If you look at some tools like SWAT (for configuring Samba,) you can design the tools to display novice or advanced user options. Most users don't need to make more than a couple changes to make samba, sendmail, or apache work for most cases.
See my post above for my ideas on using XML as the common format.
What I didn't go into is details on how that would work, but anyone with some imagination can grasp the concepts.
Which is why you use XML. Human readable, parsable via common code library, extensible (that's the X part...)
The cool part is that one tool would be able to configure new things that didn't exist when the configuration tool was designed as long as the tool was well thought out and feature complete. Since the current crop of configuration tasks is quite diverse already, I see no reason why this wouldn't be doable.
With this system, you would also never have to write your own GUI config tool for each app ever again. KDE, Gnome, Samba, Apache, Mozilla, Galeon, etc. could all dump their custom X / web-based tools if they desired (you could even have a web-based version of the tool.) Hell, you could even use this to configure the kernel.
For migration, separate utilities could import / export from the new XML based files while all the software that uses config files get's updated.
Some software such as Apache is already close as it is already somewhat xml like.
The one thing I ask that of ANY config tool is that it NOT be like the Windows Registry, Don't put everything in one big-ass binary database. That's the most hostile, fragile pile of crap on the planet.
Film loses when we all we get to see is a 4th / 5th gen crappy copy in a theater. After a week of showings it's already scratched and patched. That's the real issue, and anyone that's seen a digital film and gone back and seen it on normal film will invariably prefer the digital version.
Um, first of all, it's all in how you handle / store media. It's VERY difficult to keep an LP from getting scratched / warped over a many year period. You also have imperfections from the pressing process causing pops / skips / etc. The "Original Master Disks" were better, but still had flaws.
While I don't have numbers on life of original pressed CD's, recordable CD's have varying life spans ranging over 100 years (depends on the dyes.) You can generally find this info on the manufacturers' web sites. Considering that CD's are basically plastic wrapped aluminium foil (gross simplification here) with holes punched in it, I have a hard time beliving the 50 year number (if properly stored of course.)
You probably will want your music on a different media in 10 years anyway. CD's are near end of life for various reasons, such as size, fragility, etc. At least when you start with a digital version you can shift to a different format (1G smart media cards maybe?) and not lose anything.
With film, it gets brittle with age. In as little as 20 years it becomes Very fragile (again depending on how it's stored.) You also have color fade which cannot be stopped. While current technology digital film doesn't have the resolution as real film, this will change over time and surpass it (for movie uses. Large format film photography will beat digital photography for Many Many years to come. I remember hearing about a massive camera that used 8 FOOT tall film. It may have gone directly to a positive paper instead of film negative, but still.)
That's like saying a good driver doesn't allow their tires to wear, or a good pr0n star that doesn't allow her body to age. The nature of film running through the system will cause scratches over time no matter what you do or don't do. Mishandling of course will cause this degredation to happen sooner, but it WILL happen.
Get a better job at a place without police-state filtering.
Why should the rest us us suffer with extended page-load times caused by morons who post what's already available because YOU have braindead filters in place?
It's also a copyright infringment and could get slashdot SUED, and SHUTDOWN. Is that what you want?
THINK PEOPLE!
Re:We need technical measures, not laws, for spam
on
FTC Goes After Spammers
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· Score: 3, Insightful
People: Stoping spam by changing email standards WON'T WORK.
First, it will take YEARS to implement any new standard. If you don't believe me, look at IPv6!
Second, any scheme based on charging per email no matter WHAT the details of this scheme is NOT THE ANSWER. It totally hoses things like mailing lists, SMS, autoresponders, email based applications (send an email command, cause something to happen), kiosk email, etc., etc., etc.
Third, (stupid HashCash), how the hell do you hand out a business cards with your email on it and expect people to be able to communicate with you without jumping through hoops.
Bottom line is that SPAM is NOT a TECHNICAL PROBLEM. It's a SOCIAL PROBLEM, like murder, rape, theft, hate crimes, drugs, etc. The reason women don't get raped every time they walk out the door is because we have set moral and legal standards in our society. We need to set those same standards for spam.
