That's an interesting theory. I thought there were other original content pieces being run, although I never see them.
But surely it's more convenient for the readers to click through to an article on Slashdot than to read the summary here and click through to an article elsewhere. And it also avoids bifurcating the discussion -- otherwise we'd have some people commenting on Slashdot, and some people commenting in the threads on whatever site was hosting the article.
Given the advantages of hosting the content on Slashdot, if readers have a problem because they expect a link to an article that's hosted elsewhere, maybe the problem is with people's expectations?:)
"The argument about the danger of talking to cops is based on a sampling error. Professor Duane says that criminal defense attorneys "always, always say it was a bad idea for their client to talk to the police". But this sample obviously only includes people who talked to the police and ended up getting arrested, and charged, and needing a criminal defense attorney. The sample wouldn't include anyone that the police talked to and decided not to arrest -- whether they were initially brought in as a suspect but then convinced the police that they were innocent, or whether they were simply third-party witnesses who volunteered information to the police that they thought was useful."
By "seems like a blatant ad" --
If you mean "the author got bribed", do you have any reason for believing that's true? Don't you think positive reviews can "just happen"?
If you mean "this is an extremely positive review", then that point seems so obvious that, why bother?
And, thanks for providing a pointer to the Mac alternative.
Again, is there a specific statement that I've made -- quote the sentence if I you have to -- that you think is incorrect?
Plenty of people did that in the other article. Didn't you read the replies?
The overwhelming majority of the replies were of the form "Why should I listen to this person disagreeing with a lawyer if he's not a lawyer?" and "Why is this article even here?" (The latter objection did make a little sense if people hadn't read the previous articles about recent tech cases involving the Fifth Amendment.) Very few cited a statement that I made that they thought I was wrong.
For the third time: Is there a specific statement that I made in that article (or some other article) that you think is incorrect?
My main statement in that article -- that Professor Duane was wrong, it can help to talk to a cop -- was backed up by the police officer featured in the video, who cited several factual examples.
Again, is there a specific statement that I've made -- quote the sentence if I you have to -- that you think is incorrect?
Your math teacher is turning in their grave. Or possibly still alive and frowning with disappointment.
You're very articulate. Your English teacher would be proud.
A math/science/engineering teacher might ask you to cite an example of a statement I made that you think is incorrect, but you can get quite far in life without pleasing those kinds of fact-oriented people.
You wouldn't need to get a conviction based on an IP address. All you'd need would be to get a warrant to arrest the computer owner and search their computer. At that point their life may as well be ruined anyway even prior to the conviction (as is probably the case with Jeffrey Feldman), and if they find incriminating evidence on your computer, you'll be convicted as well.
The protocol I'm describing, would mitigate that, since law enforcement would lack probable cause to think that you *possessed* a file on your computer, simply because your computer had passed the bytes along.
My point was that regardless of how much time it takes to properly review a paper, the total workload doesn't change if you have a smaller number of journals publishing a larger number of articles per journal, rather than a huge number of small journals. The only variables that matter are the number of incoming submissions and the number of reviewers per submission, and I was arguing you can keep those constant.
I agree, that's why I said at the end: "There should probably be multiple open-access journals (or Virtual Super-Journals) within each field, so that the competition between them keeps them honest."
They'd probably do an even better job of keeping each other honest if they did "hit jobs" on each other like I discussed in the article, if one journal ever gave its stamp of approval to something that the other journals did not think was good enough.
This is correct, but the question is how to make this scale to a large number of journals. The more journals you have, the more you run the risk that some are not following this procedure, and it's hard to audit them from the outside.
That's why I'm recommending having a smaller number of journals with a larger output and a larger number of reviewers on call, because then you have a centralized point where the procedures can be enforced.
But legitimate senders have trouble getting past spam filters too, that's why they need "deliverability services".
I call bullshit on that one. I used to work for a company with about a million customers. Spam filters were never anyones concern, the reason external partners come up for delivery is that you need mail servers tuned to handling high-volume messages like that with all the greylisting and delays and bounces.
Well, some legitimate senders have trouble getting past spam filters. Obviously not all of them do.
