The problem is not state powers. This is about what California can do to you if you're in New York, not what it can do to you if you're in California.
The internet has raised this issue in the past and will raise it in the future. 50 different laws are (mostly) fine when they apply only to the people in the states. When they start reaching out of the state and grabbing people for sending packets, that's a bad idea. Sure, some packets, including spam, can be bad, but they aren't a local issue.
The problem is having 50 different laws. Any one law might not seem to present too much burden to you. But because e-mail's nature is to not know the destination state, the thing which places the undue burden is not any given law, but the burden to either find the destination of comply with 50 laws.
This matter is one that belongs in the federal arena. That's why we have a federal government, to deal with things that are not local in scope. Internet traffic is just one of those things.
And yes, the supreme court has ruled that you can put on false e-mail headers. (You can't forge, as in use the real address of somebody else, but you do have the supreme-court-declared right to communicate anonymously by using the address of nobody. There's even a new domain,.invalid, in the IETF standards to formalize doing this cleanly.)
You say we must do what we can. Right now we're bickering and passing useless laws which are doing very close to zero to fight spam, instead of actually fighting it.
Are you a pragmatic person? Do you believe the existing laws have stopped even 1% of spam?
The law applies to out of state mailers as far as I can read it. It seems to apply if the recipient's mailbox OR the sender are in California, not necessarily both.
California does have the power to regulate what Californians do to other Californians (mostly), but the commerce clause was tested here because this law does more than that.
The question of harvesters was not brought up by this law, it applies to all emailers. Indeed, another major problem with this law is it applies to anybody sending E-mail, not just people sending bulk e-mail, making it overbroad.
As for the concept of making an effort to go to the lowest common denominator, that's the whole point of my copmlaint. What states can do is deliberately limited in order to avoid people being forced to obey 50 laws at once, or even to have to follow the laws of the most restrictive state.
The label here is content-based, which is particularly disturbing. I think if you're going to regulate e-mail, the regulations should be "time and manner" regulations, and not dependent on the content of the E-mail. Making one mail legal and another because of what they say is another bad precedent.
What you need to do, if you're going to ban spam, is define spam, and make them label it as spam. Spam is spam regardless of what the message says. The things that make it spam are not the fact that it has an ad in it, but that it was bulk mailed to people who don't know the sender and never asked for it. Nothing to do with the content of the message.
Still my main point is if you want to talk about spam law, states are the wrong place. In fact, there's argument that even federal laws aren't much use because spammers can and do go international.
By that logic, a web site which takes orders is subject to the law of all 50 states because without a lot of work, web sites accept page requests from all 50 states.
When you actually ship a product into a state, you are indeed subject to its laws. What this ruling ignores is the design of the internet, that you don't normally know, when engaging in internet traffic, where the other end of the connection is.
Just law doesn't make people subject to laws when they would normally not be aware that they are violating them. Ignorance of the law _is_ an excuse when it comes to the laws of places you don't set foot in.
The commerce clause is there for exactly that purpose. It's there to say, "If you live in New York, you don't need to worry about the laws of California until you decide to do something in California."
But with E-mail, you don't decide to send E-mail to California. You decide to send E-mail to an unknown location, which might be California and might not be. Likewise with a web site, you don't decide to send pages to California, you send pages to anybody, and any one might be from California or might not be.
There's the rub. It's not tenable to say "if you don't know where it's going, you have to learn and obey the laws of all 50 states" but this decision
demands it.
That has nothing to do with spam at all.
Likewise the compelled speech rules are independent of spam. One district court, for example, ruled that a law requiring dairys to say whether they used BHT hormone was unconstitutional compelled speech.
BTW, under this law, if you ever send a resume to a company without an invitation, make sure you put "ADV:" in the subject line, since you will be advertising your services in the resume.
Good point. These laws have shown to be almost entirely ineffective. I get automated voice phone calls all the time, and they were banned by a federal law in 1992 that's probably constitutional.
I've even sued people who use these devices in court and won the $500 judgement, and gotten settlements in each case. However, in most of the cases you can't find the party without a lot of work, and when you can, it's more than $500 of work to get the case done.
When I have gone to court, the small claims judges have been highly surprised, and have never seen such cases before. Ie. nobody else is enforcing the law and the abuse continues.
We have 18 spam laws now in states and spam is up, up, up.
So I agree with the point you didn't know you made -- because the laws are ineffectual, they should not be allowed to affect people outside the state at all.
However, note that in this case we're talking about the interstate commerce coming into California.
My understanding is California has absolutely zero power to pass laws that affect commerce between Nevada and Oregon. Such laws will not be struck down by the California court, but by the federal one.
