The site assumes that if you post something about a product where the whole world can see it, then you consent to being used in an ad.
That's an assumption that will get them sued. There are laws and legal precedence about using people's likenesses without their consent. Just because you say you like a product or service in public it does not give anyone the right to use that as a commercial endorsement of the product or service. If it were so, you'd see celebrities constantly hounded to give their opinions on products hoping to use their response in advertising.
Then the onus would be on the sender to make sure that any email addresses they already know about do not hash to a value in the list.
Of course, it doesn't need to be that complicated. The server takes an address from the spammer and either tells it yes or no. There's no need to hash it if the server never sends out addresses. I would take this idea a bit further. See my Option #2 here.
I'm not entirely convinced that such a list would fail... with the right precautions. Some ideas just off the top of my head:
One option: =========== - Distribute the list only to marketers who's credentials and location you have verified. - Require that distributed copies of the list not be redistributed. - Fill the list with 10-20% honey-pot addresses. These addresses should vary from distribution to distribution so as to establish a "unique fingerprint" that would take the comparison of several distributions to identify even a part of.
Another option: =============== - Establish a online service available only to marketers who's credentials and location you have verified. - Require that they submit addresses to be compared to the database, and tell them which addresses have requested to opt-out from the list they submit. - Record that they asked about a given address in association with that address. - Allow the address holders access to review who has been told not to mail to them through the system for their own comparison to the spam they're receiving.
Will either system do anything about illicit email harvesting and other forms of blanket spamming? Of course not. Would either system keep legitimate operations from hassling you with a minimal risk of increasing your spam load. I think so.
At the risk of being modded a troll, I think the long-term solution to spam is to allow it and regulate it. If it were allowed, I believe people who are skirting the law to send spam would be rapidly marginalized by legitimate operations. The American way for most commercial endeavors is to allow it, regulate it, and tax it. Do those three things to commercial email, provide a centralized opt-out system, and I believe the illicit stuff will be marginalized and far easier for law enforcement to deal with. (Also, the loss of tax revenue would be an incentive for lawmakers to stiffen the penalties for the violators). BTW, when I say tax it, I mean the sending. Even a one cent fee per email would be an enormous tax windfall if even a small fraction of these operations went legit.
I'd say "you must be new here"; but, with a uid of 3800, surely you've seen more than your share of blatant exaggeration in story summaries. Why did this one bother you particularly? Seriously. I'm curious.
correct me if i'm wrong but in most countries it's ILLEGAL not to accept legal tender as payment.
I cannot speak to the "most" portion of your statement; but, in the U.S., you are not required to accept cash for a sale. Consult the U.S. Treasury Department for more information.
When it says "Legal Tender For All Debts Public And Private" right on the money, it means literally "debts". If I owe you money, you have to take cash. However a Sale != a Debt.
So Comcast causing Bittorrent problems is OK for Net Neutrality. But if Comcast suddenly lets Blizzard's WoW updates unimpeded while causing problems for say, Linux ISO torrents, then that conflicts with Net Neutrality.
Dude, you didn't even get out of the paragraph before contradicting yourself. If you read the article, Comcast isn't just slowing down bittorrent in a QoS style. They're doing man in the middle attacks to shut down some shares entirely. Relegating traffic to the slow lane is one thing. Sending traffic up the off ramp is something else entirely. There is no way, under any person's interpretation, that what Comcast is doing is compatible with Net Neutrality.
What do you mean by "causing Bittorrent problems" anyway. QoS should only be tolerated to slow traffic down. Flat out dropping it on the floor or otherwise killing it isn't QoS.
Well, for one thing, its not false if it was true the time the accusation was made. It wasn't a "false charge" when it was made, so you couldn't call it "lame" unless its still being thrown around. Even still, it wasn't lame a year or two ago, was it? And do remember he has only recently made these changes; he's been harping over environmental issues for over a decade.
To my knowledge, carbon offsets, didn't exist a decade ago.
What was lame about attacking Gore's carbon output is that it completely disregards the offsets he buys and the people he inspires to reduce their own emissions or purchase their own offsets. Rather than do something constructive about carbon emissions, right wing idealogs amuse themselves buy creating these sort of straw man arguments. They dismiss anyone who advocates carbon reduction while still emitting themselves as hypocrites.
I have yet to hear Gore advocate that Humanity immediately cease all CO2 output. He advocates that we reduce where we can and invest in technology to find ways to reduce further. Things like Compact Fluorescent bulbs and fuel efficient cars achieve the former while carbon offsets work toward the latter.