No matter WHAT technical barriers you set up, you either make the system virtually unusable (whitelists, auto-responding password challenges,) impractical (hashcash, charging real money, etc.,) or impotent (spammers will find a way around filters...)
Just like we have laws against theft, rape, and murder, we need laws against spam. Sure, we still have some cases of rape, murder, and theft, but I would MUCH rather have a couple spams per year (that I may be able to recover $$$ damages on) than to have a police-state driven, hostile, and unusable email system. These "technological whiz-kid" solutions will screw us all rather than just screwing the spammers.
Great points. Comparing a DVD to a book could be carried a little farther. Consider the restrictions in Region coding. That's like taking a book from the US to Japan, and then being unable to read the book when you're in Japan. Bogus.
However, the issue of cracking programs (or copyright protection methods, ie. Encryption no matter how weak) is also covered under the DMCA, not just the license agreement. So while the "license" may not be enforcable, the laws still are (of course we still haven't had a good challenge to the DMCA yet...)
The biggest thing that bugs me about bundled software and it's license agreements (mainly speaking about Windows being bundled with computers here) is that I don't have the option of buying a Toshiba Laptop (for example) without paying for something I won't use (I use Linux) and not having the right to resell (or give) that unused license to someone else who may want it (someone who wants to upgrade, a school, business, etc.) Of course, some may claim that I would be an evil person if I encouraged the use of Microsoft software, but hey. To each his own.
Well, since you CAN get a lifetime sub for a little over $200, and a DirectTivo is only $99, the combined total is about the same as a normal tivo. You basically get the subscription for free. (considering it has a 40G hard drive in it, $99 is not bad...)
This is BS as "Fair Use" is well established. It's an obvious extension of technology to use hard drives instead of video tape, and computer searchable guides instead of paper guides. If anything, you would think that studios would WANT people to watch their bad movies / shows. What they are REALLY pissed about is the ability of people to fast-forward through commercials.
Frankly, if there is a show I want to watch, I let tivo record it and watch it later as commercials are just too annoying (one of the worst offenders is TNN which turns a 1:45 movie into 3 hours. Who the hell is willing to put up with that?)
Tivo and friends are are pure time-shifting devices. The don't have the ability to save off to an archive except by playing the movie and recording it with a VCR. If you are going to do that, you might as well just have recorded the damn thing with a VCR to begin with.
If they really don't want people to record by name, actor, director, they also need to sue TV Guide, all the newspapers in the US, movie trivia sites, book authors and publishers, film / entertainment magazines, etc. who also publish this info.
Frankly, your whole "affiliate" program encourages spam. If you required your "affiliates" to sign a binding contract that imposed a penalty for spamming (in addition to getting nothing for driving people to your site) then MAYBE, it would be ok. As it stands now, you are like the Taliban - encouraging evil.
Because spamming "pays" for you, you are only giving lip service to the anti-spam movement.
Any spam filter that analyzes content and makes decisions will have both false positives and negatives. End result is that you may lose legit mail and still get spam. Not much, but for a business you can't afford to lose mail, so those solutions don't work.
Whitelist programs also suffer the same problems, and are not appropriate for use in business.
Whitelisting can be broken easily too with autoresponders, and if spam isn't illegal, they will do it and your solution fails. THey haven't done it yet because you are 0.00001% that use it. If only 20% of people whitelisted, you better belive that they would get their spam through one way or another.
The reason we don't have thousands of bank robberies a day is because we enforce the laws, and the penalties are stiff. You don't need to stop ALL spam, just the bulk of it. Spam wasn't that annoying when you got one a month. 50 a DAY is a problem however.
... And how many years of SPAM will we have to put up with while we wait for this to be adopted? I'm still waiting for multicasting to be universal and IPv6, and I think I have a few more years to wait.
People: there are no easy technical soulutions to this. Spam is a social problem, not a technical problem. Laws handle the social problems. While there are still people that break the laws, enforcement keeps that number down.
Sounds like the mailing list administrator needs to be hit over the head with a clue-stick. Any decent list bounces all non-plain text messages automagically.
