Yahoo has said that now, to use their free email service, you must consent to having emails for Yahoo products sent to you. It's no more spam than the Slashdot banner ads are. (Ad blockers notwithstanding.) They will send you third-party advertising, too, if you haven't opted-out.
I forget exactly, but it looks like the big change is that they changed the option from a single Yes/No option to multiple, categorized Yes/No option quite some time ago, and are just now implementing the change. Furthermore, one of the categories is for the Yahoo messages, so it still looks like you can opt-out of it.
Spam [*] is unsolicited commercial/bulk email. This is not unsolicted, as you're using the Yahoo service to begin with.
[*] A gentle reminder: it's "spam" not "SPAM" . I don't know why people keep thinking it's an acryonym.
I registered there several years ago, but wound up not using it too much. (One of these days I've GOT to get broadband.) Just a few weeks ago, the used-only-there, Sneakemail address I gave them started getting beastality porn spam. Complaints as well as a snail-mail letter went unanswered.
I figured a list of email addresses was snuck out by an employee, but now I have to wonder if there was some last minute, desperate attempt to raise funds.
The comparison is often made between banner ads and TV advertising. Both basically act as a source of revenue for the content provider (TV station / web site) when viewed by the consumer. However, there really is no way for the advertiser to know if his ad was *actually viewed by the recipient.* (OK, there might be some tricks you can do on the web, but let's leave that aside for now.)
So there are two extremes possible here, with reality probably somewhere in between:
Everyone always looks at a banner ad / pop-up for a reasonable amount of time and carefully considers the product or service being considered.
Everyone uses one banner ad blocking program or another, and no one ever sees a banner ad.
What I'm trying to say here is that the advertiser can't tell the difference between these two scenarios. This makes banner ads in the presence of ad-blocking technology essentially equivalent to TV advertising.
The fact that it is sometimes possible to determine if an ad was served means that banner ads are a *better* advertising medium than TV, except for the fact that the web is less ubiquitous than TV. A TV advertiser has no way of knowing if I saw his ad, or if I fast forwarded though a recording of the TV program. No one is predicting the death of TV, so I think that predictions of doom for the web are a bit premature.
The trouble with spam is, we're all complaining about it, but most of the time it isn't illegal! Until spam is illegal than blocking it through technical means and blocking IP address ranges carpet-bomb style to try to prevent it hurts legitimate users more than it hurts the spammers.
Whether or not spam is legal is not relevant. Blocking mail isn't illegal.
The spammers will just be moved by their spam-friendly ISP to an unblocked range
Yes, and that's what blocklists like SPEWS are for. If you're using a spam-friendly ISP, you shouldn't get to send mail to me. You make it sound like the spammer here is entirely at fault, and the spam-friendly ISP is somehow innocent. In this hypothetical situation, they chose to take a known spammer and assist them. Not kick them off their network once they found them, but help them spam.
That's the problem with all these god damn blacklists, especially ones like SPEWS who actively seek to punish everyone getting service from an ISP for the sake of hurting a couple of people.
SPEWS seeks to punish no one. SPEWS lists IP addresses of spam-friendly ISPs, in order to quarantine them. Any email coming from such an ISP has a higher-than-average probablity of being spam, and therefore some people may choose to block it. Once the spammer is gone, the SPEWS listing goes away.
It's exactly the same as a boycott. You may not choose to do business with some company because of some less-than-ethical business practice they use; SPEWS allows one to identify less-than-ethical ISPs and avoid accepting mail (er, spam) from them.
If the emails cost 1 cent to send, then those 5,000,000 spams now cost them $50,000 to send, which obliterates their $25,000 profit, and then some. Suddenly, it's not worth it. And they'll stop doing it.
Except many spammers now routinely use fake credit card numbers to get the ISP throwaway accounts they use now. OK, $50,000 is a bit much to put on a credit card, but if the price were a bit lower, it wouldn't be much of a problem.
One could view the fee as a "suggested voluntary donation", however scientist are generally not allowed to spend research grants on charity.
Page charges are typically requested by even for-profit journals. This appears to be an online analogue to that. Many grants have a line item for this very thing. In every journal I've published, they've been optional, but I'm not sure what percentage of researchers actually pay them.
