approach to fighting spam. your idea will not work. here is why it won't work. (one or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected (X) no one will be able to find the guy or collect the money (X) it is defenseless against brute force attacks (X) it will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it (X) users of email will not put up with it ( ) microsoft will not put up with it ( ) the police will not put up with it ( ) requires too much cooperation from spammers ( ) requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once (X) many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) laws expressly prohibiting it (X) lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) open relays in foreign countries ( ) ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses (X) asshats ( ) jurisdictional problems (X) unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) huge existing software investment in smtp ( ) susceptibility of protocols other than smtp to attack ( ) willingness of users to install os patches received by email ( ) armies of worm riddled broadband-connected windows boxes ( ) eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches (X) extreme profitability of spam (X) joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) technically illiterate politicians ( ) extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers (X) dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) smtp headers should not be the subject of legislation (X) blacklists suck (X) whitelists suck ( ) we should be able to talk about viagra without being censored ( ) countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) countermeasures must work if phased in gradually (X) sending email should be free (X) why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses (X) feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) i don't want the government reading my email (X) killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
furthermore, this is what i think about you:
(X) sorry dude, but i don't think it would work. (X) this is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) nice try, assh0le! i'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Anyway , all the guy had to do was download the software and run it to check the veracity of my claims
Which makes your contribution "original research" that should not be in Wikipedia at all.
Look, Wikipedia is, first and foremost, an encyclopedia. It's supposed to be a collection of information from other reliable sources. If you can't provide a reliable source for the material, then it doesn't go in. Period.
Saying "run the software yourself" is not a source. Wikipedia doesn't publish "things that are true", it publishes "things that can be verified by asking other reliable sources".
But you also can't improve GPL'd things and give other downstream from YOU more freedom (ie, here I've followed the GPL, but I'm making my mods MIT).
How is that "more" freedom, exactly? By wanting to change the license, you make the software less free to downstream users, since somebody could then close the source in their own product.
Somebody with access to a thing can grant others access to that thing. So yes, giving your child access to things he doesn't need to know about is a bad idea.
Nobody's saying that the GPL doesn't work as it's intended. Obviously, if you include anything with a GPL license in your application, then your application must also be GPL licensed (loosely speaking). The ridiculous part is the sense that you're in the right by restricting the licence choices of your downstream users.
Really? You think that that is ridiculous? What a massive sense of entitlement you have!
Somebody gives you something (that you find valuable) for free, and you still somehow figure out a way to complain that it isn't free enough for you to make it less free to some other people later.
People never cease to amaze me. You're basically saying that you feel restricted because you can't take this free software you got and use it in something else which you want to make non-free. I mean, you basically are saying that you want a handout, like some bum on the street corner asking for change.
Actually, it's the cellular companies that want that data more. By having the phones report back on position and cell tower ID strengths, they can more easily map "dead zones" in their coverage areas, telling them where to put new towers to hit the most people.
Google did this specifically in Google Maps Mobile well before they rolled out the "find my location" support in it.
In early Google Maps Mobile versions, if you had GPS support, it would include the GPS coordinates and the "visible" cell tower IDs and strengths in every request back to Google. They used this data to improve their location service (by getting GPS data on where the cell towers were) before rolling it out to the public. That's how they got the location service to work even on phones without GPS data, it uses the cell tower signal strengths to guess at where you are.
The data is still sent by Google Maps Mobile on any phone that supports it.
I still blame the parents for not creating a decent separation of their data vs. their kids. Why does little Billy Downloady have the equivalent of root access, so he can install the software to begin with? Why does he have access to the tax records in the first place?
You don't need to resort to hard core encryption. Simple user separation would have prevented this sort of thing. Heck, even Windows rather lame user system would work just fine to prevent this.
Family members should have separate accounts on the local PC. It just makes sense.
What about my freedom? If I make something awesome with a library that is GPL and I'm feeling altruistic, I can't let people sell it without distributing source? That's ridiculous.
No, what's ridiculous is you thinking that you have the right to take other people's work (the GPL library) and use it however you damn well please without paying those people for their hard work.
The form of payment they want just happens for you to release your own source code too. If you don't agree to their terms of payment, what gives you the right to steal their hard work? Why do you want to be a thief?
