My father had a job where at one point he had to crawl through ducts. These ducts had lots of asbestos fibres in them, at a time before the health hazards of asbestos fibes were understood. It's no surprise he died at 57 from an extremely painful lung disease.
If you are working in a job where your health is put at risk, make sure you get the right safety equipment. If they don't supply it, complain incessantly until they do. The worst that can happen is that you lose your job, but it is better to lose your job than it is to lose your health. You can always get another job but once you lose your health it's gone for good.
Someone who doesn't know how to use punctuation properly is in no position to criticise another's spelling. Seven and eight exclamation marks is too many to end a sentence with, only one full stop is usually used at the end of a sentence instead of three, and "that's" is spelt with an apostrophe.
Imagine that. A few rich people own most of the land, and the rest of the population have to pay rent on it. What a historical aberration.
The historic aberration is that the English never had a revolution to relieve themselves of a parasitic aristocracy that constantly bleed the "lower classes" for their own benefit.
If you file papers- I'd bet a lot of companies would simply recognize you're serious, and cave in.
Especially when one of the papers that you file is an injunction or restraining order prohibiting that company from distributing the allegedly infringing software.
"An injunction is an equitable remedy in the form of a court order that prohibits ("enjoins" or "restrains") a party from continuing to do an illegal activity. The party that fails to adhere to the injunction faces civil or criminal contempt of court and may have to pay damages or sanctions for failing to follow the court's order."
Injunctions are wonderful things. These are used all the time by companies to stop other companies doing harmful things. The injunction can be the weapons of choice against GPL violators.
If your lawyer threatens the company with an injunction prohibiting the company from distributing the matter until the matter is settled, they must listen to you. If they do not, get a temporary injunction prohibiting the distribution of the offending code.
If you feel like it, offer them a real licence to do what they are doing for an appropriate cost, say $2million or some other number you'd be happy with.
You want to be careful here when choosing the figure to set.
If you choose a figure like $2,000,000, it's very likely that you'll have to pursue the company in court to recover this amount of money. The company would be gambling their lawyer fees on a court case (maybe $10,000) against what they feel is a 50% chance of paying nothing more. Paying a lawyer $10,000 for a 50% chance of not having to pay $2,000,000 is good odds, and most companies will take this 'bet'. Do YOU have $10,000 to fight them in court?
On the other hand, if you set the figure at a more modest $10,000 to $20,000, the company would be much more likely to pay up without contest if you can prove your assertions. The gamble here is much worse for the company: $10,000 in lawyer fees for a day in court for a 50% chance of not having to pay $20,000 is poor odds. Instead, the company would decide that the amount of money involved isn't worth pursuing in court, and they may hand over that amount more readily (but their lawyers might ask you to sign a release).
There's also the customers of the copyright violators. Do the original copyright violators indemnify their customers against copyright infringement lawsuits? If not, which is likely, you may be able to pursue the customers as well for a similar amount of money.
After all, if SCO can get away with actions similar to this for so long when 99% to 100% of the code they are 'licensing' isn't even theirs, then your chances are good if you use the legal system to your advantage.
It shouldn't be hard. Obfuscated source has its uses.
For example, suppose you are writing some application in C that uses strings. The nature of the application isn't important to this discussion, but the use of strings is important.
Suppose these strings contain information you'd rather have hidden, so you choose to 'encrypt' the strings in the binary, and 'decrypt' the strings whenever you use them. Here, 'encrypt' and 'decrypt' could be something as brainless as ROT13; the exact encryption method isn't important. However, the presence of this encryption could make the life of someone attempting to purloin your code difficult, because they wouldn't be able to remove it easily.
It's therefore likely that someone using your code would not go to the trouble of converting these strings into something readable, and the unmodified strings would remain in the binary.
And there's the way you can examine a binary for GPL violations involving your code. Suppose you ran a command like strings on the binary piped through grep with the search string set to one of your encrypted strings. It is unlikely that a random application would happen to have a string like "&h3#0[_?/[jK;" in it, but if you had this string in your code and it appeared in a binary, the chances are good that you've just found a GPL violation.
Another method would be to output short sequences of assembler that did nothing useful but contained watermarks. A pseudocode example:
jump program_counter + 8 bytes ; relational jump DB 8 bytes of crud nop
Here, it would jump over the 'crud' to the no-op and then proceed happily with the rest of the code. The 'crud' is a searchable watermark (or possibly a constant or variable that the code needs that is addressed by another part of the code).
