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?"
- Dark Helmet
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
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
First, we need to get a big-ass spotlight.
Next, get a big piece of cardboard and make a cutout of Tux. Remove the cutout and place the remaining cardboard over the lens of the spotlight.
Wait for a cloudy night, flip on the light, and wave it randomly around. Viola!
The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer. - Albert Einstein
Is there no quality control there?
11 Larry Flynt, build a porn browser It should cover our tracks coming and going.
I think we all know that should read "coming and coming".
What do you mean "101 ways to save the Internet from spammers, crackers and smothering regulation"? I can list off twice as many as that without even taking off my socks.
24. Release Episode III on the Net It's going straight to video anyway.
Lets see how long it takes wired to get DOS'ed by the Star Wars geeks of doom.
And why did you staple the trout to the RAM?
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
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.
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.
Wait a minute, that has been done.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
#0. The internet works great! Don't touch it!
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 :-)
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
Looks like geeks over at the Wired offices started drinking early.
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
Wired? This is the same Wired that gave us 101 Ways to Save Apple, with such great suggestions as "Admit it. You're out of the hardware game," "Sell yourself to IBM or Motorola," "Relocate the company to Bangalore," and "Invest heavily in Newton technology." Hilarious. Although there is one prescient thing in the article, which I'm not sure was intended seriously or was menat to be sarcastic (this was 1997 after all) - "It's Netscape we should really worry about."
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.
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.
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.
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?
I set up my filtering system to keep a list of spammers. Then, everytime I get a spam, I forward it to every address on that list. It might not be much, but at least it makes ME feel better.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
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?
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.
I once got spam with my own address.
The owls are not what they seem
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.
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.
psst... we're allowed to swear here, ya fuckin wanker.
"Verbing weirds language." -- Calvin
Honestly only about 10% of these ideas are realistic. A lot of them almost make me angry because they're just stupid.
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.
C'mon, P2P is vulnerable to attack as well, mostly contamination of bad data/files. Yes P2P is good for some services, but not everything. File downloading it's great for. Even if we had some sort of automated server mirroring setup, where servers would mirror each other and a download client would get the file from multiple RELIABLE TRUSTWORTHY sources closest to that person. That's not exactly P2P, but it's along the middle road.
Point being this list is largely crap made up for news.
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.
And, this guy obviously hasn't actually tried it...
http://www.amazon.com/wolf/wired
Sucker...
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.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
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.
"Sufferin' succotash."
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
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
1. stop slashdotting helpless websites. :)
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
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.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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!
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
#102: Stop splitting up articles over multiple pages for the sole purpose of increasing advertising hits (or link directly to the printer version).