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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?"
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
What the hell is wrong with the mods lately?
This is not Offtopic! Sure, it's a lame joke, but it's on topic to the story.
Moderators around here are more kneejerk about enforcing the hive mind and censorship than ever before.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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!
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
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.
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
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.
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 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!
Beyond that, software will simply evolve to handle any problems such as SPAM; it's an emergent system.
--
Power to the Peaceful
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.
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?
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.
Laws are not the solution to everything.
On the other hand, don't fall into the trap of thinking that they are not the solution to anything.
Some people simply will never play nice with others. For these, you must have laws with penalties, and then enforce them.
There is a reason why we go through this completely silly exercise of writing down laws on books that say you can't steal from my home. Such a thing should be obvious right? So why is it that we spend money on legislatures to go through this exercise?
I would point out that the Junk Fax problem is largely a thing of the past.
Those who would give up liberty in exchange for security and DRM should switch to Microsoft Palladium!
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.
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
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
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.
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!