I do not see Al Gore's lifestyle as "do as I say, not as I do." Ideally, he'd like to see a world where everyone leads a "carbon neutral" lifestyle.
The idea behind carbon offsets is that money is pooled and used to fund development of cleaner technologies and cleaner power. The idea is that if you want to lead a "carbon neutral" lifestyle, you can pay to emit carbon in circumstances where it cannot be avoided (e.g., air travel) and the money you pay is used to reduce offsetting emissions elsewhere (e.g., adding carbon sequestration equipment at a coal power plant.)
'buy' offsets from a company you have a large stake in."
Well, by your cynical reasoning, wouldn't he be better off advocating offsets?
So why bother telling people all these inconvenient things to do, when they could just pay $20/month?
Exactly which inconvenient things has he advocated?
Changing incandescent bulbs to compact fluorescents is hardly inconvenient. You pay more for the bulb up front but save many times that over the life of the bulb in reduced energy costs.
Driving a more fuel efficient vehicle an inconvenience? It too, at $3 a gallon, is an investment that pays for itself.
Much of what Gore advocates people do will actually save them money if they do it. It's called enlightened self-interest.
You're not going to find a lot of people who will pay an extra $20/month to keep doing exactly what they're doing. They'll just keep the money. Are you paying for carbon offsets? I don't. I use Compact Fluorescent bulbs, drive a car that gets over 30mpg, and buy my energy from a green provider.
I'll tell you why: because carbon control has nothing to do with the environment.
Falsely charging a celebrity with hypocrisy vis-a-vis global warming is a lame straw-man argument to deflect from the issue. Al Gore, through carbon offsets, leads a carbon-neutral life; and, thorough his work, he has inspired many, many others to reduce or eliminate their carbon footprint.
Don't forget the enormous manpower that goes into investigating Congress.
Between time spent lobbying and investigating Congress, I wonder if the FBI has considered just eliminating Congress to free up resources. Probably the only delaying issue is trying to determine whether Cheney is part of the legislative branch.
However, if a member of a law enforcement branch of the government says "this is legal" and it's plausible, I might answer differently.
The NSA isn't law enforcement. It's a spy agency. They serve two purposes: they protect American intelligence assets, and they attempt to acquire foreign intelligence assets. Note my emphasis on foreign. Domestic spying used to be illegal for them to do, and that knowledge should be basics civics knowledge for any high school graduate.
Requiring somebody to pass a test before they operate a vehicle is hardly the same as sabotaging somebody's computer.
You're right. A more apt analogy would be to equate people who don't protect their computer from hackers with people who drive while intoxicated or otherwise impaired.
The solution suggested above, in my opinion, doesn't go far enough. Infected computers should be knocked off the network in much the same way that drunk drivers are pulled over and arrested. Incompetence/Impairment is no excuse for improperly operating your computer/vehicle in a way that is a risk to others.
We need ISPs to be willing to take the financial hit involved in policing their networks. Infected computers should not have access to the Internet; and, as such, when a computer is identified as infected, the ISP should boot it.
Print up a flier explaining, in great detail, the MPAA's "accomplishments" in DRM enforcement, copyright extension, etc. under your distinguished guest's management. Paint as rosy a picture as possible, to the point of exageration if necessary. Get the more educated students so fed up at the line they're being fed that they take it upon themselves to protest.
Your job, I assume, is to educate the students, so educate them fully as to what the MPAA means to their rights. I'm sure you can find some great material here.
That notion is one of the problems with today's society. Respect should be afforded to everyone until they prove themselves unworthy of it. Now, in this case, respect may not be deserved; but, no respect for others should not be your default stance.
Lets assume for one moment, before he took this position that he was a good lawyer. But to be led by a man who has destroyed so many other reputations is no easy task.
Gonzales has been with Bush since Texas. That's how long his poor judge of character has been in place.
As for him being a good lawyer, that's hard to say. I'm more concerned about whether he's an ethical and moral lawyer, which he is not; and, that didn't start when he took the AG job. Remember that it was Alberto Gonzales that convinced the president that the Geneva Conventions prohibiting torture were "quaint" and don't apply to the U.S. We have the detentions at Guantanamo of "foreign combantants" and the suspension of Habeas Corpus for Americans suspected of ties to terrorism because of him.
Gonzales was amongst the crew strongarming former Attorney General John Ashcroft in the ICU to approve the warrantless wiretapping program. The polital firings of U.S. attorney's is just the last straw on a big pile of straws.
CNN is talking about Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff as a replacement. Bush may simply opt for a recess appointment to avoid a fight with the Senate, but the Senate would be hard pressed to turn down a guy most of them approved for a cabinet position only a couple of years ago. Either way, don't expect to see an Attorney General willing to appoint any special prosecutors.