There are a couple of reasons my emails might be more likely to trigger spam filters than other high-volume mails. When I mail out a new match of proxy sites, I register several new domains at a time, and often they are cheap.info domains. I also mail each new site to only a subset of the list (so that if a censoring company joins the list so they can block my new sites, they'll only find out about one new site, not all of them). The act of (1) registering all new domains, (2) registering.info domains, and (3) sending slight variations of the same message to different subsets of the list, on all three counts is similar to what a lot of spammers do, so those factors might trip some spam filters.
However, I would not consider that "close to actually being a spammer". A spammer sends messages to people who haven't requested it; a non-spammer sends messages only to people who have requested it.
While I emphasized in the article that I was only sending solicited email, maybe I should have emphasized more clearly that WhatCounts, too, only does deliverability for companies that are sending solicited email. However, just because I didn't stress this, doesn't mean people have any grounds for jumping to the conclusion that they must be "spammers".
If you have trouble getting past spam filters, then I maintain the reason is most likely that you are too close to actually being a spammer. Might not be the customer side (i.e. they may all have signed up with you), but the content of your message. Thank the spammers for ruining that, instead of giving them money to teach you how to escalate the battle to the next level.
From all you describe it seems you are genuine. Nevertheless, listening to spammers is the worst thing you could've done. That's like complaining about the park being closed at night - and asking a burglar for advise.
Well you can revise my definition to remove the word "owner" and avoid semantic debates about it:
Under virtually every commonly accepted definition, you're not a spammer if you only send mail to an email address if you obtain the consent of a person who has access to that email address (as verified by them replying to a confirmation message that you send them).
As I pointed out, if you don't agree with that definition, then you could define every sender in the world as a "spammer" because you're able to join their mailing list using your work email address even if your workplace hasn't given you permission to do that.
WhatCounts does deliverability for non-spammer clients. If they were delivering messages for spammers, their sending IPs would end up blocked at most of the sites that they're trying to deliver mail to.
Perhaps people heard "deliverability services" and assumed that must be talking about spammers. But legitimate senders have trouble getting past spam filters too, that's why they need "deliverability services". Since the company I was talking about sends to verified-opt-in mailing lists, I think that negates some of the points you made based on the assumption that they were "spammers"...
I'm not sure what you meant by "re-examining my position". In my reply to your post, I said that (1) sending to confirmed-opt-in lists is not spam, (2) putting the URL of a web proxy in an email does not make it spam. Both of which I believed before writing the article.
I am sending to several times the 35,000 volume you listed -- about 400,000 people, all of whom replied to the original confirmation message that I sent them, so the list is still 100% verified-opt-in.
Do you consider all images in email (that are loaded from a remote server, as opposed to being embedded) to be "web bugs"? By that definition more than half of the newsletters I willingly subscribe to, have "web bugs".
I don't think we should dilute the definition of "spammer" -- it should be reserved for people sending unsolicited email.
Well it wasn't the provider that disabled the domains, it was the domain registrar: http://slashdot.org/story/12/10/16/175248/zero-errors-spamhaus-flubs-causing-domain-deletions
Of course I had a "beef" with them too, but Spamhaus was recklessly making false statements about us, in a manner that they knew would do very direct damage to the targets of those statements, so I think that "matters".
Well, it would be the death knell of any mailing list aimed at average-skill users, but besides that, PGP wouldn't actually solve the problem.
Someone can still join the list, using their PGP key, decrypt the messages that I send out, and take the domain and blacklist it as a "spam" site. Whether Spamhaus joined our list themselves, or whether a third party joined our list and reported one of our domains to Spamhaus, in either case PGP wouldn't have helped.
I said in the article that most of the spam filtering problems come from AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, and Gmail. That can't be caused by people switching jobs.
I'm familiar with the blacklist practice of "punishing the whole network" and the blacklisters' rationale for it, however it doesn't make any sense to assume that that's what happened here, for a number of reasons:
1) the domains that got deleted were hosted at multiple different providers, and it's unlikely that all of those different providers would have had all of the subsections of their network randomly blacklisted at the moment I happened to register my domains
2) no other domains hosted at those networks, were blacklisted
3) as soon as I submitted the domains in a form on Spamhaus's website, the form said, "OK, these domains have been un-blacklisted". Which I was happy about, of course, but they wouldn't have done that if they had had a good reason for blacklisting them in the first place.
