There are basic fundamental differences between Barack Obama and John McCain in how they will each end up screwing things up. It's really a choice of which way you want to have the country screwed up.
Sure, I am. Just hook me up with a few dozen OC-192 connections at each of the largest 100 cities in the country, and set me up with 1000 computers at each site, and I'll stream it in OGG Theora format. Oh, and I'll also need a satellite dish and receiver tuned to the C-SPAN channel.
I only "have" TV because my roommate has TV (because of his addiction to "Deal Or No Deal"). It's generally not worth having because it's content controlled by big corporations, not real people.
1. The H1B program, in spirit is a wonderful, clever thing. I have lived and worked in Europe, Japan and India. I love to travel and take in new experiences. Thanks to the H1 program, it allows for me to actually live and work here. In all honesty, it has been a great experience.
I think it's great you can travel around the world and work in different places.
2. The H1B program allows for _american_ companies to actually fill in a labour gap as and when required.
The problem here is that MOST of those hired via the H-1B program are not hired to fill a labour gap, per se. Instead, they are hired to fill in a gap of people who are willing to work for substandard pay levels, and work extreme workloads and longer hours.
3. Does the H1B program get abused as the article states ? Absolutely. I have seen it happen myself. There are huge number of shell companies ( called consultants ) out there who are absolutely flooding the H1B channels with applications for requirements which do not exist. The article is spot-on with its observations. The biggest victim of this whole thing however is the H1B program. Due to this channel-stuffing, legitimate american companies cannot actually recruit an employee when it is _really_ required since the quota has already been filled by fraudulent/redundant applications. These redundant and fraudulent applications really really need to be stopped for the H1B program to actually deliver what it actually set out to deliver.
Not all of the abuse is like this. In one case I know of in the past, a major american company primarily involved in high-technology engineering and manufacturing hired someone for a position as a Unix system administrator, despite a few dozen of them in that city being available for work (who were presumably US citizens). It turns out the person actually hired did have a graduate degree in a field unrelated to computers or engineering. She was then trained on Unix system administrator by that company, and she also sought out outside help to speed up her learning of Unix system administration. That's how I ended up meeting her.
The problem here is that this major company knew what they were doing. If they really had a true need for people in very specialized fields for which the supply of skilled and experienced people here had been exhausted, they would not have been trying to hire someone for a Unix system administrator job (which has an abundant supply of people available in large and small cities, and has for at least a decade).
4. There is a lot of talk about salaries and cost, and this is what I think. The H1B program is a cleverly crafted law in some ways. The H1 application belongs to the employee and and not the employer. The employee is free to change his employers as and when he or she wants to. If an employee thinks that he is being paid less than the market value, he or she is free to seek out an employer who will pay him as much as he or she deserves. The free market will, at the end of the day take care of it. Also if there is a company which pays its employees based on his legal status and not his skills and ability, please do not consider working for it, whatever might be your legal status.
This is not true. If someone with an H-1B visa is let go from their current job, they have a finite period of time to find a new employer who can sponsor them before their visa expires. The visa lets them in the country. The sponsorship is required for the visa to remain valid. Maybe they can work at any job for the month or two they are allowed to stay when losing sponsorship. But they must find that sponsorship by a deadline to keep the visa.
Apparently, part of the big picture of abuse is that the "recruiting companies" that they get their work through is carrying out some fraudulent practices to keep them here. The shell companies may be part of that. That fact is, the free mark
97000 applications times 21 percent comes to 20370 cases that businesses need to be fined. Now I'll pick a totally random number of 700 billion dollars, and divide it by 20370. Each business involved should be fined 34,364,261 dollars and 18 cents per bad application.
Not just anybody can do this. It has to be someone that knows what they are doing. It has to be someone that understands the technology involved thoroughly. Schools that are run by non-technology people will have much of the same issues as businesses run by non-technology people... they will be afraid of hiring someone that knows so much about something.
What it sounds like this university is doing, or trying to do, or may end up doing out of foolishness, is simply outsourcing. I can tell you from experience you will simply never be satisfied by outsourcing a crucial function like email. But it sounds like this is a "low technology" school that is unwilling to invest in, and deploy, their own network facilities to do email. Are they afraid they cannot acquire the technical skills to accomplish this? It sure sounds like a school I would not recommend anyone go to for any kind of science or engineering education. May it would be fine for some other fields not related to technology.
