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
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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."
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.
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
I once got spam with my own address.
The owls are not what they seem
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.
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