It's only been under 10,000 years since we left the caves and jungles. Much much less for some peoples. Do you really think that, on a scale that someone from the future might use, we're really all that far along?. We're still writing on stone, only the writing is 0.13 microns wide and says Pentium on it. Most of our technology is just advanced weights, wheels, and pulleys.
I imagine some half slug kid with a huge brain filled head sitting in some robo-shell thinking (not talking) to his friend:
Can you believe they actually had arms and legs, and had to make noises to communicate? Not much better than the animals.
Not that far into the future either, since I'm also sure human cloning is probably going to produce a lot of strangeness. =)
There should only be root servers that answer for "." as the TLD. The.com.net.blah is only a source for confusion for newbies, which is an obstacle to their acceptance of the Internet. It's also unregulated, so you have.orgs that are not.orgs, etc. Too much duplication; what is the purpose of having a mcdonalds.net and a mcdonalds.com. This is a result of the lack of organization. Now they have.tv being touted as something great, and it is just as open, adding to the stupidity. The TLDs must go.
In either case, this needs to be driven by a large ISP or someone is going to decide to cut the pipes of one of these "renegade TLD" or "non-TLD" sites and end them at that. The/. effect on these sites when they appear will swamp them and draw attention from the current ISP who will see the traffic as bad. An ISP could make a nice name for themselves by calling this a benefit of their service while other ISPs are not supporting it.
God forbid (no pun intended) that anyone in that line of 5,000 years have miscalculated someone's age and deluded every decendant gullible enough to believe the "documents". Hold on a second and I'll document my family tree to 10 million years for you. You'll pardon me for snickering in your general direction.
God creates man. Man kills dinosaurs. Man recreates dinosaurs. Dinosaurs eat man.
Your first assumption is that descending from apes is a devaluation. YOU are the one taking a bad view of it. Rather than have that negative stance, I feel we are the culmination of a microbe that began evolving billions of years ago, and never died. Instead, that immortal cell has survived comet strikes and climate changes by dividing and evolving into different forms, the latest and greatest of which is...us. In some form or another, while other cells in our body have died, those of us who have reproduced have contributed to the survival of that microbe across the ages.
Absolutely not! I ues Deja for getting answers to bugs that pop up knowing that someone before me has gone through it already and hopefully solved it. If I am cut off from everything before August, that's a lot of stuff that I can't use as a resource.
A tiny minority of the world's population has enjoyed "first world" life quality for a tiny period of time. The conditions of India have been the way they are for, well, a long damn time, longer than our "first world cultures" have existed by a magnitude of scale.
Very true. I do not believe that we are the cause of India's troubles, but by being there we are helping, in what little way we can. I want to emphasize the word little. As most likely those reading this, we westerners like to think of ourselves as being powerful, but in the face of this scale of poverty, there is *very* little we can do to alleviate this poverty, even if it were our duty to do so. Sally Struthers can only help get them a bowl of rice, but in order to make sidewalks and buses and convenience stores, there needs to be things that serve that country and amplify its money (read: corporations) and solely for their benefit. You need capitalism to make capital, and poverty, by our western standard of thinking is that lack of capital that must be cured by creating capital.
Now, while in India, I had discussions with people on how there are alternatives to measuring success by wealth. That simply because the western world has measured it by capitalism for a few hundred years does not make it the right thing that will still be around a thousand years from now. The problem is that something that does not depend on wealth to measure success has a hard time getting further than feeding mouths. Socialism didn't do too well with the Communist experiment. Not many systems from a thousand years ago are left standing, so I would expect that nothing more other than some small influence would be left of us a thousand years from now anyway. A system not depending no wealth must also be isolated from those that do measure success by wealth or you are somehow going to end up measuring it that way anyway. That was the idea behind making communes and isolating them from the world. But slowly China makes its capitalist zones and all these countries open up their markets. And somewhere in capitalism it is expected that a certain small percentage of the population is not going to succeed in order to make another portion of it amplify its money into success, and when you translate that into a billion people, you get a number that makes westerners cringe. Only a few leaders of thugs will ever make it while the social parties insist on spreading the money so thin that no one can make something of it other than a bowl of rice.
