You do, in fact, have the right to make comments that are slanderous. I can go on national television and say that J. Random Person blows goats and that I have pictures, and, legally, no one can do a thing to stop me. If the police see me doing it, they will have to stand by, helpless. It's the same thing with shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater.
However, this does not stop J. Random Person from sueing me for my false statements and damage to the reputation, or the police arresting me for endangering people's lives, after the fact.
It is really mind-bogglying how, whereever anyone mentions the 2000 presidental election (Despite who you think should have been decided the winner, or what procedures you don't think were follow or were follow correctly.), some moron always mentions the completely irrelevant fact that Gore lost Tennesee.
You do realize that this makes the 'Bush really won the election' side look completely stupid, right? Lots of presidents don't get their home state.
And as an aside, Gore was not the 'incumbent', the incumbent was Bill Clinton. And, yes, the presidental election was decided in Florida, legal decisions there (And in Washington about there.) decided the course of the election.
In many places, learning about Nazis is part of the school curriculum. It's not that farfetched that said curriculum is actually written down as part of state policy, and that it is also state policy that you have to puchase textbooks from one of these ten suppliers, thus forcing purchasers to purchase Nazi 'paraphernalia'. (Whatever the hell 'paraphernalia' means in that context.)
While such textbooks probably aren't illegal in France, which just seems to care that they don't have neo-Nazis walking around, I'd wager to bet many of them are illegal in Germany, because Germany frankly doesn't allow any presentation of WWII that isn't government approved. (Of course, the reason it isn't approved is simply because the textbook manufactures don't care enough to submit their books, but that's beside the point.)
Ergo, there are situtations where schools in some countries are required, as part of their educational mandate that was handed down by the government, to purchase things that may be illegal in other countries.
Another example: In Quebec, it is required that you have French and Eglish on all signs, and that they be equal size. In various cities in America, there are laws saying that your main sign must be in English, or at least the English must be larger than your other signs. (This is to stop 'Chinatowns' and whatnot from becoming completely unnavigatable by police and just random passerbyers.) These laws are in direct contradiction to each other.
And, of course, there is the very very obvious one of 'you must drive on the left', vs. 'you must drive on the right', though I think it would get pretty surreal pretty quickly if every government tried to enforce their traffic laws everywhere.
There are also the 'wildly different' laws that, despite having the exact same intention and pretty close legal framework, were created with no regard to each other and thus directly conflict in different parts. For example, common law marriage times are different in different countries. Though I don't know the laws, let's say that if you live with someone for two years you're married in England, and it's three years in Louisiana. If you have sex with your common law wife of two and a half years in England, you can be arrested for rape in Louisiana if you happen to mention you're married, because a) You aren't married in Louisiana, and b) It's rape if you trick the other person into thinking you're married to them.
Obviously that isn't the intent of the law, and you wouldn't be arrested even if you did it in Louisiana (Countries pretty much just accept if you're from another country and say you're married, that you are, and they'd have to prove you knew you weren't married there anyway.), but conflicts between different country's laws happen all the time, and it's crazy to try to enforce them in anything outsides the boundaries of this country for exactly this reason.
That is actually a horrible idea. Well intentioned, but horrible. It's been gone over in the newsgroups to death.
You know why? It's entirely likely that spam would become 'legal', except pornographic spam. The second this whole thing started, the DMA will leap in about all the evil pornographers, the newspapers and 'parent groups' would have a field day about 'smut', and we'd end up worse off than we are now, because, while we'd stop getting prono spams, we'd end up get more of other kinds, because they're magically 'legit'.
OTOH, it's already illegal to distribute pornographic materials to children, so if you want to have spammers who do it locked up, you have pretty good grounds to do so.
It's easy: Find the sites that list open relays, and submit it to them. A quick test later, and poof, you're unable to send email to 10% of the internet. Spammers will notice you're on the list, and use you to relay spam. Poof, you're unable to send email to 25% of the internet.
But I have to question this 'unable to spend enough time' on it. Most email servers can be stopped from being an open relay with one checkbox or one line in a config file, so the only possible way that makes any sense is if he has to set up authnicated relaying or something.
