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

Forget It

[worst_name_ever]

"Evil will always triumph, because good is dumb."

- Dark Helmet

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.

They made a typo.

[LNO]

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".

My favorite one

[SargeZT]

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.

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.

Re:getting rid of spammers

[tomhudson]

Or we could make it a goal in 2004 to each 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 that the "legit" replies to their spam will be lost in the background noise.

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.

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.

What does do

[i_am_pi]

What does do Slashdot readers think of these suggestions

I do did thinked that the editorers shoulds read the sumbisions more betterly so the grammer is gooder kthx bye

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.

Re:getting rid of spammers

[October_30th]

The current tactic of ignoring spam "in the hope it will go away"

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.

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.

Stopping spam, popups, etc.

[Animats]

• Define adware, spyware, etc. as "computer intrusions" under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Require European-style "explicit, separate permission" for installs of such things as public policy, so they can't hide "permission" in some vague EULA.
• Get Visa International to require that any site that accepts credit cards must have a digital certificate that gives the identity of the merchant, including their true name, DUNS number, and primary banking relationship. Any credit card site that doesn't do this gets their transactions reversed as soon as someone reports them to Visa. That will make it easy to follow the money.
• Enforce the new Federal spam law. It's weak, but it's something. A few high profile raids and arrests will do it.
• Lobby the FTC on the details of the "do not spam" list. Insist that opt-out by domain be supported. Insist that mail service providers that don't opt out their customers be required to disclose this in ads.

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.

--

101 Ways to Save Apple

[sandalwood]

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."

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.)

Re:getting rid of spammers

[Valar]

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.

Re:url

[spazoid12]

And, this guy obviously hasn't actually tried it...

http://www.amazon.com/wolf/wired

Sucker...

Stop blocking spammers, block companies

[KalvinB]

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