It's not users that come up with products; it's developers. OK, now that we are past your misuse of the word, let's move on to understanding why it is the majority of people buy Microsoft Windows. The answer to that is simple; that's what the PC comes with. The issue about whether Microsoft Windows is better or Linux is better or whatever is all moot. Clearly Microsoft itself knows that what it sells is crap, since they force PC makers to put Windows on every PC in exchange for the right to even put it on one. If in fact Windows was better, then they wouldn't need to do that, and they'd have the same share of the market based on actual choice (assuming the PC makers pass the choice on to the consumer).
Show me a store where you can walk in and buy any PC or laptop and have it with your choice of Microsoft Windows or a major distribution of Linux (e.g. Mandrake, Redhat, SuSE, or Xandros). Once you find it, now lets examine what choices people actually make. And to measure this more accurately, let's narrow it down to just those customers who have experience in using both systems. Keep tabs and see how many choose Windows and how many choose Linux. I think you'll be surprised that Linux, while not necessarily the winner, will give a damned good showing of around 40%.
But what about the rest of the people who buy computers? Well, they aren't really making a choice. They may stick with what they got on the PC. Or they may only have heard of Microsoft (remember, these are not geeks we are talking about, but just ordinary people like your grandmother). And some people simply don't know enough to make choices. If you want to know about what people do choose, then don't bother with these people who aren't even making choices.
I tried to make a donation to a good cause. But I could not find out where to send the money. I couldn't track anyone down at all. So I guess SPEWS will have to do without my money and we'll all still have to deal with a growing spam problem.
Originally the idea was to use a computer controlled multi polarized liquid crystal windshield system to align the crystals so that they have opposing polarity in each layer so as to block direct sunlight. Don't you just hate it when driving east in the morning or west in the afternoon and have to put up with sunlight in your eyes when it is below the visor level? Do you try to align your head so the sun is behind the rear view mirror? Well this idea would block the sun by tracking the direction it is at.
So I was thinking. Why not add some more smarts to the computer software and have it scan the field of view looking for tell-tale billboard signs, and automatically block them out, too?
"We believe we have certain rights as a corporation to use this information," said Eric Rabe, vice president of Verizon media relations. He added that the new rules are confusing and unnecessarily strict.
and
Under new Washington rules, telephone companies:
may not use "call-detail," such as when, where, to whom, or how often calls are made, to sell services unless customers give express permission
may not share call-detail information with other companies without permission
must allow customers to "opt out" -- take their names and numbers off lists the company shares with other companies
must make it easy for customers to opt out, using e-mail, a toll-free number or postage-paid return card
Yeah, I guess that is too confusing for PHBs to understand. When words reach 10 letters long, they can't seem to handle it very well. But I'm not surprised. There are lots of things company executives at Verizon are confused about, such as honesty. And there's that strictness imposed by words such as "may not" and "must allow". That reminds me of my 5th grade teacher. Oh the horror that their right to screw consumers' privacy would be denied.
If this guy can send a billion pieces of spam in a day, then he's costing others at least $15 million a day. Figure it takes 3 seconds to open, read, and delete spam (low). Figure the average salary of $24,000 a year (low). Figure there are 50 work weeks a year (low), 5 work days a week (typical), 8 hours of work a day (low), and 3600 seconds in an hour (average). That amounts to 7.2 million second a year on the job, which works out to $0.01 per 2 seconds of time. So with time being valued at about $0.005/sec (low), a billion pieces of spam that takes 3 seconds each to delete costs the economy $15 million a day. So while Ralsky takes in a few grand to make that spam run, he's causing an economic loss of several million dollars. And that's per day. Imagine if he did that every day (he tries to, he wants to, he approaches it). Now figure in the other spammers and the fact that for some people these estimates are way way low. Basically, spam costs the economy several billion dollars a year. So yes, spam is theft. It's already illegal. It just needs to be enforced now.
Is spamming a form of terrorism? That depends on how you define terrorism. The biggest differences I see in the definitions of terrorism are in whether those taking the actions are intending to cause the fear or not. Certainly the fear of opening your mailbox to find spam, or even the fear to open your ISP bill to find surcharges due to mail volume, do not rise to the level of fear of being shot while pumping gas. But spam is certainly causing people to fear doing things like signing up for things they do want to get in email because of the perceived (in most cases) or real (in some cases) that the email address might end up on more spammer lists. And while that isn't a fear of bodily harm, it is the kind of fear that is hurting the economy. And I really do believe it is at least partially to blame for the slump in the economy in the US and Europe.
Most spammers probably aren't actually intending to cause fear of email. I'm sure they'd rather there be no fear of is, as then their goals of getting rich are easier to accomplish. But still, that fear happens, and the spam is the principle cause of it.
Technically, many real terrorists are probably not really trying to cause terror so much as to cause some effect. The sniper in the area of Washington DC might well have done it more for the kicks. It's related to causing terror, but not exactly. But we might never really know his true motives. Still, that's no comfort to everyone reacting in that fear.
What we need is a new word (or phrase) to effectively call spamming a form of terrorism, while still not trying to equate it to bombing busses of school children, or slamming airplanes into tall buildings. The goal should be to get it well understood that spam is hurting business and the economy. Maybe something like: promophobia?
If spammers had sent mail only to the people who actually wanted it, we might not have any of this discussion we have today. But the sad fact is, a response rate of 0.01% in email campaigns is considered a good response because of the extremely low cost of sending the same message over and over. There's no financial incentive to spammers to clean their lists of anyone other than the few who complain enough to ISPs to get them terminated. So that means 99.99% get bombarded by junk intended for 0.01%. So resources are being wasted to "serve" a tiny fraction of the internet base, but the spammer doesn't pay for that waste.
Advertising like superimposing images on football fields or race tracks may be disgusting or annoying, but it isn't like spam. Those ads don't waste your network bandwidth. They do pay for the TV programming you get. They don't grow exponentially. They are limited by the TV executives who do insist on the advertisers paying high prices for them. And it's better the ad be on the field or the track rather than cutting away for a 30 second spot where you might miss a piece of the action. Please don't compare that to spam. The reasons each are disliked are entirely different.