The courts have also ruled that you can't regulate advertising "just because it's advertising." There has to be another reason. Commercial speech has been ruled to be highly protected, while non commercial speech is extremely highly protected, which is different from the way some people think about it.
And a capable lawyer brings up everything that might have a bearing, even if they don't think it has a chance. It's the judge's job to dismiss it.
The question of whether the government can force us to classify our speech is an interesting but unsettled one.
However, it still remains the case that we don't want the government defining the syntax of email headers. If you want a law for that, the law should say, "Appropriate standards bodies for the E-mail being sent may define headers which allow the expression of whether the mail is commercial or not, and if they do, commercial mailers must use them."
However, the surpreme court has thrown out regulation of commercial speech "just because it is commercial." As we all know, there is religious spam, charitable spam, politicial spam and various other types. If there is to be a law about spam, court ruling suggest it needs to be about spam, not about commerce, which is simply the most popular type of spam.
This has nothing to do with spam, that's the problem. This ruling, should it stand, makes you subject to any state's law if you mail into the state, even if you didn't know you were mailing into the state -- which is the norm for e-mail.
New Mexico for example, passed a "decency" law like the CDA. This ruling, if upheld in the surprme court, would make everybody at risk for New Mexico's law and force them to check that their mail is not going to NM if it violates the decency standards of NM.
Some people's minds are clouded because this law regulates spammers and nobody likes spammers. Look past that, and see the precedent it sets about states laying any other sort of regulation they happen to like on you. You like the spam-stomping, but you won't like the next one.
More than that. While we may not mind the law saying that spammers have to check every law in every state and comply with all of them if they don't know the destination, that's not the regime we want generally for regulation of the internet.
<P>
And indeed this was fought over web sites, when states tried to regulate web sites on the theory that if a web site is serving pages to a user in New York, it had better follow the law of New York. But web sites don't know where they are serving pages to normally, and it would be much work for them to check.
<P>
Likewise it was fought over France's claim that since Yahoo auctions could be bid on from France, Yahoo could not sell things that violated French law.
<P>
So while you might love it banning spam, this ruling is saying that everybody has to know every law from all 50 states, and comply with all of them if sending an e-mail to an unknown destination.
A good analysis, but in fact it is not simply a question of whether it is possible to figure out where a mailbox is. California doesn't even have the power to make you try to find this out,
nor should it.
With this precedent, you now have to figure out where you are mailing. Not just if you are mailing to a mailbox in California, but every time. If a person in Nevada mails a person whose mailbox location they don't know, and the person has to be in Oregon, this ruling says you need to find out where it is to make sure it's not in California.
In effect, they are banning sending mail when you don't know what state the target mailbox is in. You may be able to find out the state with a bit of whois work or searching lists, but California is not supposed to have the power to make you take these extra steps if it turns out the mail is not going to come to California.
In other words, California is making people from Nevada take extra steps on mail that turns out to be going to Oregon. That is unconstitutional.
While if you hate spam as much as I do, you might be tempted to be pleased at this law, it's actually a terrible decision.
The court has said that when you mail, you have a duty to figure out in advance what state the mailbox you're mailing to is in, and then find out the e-mail laws of that state and obey them.
Yikes! That's not at all the way E-mail works. You often have no idea what state the other guy's mailbox is in, and it's a pain, or impossible, to find out in many cases.
You may cheer that this law puts this burden on senders of UCE, but the reality is that if this decision stands, you are letting all states put whatever rules they care to pass on E-mail, and putting a duty on everybody to know all the laws and know the state they are mailing.
To add insult to injury, this law defines new syntax for the Subject header! The government should not be defining the forms of e-mail headers. The IETF does that. This is also compelled speech and apparently the defendant didn't even bring that issue up.
Less you think I'm defending spam, you can read my essay on the insidious evil of spam to find out the contrary.
But we must fight spam the right way, and setting precedents like this is a dark day for e-mail and the internet in general.
California had another spam law which wasn't so bad because the recipient had to notify, thus making it clear what state they were in.
We at the EFF (please donate, it's been a tough year for charities but an even worse one is coming for online freedom) always encourge donors to donate appreciated stock instead of cash.
If you are lucky enough to have stock that has gone up in value (particularly founder's stock that has in effect a near-zero basis) you can get a double tax deduction in many cases for donating it rather than money.
The reason is you get to deduct the full value of the stock as a charitable donation, and you never pay the capital gains tax on it you would have paid if you sold it.
You need to have had it for a year. Contact a tax advisor for the full scoop.