I don't believe that we are not exploiting anyone in the third world, but having been to India in the past month I now think those shops are a necessity. With the number of people that make up these countries, given nothing to do they would all starve. Someone has to hold open the door for you to get that 10 rupie tip because they would otherwise be standing on the sidewalk watching you open the door for yourself, wishing they could eat. It is only right that we as a wealthy nation contribute something to these countries, but damn if we can't get something like a pair of shoes in return. Nike's quotas are another matter, though! Because of that people density, the amount of money put into hiring them is greatly diluted for each one. Giving a million people a $0.01 an hour raise is not a tiny figure. In fact, even the corruption that infects those countries is necessary for the same reason.
The $100 that you put into those shoes gets further reduced by half each time some distributed handles them. God knows that fuel used to power the ships that bring clothes to cover your asses is free these days. Take $100 a month and send it to someone in a third world country to them live a better life, and then realise that 1 out of a billion people is NOTHING. There aren't even enough Americans to send someone in India $100 a month to make a difference, even if you could imagine that Americans could afford such a thing.
You want to save the world? Stop asking for raises. Stop putting $1 bills into soda and candy bar machines. You're driving down the price of the dollar and helping to send the world into an inflation ridden lamaise. If not you'll see what a great thing Nike was when millions of people all over the world lose their jobs as American companies pull out, leaving all those people with...nothing to do in order to eat. We can't save the world, folks. Stop believing everything that you breathe.
Simply using another name isn't going to kill anyone. "FreSH is a free, open source implementation of the SSH2 protocol." Bam. (The hardest part for most people would be learning to type "fresh" after their fingers are trained to type "ssh"... although on second thought, you know everyone's going to just make a symbolic link to "fresh"--or whatever it's called--from "ssh" anyway.)
And I don't see anything wrong with that since no one can tell me what I can and cannot name my symbolic link on my system. If I want to rename "ls" to "pepsi" that's my business. Oh, hold on, there's some lawyers at my door.
"we have offered certain licenses to use the SSH mark to refer to the protocol and to indicate that a product complies with the standard."
It seems to me that his company has allowed the use of the name and if I'm not mistaken, the OpenSSH group got their name from the protocol and not from the originating company. It was not explicitly stated that the name of the protocol couldn't be used in the name itself. If this is the case, then they should be allowed to keep their name as it stands.
-----
I think you have to have it in common use for many more years, probably for something like half the current life of the Internet (not web!!), before you can call it public domain.
Change the name to SECSH and be done with it. You get your own name without having to stoop to putting Open in front of it to differentiate it, and everyone will know that you are implementing SECSH. It's not worth the time and distraction from the coding to fight this and the guy does have a point. Invalidating trademarks of this type only means less $$ for the rest of us later on, and we all have to eat.
200 years from now that asteroid will be a floating museum piece that people will pass by on their tour of the solar system. Leaving it there will be a reminder of what we went through to get that thing there.
Eventually they have to release some information about the bugs. The fact that the bugs have been discovered means that some cracker is going to find them too. Instead of hearing about the bugs in the bind-announce we're going to hear about it on the 8uGz-t0-3Xpl01+ list.
------
ISC has historically depended upon the "bind-workers" mailing list, and
CERT advisories, to notify vendors of potential or actual security flaws
in its BIND package. Recent events have very clearly shown that there is
a need for a fee-based membership forum consisting only of:
------
What are those recent events? Reached the last check in your checkbook? A private list and a fee based list are mutually exclusive
------
1. ISC itself
2. Vendors who include BIND in their products
3. Root and TLD name server operators
4. Other qualified parties (at ISC's discretion)
------
5. Anyone with $$$ and can either fake being a corporate d00D or is in a corporation and has contacts to the cracker community.