There's also the way the code functions in cases where the behaviour is not well-defined. In cases where the programmer has a choice of what to do in certain cases, choose anything that you like that makes sense. The implementation of packet encoding in TCP/IP is one example - it's possible to determine the operating system of a remote host on the internet with some accuracy simply by observing how the TCP packets you receive from that host are constructed. If you intentionally build similar fingerprints into your code, you can use these later to detect uses of your code in the wild.
It is a bold initiative to announce a return to the moon and then go on to Mars, but it will be expensive. It might turn out to be too expensive for one nation alone.
To save costs, China, Russia and the ESA should also be involved in the missions. China has announced its own plans to go to the moon in a similar time frame. Russia has some lunar experience, especially with their robotic craft in the early 1970s and their sample return missions at about the same time.
Joint missions to the moon are not a new idea. The Soviet Premier Khrushchev proposed a joint effort to go to the moon with the Americans in 1961 and 1963. It was rejected by JFK in 1961, but JFK was more willing to consider the idea when it was proposed again in 1963. Had JFK not been assassinated a few weeks later, a Russian might have walked on the moon in 1969 with an American.
If Bush is talking about "humanity", he needs to involve more of humanity in this new space exploration initiative than just Americans.
Congress will never really do anything to protect the private citizen
I read somewhere about an interesting tactic used some time ago to get the message across to these 'representatives'.
If you are a group with limited funds, what you do is you pick one particularly clueless incumbent representative in a seat that can change hands, and you focus all your attention on getting that representative voted out. Fund their opponents. Discredit the representative. If you can get that representative voted out, then you can send a clear message that you mean business. After that, you may find representatives more willing to listen to your group.
It's simple. The contributors to the Linux kernel have forgotten to file a high-profile class-action countersuit against SCO for copyright infringement. Every person who has contributed original code to the Linux kernel can sue SCO for copyright infringement if SCO sells their copyrighted code for profit because the GPL does not specifically renounce claims to copyright. This would be software piracy. Because each person has only contributed a small portion of the code, an individual lawsuit against SCO is unprofitable after paying the legal bills. However, a class-action copyright infringement lawsuit is another matter.
For maximum effect, the lawsuit must not be filed quietly. When the lawsuit is filed, a press release should be prepared and sent to all major media organisations in the U.S. and select ones from other countries. Chances are some media organisations will report this lawsuit as news. Once this lawsuit is filed, people will think twice about buying SCO stock and the stock price will start to fall. If institutional investors decide the stock isn't worth the risk, the stock price will crash so hard it will leave a crater.
Paul Graham's article was an interesting read, but he didn't mention the role that emotive and neutral terminology plays in the spread of ideas.
To define these terms: Emotive language is the choice of words that conjure up the desired emotions in the listener, whereas neutral language is devoid of such emotional associations.
Many of these terms are spread by people in positions of power, such as government leaders, major corporations and powerful lobby groups.
Let's examine two examples.
The DMCA was enacted to combat "piracy". The word "piracy" and its various derivatives are commonly used by MPAA and RIAA executives. However, the strict definition of piracy in the sense of copyright infringement is to copy someone else's work and sell it for your own personal profit. This isn't as widespread as the copyright holders like to have us believe. For example, someone copying a CD so they can have a copy in their car as well as in their home isn't strictly piracy because they are not selling the copy. Yet the RIAA would use "piracy" to describe this activity. The term "copyright infringement" is available for their use, but they often eschew this term for the less accurate but more emotive term "piracy". Why? To engender the emotional response they want in their listeners.
"Downsizing" was a corporate buzzword in the recession era of the early 1990's. What it means, however, is to make many staff redundant at once. This made many people unhappy because they were now out of work. The proponents of this corporate philosophy introduced the term "downsizing" because it was a term with no emotive associations. To get people to swallow nasty medicine, you have to make it taste bland. In the same way, to get the masses to accept something bad, you have to cloak the concept with a neutral name that is often derived from corporate doublespeak.
If you want to look for nasty ideas someone is going to foist on you, look for bland-sounding terms. On the other hand, if you want to "look under the rocks" as Paul Graham said in his article, look for emotive terminology and question the concepts behind the emotive terms.
