as many bits as they sent you would be legitimate. It's not as effective unless everybody does it, but hey, it's a start.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
As far as P2P servers for domain names go, there's a real difference between the distribution technology for the names (which isn't usually a problem) and the decision-making processes, which are hierarchical by design (and have a big ugly glaring mess at the top levels of the hierarchy.)
But yes, "Wired the Conde Nast Travel Magazine" is a bit different than "Wired" was the first year or two, when my friends were in it more often :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Email is P2P. It's possibly the canonical peer-to-peer system on the 'net. The only non P2P part comes from DNS address look up.
To send you email, I look up the corresponding MX record and connect to your host directly and attempt to deliver.
Of course in the real world, home Windows machines typically do not run their own mail servers, and rely on some other server (their ISP?) to handle mail for them. But there's nothing stopping users from handling their own mail if they have decent network connectivity and working name service.
Here is another example of how widespread NAT and dynamic IPs cause problems that we have to struggle to work around. This is the problem, not any lack of P2P-ness of email!
(I'm not the original poster.)
I know a friend of mine had to shut down his satan@hell.org address because his mail server was clogged by the bounce messages replying to spam supposedly from that address.
HA HA! I am so funny! Because everyone who uses Windoze is stupid because I'm smarter than they are because I use linux and all the rest of you Micro$heep are stupid! Look! I combined microsheep and using a $ for an S! Because Micro$oft is greedy and their customers are stupid sheep that do whatever they're told! HA HA! I am so clever!
Finally, after all these years, someone at Wired thinks I'm nifty. I feel so much better now. Well, maybe not.
Project Web Form Flooder at http://formflood.sourceforge.net
Set her up with Eudora, with the proper set-up (though even the default settings beat Outhouse any day). You can set the font to whatever you please. The links work, but don't auto-open. The photos work fine as .jpg attachments (and they don't auto-open, either). Easily supports "family" computers with multiple mail accounts (set up a separate short-cut to each mailbox). All my non-techie clan have no trouble using it this way.
I remember the good old days, back in early 1998 when I first got DSL. Except for the few random people who visited my little web page, the transmit light on my router wouldn't blink at all unless I was doing something. I get all nostalgic just thinking about it.
That would be the "do not spam" list from the CAN-SPAM Act.
I liked 5 - one Inbox for everything - phone, fax, email, dumb requests from boss
Then I just have one pile to trash!
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
That actually is one of the reasons I switched back from Linksys to a Linux-based fw. I wanted to see just WTF was keeping my Activity light going 24x7 with rare blinks. It is ridiculous, you're absolutely right.
This should be attempted with caution. Spammers may be working with crackers, virus-writers, and possibly meat-space criminals. Operate from behind a firewall, in an open-source browser, with active content diabled. Never give your true name or similar information. If there are strange codes in the URL, remove them, they may encode your e-mail address.
So that's my little guide to vigilante anti-spam activity. Not that I'd ever encourage you to do anything illegal :-)
Sig:Why copyright isn't a fundamental human right
Of course!
To any idiot automatically deleting their spam, STOP DOING IT. Register for an account over at SpamCop now and start reporting. I've been doing it for a loong time now.
Spare a though for the people who refresh their inbox every minute in order to catch the latest "Free Cable", "Enlarge %s", "Give your %s multiple %o" offer.
All-points reply. Some are fine, some are insane. I think this guy doesn't think things through, or is very ignorant.
1 Unleash vigilante justice on spammers One activist has proposed filters that launch distributed denial-of-service attacks back at spammers. Great. Just make sure we have the right addresses first.
That's fine with me, but the potential for disaster is pretty high. I like the odds, but most people (polticians and corporations especially) will not.
2 Slash song prices charge 29 cents per download. You''ll make it up in volume.
Bring it on. It' make it 25 cents, for the "Only a quarter" factor. Related note: Perhaps music stores should use BR, or make it an option? Seamless BT for broadband users would save the company a bit on bandwidth, maybe making it possible to run more cheaply (maybe not, I've really no idea).
3 Quit already, Jack Valenti
That will only treat a symptom of a problem.
4 Appoint Larry Lessig to the Supreme Court Is he a Democrat or a Republican? Who cares! Laws governing information flow are the new affirmative action, abortion, and gun control rolled into one.
Would never happen soon enough to be crucial to those issues, would be cool.
5 Create the all-in-one inbox Email, phone calls, instant messages - they should all go into a single app.
Haha. Sure. And invent a computer which anybody can make do anything they need without effort, first time, every time. How? Oh, I thought we were exchanging fantasies...
6 Triple our cable modem speed First step: Just turn off the Golf Channel and UPN.
Fine by me. But make it ESPN and ESPN2 and all sports channels and all shopping channels and leave UPN. They rerun Buffy.
7 Demand truth in advertising for software updates C'mon, AOL 9.0 is really AOL 8.0 with the version number increased 1.0.
So what do you want? A feature list? A changelog? Fine print which says "Improvements may not be dramatic?" How would this work?
8 Declare spammers are terrorists And put Ashcroft, Ridge, and Rumsfeld on their tails.
This would REALLY not help. The problem is that if spammers can be classified as terrorists, so can legitimate emailers, and so can I, and so can you. Jumping to extreme measures ALWAYS backfires, sooner or later.
9 Hands off Internet phone calls Just because the creaky old phone system was regulated to death doesn't mean VoIP should suffer the same fate.
Indeed.
10 Free the handsets We should be able to buy any cell phone and match it with any service plan.
Sure.
