I think you guys probably could have come up with a better headline than
Lawmakers Want a Space Shuttle In New York City
A headline that vague leaves wide open to the reader what the lawmakers want to do with the shuttle. Are they asking for a working shuttle, or a decommissioned one? Do they want a launch pad for the next generation fo billionaires, or do they want a museum? Do they want the current shuttle, or do they actually want the vehicle that will replace it?
It's too bad slashdot doesn't employ anyone with journalism or editing experience, they would have caught that and come up with a more meaningful headline.
If they set it up as well as they did the Concorde on the Pier next to the Intrepid. I was in NYC this summer and the Intrepid was one of the top highlights of the trip for me. I'll never get to fly on a Concorde - or a Space Shuttle - but at the Intrepid I could walk into and through one. While I couldn't sit in the all-first-class seating, I could at least see the inside in person. For me, that alone was worth the cost of admission. And if I could walk through a Space Shuttle, and see the controls and the loading bay, that would be worth twice that to me.
The two are in the top echelon of most important aircraft of the latter half of the 20th century. I think it should be a no-brainer to put them in the same museum.
And for those who haven't been there yet - the Concorde does not sit on the deck of the Intrepid, it is on the Pier next to it. I don't know if there is room on the Pier for a Space Shuttle, but I suspect the staff there would find room for something of that importance.
The US has had a similar policy for some time. If your research is funded by the NIH (the largest funding source for life science research) you are required to make your published works available freely. Even if you publish in a high-impact expensive journal, your published works must be available freely through the NIH.
Downtime due to all the virus, or the downtime and slowdowns caused by the virus scanners.
Quite possibly the latter. I know of one system at my work that for some stupid reason is set to do a full virus scan of the entire hard drive everytime it reboots (regardless of how long it has been since it last rebooted). And the virus scan itself is so CPU/RAM intensive that the system is pretty well unusable while scanning - hence the system is unusable for a solid 10 minutes after rebooting.
Oh, and to make it more interesting, the virus scanner won't start until someone logs in. So you have to reboot, then log in, then go get coffee. If you're lucky, the system will be usable by the time you're back.
* Don't log into your PC as administrator unless you absolutely need to. Most Windows viruses need administrator privilege to install and run. If you aren't running as administrator, most viruses won't be able to do anything.
I saw that Windows XP boxes all around me were stuck in reboot loops. Someone asked me about as "svchost.exe" virus that their system was "identifying" at boot (or later if it was up for a while). I compared their "svchost.exe" to the same on a system that wasn't running McAffee and saw they were the same date and size. I had one important system running XP that was stuck in the same reboot loop; I rebooted into safe mode and moved McAffee out of the way (so it couldn't start itself up on boot) and life was back to normal.
Apparently the problem has since been "resolved" at the enterprise level. I presume it involves new virus definitions, but I'm not sure of that. With the exception of a couple of PC's connected to instruments that are critical to my research everything I use is in Linux, IRIX, or OS X.
First, your assertion of "they won't work" is false. Groups have managed to disconnect botnets from their controllers during spam floods, and that does effectively stop spam from being sent. It is far more effective than any filter could ever hope to be at reducing spam-driven network traffic. And when people start pooling their resources to take the proper steps to remove spammers from their profit motives, we will see the real difference.
Except that it has been shown to be irrelevant on a long-term basis; it's no less of a cat-and-mouse game than filtering.
That is untrue. When you stop a botnet from sending spam, you making spamming slightly more expensive for the spammer. And when you take more direct proactive economic steps against spam you will do even more to hurt the spammer's bottom line. The only way to get spammers to stop sending spam is to drive them out economically, because the only reason they do it is to make money.
So no, going after the botnets - and eventually the profit motive itself - is not a cat-and-mouse game. Going for the profit motive itself is the only way that you will drive spammers into a new business. At the end of the day, spammers care only about how much spam they send, not how much gets through. Similarly at the end of the day, someone has to pay for the traffic of all the spam that is sent, regardless of how it is handled in the end. So if you want to make a meaningful difference in the spam problem you need to go after what drives it, rather than just escalating the filtering arms race.