So why not just let the students each, individually, pick their own service provider? They don't have to have email addresses with the school's domain name on it. And by picking their own outside the school's domain, they get an address they can keep once they graduate (or transfer out of desperation).
In addition to the above, the school should still run an internal-only email system. This email system would have no access to the internet. It would not accept SMTP connections from outside. It would not attempt to make email connections to the outside. All email would be within that system alone. Then the only spam people would get would be from someone they can suspend, kick out, demote, or fire (or in the case of tenured faculty, lock them out of the internal system). Let everyone use their outside email for outside communications (reaching it through the campus LAN/WAN is OK), and their inside email for inside communications.
Teachers will want to be able to do bulk communications with students in their classes, for example. That can get troublesome on an outside provider, because this can appear to be spam because of the duplications and/or large lists. Doing such academic specific email only on the internal system ensures control, and academic specific policies can be enforced (such as how to determine what is spam). Also, research faculty may need greater levels of security than outside vendors should ever be trusted with. If an outside vendor is used, many departments will still end up setting up something of their own, anyway.
For a good example of 6 and 12 inch data, look at the state of Indiana (in the US) in Google Earth. In 2005/6, Indiana re-imaged the entire state with aerial photos. The whole state is at least 12 inches and all metro areas are 6 inches.
The classical region locking allowed manufacturers to price products for specific areas. For example they sell things cheaper in India, because the cost of living and corresponding wages are lower there, despite exchange rates with countries like UK and US. This has the effect of blocking products like American movies sold in India cheaply making their way back to the US as cheap gray market and underpricing.
As companies will, this has gone from gray market deterrence to abuse of the consumers. For example products are not released at the same time in all regions. DVDs get released later in some regions because the theatrical showings are later. The abuse is that consumers get screwed two ways because it makes it so easy to delay in some regions.
Pirates generally don't use region locking. Guess which products lots of consumers prefer.
The basic problem with the idea that it is wrong to send something to someone that does not want it is that it turns the idea of an open communication medium on its ear. It is fine that with Yahoo Messenger you cannot send anything to someone until they accept you as a contact. Email was not intended to work that way.
Email was intended for civil participants that would not use it to steal from others. Of course that was naive about the real world, and naive about the protocols being used for real world communications. But if you want to speak of intentions, that was the intent.
Trying to introduce this sort of permission into email means that it can no longer be used to communicate with people prior to establishing a relationship. Should a law get passed that says it is wrong to send things to people they do not want essentially enforces this. You now have the situation where I cannot send you a receipt for your purchase because I have no idea if you want it or not. And as a commercial entity, I cannot take the chance that you don't want it without explicit permission.
Prior communications, transactions, or business relations would imply the intent to communicate within reason about it. The law probably needs to include a clause that says this to be clear about it. This is why a similar clause exists to permit communication by telephone in similar circumstances. It also needs to include a clause that allows the would-be recipient to cancel the relation to the extent that it permits communication by particular methods such as email, or communication about issues not specific to the existing relation (e.g. don't send me advertising about other products, just notify me when the product I ordered is shipped).
If you post in a forum where your email address is available (and more people would make it available if the spam issue did not exist), then it is reasonable to assume this implies the permission for reasonable communications specifically about the subject matter posted. It would not necessarily imply permission for communications about other matters. If I post in a photography forum that I am looking to buy a particular type of camera, that would reasonably imply that I want communications from those who might offer to sell me that type. That could be troublesome if 9000 people send me email with offers to sell me exactly the type of camera I want. But none of those 9000 people would be abusing email if each only sends me one message that is exactly about what I asked for. This would be the rare situation (compared to the rampant abuse of spam taking place today).
And then we're back to Yahoo Messenger instead of email.
I don't see why that would be so.
Personally, I think that email today is already broken enough that it cannot and should not be used to deliver anything of importance. Most people do not receive all the email that sent to them - it is filtered by third parties that are not interested in filtering errors. This means email is unreliable. So if I am sending you a receipt or a notification of a credit I have no idea if it is getting through to you or not. It is therefore useless.
That certainly is a situation we have today with email. I would suggest that it would not have been so had a correct and proper law been in place since the beginning of email that carefully, and constitutionally, prohibited abuses with specific and strong penalties (strong because of the difficult of bringing cases).
That law is in fact prohibiting speech. Even if it were rewritten to be more narrowly focused on spammers, it would still be the wrong approach.
The problem with spam is not a speech issue. It is a property issue.