Actually, he probably is. He has been known to use false identification in the spam he sends. That's already illegal. But it just doesn't rise to the level of a serious crime enough for law enforcement to get involved if the false identities do not already belong to someone else. If no one complains, nothing will happen.
The problem with legislation is it will probably end up making only a small portion actually illegal, and have the effect of making all the rest even more "legal" than it ever was. Then spam will increase even more.
Letting older browsers degrade is the problem here. That is what should not be done. Web pages should not degrade. Instead, they should do as good as they always could do in that browser. I'm not saying you should avoid modern HTML. I'm saying you should not do the degrading thing to be in effect biased against people with smaller browsers.
Given that CSS is NOT yet well deployed, the use of HTML at the level which says that compatibility is to be avoided (setting background color is still a compatible feature) is an intentional form of degrading, not something compelled by a standard.
I'm all for standards. But I absolutely insist they be competently and completely implemented and deployed before moving off the old ones. And I'm certainly for shaking off the old ones as soon as possible when the new ones are fully usable. That doesn't mean you can't use the new ones now. What it means is the old ones are still just as much in effect until the new ones have taken their place. It has not happened yet. And people like Zeldman don't even try to improve the situation by supporting efforts to do such development.
In order to make the web site do on an older browser such as Netscape 3 all that could be done on Netscape 3, then color information must be coded in the HTML part. Web sites should not be designed for Mozilla or IE. They should be designed to work in general, and it should come out reasonably well on all browsers still in general use... if it is your intention to do so. You have the choice and right not to. But don't claim that you are making your site compatible with Netscape 3 if you exclude Netscape 3 users from the color information Netscape 3 is certainly capable of correctly handling. Information can be in the color, too. And some sites are even worse. They do put HTML color info in, different than the CSS color, and (possibly intentionally) the HTML color is the same as the text color (or maybe 1 value step off) making it impossible to read the information. One example of this is in the menu on the left of http://www.state.tx.us/. The text color is #5a61a9 while the background color is #5b61a9. The link text color is set with this HTML:
which clearly shows to me they explicitly intended to make the links hard to read on non-CSS systems. You can see what it looks like in Netscape 4.77 in PNG or (for those using Netscape 3 right now) JPEG format. Older browsers and older computers do handle these colors just fine, so there's no reason not to do it, unless you just want those users to have to deal with the lack of quality presentation. For you, I think that should be your choice. For the State of Texas, they should not be trying to obscure things, and should be trying to make things accessible to everyone.
BTW, when I contacted officials at the state office dealing with these issues, two months ago, their response was "we're working on it". BS! Just edit the HTML and change the color code.
The whole "web standards" debate is stupid, and most especially one sided sites like Zeldman's webstandards.org. All that Zeldman and his cronies are doing is try to push new standards ahead of sane development, probably just so that he won't have to deal with standards like HTML. He has a point, though, as the older standards are lame and the newer standards are better. But he lacks the ability to understand that browser development and deployment will always lag behind, and why. The sad thing is that his kind of suckered lots of web developers into believing that all they have to do is blame the user for having an old browser and all will become better because all users will upgrade. Truth is, that's not always possible or feasible.
A tour of web sites using the Zeldman style with an older browser will generally work, as he does not advocate breaking them. But what you do get is less than what that browser is capable of. For example, browsers have for ages supported setting a background color or even a background image in HTML. Zeldmanistas refuse to set the background color, or in some cases, intentionally set it to something different than what is set in CSS. So while the site looks fine with CSS, without CSS you get maybe stark gray, or worse, black with black text over it. So what's actually going on here is not a case of these developers adhering to web standards, but rather, they are picking and choosing the standards they want to use, such as by not making use of HTML completely and correctly. So why should he any right to expect that others will choose to use newer standards like CSS or XML or whatever.
There is also a very good reason to make a web site that works with older browsers. Many groups are now operating in lower income urban areas carrying out programs to get older computers donated to them from businesses that are doing the upgrading. Because of the economy, the number of businesses doing upgrades has dropped off and most donations are rather old. What this means is that most of the people receiving these computers are getting something in the late 486 or early Pentium range, and at best a copy of Windows 95, which is usually all (other than BSD or Linux, which hasn't made it to these programs that I've seen yet... something for us to get more involved in I suppose) that these old machines with slow CPU, small memory, and limited hard drive capacity can handle. So they end up with usually an old Netscape version 3 browser (Java and Javascript are hopelessly broken, and CSS is non-existant). Newer browsers overwhelm the machine, if they even fit at all.
This "economic accessibility" isn't yet addressed by law, and may never be. Private business does not have to cater to them. So the banks and other financial institutions listed with specific browser requirements aren't in violation. And besides, we're talking about people who can't afford a computer and have to use limited time community access ISPs just to get online (if the phone and electric bill are paid up). I'm sure the financial institutions have no interest in extending them credit.
While businesses probably should have a free choice in what, and who, they support, governments OTOH should not. People should have a right to expect their government internet based services to be accessible to all, not just those who can afford a bigger faster computer that can handle the latest obese and overloaded software. And since it is possible to make web sites that not only work well with new standards, but also work well (as well as those standards allow) with older standards that the smaller browsers support, governments should be required to do this in all citizen-facing web sites. In other words, if it can be made to work in a minimal set of standards, it must be made to work that well when that's what's available. Then if it works even better in newer standards in ways that the older standards could never do, that's fine, too.
What I think might be a better approach to this would be to support the development of a not-so-obese web browser, as well as programs to get systems like Linux deployed onto more of the computers being donated to the economically disadvantaged (aside: why are politically correct words so long?).
