Don't you ever wonder why there have been so few significant arrests of spammers/phishers/etc?
No, not really.
For the most part, these have been made federal crimes, even to the extent of superseding existing state laws. A few years ago, several states had passed fairly strong anti-spam laws. If someone violated the law, you could file against them in your local small claims court, and secure a guaranteed judgement (good luck collecting, but that's another story) if they didn't show. Slashdot regular Bennett Haselton made boilerplate of that process, as I recall. Then along came CAN-SPAM, which created huge loopholes and essentially declared that individual state laws about spam, if less tolerant than the federal statute, were no longer enforceable.
So now it's up to the feds to prosecute spammers, phishers, and other ill-willed malfeasants. Most of the time, the feds have better things to worry about, and unless you personally can prove tens of thousands in damages, they're unlikely to raise an eyebrow. You do remember how the FBI's last few technology initiatives turned out, right? The penultimate example being "Virtual Case File," a/k/a "Virtual Money Sink." What amounts to a data warehouse with a client app to query it, $200 million later and it's scrapped. Two hundred MILLION dollars down the drain on a failed initiative to, in essence, secure some data feeds, create some transformations, and develop a GUI to query the whole shebang. You really expect these guys to track down John Dodrescu in Romania who's spoofing a Bank of America website on some zombie PCs in Italy, oh wait, that was 10 minutes ago before the TTL on the DNS expired, now it's some zombie PCs in France?
Give me, a non-gov IT professional, a team of 10 people of my choosing, fund me with one single million dollars and some travel vouchers, and agree to keep the project going for one year. A lot of these assholes will be out of business inside of 6 months, with many of their contemporaries scared shitless of becoming the next statistic. No fatalities, just a lot of people behind bars. But the federal government doesn't work that way because as many of us are well aware, it isn't profitable to run an IT department. They'd rather hire 1,000 guys who may or may not be able to tell you which of (XM|XP|XTC) is a version of Windows, at $50K a year apiece, then bitch and moan that they can't stop the problem with $50mil so they can justify a bigger budget next year.
America is spending more money per day in Iraq than it would take to adequately investigate, build cases against, and convict all of the prolific spammers in the entire world.
No, I don't often wonder why these problems haven't been solved. The federal government has been tasked with solving them, and that's all the why I need.
NOAA is the single remaining government agency that I still trust implicitly. DHS is nearly the polar opposite. I'm not sure what to make of a collaboration between them, but I'm encouraged by the fact that they're taking input from regular citizens. No doubt NOAA is behind that initiative.
There has been tremendous pressure from commercial weather interests to devalue the NOAA/NWS, to decrease its funding, to cripple its information distribution, in favor of making people pay to get the sort of weather data that NOAA has been distributing for free ever since they were chartered. I'm happy to see that new programs with public participation and cooperation are still being created. WX data is crucial for everyone, let's keep it open and free and public.
I don't care how many people are in your enterprise; when you create a resource for the public (like MSDN), publish your entire API references etc. there, your URIs should not be changing every month. I've had the same experience as the OP, where I'll bookmark something on MSDN and try to pull it up merely a few weeks later, only to hit a 404. Even the MSKB URIs keep changing around. "This article (876543) was previously known as 'Q876543'" and such tripe. Pick a consistent gosh-darned convention and stick with it. It seems to have something to do with constant reorganization of their "tree" navigation structure, but whatever the cause, it's damned annoying.
Five years ago, I could go to http://php.net/fsockopen and be taken to the documentation for that function. The same URI works today. There's no reason that I shouldn't be able to go to http://microsoft.com/api/win32/wsastartup and rely on that URI to point wherever Microsoft has decided that documentation wants to go today...
This slashdot article seems to be a mix of push polling and advertisement on slashdot. Why did the submitter word his "Question" in such an obvious way to make wikipedia come off looking so well?
Come, now, based on your UID, you ought to have this figured out. Everyone knows that the Wikipedia Slashvertisements refer to "Jimbo" Wales by [nick]name, and paint a sinister conspiracy theory in order to encourage massive amounts of discussion. We've had a couple of them in the past week, but this isn't one of 'em. This is just Yahoo sucking ass.
That has never stopped the media companies from going after software that enables copyright infringement.
Or victims of gun crime from going after the aforementioned H&K et al. The manufacturers may not be liable, but they sure do have to prove it in court pretty often.
I'm in Comcast's Memphis market and haven't yet had any problems with BitTorrent. I don't doubt that the filter will probably be rolled out to all service areas, though, if it proves reliable and doesn't get them sued.
Is this any different then the stats of the dead tree style of spam that appears in my mailbox every day?
Yes, very much.
1) The sender pays to mail the junk that shows up in your postal mailbox. With spam, the cost is effectively offloaded to the recipient in terms of higher ISP fees, etc. There's also the theory that the bulk-mailers keep first class postage rates lower than they otherwise would be, by subsidizing a large part of the postal operation.
2) There's actually a reliable way to "opt out" of almost all junk postal mail, by contacting the DMA and requesting that its members stop mailing you.
3) Junk postal mail is sent through a legal and legitimate channel with established regulators who have guns and actually track down fraud and scammers.
police? marginally effective, but in fact most of the population are scared of them. legal system? any cases take years to even begin being heard. public health system? don't get me started on that. is a s***hole, all capable citizens resort to private health insurance. public schools? horrible, able citizens put their kids on private schools.
A season of X-Files, presumably bootleg, is $56. I think I'm in the wrong line of work.