The protection of free speech in the US Constitution does not grant speakers the right to steal property rights. You cannot steal my paper, ink, and printing press and justify the theft as enabling your freedom of speech.
Remember... free as in free speech, not as in free beer.
Email costs more to the recipient than to the sender. The sending server only needs to store mail until it can exchange it with the recipient's MX host. In the case of spamming, this cost is virtually nil since the message tends to be the same for all recipients, so only the recipient email address is all that needs to be stored. The recipient server has to store each message individually, if it arrived individually. It also has to store the messages longer, until the recipient's user agent (client) picks up the mail. And that pickup is through yet another active service (IMAP, POP, Web).
Sending something to someone that doesn't want that is fundamentally wrong. It is a theft of computing resources. It can also be a theft of personal time. When this is done on a very small scale, such as trying to contact an old friend that has no interest in communicating with you, or asking someone a question about free software they wrote when they don't want to deal with such questions, then it's generally not a big deal. It's still wrong, but the scale of it doesn't rise to be a criminal interest.
Doing this sending in bulk, however, indicates the intent to benefit in some way from this theft, usually financially. Sometimes there are other forms of benefit, such as political.
It could be argued that existing property law already provides the proper protection. However, this would require a complex constructive argument in court, which might also be easy to knock down. Email, the internet protocols, and the way computers work, are complex issues that would have to be dealt with over and over in courts this way. What we need is a law clearly written to deal with the property theft aspect of spam. It needs to avoid any reference to what the content of a message is. It needs to focus on the means by which the sender is doing the theft in bulk (even if the case before a court is only one instance of what the spammer did). It needs to make clear that freedom of speech is about the right to say what one wants to say, not about giving the speaker a right to steal property from others to achieve that speech.
The law needs to make clear that sending email against the wishes of the recipient is theft. It needs to make clear that doing so in bulk raises the level of this theft to be criminal. It also needs to make clear that the definition of bulk can include sending any one given recipient just one copy.
Such a law should do better to stand within the protections of free speech in the First Amendment.
Surely they would not be intercepting anything more than port 80. If porn web sites used other random port numbers they could bypass this. Pick a number that isn't needed on porn web site, but which ISPs would have big problems trying to intercept, such as 993 (it would break people accessing secure office email if they intercepted this).
Finland's geek population is united against censorship for a simple reason. It does not and cannot work. This has not been disputed - everyone and their mother has been trying to tell the lawmakers that, including the Federal Bureau before the law came to force. Effective Internet censorship is not possible without an effort on China's or Saudi Arabia's level, and even then Saudi Arabia's leaks like a sieve. I can think of four ways of circumventing Finland's without specialist knowledge, and I got a 1/5 out of my single network course. In fact everything about this is permeated by bureaucratic incompetence to the point that accusing W3C of child porn is not disproportionate. Not only does the censorship only target web pages, which I'm told make up a very small percentage of online child porn, there's no oversight, no way to appeal, and in several publicized cases, no effort to remove the material from the Internet.
I bet the problem with W3C is not that they host any child porn, or even any porn at all. Instead, W3C hosts technical details on protocols that would allow people, especially teens, to figure out how to bypass the blocking filters. Once someone learns about things like TCP and port numbers, they can figure out how to bypass things. For example, by using HTTPS, the proxy will have no idea what the host NAME is, since that is inside the encrypted protocol. All the proxy can do is pass on the TCP connection via the CONNECT command (if the browser has the proxy configured) or via the TCP SYN packet (if they route map the traffic via the proxy). So all the porn sites need to do is enable HTTPS. Then the only way to block is by IP address, or do the stupid thing and block all port 443 or anything that looks like HTTPS.
Matti Nikki is both a devoted proponent of online freedom and kind of a dick. He published a list of censored sites to prove that censorship makes them much easier to catch with an automated webcrawler without restricting access in any meaningful way. (Later examinations of this list suggest that it has a 2% accuracy rate, but happens to feature the first Google search results for "gay porn.") When Nikki converted the list into links, his site was censored. That is to say, a domestic text-only website was censored using a law that legalized the censorship of foreign child porn. BOOM! Organized resistance!
So just post the list on Slashdot and get Slashdot censored.