If you do more than a tiny amount of charitable giving you can also set up a donor-advised fund (there is probably one in your area, do a web search). There you give stock to the fund (double deduction) and then have it dole out money to your favourite charities as you like it.
Re:How do you tell what is and isn't spam?
on
Crazy Stats on Spam
·
· Score: 1, Redundant
This is actually a very important question in the fight against spam. People argue over what it is.
Many people want a definition that includes any sort of mail that annoys them. You will never get wide agreement on something like that.
The best course is actually to find a minimal definition which includes most such mail (enough to solve the problem and take back our mailboxes) but almost deliberately misses out on a small fraction. That way everybody can agree that the minimal definition describes something to be stopped, even if there is more they would like stopped.
That way the definition can be used in whatever means you plan to stop spam, be it contracts and TOS, laws, blacklists, new protocols, filters etc.
The definition I use is very short and clear -- "bulk mail from a stranger."
You have to fine tune it a bit with definitions of the bulk threshold, and a more precise definition of stranger, but I feel it works, and hits 99% of the stuff I receive that might be called spam.
AdCritic was unicasting video, which has always been a strange and not very efficient idea. I never figured the business plans of the other video broadcast sites who wanted to send out free video. Looks like the only folks willing to pay are corporate video producers who have a lot riding on it.
Think about it. On a major TV network, the advertiser pays only one cent for each user who is presented the ad. Why should they pay more than that to a web site like adcritic, even if adcritic did try to charge the advertisers?
Indeed, why pay more than a cent to deliver a low-res version of the ad with a long wait? Well, perhaps to a more receptive viewer, since some chunk of those TV viewers are in the bathroom or fast forwarding, but still why pay more than a couple of cents?
And you can't deliver megabyte files for a penny, not that effectively. The internet is great but it's not (without multicast) for broadcasting. Broadcast TV is many orders of magnitude more efficient at getting data out to a lot of viewers if that data is video.
Plus on TV you watch the ad and you get a free program with it to boot.
Online radio faces the same problem, though the bandwidth need is not as crazy. But still, regular broadcast is orders of magnitude more efficient.
Re:You may want the data more than you think
on
Comparing the DVRs?
·
· Score: 2
No, of course nobody is doing this, since there is no market for it yet. You would need a PVR that could take the data and it would have to be popular enough that the data provider would expect hundreds of thousands of subscriptions at a $20/year price before they would even consider it financially worthwhile.
Re:You may want the data more than you think
on
Comparing the DVRs?
·
· Score: 2
Indeed I have described such products many times on the tivo newsgroup.
As for the listing data, it is in theory up for free on places like tvguide.com, but they would try to block that if people started machine downloading it and not viewing their ads as they have no revenue from such users.
However, the market value of the data is moderate, and I think a blessed pay service could easily happen for something more in the range of $20 a year not $120 a year, if there were a box to take it. The money you pay Tivo is really paying for all their software and maintenance and support, and frankly they are losing money even with the $10 per month.
You may want the data more than you think
on
Comparing the DVRs?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Obviously you can be wary when somebody says "trust me."
But trust me, try out a Tivo or similar box with the listing data. It really is a whole different beast from a simple hard disk recorder that can record shows at set times. Even though you can fully comprehend what all the features do, you won't really understand how it changes your watching of TV until you try it for a while.
I mean, I'm very up on the technology, and in many ways I feel that even before I got a box I knew better what features they were missing, but even so, there are elements you won't indentify until you sit down and use it.
With the Tivo, if you get an older box (not a new one, you need to get one of old inventory or used) you can cancel the monthly service and use it for timed recording.
And even though the data is overpriced at $9.95 (it's not really overpriced, it's just that you are paying for software upgrades and part of the box in there, but it seems like you are paying for listings) the change is remarkable.
It's not just a better UI where you browse both upcoming, live and recorded programs by name and category. It's not just the way it adjusts when programs change channel or timeslot. Not just how it records only the new shows and not the reruns, or lets you see all the different times the same show is on. And it's not just the fact that when the machine has nothing to do, it records shows that match your other tastes and puts them in spare disk space.
The key is you think about TV differently. There is an asynch pile of stuff coming in and you watch it in any order you like, at any time you like. You never watch the live TV again. Almost never, at least. The pausing live TV is a red herring feature to bring in new users, it turns out to be not useful because you don't watch live tv.
Whatever your opinion of using government regulation of E-mail to stop spam, I hope that most of you will come out in opposition to the idea that the individual states should be doing so.