Include a disclaimer in your e-mail signature for use in all e-mails that is worded like the following:
The sending of this e-mail to you must not be interpreted by the recipient as the sender giving permission to add the sender's e-mail address to any list, database or other similar collection of e-mail addresses unless the body of the e-mail expressly grants this permission. The sending of this e-mail must not be interpreted by the recipient as the establishment of a business relationship with the sender unless the body of the e-mail expressly states otherwise.
You are incorrect. I have chosen not to register because I object to the illegitimate gathering of my personal information for their commercial gain. I don't know to what use they will put my personal details, either now or in the future, nor I suspect do you. Until I do know, I will follow Fats Waller's advice - "Don't give your right name!"
IIRC, the long syllables are also indicated with a special character to indicate the double length that looks a lot like a dash.
Hence haiku make sense when you consider the "n" and "-" characters as separate "syllables". It also helps to understand the large role that calligraphy plays in Japaanese culture. Haiku are probably intended to be written.
If I use a switch and charge a monthly rate, does this make me an ISP.
Perhaps.
If you want to claim ISP status, so you can sue spammers, start charging a fee. Then provide "free" beer to your students every month for roughly the cost of the fee. You get the right to sue spammers, your students get beer. Everyone wins!
As a business owner, voting for a business-friendly candidate means not only lower taxes, but a permanent ban on ALL types of unsolicited e-mails.
Uh... I assume you mean spam? "Unsolicited e-mail" is what I must send if I find a business's e-mail address on their website and I e-mail them to ask for more information about their wonderful product or service.
From the CAUCE website: The law would only permit the FTC, state Attorneys General, and ISPs to bring actions against violators.
So what, under the definition of this legislation, is an ISP? Can you hook up a modem to your home box and claim to be an ISP because you have the capability to supply dialup internet services? If so, then you could hook up a modem and start suing the spammers....
When a vote is cast, the machine punches holes in a paper card. The paper card is then transferred to a card reader and the vote on the card is read. If the vote read from the paper card matches the vote that was cast, the paper card is transferred to a secure box and the electronic vote is recorded. If the card cannot be read, it is destroyed, and the machine shuts down until someone can service it.
This simple technique creates a paper audit trail, and provides a backup method of tallying votes. Recounts actually become possible.
If you read the analyses, there's some advice for beating chess computers.
Chess computers have large opening databases. If they can make a database move, while the human has to think, the computer gets the edge due to the reduced amount of time they need to make a database move.
During the games, Kasparov tried to play unusual moves in the opening to knock the computer out of its database as early as possible. One example from game 2 is Kasparov's move 8...Re8, which is annotated with "This move by Kasparov had never been played before in this exact position." This knocked Fritz out of its opening database, and forced it to calculate.
A more striking example of the way to beat chess computers is the great wall of pawns that dominated game 3. Chess computers cannot evaluate such positions properly. If you built a wall of pawns like that, and snuck your forces behind them, you are a good chance of winning because the computer cannot calculate deeply enough.
Spammers are using automated software to post to weblogs and other similar places? We can do the same thing to make their business ineffective. Turnabout is fair play.
Use software to visit the links and analyse their website. If they have an HTML form, submit useless infomation to it, so as to fill up their logs with garbage. It shouldn't take long to fill up their database with crud. If they have to troll through 10,000 garbage posts to find 1 order, they will not stay in "business" for long.
Some of the messages could be community-service announcements like "Stop spamming" and "You are trading illegally". Some could be "orders" to people named Herr Schlongmeister, I.P.Freely, Hugh Jass, Mike Hunt and Dick Biggins. Whatever you do, stay within the law if possible, but I don't consider such a turnabout DOS against a spammer to be ethically unsound.
Suppose you live in a country where everyone has an RFID tag implanted in the back of their necks.
You meet a good-looking member of the appropriate gender in a bar. You chat. You have a few drinks. You are getting along well, so you get invited back to their place. You have more drinks.
Next thing you know, you are lying in a bathtub, covered in blood. The back of your neck hurts like hell.
Or maybe you just don't wake up at all.
It would be like the stolen-kidney urban myth all over again.
Slashdot Mirror
Separating quarks and gluons is somewhat tricky. Instead, I recommend constructing superheavy elements using very small tweezers.
My father had a job where at one point he had to crawl through ducts. These ducts had lots of asbestos fibres in them, at a time before the health hazards of asbestos fibes were understood. It's no surprise he died at 57 from an extremely painful lung disease.