Maybe it is time to start thinking about how to actually address the spamming problem now, instead of just dealing with the spam itself.
People are not *just* dealing with spam. Many have come up with proposed solutions. Since none has worked until now, filtering is indispensable.
Your conclusion can only be supported if you ignore the botnets that have already been disabled and the spam that was not sent as a result.
If you oppose proactive solutions to spam, that is your own prerogative. Just be aware that filtering will never actually solve the problem, and in the end only ends up directing more of the costs of spam to the consumer directly. Any alternate claim of the benefits of filtering are disingenuous at best or outright lies at worst.
Maybe it is time to start thinking about how to actually address the spamming problem now, instead of just dealing with the spam itself.
Except that many did, and those solutions were dismissed because they won't work.
First, your assertion of "they won't work" is false. Groups have managed to disconnect botnets from their controllers during spam floods, and that does effectively stop spam from being sent. It is far more effective than any filter could ever hope to be at reducing spam-driven network traffic. And when people start pooling their resources to take the proper steps to remove spammers from their profit motives, we will see the real difference.
And second, are you actually trying to either defend scaling up filters (in an endless arms race) until the end of time, or are you suggesting instead to do nothing at all (which is equally as useful)?
If people want to actually stop spam, they can't just keep updating filters. Because sticking to filters only increases the cost of spam for everyone.
Can your filters respond to an avalanche of spam from an increasing number of throw-away email accounts when it is relayed by legitimate email servers? Can your filters handle spam email that changes body, subject, header, relay, and source address? How much time are you putting into these filtering configurations to do that?
Maybe it is time to start thinking about how to actually address the spamming problem now, instead of just dealing with the spam itself. Your filters aren't going to help you forever...
I use Perl. It's more than friendly enough for me when I want to do work on a computer. If I'm really feeling enthusiastic I'll even add something to tell me the progress of the script rather than running it all in the background.
In the US, well, nothing would surprise me. Labour laws seem incredibly weak from the employee side.
You are correct on that observation. Over the past 30 years (plus change) the US has veered increasingly conservative in all practices that can in any way be remotely tied to a dollar (which is pretty well everything). This means that the labor unions have lost most of the membership - and power - that they enjoyed decades ago. You may have heard that Toyota recently closed their only UAW-staffed vehicle assembly plant in this country, in spite of its stellar performance.
We have been fed BS about "labor=communism" for so long that a staggering number of people here believe it and vote on it. Notice that the "health care reform bill" that recently passed did not fix any of the major problems and people are screaming bloody apocalyptic murder.
So yes, in a nutshell, worker's rights just have a tendency to get in the way of profit. And nowadays it is considered "un-American" to do such a thing, so most worker's rights have gone out the window.
That was one of many questions left unanswered at the time. And if you look at the image closer, you'll see that the zapper isn't only black, but it was made to look especially similar to the actual gun that the idiot left loaded and ready to fire within easy reach of the toddler. Hence the idiot went out of his way to get that particular zapper... perhaps a very, very, far ways out of his way.
That said, young children are naturally curious, and will generally try to put just about everything they can reach into their mouths. The parents are 100% the cause of the death of the toddler, not the Wii, the zapper, or even the loaded gun itself. The gun owner demonstrated an appalling lack of concern for gun - and toddler - safety, and now that young child is dead because of his utterly recklessness. The article as posted here did the same thing the parents did - tried to blame it on the Wii. I mention it here because those atrociously stupid parents will now probably try to sue this company as well.
Like all DARPA projects Transformer TX is unlikely to succeed at all
Yeah, because that bullshit with networking computers - now that was a failure! I don't know why the government ever invested in such a worthless idea... And with a track record like that I don't think I want DARPA working on anything of any importance, ever again.