This has to be opposed on the general principle of the thing. Individual states should not be making any rules about E-mail. It doesn't matter if the rules support motherhood and condemn terrorists. It's a jurisdictional issue, and the laws are unconstitutional.
The reason is that for a large fraction of E-mails, the sender has no idea what state the recipient is in. If we let the states regulate E-mail "into the state" then we create a duty on every E-mailer to know what state they are mailing, and become aware of the E-mail laws of that state and obey them.
This means that if I, in California, send an E-mail to somebody who happens to be in Oregon (though I don't know that directly) that I must check to see that they are not in Washington. But Washington has, under the constitution, no power to put any requirements on people mailing from California to Oregon, nor should they have such power.
Consider: New Mexico passed laws restricting indecent material on the net. Are you now ready to be aware of that, and to check every E-mail you send to make sure it's not going to New Mexico or is not indecent by their standards? And check 49 other states while you're at it.
It would be a zoo.
Now, I'm not really keen on any government regulation of E-mail, but if it is to exist, it should only be federal.
This show is more certain than others in the past
on
Leonid Meteor Shower
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Though there are 4 different sets of predictions, the main 3 agree exactly on the times of the peak -- 10 GMT and 18 GMT. I'm off to Japan or places near it. Airfares are super low -- $400 or so round trip to Japan.
Joe Haldeman saw the storm in 1966. That one was bigger, about 66,000 meteors per hour by estimate. He described it to me as being like in a car driving through the snow or being on the bridge of the enterprise. For the first time, he felt he was on a planet speeding through space. It gave him a real sense of scale.
That was enough for me to book the asian trip.
Note that Australia will get half the meteors of Japan, Guam or China, but has the best chance of clear skies and the most English.
Smallpox isn't as scary as you sound because it is NOT infectious during almost all of the incubation period. So you go home, do nothing for 10 days, and then you start getting sick and infecting people.
Immediately everybody who care into contact with you in the past day or so is vaccinated. Because we are looking the diseases is identified quickly. You are vaccinated too, which will help you, though not enough and you might die.
The figures on smallpox show 30% mortality, but that is from long ago, with a population not nearly as healty as ours, without modern medicine. Hard to predict, but fortunately the mortality will probably be much lower. Not that any is good.
They seem to think that forcing people to turn a laptop on is an important security measure. You used to be able to not even have it x-rayed if you could get it to display a boot.
With multi-swappable bay laptops, or even older ones, why did they think this was a way to protect against a weapon being in the laptop?
Of course. The question is, why make it easier for them? Half of why we want open source is to make our programs better. We don't want these privacy invading programs to be better and easier to use! That's quite different from our goals on most packages.
We do want to be sure that they aren't snooping on us improperly, and some feel that if they are open source, that means we can check for that sort of thing. But in fact, that's possibly a big mistake.
We can verify that the open source version is OK, but as you point out, there are people who can modify the code. And it's a lot easier to take the open source snooper and add patches to it to take out the safeguards than it is to write one without safeguards from scratch. This is really quite different from the goals of open source.
The people who take out the safeguards won't tell you they did it, nor will they contribute their patches. Nor will they follow the GPL.
When the FBI shows up with a DCS1000 Carnivore, they just attach a black box to your ethernet. They claim it's even wired so it can read, and not write, to your ethernet. But you don't get to inspect it, or check MD5s on the binaries to assure they were inspected to behave well.
Now, I like the idea of a free tool for ISPs so they can install it to comply with warrants and thus refuse the police black box. But what advantage is gained by that being open source. It would be nice if it's free to the ISPs, with source available if you sign a contract, but that's about it.
I'm also concerned that since secuity at ISPs is not super high (some run IIS for chrisakes) that it's not that hard for anybody, even a script kiddie to break in to a machine on my ISP's ethernet, and then get another script based on this open source snooper you want to snoop me. Forget the feds, these guys are worse.
So I want to work to encrypt all my traffic but I can't yet, so I hope to not make it easier for the snoops.
Not that it should be illegal or anything to release this package. I just want to argue that it's not a great idea. It doesn't match the reasons we like open source.
That's not quite true. In many regimes the network centers are still run by private individuals and even corporations. Many totalitarian states still have private companies.
The question is how easy do we make it. I don't know about this GNU carnivore but one thing FBI's Carnivore/DCS1000 does is track DHCP and radius traffic so that it associates IP addresses with real userids. Not something you can as easily do with a standard router.
Instead of writing tools to make it easy to snoop, we should be writing opportunistic crypto tools to make it harder.
Because it's never a black and white, 1 and 0 matter. We like open source software because the users maintain it and keep it high quality, and we can fix the bugs in it. We can also be more confident in its security if we compile it ourselves.