Yeah, no kidding! I submitted the same story like four hours earlier with a correct summary:
The New York Times (registration likely required) has a report on Google's plans to recoup its $1.65 billion investment in You Tube. Borrowing a move from television networks, Google will introduce advertising that overlays the bottom fifth of the video starting at the 15 second mark. Are they going to kill the goose that has so far laid a giant goose egg for their bottom line?
There's just no accounting for the "editorial" process here on Slashduh.
Most of human history was spent without any governments being formed.
That depends on how you define government. I would suggest that a small tribe informally run by the Alpha male (or female!) still constitutes a form of government. They may not have advanced to the point of recording their histories, but to believe that pre-historic man didn't have governments because they didn't have written records is simply naive.
Anarchy is a fantasy. In the absense of participatory government and laws, the strong rule the weak.
Politicians in both parties are ruining this country because people have divorced themselves from the political process. Politicians will continue to take your money and spend it as they see fit, get us into wars, and commit attrocities in your name whether you're involved in the process or not.
Voting is not just a right: It's a responsiblity. Being informed about the issues allows you to take that responsiblity seriously.
I know many nerds who get all the news they want from Slashdot, DZone, etc. I'm glad some of the Slashdot editors occasionally slip in news they need. Whether you care about politics or not, it is "stuff that matters."
The police have no legitimate interest in tracking the driving patterns of people who have not committed a crime and are not under suspicion of having committed a crime.
No legitimate interest? How about 95 stolen cars and 111 wanted felons.
As for tracking driving patterns, the system doesn't do that. It is a snapshot of where cars are at a the time the scanner passed the car.
I suppose you could, given enough scans, and enough computing power begin to associate people with places. But, and this is a big but, you presume that this data would be openly shared with the public sector. Try writing down a random license plate number and then try to find out from the police to whom the car belongs. I'll wait here.
License Plates do not belong to the owner of the vehicle, they are property of the state and must remain in public view as long as the vehicle is on public property. Seeing something that is in plain site hardly constitues a search and they've seized nothing they didn't already have.
Slashdot Mirror
The site assumes that if you post something about a product where the whole world can see it, then you consent to being used in an ad.
That's an assumption that will get them sued. There are laws and legal precedence about using people's likenesses without their consent. Just because you say you like a product or service in public it does not give anyone the right to use that as a commercial endorsement of the product or service. If it were so, you'd see celebrities constantly hounded to give their opinions on products hoping to use their response in advertising.
Then the onus would be on the sender to make sure that any email addresses they already know about do not hash to a value in the list.
Of course, it doesn't need to be that complicated. The server takes an address from the spammer and either tells it yes or no. There's no need to hash it if the server never sends out addresses. I would take this idea a bit further. See my Option #2 here.
I'm not entirely convinced that such a list would fail ... with the right precautions. Some ideas just off the top of my head:
One option:
===========
- Distribute the list only to marketers who's credentials and location you have verified.
- Require that distributed copies of the list not be redistributed.
- Fill the list with 10-20% honey-pot addresses. These addresses should vary from distribution to distribution so as to establish a "unique fingerprint" that would take the comparison of several distributions to identify even a part of.
Another option:
===============
- Establish a online service available only to marketers who's credentials and location you have verified.
- Require that they submit addresses to be compared to the database, and tell them which addresses have requested to opt-out from the list they submit.
- Record that they asked about a given address in association with that address.
- Allow the address holders access to review who has been told not to mail to them through the system for their own comparison to the spam they're receiving.
Will either system do anything about illicit email harvesting and other forms of blanket spamming? Of course not. Would either system keep legitimate operations from hassling you with a minimal risk of increasing your spam load. I think so.
At the risk of being modded a troll, I think the long-term solution to spam is to allow it and regulate it. If it were allowed, I believe people who are skirting the law to send spam would be rapidly marginalized by legitimate operations. The American way for most commercial endeavors is to allow it, regulate it, and tax it. Do those three things to commercial email, provide a centralized opt-out system, and I believe the illicit stuff will be marginalized and far easier for law enforcement to deal with. (Also, the loss of tax revenue would be an incentive for lawmakers to stiffen the penalties for the violators). BTW, when I say tax it, I mean the sending. Even a one cent fee per email would be an enormous tax windfall if even a small fraction of these operations went legit.
pCock - Python variant
Also used by NBC to datamine it's viewers.
I'd say "you must be new here"; but, with a uid of 3800, surely you've seen more than your share of blatant exaggeration in story summaries. Why did this one bother you particularly? Seriously. I'm curious.
correct me if i'm wrong but in most countries it's ILLEGAL not to accept legal tender as payment.