Heck, they could use the honor system. Say 'Here's the ISO, here's where you send your check or money order, or you can give us your credit card over here.'
Sure, lots of people would download without paying, but lots of people would pay, and there isn't any sort of precedent for it being freely available. This would get them a lot more money then they are getting now, which is $0, and it would allow people who truely want to pay for the great game a way to do it.
Hell, they don't even need server space. Just say 'If you want to purchase this game, please find an old copy of the game, burn a duplicate copy, and send us 5 dollars.', and abandonware sites would be glad to host it. (Probably want to put something in there about not reselling it, so people don't go burn 30 copies and stick it in the window of their software store at $40 apiece to rip people off.)
My abuse messages to open relays anywhere in the word consists of one line, something like 'You're running an open relay'. If they can't understand the phrase 'open relay' they shouldn't be running a fucking mail server.
As a matter of fact, they shouldn't be running one anyway, anyone who sets up an open relay should be banned from the internet. (Note I said sets one up. I am aware that there are some open relays around from the earlier times, and I'm not too pissed at the people who inherited that system and never checked sendmail.cf, but they need to close them as soon as they are notified.) But anyone who sets a new one up should be prohibited from running any sort of server for a good year, because they are too irresponsibly to operate one.
Do we even know the people sending those are Nigerian? I always assumed not, it was just a generic 'grab the account number so we can do a money transfer' thing, but my Kenyan roommate seemed to think they were actually Nigerians. Of course, he didn't hold the entire country of Nigeria in very high regard anyway, so I don't know.
The only difference between the way you would do it and the way I would do it, is you lose all the other mail, too, while I would not.
I don't want email from people supporting thieves. If they're doing it unknowingly, well, they'll see the block and do a little research, and thus become knowing. If they already know they'll living in the slums and pay rent to thiefs, they either move or I refuse to visit them.
If you're going to block a range, the only range you need to block is the range the actual spam comes from. If you are capable of blocking a range, then you can succeed at blocking the spammer range. The only time you need to block the whole ISP is if they help the spammer evade your block. But as long as the ISP is simply providing basic IP service in a box, the content should be irrelevant to them (not to you or me, course).
No it shouldn't. I don't knwo where you get this concept they don't have to follow AUPs. Rackspace's AUP with their provider clearly says that they can't have anything to do with spamming. (As does pretty much everyone's in the entire world.) They simply lie and move people, take a month to deal with a complaint, etc.
The extreme danger in this is that it sets up the precedent that a hosting company has to judge content. Once they are judging one type of content, then they could be forced to judge another. They might end up having to take down a web site because the corporation it makes fun of, or reports about improprieties by, would be offended and threaten the ISP with a lawsuit. As long as the ISP doesn't give the spammer special treatment by letting them change IP addresses all the time, blocking gets the job done by blocking the spammer and not the ISP.
There is no precedent here for the simple fact this isn't a legal processing. Or do you want to worry that the BSU's boycott of Disney will create a precedent that people can sue Disney for things they find offensive? Boycotts are entirely legal, and they don't create any precedents, unless you want to count 'more boycotts' as predecents.
If you do want to talk about the concept of creating other types of blocklists...they already exist. Things like netnanny and junkbuster are the exact same thing, for the web instead of the net. People just haven't come up with the infrastructure to add things in real time, like with spam blocklists. (Though you can do that with whatever the usenet one is called...NoCemEm or something.)
There are plenty of volentary methods for blocking what you see on the internet, and plenty of people are willing to share what they block, and use what other people block. This isn't anything new, and none of them have resulted in any sort of bad legal decision. (Though the availibility of netblockers did help shoot down the CDA.)
If you think that by doing this kind of blocking (of the whole ISP) often enough will cause spammers to somehow just disappear, you are delusional. Spammer types have always existed before the internet, and will continue to exist as the internet becomes entirely ubiquitous.
I don't care if they exist, I just don't want them on the same wires as me. As that isn't strictly possible, I'll settle for simply blocking them off the same part of the net as me.
As long as there is perceived to be a target market for spam, there will be spammers, and they will find ways to deliver the garbage. And there is such a target market out there. While you and I pay greater costs, to the spammer it is a success because they very frequently get returns well in excess of expenditures (and the last time I looked, that was the way business worked).