But this is one piece of software I don't want to be easier to use, and maintained at higher quality. Most of us are never going to use it ourselves.
But I do want to be sure it's not got hidden holes, so there is a dilemma. But the right answer may be in some mix, not the pure open source model.
And you're dreaming if you think the spooks who take and enhance this software here or elsewhere are going to contribute back their modifications, GPL or no GPL.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is not state powers. This is about what California can do to you if you're in New York, not what it can do to you if you're in California.
The internet has raised this issue in the past and will raise it in the future. 50 different laws are (mostly) fine when they apply only to the people in the states. When they start reaching out of the state and grabbing people for sending packets, that's a bad idea. Sure, some packets, including spam, can be bad, but they aren't a local issue.
The problem is having 50 different laws. Any one law might not seem to present too much burden to you. But because e-mail's nature is to not know the destination state, the thing which places the undue burden is not any given law, but the burden to either find the destination of comply with 50 laws.
.invalid, in the IETF standards to formalize doing this cleanly.)
This matter is one that belongs in the federal arena. That's why we have a federal government, to deal with things that are not local in scope. Internet traffic is just one of those things.
And yes, the supreme court has ruled that you can put on false e-mail headers. (You can't forge, as in use the real address of somebody else, but you do have the supreme-court-declared right to communicate anonymously by using the address of nobody. There's even a new domain,
You say we must do what we can. Right now we're bickering and passing useless laws which are doing very close to zero to fight spam, instead of actually fighting it.
Are you a pragmatic person? Do you believe the existing laws have stopped even 1% of spam?
The law applies to out of state mailers as far as I can read it. It seems to apply if the recipient's mailbox OR the sender are in California, not necessarily both.
California does have the power to regulate what Californians do to other Californians (mostly), but the commerce clause was tested here because this law does more than that.
The question of harvesters was not brought up by this law, it applies to all emailers. Indeed, another major problem with this law is it applies to anybody sending E-mail, not just people sending bulk e-mail, making it overbroad.
As for the concept of making an effort to go to the lowest common denominator, that's the whole point of my copmlaint. What states can do is deliberately limited in order to avoid people being forced to obey 50 laws at once, or even to have to follow the laws of the most restrictive state.
The label here is content-based, which is particularly disturbing. I think if you're going to regulate e-mail, the regulations should be "time and manner" regulations, and not dependent on the content of the E-mail. Making one mail legal and another because of what they say is another bad precedent.
What you need to do, if you're going to ban spam, is define spam, and make them label it as spam. Spam is spam regardless of what the message says. The things that make it spam are not the fact that it has an ad in it, but that it was bulk mailed to people who don't know the sender and never asked for it. Nothing to do with the content of the message.
Still my main point is if you want to talk about spam law, states are the wrong place. In fact, there's argument that even federal laws aren't much use because spammers can and do go international.
By that logic, a web site which takes orders is subject to the law of all 50 states because without a lot of work, web sites accept page requests from all 50 states.
When you actually ship a product into a state, you are indeed subject to its laws. What this ruling ignores is the design of the internet, that you don't normally know, when engaging in internet traffic, where the other end of the connection is.
Just law doesn't make people subject to laws when they would normally not be aware that they are violating them. Ignorance of the law _is_ an excuse when it comes to the laws of places you don't set foot in.
The commerce clause is there for exactly that purpose. It's there to say, "If you live in New York, you don't need to worry about the laws of California until you decide to do something in California."
But with E-mail, you don't decide to send E-mail to California. You decide to send E-mail to an unknown location, which might be California and might not be. Likewise with a web site, you don't decide to send pages to California, you send pages to anybody, and any one might be from California or might not be.
There's the rub. It's not tenable to say "if you don't know where it's going, you have to learn and obey the laws of all 50 states" but this decision
demands it.
That has nothing to do with spam at all.
Likewise the compelled speech rules are independent of spam. One district court, for example, ruled that a law requiring dairys to say whether they used BHT hormone was unconstitutional compelled speech.
BTW, under this law, if you ever send a resume to a company without an invitation, make sure you put "ADV:" in the subject line, since you will be advertising your services in the resume.
Good point. These laws have shown to be almost entirely ineffective. I get automated voice phone calls all the time, and they were banned by a federal law in 1992 that's probably constitutional.
I've even sued people who use these devices in court and won the $500 judgement, and gotten settlements in each case. However, in most of the cases you can't find the party without a lot of work, and when you can, it's more than $500 of work to get the case done.
When I have gone to court, the small claims judges have been highly surprised, and have never seen such cases before. Ie. nobody else is enforcing the law and the abuse continues.