First and foremost, the reason spam isn't stopping at all is because it IS legal. If it's not legal, you at least have the power to go after spammers and the ISP's who harbor them. In order for spammers to make money, there has to be a way of contacting the spammer - PO Box, 800 number, etc. so you Will be able to find them and procecute them. Hell, we would probably have spammer bounty hunters that will take a cut of the fine for doing this for you...
Your solution fails on a number of accounts.
First, it requires that you dump the current standard and replace it with another. OK, how many years are you going to give people to upgrade all their mail software, hardware devices, firewalls, etc. before the old protocol stops working? How many more years of SPAM will we have to put up with before that happens? Considering how superior IPv6 is, why are we still on IPv4? Even though we have digital TV (in the US), we still broadcast analog too, and will for a while. Protocols like this can't be changed overnight.
Second, the current system allows for offline and batch delivery. EMail makes it's way through the internet even though mail servers and networks go down periodically. With a system that requires a "pick up", you then have to deal with network / server outages, and you lose the ability to batch.
Mailing lists batch delivery, by the way. If there are 500 AOL users subscribed to a list, only ONE copy is sent to the AOL servers. Your system would require 500x the bandwidth and have much higher server overhead. I've run mailing lists for MANY years with tens of thousands of users. I don't have any problems with them as I know what the hell I'm doing, and use decent mailing list software (with heavy customizations....)
Third, when you do crypto verifications, you need an authority elsewise you can be spoofed (man in the middle attacks, etc.). Anyone wanna have to buy a $150 verisign cert per email address? They won't be free you can bet your bottom on that.
Spam is not just a security problem. It's a social problem. Not all laws are bad - you KNOW there are going to be a couple new laws that will go a long way towards preventing future Enron problems for example.
Bouncing spam after it's in your inbox is useless. Since most spam is forged, all this will do for you is get you another email from "Yahoo" (or whoever the spammer used as a forged address) claiming the user is unknown.
Spam has to be bounced at the SMTP server level before reception is complete to be effective at all, and even at this point it's usually pointless as the spammer is probably just bouncing off some random open relay in China. All this will do is fill up the clueless administrators mailbox of the relay in china with bounce messages. Maybe this will cause them to close their open relay, but with hundreds of thousands more open relays to choose from, it does little good in the overall picture.
Spammers have found another method too. Relay through some lammer's poorly-configured wingate or squid proxy.
Use spamcop, bounce messages, write nasty notes all you want, but you will not make a dent in the spam problem.
The only thing you can do that might have ANY impact at all would be to complain to your congressmen that they need to outlaw spam. Once laws are in place we can sue the pants off these assholes, and maybe even get them some jail time.
What scares me more than the "make money quick" or "loose 150 lbs in 10 minutes" spams are the pseudo-legit type used by businesses.
Think about that... If only 1% of american businesses decided to use spam, and they only sent one spam email a year to 1% of the population,
that's still thousands of messages A week per person!
With all the filters I have setup, I block about 600 spam attempts per day to my server, another 50 or so a day get filtered into a spam folder automatically, and about 2 or so a day get all the way through to my main inbox folder. This is on an email address I've had for 7 years, so just about every spammer seems to hit it.
Considering that I only get about 100 legit emails a day (including several mailing lists) I'd say the problem is WAY out of hand. With the levels of spam increasing about 10% per month, my guess is that we have about a year left before email is completely saturated with spam making it impossible to communicate.
So Please, do as I have and write a physical letter (no emails, they just junk those) to your congress critters (or what ever government officials you have in your country that pass laws) to ban spam.
"All I am saying is think through what regulation does, it limits company's and individual's freedom and costs customer's money."
Regulation does much more. It also protects us from scammers, toxic waste dumps, bad products, etc.
Company officers (for public companies) are REQUIRED BY LAW to maximize profits for shareholders. If there were no regulations, they would do anything and everything they could to accomplish that goal including things that are bad for you and me, and everyone else.
The problem is that while we were free to opt out of doing business with these companies, we were not free from harassment. Your "doom and gloom" predictions which are used over and over by big business that are doing bad things NEVER PLAY OUT in reality. In fact, it may force companies to be more creative in customer acquision and management which may ultimately increase business.
