That's a great book that everybody should read. But it's not about math. It's about how people misuse math. I know this because I have over a billion seconds of experience!
They don't want to have to know about racks or buildings. They just want to print, or get a file from a network share.
And how does tacking a cutsy word onto a functional ID string further that goal? I think that calling the printer on the second floor of building 12 "P12-2" is the best way to make life easy for users. Maybe calling it "Fred" instead is more user friendly. Calling it "P12-2-Fred" is the worst of both worlds.
Here's a useful ally: Oprah Winfrey. I've heard her complain about all the wall warts she has to lug around. You want a crusade to have impact, get five minutes on her show. If you think the Slashdot effect is awesome, wait till you start getting angry phone calls and emails from millions of outraged Oprah viewers.
Oh well, OK then. I still want to go back to expensive domain names (I'll see to it after I've finished selling skis to Satan) but I'll concede that it probably wouldn't impact spam much. Then again, nothing will, short of a meaningful ID infrastructure so that somebody who wants to send you email has to actually identify themselves. So all this ranting against "spam-friendly" service providers is really silly.
$50 was the price charged by NS when.com and the other major domains were first invented. I forget when they lowered the fee, (1995?) but as I recall they lowered it to $35 in an effort to head off attempts to end their monopoly.
Um, why would you not expect that to be a problem for 3LD registrars?
Because if everybody's getting spam from *.welovespam.com, nobody's going to want to register in that namespace.
If you want to keep spammers from buying and throwing away domains you need to make it too expensive for them, and I doubt $50 would be enough to do the job... and once you get the price high enough to deter spammers, it's going to deter non-spammers as well.
To be honest, I suppose I'm really bitching about the fact that people decided that registration costs were too high, and bitched about it until the marketplace was made competitive. This meant you could renew your domain for a small annual fee, but also that you can't get a really useful domain name without paying a lot of money to a squatter. Ironic, no?
But back to spammers. Spam is profitable because there's almost no overhead. Obviously it's true for the cost of sending out the spam, but it's also true for domain registrations. Never mind the $10/year that most people pay. Anybody who needs a lot of disposable domains can register them in bulk for pennies each.
I suppose I should be arguing that all domains should cost $10, no matter what. That would certainly make it less cost effective to use disposable domains. (Or maybe not. Spamming is pretty profitable.) But for me, the $50 figure always comes to mind, because I remember everybody whining about it when Network Solutions had a monopoly and that's what they charged. People didn't complain because it was a lot of money (it's not). They complained because it was obviously mostly profit, and that ticked them off.
That was sarcasm. I used to use them, and bailed after not being able to get my email with any reliability for days at a time. And while they offer uncapped bandwidth, I'm dubious of their ability to actually provide it. Couldn't say for sure, because I never served that many bits.
That "best price" you mention requires a ten year up front payment. Having walked away from $60 or so in advance payments I'd already made to them, I'd think twice about giving them $700.
I'll say it again: if your web site has any volume at all, you'll spend a lot more than $50 a year on hosting. If you go cheap, you have to live with either bandwidth caps or reliability issues. There's no free lunch here.
Right, and when was the last time you heard of that happening to anybody?
A long time ago, when I was still silly enough to think I could help stamp out spam one spammer at a time, I looked up the whois entry for somebody who was spamming me. The phone number was useless (don't recall whether it was bogus or just didn't pick up) so I found out who lived at the address given and called them. It was an old woman who didn't even own a computer.
I presented this evidence to the registrar — and got nowhere. The person answering abuse complaints didn't even understand that there was an issue. After a couple of clueless email exchanges, they just ignored me.
I know what you're saying: registrars should be required to investigate complaints like this. But if they did, it would cost them a lot. Which would mean no more cheap registrations. Which is where I came in.
Anyway, what makes you think that we can file complaints faster than spammers and scammers can register new domains?
The thing is, if you made SLDs unaffordable, then there would be a demand for reliable third-level registrars, and many many people would switch to using reliable 3LD registrars, and the same problem would exist at the third level instead of the second.
Yes, but then you'd have an easy way to identify domains from a spam-friendly registrar: just look at the 3LDN. You can't do that with 2LDNs registered by Wild West (not without a whois lookup, which adds too much overhead) and even if you could, you'd end up filtering a lot of innocent sites.
Anyway, I question your definition of $50/year as "unaffordable." Even annual hosting costs on a minimal web site are more than that. Most people who maintain real web sites could easily afford it. A few would switch to third-level rather than spend that much money just to have a 2LDN for their blog or vanity site. (Though, come to think of it, most blogs already use 3LDNs.) But that's not a matter of affordability, that's a matter of how much something is worth to you.
Actually, it's a lot less than $10 if you register a lot of domains at once. And no, forcing squatters to buy multiple years at once won't raise their average costs much, because squatters often hold on to their domains for years before finding a buyer. I suppose spammers might be hurt, but given the scale of the spam business, not by much.
