legal solutions will not work -- too much of the internet is outside the US for any laws we pass to do much good. it might help in the short term, but the spammers will just move offshore b/c the profit will still be there.
the only way to get rid of spam is to make it unprofitable. you can either charge money for the receipt of each message (even $0.01 per msg would make spamming unprofitable), or you can require passing a turing test or performing some computationally-difficult operations.
2) it is asking someone to recall something memorized
Not necessarily. I'd consider an answer like "I'd check the mod_throttle directives documentation" to be pretty good. For anything that's not totally basic, I think demonstrating that you know how to find out the answer to be at least as valid as knowing the answer itself.
I assume they're talking about using iDisk as a roaming home dir. They've already got backup using iDisk, why not make the same data available as a remote home dir?
I bought a Sony PC from Circuit City a few years ago, and the salesguy would absolutely not let me have it without the warranty. After about five minutes of arguing about it, he finally told me to call back next week and say that I'd found it somewhere else at a lower price (say the amount of the warranty...), and he'd give me a refund for the difference.
There was no way in hell I'd find a better price (it was a discontinued line, and the Sony tech support ppl wouldn't believe me when I said I'd gotten it new when I nuked the hard drive on it the first night installing Linux on it), but I called back the next week and he did give me the refund.
They've got to have some scary pressure on the salescritters to get them to do something like that.
How much you wanna bet that some kind of postage on email won't make much difference, as the cost will either be so low that most won't care, or there'll be ways for companies to get out of it (or to get a much cheaper rate)?
I won't even get into how backwards you've got it on bulk snail mail...
The only reason that spam is profitable is that once you've gotten an internet connection and a mailing list, there is no additional cost to send more spam. So you can send out millions of spams for basically the same price as sending out a few hundred. This means that you only need a one-in-a-million response rate to make money.
No matter how cheap the e-postage is (even $0.001 per message), it will drastically change the economics of scale. When sending out those million spams now costs you $1,000, you suddenly need one-in-a-thousand response rate to be profitable. That will get rid of 99% of the pr0n, Nigerian scams, etc.
Of course, this won't stop everyone. The postage is bound to be cheap, and if you're running a legitimate business, it's still going to be a lot less expensive than paper mail. But if it can get rid of the worst of the spam, I think it'd be worth it.
-Esme
Re:Library of congress?
on
An IMDb for Books
·
· Score: 2, Informative
You forgot Spyglass -- the company setup by UIUC to manage and commercialize the Mosaic source code. When they negotiated with Microsoft, they thought they had done a really good job. They got a fixed percentage of the gross.
And then MS gave it away for free, screwing not only Spyglass, but Spyglass's only other customer -- Netscape.
The combination of the auto-responder and the money scenario of payment would be pretty bad. I think the best thing would be for the auto-response to ask for the completion of a Turing test -- very easy for somebody to do, and probably easily done via email. But you definitely bring up the social issues that would make implementing anything like this very difficult.
Finding a system that doesn't break legitimate traffic like mailing lists and automated confirmations will be a real challenge, I think. If there were a well-established web of trust for mailing lists and e-commerce sites, you could use that to ease the burden on legitimate people who happen to share some properties of spammers. Since the user has to subscribe to the mailing list in the first place, the list address could be automatically whitelisted at the same time. Same should go for confirmation emails, since you could automatically whitelist the automated confirmation bot at the time of purchase. This would require some integration between web browsers and email clients, but it shouldn't be too hard.
Of course, they envision running this as a proprietary service, maybe having a federation of ticket-servers that had "contractual agreements" to trust each other's tickets. Kinda like the new system with online postage printing and the USPS trusting it.
Seems like open protocols and real-time challenging would be more appropriate.
One of the impediments of a new email handling system is that there are a lot of servers to upgrade with a new protocol, a lot of environments to develop new software on, etc. Inertia.
