I finally spoke with Sean. The truth is that this is a cooperative effort with ISPs. The problem is not so much "child porn sites" as it is "child porn sites overseas".
Sean said the A.G. Office sends an informal letter to ISPs asking them to block access to a particular site in question.
Worldcom has been the only one that threw it back at them and asked for a court order, so they gave them one.
It sounds to me like this isn't nearly as bad as the Salon article makes it out to be.
I later thought about overseas incidents where U.S. has no jurisdiction. I would hope at a minimum the A.G. office should provide a free list of these oversea sites. Ultimately it's not the responsibility of the ISP to be a police officer.
I read this article today and it disturbes me quite a bit. http://www.salon.com/tech/wire/2003/02/19/in ternet _filters/index.html
I'm curious how the Penn. A.G. office (or whomever was in charge) came to the conclusion to force the ISPs to block the sites instead of going after the sites themselves?
I am the co-owner of a small ISP in Missouri and if MIssouri were to issue a judgement of this magnitude could put us out of business. We don't have the money or resources to implement such a solution.
Not only that but I don't want to be the one that has to research which sites are and aren't child porn. Especially since many of these sites probably require a fee before you can gain access. This is not my job. I am a programmer by trade not a police officer.
It seems to me that the wrong people are being penalized. Would you fine the phone company if you received a phone call with pornographic sounds of children? No, you would have the police find out who made that call and bust them. The phone company was only the messenger. It's not their job to screen your calls.
Theoretical Scenario: If I was evil and a competiting ISP, I could pay someone to setup a child porn site. Then I could immediately complain to the A.G. Office that such and such ISP was allowing child porn through the line. That ISP would then be hit with heavy fines.
The possibilities of something like that happening are slim, but it has now been setup for something like that to happen.
I left a message with your secretary. I would greatly appreciate it if you could return my call and just make sure that I'm understanding the situation correctly. Also, if I can be of any assistance to the Penn. Attorney General's office, I am always more than happy to help out.
Thanks again, personal info withheld for this posting.
The only time an ISP will really truly care is if an existing paying customer complains that there are spammers on the network they are hosting from.
This is a very valid complaint. Someone above mentioned they just blacklisted rackspace.com. I wish every rackspace.com would call their account rep. and give them a lot of trouble.
In fact, I highly recommend that every corporate customer using some sort of ISP for bandwidth or hosting should do some research on spamcop and/or other dnsbl lists and find out what complaints are in the queue. If there are a lot, call up your account rep and threaten to take your business elsewhere because those spammers are hurting your business by potentially getting you blacklisted.
Seems like they should hire google to create a CVS type cache of sites. Can you imagine the amount of storage would be necessary to back up "the internet?!"
It doesn't look like an X-Men rip off either. X-Men the movie was lacking a certain charm about it. This movie looks like it's got everything it needs to be awesome.
I too select text while I browse in order to read faster! I'm surprised to hear that other people do that as well.
I do really love gestures though. I use them in opera and mozilla. I used to be a full time keyboard user, but ever since gestures came out (and my 5 button programmable mouse) I can do all of my most critical functions with the mouse.
I can only imagine if my system accepted TWO independent mice! haha
Believe it or not I am one of the few people in the world that has a 100% unique name.
It's very American as well. Throughout all of time, there has been no other with my first and last name combination.
The reason for this is because my first name was never used before the 1800s when my ancestors moved to America. I've got most of the family tree traced after they crossed over and unless it's a very young person that I don't have record of, I'm still unique.
Because of privacy concerns I don't want to post it here, but if you really want to know it shouldn't be too difficult to trace down.
I pay every penny of my T1 cost and we're already looking at jumping to T3 for more bandwidth.
So just to put things into perspective... Every piece of spam comes through: 1. Eats a little bandwidth 2. Eats up a little CPU doing filtering. 3. Eats up a little bit of CPU doing virus filtering. 4. Eats up a little bit of disk space.
Now you say most americans don't pay by the bandwidth, this is true, but they do pay FOR the bandwidth. For instance, all of my customers pay for the shared resources on my server. If one customer gets 50 million pieces of spam in an hour my server has come to a crawl and all of the customers who paid for hosting service are interrupted.
If they want to make.name successful, they should have lobbied for a worldwide.name law that would have made it illegal (with huge penalties) to send unsolicited bulk email to any.name email address.
I personally think business to business unsolicited non-bulk email is a Good Thing(TM).
I don't mind receiving email when people take the time to write me. Often, I am able to turn those solicitations around and actually gain clients either directly or indirectly.
Plus, then you get into nasty situations such as what's considered unsolicited? If I put my email address on my company web page and another company wants to email me, is that unsolicted?
I proposed a complete system to the state of Missouri that would allow spammers to upload their list and receive a list in return of all the addresses that weren't registered.
Slashdot Mirror
Cauce.org seems to have good intentions but if you search their site, you won't find any suggested solutions.
In fact, I have yet to see any good solutions to spam. I personally don't like the pay per email scheme or filtering solution.
What solution would you recommend to cauce.org?
I finally spoke with Sean.
The truth is that this is a cooperative effort with ISPs. The problem is not so much "child porn sites" as it is "child porn sites overseas".
Sean said the A.G. Office sends an informal letter to ISPs asking them to block access to a particular site in question.
Worldcom has been the only one that threw it back at them and asked for a court order, so they gave them one.
It sounds to me like this isn't nearly as bad as the Salon article makes it out to be.
I hope everyone will read my post here:
4 422
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=54488&cid=534
I later thought about overseas incidents where U.S. has no jurisdiction. I would hope at a minimum the A.G. office should provide a free list of these oversea sites. Ultimately it's not the responsibility of the ISP to be a police officer.
