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?"

Comments

What does this have to do with the Internet?

[shagoth]

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.

to really save the internet...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:getting rid of spammers

[October_30th]

You do realize that most spam headers are forged?

I once got spam with my own address.

Re:getting rid of spammers

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

#98

[sofakingl]

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.

Poorly researched article

[Tim C]

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.

My question is...

[Overly Critical Guy]

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.

Watch out for Joe-Jobs

[billstewart]

Spammers often impersonate people they don't like, so angry responders trash them. Make sure you don't get tricked into harassing the innocent. And far more often than that, they use fake addresses on real servers, such as YetAnotherBogusAddress@yahoo.com. Try not to waste their resources either. And your ISP would appreciate if you don't waste their resources.

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.