If anyone is seeking compensation for use of the "Guru Meditation Error" they might want to consider going after slashdot as well; I see Guru Meditation Errors on slashdot at least 5-10 times a week...
ME: Instead of each machine scanning the same message, only a few machines that get it first scan it
YOU: Which still requires that message to be distributed to several different servers. How does this not generate additional network traffic?
But I said just two sentences later
The hashes do increase network traffic a little, but not nearly as much as the reduced spam effect decreases traffic.
But you're asking for multiple systems to examine the same message though. Previously each message was examined by only one system. I understand that you want to implement a hash-based solution to remember what messages are declared spam - after the messages are analyzed.
However, you still need the messages to get through to your "analysis" servers (each message to multiple servers) before it becomes an entry in the hash. And then, the systems that normally receive email for clients will receive the email and check against the hash for what to declare as spam.
Hence, unless you are asking people to depend on your "analysis" servers for upstream spam-filtering, you haven't done anything to reduce network traffic. Email isn't ordinarily sent in parts (aside from the network packets themselves), so the entire message will be received by the end system before it is analyzed against the hash to be declared as spam.
You close asking me to read your posting history
It's out there in the open. You can see that I have consistently argued against the utility of spam filtering, and that the solution is elsewhere. I brought that up only to point out that I have not been making this as a "new argument" - I called out spam filtering as futile somewhere over 2 years ago.
And ultimately, all you are doing is making a bigger spam filter. A distributed spam filter, but still just a filter.
but you're not even responding to this one with integrity
I challenge your definition of integrity. I responded to your idea by pointing out the flaws in it. You are proposing nothing more than an enormous spam filter for people to look to. Your idea doesn't do anything to reduce spam-driven network traffic, unless people agree to allow your analysis servers to handle, process, and reject all of their email.
This discussion looks like the common Web spiral where you're not interested in a working system, but in promoting your own. If your next post doesn't legitimately engage the tech and legal issues you're responding to, I won't be continuing in it.
I addressed both the legal and the tech issues. I pointed out yet again that the US cannot just walk into another country without permission and pursue an arrest warrant; there are international laws that specifically prohibit that (wars have been started over that kind of behavior).
I also discussed the tech issues, and the fact that your plan either requires people to entrust all of their email to your systems - for handling, processing, and filtering - or else your system will increase network traffic while not reducing spam traffic at all.
Goodbye.
I apologize for hurting your feelings by poiting out the flaws in your system. I expected that someone on slashdot would be mature enough to handle criticism of their ideas without getting angry in the way you have. It appears you have disproven that idea as well.
They need something for systems that have been screwed up by their own users. Perhaps a patch that prevents administrator users from connecting to websites that use bad javascript?
So the ALA has a pretty valid point that E-cigs are still bad, even if they are less bad.
So we should ban E-Cigs, but not the "more" bad regular kind?
I suspect it is, at least in part, a case of them picking their battles. It is easier to stop a new product than kill an existing one; and if their interest is in lung health they should take action against things that are bad for lung health. They likely realize that there is no chance in hell of pulling off a full bad on regular cigarettes - at least not with a pro-business government - so they might as well put energy into something they might be able to get some traction on.
While they may be less bad than traditional smoked tobacco, they still aren't good for your lungs. Our lungs are, after all, living tissue that is tasked with gas exchange. That is a fairly complicated job to begin with, and if you start intoducting airborne solids into the mixture you are only making the job that much more difficult.
So while the rest of the toxic crap that is added to cigarettes (much of it to keep them burning) might not be present, the inhaled mixture itself isn't good for your lungs regardless. So the ALA has a pretty valid point that E-cigs are still bad, even if they are less bad.
Instead of each machine scanning the same message, only a few machines that get it first scan it
Which still requires that message to be distributed to several different servers. How does this not generate additional network traffic?