This is a fairly common fallacy, that because I'm doing on thing to stop something I can't do another. I do educate people about spam, and tell them not to reply. I don't see how blocking spammers will hinder (or help) this. I can do two things at once, especially when one's automatic.
Compare this to the illegal drug market in the US. As long as people want to buy these drugs, someone will find a way to deliver it, no matter how much the US law enforcement does to stop them. As the supply diminishes, the prices go up, and the attraction to enter supply side is greater. So it is with spam. The more we reduce it on everyone, the more successful the spammers who remain will be (because their target is less saturated). If instead of trying to stop all spam, we work on stopping spam from just us, and let it go on to those who don't really care (and whether you believe it or not, there are a large number of people out there who really don't care), then at least we can be spam free. Economics works with spam, too.
Yes, that's a good way to get rid of spam, and it's how spam will eventually die. But the entire world isn't anywhere near being on the internet. Sure, we can educate everyone around us, but what about in ten years when everyone in India suddenly leaps on the internet, or twenty when everyone in China does?
Everyone getting educated to the point of not replying to spam is a long way off, and I perfer not delete the eight septillion spam messages between now and then.
Making the falsifying of "From:" addresses a felony would fix that.
I would like to suggest that there is a single exception, @example.com (example.* is reserved), for people who truly wish to not be reachable. Of course, you'd have an easy way to filter these out in your email program.
I would not only make it a felony, but using someone else's real email making you liable for $1000 per message.
Making use of open mail relays w/o permission a misdemeanor at least would help.
There are some pretty good arguments it is illegal, but, yes, it should explictly be illegal. In fact, let's make it illegal to access a system by using some other system without explict permission from the proxy, and get people misusing open SOCKS proxies too. (Real public proxies would presumably have big permission granting messages in the connect screen.)
How is it against any 'spirit of the internet' that you can choose to let someone else decide what you can see?
I can think of a bunch of different things like that, from various junkbusters lists to NoCemUm messages on Usenet to PICS ratings for web pages, to, obviously, moderation on Slashdot.
I can't imagine why you would think it wasn't common on the Internet for people to hand off the decision of what crap to get rid to other people. It's pretty much the most common way to get rid of crap on the internet.
That's nothing, I would have taken the money, alerted the provider that you were planning to violate your AUP, and then tried to send the spam four hours later...what? No connection? Well, darn.
Slashdot Mirror
However, this does not stop J. Random Person from sueing me for my false statements and damage to the reputation, or the police arresting me for endangering people's lives, after the fact.
You do realize that this makes the 'Bush really won the election' side look completely stupid, right? Lots of presidents don't get their home state.
And as an aside, Gore was not the 'incumbent', the incumbent was Bill Clinton. And, yes, the presidental election was decided in Florida, legal decisions there (And in Washington about there.) decided the course of the election.
Does anyone else think that com.com is the lamest domain name possible?
While such textbooks probably aren't illegal in France, which just seems to care that they don't have neo-Nazis walking around, I'd wager to bet many of them are illegal in Germany, because Germany frankly doesn't allow any presentation of WWII that isn't government approved. (Of course, the reason it isn't approved is simply because the textbook manufactures don't care enough to submit their books, but that's beside the point.)
Ergo, there are situtations where schools in some countries are required, as part of their educational mandate that was handed down by the government, to purchase things that may be illegal in other countries.
Another example: In Quebec, it is required that you have French and Eglish on all signs, and that they be equal size. In various cities in America, there are laws saying that your main sign must be in English, or at least the English must be larger than your other signs. (This is to stop 'Chinatowns' and whatnot from becoming completely unnavigatable by police and just random passerbyers.) These laws are in direct contradiction to each other.
And, of course, there is the very very obvious one of 'you must drive on the left', vs. 'you must drive on the right', though I think it would get pretty surreal pretty quickly if every government tried to enforce their traffic laws everywhere.
There are also the 'wildly different' laws that, despite having the exact same intention and pretty close legal framework, were created with no regard to each other and thus directly conflict in different parts. For example, common law marriage times are different in different countries. Though I don't know the laws, let's say that if you live with someone for two years you're married in England, and it's three years in Louisiana. If you have sex with your common law wife of two and a half years in England, you can be arrested for rape in Louisiana if you happen to mention you're married, because a) You aren't married in Louisiana, and b) It's rape if you trick the other person into thinking you're married to them.