As I said, any confusion could have been avoided if Spamhaus had just said why the domains got blacklisted, and owned up to the error and made changes to avoid similar screw-ups in the future.
I was never a fan of MAPS, but at least when you looked up an IP address on their site and they said it was blacklisted, they said why (and if you were blacklisted because you shared your network with the actual guilty party, the lookup form would tell you who that guilty party was and show you the evidence that they had been spamming)
If you're sending mail only to people who have signed up to receive your mails and replied to the confirmation message, then you're not a spammer, are you?
That depends on if they have the unconditional authority to make those decisions about that email address.
Not under any commonly accepted definition of "spam".
Under virtually every commonly accepted definition, you're not a spammer if you receive the email owner's consent to send them mail (as verified by them replying to a confirmation message that was sent only to them). It's not your responsibility to determine whether the email address owner had the "right" to make decisions about that email address.
Otherwise, every email sender in the world could be branded a "spammer", if someone happened to subscribe to their list using an email address where someone else had the authority to make decisions about that email address, and didn't want that person joining any lists.
Or post your spam on/. as an "article". FTspammyA:
The webinar (which you can view here), was presented by Brad Gurley, the "Director of Deliverability" for WhatCounts, who has worked in the email "deliverability" industry for 10 years.
Just from that sentence, there is no way I would ever do business with them.
Email "deliverability" does not necessarily refer to spammers. As long as legitimate senders are getting blocked too, there's every reason for them to need "deliverability" services to help avoid being blocked by spam filters.
If you're sending mail only to people who have signed up to receive your mails and replied to the confirmation message, then you're not a spammer, are you?
Saying "open proxies properly belong on blocklists", you might be confusing open SMTP relays (where most mail originating from them is spam, which is why they're blacklisted) with open web proxies (where most emails containing the name of the proxy site, are not spam).
You realize that the guy who said our mails were blacklisted because some spammer had borrowed our proxy site and used it in their own spams, was just guessing. And there was no reason to think that guess was correct, since if a spammer wanted to do that, they would just use one of many web proxies already out there, instead of signing up to get the new ones.
Slashdot Mirror
That's an interesting theory. I thought there were other original content pieces being run, although I never see them.
:)
But surely it's more convenient for the readers to click through to an article on Slashdot than to read the summary here and click through to an article elsewhere. And it also avoids bifurcating the discussion -- otherwise we'd have some people commenting on Slashdot, and some people commenting in the threads on whatever site was hosting the article.
Given the advantages of hosting the content on Slashdot, if readers have a problem because they expect a link to an article that's hosted elsewhere, maybe the problem is with people's expectations?
What's a paragraph you didn't think was necessary?
"The argument about the danger of talking to cops is based on a sampling error. Professor Duane says that criminal defense attorneys "always, always say it was a bad idea for their client to talk to the police". But this sample obviously only includes people who talked to the police and ended up getting arrested, and charged, and needing a criminal defense attorney. The sample wouldn't include anyone that the police talked to and decided not to arrest -- whether they were initially brought in as a suspect but then convinced the police that they were innocent, or whether they were simply third-party witnesses who volunteered information to the police that they thought was useful."
Is there a specific statement of mine in the article, that you think is incorrect?
You're very articulate. (Well, not really, but that's how I always start my suggestions for people to be specific.)
Now. Is there a specific statement of mine in the article that you linked to, that you believe is incorrect?
By "seems like a blatant ad" --
If you mean "the author got bribed", do you have any reason for believing that's true? Don't you think positive reviews can "just happen"?
If you mean "this is an extremely positive review", then that point seems so obvious that, why bother?
And, thanks for providing a pointer to the Mac alternative.
Plenty of people did that in the other article. Didn't you read the replies?
The overwhelming majority of the replies were of the form "Why should I listen to this person disagreeing with a lawyer if he's not a lawyer?" and "Why is this article even here?" (The latter objection did make a little sense if people hadn't read the previous articles about recent tech cases involving the Fifth Amendment.) Very few cited a statement that I made that they thought I was wrong.
For the third time: Is there a specific statement that I made in that article (or some other article) that you think is incorrect?
My main statement in that article -- that Professor Duane was wrong, it can help to talk to a cop -- was backed up by the police officer featured in the video, who cited several factual examples.
