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101 Ways To Save The Internet

Posted by timothy on from the good-luck-with-that-list dept.

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?"

20 of 490 comments (clear)

  1. Conflicting goals? by October_30th · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Quite frankly, I don't see any other alternative to controlling the spammers and crackers than regulation.

    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
  2. Stupid by EmCeeHawking · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Stupid by damiam · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Obviously, that would require the labels totake less than 70 cents (probably 20 or so).

      --
      It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
  3. This "article" sucked! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  4. #12 is dumb by Burlynerd · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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

  5. Poor tech article from Wired by Ophidian+P.+Jones · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Poor tech article from Wired by DarthBart · · Score: 3, Insightful

      "Make email addresses portable" - get your own domain name and move it from ISP to ISP as you please.

      Butbutbutbut...I like my 2sexykitty4u696969@msn.com address. All my buddies have it.

      "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.

      Apparently, clicking on "Put" in either Dreamweaver or Frontpage or any of the other "Web Design Expert in a Box" packages is toooooo haaaaaaard for people.

      "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.

      Change this to "Big music, how about releasing something that isn't crap. And when you do release it, don't fuck us up the ass for $20 per cd."

      "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.

      You find me a P2P network that doesn't use at least one client/server connection to find the other peers in the network and I'll show you one of Monica's dresses that doesn't have a big Bill stain on the front of it.

  6. You'd think they'd know by now. by reaper20 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Anyone else find it funny that "Just use Mozilla" would have taken care of over half of these?

  7. eep by AEton · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  8. Vigilantism... by BJZQ8 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  9. 92 Turn off your HTML email by JohnGrahamCumming · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:92 Turn off your HTML email by Fnkmaster · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Yes, I agree and you agree - we'd prefer that pretty graphics stay on the web and that email be used for text. The problem is that Joe Average seems absolutely enamored of using all sorts of atrocious fonts, background colors, and blinkenlights in his emails. I receive this things in the course of business all the time, and they make me want to gouge my eyes out.


      The counterpoint to this is that Joe Average seems to respond to HTML emails with large images and huge blinkenlights much better than he responds to plain text. That is actually the primary reason spammers use it - the people saavy enough to prefer text email are exactly the same people who never buy something they receive an unsolicited email about.


      The sad truth is that people are dumb, and people like shiny flashy things (my preciousssss...). Just deal with it. Don't expect them to change just because it would create a positive externality for all of us who use the Internet.

  10. Educate Joe Sixpack by Gothmolly · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  11. Self-installing Adware? by Marillion · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Block self-installing adware for good

    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
  12. Re:getting rid of spammers by October_30th · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Imagine a bunch of perl scripts identifying spam, auto-composing semi-random replies

    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
  13. Alternative Pls. by bstadil · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Alternative Pls. by Bistronaut · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Give her Mozilla. It makes the links clickable, picture attachments show up at the end, and font size is configurable. That way, every e-mail she gets will be readable - not just yours.

      If you just have to have your pictures embedded in your text, use some other delivery system, like http.

    2. Re:Alternative Pls. by Patik · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I really wish a stripped down version of HTML (like Slashdot's) were the standard for e-mail and usenet. It allows only the good, useful tags (links, paragraphs, bold, italic, lists, fixed-width/preformatted) and none of the bad ones (colors, images, font sizing, embedding). Sure there are probably one or two more tags to throw in (maybe font sizing should be allowed for just one size bigger or smaller), but other than that it allows you to make highly readable messages without adding potential for abuse (large file sizes, viruses, etc.)

  14. Control the Ends and the Medium by Saeger · · Score: 4, Insightful
    If we want to save the internet from top-down fascist control, we just need to ensure two things:

    1. We need to keep The Ends - our computing devices - under OUR complete control, and not in THEIR control. i.e. "Trusted Computing"/Palladium/EFI/DRM/etc must fail.
    2. We need to keep the communication medium free from government and/or corporate censorship. i.e. ISPs must remain common carriers, and major routers mustn't refuse to carry "untrusted" packets.

    Beyond that, software will simply evolve to handle any problems such as SPAM; it's an emergent system.

    --

    --
    Power to the Peaceful
  15. Re:getting rid of spammers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.