Obviously that isn't the intent of the law, and you wouldn't be arrested even if you did it in Louisiana (Countries pretty much just accept if you're from another country and say you're married, that you are, and they'd have to prove you knew you weren't married there anyway.), but conflicts between different country's laws happen all the time, and it's crazy to try to enforce them in anything outsides the boundaries of this country for exactly this reason.
Yes, here it's for cocaine users. ;)
I suspect the reason you're not moderating is more due to the fact you're an anonymous coward than anything else, but sure, you can use the sig. ;)
So...what's stopping spammers from signing their spam?
You know why? It's entirely likely that spam would become 'legal', except pornographic spam. The second this whole thing started, the DMA will leap in about all the evil pornographers, the newspapers and 'parent groups' would have a field day about 'smut', and we'd end up worse off than we are now, because, while we'd stop getting prono spams, we'd end up get more of other kinds, because they're magically 'legit'.
OTOH, it's already illegal to distribute pornographic materials to children, so if you want to have spammers who do it locked up, you have pretty good grounds to do so.
But I have to question this 'unable to spend enough time' on it. Most email servers can be stopped from being an open relay with one checkbox or one line in a config file, so the only possible way that makes any sense is if he has to set up authnicated relaying or something.
Sure, lots of people would download without paying, but lots of people would pay, and there isn't any sort of precedent for it being freely available. This would get them a lot more money then they are getting now, which is $0, and it would allow people who truely want to pay for the great game a way to do it.
Hell, they don't even need server space. Just say 'If you want to purchase this game, please find an old copy of the game, burn a duplicate copy, and send us 5 dollars.', and abandonware sites would be glad to host it. (Probably want to put something in there about not reselling it, so people don't go burn 30 copies and stick it in the window of their software store at $40 apiece to rip people off.)
As a matter of fact, they shouldn't be running one anyway, anyone who sets up an open relay should be banned from the internet. (Note I said sets one up. I am aware that there are some open relays around from the earlier times, and I'm not too pissed at the people who inherited that system and never checked sendmail.cf, but they need to close them as soon as they are notified.) But anyone who sets a new one up should be prohibited from running any sort of server for a good year, because they are too irresponsibly to operate one.
Do we even know the people sending those are Nigerian? I always assumed not, it was just a generic 'grab the account number so we can do a money transfer' thing, but my Kenyan roommate seemed to think they were actually Nigerians. Of course, he didn't hold the entire country of Nigeria in very high regard anyway, so I don't know.
That's due to the obvious fact that Mozilla and Netscape are from the same codebase, and Galeon is just a front end to Mozilla.
I don't want email from people supporting thieves. If they're doing it unknowingly, well, they'll see the block and do a little research, and thus become knowing. If they already know they'll living in the slums and pay rent to thiefs, they either move or I refuse to visit them.
If you're going to block a range, the only range you need to block is the range the actual spam comes from. If you are capable of blocking a range, then you can succeed at blocking the spammer range. The only time you need to block the whole ISP is if they help the spammer evade your block. But as long as the ISP is simply providing basic IP service in a box, the content should be irrelevant to them (not to you or me, course).
No it shouldn't. I don't knwo where you get this concept they don't have to follow AUPs. Rackspace's AUP with their provider clearly says that they can't have anything to do with spamming. (As does pretty much everyone's in the entire world.) They simply lie and move people, take a month to deal with a complaint, etc.
The extreme danger in this is that it sets up the precedent that a hosting company has to judge content. Once they are judging one type of content, then they could be forced to judge another. They might end up having to take down a web site because the corporation it makes fun of, or reports about improprieties by, would be offended and threaten the ISP with a lawsuit. As long as the ISP doesn't give the spammer special treatment by letting them change IP addresses all the time, blocking gets the job done by blocking the spammer and not the ISP.
There is no precedent here for the simple fact this isn't a legal processing. Or do you want to worry that the BSU's boycott of Disney will create a precedent that people can sue Disney for things they find offensive? Boycotts are entirely legal, and they don't create any precedents, unless you want to count 'more boycotts' as predecents.