Censorship made the evening news a couple of times, appeared in some newspapers and talk shows, and sparked one large geek demonstration back in March. "Google is a browser! Google is a browser!" we chanted, quoting the Bureau's chief on why Google has not been censored despite making child porn available as much as Nikki. We had no effect whatsoever. Okay, some ISPs have made censorship an opt-out system and maybe the Parliament will be wary about expanding it. Aside from that, I feel like the biggest achievement involved was me pissing off a bodyguard of the Minister of Communications with my taped-over mouth. Everything about the issue seems to be mired in its morass of utter incompetence that makes it meaningful debate impossible. For instance, the spokesman of a usually benign children-saving organization appeared in a debate and went on for minutes about the way censorship is a valuable statement of principles (as if making child porn strictly illegal wasn't enough) without ever addressing her opponent's statement that censorship does not work, cannot work, and does more harm than good to its cause. That debate sums up this whole sordid mess.
I'm all for censorship on an opt-in basis, provided there is competition that allows someone using censorship to choose who to use for their censoring parameters so they might choose to use the ones that are more accurate.
I'd like to see a list that censors big evil corporations. I'd like to see a list that censors undemocratic governments. I'd like to see a list that censors web sites that have too much flash on their web pages. I'd like to see a list that censors ad banner providers. This could go one for a while.
1) Not all ISPs use DNS-based filtering - for example the aforementioned DNA Finland, which uses proxy-based filtering, which in turn is a lot more difficult to bypass.
Is this a configured proxy (you configure the browser to use a proxy) or is it a intercept proxy (the TCP traffic to some IPs or all IPs on port 80 or maybe also other ports is intercepted and passed to a proxy)? The former is, of course, easy to bypass, but is otherwise effective for all port numbers. The latter is harder but it can be done with the web site cooperation by using other port numbers (maybe even 443). Either way is expensive because that means a lot of proxy servers.
Do their blocks apply to UDP and SCTP?
2) W3C is, AFAIK, still being blocked by MPY.
Information about how protocols work tells people what they can do to bypass the blocking. So of course they don't want to allow that. Gotta keep the masses dumbed down.
How do they censor by domain name? Do they force/expect everyone to use the ISP proxy server? Do they force/expect everyone to use the ISP name server? Unless they block direct access, it should be easy enough for a user to get around. Of course most users would not know how. OTOH a lot of the really bad pr0n sites don't even use domain names. They use constantly changing IP addresses of proxies running on exploited home/office Windows computers.
Amazon starts to stream the entire movie during the free preview -- even though it pauses the video on the Web browser after the first two minutes -- so that users can start watching the rest of the video right away once they pay.
However, even if a user doesn't pay, the stream still sends the movie to the video catching software, but not the browser.
So that's why my SQUID caches were getting so big:-)
Normally if you can play the video, you can capture it. So encryption/DRM is rather pointless. However, DRM can work (up to a point) if HDCP is used. The player has to be sure that the path from the internet to the display is full encrypted OR sealed. By doing the decryption in the video card, uncompressing it there, and re-encrypting it for HDCP over HDMI (audio, too... so DVI won't work unless they want to give up the protection on the audio), you can be sure the video is safe all the way, as long as the content owner trusts the video card (it would have a player device key like a DVD player would, that can be revoked) and the video display device.
But there are still a couple analog holes. Internal electronics of the display could be tapped to get analog, which may have stair step levels that would allow determining original digital values. And then there is the camera on the screen method.
One big catch is, unlike the home TV market, few people have HDCP capable video cards and displays, and fewer still have it for HDMI that can support DRM audio through the video card. So deploying strong DRM for streaming video is not practical, yet.
Yes, they're starting to have some services which will sell you an unencumbered MP3. But, go buy a real, physical CD. You can turn that into unencumbered MP3 all you like.
Then I'd have to put the CD drive back in my computer. And I'd have to take a hard drive out to do that, or buy a USB CD drive. I don't have to do any of these things with Magnatune, which lets me simply do normal downloads in the browser of the music in raw, flac, ogg, or mp3 formats.
Oh, in case you are wondering how I might do a system rescue without a CD drive? I have USB ports for USB sticks, and slots for CF and SDHC cards connected via USB, all bootable. 16GB of flash can hold a lot of rescue software. I removed floppy drives from my computers years ago. I removed CD drives last year. They are so 2nd millennium technology.
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There are basic fundamental differences between Barack Obama and John McCain in how they will each end up screwing things up. It's really a choice of which way you want to have the country screwed up.
Are you casting your vote tomorrow?