Again, is there a specific statement that I've made -- quote the sentence if I you have to -- that you think is incorrect?
Your math teacher is turning in their grave. Or possibly still alive and frowning with disappointment.
You're very articulate. Your English teacher would be proud.
A math/science/engineering teacher might ask you to cite an example of a statement I made that you think is incorrect, but you can get quite far in life without pleasing those kinds of fact-oriented people.
You wouldn't need to get a conviction based on an IP address. All you'd need would be to get a warrant to arrest the computer owner and search their computer. At that point their life may as well be ruined anyway even prior to the conviction (as is probably the case with Jeffrey Feldman), and if they find incriminating evidence on your computer, you'll be convicted as well.
The protocol I'm describing, would mitigate that, since law enforcement would lack probable cause to think that you *possessed* a file on your computer, simply because your computer had passed the bytes along.
My point was that regardless of how much time it takes to properly review a paper, the total workload doesn't change if you have a smaller number of journals publishing a larger number of articles per journal, rather than a huge number of small journals. The only variables that matter are the number of incoming submissions and the number of reviewers per submission, and I was arguing you can keep those constant.
I agree, that's why I said at the end: "There should probably be multiple open-access journals (or Virtual Super-Journals) within each field, so that the competition between them keeps them honest."
They'd probably do an even better job of keeping each other honest if they did "hit jobs" on each other like I discussed in the article, if one journal ever gave its stamp of approval to something that the other journals did not think was good enough.
This is correct, but the question is how to make this scale to a large number of journals. The more journals you have, the more you run the risk that some are not following this procedure, and it's hard to audit them from the outside.
That's why I'm recommending having a smaller number of journals with a larger output and a larger number of reviewers on call, because then you have a centralized point where the procedures can be enforced.
But legitimate senders have trouble getting past spam filters too, that's why they need "deliverability services".
I call bullshit on that one. I used to work for a company with about a million customers. Spam filters were never anyones concern, the reason external partners come up for delivery is that you need mail servers tuned to handling high-volume messages like that with all the greylisting and delays and bounces.
Well, some legitimate senders have trouble getting past spam filters. Obviously not all of them do.
There are a couple of reasons my emails might be more likely to trigger spam filters than other high-volume mails. When I mail out a new match of proxy sites, I register several new domains at a time, and often they are cheap .info domains. I also mail each new site to only a subset of the list (so that if a censoring company joins the list so they can block my new sites, they'll only find out about one new site, not all of them). The act of (1) registering all new domains, (2) registering .info domains, and (3) sending slight variations of the same message to different subsets of the list, on all three counts is similar to what a lot of spammers do, so those factors might trip some spam filters.
However, I would not consider that "close to actually being a spammer". A spammer sends messages to people who haven't requested it; a non-spammer sends messages only to people who have requested it.
While I emphasized in the article that I was only sending solicited email, maybe I should have emphasized more clearly that WhatCounts, too, only does deliverability for companies that are sending solicited email. However, just because I didn't stress this, doesn't mean people have any grounds for jumping to the conclusion that they must be "spammers".
If you have trouble getting past spam filters, then I maintain the reason is most likely that you are too close to actually being a spammer. Might not be the customer side (i.e. they may all have signed up with you), but the content of your message. Thank the spammers for ruining that, instead of giving them money to teach you how to escalate the battle to the next level.
From all you describe it seems you are genuine. Nevertheless, listening to spammers is the worst thing you could've done. That's like complaining about the park being closed at night - and asking a burglar for advise.
Well you can revise my definition to remove the word "owner" and avoid semantic debates about it:
Under virtually every commonly accepted definition, you're not a spammer if you only send mail to an email address if you obtain the consent of a person who has access to that email address (as verified by them replying to a confirmation message that you send them).
As I pointed out, if you don't agree with that definition, then you could define every sender in the world as a "spammer" because you're able to join their mailing list using your work email address even if your workplace hasn't given you permission to do that.
WhatCounts does deliverability for non-spammer clients. If they were delivering messages for spammers, their sending IPs would end up blocked at most of the sites that they're trying to deliver mail to.
Perhaps people heard "deliverability services" and assumed that must be talking about spammers. But legitimate senders have trouble getting past spam filters too, that's why they need "deliverability services". Since the company I was talking about sends to verified-opt-in mailing lists, I think that negates some of the points you made based on the assumption that they were "spammers"...