I cannot speak to the "most" portion of your statement; but, in the U.S., you are not required to accept cash for a sale. Consult the U.S. Treasury Department for more information.
When it says "Legal Tender For All Debts Public And Private" right on the money, it means literally "debts". If I owe you money, you have to take cash. However a Sale != a Debt.
So Comcast causing Bittorrent problems is OK for Net Neutrality. But if Comcast suddenly lets Blizzard's WoW updates unimpeded while causing problems for say, Linux ISO torrents, then that conflicts with Net Neutrality.
Dude, you didn't even get out of the paragraph before contradicting yourself. If you read the article, Comcast isn't just slowing down bittorrent in a QoS style. They're doing man in the middle attacks to shut down some shares entirely. Relegating traffic to the slow lane is one thing. Sending traffic up the off ramp is something else entirely. There is no way, under any person's interpretation, that what Comcast is doing is compatible with Net Neutrality.
What do you mean by "causing Bittorrent problems" anyway. QoS should only be tolerated to slow traffic down. Flat out dropping it on the floor or otherwise killing it isn't QoS.
Well, for one thing, its not false if it was true the time the accusation was made. It wasn't a "false charge" when it was made, so you couldn't call it "lame" unless its still being thrown around. Even still, it wasn't lame a year or two ago, was it? And do remember he has only recently made these changes; he's been harping over environmental issues for over a decade.
To my knowledge, carbon offsets, didn't exist a decade ago.
What was lame about attacking Gore's carbon output is that it completely disregards the offsets he buys and the people he inspires to reduce their own emissions or purchase their own offsets. Rather than do something constructive about carbon emissions, right wing idealogs amuse themselves buy creating these sort of straw man arguments. They dismiss anyone who advocates carbon reduction while still emitting themselves as hypocrites.
I have yet to hear Gore advocate that Humanity immediately cease all CO2 output. He advocates that we reduce where we can and invest in technology to find ways to reduce further. Things like Compact Fluorescent bulbs and fuel efficient cars achieve the former while carbon offsets work toward the latter.
I do not see Al Gore's lifestyle as "do as I say, not as I do." Ideally, he'd like to see a world where everyone leads a "carbon neutral" lifestyle.
Except man-made carbon dioxide is a minuscule fraction of all the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
How about a source on such a ridiculous claim?
Does "carbon offset" mean anything yet?
The idea behind carbon offsets is that money is pooled and used to fund development of cleaner technologies and cleaner power. The idea is that if you want to lead a "carbon neutral" lifestyle, you can pay to emit carbon in circumstances where it cannot be avoided (e.g., air travel) and the money you pay is used to reduce offsetting emissions elsewhere (e.g., adding carbon sequestration equipment at a coal power plant.)
'buy' offsets from a company you have a large stake in."
Well, by your cynical reasoning, wouldn't he be better off advocating offsets?
So why bother telling people all these inconvenient things to do, when they could just pay $20/month?
Exactly which inconvenient things has he advocated?
Changing incandescent bulbs to compact fluorescents is hardly inconvenient. You pay more for the bulb up front but save many times that over the life of the bulb in reduced energy costs.
Driving a more fuel efficient vehicle an inconvenience? It too, at $3 a gallon, is an investment that pays for itself.
Much of what Gore advocates people do will actually save them money if they do it. It's called enlightened self-interest.
You're not going to find a lot of people who will pay an extra $20/month to keep doing exactly what they're doing. They'll just keep the money. Are you paying for carbon offsets? I don't. I use Compact Fluorescent bulbs, drive a car that gets over 30mpg, and buy my energy from a green provider.
I'll tell you why: because carbon control has nothing to do with the environment.
What's it all about then?
Right wing naysayers need to get over themselves. Here's a link to rebut yours:
http://neutralsource.org/content/blog/detail/598/
Falsely charging a celebrity with hypocrisy vis-a-vis global warming is a lame straw-man argument to deflect from the issue. Al Gore, through carbon offsets, leads a carbon-neutral life; and, thorough his work, he has inspired many, many others to reduce or eliminate their carbon footprint.
lobbying congress for more power.
Don't forget the enormous manpower that goes into investigating Congress.
Between time spent lobbying and investigating Congress, I wonder if the FBI has considered just eliminating Congress to free up resources. Probably the only delaying issue is trying to determine whether Cheney is part of the legislative branch.
However, if a member of a law enforcement branch of the government says "this is legal" and it's plausible, I might answer differently.