We have 18 spam laws now in states and spam is up, up, up.
So I agree with the point you didn't know you made -- because the laws are ineffectual, they should not be allowed to affect people outside the state at all.
However, note that in this case we're talking about the interstate commerce coming into California.
My understanding is California has absolutely zero power to pass laws that affect commerce between Nevada and Oregon. Such laws will not be struck down by the California court, but by the federal one.
The courts have also ruled that you can't regulate advertising "just because it's advertising." There has to be another reason. Commercial speech has been ruled to be highly protected, while non commercial speech is extremely highly protected, which is different from the way some people think about it.
And a capable lawyer brings up everything that might have a bearing, even if they don't think it has a chance. It's the judge's job to dismiss it.
The question of whether the government can force us to classify our speech is an interesting but unsettled one.
However, it still remains the case that we don't want the government defining the syntax of email headers. If you want a law for that, the law should say, "Appropriate standards bodies for the E-mail being sent may define headers which allow the expression of whether the mail is commercial or not, and if they do, commercial mailers must use them."
However, the surpreme court has thrown out regulation of commercial speech "just because it is commercial." As we all know, there is religious spam, charitable spam, politicial spam and various other types. If there is to be a law about spam, court ruling suggest it needs to be about spam, not about commerce, which is simply the most popular type of spam.
New Mexico for example, passed a "decency" law like the CDA. This ruling, if upheld in the surprme court, would make everybody at risk for New Mexico's law and force them to check that their mail is not going to NM if it violates the decency standards of NM.
Some people's minds are clouded because this law regulates spammers and nobody likes spammers. Look past that, and see the precedent it sets about states laying any other sort of regulation they happen to like on you. You like the spam-stomping, but you won't like the next one.
More than that. While we may not mind the law saying that spammers have to check every law in every state and comply with all of them if they don't know the destination, that's not the regime we want generally for regulation of the internet.
<P>
And indeed this was fought over web sites, when states tried to regulate web sites on the theory that if a web site is serving pages to a user in New York, it had better follow the law of New York. But web sites don't know where they are serving pages to normally, and it would be much work for them to check.
<P>
Likewise it was fought over France's claim that since Yahoo auctions could be bid on from France, Yahoo could not sell things that violated French law.
<P>
So while you might love it banning spam, this ruling is saying that everybody has to know every law from all 50 states, and comply with all of them if sending an e-mail to an unknown destination.
With this precedent, you now have to figure out where you are mailing. Not just if you are mailing to a mailbox in California, but every time. If a person in Nevada mails a person whose mailbox location they don't know, and the person has to be in Oregon, this ruling says you need to find out where it is to make sure it's not in California.
In effect, they are banning sending mail when you don't know what state the target mailbox is in. You may be able to find out the state with a bit of whois work or searching lists, but California is not supposed to have the power to make you take these extra steps if it turns out the mail is not going to come to California.
In other words, California is making people from Nevada take extra steps on mail that turns out to be going to Oregon. That is unconstitutional.
The court has said that when you mail, you have a duty to figure out in advance what state the mailbox you're mailing to is in, and then find out the e-mail laws of that state and obey them.
Yikes! That's not at all the way E-mail works. You often have no idea what state the other guy's mailbox is in, and it's a pain, or impossible, to find out in many cases.
You may cheer that this law puts this burden on senders of UCE, but the reality is that if this decision stands, you are letting all states put whatever rules they care to pass on E-mail, and putting a duty on everybody to know all the laws and know the state they are mailing.
To add insult to injury, this law defines new syntax for the Subject header! The government should not be defining the forms of e-mail headers. The IETF does that. This is also compelled speech and apparently the defendant didn't even bring that issue up.
Less you think I'm defending spam, you can read my essay on the insidious evil of spam to find out the contrary.
But we must fight spam the right way, and setting precedents like this is a dark day for e-mail and the internet in general.
California had another spam law which wasn't so bad because the recipient had to notify, thus making it clear what state they were in.
Instead of calling these things "flaws" or "holes" or "exploits" I recommend a different term.
Call them a "window."
As in, "A window was discovered today into AOL instant messanger."
If you are lucky enough to have stock that has gone up in value (particularly founder's stock that has in effect a near-zero basis) you can get a double tax deduction in many cases for donating it rather than money.
The reason is you get to deduct the full value of the stock as a charitable donation, and you never pay the capital gains tax on it you would have paid if you sold it.
You need to have had it for a year. Contact a tax advisor for the full scoop.