Knowing the difference between Red Hat and Debian, or FreeBSD and Solaris, or Linux and Windows... is for you. If you want to get your non-computer friends and relatives off Windows and on to something like Linux, then by all means go for it. You know you'll have to be in a position to help them out. Have they not already asked you why their computer did this or did that, and you get flustered because it due to it being Windows and it might not be a problem if it is Linux, or if there was a problem, you could more quickly fix it? So you know you want to get them on Linux. But if you're into Debian, but don't think vanilla Debian is right to put on their computer (because they aren't computer oriented), I'm just saying you should have Xandros in your "computer help kit" for them. Some might even be able to do the install themselves. But if they need some package added from the net, you can tell them how in Debian terms, or do it for them in a familiar way.
I don't believe that they should merge. If they did I would have to put up w/the tons of shit from Mandrake and RedHat while all I want is Debian.
Then download Debian or buy a CD with Debian and install it and set it up yourself. But what about people you know who are not into computers enough to do it themselves, but still want occaisional access to your knowledge they can fall back on if they have problems, and you would prefer they have Debian? Well... there's Xandros... which is based on Debian.
If there are any remaining SPEWS or other listings directed at any HE.NET address space, then you know how to check them and you know where to post to point out what spammers have been removed. Don't forget, spammers are like cockroaches when they get in. They hide everywhere. Sometimes you just have to spray the place. And maybe when the stench finally fades, more legitimate businesses will come your way.
Can't you counter sue Spamford Wallace to recover costs due to his frivolous lawsuit against you?
Re:Breaking things is not fixing the problem.
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As the Spam Turns
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· Score: 2
That is a method that is at least on track to deal with what the problem is. It's not the ideal solution, but for now it looks like it is the best solution, at least for senders who are reaching your mailbox for the first time. Your regular peers can be whitelisted automatically.
The thing to do is to do this at the server level. Sending back a clear message will be the hard part. The SMTP daemon will need to connect back to the sender's SMTP server while the original transaction is in progress, to avoid queueing the message (because the bulk of this will be undeliverable). And this won't necessarily be the same IP address, so that means doing all the usual MX lookup, too. If the sender's server cannot be contacted, the mail needs to be refused, at least with a soft error (but a hard error in obvious cases, such as no such domain from an authoritative DNS server, or a hard error from the sender's apparent mail server). This can make for some more complex servers.
This idea has been suggested, and even implemented. Some people object to it, and some have some good reasons, too. But it may ultimately be that we just have to get used to it. Having an open society isn't cheap; we do have to buy locks, guns, etc. The internet isn't any different.
Re:Great, more censorship
on
As the Spam Turns
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· Score: 3, Insightful
By the time the Bayesian filters are engaged, it's already too late. The bandwidth has already been wasted, and should some legitimate mail be rejected, your mail server is now obligated to return a bounce message which means tons of spam bounces will sit in the queue. The right time to block spam is when the SMTP connection first arrives, but before any mail is actually sent. I won't be doing it any other way.
Re:Breaking things is not fixing the problem.
on
As the Spam Turns
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· Score: 4, Insightful
What if the someone that wants to talk to you just wants to sell your something? Or what if they want to convice you to change your opinion about something. Or what if they want to just reply to your Slashdot posting privately? How are you going to tell these apart?
The problem with spam isn't really the message. If I were to get in my mail box precisely and exactly the information I was interested in, I wouldn't have any problem with it. Maybe I would be interested in visiting just the right kind of porn site. Maybe I really would like to enlarge my penis. Maybe my printer really has run out of ink. Maybe. Maybe NOT.
But this is a hard thing to work out when you are dealing with content. For example, I often post on mailing lists or USENET and for many, I do get private replies (and spam, too). It's reasonable to assume that if you post, you've invited a reply (unless you say otherwise). But a "reply" to a posting about what I think should be in the next version of some standard should not be asking me if I need more golf balls. That's just plain off topic. Still, I have gotten replies that are completely ON topic, yet are sent by someone that is a total moron and not worth reading and a total waste of my time.
The real problem with spam isn't the content at all. The real problem is the way it is delivered, and the way it is determined to whom it is delivered.
TV commercials, radio spots, newspaper ads, and web banners, are what I call gatewayed advertising. What that means is that someone (the TV station sales department, the newspaper advertising department, or CmdrTaco while trying to get more revenues for Slashdot to keep it alive and pay for the kind of bandwidth that would create a Slashdot Effect on most web servers) is the "gateway" into the media where the advertising is presented. You don't get to put a TV commercial on without paying the TV station for the time. As much as I dislike most commercials (some I do enjoy the first time around), I also know they pay for, or in some cases at least help pay for, what I am receiving. But the whole point is, it's not going to get out of control because there is someone acting as the gateway. TV stations know they will lose viewers if there is 50 minutes of commercials every hour. CmdrTaco knows it would ruin Slashdot if every page were plastered with dozens of banner and box ads totally obscuring the content. And even if they did do the wrong thing and ruin it, I can change the channel or go to another site. There isn't a scaling issue here for these media.
But with spam, you can't change the channel. You can't choose to visit another site. And worst of all, it's not paying for a damned thing you receive.
We can make a comparison of spam with telemarketing and fax ads. Neither of these really pay for anything you receive. While it may be argued that telemarketers keep the cost of phone service down by providing more revenue for the phone company, this isn't really true. Most telemarketing actually takes place at the peak times that phone networks are busy, so the phone companies just have to scale up to that level of business. They aren't getting new revenues, and you can be damned sure that telemarketers are not paying an extra premium to the phone companies to help lower your phone bill (there are plenty of scumbags in that industry that would find ways around that).
Another comparison is with ads you get in snail mail. It doesn't really pay for anything you receive (they get huge discounts from the Postal Service for bulk packaging them so the delivery guy doesn't even have to check the addresses). But while these are annoying and a bit of a problem, it's not something that's going to grow exponentially from here because there is a "gateway" of cost. Those leaflets you get on your windshield are much the same. It's a pain to have to reach over and grab it and throw it away, and again, it hasn't paid for anything you receive. But like bulk snail mail, there is cost and someone has to roam around sticking them on.
The problem with spam isn't the content, it's that so much can be delivered so fast and to so many people that there is in effect NO GATEWAY to this. And as bandwidth gets cheaper and cheaper, and servers get faster and faster, you and your delete key will have to just work harder and harder to keep up. No wonder people are working on automating things to delete spam. And it just escalates.