If you are working in a job where your health is put at risk, make sure you get the right safety equipment. If they don't supply it, complain incessantly until they do. The worst that can happen is that you lose your job, but it is better to lose your job than it is to lose your health. You can always get another job but once you lose your health it's gone for good.
Someone who doesn't know how to use punctuation properly is in no position to criticise another's spelling. Seven and eight exclamation marks is too many to end a sentence with, only one full stop is usually used at the end of a sentence instead of three, and "that's" is spelt with an apostrophe.
Imagine that. A few rich people own most of the land, and the rest of the population have to pay rent on it. What a historical aberration.
The historic aberration is that the English never had a revolution to relieve themselves of a parasitic aristocracy that constantly bleed the "lower classes" for their own benefit.
If you file papers- I'd bet a lot of companies would simply recognize you're serious, and cave in.
Especially when one of the papers that you file is an injunction or restraining order prohibiting that company from distributing the allegedly infringing software.
Wikipedia says:
"An injunction is an equitable remedy in the form of a court order that prohibits ("enjoins" or "restrains") a party from continuing to do an illegal activity. The party that fails to adhere to the injunction faces civil or criminal contempt of court and may have to pay damages or sanctions for failing to follow the court's order."
Injunctions are wonderful things. These are used all the time by companies to stop other companies doing harmful things. The injunction can be the weapons of choice against GPL violators.
If your lawyer threatens the company with an injunction prohibiting the company from distributing the matter until the matter is settled, they must listen to you. If they do not, get a temporary injunction prohibiting the distribution of the offending code.
Discalimer: IANAL.
If you feel like it, offer them a real licence to do what they are doing for an appropriate cost, say $2million or some other number you'd be happy with.
You want to be careful here when choosing the figure to set.
If you choose a figure like $2,000,000, it's very likely that you'll have to pursue the company in court to recover this amount of money. The company would be gambling their lawyer fees on a court case (maybe $10,000) against what they feel is a 50% chance of paying nothing more. Paying a lawyer $10,000 for a 50% chance of not having to pay $2,000,000 is good odds, and most companies will take this 'bet'. Do YOU have $10,000 to fight them in court?
On the other hand, if you set the figure at a more modest $10,000 to $20,000, the company would be much more likely to pay up without contest if you can prove your assertions. The gamble here is much worse for the company: $10,000 in lawyer fees for a day in court for a 50% chance of not having to pay $20,000 is poor odds. Instead, the company would decide that the amount of money involved isn't worth pursuing in court, and they may hand over that amount more readily (but their lawyers might ask you to sign a release).
There's also the customers of the copyright violators. Do the original copyright violators indemnify their customers against copyright infringement lawsuits? If not, which is likely, you may be able to pursue the customers as well for a similar amount of money.
After all, if SCO can get away with actions similar to this for so long when 99% to 100% of the code they are 'licensing' isn't even theirs, then your chances are good if you use the legal system to your advantage.
Disclaimer: IANAL.
For example, suppose you are writing some application in C that uses strings. The nature of the application isn't important to this discussion, but the use of strings is important.
Suppose these strings contain information you'd rather have hidden, so you choose to 'encrypt' the strings in the binary, and 'decrypt' the strings whenever you use them. Here, 'encrypt' and 'decrypt' could be something as brainless as ROT13; the exact encryption method isn't important. However, the presence of this encryption could make the life of someone attempting to purloin your code difficult, because they wouldn't be able to remove it easily.
It's therefore likely that someone using your code would not go to the trouble of converting these strings into something readable, and the unmodified strings would remain in the binary.
And there's the way you can examine a binary for GPL violations involving your code. Suppose you ran a command like strings on the binary piped through grep with the search string set to one of your encrypted strings. It is unlikely that a random application would happen to have a string like "&h3#0[_?/[jK;" in it, but if you had this string in your code and it appeared in a binary, the chances are good that you've just found a GPL violation.
Another method would be to output short sequences of assembler that did nothing useful but contained watermarks. A pseudocode example:
Here, it would jump over the 'crud' to the no-op and then proceed happily with the rest of the code. The 'crud' is a searchable watermark (or possibly a constant or variable that the code needs that is addressed by another part of the code).