------
Requirements of bind-members will be:
1. Not-for-profit members can have their fees waived
2. Use of PGP (or possibly S/MIME) will be mandatory
3. Members will receive information security training
4. Members will sign strong nondisclosure agreements
------
This exclusion of everyone else using BIND is a betrayal of anyone in the common user community who has ever worked to look over that code and found bugs or a way to improve the code.
------
Features and benefits of "bind-members" status will include:
1. Private access to the CVS pool where bind4, bind8 and bind9 live
2. Reception of early warnings of security or other important flaws
3. Periodic in-person meetings, probably at IETF's conference sites
4. Participation on the bind-members mailing list
------
Stupid, stupid, stupid. Eventually the bugs will circulate by word of mouth (no NDA can stop it) and the bugs will be exploited while everyone else who holds that NDA as holy will stand by and watch as sites get hosed instead of passing out known info. I don't know if you're trying to create some monastic order of name providers, but this has to be extremely stupid and goes against the whole idea of the internet in spreading information. The responsibility of sites having trouble when a bug is discovered lies with the admins if a better version is out there. The flow of information is essential; keeping admins ignorant is wrong, and charging a fee for the information is holding us hostage.
Will the code eventually be hidden from common users for a year while the brotherhood of named gets the latest fixes? Maybe only binary versions with backdoors in them will then be available. See this as the beginning of mistrust.
------
If you are a BIND vendor, root or TLD server operator, or other interested
party, I urge you to seek management approval for entry into this forum, and
then either contact, or have a responsible party contact, isc-info@isc.org.
Paul Vixie
Chairman
ISC
What's even less secure is that little button that says "don't sign this message" or "don't encrypt this message". At least that's how my PGP works. I sit down at your computer, I turn off the use of the certificate, I send a letter to your boss saying how much you want to tie him up and eat his dog in front of his whole family, and then I leave.
You say that it couldn't be you, because you always use encryption for everything you do? Convenient excuse. Hard to use that certificate on that computer in the office from the unemployment line.
Point is that unless you live in a tank you're not even going to be 99% safe. Heck, even then, give enough Vodka to some guy name Lenin and his wife and years later you end up with a kid with whole lot of tanks that'll take your keys and give you to guys with enough bamboo sticks to make you shout your keyphrase 5 times a minute.
This is a good point. Almost done reading Cryptonomicon and it's putting me of a mind to make sure our overseas offices (one in a Soviet bloc country) begins using crypto for their communications to the US. Can overseas people get 4096-bit stuff?
It also brings to mind what can happen to someone in another country when the state wants to get your keys. How many days would it take to crack your key by putting you in a cell? And, you may not know what you want to hide until it's time to hide it, by which time it's already encrypted and you look incriminating.
Oh, boy! Lets pity Castro's supporters because they've blindly embraced the hull of the Titanic on its way down. That mean old iceberg.
Open your freaking eyes! The Russians abandoned that Communist crap almost a decade ago, and the Chinese are slowly building more capitalist zones to power the PLA. Cuba will turn noce Castro's mouldering corpse is thrown into the waters between Florida and Cuba.
What the fuck are you doing in *your* basement, freako?
Nimrod, China is it's own sphere of influence and never needed Soviet protection. And the former Soviet bloc countries are still a reason to make people paranoid.
How ironic that this was posted right before the ancient article on Undernet being DDoS. Some people get a hold of bad weed, and the rest of us get a hold of some bad info. Slashdot is getting very lax in checking the articles lately and that just exemplified what this article speaks of.
Apple is going down the same path they went down in 1995. They are paying more attention to the color and curve of their models when they hold a miniscule piece of the market instead of concentrating on ads that aren't overly cocky. Now, I can't remember a time where I didn't want smack Jeff Goldblum until the Apple-sauce ran out of him.