Anyway, what is the big deal about $50 a year? If your web site has any volume at all, it's costing you thousands to to keep the lights on. The day when you could host a major web site on a server in your closet is long gone.
So what? It's not that hard to fake registration data. The registration data for my own web site is bogus, because I registered it before registrars started offering anonymous registration.
It would be trivial to track purchasing behavior based on phone numbers, and this would force spammers to somehow get access to a new phone number each time... raising their cost somewhat.
When I was with AT&T, that's about what I paid. But every time I had to deal with them, it was a nightmare. After the umpteenth snafu, I decided my sanity was worth an extra $15/month for Speakeasy.
Maybe some registrars are more spam-friendly than others, but as long as domains are so absurdly cheap, there's not a lot registrars can do to prevent abuse. If they freeze one domain, the spammer or phisher or whatever just spends a few bucks to get another one.
Ever get spam from Continental Who's Who? They use a different domain name with every daily email!
Not that I think it will ever happen, but I'd dearly love to go back to when domain registration was a monopoly, and a second level domain cost you $50 a year. That's not a lot compared to the cost of maintaining a high-visibility web site — and low-visibility sites don't need second level domains. This situation ended when people started whining about getting "ripped off" by registrars. Opening up competition brought registration fees down, but it also destroyed service levels and enabled another kind of ripoff: squatters who can afford to register thousands of domains on the off chance that somebody might be willing to pay a few thousand bucks to use them.
Astroturfing would be if he had a bunch of bogus users telling us how great WISPs are. (Astroturf == fake grass roots.) The submission is dishonest. When you report on a business, you should state any interest you have in it. And even if you have an interest, it's stupid to simply ignore the downsides of the technology you're trying to promote — especially on Slashdot, where the technerds will tear you apart.
In some cases there is shared space on the cable side,
Some cases. Not a lot. I'm surprised there are any. Cable companies are not anxious to support their own competition, and have successfully fought efforts to require them to share their infrastructure. Except, I guess, in some locales, including yours.
Slashdot Mirror
You can always fill it out with Sphereland.
That's a great book that everybody should read. But it's not about math. It's about how people misuse math. I know this because I have over a billion seconds of experience!
No it's not. Sorry.
Good point. Ironic that it comes from an AC!
Why do people always overlook the latency issues with this RFC?
How do you bring somebody to small claims court who lives in Russia or Nigeria? How do you even trace the origin of spam from a botnet?
They don't want to have to know about racks or buildings. They just want to print, or get a file from a network share.
And how does tacking a cutsy word onto a functional ID string further that goal? I think that calling the printer on the second floor of building 12 "P12-2" is the best way to make life easy for users. Maybe calling it "Fred" instead is more user friendly. Calling it "P12-2-Fred" is the worst of both worlds.
Here's a useful ally: Oprah Winfrey. I've heard her complain about all the wall warts she has to lug around. You want a crusade to have impact, get five minutes on her show. If you think the Slashdot effect is awesome, wait till you start getting angry phone calls and emails from millions of outraged Oprah viewers.
Oh well, OK then. I still want to go back to expensive domain names (I'll see to it after I've finished selling skis to Satan) but I'll concede that it probably wouldn't impact spam much. Then again, nothing will, short of a meaningful ID infrastructure so that somebody who wants to send you email has to actually identify themselves. So all this ranting against "spam-friendly" service providers is really silly.
$50 was the price charged by NS when .com and the other major domains were first invented. I forget when they lowered the fee, (1995?) but as I recall they lowered it to $35 in an effort to head off attempts to end their monopoly.
Um, why would you not expect that to be a problem for 3LD registrars?
Because if everybody's getting spam from *.welovespam.com, nobody's going to want to register in that namespace.
If you want to keep spammers from buying and throwing away domains you need to make it too expensive for them, and I doubt $50 would be enough to do the job... and once you get the price high enough to deter spammers, it's going to deter non-spammers as well.
To be honest, I suppose I'm really bitching about the fact that people decided that registration costs were too high, and bitched about it until the marketplace was made competitive. This meant you could renew your domain for a small annual fee, but also that you can't get a really useful domain name without paying a lot of money to a squatter. Ironic, no?
But back to spammers. Spam is profitable because there's almost no overhead. Obviously it's true for the cost of sending out the spam, but it's also true for domain registrations. Never mind the $10/year that most people pay. Anybody who needs a lot of disposable domains can register them in bulk for pennies each.
I suppose I should be arguing that all domains should cost $10, no matter what. That would certainly make it less cost effective to use disposable domains. (Or maybe not. Spamming is pretty profitable.) But for me, the $50 figure always comes to mind, because I remember everybody whining about it when Network Solutions had a monopoly and that's what they charged. People didn't complain because it was a lot of money (it's not). They complained because it was obviously mostly profit, and that ticked them off.
Yes, and DreamHost is so reliable.