There's also the way the code functions in cases where the behaviour is not well-defined. In cases where the programmer has a choice of what to do in certain cases, choose anything that you like that makes sense. The implementation of packet encoding in TCP/IP is one example - it's possible to determine the operating system of a remote host on the internet with some accuracy simply by observing how the TCP packets you receive from that host are constructed. If you intentionally build similar fingerprints into your code, you can use these later to detect uses of your code in the wild.
It is a bold initiative to announce a return to the moon and then go on to Mars, but it will be expensive. It might turn out to be too expensive for one nation alone.
To save costs, China, Russia and the ESA should also be involved in the missions. China has announced its own plans to go to the moon in a similar time frame. Russia has some lunar experience, especially with their robotic craft in the early 1970s and their sample return missions at about the same time.
Joint missions to the moon are not a new idea. The Soviet Premier Khrushchev proposed a joint effort to go to the moon with the Americans in 1961 and 1963. It was rejected by JFK in 1961, but JFK was more willing to consider the idea when it was proposed again in 1963. Had JFK not been assassinated a few weeks later, a Russian might have walked on the moon in 1969 with an American.
If Bush is talking about "humanity", he needs to involve more of humanity in this new space exploration initiative than just Americans.
Gibberish should be a red flag that either somebody's cat walked on the keyboard, or there's spam going on here
Or both at the same time. You think cats don't have a secret agenda?
Congress will never really do anything to protect the private citizen
I read somewhere about an interesting tactic used some time ago to get the message across to these 'representatives'.
If you are a group with limited funds, what you do is you pick one particularly clueless incumbent representative in a seat that can change hands, and you focus all your attention on getting that representative voted out. Fund their opponents. Discredit the representative. If you can get that representative voted out, then you can send a clear message that you mean business. After that, you may find representatives more willing to listen to your group.
What have we forgotten?
It's simple. The contributors to the Linux kernel have forgotten to file a high-profile class-action countersuit against SCO for copyright infringement. Every person who has contributed original code to the Linux kernel can sue SCO for copyright infringement if SCO sells their copyrighted code for profit because the GPL does not specifically renounce claims to copyright. This would be software piracy. Because each person has only contributed a small portion of the code, an individual lawsuit against SCO is unprofitable after paying the legal bills. However, a class-action copyright infringement lawsuit is another matter.
For maximum effect, the lawsuit must not be filed quietly. When the lawsuit is filed, a press release should be prepared and sent to all major media organisations in the U.S. and select ones from other countries. Chances are some media organisations will report this lawsuit as news. Once this lawsuit is filed, people will think twice about buying SCO stock and the stock price will start to fall. If institutional investors decide the stock isn't worth the risk, the stock price will crash so hard it will leave a crater.
Disclaimer: IANAL.
Paul Graham's article was an interesting read, but he didn't mention the role that emotive and neutral terminology plays in the spread of ideas.
To define these terms: Emotive language is the choice of words that conjure up the desired emotions in the listener, whereas neutral language is devoid of such emotional associations.
Many of these terms are spread by people in positions of power, such as government leaders, major corporations and powerful lobby groups.
Let's examine two examples.
The DMCA was enacted to combat "piracy". The word "piracy" and its various derivatives are commonly used by MPAA and RIAA executives. However, the strict definition of piracy in the sense of copyright infringement is to copy someone else's work and sell it for your own personal profit. This isn't as widespread as the copyright holders like to have us believe. For example, someone copying a CD so they can have a copy in their car as well as in their home isn't strictly piracy because they are not selling the copy. Yet the RIAA would use "piracy" to describe this activity. The term "copyright infringement" is available for their use, but they often eschew this term for the less accurate but more emotive term "piracy". Why? To engender the emotional response they want in their listeners.
"Downsizing" was a corporate buzzword in the recession era of the early 1990's. What it means, however, is to make many staff redundant at once. This made many people unhappy because they were now out of work. The proponents of this corporate philosophy introduced the term "downsizing" because it was a term with no emotive associations. To get people to swallow nasty medicine, you have to make it taste bland. In the same way, to get the masses to accept something bad, you have to cloak the concept with a neutral name that is often derived from corporate doublespeak.
If you want to look for nasty ideas someone is going to foist on you, look for bland-sounding terms. On the other hand, if you want to "look under the rocks" as Paul Graham said in his article, look for emotive terminology and question the concepts behind the emotive terms.
It's possible - just possible! - that SCO's employees don't read Slashdot at work
It's also possible that the SCO corporate firewall won't let you read Slashdot from work.