So yeah, we do need to be able to continue to communicate, and this also needs to include advertising where appropriate. But there needs to be some kind of "gateway" to control it, to make sure it doesn't get out of hand, and to make sure the decisions about how much to send and to whom to send are decided on properly. And this also includes making sure it is sent to the proper email address for those of us with many (if you own a domain and have set it up so that any name on the left of the at sign works, raise your hand).
There will always be those who think it is their right to communicate with everyone. But, yet again, the issue is not about the message, but instead is about the methodology. Email is not a broadcast medium and should not be treated as such. It is a one to one communication medium. And I translate that to being a person to person communication medium. So if you want to communicate with me, you need to at least be a person, and not a machine running some spamware. Maybe SMTP needs a rethought. Or maybe not. I've thought about it and don't really have any answers (yet). But I do think the ultimate solution is going to end up having to be something that proves that it is a person who communicates with me, and gives me as much of their time in sending me the message as it takes from me to read it or listen to it. We need to find some way to communicate that does not allow the sender to automate it without that message being tagged as automated. That is the real problem with spam... it's so impersonal... it's all automated.
The Federal Trade Commission said on Wednesday that it had sued six junk e-mailers who bombarded Internet users with illegal pyramid schemes, fraudulent loans and e-mail filters that actually attracted more "spam."
Excuse me? These are fraud (a felony) cases! They should be arresting the spammers and putting them in jail for at least 24 hours. The spammers should be facing criminal charges, not civil remedies.
Most of the open relays in China are Exchange server. Documentation for Exchange server is available in Chinese (not sure which dialects), Korean, and Japanese. The problem is, most of the deployed servers in China (and probably Korea, too, but I didn't really check there) are versions prior to Exchange 5.5. And those older versions, while they do have some settings to supposedly turn off relaying, do not completely turn it off, and spammers know how to exploit the relay holes.
The cause of the problem is that virtually all of these servers are running pirated copies of Exchange (and probably of Windows, too). It sure seems that, on average, the Chinese people are less concerned about theft (be it of your mail server bandwidth, or of commercial software) than westerners (Americans and Europeans) on average. Eastern European countries also have some of this problem. This seems to be a pattern that poorer countries are where it happens. Places like India, South American and Africa have less of it, but I think that is probably because there is virtually no internet connectivity outside of the big cities (this is changing quickly now in India and parts of South America), and so the deployment of mail servers and spammable bandwidth just isn't there yet. Expect new waves of spam from India over the next year or two, and from Africa after that (Much of the Nigerian money export scams really are originating from Europe and USA, not all from Nigeria, but this kind of thing doesn't need lots of bandwidth anyway, since it often uses Chinese and Korean open relays, anyway).
This is actually a missed opportunity for the Linux community. Given there are distributions of Linux specifically designed for various Asian languages, we should work to further promote this deployment. Not only will it help the spam problem because of defaults that don't open relay and readily available native language documentation, but it also gets Linux installed in more places, in one form or another.
What the music industry executives don't quite get, yet, is that it only takes one successful rip of a CD to spread like wildfire over sharing networks (which incidentally are digging deeper and deeper underground).
Given the quality level of a lot of music out there now, it's clear to me that absolute CD perfection is not the desire of the masses. Back when piracy was done (more slowly) by multiple generation analog re-recording, the quality level would drop each generation. It didn't take long before it totally sucked, and even then people often would put up with music 4 or 5 generations deep, just because it was free. Digital basically eliminates the generation problem, completely. Therefore a semi-sucky rip is actually good enough for the masses because it won't get any worse from there. And all it takes is for someone to rip it by playing it on a device that can play the copy protected CD and recording it via a sound card input. And if the device has no electrical analog output (permanently wired headphones, for example), it can still be captured by other means (some player will have to be able to play it for big home sound systems or else the music industry will be cutting out more market than piracy). It might suck to have to record music with microphones propped up against speakers (possibly with filters and noise generators to mask watermarking), but the quality of that won't be any worse than 2nd or 3rd generation analog was, and will probably still be better, anyway. The "analog hole" does exist, and it means that people can rip the music and swap it online, anyway.
What the copy protection is targeting most effectively is not the online trading, but rather, the casual CD duplicating. Many people do buy CDs then make copies for their friends. And with holidays approaching, the reverse will be common, too (buy CDs, duplicate or rip them, and send the original to your cousin for a gift).
Because of the fact that online music swapping is already virtually ubiquitous, it won't be much of a stretch to engage in that practice even more in the future. As more and more CDs fail to be playable on equipment that people paid good money to buy, be that an actual stereo system, or a custom made personal computer system running the latest Debian Linux, people will more often explore getting their music for free from the internet instead of buying CDs that don't work. They aren't going to just trash their stereo systems, and they aren't giving up on computer systems that still do other functions well. They will just get music in other forms instead of the store bought CD. And it's not because they necessarily want free music (those that do are already swapping anyway); it's that they want music that works, and swapped music may eventually be all that does. And to the extent the music industry doesn't want to serve this market, the more they drive this market away from buying any CDs at all.
Yes, there is a lot of piracy going on, and probably a lot more than there ever was. But it's the music industry itself, that will effectively destroy the CD format as we know it today. You just watch. They will do it.
I'm assuming that since this is mentioned as an embedded product, your choice of Linux is not for the purpose of making your device work in other people's Linux systems, but is instead, for the purpose having a embedded operating system inside your embedded product. If this assumption is true, then I recommend instead to use one of the BSDs for it, e.g. FreeBSD or NetBSD or OpenBSD. The licensing issues are so much easier. FreeBSD is actually the foundation OS in many a network device on the market over quite a range of sizes from small handheld devices to huge WAN switches. Linux is, too, but if the GPL licensing is the big issue, then give BSD a serious look-see.