Sure, I am. Just hook me up with a few dozen OC-192 connections at each of the largest 100 cities in the country, and set me up with 1000 computers at each site, and I'll stream it in OGG Theora format. Oh, and I'll also need a satellite dish and receiver tuned to the C-SPAN channel.
I only "have" TV because my roommate has TV (because of his addiction to "Deal Or No Deal"). It's generally not worth having because it's content controlled by big corporations, not real people.
1. The H1B program, in spirit is a wonderful, clever thing. I have lived and worked in Europe, Japan and India. I love to travel and take in new experiences. Thanks to the H1 program, it allows for me to actually live and work here. In all honesty, it has been a great experience.
I think it's great you can travel around the world and work in different places.
2. The H1B program allows for _american_ companies to actually fill in a labour gap as and when required.
The problem here is that MOST of those hired via the H-1B program are not hired to fill a labour gap, per se. Instead, they are hired to fill in a gap of people who are willing to work for substandard pay levels, and work extreme workloads and longer hours.
3. Does the H1B program get abused as the article states ? Absolutely. I have seen it happen myself. There are huge number of shell companies ( called consultants ) out there who are absolutely flooding the H1B channels with applications for requirements which do not exist. The article is spot-on with its observations. The biggest victim of this whole thing however is the H1B program. Due to this channel-stuffing, legitimate american companies cannot actually recruit an employee when it is _really_ required since the quota has already been filled by fraudulent/redundant applications. These redundant and fraudulent applications really really need to be stopped for the H1B program to actually deliver what it actually set out to deliver.
Not all of the abuse is like this. In one case I know of in the past, a major american company primarily involved in high-technology engineering and manufacturing hired someone for a position as a Unix system administrator, despite a few dozen of them in that city being available for work (who were presumably US citizens). It turns out the person actually hired did have a graduate degree in a field unrelated to computers or engineering. She was then trained on Unix system administrator by that company, and she also sought out outside help to speed up her learning of Unix system administration. That's how I ended up meeting her.
The problem here is that this major company knew what they were doing. If they really had a true need for people in very specialized fields for which the supply of skilled and experienced people here had been exhausted, they would not have been trying to hire someone for a Unix system administrator job (which has an abundant supply of people available in large and small cities, and has for at least a decade).
4. There is a lot of talk about salaries and cost, and this is what I think. The H1B program is a cleverly crafted law in some ways. The H1 application belongs to the employee and and not the employer. The employee is free to change his employers as and when he or she wants to. If an employee thinks that he is being paid less than the market value, he or she is free to seek out an employer who will pay him as much as he or she deserves. The free market will, at the end of the day take care of it. Also if there is a company which pays its employees based on his legal status and not his skills and ability, please do not consider working for it, whatever might be your legal status.
This is not true. If someone with an H-1B visa is let go from their current job, they have a finite period of time to find a new employer who can sponsor them before their visa expires. The visa lets them in the country. The sponsorship is required for the visa to remain valid. Maybe they can work at any job for the month or two they are allowed to stay when losing sponsorship. But they must find that sponsorship by a deadline to keep the visa.
Apparently, part of the big picture of abuse is that the "recruiting companies" that they get their work through is carrying out some fraudulent practices to keep them here. The shell companies may be part of that. That fact is, the free mark
97000 applications times 21 percent comes to 20370 cases that businesses need to be fined. Now I'll pick a totally random number of 700 billion dollars, and divide it by 20370. Each business involved should be fined 34,364,261 dollars and 18 cents per bad application.
Not just anybody can do this. It has to be someone that knows what they are doing. It has to be someone that understands the technology involved thoroughly. Schools that are run by non-technology people will have much of the same issues as businesses run by non-technology people ... they will be afraid of hiring someone that knows so much about something.
What it sounds like this university is doing, or trying to do, or may end up doing out of foolishness, is simply outsourcing. I can tell you from experience you will simply never be satisfied by outsourcing a crucial function like email. But it sounds like this is a "low technology" school that is unwilling to invest in, and deploy, their own network facilities to do email. Are they afraid they cannot acquire the technical skills to accomplish this? It sure sounds like a school I would not recommend anyone go to for any kind of science or engineering education. May it would be fine for some other fields not related to technology.
So why not just let the students each, individually, pick their own service provider? They don't have to have email addresses with the school's domain name on it. And by picking their own outside the school's domain, they get an address they can keep once they graduate (or transfer out of desperation).