From their ticket-system page:
There are several scenarios for spam control. Most naively, when someone new sends me email, my mail server stashes it away and sends a bounce containing a link to the ticket server. The sender receives the bounce, follows the link to get a challenge, calls the ticket server a second time to respond and get a ticke, and sends the resulting ticket to my mail server, together with the ID of the relevant email message. My mail server takes the ticket, calls the ticket server to mark the ticket as having been used, and frees the email message into my inbox. I probably add the sender to a whitelist.
I think this would be a good way of having an out-of-band mode at the beginning -- only the people who wanted to use the system would have to upgrade their email servers, and then regular email could be used for everything else (or maybe a webserver could be used for completing the test/payment).
The only problem with this is that they are probably doing *something* at that website to make money. Especially if it's just ads, you'll be shoveling cash their way by doing this.
Probably the worst is that their site gets nuked, and they have to switch to a new hosting company. But these are spammers we're talking about -- they're used to moving around. So it might not make much difference.
A new SMTP (I have a hard time equating "MS" with "More Secure", for some reason...) that had a mechanism to verify the sender's status would be good. In fact, it would be pretty much required to implement a pay-to-send system, because the SMTP would need to get the authorization to debit whatever account was going to pay for the message. The list of people who had valid accounts would defacto be the same as your "ISPs in good standing".
But I think adding the monetary element is crucial, because of the economics. In a trust system, I suspect there would be constant attacks of people hijacking trusted mail servers and using them to spam. It would, after all, still be profitable. There would also probably be people who had built up a level of trust who would then blow it all on one big spamfest. These would be corrected eventually, but the number of ISPs around the world is pretty large, so I suspect there would still be a lot of spam leaking throught the cracks.
I don't think ISPs need to charge their users per email. Since most users receive more email than they send anyway, they would generate a net income for the ISPs. They could set a quota -- even a fairly high one like 100 emails per day -- that users get included with their access.
That said, if you don't want to pay to talk to yourself, you might try a different system like a PDA or something web-based. Just because it inconveniences you, doesn't mean it wouldn't be worth it -- after all, I don't know anyone who uses email who isn't inconvenienced by spam. So even if 10% of people were inconvenienced by the new system, it would still be a drastic improvement.
As much as I'd like to see spammers prosecuted for fraud (and think making various deceptive tactics illegal is a good short-term approach), legal and social approaches are doomed to failure. The number of people you can spam is so vast, that even if only one in a million takes the bait, it's still profitable -- that's a powerful economic imbalance that you don't find anywhere else. And it's going to make people forge headers, spam from overseas, etc. to get around any legal and social roadblocks.
I think that breaking that economic model -- ending the reciever-pays system for email -- is the only way to fix spam. If you had to pay some amount of money -- event 1 cent -- for each message that is delivered, spam would stop being economical. And that's the only thing that's going to make it stop.
In my experience, the only performance problem with Java is the JVM startup. So it depends greatly on what kind of app you're working with.
If you're doing a simple command-line program where it performs one simple task, then the JVM startup time will kill your performance. But if you're doing an application that does a lot of processing, once the JVM is loaded, I have found Java to be faster than many native programs. For example, I've found Xalan-J to be about 10% faster than libxslt, when I'm running a Java app that does thousands of XSLT transforms.
That said, I still use libxslt on the command line, and for simple single-transform apps, b/c there is zero startup penalty.
When you're running inside a Servlet or EJB container, where the JVM and probably your classes are already loaded, there is no performance difference between Java and other languages.
This won't work -- many people have already mentioned the jurisdiction problems of overseas spammers, and the forged headers and open relays that make it very hard to track people down anyway.
Other techniques such as filtering are doomed as well -- it might change the ratio a little bit, so they need to send out 10 million emails for it to be profitable. But it's still going to be profitable. It's a fundamental facet of email that it's cheap to send, so even if only one in a million reads the spam and buys the product (or whatever), it still makes them money.
IMHO, the only way to get rid of spam is to change the economics of email -- to end the receiver-pays system as we know it. One way would be for SMTP to require payment before accepting an email for relay or delivery.
Normal users wouldn't be effected much by this b/c they don't send a whole lot of email, and the fees ISPs would collect for receiving email would offset the fees they incurred in sending the user's normal-load email. But it would drastically alter the landscape for all commercial email -- shifting the burden back to the advertisers like it should be.
