I have not actually used DSPAM, but have just read the specs.
Yawn. Yet another, albeit well designed, content-based filter. While content-based filters are a valuable tool, let's not forget that the spam problem is one of anti-social behavior and consent and has nothing to do with content. Using content as a factor in deciding what is spam or not spam will always be flawed. Even if you tweak your favorite filter from 99% to 99.9%, the spammers can just up the ante by sending more. Scaling up costs them little on an individual basis. It saddens me to see really brilliant people put great amounts of work into a project whose underlying premise is flawed.
Concords were only allowed to fly in certain areas because of the sound issue, so indeed the sound is a problem.
It was a problem, but is akin to worrying that your latest sports car is too noisy to carpool the neighborhood kids to school. Who gives a flying ****? You'd have to make 8 trips instead of 1 and at 12 miles per gallon fuel consumption. No, the noise was the lowest on a long list of problems.
Only a niche market wants fast. The general populace would much prefer cheap.
Been there, done that. Of course, whether it's actually on at any given moment is another story. If he actually wanted to pay me for the time I'm on-call, well, maybe it that darn reception would get better.
Its called FREE SPEECH !! I'm glad that they allow their hosting to be used by anything the customer wants.
I think the real issue is that the customer was spamming, or at least probing for vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, this person making the argument is anti-porn as well as anti-spam. When such people include "it was porn too!" in their argument they open themselves up to the free-speech-at-all-costs crowd. But, they're too stupid to realize this and keep using the argument anyway.
Being a common carrier means that you are not responsible for other people's content.
ISPs are not common carriers. The last time I checked, they were not anxious to become common carriers either. I think your definition of what it means to be a common carrier could be more specific. It's not the panacea you seem to think it is.
I know the Ashcroft-obsessed crowd will drown out this message, but I will say it anyway.
foo.net has, for the longest time, been protecting carders. They've been told so, repeatedly, by the anti-spam community and weaseled. My suspicion at this point is that either they are actively involved and/or some of their members are involved. FBI methods aside, foo.net isn't the innocent-victim they would have you believe.
Could this be a sign of the beginning of the end of spam?
No, because spam isn't an authentication issue. It's a permission and private property rights issue, which is not going to be solved by a purely technical approach.
Does anyone in IT even use these boards to look for a job?
I think this is the wrong question to ask. More appropriate would be, "does any serious company use these boards to hire?" My experience is that most companies go with headhunting firms they can have an ongoing relationship with. HR departments love the synergy.
Or you can tell your email provider to block them for you. Then it is never delivered.
Not true. The Subject: header is part of the DATA segment, same as the body of the email. By the time your email provider can filter on "adv:", it's too late, the spammer has sent the whole thing and has wasted that bandwith. So now, instead, you get to distribute the cost of delivery of all your spam, plus the spam of all users at $YOURISP, among all users at $YOURISP.
Please know the technology before making statements like that.
Spamming would stop practically overnight if the entire Internet-using population simply failed to respond to ANY of the offers contained in spam
Statistically unrealistic. A spammer merely needs to find one sucker in 1 million to make a profit. (Cost shifting his advertising costs onto the recipients while he does so.) You, however, must contact, convince, and educate all 1 million of those people to stop him. The numbers just don't add up.
I agree, though, that private-right-of-action is the only legislative solution that will have any chance of success.
Okay, accepting that everyone has a right to try to make a living, but the thing that irritates me most about spam is that I'll get the same email 6 times in one day to the same address!
Get past the issue of "content that offends me" and start thinking of it in terms of property rights and permission to use property. The content worriers are the ones who get us into first amendment trouble every time a bill is being drawn up.
Just put "adv:" in the subject so I don't have to look at it if I don't want to.
Sigh. Sometimes I get so surprised at the technical naievete of Slashdot readers.
By the time you get the chance to filter on "adv:" you've already paid for the delivery. Now, you're going to pay slightly more (in cpu cycles) to filter it.
If spam largely is fraudulent (direct ripoff) or advertising fraudulent products (real product, doesn't work), or even criminal (selling drugs illegally), why don't we ever hear about prosecutions for this?
Because when if one relies on the government for enforcement, it only becomes worth their time if it involves XXX dollars. The only legislative solution that will have any impact at all is one that incorporates a private-right-of-action. After all, it's the consumers they're stealing from, they should get that money back for enforcement duties. Of course, such private-right-of-action scares the bejeezus out of mainstream companies who are skirting the fine line between spamming and proper opt-in.
Not if the robots.txt file prevents you from accessing that data, which it does.