That was sarcasm. I used to use them, and bailed after not being able to get my email with any reliability for days at a time. And while they offer uncapped bandwidth, I'm dubious of their ability to actually provide it. Couldn't say for sure, because I never served that many bits.
That "best price" you mention requires a ten year up front payment. Having walked away from $60 or so in advance payments I'd already made to them, I'd think twice about giving them $700.
I'll say it again: if your web site has any volume at all, you'll spend a lot more than $50 a year on hosting. If you go cheap, you have to live with either bandwidth caps or reliability issues. There's no free lunch here.
Right, and when was the last time you heard of that happening to anybody?
A long time ago, when I was still silly enough to think I could help stamp out spam one spammer at a time, I looked up the whois entry for somebody who was spamming me. The phone number was useless (don't recall whether it was bogus or just didn't pick up) so I found out who lived at the address given and called them. It was an old woman who didn't even own a computer.
I presented this evidence to the registrar — and got nowhere. The person answering abuse complaints didn't even understand that there was an issue. After a couple of clueless email exchanges, they just ignored me.
I know what you're saying: registrars should be required to investigate complaints like this. But if they did, it would cost them a lot. Which would mean no more cheap registrations. Which is where I came in.
Anyway, what makes you think that we can file complaints faster than spammers and scammers can register new domains?
The thing is, if you made SLDs unaffordable, then there would be a demand for reliable third-level registrars, and many many people would switch to using reliable 3LD registrars, and the same problem would exist at the third level instead of the second.
Yes, but then you'd have an easy way to identify domains from a spam-friendly registrar: just look at the 3LDN. You can't do that with 2LDNs registered by Wild West (not without a whois lookup, which adds too much overhead) and even if you could, you'd end up filtering a lot of innocent sites.
Anyway, I question your definition of $50/year as "unaffordable." Even annual hosting costs on a minimal web site are more than that. Most people who maintain real web sites could easily afford it. A few would switch to third-level rather than spend that much money just to have a 2LDN for their blog or vanity site. (Though, come to think of it, most blogs already use 3LDNs.) But that's not a matter of affordability, that's a matter of how much something is worth to you.
Actually, it's a lot less than $10 if you register a lot of domains at once. And no, forcing squatters to buy multiple years at once won't raise their average costs much, because squatters often hold on to their domains for years before finding a buyer. I suppose spammers might be hurt, but given the scale of the spam business, not by much.
Anyway, what is the big deal about $50 a year? If your web site has any volume at all, it's costing you thousands to to keep the lights on. The day when you could host a major web site on a server in your closet is long gone.
So what? It's not that hard to fake registration data. The registration data for my own web site is bogus, because I registered it before registrars started offering anonymous registration.
It would be trivial to track purchasing behavior based on phone numbers, and this would force spammers to somehow get access to a new phone number each time... raising their cost somewhat.
http://www.tossabledigits.com/
When I was with AT&T, that's about what I paid. But every time I had to deal with them, it was a nightmare. After the umpteenth snafu, I decided my sanity was worth an extra $15/month for Speakeasy.
Maybe some registrars are more spam-friendly than others, but as long as domains are so absurdly cheap, there's not a lot registrars can do to prevent abuse. If they freeze one domain, the spammer or phisher or whatever just spends a few bucks to get another one.
Ever get spam from Continental Who's Who? They use a different domain name with every daily email!
Not that I think it will ever happen, but I'd dearly love to go back to when domain registration was a monopoly, and a second level domain cost you $50 a year. That's not a lot compared to the cost of maintaining a high-visibility web site — and low-visibility sites don't need second level domains. This situation ended when people started whining about getting "ripped off" by registrars. Opening up competition brought registration fees down, but it also destroyed service levels and enabled another kind of ripoff: squatters who can afford to register thousands of domains on the off chance that somebody might be willing to pay a few thousand bucks to use them.
your house is being towed.
I hate when that happens!
Your upfront costs are horrendous, but $60 for 3 megabits is actually pretty good compared to most DSL services.
Astroturfing would be if he had a bunch of bogus users telling us how great WISPs are. (Astroturf == fake grass roots.) The submission is dishonest. When you report on a business, you should state any interest you have in it. And even if you have an interest, it's stupid to simply ignore the downsides of the technology you're trying to promote — especially on Slashdot, where the technerds will tear you apart.
In some cases there is shared space on the cable side,
Some cases. Not a lot. I'm surprised there are any. Cable companies are not anxious to support their own competition, and have successfully fought efforts to require them to share their infrastructure. Except, I guess, in some locales, including yours.
Personally I'm a big fan of municipal fiber, but that's a rant for another day.
No, I think we need to start ranting about it now. The lack of competition and infrastructure in the U.S. ISP marketplace is just plain humliating.
Proof that M. Night Shyamalan's 15 minutes are up. "I see dead filmmakers!"
I'm 6'8" you insensitive clod! And there's more to irony than making a Star Trek reference. Come to think of it, Star Trek is the opposite of irony.