Look at the lack of regulation in the power industry in California. Hmm. The power companies wrote the deregulation laws and then abused the situation. (Actually, I place only 50% of the blame there, the other 50% goes to the environmental nazi's which protested and sued over all new power plant requests...)
We actually had a privacy bill going here in CA, but the big corporate groups bought our governor and the bill died. The amount of FUD those companies put out was amazing.
Well, the big difference is in who pays for the mail. Bulk US mail doesn't cost me anything, and can actually be used to heat my house. In fact, I LIKE mail - it's like firewood delivered to my door for free!!!
Email spam is different. It costs me money as my bandwidth and diskspace is used up in the hundreds of spams I get a day. I've had the same email address for 7 years, and I don't intend to change it.
Note that you can also opt-out via the DMA which WILL reduce sales calls and junk US mail to a degree, but there is no such facility for email. In fact, you can demand telemarketers to be put you on "Do Not Call" lists which they MUST adhear to by law or face fines.
Frankly, Opt-in is SO much more superior in that you don't have to constanly request to NOT be contacted.
Bottom line is that "Personal information" (which is what this law is about), "Spam", and "Bulk US Mail" are all very different things and need different laws handling them.
If you want to know who is fighting these laws, it's easy. It's the DMA (Direct Marketing Association), all it's members (most major US business that sell direct), the banking and insurance industries (who want to sell your personal information), etc. You're talking Bank of America, State Farm, American Express, L.L. Bean, Dell, Compaq, etc. With these types of companies fighting, it's no wonder that it's so hard to pass consumer protection laws.
So I applaud the state of Vermont. Way to go guys!! Let's support Vermont businesses now, like Cabot Cheese (.com) which makes the BEST sharp white chedder in the US - better than anything you can get in California or Wisconson (oh shit, now I have some rabid California Cows pounding on my door... Seems they are not so happy anymore. gotta go!)
It's more like there is enough beer for everyone to have a REASONABLE amount, say 6 beers. People pay 3 bucks each to cover the reasonable amount. Some people have 2 or 3, others 7 or 8. Then you have this really obnoxious group show up that drink 18 - 24 each! WAY more than the normal reasonable consumption, thus causing a shortage. The host then asks the obnoxious group to pay 6 bucks instead of three - still less than cost, but more than the "average" people paid.
Listen, the bottom line is that internet bandwidth costs money. The cable company buys a LARGE chunk at a reasonable rate (volume discount.) They make assumptions based on average sustained usage per person, and buy that much bandwidth, and design their network around those assumptions.
Well, turns out that you have a small group of bandwidth-a-holics that blow all those assumptions out of the water. Now the "host" has put a limit of 6 beers before you get the new rate. Probably should have made the limit 12, but hey, it's HIS party, you don't have to go.
Frankly, the bandwidth-a-holics are just screwing over their neighbors, and everyone else on the system with the attitude of "I paid for it, I can use as much as I want" attitude rather than the correct "I paid for a share, I'll use my share."
Frankly, I like the idea of dynamic rate caps. Heavy bandwidth users (more than X Gig / month) get severly capped (50 - 100K) during peak times. Want the cap raised? $1 per Kb/sec more on your monthly bill which puts it in line with business rates.
If you want business class service, you are going to have to pay business class prices which means about $1K / month for a T1.
You know, I'd like a nice 5000 sq ft house with a pool on 10 acres of land right near downtown San Jose, but I only want to $1000 / month for it.
I mean, sheesh. You get what you pay for. Cable-modem service sucks EVERYWHERE. Sure, you could be one of the lucky few that actually has few problems and good bandwidth, but that is the EXCEPTION, not the rule.
I just don't understand you people that expect world class service and support from a cut-rate outfit. You are paying yugo prices but expecting a BMW. Co ON people! Wake the hell up! Of COURSE their gonna advertise the service as being awesome, and OF COURSE it's gonna suck.
Newsflash: the "Stomach Electrocutor" aint gonna turn a 400lb fat ass slob into a lean body-builder either.
Slashdot Mirror
If you look at some tools like SWAT (for configuring Samba,) you can design the tools to display novice or advanced user options. Most users don't need to make more than a couple changes to make samba, sendmail, or apache work for most cases.
See my post above for my ideas on using XML as the common format.