They generate a hash and distribute it to the other machines receiving messages. Those machines need only generate a hash of incoming messages, which is not as intensive as scanning it for spam (like bayesian algorithms).
So does your hash then match the entire message, or some part of the header instead?
The hashes do increase network traffic a little, but not nearly as much as the reduced spam effect decreases traffic.
So are you then proposing that an upstream server filter the messages before they get to their second-to-final destination (as in, some sort of "post office" intermediate)? Otherwise the email still needs to get to that last server (generally prior to the user's system) to be filtered.
The hash is probably something like 16 or 32 bytes, while the average spam is hundreds or thousands of bytes, in each message.
What part of the email are you planning to use to identify it? And how long do you expect it will take for spammers to find a way around it?
Since unidentified spam usually means multiple messages (exact or similar), the prevented spam traffic is thousands of times bigger than the hash traffic that prevents it.
Again that only works if you trust an upstream mail relay to filter your email.
Besides, the hash traffic is nothing compared to the increasing video streaming traffic we're carrying, and all the other traffic (including legit email). And the whitelisting I described would remove even more traffic and processing.
So who upstream do you trust with that responsibility, why should others trust them, and how much will you be paying them for their services?
So it's really negligible
Not the way you described it, it isn't.
As for the FBI and other US police, they do indeed have the jurisdiction
I don't know where you got that information from. Police and law enforcement officials do not have jurisdiction outside of their home country unless it is specifically granted to them.
If you know of other countries who have ever specifically granted US law enforcement jurisdiction in their countries for the purpose of fighting spam, please share that information.
They routinely bust international crime rings with some operations in the US. They routinely operate in foreign countries at the foreign countries' request, often on crimes with no US activity
They do that in cooperation with law enforcement in those other countries. There are international laws against doing such things without.
And when there is a jurisdictional boundary, there is Interpol and many other intercop infrastructures.
Interpol has almost no interest in fighting spam, they have slightly larger issues to deal with presently.
So it looks like you did read my post
That is what I told you already...
What you don't understand is how the technology or the police work.
No, I understand it fine. You don't seem to be aware of the problems with either in light of your proposal.
you're not interested in a working system
Your "working system" is nothing more than an expansion on existing technologies. It isn't really new, its just bigger - to say nothing of the privacy implications.
but in promoting your own
I have said for a long time that filtering will never stop spam. I invite you to read through my old posts and journal articles to see how long I've been saying this.
No, the network is just interconnecting the resources used by existing antispam applications. Which already scan entire mail queues - however much work and intrusion that might be.
Which would generate more network traffic than letting the last mail host scan it in whatever way it is configured to do so. Simultaneously you would be increasing the work load of each system that scans, as it would be scanning more mail than it did before.
I'm talking about making the existing resources vastly more efficient by eliminating the redundancy of separate recipients each scanning the same message to determine whether it's spam. And closing the percentage of missed spam by allowing multiple different scanners to spot it their way.
Those sound like two different aims there. You want to work at "eliminating the redundancy" while also "allowing multiple different scanners to spot it their way". I don't see how you can do both.
And indeed I also explicitly specified the FBI and other cops should go after the root of the problem: spammers.
Sorry, wrong answer. The FBI and other US police forces don't have the jurisdiction to go after the spammers responsible for most spam. And indeed those spammers mostly reside in countries that either don't care about spam, or are actively working to support the spammers for various reasons.
The answer to stopping spam is in the money. Stop spending money trying to fight the spam you've already received. Start putting money and time into preventing money from going to the spammers instead. If they aren't getting paid, they won't send spam.
So it looks like you didn't understand my post at all. Try reading it again.
It appears I understood your post just fine. It also appears you didn't understand the problems with the plan.
Slashdot Mirror
Lawmakers Want a Space Shuttle In New York City
A headline that vague leaves wide open to the reader what the lawmakers want to do with the shuttle. Are they asking for a working shuttle, or a decommissioned one? Do they want a launch pad for the next generation fo billionaires, or do they want a museum? Do they want the current shuttle, or do they actually want the vehicle that will replace it?