I'm not sure what you meant by "re-examining my position". In my reply to your post, I said that (1) sending to confirmed-opt-in lists is not spam, (2) putting the URL of a web proxy in an email does not make it spam. Both of which I believed before writing the article.
I am sending to several times the 35,000 volume you listed -- about 400,000 people, all of whom replied to the original confirmation message that I sent them, so the list is still 100% verified-opt-in.
Do you consider all images in email (that are loaded from a remote server, as opposed to being embedded) to be "web bugs"? By that definition more than half of the newsletters I willingly subscribe to, have "web bugs".
I don't think we should dilute the definition of "spammer" -- it should be reserved for people sending unsolicited email.
Well it wasn't the provider that disabled the domains, it was the domain registrar:
http://slashdot.org/story/12/10/16/175248/zero-errors-spamhaus-flubs-causing-domain-deletions
Of course I had a "beef" with them too, but Spamhaus was recklessly making false statements about us, in a manner that they knew would do very direct damage to the targets of those statements, so I think that "matters".
Well, it would be the death knell of any mailing list aimed at average-skill users, but besides that, PGP wouldn't actually solve the problem.
Someone can still join the list, using their PGP key, decrypt the messages that I send out, and take the domain and blacklist it as a "spam" site. Whether Spamhaus joined our list themselves, or whether a third party joined our list and reported one of our domains to Spamhaus, in either case PGP wouldn't have helped.
I said in the article that most of the spam filtering problems come from AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, and Gmail. That can't be caused by people switching jobs.
I'm familiar with the blacklist practice of "punishing the whole network" and the blacklisters' rationale for it, however it doesn't make any sense to assume that that's what happened here, for a number of reasons:
1) the domains that got deleted were hosted at multiple different providers, and it's unlikely that all of those different providers would have had all of the subsections of their network randomly blacklisted at the moment I happened to register my domains 2) no other domains hosted at those networks, were blacklisted 3) as soon as I submitted the domains in a form on Spamhaus's website, the form said, "OK, these domains have been un-blacklisted". Which I was happy about, of course, but they wouldn't have done that if they had had a good reason for blacklisting them in the first place.
As I said, any confusion could have been avoided if Spamhaus had just said why the domains got blacklisted, and owned up to the error and made changes to avoid similar screw-ups in the future.
I was never a fan of MAPS, but at least when you looked up an IP address on their site and they said it was blacklisted, they said why (and if you were blacklisted because you shared your network with the actual guilty party, the lookup form would tell you who that guilty party was and show you the evidence that they had been spamming)
If you're sending mail only to people who have signed up to receive your mails and replied to the confirmation message, then you're not a spammer, are you?
That depends on if they have the unconditional authority to make those decisions about that email address.
Not under any commonly accepted definition of "spam".
Under virtually every commonly accepted definition, you're not a spammer if you receive the email owner's consent to send them mail (as verified by them replying to a confirmation message that was sent only to them). It's not your responsibility to determine whether the email address owner had the "right" to make decisions about that email address.
Otherwise, every email sender in the world could be branded a "spammer", if someone happened to subscribe to their list using an email address where someone else had the authority to make decisions about that email address, and didn't want that person joining any lists.
Oops, I forgot to log in before. Now:
You're very articulate. Is there a statement in the article you think is incorrect?
Or post your spam on /. as an "article". FTspammyA:
Just from that sentence, there is no way I would ever do business with them.
Email "deliverability" does not necessarily refer to spammers. As long as legitimate senders are getting blocked too, there's every reason for them to need "deliverability" services to help avoid being blocked by spam filters.
If you're sending mail only to people who have signed up to receive your mails and replied to the confirmation message, then you're not a spammer, are you?
Saying "open proxies properly belong on blocklists", you might be confusing open SMTP relays (where most mail originating from them is spam, which is why they're blacklisted) with open web proxies (where most emails containing the name of the proxy site, are not spam).
You realize that the guy who said our mails were blacklisted because some spammer had borrowed our proxy site and used it in their own spams, was just guessing. And there was no reason to think that guess was correct, since if a spammer wanted to do that, they would just use one of many web proxies already out there, instead of signing up to get the new ones.