What I didn't go into is details on how that would work, but anyone with some imagination can grasp the concepts.
Which is why you use XML. Human readable, parsable via common code library, extensible (that's the X part...)
The cool part is that one tool would be able to configure new things that didn't exist when the configuration tool was designed as long as the tool was well thought out and feature complete. Since the current crop of configuration tasks is quite diverse already, I see no reason why this wouldn't be doable.
With this system, you would also never have to write your own GUI config tool for each app ever again. KDE, Gnome, Samba, Apache, Mozilla, Galeon, etc. could all dump their custom X / web-based tools if they desired (you could even have a web-based version of the tool.) Hell, you could even use this to configure the kernel.
For migration, separate utilities could import / export from the new XML based files while all the software that uses config files get's updated.
Some software such as Apache is already close as it is already somewhat xml like.
The one thing I ask that of ANY config tool is that it NOT be like the Windows Registry, Don't put everything in one big-ass binary database. That's the most hostile, fragile pile of crap on the planet.
Film loses when we all we get to see is a 4th / 5th gen crappy copy in a theater. After a week of showings it's already scratched and patched. That's the real issue, and anyone that's seen a digital film and gone back and seen it on normal film will invariably prefer the digital version.
Um, first of all, it's all in how you handle / store media. It's VERY difficult to keep an LP from getting scratched / warped over a many year period. You also have imperfections from the pressing process causing pops / skips / etc. The "Original Master Disks" were better, but still had flaws.
While I don't have numbers on life of original pressed CD's, recordable CD's have varying life spans ranging over 100 years (depends on the dyes.) You can generally find this info on the manufacturers' web sites. Considering that CD's are basically plastic wrapped aluminium foil (gross simplification here) with holes punched in it, I have a hard time beliving the 50 year number (if properly stored of course.)
You probably will want your music on a different media in 10 years anyway. CD's are near end of life for various reasons, such as size, fragility, etc. At least when you start with a digital version you can shift to a different format (1G smart media cards maybe?) and not lose anything.
With film, it gets brittle with age. In as little as 20 years it becomes Very fragile (again depending on how it's stored.) You also have color fade which cannot be stopped. While current technology digital film doesn't have the resolution as real film, this will change over time and surpass it (for movie uses. Large format film photography will beat digital photography for Many Many years to come. I remember hearing about a massive camera that used 8 FOOT tall film. It may have gone directly to a positive paper instead of film negative, but still.)
That's like saying a good driver doesn't allow their tires to wear, or a good pr0n star that doesn't allow her body to age. The nature of film running through the system will cause scratches over time no matter what you do or don't do. Mishandling of course will cause this degredation to happen sooner, but it WILL happen.
Sheesh.
No, it doesn't make sense. It's probably Divx.
It's just a scam.
There is NO WAY IN HELL that SOFTWARE can turn a cdrecorder which does 650 - 700M into a 5G DVD recorder.
If you want to do divx, software is free anyway
(at least on Linux, I don't use Windows..)
Get a better job at a place without police-state filtering.
Why should the rest us us suffer with extended page-load times caused by morons who post what's already available because YOU have braindead filters in place?
It's also a copyright infringment and could get slashdot SUED, and SHUTDOWN. Is that what you want?
THINK PEOPLE!
People: Stoping spam by changing email standards WON'T WORK.
First, it will take YEARS to implement any new standard. If you don't believe me, look at IPv6!
Second, any scheme based on charging per email no matter WHAT the details of this scheme is NOT THE ANSWER. It totally hoses things like mailing lists, SMS, autoresponders, email based applications (send an email command, cause something to happen), kiosk email, etc., etc., etc.
Third, (stupid HashCash), how the hell do you hand out a business cards with your email on it and expect people to be able to communicate with you without jumping through hoops.
Bottom line is that SPAM is NOT a TECHNICAL PROBLEM. It's a SOCIAL PROBLEM, like murder, rape, theft, hate crimes, drugs, etc. The reason women don't get raped every time they walk out the door is because we have set moral and legal standards in our society. We need to set those same standards for spam.