What is the proposed self-enforcing voting protocol?
Everybody in the same room makes a mark on a ballot, folds it, puts it in a box with an open top, so all can see it is not subject to being rigged, but still not see the actual votes. At the end, the votes are upended on the floor and everybody looks at them, and can count them themselves.
Less subject to coercion than a show of hands, still not perfect. However, it is self-enforcing, since all can see the results.
There's other ways as well, but the point is that everybody needs to know how the system works and to be able to follow all the votes all the way through the system to the final count for it to be self-enforcing.
True, but in many situations, such a case is perfectly acceptable. Case in point: Writing non-GPL plugins for a GPL piece of software. Typically only the plugins are distributed by themselves, without the original software. Those plugins deep link, but whether they are derivative or not is a matter of law.
The "linking rule" is a rule-of-thumb that doesn't always apply, despite what the FSF would have you believe. And in many cases, you can write deep linked code for GPL'd without being subject to the GPL yourself. In some of those cases, distribution even becomes not an issue.
As always, however, consult a quality lawyer first.
Apparently I don't understand the DMCA as well as I thought. Saying that jailbreaking the iPhone violates DMCA would be like saying once you purchase your new laptop, you are not allowed to install any software not specifically approved by the laptop manufacturer, and installing any unapproved 3rd party applications would be a violation of the DMCA. People are not trying to port the iPhone OS itself over to other phones or devices, which I believe would violate DMCA, they simply desire the ability to install apps and customize the device they have paid for to make it useful for them.
In order to install your own applications on the iPhone (or unlock it for other carriers), you must circumvent a protection measure (jailbreak it). This runs afowl of the DMCA.
A new laptop doesn't have protection measures designed to prevent you from installing your own software on it. The iPhone does.
USAA and a few other banks have been doing this for ages.
I know that USAA in particular already has a system that lets users scan checks themselves with a PC and a scanner, and then can deposit the check via email or the website or what have you, simply by sending the image file to them.
So the only thing interesting here is really a) they're going to do it via an iPhone app, and b) the iPhone picture quality is now considered good enough for this sort of thing.
It wouldn't matter anyway, their opt-out process doesn't work. The only way to opt-out is to manually modify your systems to use static DNS from a non-hijacking server.
Since the opt-out page is broken and doesn't actually opt you out of anything, you'll have to do it yourself. Here's a list of all Comcast's DNS servers: http://dns.comcast.net/dns-ip-addresses.html
The first two are the "redirecting" servers, and have the Comcast DNS hijacking enabled.
The second two are the correct servers to use, they are running pure DNS without Comcast's bullshit.
Please point me to the codicil that states it is illegal to modify your own car. Alternatively, I can point you to the codicil of law that states that it is illegal to modify a device for the purposes of circumventing another tenet of law/society, that of copyright.
Who said anything about violating copyright? There's plenty of other reasons to modify your game hardware. The primary one, in most cases, is to play imported games or to be able to run homebrew type software (ala XBMC and others). Copying of games is indeed possible, but rarely the primary use.
To go back to the car analogy, there are ways you can modify the car which are, in fact, illegal. Emissions comes to mind right away, since you can increase power by ignoring emissions and fuel standards. Does this mean that all car modification is illegal?
And in no jurisdiction would you find a reputable licensed mechanic willing to break the law, for example in regards to speed limiters, safety devices, emissions control, and so forth.
Disabling speed limiters is not against the law, and yes, reputable mechanics will indeed help you change the chips in your car, for improved performance and such. Or have you not been to a car show?
"Breaking the law" is really a matter of application. With the same hammer I can either pound a nail or kill a person.
Also, I was talking about the viewpoint of the common person, aka "common sense", which is a fair bit different than the letter of the law.
It is not illegal to modify your own vehicle with AutoZone parts, so the analogy is flawed, fatally.
False. It is illegal to perform certain types of modifications, and yes, AutoZone (along with every other auto parts store) carries the parts that will let you do that.
Legal vs. illegal is a matter of intent, not of what tools you use.
The point of the law is to have something solid to rely on.
No. The point of the law is to have guidelines to rely on. Because if they're anything other than guidelines, then you're suggesting that people who know nothing of the details of the situation and who may have wrote those words many years ago are nevertheless more qualified to judge than the man on the spot.