It's too bad slashdot doesn't employ anyone with journalism or editing experience, they would have caught that and come up with a more meaningful headline.
If they set it up as well as they did the Concorde on the Pier next to the Intrepid. I was in NYC this summer and the Intrepid was one of the top highlights of the trip for me. I'll never get to fly on a Concorde - or a Space Shuttle - but at the Intrepid I could walk into and through one. While I couldn't sit in the all-first-class seating, I could at least see the inside in person. For me, that alone was worth the cost of admission. And if I could walk through a Space Shuttle, and see the controls and the loading bay, that would be worth twice that to me.
The two are in the top echelon of most important aircraft of the latter half of the 20th century. I think it should be a no-brainer to put them in the same museum.
And for those who haven't been there yet - the Concorde does not sit on the deck of the Intrepid, it is on the Pier next to it. I don't know if there is room on the Pier for a Space Shuttle, but I suspect the staff there would find room for something of that importance.
does anyone know if the NSF has similar requirements?
I don't know if NSF does, but NIH definitely does.
The US has had a similar policy for some time. If your research is funded by the NIH (the largest funding source for life science research) you are required to make your published works available freely. Even if you publish in a high-impact expensive journal, your published works must be available freely through the NIH.
Downtime due to all the virus, or the downtime and slowdowns caused by the virus scanners.
Quite possibly the latter. I know of one system at my work that for some stupid reason is set to do a full virus scan of the entire hard drive everytime it reboots (regardless of how long it has been since it last rebooted). And the virus scan itself is so CPU/RAM intensive that the system is pretty well unusable while scanning - hence the system is unusable for a solid 10 minutes after rebooting.
Oh, and to make it more interesting, the virus scanner won't start until someone logs in. So you have to reboot, then log in, then go get coffee. If you're lucky, the system will be usable by the time you're back.
And yes, that's McAffee enterprise edition.
* Don't log into your PC as administrator unless you absolutely need to. Most Windows viruses need administrator privilege to install and run. If you aren't running as administrator, most viruses won't be able to do anything.
I saw that Windows XP boxes all around me were stuck in reboot loops. Someone asked me about as "svchost.exe" virus that their system was "identifying" at boot (or later if it was up for a while). I compared their "svchost.exe" to the same on a system that wasn't running McAffee and saw they were the same date and size. I had one important system running XP that was stuck in the same reboot loop; I rebooted into safe mode and moved McAffee out of the way (so it couldn't start itself up on boot) and life was back to normal.
Apparently the problem has since been "resolved" at the enterprise level. I presume it involves new virus definitions, but I'm not sure of that. With the exception of a couple of PC's connected to instruments that are critical to my research everything I use is in Linux, IRIX, or OS X.
First, your assertion of "they won't work" is false. Groups have managed to disconnect botnets from their controllers during spam floods, and that does effectively stop spam from being sent. It is far more effective than any filter could ever hope to be at reducing spam-driven network traffic. And when people start pooling their resources to take the proper steps to remove spammers from their profit motives, we will see the real difference.
Except that it has been shown to be irrelevant on a long-term basis; it's no less of a cat-and-mouse game than filtering.
That is untrue. When you stop a botnet from sending spam, you making spamming slightly more expensive for the spammer. And when you take more direct proactive economic steps against spam you will do even more to hurt the spammer's bottom line. The only way to get spammers to stop sending spam is to drive them out economically, because the only reason they do it is to make money.
So no, going after the botnets - and eventually the profit motive itself - is not a cat-and-mouse game. Going for the profit motive itself is the only way that you will drive spammers into a new business. At the end of the day, spammers care only about how much spam they send, not how much gets through. Similarly at the end of the day, someone has to pay for the traffic of all the spam that is sent, regardless of how it is handled in the end. So if you want to make a meaningful difference in the spam problem you need to go after what drives it, rather than just escalating the filtering arms race.