If you do more than a tiny amount of charitable giving you can also set up a donor-advised fund (there is probably one in your area, do a web search). There you give stock to the fund (double deduction) and then have it dole out money to your favourite charities as you like it.
This is actually a very important question in the fight against spam. People argue over what it is.
Many people want a definition that includes any sort of mail that annoys them. You will never get wide agreement on something like that.
The best course is actually to find a minimal definition which includes most such mail (enough to solve the problem and take back our mailboxes) but almost deliberately misses out on a small fraction. That way everybody can agree that the minimal definition describes something to be stopped, even if there is more they would like stopped.
That way the definition can be used in whatever means you plan to stop spam, be it contracts and TOS, laws, blacklists, new protocols, filters etc.
The definition I use is very short and clear -- "bulk mail from a stranger."
You have to fine tune it a bit with definitions of the bulk threshold, and a more precise definition of stranger, but I feel it works, and hits 99% of the stuff I receive that might be called spam.
AdCritic was unicasting video, which has always been a strange and not very efficient idea. I never figured the business plans of the other video broadcast sites who wanted to send out free video. Looks like the only folks willing to pay are corporate video producers who have a lot riding on it.
Think about it. On a major TV network, the advertiser pays only one cent for each user who is presented the ad. Why should they pay more than that to a web site like adcritic, even if adcritic did try to charge the advertisers?
Indeed, why pay more than a cent to deliver a low-res version of the ad with a long wait? Well, perhaps to a more receptive viewer, since some chunk of those TV viewers are in the bathroom or fast forwarding, but still why pay more than a couple of cents?
And you can't deliver megabyte files for a penny, not that effectively. The internet is great but it's not (without multicast) for broadcasting. Broadcast TV is many orders of magnitude more efficient at getting data out to a lot of viewers if that data is video.
Plus on TV you watch the ad and you get a free program with it to boot.
Online radio faces the same problem, though the bandwidth need is not as crazy. But still, regular broadcast is orders of magnitude more efficient.
No, of course nobody is doing this, since there is no market for it yet. You would need a PVR that could take the data and it would have to be popular enough that the data provider would expect hundreds of thousands of subscriptions at a $20/year price before they would even consider it financially worthwhile.
Indeed I have described such products many times on the tivo newsgroup.
As for the listing data, it is in theory up for free on places like tvguide.com, but they would try to block that if people started machine downloading it and not viewing their ads as they have no revenue from such users.
However, the market value of the data is moderate, and I think a blessed pay service could easily happen for something more in the range of $20 a year not $120 a year, if there were a box to take it. The money you pay Tivo is really paying for all their software and maintenance and support, and frankly they are losing money even with the $10 per month.
Obviously you can be wary when somebody says "trust me."
But trust me, try out a Tivo or similar box with the listing data. It really is a whole different beast from a simple hard disk recorder that can record shows at set times. Even though you can fully comprehend what all the features do, you won't really understand how it changes your watching of TV until you try it for a while.
I mean, I'm very up on the technology, and in many ways I feel that even before I got a box I knew better what features they were missing, but even so, there are elements you won't indentify until you sit down and use it.
With the Tivo, if you get an older box (not a new one, you need to get one of old inventory or used) you can cancel the monthly service and use it for timed recording.
And even though the data is overpriced at $9.95 (it's not really overpriced, it's just that you are paying for software upgrades and part of the box in there, but it seems like you are paying for listings) the change is remarkable.
It's not just a better UI where you browse both upcoming, live and recorded programs by name and category. It's not just the way it adjusts when programs change channel or timeslot. Not just how it records only the new shows and not the reruns, or lets you see all the different times the same show is on. And it's not just the fact that when the machine has nothing to do, it records shows that match your other tastes and puts them in spare disk space.
The key is you think about TV differently. There is an asynch pile of stuff coming in and you watch it in any order you like, at any time you like. You never watch the live TV again. Almost never, at least. The pausing live TV is a red herring feature to bring in new users, it turns out to be not useful because you don't watch live tv.
Whatever your opinion of using government regulation of E-mail to stop spam, I hope that most of you will come out in opposition to the idea that the individual states should be doing so.
This has to be opposed on the general principle of the thing. Individual states should not be making any rules about E-mail. It doesn't matter if the rules support motherhood and condemn terrorists. It's a jurisdictional issue, and the laws are unconstitutional.
The reason is that for a large fraction of E-mails, the sender has no idea what state the recipient is in. If we let the states regulate E-mail "into the state" then we create a duty on every E-mailer to know what state they are mailing, and become aware of the E-mail laws of that state and obey them.