In addition to the above, the school should still run an internal-only email system. This email system would have no access to the internet. It would not accept SMTP connections from outside. It would not attempt to make email connections to the outside. All email would be within that system alone. Then the only spam people would get would be from someone they can suspend, kick out, demote, or fire (or in the case of tenured faculty, lock them out of the internal system). Let everyone use their outside email for outside communications (reaching it through the campus LAN/WAN is OK), and their inside email for inside communications.
Teachers will want to be able to do bulk communications with students in their classes, for example. That can get troublesome on an outside provider, because this can appear to be spam because of the duplications and/or large lists. Doing such academic specific email only on the internal system ensures control, and academic specific policies can be enforced (such as how to determine what is spam). Also, research faculty may need greater levels of security than outside vendors should ever be trusted with. If an outside vendor is used, many departments will still end up setting up something of their own, anyway.
For a good example of 6 and 12 inch data, look at the state of Indiana (in the US) in Google Earth. In 2005/6, Indiana re-imaged the entire state with aerial photos. The whole state is at least 12 inches and all metro areas are 6 inches.
Also see the entire country of Denmark. And it has better color correction than the state of Indiana. For example, Tivoli Gardens and these strange neighborhoods.
The classical region locking allowed manufacturers to price products for specific areas. For example they sell things cheaper in India, because the cost of living and corresponding wages are lower there, despite exchange rates with countries like UK and US. This has the effect of blocking products like American movies sold in India cheaply making their way back to the US as cheap gray market and underpricing.
As companies will, this has gone from gray market deterrence to abuse of the consumers. For example products are not released at the same time in all regions. DVDs get released later in some regions because the theatrical showings are later. The abuse is that consumers get screwed two ways because it makes it so easy to delay in some regions.
Pirates generally don't use region locking. Guess which products lots of consumers prefer.
You gotta keep scientists off the streets and out of trouble somehow.
I'm waiting for the sonic boom.
Can't Slashdot do the same?
... and it works like a champ.
The basic problem with the idea that it is wrong to send something to someone that does not want it is that it turns the idea of an open communication medium on its ear. It is fine that with Yahoo Messenger you cannot send anything to someone until they accept you as a contact. Email was not intended to work that way.
Email was intended for civil participants that would not use it to steal from others. Of course that was naive about the real world, and naive about the protocols being used for real world communications. But if you want to speak of intentions, that was the intent.
Trying to introduce this sort of permission into email means that it can no longer be used to communicate with people prior to establishing a relationship. Should a law get passed that says it is wrong to send things to people they do not want essentially enforces this. You now have the situation where I cannot send you a receipt for your purchase because I have no idea if you want it or not. And as a commercial entity, I cannot take the chance that you don't want it without explicit permission.
Prior communications, transactions, or business relations would imply the intent to communicate within reason about it. The law probably needs to include a clause that says this to be clear about it. This is why a similar clause exists to permit communication by telephone in similar circumstances. It also needs to include a clause that allows the would-be recipient to cancel the relation to the extent that it permits communication by particular methods such as email, or communication about issues not specific to the existing relation (e.g. don't send me advertising about other products, just notify me when the product I ordered is shipped).
If you post in a forum where your email address is available (and more people would make it available if the spam issue did not exist), then it is reasonable to assume this implies the permission for reasonable communications specifically about the subject matter posted. It would not necessarily imply permission for communications about other matters. If I post in a photography forum that I am looking to buy a particular type of camera, that would reasonably imply that I want communications from those who might offer to sell me that type. That could be troublesome if 9000 people send me email with offers to sell me exactly the type of camera I want. But none of those 9000 people would be abusing email if each only sends me one message that is exactly about what I asked for. This would be the rare situation (compared to the rampant abuse of spam taking place today).
And then we're back to Yahoo Messenger instead of email.
I don't see why that would be so.
Personally, I think that email today is already broken enough that it cannot and should not be used to deliver anything of importance. Most people do not receive all the email that sent to them - it is filtered by third parties that are not interested in filtering errors. This means email is unreliable. So if I am sending you a receipt or a notification of a credit I have no idea if it is getting through to you or not. It is therefore useless.
That certainly is a situation we have today with email. I would suggest that it would not have been so had a correct and proper law been in place since the beginning of email that carefully, and constitutionally, prohibited abuses with specific and strong penalties (strong because of the difficult of bringing cases).
That law is in fact prohibiting speech. Even if it were rewritten to be more narrowly focused on spammers, it would still be the wrong approach.