Maybe it is time to start thinking about how to actually address the spamming problem now, instead of just dealing with the spam itself.
People are not *just* dealing with spam. Many have come up with proposed solutions. Since none has worked until now, filtering is indispensable.
Your conclusion can only be supported if you ignore the botnets that have already been disabled and the spam that was not sent as a result.
If you oppose proactive solutions to spam, that is your own prerogative. Just be aware that filtering will never actually solve the problem, and in the end only ends up directing more of the costs of spam to the consumer directly. Any alternate claim of the benefits of filtering are disingenuous at best or outright lies at worst.
Maybe it is time to start thinking about how to actually address the spamming problem now, instead of just dealing with the spam itself.
Except that many did, and those solutions were dismissed because they won't work.
First, your assertion of "they won't work" is false. Groups have managed to disconnect botnets from their controllers during spam floods, and that does effectively stop spam from being sent. It is far more effective than any filter could ever hope to be at reducing spam-driven network traffic. And when people start pooling their resources to take the proper steps to remove spammers from their profit motives, we will see the real difference.
And second, are you actually trying to either defend scaling up filters (in an endless arms race) until the end of time, or are you suggesting instead to do nothing at all (which is equally as useful)?
If people want to actually stop spam, they can't just keep updating filters. Because sticking to filters only increases the cost of spam for everyone.
Can your filters respond to an avalanche of spam from an increasing number of throw-away email accounts when it is relayed by legitimate email servers? Can your filters handle spam email that changes body, subject, header, relay, and source address? How much time are you putting into these filtering configurations to do that?
Maybe it is time to start thinking about how to actually address the spamming problem now, instead of just dealing with the spam itself. Your filters aren't going to help you forever...
I use Perl. It's more than friendly enough for me when I want to do work on a computer. If I'm really feeling enthusiastic I'll even add something to tell me the progress of the script rather than running it all in the background.
In the US, well, nothing would surprise me. Labour laws seem incredibly weak from the employee side.
You are correct on that observation. Over the past 30 years (plus change) the US has veered increasingly conservative in all practices that can in any way be remotely tied to a dollar (which is pretty well everything). This means that the labor unions have lost most of the membership - and power - that they enjoyed decades ago. You may have heard that Toyota recently closed their only UAW-staffed vehicle assembly plant in this country, in spite of its stellar performance.
We have been fed BS about "labor=communism" for so long that a staggering number of people here believe it and vote on it. Notice that the "health care reform bill" that recently passed did not fix any of the major problems and people are screaming bloody apocalyptic murder.
So yes, in a nutshell, worker's rights just have a tendency to get in the way of profit. And nowadays it is considered "un-American" to do such a thing, so most worker's rights have gone out the window.
That was one of many questions left unanswered at the time. And if you look at the image closer, you'll see that the zapper isn't only black, but it was made to look especially similar to the actual gun that the idiot left loaded and ready to fire within easy reach of the toddler. Hence the idiot went out of his way to get that particular zapper ... perhaps a very, very, far ways out of his way.
That said, young children are naturally curious, and will generally try to put just about everything they can reach into their mouths. The parents are 100% the cause of the death of the toddler, not the Wii, the zapper, or even the loaded gun itself. The gun owner demonstrated an appalling lack of concern for gun - and toddler - safety, and now that young child is dead because of his utterly recklessness. The article as posted here did the same thing the parents did - tried to blame it on the Wii. I mention it here because those atrociously stupid parents will now probably try to sue this company as well.
Like all DARPA projects Transformer TX is unlikely to succeed at all
Yeah, because that bullshit with networking computers - now that was a failure! I don't know why the government ever invested in such a worthless idea... And with a track record like that I don't think I want DARPA working on anything of any importance, ever again.
