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?"
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.
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
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?
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 :-)
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.
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.
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?
And you don't think the terrorists have already won?
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.
the other day I was in a lunchroom conversation and everyone started bitching about popups. Couple of us said "use Mozilla or Firebird." Everyone else acted like someone has just ripped a big fart. Uncomfortable pause, and on to discussions of how best to disable ActiveX scripting.
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
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