They do not learn from these mistakes and will again pay for it in earning reports and declining stock once people wise up and see that the shine on that machine is not helping them get any useful software to run on the thing.
If I don't know you, whatever crap you have to tell me is probably incredible unimportant to me if you are from some spam place that is trying to get me to buy some crap.
Just like how I don't answer my phone if the Caller ID says the number is unlisted. If I don't know you, you can speak to my answering machine, which screens my calls. You won't believe the number of people that call from unlisted numbers, but refuse to leave a message. Simplifies my life greatly. Invariably, when I'm in the mood for some entertainment and decide to pick up on one of those calls, it's some assmunch trying to give me a credit card or buy insurance or refinance my home. Because apparently all those companies were accidentally left out of my phonebook where I could look them up in the event I did need those services.
MAPS screens my mail for me. You won't believe how many emails people on the internet get that are not addressed directly to them and are trying to sell some bogus junk. Because apparently all those companies are not in any web engines in the event I completely lose my mind and decide I need to look up some Internet money making scheme. Give me a break!
If your ISP gets MAPS listed, maybe that's a clue that their service is not that great. That maybe their Acceptable Use Policy just isn't that important to them that they should enforce it and that there are probably a lot of other things that aren't as important to them that they should be doing for you. Think about that the next time your modem doesn't connect.
My favorite solution was back when I used Eudora 3.0. I had it filter any mail that was not addressed to me into a folder, and invariably it was all spam. Then, I forwarded all those addresses to each other so they would get picked up by the mailing lists and cause a nice storm of autoresponders mailing each other.
Hooooowwweeeeee! Boy, did they take me off their list, and a few of those sites seemed to be unavailable for a day or so.
Hopefully that prevented those last few people from hearing about those great money making schemes that are making everyone rich these days. Don't want those fantastic secrets spreading too far!!
Slashdot Mirror
What could be more entertaining than real religious wars, but religious wars in the computer world...
Looks like I misinterpreted how you were to go about doing that last part and they now have me cleaning out my desk.
It's only been under 10,000 years since we left the caves and jungles. Much much less for some peoples. Do you really think that, on a scale that someone from the future might use, we're really all that far along?. We're still writing on stone, only the writing is 0.13 microns wide and says Pentium on it. Most of our technology is just advanced weights, wheels, and pulleys.
I imagine some half slug kid with a huge brain filled head sitting in some robo-shell thinking (not talking) to his friend:
Can you believe they actually had arms and legs, and had to make noises to communicate? Not much better than the animals.
Not that far into the future either, since I'm also sure human cloning is probably going to produce a lot of strangeness. =)
There should only be root servers that answer for "." as the TLD. The .com .net .blah is only a source for confusion for newbies, which is an obstacle to their acceptance of the Internet. It's also unregulated, so you have .orgs that are not .orgs, etc. Too much duplication; what is the purpose of having a mcdonalds.net and a mcdonalds.com. This is a result of the lack of organization. Now they have .tv being touted as something great, and it is just as open, adding to the stupidity. The TLDs must go.
In either case, this needs to be driven by a large ISP or someone is going to decide to cut the pipes of one of these "renegade TLD" or "non-TLD" sites and end them at that. The /. effect on these sites when they appear will swamp them and draw attention from the current ISP who will see the traffic as bad. An ISP could make a nice name for themselves by calling this a benefit of their service while other ISPs are not supporting it.
God forbid (no pun intended) that anyone in that line of 5,000 years have miscalculated someone's age and deluded every decendant gullible enough to believe the "documents". Hold on a second and I'll document my family tree to 10 million years for you. You'll pardon me for snickering in your general direction. God creates man. Man kills dinosaurs. Man recreates dinosaurs. Dinosaurs eat man.
Your first assumption is that descending from apes is a devaluation. YOU are the one taking a bad view of it. Rather than have that negative stance, I feel we are the culmination of a microbe that began evolving billions of years ago, and never died. Instead, that immortal cell has survived comet strikes and climate changes by dividing and evolving into different forms, the latest and greatest of which is...us. In some form or another, while other cells in our body have died, those of us who have reproduced have contributed to the survival of that microbe across the ages.