-Esme
Re:I Want This For All Apps
on
Tabs for Safari
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I should have been more specific -- I want single-click access to every window, like the Gnome taskbar (if you turn off grouping) or the Windows taskbar give you. (I never thought I'd find myself complaining about a usability feature that's present in Windows and Linux, but missing from OSX).
In fact, I started to write my own taskbar, but I was trying to do it in Java (b/c I don't know Obj-C). The Java APIs will get you a lot of stuff, but crucially won't let you talk to the window server to get the open windows. There are some classes that let you register to receive application lifecycle events, but I couldn't get them to work, either. Maybe I should check out Real Basic to see if it can talk to the window server.
-Esme
I Want This For All Apps
on
Tabs for Safari
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I want a Pith for everything -- a taskbar that displays an icon for each window that's open.
My one big problem with OSX right now is that it's too hard to switch between windows of different apps. Since I often have a bunch of terminals, several Mozilla windows, plus other random stuff open, I need to do this often. Mozilla's tabs make it easier to get the Moz windows, at least. But I'd like it to handle all apps...
IMHO, Chimera was always a dead end. Pheonix is working on some of the same problems (bloat, complicated UI) that Chimera was, but with a cross-platform approach that still uses XUL instead of native widgets. The fact that Phoenix has made such progress is a good indication that the problem wasn't XUL in the first place.
And if you're dying to have native widgets, check out Pinstripe theme. Turns out that plain-jane Mozilla has hooks to get OSX to draw the widgets. It doesn't solve all of the other Human Interface Guidelines problems -- but most of those should be solved for all platforms, anyway.
In general, the business model to almost give away some piece of equipment and then afterwards cash in on the required consumables or assecoires should be prevented, since it is misleading for the public and unethical.
Just one quibble: this is a tried and true business model. It's also a model that works very well for consumers since it allows them to spread the cost of the purchase over the lifetime of the base unit that's sold as a loss-leader.
In the traditional razor-and-blades model, there's no reason why you need to buy blades from the same company you bought your razor from. Many people do, so it generally is a good buisness model. But you can only charge so much, or people defect to off-brand blade makers.
The problem is that makers of consoles and inkjet printers are using technological measures to artificially inflate the profit they can make from the consumables. That's the problem, not the business model itself.
Melodrama aside -- language is constantly evolving, and draws new words and new uses from many different places. Despite its effective use in dystopic fiction, totalitarian regimes are generally not any more effective at changing language than other sources. Add to that the fact that the idea that our thoughts are controlled by our vocabulary has been utterly discredited. One look at the parade of newly-coined euphamisms for being disabled or black should be enough to convince you of the futility of trying to control people's thoughts by controlling their vocabulary.
I think it's presumptious of you to assume that I'm misinformed. We disagree. I see a flawed implementation of relational theory (like any instatiation of an Aristotelian ideal is bound to be). You clearly see something different.
But my original point stands: everybody uses the term relational database the way I do, and it's disingenious of you to insist otherwise. There hasn't been a massive conspiracy to control people's minds, there has been a natural evolution of language. Loudly denouncing people for using terms the way they are consistently used in the industry is not constructive.
Slashdot Mirror
-1: Copyright infringement
-Esme
legal solutions will not work -- too much of the internet is outside the US for any laws we pass to do much good. it might help in the short term, but the spammers will just move offshore b/c the profit will still be there.
the only way to get rid of spam is to make it unprofitable. you can either charge money for the receipt of each message (even $0.01 per msg would make spamming unprofitable), or you can require passing a turing test or performing some computationally-difficult operations.
-esme
Not necessarily. I'd consider an answer like "I'd check the mod_throttle directives documentation" to be pretty good. For anything that's not totally basic, I think demonstrating that you know how to find out the answer to be at least as valid as knowing the answer itself.
-Esme
-Esme
There was no way in hell I'd find a better price (it was a discontinued line, and the Sony tech support ppl wouldn't believe me when I said I'd gotten it new when I nuked the hard drive on it the first night installing Linux on it), but I called back the next week and he did give me the refund.