Hmm, perhaps the careless parents who killed their toddler with atrocious gun safety habits will sue the owners of the wii zapper patent and this other company as well.
The Amiga's "Guru Meditation Error"
If anyone is seeking compensation for use of the "Guru Meditation Error" they might want to consider going after slashdot as well; I see Guru Meditation Errors on slashdot at least 5-10 times a week...
ME: Instead of each machine scanning the same message, only a few machines that get it first scan it
YOU: Which still requires that message to be distributed to several different servers. How does this not generate additional network traffic?
But I said just two sentences later The hashes do increase network traffic a little, but not nearly as much as the reduced spam effect decreases traffic.
But you're asking for multiple systems to examine the same message though. Previously each message was examined by only one system. I understand that you want to implement a hash-based solution to remember what messages are declared spam - after the messages are analyzed.
However, you still need the messages to get through to your "analysis" servers (each message to multiple servers) before it becomes an entry in the hash. And then, the systems that normally receive email for clients will receive the email and check against the hash for what to declare as spam.
Hence, unless you are asking people to depend on your "analysis" servers for upstream spam-filtering, you haven't done anything to reduce network traffic. Email isn't ordinarily sent in parts (aside from the network packets themselves), so the entire message will be received by the end system before it is analyzed against the hash to be declared as spam.
You close asking me to read your posting history
It's out there in the open. You can see that I have consistently argued against the utility of spam filtering, and that the solution is elsewhere. I brought that up only to point out that I have not been making this as a "new argument" - I called out spam filtering as futile somewhere over 2 years ago.
And ultimately, all you are doing is making a bigger spam filter. A distributed spam filter, but still just a filter.
but you're not even responding to this one with integrity
I challenge your definition of integrity. I responded to your idea by pointing out the flaws in it. You are proposing nothing more than an enormous spam filter for people to look to. Your idea doesn't do anything to reduce spam-driven network traffic, unless people agree to allow your analysis servers to handle, process, and reject all of their email.
This discussion looks like the common Web spiral where you're not interested in a working system, but in promoting your own. If your next post doesn't legitimately engage the tech and legal issues you're responding to, I won't be continuing in it.
I addressed both the legal and the tech issues. I pointed out yet again that the US cannot just walk into another country without permission and pursue an arrest warrant; there are international laws that specifically prohibit that (wars have been started over that kind of behavior).
I also discussed the tech issues, and the fact that your plan either requires people to entrust all of their email to your systems - for handling, processing, and filtering - or else your system will increase network traffic while not reducing spam traffic at all.
Goodbye.
I apologize for hurting your feelings by poiting out the flaws in your system. I expected that someone on slashdot would be mature enough to handle criticism of their ideas without getting angry in the way you have. It appears you have disproven that idea as well.
(X) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(X) Jurisdictional problems
(X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
... now I am definitely buying it for her this year!
They need something for systems that have been screwed up by their own users. Perhaps a patch that prevents administrator users from connecting to websites that use bad javascript?
So the ALA has a pretty valid point that E-cigs are still bad, even if they are less bad.
So we should ban E-Cigs, but not the "more" bad regular kind?
I suspect it is, at least in part, a case of them picking their battles. It is easier to stop a new product than kill an existing one; and if their interest is in lung health they should take action against things that are bad for lung health. They likely realize that there is no chance in hell of pulling off a full bad on regular cigarettes - at least not with a pro-business government - so they might as well put energy into something they might be able to get some traction on.
Gesundheit!
While they may be less bad than traditional smoked tobacco, they still aren't good for your lungs. Our lungs are, after all, living tissue that is tasked with gas exchange. That is a fairly complicated job to begin with, and if you start intoducting airborne solids into the mixture you are only making the job that much more difficult.
So while the rest of the toxic crap that is added to cigarettes (much of it to keep them burning) might not be present, the inhaled mixture itself isn't good for your lungs regardless. So the ALA has a pretty valid point that E-cigs are still bad, even if they are less bad.