Telling the police that each and everyone one of them is judge, jury, and executioner is not the solution.
At what point did I say the police should find somebody guilty and then kill them? You're taking the situation too far.
The policeman has a choice to either enforce the law (arrest somebody) or not (let them go, warn them not to do it again, etc). That's it. They can do their job or look the other way. This capability of applying humanity to their jobs exists at every level of the system, or it should. Nobody should blindly follow orders, ever. You have a brain, you're supposed to use it.
Or do you really think that every speeding violation should result in arrest and jail time?
This is slashdot, so I have to use the car analogy.
Are you suggesting that the population at large would think it should be illegal to, say, modify their own car? That AutoZone is providing millions of Americans the tools and instructions on how to break the law?
Their DNS does indeed return the proper NXDOMAIN responses if you a) sign up for an account, b) register your IP with them, and c) disable all the "advanced" features they offer. Set it to be basic no-frills DNS and that's indeed what you get with them.
So yes, their opt-out for that sort of thing, while a bit of a pain, does work properly. But considering that their entire service is opt-in to begin with, there's not a lot to complain about on that score.
For people with dynamic IPs, they offer software to run that pings them every so often to update your IP and make you stay opted out. Actually, they use that because you can create "templates" of settings to apply to different networks you use and such.
Would you rather have police interpreting the laws as they see fit and only enforcing the ones they agree with?
YES. Absolutely.
The law only works as a system when every single person enforcing it applies common sense to the situation. Without that injection of common sense, "law" is nothing more than tyranny and oppression.
"Legalize" jailbreaking? So you're implying that it is currently illegal to do what you want with your own phone? I didn't know breaking of the terms and conditions was "illegal".
Yes, Jailbreaking violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which is why they're asking the copyright office for an exemption.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't need an SSN to perform a credit check. Name and address is almost always enough, unless you've just moved to the new location.
your post advocates a
(X) technical ( ) legislative (X) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. your idea will not work. here is why it won't work. (one or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(X) no one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
(X) it is defenseless against brute force attacks
(X) it will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) users of email will not put up with it
( ) microsoft will not put up with it
( ) the police will not put up with it
( ) requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(X) many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) open relays in foreign countries
( ) ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) asshats
( ) jurisdictional problems
(X) unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) huge existing software investment in smtp
( ) susceptibility of protocols other than smtp to attack
( ) willingness of users to install os patches received by email
( ) armies of worm riddled broadband-connected windows boxes
( ) eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) extreme profitability of spam
(X) joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) technically illiterate politicians
( ) extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(X) dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) smtp headers should not be the subject of legislation
(X) blacklists suck
(X) whitelists suck
( ) we should be able to talk about viagra without being censored
( ) countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(X) sending email should be free
(X) why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(X) feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) i don't want the government reading my email
(X) killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
furthermore, this is what i think about you:
(X) sorry dude, but i don't think it would work.
(X) this is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) nice try, assh0le! i'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Anyway , all the guy had to do was download the software and run it to check the veracity of my claims
Which makes your contribution "original research" that should not be in Wikipedia at all.
Look, Wikipedia is, first and foremost, an encyclopedia. It's supposed to be a collection of information from other reliable sources. If you can't provide a reliable source for the material, then it doesn't go in. Period.
Saying "run the software yourself" is not a source. Wikipedia doesn't publish "things that are true", it publishes "things that can be verified by asking other reliable sources".
But you also can't improve GPL'd things and give other downstream from YOU more freedom (ie, here I've followed the GPL, but I'm making my mods MIT).
How is that "more" freedom, exactly? By wanting to change the license, you make the software less free to downstream users, since somebody could then close the source in their own product.
Somebody with access to a thing can grant others access to that thing. So yes, giving your child access to things he doesn't need to know about is a bad idea.
Nobody's saying that the GPL doesn't work as it's intended. Obviously, if you include anything with a GPL license in your application, then your application must also be GPL licensed (loosely speaking). The ridiculous part is the sense that you're in the right by restricting the licence choices of your downstream users.
Really? You think that that is ridiculous? What a massive sense of entitlement you have!