No matter WHAT technical barriers you set up, you either make the system virtually unusable (whitelists, auto-responding password challenges,) impractical (hashcash, charging real money, etc.,) or impotent (spammers will find a way around filters...)
Just like we have laws against theft, rape, and murder, we need laws against spam. Sure, we still have some cases of rape, murder, and theft, but I would MUCH rather have a couple spams per year (that I may be able to recover $$$ damages on) than to have a police-state driven, hostile, and unusable email system. These "technological whiz-kid" solutions will screw us all rather than just screwing the spammers.
Think about it.
Great points. Comparing a DVD to a book could be carried a little farther. Consider the restrictions in Region coding. That's like taking a book from the US to Japan, and then being unable to read the book when you're in Japan. Bogus.
However, the issue of cracking programs (or copyright protection methods, ie. Encryption no matter how weak) is also covered under the DMCA, not just the license agreement. So while the "license" may not be enforcable, the laws still are (of course we still haven't had a good challenge to the DMCA yet...)
The biggest thing that bugs me about bundled software and it's license agreements (mainly speaking about Windows being bundled with computers here) is that I don't have the option of buying a Toshiba Laptop (for example) without paying for something I won't use (I use Linux) and not having the right to resell (or give) that unused license to someone else who may want it (someone who wants to upgrade, a school, business, etc.) Of course, some may claim that I would be an evil person if I encouraged the use of Microsoft software, but hey. To each his own.
Well, since you CAN get a lifetime sub for a little over $200, and a DirectTivo is only $99, the combined total is about the same as a normal tivo. You basically get the subscription for free. (considering it has a 40G hard drive in it, $99 is not bad...)
This is BS as "Fair Use" is well established. It's an obvious extension of technology to use hard drives instead of video tape, and computer searchable guides instead of paper guides. If anything, you would think that studios would WANT people to watch their bad movies / shows. What they are REALLY pissed about is the ability of people to fast-forward through commercials.
Frankly, if there is a show I want to watch, I let tivo record it and watch it later as commercials are just too annoying (one of the worst offenders is TNN which turns a 1:45 movie into 3 hours. Who the hell is willing to put up with that?)
Tivo and friends are are pure time-shifting devices. The don't have the ability to save off to an archive except by playing the movie and recording it with a VCR. If you are going to do that, you might as well just have recorded the damn thing with a VCR to begin with.
If they really don't want people to record by name, actor, director, they also need to sue TV Guide, all the newspapers in the US, movie trivia sites, book authors and publishers, film / entertainment magazines, etc. who also publish this info.
Frankly, your whole "affiliate" program encourages spam. If you required your "affiliates" to sign a binding contract that imposed a penalty for spamming (in addition to getting nothing for driving people to your site) then MAYBE, it would be ok. As it stands now, you are like the Taliban - encouraging evil.
Because spamming "pays" for you, you are only giving lip service to the anti-spam movement.
Actually, exim does this out of the box. You can also easily add that functionality to sendmail.
Any spam filter that analyzes content and makes decisions will have both false positives and negatives. End result is that you may lose legit mail and still get spam. Not much, but for a business you can't afford to lose mail, so those solutions don't work.
Whitelist programs also suffer the same problems, and are not appropriate for use in business.
Whitelisting can be broken easily too with autoresponders, and if spam isn't illegal, they will do it and your solution fails. THey haven't done it yet because you are 0.00001% that use it. If only 20% of people whitelisted, you better belive that they would get their spam through one way or another.
The reason we don't have thousands of bank robberies a day is because we enforce the laws, and the penalties are stiff. You don't need to stop ALL spam, just the bulk of it. Spam wasn't that annoying when you got one a month. 50 a DAY is a problem however.
... And how many years of SPAM will we have to put up with while we wait for this to be adopted? I'm still waiting for multicasting to be universal and IPv6, and I think I have a few more years to wait.
People: there are no easy technical soulutions to this. Spam is a social problem, not a technical problem. Laws handle the social problems. While there are still people that break the laws, enforcement keeps that number down.
Sounds like the mailing list administrator needs to be hit over the head with a clue-stick. Any decent list bounces all non-plain text messages automagically.