If the above assumption is not correct, and you are making a device which is to be accessed by a hosted Linux system, then I can at least say this: I won't use your device in my managed network engines (Linux based) unless the source code is open. This is due to the need to be able to fully audit the entire security and not wanting to have to negotiate for NDA source. Lack of source can cut into your market share, especially where security is an issue (affects network devices far more than high performance video cards). So if you have intellectual property in a network device intended for a hosted system (e.g. for example a 10GB ethernet card or an OC-192 WAN line card), try to keep the intellectual property locked up in the device itself as much as possible.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not users that come up with products; it's developers. OK, now that we are past your misuse of the word, let's move on to understanding why it is the majority of people buy Microsoft Windows. The answer to that is simple; that's what the PC comes with. The issue about whether Microsoft Windows is better or Linux is better or whatever is all moot. Clearly Microsoft itself knows that what it sells is crap, since they force PC makers to put Windows on every PC in exchange for the right to even put it on one. If in fact Windows was better, then they wouldn't need to do that, and they'd have the same share of the market based on actual choice (assuming the PC makers pass the choice on to the consumer).
Show me a store where you can walk in and buy any PC or laptop and have it with your choice of Microsoft Windows or a major distribution of Linux (e.g. Mandrake, Redhat, SuSE, or Xandros). Once you find it, now lets examine what choices people actually make. And to measure this more accurately, let's narrow it down to just those customers who have experience in using both systems. Keep tabs and see how many choose Windows and how many choose Linux. I think you'll be surprised that Linux, while not necessarily the winner, will give a damned good showing of around 40%.
But what about the rest of the people who buy computers? Well, they aren't really making a choice. They may stick with what they got on the PC. Or they may only have heard of Microsoft (remember, these are not geeks we are talking about, but just ordinary people like your grandmother). And some people simply don't know enough to make choices. If you want to know about what people do choose, then don't bother with these people who aren't even making choices.
Is this the same Lessig that is totally clueless about spam, and proposes silly ideas like this?
I tried to make a donation to a good cause. But I could not find out where to send the money. I couldn't track anyone down at all. So I guess SPEWS will have to do without my money and we'll all still have to deal with a growing spam problem.
Originally the idea was to use a computer controlled multi polarized liquid crystal windshield system to align the crystals so that they have opposing polarity in each layer so as to block direct sunlight. Don't you just hate it when driving east in the morning or west in the afternoon and have to put up with sunlight in your eyes when it is below the visor level? Do you try to align your head so the sun is behind the rear view mirror? Well this idea would block the sun by tracking the direction it is at.
So I was thinking. Why not add some more smarts to the computer software and have it scan the field of view looking for tell-tale billboard signs, and automatically block them out, too?
Well, I can dream, anyway.
and
Yeah, I guess that is too confusing for PHBs to understand. When words reach 10 letters long, they can't seem to handle it very well. But I'm not surprised. There are lots of things company executives at Verizon are confused about, such as honesty. And there's that strictness imposed by words such as "may not" and "must allow". That reminds me of my 5th grade teacher. Oh the horror that their right to screw consumers' privacy would be denied.
If this guy can send a billion pieces of spam in a day, then he's costing others at least $15 million a day. Figure it takes 3 seconds to open, read, and delete spam (low). Figure the average salary of $24,000 a year (low). Figure there are 50 work weeks a year (low), 5 work days a week (typical), 8 hours of work a day (low), and 3600 seconds in an hour (average). That amounts to 7.2 million second a year on the job, which works out to $0.01 per 2 seconds of time. So with time being valued at about $0.005/sec (low), a billion pieces of spam that takes 3 seconds each to delete costs the economy $15 million a day. So while Ralsky takes in a few grand to make that spam run, he's causing an economic loss of several million dollars. And that's per day. Imagine if he did that every day (he tries to, he wants to, he approaches it). Now figure in the other spammers and the fact that for some people these estimates are way way low. Basically, spam costs the economy several billion dollars a year. So yes, spam is theft. It's already illegal. It just needs to be enforced now.
Is spamming a form of terrorism? That depends on how you define terrorism. The biggest differences I see in the definitions of terrorism are in whether those taking the actions are intending to cause the fear or not. Certainly the fear of opening your mailbox to find spam, or even the fear to open your ISP bill to find surcharges due to mail volume, do not rise to the level of fear of being shot while pumping gas. But spam is certainly causing people to fear doing things like signing up for things they do want to get in email because of the perceived (in most cases) or real (in some cases) that the email address might end up on more spammer lists. And while that isn't a fear of bodily harm, it is the kind of fear that is hurting the economy. And I really do believe it is at least partially to blame for the slump in the economy in the US and Europe.
Most spammers probably aren't actually intending to cause fear of email. I'm sure they'd rather there be no fear of is, as then their goals of getting rich are easier to accomplish. But still, that fear happens, and the spam is the principle cause of it.
Technically, many real terrorists are probably not really trying to cause terror so much as to cause some effect. The sniper in the area of Washington DC might well have done it more for the kicks. It's related to causing terror, but not exactly. But we might never really know his true motives. Still, that's no comfort to everyone reacting in that fear.
What we need is a new word (or phrase) to effectively call spamming a form of terrorism, while still not trying to equate it to bombing busses of school children, or slamming airplanes into tall buildings. The goal should be to get it well understood that spam is hurting business and the economy. Maybe something like: promophobia?
If spammers had sent mail only to the people who actually wanted it, we might not have any of this discussion we have today. But the sad fact is, a response rate of 0.01% in email campaigns is considered a good response because of the extremely low cost of sending the same message over and over. There's no financial incentive to spammers to clean their lists of anyone other than the few who complain enough to ISPs to get them terminated. So that means 99.99% get bombarded by junk intended for 0.01%. So resources are being wasted to "serve" a tiny fraction of the internet base, but the spammer doesn't pay for that waste.
Advertising like superimposing images on football fields or race tracks may be disgusting or annoying, but it isn't like spam. Those ads don't waste your network bandwidth. They do pay for the TV programming you get. They don't grow exponentially. They are limited by the TV executives who do insist on the advertisers paying high prices for them. And it's better the ad be on the field or the track rather than cutting away for a 30 second spot where you might miss a piece of the action. Please don't compare that to spam. The reasons each are disliked are entirely different.