Somebody gives you something (that you find valuable) for free, and you still somehow figure out a way to complain that it isn't free enough for you to make it less free to some other people later.
People never cease to amaze me. You're basically saying that you feel restricted because you can't take this free software you got and use it in something else which you want to make non-free. I mean, you basically are saying that you want a handout, like some bum on the street corner asking for change.
Seriously, man. Have you no self-respect?
Actually, it's the cellular companies that want that data more. By having the phones report back on position and cell tower ID strengths, they can more easily map "dead zones" in their coverage areas, telling them where to put new towers to hit the most people.
Google did this specifically in Google Maps Mobile well before they rolled out the "find my location" support in it.
In early Google Maps Mobile versions, if you had GPS support, it would include the GPS coordinates and the "visible" cell tower IDs and strengths in every request back to Google. They used this data to improve their location service (by getting GPS data on where the cell towers were) before rolling it out to the public. That's how they got the location service to work even on phones without GPS data, it uses the cell tower signal strengths to guess at where you are.
The data is still sent by Google Maps Mobile on any phone that supports it.
I still blame the parents for not creating a decent separation of their data vs. their kids. Why does little Billy Downloady have the equivalent of root access, so he can install the software to begin with? Why does he have access to the tax records in the first place?
You don't need to resort to hard core encryption. Simple user separation would have prevented this sort of thing. Heck, even Windows rather lame user system would work just fine to prevent this.
Family members should have separate accounts on the local PC. It just makes sense.
Assuming a judge will agree with anybody is a bad mistake to make. Judges have their own interpretations, and make up their own minds.
My point was, and is, that it's a far cry from proven either way. Assuming either side is in the right is a bad move.
What about my freedom? If I make something awesome with a library that is GPL and I'm feeling altruistic, I can't let people sell it without distributing source? That's ridiculous.
No, what's ridiculous is you thinking that you have the right to take other people's work (the GPL library) and use it however you damn well please without paying those people for their hard work.
The form of payment they want just happens for you to release your own source code too. If you don't agree to their terms of payment, what gives you the right to steal their hard work? Why do you want to be a thief?
What is the proposed self-enforcing voting protocol?
Everybody in the same room makes a mark on a ballot, folds it, puts it in a box with an open top, so all can see it is not subject to being rigged, but still not see the actual votes. At the end, the votes are upended on the floor and everybody looks at them, and can count them themselves.
Less subject to coercion than a show of hands, still not perfect. However, it is self-enforcing, since all can see the results.
There's other ways as well, but the point is that everybody needs to know how the system works and to be able to follow all the votes all the way through the system to the final count for it to be self-enforcing.
There's an exception allowing binary modules for the Linux kernel.
Well, okay, it's not an exception, exactly. Linus simply doesn't consider all possible kernel modules to be "derived works".
http://kerneltrap.org/node/1735
True, but in many situations, such a case is perfectly acceptable. Case in point: Writing non-GPL plugins for a GPL piece of software. Typically only the plugins are distributed by themselves, without the original software. Those plugins deep link, but whether they are derivative or not is a matter of law.
The "linking rule" is a rule-of-thumb that doesn't always apply, despite what the FSF would have you believe. And in many cases, you can write deep linked code for GPL'd without being subject to the GPL yourself. In some of those cases, distribution even becomes not an issue.
As always, however, consult a quality lawyer first.
Apparently I don't understand the DMCA as well as I thought. Saying that jailbreaking the iPhone violates DMCA would be like saying once you purchase your new laptop, you are not allowed to install any software not specifically approved by the laptop manufacturer, and installing any unapproved 3rd party applications would be a violation of the DMCA. People are not trying to port the iPhone OS itself over to other phones or devices, which I believe would violate DMCA, they simply desire the ability to install apps and customize the device they have paid for to make it useful for them.
In order to install your own applications on the iPhone (or unlock it for other carriers), you must circumvent a protection measure (jailbreak it). This runs afowl of the DMCA.
A new laptop doesn't have protection measures designed to prevent you from installing your own software on it. The iPhone does.
I'm sorry, your examples are exactly contrary to what I was advocating. I was arguing FOR common sense, not against it.
USAA and a few other banks have been doing this for ages.
I know that USAA in particular already has a system that lets users scan checks themselves with a PC and a scanner, and then can deposit the check via email or the website or what have you, simply by sending the image file to them.