Absolutely not! I ues Deja for getting answers to bugs that pop up knowing that someone before me has gone through it already and hopefully solved it. If I am cut off from everything before August, that's a lot of stuff that I can't use as a resource.
A tiny minority of the world's population has enjoyed "first world" life quality for a tiny period of time. The conditions of India have been the way they are for, well, a long damn time, longer than our "first world cultures" have existed by a magnitude of scale.
Very true. I do not believe that we are the cause of India's troubles, but by being there we are helping, in what little way we can. I want to emphasize the word little. As most likely those reading this, we westerners like to think of ourselves as being powerful, but in the face of this scale of poverty, there is *very* little we can do to alleviate this poverty, even if it were our duty to do so. Sally Struthers can only help get them a bowl of rice, but in order to make sidewalks and buses and convenience stores, there needs to be things that serve that country and amplify its money (read: corporations) and solely for their benefit. You need capitalism to make capital, and poverty, by our western standard of thinking is that lack of capital that must be cured by creating capital.
Now, while in India, I had discussions with people on how there are alternatives to measuring success by wealth. That simply because the western world has measured it by capitalism for a few hundred years does not make it the right thing that will still be around a thousand years from now. The problem is that something that does not depend on wealth to measure success has a hard time getting further than feeding mouths. Socialism didn't do too well with the Communist experiment. Not many systems from a thousand years ago are left standing, so I would expect that nothing more other than some small influence would be left of us a thousand years from now anyway. A system not depending no wealth must also be isolated from those that do measure success by wealth or you are somehow going to end up measuring it that way anyway. That was the idea behind making communes and isolating them from the world. But slowly China makes its capitalist zones and all these countries open up their markets. And somewhere in capitalism it is expected that a certain small percentage of the population is not going to succeed in order to make another portion of it amplify its money into success, and when you translate that into a billion people, you get a number that makes westerners cringe. Only a few leaders of thugs will ever make it while the social parties insist on spreading the money so thin that no one can make something of it other than a bowl of rice.
I don't believe that we are not exploiting anyone in the third world, but having been to India in the past month I now think those shops are a necessity. With the number of people that make up these countries, given nothing to do they would all starve. Someone has to hold open the door for you to get that 10 rupie tip because they would otherwise be standing on the sidewalk watching you open the door for yourself, wishing they could eat. It is only right that we as a wealthy nation contribute something to these countries, but damn if we can't get something like a pair of shoes in return. Nike's quotas are another matter, though! Because of that people density, the amount of money put into hiring them is greatly diluted for each one. Giving a million people a $0.01 an hour raise is not a tiny figure. In fact, even the corruption that infects those countries is necessary for the same reason.
The $100 that you put into those shoes gets further reduced by half each time some distributed handles them. God knows that fuel used to power the ships that bring clothes to cover your asses is free these days. Take $100 a month and send it to someone in a third world country to them live a better life, and then realise that 1 out of a billion people is NOTHING. There aren't even enough Americans to send someone in India $100 a month to make a difference, even if you could imagine that Americans could afford such a thing.
You want to save the world? Stop asking for raises. Stop putting $1 bills into soda and candy bar machines. You're driving down the price of the dollar and helping to send the world into an inflation ridden lamaise. If not you'll see what a great thing Nike was when millions of people all over the world lose their jobs as American companies pull out, leaving all those people with...nothing to do in order to eat. We can't save the world, folks. Stop believing everything that you breathe.
HSS - Host Secure Session
Since it's definitely more than just a shell now.
Simply using another name isn't going to kill anyone. "FreSH is a free, open source implementation of the SSH2 protocol." Bam. (The hardest part for most people would be learning to type "fresh" after their fingers are trained to type "ssh"... although on second thought, you know everyone's going to just make a symbolic link to "fresh"--or whatever it's called--from "ssh" anyway.)