They've got to have some scary pressure on the salescritters to get them to do something like that.
-Esme
I won't even get into how backwards you've got it on bulk snail mail...
The only reason that spam is profitable is that once you've gotten an internet connection and a mailing list, there is no additional cost to send more spam. So you can send out millions of spams for basically the same price as sending out a few hundred. This means that you only need a one-in-a-million response rate to make money.
No matter how cheap the e-postage is (even $0.001 per message), it will drastically change the economics of scale. When sending out those million spams now costs you $1,000, you suddenly need one-in-a-thousand response rate to be profitable. That will get rid of 99% of the pr0n, Nigerian scams, etc.
Of course, this won't stop everyone. The postage is bound to be cheap, and if you're running a legitimate business, it's still going to be a lot less expensive than paper mail. But if it can get rid of the worst of the spam, I think it'd be worth it.
-Esme
catalog.loc.gov
read the patent
You forgot Spyglass -- the company setup by UIUC to manage and commercialize the Mosaic source code. When they negotiated with Microsoft, they thought they had done a really good job. They got a fixed percentage of the gross.
And then MS gave it away for free, screwing not only Spyglass, but Spyglass's only other customer -- Netscape.
-Esme
Finding a system that doesn't break legitimate traffic like mailing lists and automated confirmations will be a real challenge, I think. If there were a well-established web of trust for mailing lists and e-commerce sites, you could use that to ease the burden on legitimate people who happen to share some properties of spammers. Since the user has to subscribe to the mailing list in the first place, the list address could be automatically whitelisted at the same time. Same should go for confirmation emails, since you could automatically whitelist the automated confirmation bot at the time of purchase. This would require some integration between web browsers and email clients, but it shouldn't be too hard.
-Esme
Of course, they envision running this as a proprietary service, maybe having a federation of ticket-servers that had "contractual agreements" to trust each other's tickets. Kinda like the new system with online postage printing and the USPS trusting it.
Seems like open protocols and real-time challenging would be more appropriate.
-Esme
One of the impediments of a new email handling system is that there are a lot of servers to upgrade with a new protocol, a lot of environments to develop new software on, etc. Inertia.
From their ticket-system page:
I think this would be a good way of having an out-of-band mode at the beginning -- only the people who wanted to use the system would have to upgrade their email servers, and then regular email could be used for everything else (or maybe a webserver could be used for completing the test/payment).
-Esme
The only problem with this is that they are probably doing *something* at that website to make money. Especially if it's just ads, you'll be shoveling cash their way by doing this.
Probably the worst is that their site gets nuked, and they have to switch to a new hosting company. But these are spammers we're talking about -- they're used to moving around. So it might not make much difference.
-Esme
A new SMTP (I have a hard time equating "MS" with "More Secure", for some reason...) that had a mechanism to verify the sender's status would be good. In fact, it would be pretty much required to implement a pay-to-send system, because the SMTP would need to get the authorization to debit whatever account was going to pay for the message. The list of people who had valid accounts would defacto be the same as your "ISPs in good standing".
But I think adding the monetary element is crucial, because of the economics. In a trust system, I suspect there would be constant attacks of people hijacking trusted mail servers and using them to spam. It would, after all, still be profitable. There would also probably be people who had built up a level of trust who would then blow it all on one big spamfest. These would be corrected eventually, but the number of ISPs around the world is pretty large, so I suspect there would still be a lot of spam leaking throught the cracks.
-Esme
I don't think ISPs need to charge their users per email. Since most users receive more email than they send anyway, they would generate a net income for the ISPs. They could set a quota -- even a fairly high one like 100 emails per day -- that users get included with their access.
That said, if you don't want to pay to talk to yourself, you might try a different system like a PDA or something web-based. Just because it inconveniences you, doesn't mean it wouldn't be worth it -- after all, I don't know anyone who uses email who isn't inconvenienced by spam. So even if 10% of people were inconvenienced by the new system, it would still be a drastic improvement.