So the only thing interesting here is really a) they're going to do it via an iPhone app, and b) the iPhone picture quality is now considered good enough for this sort of thing.
It wouldn't matter anyway, their opt-out process doesn't work. The only way to opt-out is to manually modify your systems to use static DNS from a non-hijacking server.
You can get the list of servers here: http://dns.comcast.net/dns-ip-addresses.html
Since the opt-out page is broken and doesn't actually opt you out of anything, you'll have to do it yourself. Here's a list of all Comcast's DNS servers: http://dns.comcast.net/dns-ip-addresses.html
The first two are the "redirecting" servers, and have the Comcast DNS hijacking enabled.
The second two are the correct servers to use, they are running pure DNS without Comcast's bullshit.
Please point me to the codicil that states it is illegal to modify your own car. Alternatively, I can point you to the codicil of law that states that it is illegal to modify a device for the purposes of circumventing another tenet of law/society, that of copyright.
Who said anything about violating copyright? There's plenty of other reasons to modify your game hardware. The primary one, in most cases, is to play imported games or to be able to run homebrew type software (ala XBMC and others). Copying of games is indeed possible, but rarely the primary use.
To go back to the car analogy, there are ways you can modify the car which are, in fact, illegal. Emissions comes to mind right away, since you can increase power by ignoring emissions and fuel standards. Does this mean that all car modification is illegal?
And in no jurisdiction would you find a reputable licensed mechanic willing to break the law, for example in regards to speed limiters, safety devices, emissions control, and so forth.
Disabling speed limiters is not against the law, and yes, reputable mechanics will indeed help you change the chips in your car, for improved performance and such. Or have you not been to a car show?
"Breaking the law" is really a matter of application. With the same hammer I can either pound a nail or kill a person.
Also, I was talking about the viewpoint of the common person, aka "common sense", which is a fair bit different than the letter of the law.
It is not illegal to modify your own vehicle with AutoZone parts, so the analogy is flawed, fatally.
False. It is illegal to perform certain types of modifications, and yes, AutoZone (along with every other auto parts store) carries the parts that will let you do that.
Legal vs. illegal is a matter of intent, not of what tools you use.
The point of the law is to have something solid to rely on.
No. The point of the law is to have guidelines to rely on. Because if they're anything other than guidelines, then you're suggesting that people who know nothing of the details of the situation and who may have wrote those words many years ago are nevertheless more qualified to judge than the man on the spot.
Telling the police that each and everyone one of them is judge, jury, and executioner is not the solution.
At what point did I say the police should find somebody guilty and then kill them? You're taking the situation too far.
The policeman has a choice to either enforce the law (arrest somebody) or not (let them go, warn them not to do it again, etc). That's it. They can do their job or look the other way. This capability of applying humanity to their jobs exists at every level of the system, or it should. Nobody should blindly follow orders, ever. You have a brain, you're supposed to use it.
Or do you really think that every speeding violation should result in arrest and jail time?
This is slashdot, so I have to use the car analogy.
Are you suggesting that the population at large would think it should be illegal to, say, modify their own car? That AutoZone is providing millions of Americans the tools and instructions on how to break the law?
Their DNS does indeed return the proper NXDOMAIN responses if you a) sign up for an account, b) register your IP with them, and c) disable all the "advanced" features they offer. Set it to be basic no-frills DNS and that's indeed what you get with them.
So yes, their opt-out for that sort of thing, while a bit of a pain, does work properly. But considering that their entire service is opt-in to begin with, there's not a lot to complain about on that score.
For people with dynamic IPs, they offer software to run that pings them every so often to update your IP and make you stay opted out. Actually, they use that because you can create "templates" of settings to apply to different networks you use and such.
Would you rather have police interpreting the laws as they see fit and only enforcing the ones they agree with?
YES. Absolutely.
The law only works as a system when every single person enforcing it applies common sense to the situation. Without that injection of common sense, "law" is nothing more than tyranny and oppression.
"Legalize" jailbreaking? So you're implying that it is currently illegal to do what you want with your own phone? I didn't know breaking of the terms and conditions was "illegal".
Yes, Jailbreaking violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which is why they're asking the copyright office for an exemption.