And I don't see anything wrong with that since no one can tell me what I can and cannot name my symbolic link on my system. If I want to rename "ls" to "pepsi" that's my business. Oh, hold on, there's some lawyers at my door.
"we have offered certain licenses to use the SSH mark to refer to the protocol and to indicate that a product complies with the standard."
It seems to me that his company has allowed the use of the name and if I'm not mistaken, the OpenSSH group got their name from the protocol and not from the originating company. It was not explicitly stated that the name of the protocol couldn't be used in the name itself. If this is the case, then they should be allowed to keep their name as it stands.
-----
I think you have to have it in common use for many more years, probably for something like half the current life of the Internet (not web!!), before you can call it public domain.
Change the name to SECSH and be done with it. You get your own name without having to stoop to putting Open in front of it to differentiate it, and everyone will know that you are implementing SECSH. It's not worth the time and distraction from the coding to fight this and the guy does have a point. Invalidating trademarks of this type only means less $$ for the rest of us later on, and we all have to eat.
200 years from now that asteroid will be a floating museum piece that people will pass by on their tour of the solar system. Leaving it there will be a reminder of what we went through to get that thing there.
Eventually they have to release some information about the bugs. The fact that the bugs have been discovered means that some cracker is going to find them too. Instead of hearing about the bugs in the bind-announce we're going to hear about it on the 8uGz-t0-3Xpl01+ list. ------ ISC has historically depended upon the "bind-workers" mailing list, and CERT advisories, to notify vendors of potential or actual security flaws in its BIND package. Recent events have very clearly shown that there is a need for a fee-based membership forum consisting only of: ------ What are those recent events? Reached the last check in your checkbook? A private list and a fee based list are mutually exclusive ------ 1. ISC itself 2. Vendors who include BIND in their products 3. Root and TLD name server operators 4. Other qualified parties (at ISC's discretion) ------ 5. Anyone with $$$ and can either fake being a corporate d00D or is in a corporation and has contacts to the cracker community. ------ Requirements of bind-members will be: 1. Not-for-profit members can have their fees waived 2. Use of PGP (or possibly S/MIME) will be mandatory 3. Members will receive information security training 4. Members will sign strong nondisclosure agreements ------ This exclusion of everyone else using BIND is a betrayal of anyone in the common user community who has ever worked to look over that code and found bugs or a way to improve the code. ------ Features and benefits of "bind-members" status will include: 1. Private access to the CVS pool where bind4, bind8 and bind9 live 2. Reception of early warnings of security or other important flaws 3. Periodic in-person meetings, probably at IETF's conference sites 4. Participation on the bind-members mailing list ------ Stupid, stupid, stupid. Eventually the bugs will circulate by word of mouth (no NDA can stop it) and the bugs will be exploited while everyone else who holds that NDA as holy will stand by and watch as sites get hosed instead of passing out known info. I don't know if you're trying to create some monastic order of name providers, but this has to be extremely stupid and goes against the whole idea of the internet in spreading information. The responsibility of sites having trouble when a bug is discovered lies with the admins if a better version is out there. The flow of information is essential; keeping admins ignorant is wrong, and charging a fee for the information is holding us hostage. Will the code eventually be hidden from common users for a year while the brotherhood of named gets the latest fixes? Maybe only binary versions with backdoors in them will then be available. See this as the beginning of mistrust. ------ If you are a BIND vendor, root or TLD server operator, or other interested party, I urge you to seek management approval for entry into this forum, and then either contact, or have a responsible party contact, isc-info@isc.org. Paul Vixie Chairman ISC
How so?
What's even less secure is that little button that says "don't sign this message" or "don't encrypt this message". At least that's how my PGP works. I sit down at your computer, I turn off the use of the certificate, I send a letter to your boss saying how much you want to tie him up and eat his dog in front of his whole family, and then I leave.
