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

Conflicting goals?

[October_30th]

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.

Stupid

[EmCeeHawking]

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.

Poor tech article from Wired

[Ophidian P. Jones]

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.

You'd think they'd know by now.

[reaper20]

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

eep

[AEton]

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.

92 Turn off your HTML email

[JohnGrahamCumming]

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.

Re:92 Turn off your HTML email

[Fnkmaster]

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.

Educate Joe Sixpack

[Gothmolly]

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.

Self-installing Adware?

[Marillion]

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.

Control the Ends and the Medium

[Saeger]

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.

--

Re:getting rid of spammers

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Alternative Pls.

[Patik]

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.)