Include a disclaimer in your e-mail signature for use in all e-mails that is worded like the following:
The sending of this e-mail to you must not be interpreted by the recipient as the sender giving permission to add the sender's e-mail address to any list, database or other similar collection of e-mail addresses unless the body of the e-mail expressly grants this permission. The sending of this e-mail must not be interpreted by the recipient as the establishment of a business relationship with the sender unless the body of the e-mail expressly states otherwise.
You are incorrect. I have chosen not to register because I object to the illegitimate gathering of my personal information for their commercial gain. I don't know to what use they will put my personal details, either now or in the future, nor I suspect do you. Until I do know, I will follow Fats Waller's advice - "Don't give your right name!"
I guess that adds a whole new definition to the term "work from home".
Yes, the parent poster made a typo. It should be "Fight fire with a federal crime".
But surely these "mistakes" are a federal crime too? If you get billed for something you didn't receive, then surely there's a law broken somewhere?
IIRC, the long syllables are also indicated with a special character to indicate the double length that looks a lot like a dash.
Hence haiku make sense when you consider the "n" and "-" characters as separate "syllables". It also helps to understand the large role that calligraphy plays in Japaanese culture. Haiku are probably intended to be written.
If I use a switch and charge a monthly rate, does this make me an ISP.
Perhaps.
If you want to claim ISP status, so you can sue spammers, start charging a fee. Then provide "free" beer to your students every month for roughly the cost of the fee. You get the right to sue spammers, your students get beer. Everyone wins!
As a business owner, voting for a business-friendly candidate means not only lower taxes, but a permanent ban on ALL types of unsolicited e-mails.
... I assume you mean spam? "Unsolicited e-mail" is what I must send if I find a business's e-mail address on their website and I e-mail them to ask for more information about their wonderful product or service.
Uh
From the CAUCE website: The law would only permit the FTC, state Attorneys General, and ISPs to bring actions against violators.
So what, under the definition of this legislation, is an ISP? Can you hook up a modem to your home box and claim to be an ISP because you have the capability to supply dialup internet services? If so, then you could hook up a modem and start suing the spammers....
Why don't they do the voting machines like this?
When a vote is cast, the machine punches holes in a paper card. The paper card is then transferred to a card reader and the vote on the card is read. If the vote read from the paper card matches the vote that was cast, the paper card is transferred to a secure box and the electronic vote is recorded. If the card cannot be read, it is destroyed, and the machine shuts down until someone can service it.
This simple technique creates a paper audit trail, and provides a backup method of tallying votes. Recounts actually become possible.
If you read the analyses, there's some advice for beating chess computers.
Chess computers have large opening databases. If they can make a database move, while the human has to think, the computer gets the edge due to the reduced amount of time they need to make a database move.
During the games, Kasparov tried to play unusual moves in the opening to knock the computer out of its database as early as possible. One example from game 2 is Kasparov's move 8...Re8, which is annotated with "This move by Kasparov had never been played before in this exact position." This knocked Fritz out of its opening database, and forced it to calculate.
A more striking example of the way to beat chess computers is the great wall of pawns that dominated game 3. Chess computers cannot evaluate such positions properly. If you built a wall of pawns like that, and snuck your forces behind them, you are a good chance of winning because the computer cannot calculate deeply enough.
Some more info here and here.
Spammers are using automated software to post to weblogs and other similar places? We can do the same thing to make their business ineffective. Turnabout is fair play.
Use software to visit the links and analyse their website. If they have an HTML form, submit useless infomation to it, so as to fill up their logs with garbage. It shouldn't take long to fill up their database with crud. If they have to troll through 10,000 garbage posts to find 1 order, they will not stay in "business" for long.
Some of the messages could be community-service announcements like "Stop spamming" and "You are trading illegally". Some could be "orders" to people named Herr Schlongmeister, I.P.Freely, Hugh Jass, Mike Hunt and Dick Biggins. Whatever you do, stay within the law if possible, but I don't consider such a turnabout DOS against a spammer to be ethically unsound.
Suppose you live in a country where everyone has an RFID tag implanted in the back of their necks.
You meet a good-looking member of the appropriate gender in a bar. You chat. You have a few drinks. You are getting along well, so you get invited back to their place. You have more drinks.
Next thing you know, you are lying in a bathtub, covered in blood. The back of your neck hurts like hell.
Or maybe you just don't wake up at all.
It would be like the stolen-kidney urban myth all over again.