11 Larry Flynt, build a porn browser It should cover our tracks coming and going.
Some moz extensions would probably do this. What does Flynt know about software? Nothing. What do Mozilla developers knw about porn? I'd guess an awful lot. The group with the right ranges of experience is clear.
12 Make email addresses portable
Eh? Portable how? If you mean what I think you mean, then we have it already (more or less) and you're a nutjob if you propose "fixing" that in the way I think is like.y Hell, you're a nutjob anyway.
13 Don't let the Pentagon hog the airwaves The DOD doesn't need that many civilian-free radio frequencies to do its job.
Sure.
14 Dump the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
Yes!
15 Stop the US Patent Office before they patent the hyperlink Oops, too late.
Filler. Padding. Why?
16 Simplify Web publishing Why can't we post files from our desktop to a Web site in one drag-and-drop move?
Um... yeah, sure. Run a loca webserver. Problem solved! Mount your SFTP connection as a directory. Problem solved!
The point is, we can do this already.
17 Let a thousand Wi-Fis bloom Open spectrum is the new open source.
Nothing will ever be "the new open source". That would imply open source is some kind of buzz-word or fad. While it may also be the former, it is most definitely not the latter.
18 Build a
I want my Cowboyneal
Besides, how often are people going to change broadband providers and the like?
Heck, my e-mail adress has changed 3 times in less than 3 years without changing providers, thanks to @home/AT&T/Comcast.
I like the wild west approach. Short rope, tall tree, byebye spammer.
#102: Stop splitting up articles over multiple pages for the sole purpose of increasing advertising hits (or link directly to the printer version).
5 Create the all-in-one inbox Email, phone calls, instant messages - they should all go into a single app.
His wish is their command: Quotient.
Don't be fooled by the unadorned web site: Quotient is a multiprotocol server plus client plus repository, supporting POP, IMAP, SIP, IRC and IM, and based on Twisted, an event-based, multiprotocol networking framework. Quotient comes from the Twisted guys themselves.
It's a remarkable architecture, and implemented in a very nice programming language. :^)
Joe job.
Wherein you hate me, so you spam everyone in town with my web address (or whatever).
to contact the spammers, how do they make any money? I think he was suggesting we place "sales inquiries" and then not buy anything to EVERY SINGLE spam we get. This sounds like an interesting approach.
If you own your own domain and you are spammed @your-domain.com ID, then just charge the spammers for what they are doing and enjoy the money thats come to you. Here I have got Terms of Service(ToS). Feel free to use it for your own.
Senthil
There's a very, very simple idea that makes it pretty obvious spam comes from forged addresses. If they didn't, you could easily filter by address or domain.
Of course, things get murky with applications like BitTorrent which rely on simultaneous uploads and downloads. I think of BT as a method of downloading, but I'm not sure how legal is really is. In any case it's a good example of the futility of the concept of "intellectual" property.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
57: Filter fake error messages
Those ads that pose as Windows error messages ("Your computer may be infected! Download fix?") should appear in front of your lawyers, not us.
Did anybody else notice the fake Windows banner at the top of this page saying "You have 2 unread messages waiting for you"?
Hows about instead of replying to every spam you spam the smtp service of the "to remove - click here" url?
Teach her how to type it on her browser.
Tell her ho to include it on her Bookmarks.
Send her a quick email when you do an update.
Or send your HTML document as an attachment.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You are correct that many sites use .com now.
.sex would not work better. I can see why very few people would use .net or .org for their sites.
.sex sites.
.sex name is that it would place the burden of preventing minors from accessing them onto the parents or other person letting them use the computer.
.com address, that site can be sued for sending porn to a minor. This results in cash inflow for the people doing the suing and cash outflow for the porn site.
.sex in the US and have fast connection speeds.
.sex while the others will suffer bandwidth constraints.
.sex sites for minors, while adults will quickly learn the new addresses.
But that does not mean that
Oh, but I'm typing this into a site called slashdot.org, how amazing. It seems that slashdot.com redirects the user to slashdot.org so I'm thinking that a similar function might work for the
And the reason that many porn sites would adopt the
So, if a minor hits a porn site using a
Sure, some sites will move off-shore, but then they'll have to share that pipe to the US with every other person in that country. That means slower connection speeds and the legit porn sites will move to
Economics in action.
The majority of legit porn sites will move to
It will be easy to filter
Read the subject line.
Re:I'm not talking about spam.
And your reply is:
"Riiiiiiiiiiiight. Just like porn spammers are soooooo worried that their emails might inadvertently wind up in the inboxes of children."
kthxbuhbye
"Oh, I see... just because you don't have an answer, then you want to leave it out of the discussion."
.sex is web (HTTP)
Nope. I just don't see the two problems as having the same solution.
spam is email (SMTP)
Look, they even have different protocols.
But to you, because they're both porn marketing, they're the same.
"Yeah, you're a real intellectual."
No, I'm a technician. I understand protocols.
"Spam is one avenue of marketing, just as registering a particular TLD is another avenue, and is very germain to the discussion."
No. Because they are BOTH marketing does NOT mean that one solution has to apply to BOTH problems.
Again, don't strain yourself. You probably don't know anything about any of the protocols.
The fact that HTML email makes viruses easier is a red herring. Avoid that by fixing the problem that allows viruses to come in email!
Only an idiot would think of replying to the "From" field, which is not what I was suggesting.
then repeat, etc.
Also, reply to other spammers with spamminated email addies from their servers' address.
Man, wish I had mod point today. That's pretty much what I had in mind, but on a larger scale :-)
Mamma
the President's a fool
why do I have to keep
reading these technical manuals?
Love the Roger sig, BTW...