The problem with spam is not a speech issue. It is a property issue.
The protection of free speech in the US Constitution does not grant speakers the right to steal property rights. You cannot steal my paper, ink, and printing press and justify the theft as enabling your freedom of speech.
Remember ... free as in free speech, not as in free beer.
Email costs more to the recipient than to the sender. The sending server only needs to store mail until it can exchange it with the recipient's MX host. In the case of spamming, this cost is virtually nil since the message tends to be the same for all recipients, so only the recipient email address is all that needs to be stored. The recipient server has to store each message individually, if it arrived individually. It also has to store the messages longer, until the recipient's user agent (client) picks up the mail. And that pickup is through yet another active service (IMAP, POP, Web).
Sending something to someone that doesn't want that is fundamentally wrong. It is a theft of computing resources. It can also be a theft of personal time. When this is done on a very small scale, such as trying to contact an old friend that has no interest in communicating with you, or asking someone a question about free software they wrote when they don't want to deal with such questions, then it's generally not a big deal. It's still wrong, but the scale of it doesn't rise to be a criminal interest.
Doing this sending in bulk, however, indicates the intent to benefit in some way from this theft, usually financially. Sometimes there are other forms of benefit, such as political.
It could be argued that existing property law already provides the proper protection. However, this would require a complex constructive argument in court, which might also be easy to knock down. Email, the internet protocols, and the way computers work, are complex issues that would have to be dealt with over and over in courts this way. What we need is a law clearly written to deal with the property theft aspect of spam. It needs to avoid any reference to what the content of a message is. It needs to focus on the means by which the sender is doing the theft in bulk (even if the case before a court is only one instance of what the spammer did). It needs to make clear that freedom of speech is about the right to say what one wants to say, not about giving the speaker a right to steal property from others to achieve that speech.
The law needs to make clear that sending email against the wishes of the recipient is theft. It needs to make clear that doing so in bulk raises the level of this theft to be criminal. It also needs to make clear that the definition of bulk can include sending any one given recipient just one copy.
Such a law should do better to stand within the protections of free speech in the First Amendment.
Surely they would not be intercepting anything more than port 80. If porn web sites used other random port numbers they could bypass this. Pick a number that isn't needed on porn web site, but which ISPs would have big problems trying to intercept, such as 993 (it would break people accessing secure office email if they intercepted this).
I don't understand why they need a special downloader? Firefox, Konqueror, Lynx, Opera, should all be just fine for downloading.
Finland's geek population is united against censorship for a simple reason. It does not and cannot work. This has not been disputed - everyone and their mother has been trying to tell the lawmakers that, including the Federal Bureau before the law came to force. Effective Internet censorship is not possible without an effort on China's or Saudi Arabia's level, and even then Saudi Arabia's leaks like a sieve. I can think of four ways of circumventing Finland's without specialist knowledge, and I got a 1/5 out of my single network course. In fact everything about this is permeated by bureaucratic incompetence to the point that accusing W3C of child porn is not disproportionate. Not only does the censorship only target web pages, which I'm told make up a very small percentage of online child porn, there's no oversight, no way to appeal, and in several publicized cases, no effort to remove the material from the Internet.
I bet the problem with W3C is not that they host any child porn, or even any porn at all. Instead, W3C hosts technical details on protocols that would allow people, especially teens, to figure out how to bypass the blocking filters. Once someone learns about things like TCP and port numbers, they can figure out how to bypass things. For example, by using HTTPS, the proxy will have no idea what the host NAME is, since that is inside the encrypted protocol. All the proxy can do is pass on the TCP connection via the CONNECT command (if the browser has the proxy configured) or via the TCP SYN packet (if they route map the traffic via the proxy). So all the porn sites need to do is enable HTTPS. Then the only way to block is by IP address, or do the stupid thing and block all port 443 or anything that looks like HTTPS.
Matti Nikki is both a devoted proponent of online freedom and kind of a dick. He published a list of censored sites to prove that censorship makes them much easier to catch with an automated webcrawler without restricting access in any meaningful way. (Later examinations of this list suggest that it has a 2% accuracy rate, but happens to feature the first Google search results for "gay porn.") When Nikki converted the list into links, his site was censored. That is to say, a domestic text-only website was censored using a law that legalized the censorship of foreign child porn. BOOM! Organized resistance!
So just post the list on Slashdot and get Slashdot censored.