The robots.txt file prevents nothing. It's merely a request that the spider "not go here." It's not a lock on the door. It's a sign that says, "please do not enter my house."
They hired a spamhaus but they were sending the message to their own mailing list of folk who subscribed on the web page.
If that were true then, I agree, it wouldn't have been a problem. Unfortunately, that is not true. Where they got the names cannot be verified without the Dean campaign's cooperation, but people got it who had not subscribed for it on the webpage.
Ah, this clears it up. They bought a list, making the all-too-common mistake of thinking that permission can be sold. Such naivete from a campaign that touts itself as an internet grassroots breakthrough is disappointing. I had nothing against Dean, and stood a good chance of voting for him due to his "I'm internet savy" PR blitz, but this ignorance destroyed all possibility of that.
Ah. How soon we forget. The Dean campaign actually did hire a spam operation and sent a substantial amount before they got tracked down and called to task about it. IIRC, they then changed their story from "we didn't do it", to "we did it" while showing no remorse at having done so.
Some people buy a new technology not knowing, yet, what they expect out of it. These are the inspired thinkers to come up with new uses. They are often disappointed with proprietary systems, finding that someone else is dictating the boundaries of use differently than they, such as draconian DRM. These people feel cheated.
Perhaps it's time that computer science curriculums start teaching assembly language first.
It's more critical they actually teach computer science first, instead of programming. A new CS hire, assuming their school was worth a damn, can learn a new language. I want to know if they have the math background to understand the problems that will be handed to them and that they have the ability to self-learn.
Their intentions are great, and they do a lot of great work, but I must agree; it's press statements like these that make the general populace write them off as a organization of nutcases.
Slashdot Mirror
I have not actually used DSPAM, but have just read the specs.
Yawn. Yet another, albeit well designed, content-based filter. While content-based filters are a valuable tool, let's not forget that the spam problem is one of anti-social behavior and consent and has nothing to do with content. Using content as a factor in deciding what is spam or not spam will always be flawed. Even if you tweak your favorite filter from 99% to 99.9%, the spammers can just up the ante by sending more. Scaling up costs them little on an individual basis. It saddens me to see really brilliant people put great amounts of work into a project whose underlying premise is flawed.
https://www.donotcall.gov/FAQ/FAQConsumersNew.aspx
Q: Can I register my cell phone number?
A: Yes.
This was true when the list was first started as well.
Concords were only allowed to fly in certain areas because of the sound issue, so indeed the sound is a problem.
It was a problem, but is akin to worrying that your latest sports car is too noisy to carpool the neighborhood kids to school. Who gives a flying ****? You'd have to make 8 trips instead of 1 and at 12 miles per gallon fuel consumption. No, the noise was the lowest on a long list of problems.
Only a niche market wants fast. The general populace would much prefer cheap.
Been there, done that. Of course, whether it's actually on at any given moment is another story. If he actually wanted to pay me for the time I'm on-call, well, maybe it that darn reception would get better.
Its called FREE SPEECH !! I'm glad that they allow their hosting to be used by anything the customer wants.
I think the real issue is that the customer was spamming, or at least probing for vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, this person making the argument is anti-porn as well as anti-spam. When such people include "it was porn too!" in their argument they open themselves up to the free-speech-at-all-costs crowd. But, they're too stupid to realize this and keep using the argument anyway.
Being a common carrier means that you are not responsible for other people's content.
ISPs are not common carriers. The last time I checked, they were not anxious to become common carriers either. I think your definition of what it means to be a common carrier could be more specific. It's not the panacea you seem to think it is.
I know the Ashcroft-obsessed crowd will drown out this message, but I will say it anyway.
foo.net has, for the longest time, been protecting carders. They've been told so, repeatedly, by the anti-spam community and weaseled. My suspicion at this point is that either they are actively involved and/or some of their members are involved. FBI methods aside, foo.net isn't the innocent-victim they would have you believe.
Could this be a sign of the beginning of the end of spam?
No, because spam isn't an authentication issue. It's a permission and private property rights issue, which is not going to be solved by a purely technical approach.
Does anyone in IT even use these boards to look for a job?
I think this is the wrong question to ask. More appropriate would be, "does any serious company use these boards to hire?" My experience is that most companies go with headhunting firms they can have an ongoing relationship with. HR departments love the synergy.
Or you can tell your email provider to block them for you. Then it is never delivered.
Not true. The Subject: header is part of the DATA segment, same as the body of the email. By the time your email provider can filter on "adv:", it's too late, the spammer has sent the whole thing and has wasted that bandwith. So now, instead, you get to distribute the cost of delivery of all your spam, plus the spam of all users at $YOURISP, among all users at $YOURISP.