Actually, he probably is. He has been known to use false identification in the spam he sends. That's already illegal. But it just doesn't rise to the level of a serious crime enough for law enforcement to get involved if the false identities do not already belong to someone else. If no one complains, nothing will happen.
The problem with legislation is it will probably end up making only a small portion actually illegal, and have the effect of making all the rest even more "legal" than it ever was. Then spam will increase even more.
Letting older browsers degrade is the problem here. That is what should not be done. Web pages should not degrade. Instead, they should do as good as they always could do in that browser. I'm not saying you should avoid modern HTML. I'm saying you should not do the degrading thing to be in effect biased against people with smaller browsers.
Given that CSS is NOT yet well deployed, the use of HTML at the level which says that compatibility is to be avoided (setting background color is still a compatible feature) is an intentional form of degrading, not something compelled by a standard.
I'm all for standards. But I absolutely insist they be competently and completely implemented and deployed before moving off the old ones. And I'm certainly for shaking off the old ones as soon as possible when the new ones are fully usable. That doesn't mean you can't use the new ones now. What it means is the old ones are still just as much in effect until the new ones have taken their place. It has not happened yet. And people like Zeldman don't even try to improve the situation by supporting efforts to do such development.
In order to make the web site do on an older browser such as Netscape 3 all that could be done on Netscape 3, then color information must be coded in the HTML part. Web sites should not be designed for Mozilla or IE. They should be designed to work in general, and it should come out reasonably well on all browsers still in general use ... if it is your intention to do so. You have the choice and right not to. But don't claim that you are making your site compatible with Netscape 3 if you exclude Netscape 3 users from the color information Netscape 3 is certainly capable of correctly handling. Information can be in the color, too. And some sites are even worse. They do put HTML color info in, different than the CSS color, and (possibly intentionally) the HTML color is the same as the text color (or maybe 1 value step off) making it impossible to read the information. One example of this is in the menu on the left of http://www.state.tx.us/. The text color is #5a61a9 while the background color is #5b61a9. The link text color is set with this HTML:
while the menu background color is set with this HTML: which clearly shows to me they explicitly intended to make the links hard to read on non-CSS systems. You can see what it looks like in Netscape 4.77 in PNG or (for those using Netscape 3 right now) JPEG format. Older browsers and older computers do handle these colors just fine, so there's no reason not to do it, unless you just want those users to have to deal with the lack of quality presentation. For you, I think that should be your choice. For the State of Texas, they should not be trying to obscure things, and should be trying to make things accessible to everyone.BTW, when I contacted officials at the state office dealing with these issues, two months ago, their response was "we're working on it". BS! Just edit the HTML and change the color code.
The whole "web standards" debate is stupid, and most especially one sided sites like Zeldman's webstandards.org. All that Zeldman and his cronies are doing is try to push new standards ahead of sane development, probably just so that he won't have to deal with standards like HTML. He has a point, though, as the older standards are lame and the newer standards are better. But he lacks the ability to understand that browser development and deployment will always lag behind, and why. The sad thing is that his kind of suckered lots of web developers into believing that all they have to do is blame the user for having an old browser and all will become better because all users will upgrade. Truth is, that's not always possible or feasible.
A tour of web sites using the Zeldman style with an older browser will generally work, as he does not advocate breaking them. But what you do get is less than what that browser is capable of. For example, browsers have for ages supported setting a background color or even a background image in HTML. Zeldmanistas refuse to set the background color, or in some cases, intentionally set it to something different than what is set in CSS. So while the site looks fine with CSS, without CSS you get maybe stark gray, or worse, black with black text over it. So what's actually going on here is not a case of these developers adhering to web standards, but rather, they are picking and choosing the standards they want to use, such as by not making use of HTML completely and correctly. So why should he any right to expect that others will choose to use newer standards like CSS or XML or whatever.
There is also a very good reason to make a web site that works with older browsers. Many groups are now operating in lower income urban areas carrying out programs to get older computers donated to them from businesses that are doing the upgrading. Because of the economy, the number of businesses doing upgrades has dropped off and most donations are rather old. What this means is that most of the people receiving these computers are getting something in the late 486 or early Pentium range, and at best a copy of Windows 95, which is usually all (other than BSD or Linux, which hasn't made it to these programs that I've seen yet ... something for us to get more involved in I suppose) that these old machines with slow CPU, small memory, and limited hard drive capacity can handle. So they end up with usually an old Netscape version 3 browser (Java and Javascript are hopelessly broken, and CSS is non-existant). Newer browsers overwhelm the machine, if they even fit at all.
This "economic accessibility" isn't yet addressed by law, and may never be. Private business does not have to cater to them. So the banks and other financial institutions listed with specific browser requirements aren't in violation. And besides, we're talking about people who can't afford a computer and have to use limited time community access ISPs just to get online (if the phone and electric bill are paid up). I'm sure the financial institutions have no interest in extending them credit.
While businesses probably should have a free choice in what, and who, they support, governments OTOH should not. People should have a right to expect their government internet based services to be accessible to all, not just those who can afford a bigger faster computer that can handle the latest obese and overloaded software. And since it is possible to make web sites that not only work well with new standards, but also work well (as well as those standards allow) with older standards that the smaller browsers support, governments should be required to do this in all citizen-facing web sites. In other words, if it can be made to work in a minimal set of standards, it must be made to work that well when that's what's available. Then if it works even better in newer standards in ways that the older standards could never do, that's fine, too.
What I think might be a better approach to this would be to support the development of a not-so-obese web browser, as well as programs to get systems like Linux deployed onto more of the computers being donated to the economically disadvantaged (aside: why are politically correct words so long?).