First and foremost, the reason spam isn't stopping at all is because it IS legal. If it's not legal, you at least have the power to go after spammers and the ISP's who harbor them. In order for spammers to make money, there has to be a way of contacting the spammer - PO Box, 800 number, etc. so you Will be able to find them and procecute them. Hell, we would probably have spammer bounty hunters that will take a cut of the fine for doing this for you...
Your solution fails on a number of accounts.
First, it requires that you dump the current standard and replace it with another. OK, how many years are you going to give people to upgrade all their mail software, hardware devices, firewalls, etc. before the old protocol stops working? How many more years of SPAM will we have to put up with before that happens? Considering how superior IPv6 is, why are we still on IPv4? Even though we have digital TV (in the US), we still broadcast analog too, and will for a while. Protocols like this can't be changed overnight.
Second, the current system allows for offline and batch delivery. EMail makes it's way through the internet even though mail servers and networks go down periodically. With a system that requires a "pick up", you then have to deal with network / server outages, and you lose the ability to batch.
Mailing lists batch delivery, by the way. If there are 500 AOL users subscribed to a list, only ONE copy is sent to the AOL servers. Your system would require 500x the bandwidth and have much higher server overhead. I've run mailing lists for MANY years with tens of thousands of users. I don't have any problems with them as I know what the hell I'm doing, and use decent mailing list software (with heavy customizations....)
Third, when you do crypto verifications, you need an authority elsewise you can be spoofed (man in the middle attacks, etc.). Anyone wanna have to buy a $150 verisign cert per email address? They won't be free you can bet your bottom on that.
Spam is not just a security problem. It's a social problem. Not all laws are bad - you KNOW there are going to be a couple new laws that will go a long way towards preventing future Enron problems for example.
Bouncing spam after it's in your inbox is useless. Since most spam is forged, all this will do for you is get you another email from "Yahoo" (or whoever the spammer used as a forged address) claiming the user is unknown.
Spam has to be bounced at the SMTP server level before reception is complete to be effective at all, and even at this point it's usually pointless as the spammer is probably just bouncing off some random open relay in China. All this will do is fill up the clueless administrators mailbox of the relay in china with bounce messages. Maybe this will cause them to close their open relay, but with hundreds of thousands more open relays to choose from, it does little good in the overall picture.
Spammers have found another method too. Relay through some lammer's poorly-configured wingate or squid proxy.
Use spamcop, bounce messages, write nasty notes all you want, but you will not make a dent in the spam problem.
The only thing you can do that might have ANY impact at all would be to complain to your congressmen that they need to outlaw spam. Once laws are in place we can sue the pants off these assholes, and maybe even get them some jail time.
What scares me more than the "make money quick" or "loose 150 lbs in 10 minutes" spams are the pseudo-legit type used by businesses.
Think about that... If only 1% of american businesses decided to use spam, and they only sent one spam email a year to 1% of the population,
that's still thousands of messages A week per person!
With all the filters I have setup, I block about 600 spam attempts per day to my server, another 50 or so a day get filtered into a spam folder automatically, and about 2 or so a day get all the way through to my main inbox folder. This is on an email address I've had for 7 years, so just about every spammer seems to hit it.
Considering that I only get about 100 legit emails a day (including several mailing lists) I'd say the problem is WAY out of hand. With the levels of spam increasing about 10% per month, my guess is that we have about a year left before email is completely saturated with spam making it impossible to communicate.
So Please, do as I have and write a physical letter (no emails, they just junk those) to your congress critters (or what ever government officials you have in your country that pass laws) to ban spam.
"Sir, we know you have a trash compactor. You will have to come with us..."
"All I am saying is think through what regulation does, it limits company's and individual's freedom and costs customer's money."
Regulation does much more. It also protects us from scammers, toxic waste dumps, bad products, etc.
Company officers (for public companies) are REQUIRED BY LAW to maximize profits for shareholders. If there were no regulations, they would do anything and everything they could to accomplish that goal including things that are bad for you and me, and everyone else.
The problem is that while we were free to opt out of doing business with these companies, we were not free from harassment. Your "doom and gloom" predictions which are used over and over by big business that are doing bad things NEVER PLAY OUT in reality. In fact, it may force companies to be more creative in customer acquision and management which may ultimately increase business.