I submit, without comment, the following from the
Jet Blue privacy policy:
Our ticketing functionality is powered by OpenSkies Inc. The financial and personal information collected on this site is not shared with any third parties, and is protected by secure servers.
There is no further information there about sharing of data with any agency, governmental or not.
Red is the colour of blood and, since the time of cavemen, has been the accepted colour for danger.
In your (and my) culture, maybe. But this is hardly a universal fact. Just using your explanation above, red could also be the accepted color for life and health.
In China, for example, "Red, a bright, auspicious color associated with warmth, life and the Fire Element, denotes good fortune and happiness." (See here)
The greatest danger to the human race is still the human race itself, be it from nuclear, biological, or nanotechnological weapons or accidents. The very knowledge that something would survive might even be enough to cool a few hotheads.
Or incense them enough that "it's ok to kill every one off here, there are people on Mars that will carry on the species." Secondly, it would be amazingly difficult for either nuclear or biological weapons to eliminate the human species. Destroy civilization, perhaps, but not extinction.
The best way to ensure human survival is to have it distributed across the solar system in self-sufficient enclaves. A few kilometers of vacuum makes a great firewall.
In theory, perhaps. But we can't even get Biodome to work. The idea of building something to that effect incredibly far distances away, where if you screw it up, you die, is even less likely to be successful.
We're currently having difficulty permanent manned presence orbiting our own planet, and that's only a few minutes away. Mars is months if not years of travel time away. We've spent nearly twenty years and 17 billion dollars, and we can now support three (two?) people up there. The Shuttle fleet is now almost entirely dedicated to just refueling and restocking missions.
Yes, I agree if we're going to have a manned space program, it's good to have a long-term vision of what we want to do with it. On the other hand, I don't believe it's been addressed why we need a manned space program, or why we need a manned program.
Sure, long-term survivability of the species is a concern. Eventually, the Earth will experience a major impact event. It's inevitable. But also unlikely in the "near" future. Frankly, I suspect this money could be better spent researching more efficient power generation systems, hybrid cars, etc, that would have a greater impact on human society than visiting an asteroid.
Manned spaceflight is great, sure. It inspires people like little else. But space exploration has pretty much always been science-driven. [1] We go to space to learn new things, see new things, etc. And, quite frankly, many of these things can be done better, faster, with less risk, and orders of magnitude cheaper in an unmanned capacity. Manned spaceflight is quite inefficient. People are fragile, and require great amounts of protection, food, oxygen, etc. that unmanned spacecraft don't.
The International Space Station is the perfect example of this. Many of the scientific reasons for its existance no longer hold, so we're just throwing good money after bad at this point.
[1] Although there was a serious beat-the-Russkies-to-the-moon, military aspect to Apollo, as I understand it.
Hydrogen Fluoride supposedly passes right through your skin and attacks your bones.
Yes, this is true, but I believe the real danger lies in that the F- ions in your bloodstream scavenge Ca2+ ions. Since your body relies on ion concentration gradients for signal transmission across cell membranes and such, this is a Bad Thing. It eventually interferes with cardiac function.
Spilling HF on your hand is not bad because it will destroy your hand, but because it can kill you.
Bayesian is the only affective method I've seen for significant spam reduction.
Except filtering doesn't reduce the amount of spam you receive, just the amount that you receive that you see. Filtering just sweeps it under the rug, and the spammers increase the amount they send in order to make up for it.
I'm not against filtering, mind you, because it reduces the amount of time wasted with spam. I'm just pointing out that filtering is the least efficient method of dealing with it.
You know, when you put it that way, SPEWS are terrorists. Hurting innocents in an attempt to force a party only vaguely connected to the victims to accede to their wishes? What's the difference?
Because terrorists don't "hurt innocents," they engender fear and terror. They blow up bombs in crowded areas. They send horrible, infectious diseases through the mail. In one, your email doesn't get read. In the other, men, women, and children generally die agonizing deaths.
I hate it when people use the word "terrorist" to describe something that is totally unrelated. It belittles the word, and cheapens it. Much like "Nazi" was before 9/11.
Yes, this is indeed a poor policy. SPEWS exists so that the people who are violently against spam can pass the burden of fighting it onto the innocents who aren't as bothered by it.