-Esme
I think that breaking that economic model -- ending the reciever-pays system for email -- is the only way to fix spam. If you had to pay some amount of money -- event 1 cent -- for each message that is delivered, spam would stop being economical. And that's the only thing that's going to make it stop.
-Esme
If you're doing a simple command-line program where it performs one simple task, then the JVM startup time will kill your performance. But if you're doing an application that does a lot of processing, once the JVM is loaded, I have found Java to be faster than many native programs. For example, I've found Xalan-J to be about 10% faster than libxslt, when I'm running a Java app that does thousands of XSLT transforms.
That said, I still use libxslt on the command line, and for simple single-transform apps, b/c there is zero startup penalty.
When you're running inside a Servlet or EJB container, where the JVM and probably your classes are already loaded, there is no performance difference between Java and other languages.
-Esme
This won't work -- many people have already mentioned the jurisdiction problems of overseas spammers, and the forged headers and open relays that make it very hard to track people down anyway.
Other techniques such as filtering are doomed as well -- it might change the ratio a little bit, so they need to send out 10 million emails for it to be profitable. But it's still going to be profitable. It's a fundamental facet of email that it's cheap to send, so even if only one in a million reads the spam and buys the product (or whatever), it still makes them money.
IMHO, the only way to get rid of spam is to change the economics of email -- to end the receiver-pays system as we know it. One way would be for SMTP to require payment before accepting an email for relay or delivery.
Normal users wouldn't be effected much by this b/c they don't send a whole lot of email, and the fees ISPs would collect for receiving email would offset the fees they incurred in sending the user's normal-load email. But it would drastically alter the landscape for all commercial email -- shifting the burden back to the advertisers like it should be.
-Esme
In fact, I started to write my own taskbar, but I was trying to do it in Java (b/c I don't know Obj-C). The Java APIs will get you a lot of stuff, but crucially won't let you talk to the window server to get the open windows. There are some classes that let you register to receive application lifecycle events, but I couldn't get them to work, either. Maybe I should check out Real Basic to see if it can talk to the window server.
-Esme
I want a Pith for everything -- a taskbar that displays an icon for each window that's open.
My one big problem with OSX right now is that it's too hard to switch between windows of different apps. Since I often have a bunch of terminals, several Mozilla windows, plus other random stuff open, I need to do this often. Mozilla's tabs make it easier to get the Moz windows, at least. But I'd like it to handle all apps...
-Esme
And if you're dying to have native widgets, check out Pinstripe theme. Turns out that plain-jane Mozilla has hooks to get OSX to draw the widgets. It doesn't solve all of the other Human Interface Guidelines problems -- but most of those should be solved for all platforms, anyway.
-Esme
-Esme
Just one quibble: this is a tried and true business model. It's also a model that works very well for consumers since it allows them to spread the cost of the purchase over the lifetime of the base unit that's sold as a loss-leader.
In the traditional razor-and-blades model, there's no reason why you need to buy blades from the same company you bought your razor from. Many people do, so it generally is a good buisness model. But you can only charge so much, or people defect to off-brand blade makers.
The problem is that makers of consoles and inkjet printers are using technological measures to artificially inflate the profit they can make from the consumables. That's the problem, not the business model itself.
-Esme
Melodrama aside -- language is constantly evolving, and draws new words and new uses from many different places. Despite its effective use in dystopic fiction, totalitarian regimes are generally not any more effective at changing language than other sources. Add to that the fact that the idea that our thoughts are controlled by our vocabulary has been utterly discredited. One look at the parade of newly-coined euphamisms for being disabled or black should be enough to convince you of the futility of trying to control people's thoughts by controlling their vocabulary.
I think it's presumptious of you to assume that I'm misinformed. We disagree. I see a flawed implementation of relational theory (like any instatiation of an Aristotelian ideal is bound to be). You clearly see something different.
But my original point stands: everybody uses the term relational database the way I do, and it's disingenious of you to insist otherwise. There hasn't been a massive conspiracy to control people's minds, there has been a natural evolution of language. Loudly denouncing people for using terms the way they are consistently used in the industry is not constructive.
-Esme