If you do want to talk about the concept of creating other types of blocklists...they already exist. Things like netnanny and junkbuster are the exact same thing, for the web instead of the net. People just haven't come up with the infrastructure to add things in real time, like with spam blocklists. (Though you can do that with whatever the usenet one is called...NoCemEm or something.)
There are plenty of volentary methods for blocking what you see on the internet, and plenty of people are willing to share what they block, and use what other people block. This isn't anything new, and none of them have resulted in any sort of bad legal decision. (Though the availibility of netblockers did help shoot down the CDA.)
If you think that by doing this kind of blocking (of the whole ISP) often enough will cause spammers to somehow just disappear, you are delusional. Spammer types have always existed before the internet, and will continue to exist as the internet becomes entirely ubiquitous.
I don't care if they exist, I just don't want them on the same wires as me. As that isn't strictly possible, I'll settle for simply blocking them off the same part of the net as me.
As long as there is perceived to be a target market for spam, there will be spammers, and they will find ways to deliver the garbage. And there is such a target market out there. While you and I pay greater costs, to the spammer it is a success because they very frequently get returns well in excess of expenditures (and the last time I looked, that was the way business worked).
This is a fairly common fallacy, that because I'm doing on thing to stop something I can't do another. I do educate people about spam, and tell them not to reply. I don't see how blocking spammers will hinder (or help) this. I can do two things at once, especially when one's automatic.
Compare this to the illegal drug market in the US. As long as people want to buy these drugs, someone will find a way to deliver it, no matter how much the US law enforcement does to stop them. As the supply diminishes, the prices go up, and the attraction to enter supply side is greater. So it is with spam. The more we reduce it on everyone, the more successful the spammers who remain will be (because their target is less saturated). If instead of trying to stop all spam, we work on stopping spam from just us, and let it go on to those who don't really care (and whether you believe it or not, there are a large number of people out there who really don't care), then at least we can be spam free. Economics works with spam, too.
Yes, that's a good way to get rid of spam, and it's how spam will eventually die. But the entire world isn't anywhere near being on the internet. Sure, we can educate everyone around us, but what about in ten years when everyone in India suddenly leaps on the internet, or twenty when everyone in China does?
Everyone getting educated to the point of not replying to spam is a long way off, and I perfer not delete the eight septillion spam messages between now and then.
A failed company has no need of credibility, trust, self-respect, etc.
As an aside, I think most people would respect them more for suing MS. I will.
Though MS can take a little blame for it, anyone remember their FUD?
I would like to suggest that there is a single exception, @example.com (example.* is reserved), for people who truly wish to not be reachable. Of course, you'd have an easy way to filter these out in your email program.
I would not only make it a felony, but using someone else's real email making you liable for $1000 per message.
Making use of open mail relays w/o permission a misdemeanor at least would help.
There are some pretty good arguments it is illegal, but, yes, it should explictly be illegal. In fact, let's make it illegal to access a system by using some other system without explict permission from the proxy, and get people misusing open SOCKS proxies too. (Real public proxies would presumably have big permission granting messages in the connect screen.)
While I don't have any idea how to stop the spam, I have to note that the post office will give out a real address and name for any PO box.
But they will find out the list is blocking random people. That's what newsgroups are for, to find out who's being blocked.
I can think of a bunch of different things like that, from various junkbusters lists to NoCemUm messages on Usenet to PICS ratings for web pages, to, obviously, moderation on Slashdot.
I can't imagine why you would think it wasn't common on the Internet for people to hand off the decision of what crap to get rid to other people. It's pretty much the most common way to get rid of crap on the internet.
And what, pray tell, works better than blocking?
They do. I've gotten spam sent to the address I was using here. Of course, I just disabled it and got another.
That's nothing, I would have taken the money, alerted the provider that you were planning to violate your AUP, and then tried to send the spam four hours later...what? No connection? Well, darn.
Alright! A way to suffer the mental effects of sleep deprivation without suffering the physical ones!
I have to point out that you can be '80 years old' and dead.
They are listed because they are known spam supporters, and thus everyone who uses them is a spam supporter.