Hello Sean,
n ternet _filters/index.html
I read this article today and it disturbes me quite a bit.
http://www.salon.com/tech/wire/2003/02/19/i
I'm curious how the Penn. A.G. office (or whomever was in charge) came to the conclusion to force the ISPs to block the sites instead of going after the sites themselves?
I am the co-owner of a small ISP in Missouri and if MIssouri were to issue a judgement of this magnitude could put us out of business. We don't have the money or resources to implement such a solution.
Not only that but I don't want to be the one that has to research which sites are and aren't child porn. Especially since many of these sites probably require a fee before you can gain access. This is not my job. I am a programmer by trade not a police officer.
It seems to me that the wrong people are being penalized. Would you fine the phone company if you received a phone call with pornographic sounds of children? No, you would have the police find out who made that call and bust them. The phone company was only the messenger. It's not their job to screen your calls.
Theoretical Scenario:
If I was evil and a competiting ISP, I could pay someone to setup a child porn site. Then I could immediately complain to the A.G. Office that such and such ISP was allowing child porn through the line. That ISP would then be hit with heavy fines.
The possibilities of something like that happening are slim, but it has now been setup for something like that to happen.
I left a message with your secretary. I would greatly appreciate it if you could return my call and just make sure that I'm understanding the situation correctly. Also, if I can be of any assistance to the Penn. Attorney General's office, I am always more than happy to help out.
Thanks again,
personal info withheld for this posting.
http://www.attorneygeneral.gov/
press@attorneygeneral.gov
Sean Connolly is the spokesperson for Penn. A.G. Mike Fisher
His number is: 717-787-5211.
His email address is probably sconnolly@attorneygeneral.gov. I haven't confirmed this however.
Please be polite and express your valid concerns about forcing the ISPs to block the sites rather than going after the sites themselves.
The only time an ISP will really truly care is if an existing paying customer complains that there are spammers on the network they are hosting from.
This is a very valid complaint. Someone above mentioned they just blacklisted rackspace.com. I wish every rackspace.com would call their account rep. and give them a lot of trouble.
In fact, I highly recommend that every corporate customer using some sort of ISP for bandwidth or hosting should do some research on spamcop and/or other dnsbl lists and find out what complaints are in the queue. If there are a lot, call up your account rep and threaten to take your business elsewhere because those spammers are hurting your business by potentially getting you blacklisted.
So what's going to happen when the Romulans go flying by and decide to try to tow the earth into the sun?
Seems like they should hire google to create a CVS type cache of sites. Can you imagine the amount of storage would be necessary to back up "the internet?!"
I think it looks awesome. I can't wait to see it!
It doesn't look like an X-Men rip off either. X-Men the movie was lacking a certain charm about it. This movie looks like it's got everything it needs to be awesome.
I too select text while I browse in order to read faster! I'm surprised to hear that other people do that as well.
I do really love gestures though. I use them in opera and mozilla. I used to be a full time keyboard user, but ever since gestures came out (and my 5 button programmable mouse) I can do all of my most critical functions with the mouse.
I can only imagine if my system accepted TWO independent mice! haha
Believe it or not I am one of the few people in the world that has a 100% unique name.
It's very American as well. Throughout all of time, there has been no other with my first and last name combination.
The reason for this is because my first name was never used before the 1800s when my ancestors moved to America. I've got most of the family tree traced after they crossed over and unless it's a very young person that I don't have record of, I'm still unique.
Because of privacy concerns I don't want to post it here, but if you really want to know it shouldn't be too difficult to trace down.
Maybe "linux" will buy Microsoft. Errr.. wait a sec...
I pay every penny of my T1 cost and we're already looking at jumping to T3 for more bandwidth.
So just to put things into perspective... Every piece of spam comes through:
1. Eats a little bandwidth
2. Eats up a little CPU doing filtering.
3. Eats up a little bit of CPU doing virus filtering.
4. Eats up a little bit of disk space.
Now you say most americans don't pay by the bandwidth, this is true, but they do pay FOR the bandwidth. For instance, all of my customers pay for the shared resources on my server. If one customer gets 50 million pieces of spam in an hour my server has come to a crawl and all of the customers who paid for hosting service are interrupted.
I gave Testimony to the Missouri House of Reps on Jan. 29th.
It's easy to get things in motion, everyone is too lazy to try though.
Sure you can filter it, but you haven't stopped the bandwidth that you paid for from being sucked up.
If they want to make .name successful, they should have lobbied for a worldwide .name law that would have made it illegal (with huge penalties) to send unsolicited bulk email to any .name email address.
I would have bought one if that were the case.
So funny because it's true.
I guess most Unreal tournament players are sub-adults.
I will read over that document tonight.
Looks very promising.
I personally think business to business unsolicited non-bulk email is a Good Thing(TM).
I don't mind receiving email when people take the time to write me. Often, I am able to turn those solicitations around and actually gain clients either directly or indirectly.
Plus, then you get into nasty situations such as what's considered unsolicited? If I put my email address on my company web page and another company wants to email me, is that unsolicted?
He's 100% right.
How do you write the law to block unsolicited bulk email but not valid business to business email?
Junk snail mail subsidizes the cost of postage for everyone.
See this post
I proposed a complete system to the state of Missouri that would allow spammers to upload their list and receive a list in return of all the addresses that weren't registered.
Here's the link to the Missouri House Bill 228
See my journal for more information.
Here's my written testimony...
Testimony
The house bill 228 wasn't perfect, it still needs a lot of work. It was suppossed to be voted on last Monday but I didn't hear the results.