Instead of each machine scanning the same message, only a few machines that get it first scan it
Which still requires that message to be distributed to several different servers. How does this not generate additional network traffic?
They generate a hash and distribute it to the other machines receiving messages. Those machines need only generate a hash of incoming messages, which is not as intensive as scanning it for spam (like bayesian algorithms).
So does your hash then match the entire message, or some part of the header instead?
The hashes do increase network traffic a little, but not nearly as much as the reduced spam effect decreases traffic.
So are you then proposing that an upstream server filter the messages before they get to their second-to-final destination (as in, some sort of "post office" intermediate)? Otherwise the email still needs to get to that last server (generally prior to the user's system) to be filtered.
The hash is probably something like 16 or 32 bytes, while the average spam is hundreds or thousands of bytes, in each message.
What part of the email are you planning to use to identify it? And how long do you expect it will take for spammers to find a way around it?
Since unidentified spam usually means multiple messages (exact or similar), the prevented spam traffic is thousands of times bigger than the hash traffic that prevents it.
Again that only works if you trust an upstream mail relay to filter your email.
Besides, the hash traffic is nothing compared to the increasing video streaming traffic we're carrying, and all the other traffic (including legit email). And the whitelisting I described would remove even more traffic and processing.
So who upstream do you trust with that responsibility, why should others trust them, and how much will you be paying them for their services?
So it's really negligible
Not the way you described it, it isn't.
As for the FBI and other US police, they do indeed have the jurisdiction
I don't know where you got that information from. Police and law enforcement officials do not have jurisdiction outside of their home country unless it is specifically granted to them.
If you know of other countries who have ever specifically granted US law enforcement jurisdiction in their countries for the purpose of fighting spam, please share that information.
They routinely bust international crime rings with some operations in the US. They routinely operate in foreign countries at the foreign countries' request, often on crimes with no US activity
They do that in cooperation with law enforcement in those other countries. There are international laws against doing such things without.
And when there is a jurisdictional boundary, there is Interpol and many other intercop infrastructures.
Interpol has almost no interest in fighting spam, they have slightly larger issues to deal with presently.
So it looks like you did read my post
That is what I told you already...
What you don't understand is how the technology or the police work.
No, I understand it fine. You don't seem to be aware of the problems with either in light of your proposal.
you're not interested in a working system
Your "working system" is nothing more than an expansion on existing technologies. It isn't really new, its just bigger - to say nothing of the privacy implications.
but in promoting your own
I have said for a long time that filtering will never stop spam. I invite you to read through my old posts and journal articles to see how long I've been saying this.
No, the network is just interconnecting the resources used by existing antispam applications. Which already scan entire mail queues - however much work and intrusion that might be.
Which would generate more network traffic than letting the last mail host scan it in whatever way it is configured to do so. Simultaneously you would be increasing the work load of each system that scans, as it would be scanning more mail than it did before.
I'm talking about making the existing resources vastly more efficient by eliminating the redundancy of separate recipients each scanning the same message to determine whether it's spam. And closing the percentage of missed spam by allowing multiple different scanners to spot it their way.
Those sound like two different aims there. You want to work at "eliminating the redundancy" while also "allowing multiple different scanners to spot it their way". I don't see how you can do both.
And indeed I also explicitly specified the FBI and other cops should go after the root of the problem: spammers.
Sorry, wrong answer. The FBI and other US police forces don't have the jurisdiction to go after the spammers responsible for most spam. And indeed those spammers mostly reside in countries that either don't care about spam, or are actively working to support the spammers for various reasons.
The answer to stopping spam is in the money. Stop spending money trying to fight the spam you've already received. Start putting money and time into preventing money from going to the spammers instead. If they aren't getting paid, they won't send spam.
So it looks like you didn't understand my post at all. Try reading it again.
It appears I understood your post just fine. It also appears you didn't understand the problems with the plan.