No, SPEWS exists so that the people who are violently against spam can pass the burden of fighting it onto the people who are responsible for causing it, i.e. spam-friendly ISPs.
The fact that "innocents" are caught up in the block is unfortunate, but unavoidable from a practical standpoint. SPEWS doesn't list netblocks because they have a spammer or two present. SPEWS lists netblocks because the ISP knowingly and willfully hosts spammers even after they have been notified about them. Once the spammers go, the listing goes. Usually quite rapidly.
And they certainly don't mind getting told, step-by-step, how to do certain tasks.
The problem with using prefab, easy to use, pretty, "wizards" for various tasks is when you need to do something that you don't have a prefab wizard for, you're screwed.
And Mr Hemingway said there will be measures in place to make sure only fraudsters are trapped, rather than those who naturally find making such phone calls difficult.
Apparently the system isn't capable of false positives. "You can't be innocent, the machine says you're guilty. And since only guilty people are caught by the machine, you can't be innocent. QED."
Also note that the article is talking about voice-analysis stress testing (over the phone, surely that couldn't ever be inaccurate), not polygraphs. Polygraphs are a crock as well, of course, but this isn't them.
Slashdot Mirror
I forget exactly, but it looks like the big change is that they changed the option from a single Yes/No option to multiple, categorized Yes/No option quite some time ago, and are just now implementing the change. Furthermore, one of the categories is for the Yahoo messages, so it still looks like you can opt-out of it.
Spam [*] is unsolicited commercial/bulk email. This is not unsolicted, as you're using the Yahoo service to begin with.
[*] A gentle reminder: it's "spam" not "SPAM" . I don't know why people keep thinking it's an acryonym.
The Bill of Rights provides for no rights whatsoever. The Bill of Rights specifies limitations on the power of the government.
- "microsoft monopoly"
- Google: 572 hits
- MSN Newsbot: 142 hits
- "microsoft anti-trust"
- Google: 1600 hits
- MSN Newsbot: 50 hits
- "matrix" (for something not Microsoft related)
- Google: 3910 hits
- MSN Newsbot: 999 hits [*]
- "putnam scandal" (again, for something not Microsoft or tech related)
- Google: 2000 hits
- MSN Newsbot: 678 hits [*]
[*] The Newsbot hit-counter seems to pin at 999, so this may just reflect "some number greater than 1000."I figured a list of email addresses was snuck out by an employee, but now I have to wonder if there was some last minute, desperate attempt to raise funds.
So there are two extremes possible here, with reality probably somewhere in between:
What I'm trying to say here is that the advertiser can't tell the difference between these two scenarios. This makes banner ads in the presence of ad-blocking technology essentially equivalent to TV advertising.
The fact that it is sometimes possible to determine if an ad was served means that banner ads are a *better* advertising medium than TV, except for the fact that the web is less ubiquitous than TV. A TV advertiser has no way of knowing if I saw his ad, or if I fast forwarded though a recording of the TV program. No one is predicting the death of TV, so I think that predictions of doom for the web are a bit premature.
Yes, and that's what blocklists like SPEWS are for. If you're using a spam-friendly ISP, you shouldn't get to send mail to me. You make it sound like the spammer here is entirely at fault, and the spam-friendly ISP is somehow innocent. In this hypothetical situation, they chose to take a known spammer and assist them. Not kick them off their network once they found them, but help them spam.
SPEWS seeks to punish no one. SPEWS lists IP addresses of spam-friendly ISPs, in order to quarantine them. Any email coming from such an ISP has a higher-than-average probablity of being spam, and therefore some people may choose to block it. Once the spammer is gone, the SPEWS listing goes away.It's exactly the same as a boycott. You may not choose to do business with some company because of some less-than-ethical business practice they use; SPEWS allows one to identify less-than-ethical ISPs and avoid accepting mail (er, spam) from them.
Except many spammers now routinely use fake credit card numbers to get the ISP throwaway accounts they use now. OK, $50,000 is a bit much to put on a credit card, but if the price were a bit lower, it wouldn't be much of a problem.
Page charges are typically requested by even for-profit journals. This appears to be an online analogue to that. Many grants have a line item for this very thing. In every journal I've published, they've been optional, but I'm not sure what percentage of researchers actually pay them.
And if they'd both had guns, half the bar would be dead from the crossfire.