Knowing the difference between Red Hat and Debian, or FreeBSD and Solaris, or Linux and Windows ... is for you. If you want to get your non-computer friends and relatives off Windows and on to something like Linux, then by all means go for it. You know you'll have to be in a position to help them out. Have they not already asked you why their computer did this or did that, and you get flustered because it due to it being Windows and it might not be a problem if it is Linux, or if there was a problem, you could more quickly fix it? So you know you want to get them on Linux. But if you're into Debian, but don't think vanilla Debian is right to put on their computer (because they aren't computer oriented), I'm just saying you should have Xandros in your "computer help kit" for them. Some might even be able to do the install themselves. But if they need some package added from the net, you can tell them how in Debian terms, or do it for them in a familiar way.
Then download Debian or buy a CD with Debian and install it and set it up yourself. But what about people you know who are not into computers enough to do it themselves, but still want occaisional access to your knowledge they can fall back on if they have problems, and you would prefer they have Debian? Well ... there's Xandros ... which is based on Debian.
You mean this?
If there are any remaining SPEWS or other listings directed at any HE.NET address space, then you know how to check them and you know where to post to point out what spammers have been removed. Don't forget, spammers are like cockroaches when they get in. They hide everywhere. Sometimes you just have to spray the place. And maybe when the stench finally fades, more legitimate businesses will come your way.
Can't you counter sue Spamford Wallace to recover costs due to his frivolous lawsuit against you?
That is a method that is at least on track to deal with what the problem is. It's not the ideal solution, but for now it looks like it is the best solution, at least for senders who are reaching your mailbox for the first time. Your regular peers can be whitelisted automatically.
The thing to do is to do this at the server level. Sending back a clear message will be the hard part. The SMTP daemon will need to connect back to the sender's SMTP server while the original transaction is in progress, to avoid queueing the message (because the bulk of this will be undeliverable). And this won't necessarily be the same IP address, so that means doing all the usual MX lookup, too. If the sender's server cannot be contacted, the mail needs to be refused, at least with a soft error (but a hard error in obvious cases, such as no such domain from an authoritative DNS server, or a hard error from the sender's apparent mail server). This can make for some more complex servers.
This idea has been suggested, and even implemented. Some people object to it, and some have some good reasons, too. But it may ultimately be that we just have to get used to it. Having an open society isn't cheap; we do have to buy locks, guns, etc. The internet isn't any different.
By the time the Bayesian filters are engaged, it's already too late. The bandwidth has already been wasted, and should some legitimate mail be rejected, your mail server is now obligated to return a bounce message which means tons of spam bounces will sit in the queue. The right time to block spam is when the SMTP connection first arrives, but before any mail is actually sent. I won't be doing it any other way.
What if the someone that wants to talk to you just wants to sell your something? Or what if they want to convice you to change your opinion about something. Or what if they want to just reply to your Slashdot posting privately? How are you going to tell these apart?
The problem with spam isn't really the message. If I were to get in my mail box precisely and exactly the information I was interested in, I wouldn't have any problem with it. Maybe I would be interested in visiting just the right kind of porn site. Maybe I really would like to enlarge my penis. Maybe my printer really has run out of ink. Maybe. Maybe NOT.
But this is a hard thing to work out when you are dealing with content. For example, I often post on mailing lists or USENET and for many, I do get private replies (and spam, too). It's reasonable to assume that if you post, you've invited a reply (unless you say otherwise). But a "reply" to a posting about what I think should be in the next version of some standard should not be asking me if I need more golf balls. That's just plain off topic. Still, I have gotten replies that are completely ON topic, yet are sent by someone that is a total moron and not worth reading and a total waste of my time.
The real problem with spam isn't the content at all. The real problem is the way it is delivered, and the way it is determined to whom it is delivered.
TV commercials, radio spots, newspaper ads, and web banners, are what I call gatewayed advertising. What that means is that someone (the TV station sales department, the newspaper advertising department, or CmdrTaco while trying to get more revenues for Slashdot to keep it alive and pay for the kind of bandwidth that would create a Slashdot Effect on most web servers) is the "gateway" into the media where the advertising is presented. You don't get to put a TV commercial on without paying the TV station for the time. As much as I dislike most commercials (some I do enjoy the first time around), I also know they pay for, or in some cases at least help pay for, what I am receiving. But the whole point is, it's not going to get out of control because there is someone acting as the gateway. TV stations know they will lose viewers if there is 50 minutes of commercials every hour. CmdrTaco knows it would ruin Slashdot if every page were plastered with dozens of banner and box ads totally obscuring the content. And even if they did do the wrong thing and ruin it, I can change the channel or go to another site. There isn't a scaling issue here for these media.
But with spam, you can't change the channel. You can't choose to visit another site. And worst of all, it's not paying for a damned thing you receive.
We can make a comparison of spam with telemarketing and fax ads. Neither of these really pay for anything you receive. While it may be argued that telemarketers keep the cost of phone service down by providing more revenue for the phone company, this isn't really true. Most telemarketing actually takes place at the peak times that phone networks are busy, so the phone companies just have to scale up to that level of business. They aren't getting new revenues, and you can be damned sure that telemarketers are not paying an extra premium to the phone companies to help lower your phone bill (there are plenty of scumbags in that industry that would find ways around that).
Another comparison is with ads you get in snail mail. It doesn't really pay for anything you receive (they get huge discounts from the Postal Service for bulk packaging them so the delivery guy doesn't even have to check the addresses). But while these are annoying and a bit of a problem, it's not something that's going to grow exponentially from here because there is a "gateway" of cost. Those leaflets you get on your windshield are much the same. It's a pain to have to reach over and grab it and throw it away, and again, it hasn't paid for anything you receive. But like bulk snail mail, there is cost and someone has to roam around sticking them on.
The problem with spam isn't the content, it's that so much can be delivered so fast and to so many people that there is in effect NO GATEWAY to this. And as bandwidth gets cheaper and cheaper, and servers get faster and faster, you and your delete key will have to just work harder and harder to keep up. No wonder people are working on automating things to delete spam. And it just escalates.