This means that if I, in California, send an E-mail to somebody who happens to be in Oregon (though I don't know that directly) that I must check to see that they are not in Washington. But Washington has, under the constitution, no power to put any requirements on people mailing from California to Oregon, nor should they have such power.
Consider: New Mexico passed laws restricting indecent material on the net. Are you now ready to be aware of that, and to check every E-mail you send to make sure it's not going to New Mexico or is not indecent by their standards? And check 49 other states while you're at it.
It would be a zoo.
Now, I'm not really keen on any government regulation of E-mail, but if it is to exist, it should only be federal.
Though there are 4 different sets of predictions, the main 3 agree exactly on the times of the peak -- 10 GMT and 18 GMT. I'm off to Japan or places near it. Airfares are super low -- $400 or so round trip to Japan.
Joe Haldeman saw the storm in 1966. That one was bigger, about 66,000 meteors per hour by estimate. He described it to me as being like in a car driving through the snow or being on the bridge of the enterprise. For the first time, he felt he was on a planet speeding through space. It gave him a real sense of scale.
That was enough for me to book the asian trip.
Note that Australia will get half the meteors of Japan, Guam or China, but has the best chance of clear skies and the most English.
Note here
You have to put your laptop in a fine vendor bag I guess.
Smallpox isn't as scary as you sound because it is NOT infectious during almost all of the incubation period. So you go home, do nothing for 10 days, and then you start getting sick and infecting people.
Immediately everybody who care into contact with you in the past day or so is vaccinated. Because we are looking the diseases is identified quickly. You are vaccinated too, which will help you, though not enough and you might die.
The figures on smallpox show 30% mortality, but that is from long ago, with a population not nearly as healty as ours, without modern medicine. Hard to predict, but fortunately the mortality will probably be much lower. Not that any is good.
They seem to think that forcing people to turn a laptop on is an important security measure. You used to be able to not even have it x-rayed if you could get it to display a boot.
With multi-swappable bay laptops, or even older ones, why did they think this was a way to protect against a weapon being in the laptop?
Of course. The question is, why make it easier for them? Half of why we want open source is to make our programs better. We don't want these privacy invading programs to be better and easier to use! That's quite different from our goals on most packages.
We do want to be sure that they aren't snooping on us improperly, and some feel that if they are open source, that means we can check for that sort of thing. But in fact, that's possibly a big mistake.
We can verify that the open source version is OK, but as you point out, there are people who can modify the code. And it's a lot easier to take the open source snooper and add patches to it to take out the safeguards than it is to write one without safeguards from scratch. This is really quite different from the goals of open source.
The people who take out the safeguards won't tell you they did it, nor will they contribute their patches. Nor will they follow the GPL.
When the FBI shows up with a DCS1000 Carnivore, they just attach a black box to your ethernet. They claim it's even wired so it can read, and not write, to your ethernet. But you don't get to inspect it, or check MD5s on the binaries to assure they were inspected to behave well.
Now, I like the idea of a free tool for ISPs so they can install it to comply with warrants and thus refuse the police black box. But what advantage is gained by that being open source. It would be nice if it's free to the ISPs, with source available if you sign a contract, but that's about it.
I'm also concerned that since secuity at ISPs is not super high (some run IIS for chrisakes) that it's not that hard for anybody, even a script kiddie to break in to a machine on my ISP's ethernet, and then get another script based on this open source snooper you want to snoop me. Forget the feds, these guys are worse.
So I want to work to encrypt all my traffic but I can't yet, so I hope to not make it easier for the snoops.
Not that it should be illegal or anything to release this package. I just want to argue that it's not a great idea. It doesn't match the reasons we like open source.
That's not quite true. In many regimes the network centers are still run by private individuals and even corporations. Many totalitarian states still have private companies.
The question is how easy do we make it. I don't know about this GNU carnivore but one thing FBI's Carnivore/DCS1000 does is track DHCP and radius traffic so that it associates IP addresses with real userids. Not something you can as easily do with a standard router.
Instead of writing tools to make it easy to snoop, we should be writing opportunistic crypto tools to make it harder.
Because it's never a black and white, 1 and 0 matter. We like open source software because the users maintain it and keep it high quality, and we can fix the bugs in it. We can also be more confident in its security if we compile it ourselves.
But this is one piece of software I don't want to be easier to use, and maintained at higher quality. Most of us are never going to use it ourselves.
But I do want to be sure it's not got hidden holes, so there is a dilemma. But the right answer may be in some mix, not the pure open source model.
And you're dreaming if you think the spooks who take and enhance this software here or elsewhere are going to contribute back their modifications, GPL or no GPL.