The NSA isn't law enforcement. It's a spy agency. They serve two purposes: they protect American intelligence assets, and they attempt to acquire foreign intelligence assets. Note my emphasis on foreign. Domestic spying used to be illegal for them to do, and that knowledge should be basics civics knowledge for any high school graduate.
Requiring somebody to pass a test before they operate a vehicle is hardly the same as sabotaging somebody's computer.
You're right. A more apt analogy would be to equate people who don't protect their computer from hackers with people who drive while intoxicated or otherwise impaired.
The solution suggested above, in my opinion, doesn't go far enough. Infected computers should be knocked off the network in much the same way that drunk drivers are pulled over and arrested. Incompetence/Impairment is no excuse for improperly operating your computer/vehicle in a way that is a risk to others.
We need ISPs to be willing to take the financial hit involved in policing their networks. Infected computers should not have access to the Internet; and, as such, when a computer is identified as infected, the ISP should boot it.
You can't swing a cat in this town anymores without braining a couple Mexicans.
That's some cat! You'd think the first Mexican would probably stop its momentum.
Print up a flier explaining, in great detail, the MPAA's "accomplishments" in DRM enforcement, copyright extension, etc. under your distinguished guest's management. Paint as rosy a picture as possible, to the point of exageration if necessary. Get the more educated students so fed up at the line they're being fed that they take it upon themselves to protest.
Your job, I assume, is to educate the students, so educate them fully as to what the MPAA means to their rights. I'm sure you can find some great material here.
Respect is something that must be earned
That notion is one of the problems with today's society. Respect should be afforded to everyone until they prove themselves unworthy of it. Now, in this case, respect may not be deserved; but, no respect for others should not be your default stance.
Lets assume for one moment, before he took this position that he was a good lawyer. But to be led by a man who has destroyed so many other reputations is no easy task.
Gonzales has been with Bush since Texas. That's how long his poor judge of character has been in place.
As for him being a good lawyer, that's hard to say. I'm more concerned about whether he's an ethical and moral lawyer, which he is not; and, that didn't start when he took the AG job. Remember that it was Alberto Gonzales that convinced the president that the Geneva Conventions prohibiting torture were "quaint" and don't apply to the U.S. We have the detentions at Guantanamo of "foreign combantants" and the suspension of Habeas Corpus for Americans suspected of ties to terrorism because of him.
Gonzales was amongst the crew strongarming former Attorney General John Ashcroft in the ICU to approve the warrantless wiretapping program. The polital firings of U.S. attorney's is just the last straw on a big pile of straws.
CNN is talking about Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff as a replacement. Bush may simply opt for a recess appointment to avoid a fight with the Senate, but the Senate would be hard pressed to turn down a guy most of them approved for a cabinet position only a couple of years ago. Either way, don't expect to see an Attorney General willing to appoint any special prosecutors.
Yeah, no kidding! I submitted the same story like four hours earlier with a correct summary:
There's just no accounting for the "editorial" process here on Slashduh.
Most of human history was spent without any governments being formed.
That depends on how you define government. I would suggest that a small tribe informally run by the Alpha male (or female!) still constitutes a form of government. They may not have advanced to the point of recording their histories, but to believe that pre-historic man didn't have governments because they didn't have written records is simply naive.
Anarchy is a fantasy. In the absense of participatory government and laws, the strong rule the weak.
yes, this is news, but not slashdot news
And that, my friend, is the problem.
Politicians in both parties are ruining this country because people have divorced themselves from the political process. Politicians will continue to take your money and spend it as they see fit, get us into wars, and commit attrocities in your name whether you're involved in the process or not.
Voting is not just a right: It's a responsiblity. Being informed about the issues allows you to take that responsiblity seriously.
I know many nerds who get all the news they want from Slashdot, DZone, etc. I'm glad some of the Slashdot editors occasionally slip in news they need. Whether you care about politics or not, it is "stuff that matters."
The police have no legitimate interest in tracking the driving patterns of people who have not committed a crime and are not under suspicion of having committed a crime.
No legitimate interest? How about 95 stolen cars and 111 wanted felons.
As for tracking driving patterns, the system doesn't do that. It is a snapshot of where cars are at a the time the scanner passed the car.
I suppose you could, given enough scans, and enough computing power begin to associate people with places. But, and this is a big but, you presume that this data would be openly shared with the public sector. Try writing down a random license plate number and then try to find out from the police to whom the car belongs. I'll wait here.
License Plates do not belong to the owner of the vehicle, they are property of the state and must remain in public view as long as the vehicle is on public property. Seeing something that is in plain site hardly constitues a search and they've seized nothing they didn't already have.