So yeah, we do need to be able to continue to communicate, and this also needs to include advertising where appropriate. But there needs to be some kind of "gateway" to control it, to make sure it doesn't get out of hand, and to make sure the decisions about how much to send and to whom to send are decided on properly. And this also includes making sure it is sent to the proper email address for those of us with many (if you own a domain and have set it up so that any name on the left of the at sign works, raise your hand).
There will always be those who think it is their right to communicate with everyone. But, yet again, the issue is not about the message, but instead is about the methodology. Email is not a broadcast medium and should not be treated as such. It is a one to one communication medium. And I translate that to being a person to person communication medium. So if you want to communicate with me, you need to at least be a person, and not a machine running some spamware. Maybe SMTP needs a rethought. Or maybe not. I've thought about it and don't really have any answers (yet). But I do think the ultimate solution is going to end up having to be something that proves that it is a person who communicates with me, and gives me as much of their time in sending me the message as it takes from me to read it or listen to it. We need to find some way to communicate that does not allow the sender to automate it without that message being tagged as automated. That is the real problem with spam ... it's so impersonal ... it's all automated.
Excuse me? These are fraud (a felony) cases! They should be arresting the spammers and putting them in jail for at least 24 hours. The spammers should be facing criminal charges, not civil remedies.
Most of the open relays in China are Exchange server. Documentation for Exchange server is available in Chinese (not sure which dialects), Korean, and Japanese. The problem is, most of the deployed servers in China (and probably Korea, too, but I didn't really check there) are versions prior to Exchange 5.5. And those older versions, while they do have some settings to supposedly turn off relaying, do not completely turn it off, and spammers know how to exploit the relay holes.
The cause of the problem is that virtually all of these servers are running pirated copies of Exchange (and probably of Windows, too). It sure seems that, on average, the Chinese people are less concerned about theft (be it of your mail server bandwidth, or of commercial software) than westerners (Americans and Europeans) on average. Eastern European countries also have some of this problem. This seems to be a pattern that poorer countries are where it happens. Places like India, South American and Africa have less of it, but I think that is probably because there is virtually no internet connectivity outside of the big cities (this is changing quickly now in India and parts of South America), and so the deployment of mail servers and spammable bandwidth just isn't there yet. Expect new waves of spam from India over the next year or two, and from Africa after that (Much of the Nigerian money export scams really are originating from Europe and USA, not all from Nigeria, but this kind of thing doesn't need lots of bandwidth anyway, since it often uses Chinese and Korean open relays, anyway).
This is actually a missed opportunity for the Linux community. Given there are distributions of Linux specifically designed for various Asian languages, we should work to further promote this deployment. Not only will it help the spam problem because of defaults that don't open relay and readily available native language documentation, but it also gets Linux installed in more places, in one form or another.
What the music industry executives don't quite get, yet, is that it only takes one successful rip of a CD to spread like wildfire over sharing networks (which incidentally are digging deeper and deeper underground).
Given the quality level of a lot of music out there now, it's clear to me that absolute CD perfection is not the desire of the masses. Back when piracy was done (more slowly) by multiple generation analog re-recording, the quality level would drop each generation. It didn't take long before it totally sucked, and even then people often would put up with music 4 or 5 generations deep, just because it was free. Digital basically eliminates the generation problem, completely. Therefore a semi-sucky rip is actually good enough for the masses because it won't get any worse from there. And all it takes is for someone to rip it by playing it on a device that can play the copy protected CD and recording it via a sound card input. And if the device has no electrical analog output (permanently wired headphones, for example), it can still be captured by other means (some player will have to be able to play it for big home sound systems or else the music industry will be cutting out more market than piracy). It might suck to have to record music with microphones propped up against speakers (possibly with filters and noise generators to mask watermarking), but the quality of that won't be any worse than 2nd or 3rd generation analog was, and will probably still be better, anyway. The "analog hole" does exist, and it means that people can rip the music and swap it online, anyway.
What the copy protection is targeting most effectively is not the online trading, but rather, the casual CD duplicating. Many people do buy CDs then make copies for their friends. And with holidays approaching, the reverse will be common, too (buy CDs, duplicate or rip them, and send the original to your cousin for a gift).
Because of the fact that online music swapping is already virtually ubiquitous, it won't be much of a stretch to engage in that practice even more in the future. As more and more CDs fail to be playable on equipment that people paid good money to buy, be that an actual stereo system, or a custom made personal computer system running the latest Debian Linux, people will more often explore getting their music for free from the internet instead of buying CDs that don't work. They aren't going to just trash their stereo systems, and they aren't giving up on computer systems that still do other functions well. They will just get music in other forms instead of the store bought CD. And it's not because they necessarily want free music (those that do are already swapping anyway); it's that they want music that works, and swapped music may eventually be all that does. And to the extent the music industry doesn't want to serve this market, the more they drive this market away from buying any CDs at all.
Yes, there is a lot of piracy going on, and probably a lot more than there ever was. But it's the music industry itself, that will effectively destroy the CD format as we know it today. You just watch. They will do it.
Oh, you mean the message "Dick Solomon loves Mary Albright"?
I'm assuming that since this is mentioned as an embedded product, your choice of Linux is not for the purpose of making your device work in other people's Linux systems, but is instead, for the purpose having a embedded operating system inside your embedded product. If this assumption is true, then I recommend instead to use one of the BSDs for it, e.g. FreeBSD or NetBSD or OpenBSD. The licensing issues are so much easier. FreeBSD is actually the foundation OS in many a network device on the market over quite a range of sizes from small handheld devices to huge WAN switches. Linux is, too, but if the GPL licensing is the big issue, then give BSD a serious look-see.
If the above assumption is not correct, and you are making a device which is to be accessed by a hosted Linux system, then I can at least say this: I won't use your device in my managed network engines (Linux based) unless the source code is open. This is due to the need to be able to fully audit the entire security and not wanting to have to negotiate for NDA source. Lack of source can cut into your market share, especially where security is an issue (affects network devices far more than high performance video cards). So if you have intellectual property in a network device intended for a hosted system (e.g. for example a 10GB ethernet card or an OC-192 WAN line card), try to keep the intellectual property locked up in the device itself as much as possible.