Censorship made the evening news a couple of times, appeared in some newspapers and talk shows, and sparked one large geek demonstration back in March. "Google is a browser! Google is a browser!" we chanted, quoting the Bureau's chief on why Google has not been censored despite making child porn available as much as Nikki. We had no effect whatsoever. Okay, some ISPs have made censorship an opt-out system and maybe the Parliament will be wary about expanding it. Aside from that, I feel like the biggest achievement involved was me pissing off a bodyguard of the Minister of Communications with my taped-over mouth. Everything about the issue seems to be mired in its morass of utter incompetence that makes it meaningful debate impossible. For instance, the spokesman of a usually benign children-saving organization appeared in a debate and went on for minutes about the way censorship is a valuable statement of principles (as if making child porn strictly illegal wasn't enough) without ever addressing her opponent's statement that censorship does not work, cannot work, and does more harm than good to its cause. That debate sums up this whole sordid mess.
I'm all for censorship on an opt-in basis, provided there is competition that allows someone using censorship to choose who to use for their censoring parameters so they might choose to use the ones that are more accurate.
I'd like to see a list that censors big evil corporations. I'd like to see a list that censors undemocratic governments. I'd like to see a list that censors web sites that have too much flash on their web pages. I'd like to see a list that censors ad banner providers. This could go one for a while.
1) Not all ISPs use DNS-based filtering - for example the aforementioned DNA Finland, which uses proxy-based filtering, which in turn is a lot more difficult to bypass.
Is this a configured proxy (you configure the browser to use a proxy) or is it a intercept proxy (the TCP traffic to some IPs or all IPs on port 80 or maybe also other ports is intercepted and passed to a proxy)? The former is, of course, easy to bypass, but is otherwise effective for all port numbers. The latter is harder but it can be done with the web site cooperation by using other port numbers (maybe even 443). Either way is expensive because that means a lot of proxy servers.
Do their blocks apply to UDP and SCTP?
2) W3C is, AFAIK, still being blocked by MPY.
Information about how protocols work tells people what they can do to bypass the blocking. So of course they don't want to allow that. Gotta keep the masses dumbed down.
How do they censor by domain name? Do they force/expect everyone to use the ISP proxy server? Do they force/expect everyone to use the ISP name server? Unless they block direct access, it should be easy enough for a user to get around. Of course most users would not know how. OTOH a lot of the really bad pr0n sites don't even use domain names. They use constantly changing IP addresses of proxies running on exploited home/office Windows computers.
DRM cannot be trusted. DRM retailers cannot be trusted to keep up the support. This is why people should never buy DRM.
Amazon starts to stream the entire movie during the free preview -- even though it pauses the video on the Web browser after the first two minutes -- so that users can start watching the rest of the video right away once they pay.
However, even if a user doesn't pay, the stream still sends the movie to the video catching software, but not the browser.
So that's why my SQUID caches were getting so big :-)
Normally if you can play the video, you can capture it. So encryption/DRM is rather pointless. However, DRM can work (up to a point) if HDCP is used. The player has to be sure that the path from the internet to the display is full encrypted OR sealed. By doing the decryption in the video card, uncompressing it there, and re-encrypting it for HDCP over HDMI (audio, too ... so DVI won't work unless they want to give up the protection on the audio), you can be sure the video is safe all the way, as long as the content owner trusts the video card (it would have a player device key like a DVD player would, that can be revoked) and the video display device.
But there are still a couple analog holes. Internal electronics of the display could be tapped to get analog, which may have stair step levels that would allow determining original digital values. And then there is the camera on the screen method.
One big catch is, unlike the home TV market, few people have HDCP capable video cards and displays, and fewer still have it for HDMI that can support DRM audio through the video card. So deploying strong DRM for streaming video is not practical, yet.
Yes, they're starting to have some services which will sell you an unencumbered MP3. But, go buy a real, physical CD. You can turn that into unencumbered MP3 all you like.
Then I'd have to put the CD drive back in my computer. And I'd have to take a hard drive out to do that, or buy a USB CD drive. I don't have to do any of these things with Magnatune, which lets me simply do normal downloads in the browser of the music in raw, flac, ogg, or mp3 formats.
Oh, in case you are wondering how I might do a system rescue without a CD drive? I have USB ports for USB sticks, and slots for CF and SDHC cards connected via USB, all bootable. 16GB of flash can hold a lot of rescue software. I removed floppy drives from my computers years ago. I removed CD drives last year. They are so 2nd millennium technology.