You mean like those legitimate offers I'm always getting for for penis enlargment pills, mortgage refinancing, and naked hot teens?
Much more humane, but then we wouldn't have any lawyers. They do occasionally have their uses.
I guess this means we will have to start referring to it as the Blue Screen of Poverty.
In your (and my) culture, maybe. But this is hardly a universal fact. Just using your explanation above, red could also be the accepted color for life and health.
In China, for example, "Red, a bright, auspicious color associated with warmth, life and the Fire Element, denotes good fortune and happiness." (See here)
Also: Symbolism of the color red in antiquity
Or incense them enough that "it's ok to kill every one off here, there are people on Mars that will carry on the species." Secondly, it would be amazingly difficult for either nuclear or biological weapons to eliminate the human species. Destroy civilization, perhaps, but not extinction.
In theory, perhaps. But we can't even get Biodome to work. The idea of building something to that effect incredibly far distances away, where if you screw it up, you die, is even less likely to be successful.
We're currently having difficulty permanent manned presence orbiting our own planet, and that's only a few minutes away. Mars is months if not years of travel time away. We've spent nearly twenty years and 17 billion dollars, and we can now support three (two?) people up there. The Shuttle fleet is now almost entirely dedicated to just refueling and restocking missions.
Yes, I agree if we're going to have a manned space program, it's good to have a long-term vision of what we want to do with it. On the other hand, I don't believe it's been addressed why we need a manned space program, or why we need a manned program.
Sure, long-term survivability of the species is a concern. Eventually, the Earth will experience a major impact event. It's inevitable. But also unlikely in the "near" future. Frankly, I suspect this money could be better spent researching more efficient power generation systems, hybrid cars, etc, that would have a greater impact on human society than visiting an asteroid.
Manned spaceflight is great, sure. It inspires people like little else. But space exploration has pretty much always been science-driven. [1] We go to space to learn new things, see new things, etc. And, quite frankly, many of these things can be done better, faster, with less risk, and orders of magnitude cheaper in an unmanned capacity. Manned spaceflight is quite inefficient. People are fragile, and require great amounts of protection, food, oxygen, etc. that unmanned spacecraft don't.
The International Space Station is the perfect example of this. Many of the scientific reasons for its existance no longer hold, so we're just throwing good money after bad at this point.
[1] Although there was a serious beat-the-Russkies-to-the-moon, military aspect to Apollo, as I understand it.
Yes, this is true, but I believe the real danger lies in that the F- ions in your bloodstream scavenge Ca2+ ions. Since your body relies on ion concentration gradients for signal transmission across cell membranes and such, this is a Bad Thing. It eventually interferes with cardiac function.
Spilling HF on your hand is not bad because it will destroy your hand, but because it can kill you.
If it was opt-in, it wouldn't be spam.
I'm not against filtering, mind you, because it reduces the amount of time wasted with spam. I'm just pointing out that filtering is the least efficient method of dealing with it.
Because terrorists don't "hurt innocents," they engender fear and terror. They blow up bombs in crowded areas. They send horrible, infectious diseases through the mail. In one, your email doesn't get read. In the other, men, women, and children generally die agonizing deaths.
I hate it when people use the word "terrorist" to describe something that is totally unrelated. It belittles the word, and cheapens it. Much like "Nazi" was before 9/11.
No, SPEWS exists so that the people who are violently against spam can pass the burden of fighting it onto the people who are responsible for causing it, i.e. spam-friendly ISPs.
The fact that "innocents" are caught up in the block is unfortunate, but unavoidable from a practical standpoint. SPEWS doesn't list netblocks because they have a spammer or two present. SPEWS lists netblocks because the ISP knowingly and willfully hosts spammers even after they have been notified about them. Once the spammers go, the listing goes. Usually quite rapidly.
The problem with using prefab, easy to use, pretty, "wizards" for various tasks is when you need to do something that you don't have a prefab wizard for, you're screwed.
Apparently the system isn't capable of false positives. "You can't be innocent, the machine says you're guilty. And since only guilty people are caught by the machine, you can't be innocent. QED."
Also note that the article is talking about voice-analysis stress testing (over the phone, surely that couldn't ever be inaccurate), not polygraphs. Polygraphs are a crock as well, of course, but this isn't them.