Please know the technology before making statements like that.
Spamming would stop practically overnight if the entire Internet-using population simply failed to respond to ANY of the offers contained in spam
Statistically unrealistic. A spammer merely needs to find one sucker in 1 million to make a profit. (Cost shifting his advertising costs onto the recipients while he does so.) You, however, must contact, convince, and educate all 1 million of those people to stop him. The numbers just don't add up.
I agree, though, that private-right-of-action is the only legislative solution that will have any chance of success.
Okay, accepting that everyone has a right to try to make a living, but the thing that irritates me most about spam is that I'll get the same email 6 times in one day to the same address!
Get past the issue of "content that offends me" and start thinking of it in terms of property rights and permission to use property. The content worriers are the ones who get us into first amendment trouble every time a bill is being drawn up.
fixing SMTP is the best way.
I agree. Please explain to us all, in detail, what is wrong with the protocol.
Spam is all about permission and proptery rights. Both are social issues. What protocol is going to verify I want email from X but not from Y?
Just put "adv:" in the subject so I don't have to look at it if I don't want to.
Sigh. Sometimes I get so surprised at the technical naievete of Slashdot readers.
By the time you get the chance to filter on "adv:" you've already paid for the delivery. Now, you're going to pay slightly more (in cpu cycles) to filter it.
The solution is to find a way to make e-mail cost money to use. It's only because e-mail is so cheep to abuse that spam is so prevalent.
If you can find a way to make this work, economically and technically, I'll use it. However it must have two features:
If spam largely is fraudulent (direct ripoff) or advertising fraudulent products (real product, doesn't work), or even criminal (selling drugs illegally), why don't we ever hear about prosecutions for this?
Because when if one relies on the government for enforcement, it only becomes worth their time if it involves XXX dollars. The only legislative solution that will have any impact at all is one that incorporates a private-right-of-action. After all, it's the consumers they're stealing from, they should get that money back for enforcement duties. Of course, such private-right-of-action scares the bejeezus out of mainstream companies who are skirting the fine line between spamming and proper opt-in.
Laws which prohibit political speech will not hold up in court.
How about laws that prohibit theft of service under the guise of political speech?
yeah, but each time I'm with friends and they surf, and they get popups, I show them fire(bird-fox), and tabbed browsing.
I'm betting that Microsoft is getting customers faster than you're making friends.
Not if the robots.txt file prevents you from accessing that data, which it does.
The robots.txt file prevents nothing. It's merely a request that the spider "not go here." It's not a lock on the door. It's a sign that says, "please do not enter my house."
They hired a spamhaus but they were sending the message to their own mailing list of folk who subscribed on the web page.
If that were true then, I agree, it wouldn't have been a problem. Unfortunately, that is not true. Where they got the names cannot be verified without the Dean campaign's cooperation, but people got it who had not subscribed for it on the webpage.
A news article about it.
Ah, this clears it up. They bought a list, making the all-too-common mistake of thinking that permission can be sold. Such naivete from a campaign that touts itself as an internet grassroots breakthrough is disappointing. I had nothing against Dean, and stood a good chance of voting for him due to his "I'm internet savy" PR blitz, but this ignorance destroyed all possibility of that.
A victim's account of what happened.
Another mistake. This definitely wasn't a person "who subscribed on the web page."Ah. How soon we forget. The Dean campaign actually did hire a spam operation and sent a substantial amount before they got tracked down and called to task about it. IIRC, they then changed their story from "we didn't do it", to "we did it" while showing no remorse at having done so.
That's great. If it does what you want.
Some people buy a new technology not knowing, yet, what they expect out of it. These are the inspired thinkers to come up with new uses. They are often disappointed with proprietary systems, finding that someone else is dictating the boundaries of use differently than they, such as draconian DRM. These people feel cheated.
Perhaps it's time that computer science curriculums start teaching assembly language first.
It's more critical they actually teach computer science first, instead of programming. A new CS hire, assuming their school was worth a damn, can learn a new language. I want to know if they have the math background to understand the problems that will be handed to them and that they have the ability to self-learn.
It's not the first $780 he's worried about, but the the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc.
Where is the obligatory Gentoo-freak? Everyone knows you can't mention the word "linux" without one jumping out to scream, "Use Gentoo, just like me!"
Their intentions are great, and they do a lot of great work, but I must agree; it's press statements like these that make the general populace write them off as a organization of nutcases.