You say that it couldn't be you, because you always use encryption for everything you do? Convenient excuse. Hard to use that certificate on that computer in the office from the unemployment line.
Point is that unless you live in a tank you're not even going to be 99% safe. Heck, even then, give enough Vodka to some guy name Lenin and his wife and years later you end up with a kid with whole lot of tanks that'll take your keys and give you to guys with enough bamboo sticks to make you shout your keyphrase 5 times a minute.
This is a good point. Almost done reading Cryptonomicon and it's putting me of a mind to make sure our overseas offices (one in a Soviet bloc country) begins using crypto for their communications to the US. Can overseas people get 4096-bit stuff? It also brings to mind what can happen to someone in another country when the state wants to get your keys. How many days would it take to crack your key by putting you in a cell? And, you may not know what you want to hide until it's time to hide it, by which time it's already encrypted and you look incriminating.
Oh, boy! Lets pity Castro's supporters because they've blindly embraced the hull of the Titanic on its way down. That mean old iceberg. Open your freaking eyes! The Russians abandoned that Communist crap almost a decade ago, and the Chinese are slowly building more capitalist zones to power the PLA. Cuba will turn noce Castro's mouldering corpse is thrown into the waters between Florida and Cuba. What the fuck are you doing in *your* basement, freako?
Nimrod, China is it's own sphere of influence and never needed Soviet protection. And the former Soviet bloc countries are still a reason to make people paranoid.
How ironic that this was posted right before the ancient article on Undernet being DDoS. Some people get a hold of bad weed, and the rest of us get a hold of some bad info. Slashdot is getting very lax in checking the articles lately and that just exemplified what this article speaks of.
Plus, when you increase the amount of metal shielding around electronics, you start to get a small amount of radiation from *that*.
Apple is going down the same path they went down in 1995. They are paying more attention to the color and curve of their models when they hold a miniscule piece of the market instead of concentrating on ads that aren't overly cocky. Now, I can't remember a time where I didn't want smack Jeff Goldblum until the Apple-sauce ran out of him.
They do not learn from these mistakes and will again pay for it in earning reports and declining stock once people wise up and see that the shine on that machine is not helping them get any useful software to run on the thing.
A Mac to PC convert.
Even simpler...
If I don't know you, whatever crap you have to tell me is probably incredible unimportant to me if you are from some spam place that is trying to get me to buy some crap.
Just like how I don't answer my phone if the Caller ID says the number is unlisted. If I don't know you, you can speak to my answering machine, which screens my calls. You won't believe the number of people that call from unlisted numbers, but refuse to leave a message. Simplifies my life greatly. Invariably, when I'm in the mood for some entertainment and decide to pick up on one of those calls, it's some assmunch trying to give me a credit card or buy insurance or refinance my home. Because apparently all those companies were accidentally left out of my phonebook where I could look them up in the event I did need those services.
MAPS screens my mail for me. You won't believe how many emails people on the internet get that are not addressed directly to them and are trying to sell some bogus junk. Because apparently all those companies are not in any web engines in the event I completely lose my mind and decide I need to look up some Internet money making scheme. Give me a break!
If your ISP gets MAPS listed, maybe that's a clue that their service is not that great. That maybe their Acceptable Use Policy just isn't that important to them that they should enforce it and that there are probably a lot of other things that aren't as important to them that they should be doing for you. Think about that the next time your modem doesn't connect.
My favorite solution was back when I used Eudora 3.0. I had it filter any mail that was not addressed to me into a folder, and invariably it was all spam. Then, I forwarded all those addresses to each other so they would get picked up by the mailing lists and cause a nice storm of autoresponders mailing each other.
Hooooowwweeeeee! Boy, did they take me off their list, and a few of those sites seemed to be unavailable for a day or so.
Hopefully that prevented those last few people from hearing about those great money making schemes that are making everyone rich these days. Don't want those fantastic secrets spreading too far!!