Look at the lack of regulation in the power industry in California. Hmm. The power companies wrote the deregulation laws and then abused the situation. (Actually, I place only 50% of the blame there, the other 50% goes to the environmental nazi's which protested and sued over all new power plant requests...)
We actually had a privacy bill going here in CA, but the big corporate groups bought our governor and the bill died. The amount of FUD those companies put out was amazing.
Well, the big difference is in who pays for the mail. Bulk US mail doesn't cost me anything, and can actually be used to heat my house. In fact, I LIKE mail - it's like firewood delivered to my door for free!!!
Email spam is different. It costs me money as my bandwidth and diskspace is used up in the hundreds of spams I get a day. I've had the same email address for 7 years, and I don't intend to change it.
Note that you can also opt-out via the DMA which WILL reduce sales calls and junk US mail to a degree, but there is no such facility for email. In fact, you can demand telemarketers to be put you on "Do Not Call" lists which they MUST adhear to by law or face fines.
Frankly, Opt-in is SO much more superior in that you don't have to constanly request to NOT be contacted.
Bottom line is that "Personal information" (which is what this law is about), "Spam", and "Bulk US Mail" are all very different things and need different laws handling them.
If you want to know who is fighting these laws, it's easy. It's the DMA (Direct Marketing Association), all it's members (most major US business that sell direct), the banking and insurance industries (who want to sell your personal information), etc. You're talking Bank of America, State Farm, American Express, L.L. Bean, Dell, Compaq, etc. With these types of companies fighting, it's no wonder that it's so hard to pass consumer protection laws.
So I applaud the state of Vermont. Way to go guys!! Let's support Vermont businesses now, like Cabot Cheese (.com) which makes the BEST sharp white chedder in the US - better than anything you can get in California or Wisconson (oh shit, now I have some rabid California Cows pounding on my door... Seems they are not so happy anymore. gotta go!)
Yes, all consumers should be forced to pay more to get less. :-/
The people that I want to hear from should also be the ones forced to jump through hoops to contact me... Hmm.
It's more like there is enough beer for everyone to have a REASONABLE amount, say 6 beers. People pay 3 bucks each to cover the reasonable amount. Some people have 2 or 3, others 7 or 8. Then you have this really obnoxious group show up that drink 18 - 24 each! WAY more than the normal reasonable consumption, thus causing a shortage. The host then asks the obnoxious group to pay 6 bucks instead of three - still less than cost, but more than the "average" people paid.
Listen, the bottom line is that internet bandwidth costs money. The cable company buys a LARGE chunk at a reasonable rate (volume discount.) They make assumptions based on average sustained usage per person, and buy that much bandwidth, and design their network around those assumptions.
Well, turns out that you have a small group of bandwidth-a-holics that blow all those assumptions out of the water. Now the "host" has put a limit of 6 beers before you get the new rate. Probably should have made the limit 12, but hey, it's HIS party, you don't have to go.
Frankly, the bandwidth-a-holics are just screwing over their neighbors, and everyone else on the system with the attitude of "I paid for it, I can use as much as I want" attitude rather than the correct "I paid for a share, I'll use my share."
Frankly, I like the idea of dynamic rate caps. Heavy bandwidth users (more than X Gig / month) get severly capped (50 - 100K) during peak times. Want the cap raised? $1 per Kb/sec more on your monthly bill which puts it in line with business rates.
If you want business class service, you are going to have to pay business class prices which means about $1K / month for a T1.
You know, I'd like a nice 5000 sq ft house with a pool on 10 acres of land right near downtown San Jose, but I only want to $1000 / month for it.
I mean, sheesh. You get what you pay for. Cable-modem service sucks EVERYWHERE. Sure, you could be one of the lucky few that actually has few problems and good bandwidth, but that is the EXCEPTION, not the rule.
I just don't understand you people that expect world class service and support from a cut-rate outfit. You are paying yugo prices but expecting a BMW. Co ON people! Wake the hell up! Of COURSE their gonna advertise the service as being awesome, and OF COURSE it's gonna suck.
Newsflash: the "Stomach Electrocutor" aint gonna turn a 400lb fat ass slob into a lean body-builder either.