Oh, and that reminds me. The X-Files is my absolute favorite television series of all time. Through Blockbuster Online or Netflix, you can rent all nine seasons on DVD for far less than $56. They appear in your mailbox on DVD, one right after the other. IMO, it's better to go the legit route. You get a real, honest-to-gosh DVD to hold in your hands, and watch, and do whatever else you might do with it.
There's really no sense buying the junky bootlegs on a street corner. I honestly don't understand how any for-profit duplicators make it these days. It was one thing in the age of VHS tapes, but in our current environment, it's far easier for the average consumer to get his hands on a legitimate, high quality copy (and "back it up") than it's worth attempting to purchase a counterfeit copy.
Alas, the penalties for downloading (or uploading) a movie via, say, BitTorrent are tens of times more harsh than the penalties for buying or selling a counterfeit DVD on the street, or for just shoplifting the damned thing. So I guess I don't understand why these guys get into the business. They'd face less potential jail time if they set up a rape/murder cartel.
If the purpose was to go after infringers in order to recuperate lost sales, they wouldn't be going after housewives or children who pirate for personal use, they'd be going after commercial pirates.
Take two minutes to read the article; these are for-profit commercial pirates. They're selling shit-quality DVD compilations of classic TV shows, often ripped directly from TVLand and other cable channels. This is very much a for-profit copyright infringement ring.
Anyway, perhaps the reason they aren't being pursued is that they may not be in the US. If they are in, for example, Russia, allofmp3 has shown how much fun suing them can be.
TFA makes it fairly clear that this operatiion is based in Canada.
Would you rather they hire Roland Piquepaille as an editor?
I notice you're a subscriber. That gives us a little more right to bitch, but on the other hand, it shows that we're okay with the way things are because we're more than happy to toss some money in the tip jar now and then. If you're really not that happy with how things are going anymore, pull your subscription. Me, I'm not going to renew mine once it's used up.
So if Islam is great and Allah's hand is present in everyday life, how can something like Fuck Islam exist?
I know that was a rhetorical question, but if you look at the mean IQ of the folks who belong to the laundry list of groups you cited, I think you have your answer.
OK, then; who's going to sign up for internet access with company C, knowing that they cater to the lowest common denominator and give everyone shit bandwidth? That sounds more like company V, who already exists and is generally the only option for many people.
Consider that there's company V. Company V owns the phone lines. They sell DSL connections to their subscribers, giddy little consumers who are happy to pay whatever company V would like to charge.
Along comes company C. Company C claims "we won't mess with your connection! You will get Google, and YouTube, and MySpace, and Fox News, and everything at the same speed. We will never throttle anything or attempt to meter it based on content! We are all about net neutrality!" And subscribers flock to company C, as they would tend to do in a free market.
However, company C has to buy their connectivity from company V. And company V never made any agreement with company C's subscribers about how their traffic might be throttled. Suddenly, company C is trying their best to provide "all connections are equal" access to their subscribers, but company V keeps interfering. Company C's subscribers who try to load videos from YouTube find it difficult, though they can load videos from Fox News in real-time. And who's to blame? Does company C suck, or is company V holding a brother down?
I wouldn't want to be company C when this shitstorm erupts. I wish Copowi the best of luck, and I hope they get EFF on their side, but I predict they're going to sink like a lead tuna.
I know good and well what "net neutrality" means. How do you offer such, as an ISP, when you don't own any infrastructure and you have to piggyback on the big boys? If you're offering DSL over lines that really belong to Verizon or SBC, how can you promise your customers that all connections are equal?
They don't own any fiber. The access that they can deliver is at the mercy of the telcos who provision their lines. And while they claim that presently they have cushy arrangements which allow them to do whatever the fuck they want with the bandwidth as long as they pay for it... Who guarantees that agreement will remain in place? The first time a Copowi user turns into a warez pup, what's to say the local DSLAMs won't just "dry up?"
Cute idea. I wish it could work. Ain't gonna survive in our current sad state of Intellectual-Property-uber-alles, especially when one single entity owns the last mile in just about every jurisdiction of this country. Sure, I'd like to start up my own "I don't give a fuck" ISP, too. If only I owned a fiber run to everybody's house, it would be a piece of cake.
Slashdot Mirror
For the most part, these have been made federal crimes, even to the extent of superseding existing state laws. A few years ago, several states had passed fairly strong anti-spam laws. If someone violated the law, you could file against them in your local small claims court, and secure a guaranteed judgement (good luck collecting, but that's another story) if they didn't show. Slashdot regular Bennett Haselton made boilerplate of that process, as I recall. Then along came CAN-SPAM, which created huge loopholes and essentially declared that individual state laws about spam, if less tolerant than the federal statute, were no longer enforceable.
So now it's up to the feds to prosecute spammers, phishers, and other ill-willed malfeasants. Most of the time, the feds have better things to worry about, and unless you personally can prove tens of thousands in damages, they're unlikely to raise an eyebrow. You do remember how the FBI's last few technology initiatives turned out, right? The penultimate example being "Virtual Case File," a/k/a "Virtual Money Sink." What amounts to a data warehouse with a client app to query it, $200 million later and it's scrapped. Two hundred MILLION dollars down the drain on a failed initiative to, in essence, secure some data feeds, create some transformations, and develop a GUI to query the whole shebang. You really expect these guys to track down John Dodrescu in Romania who's spoofing a Bank of America website on some zombie PCs in Italy, oh wait, that was 10 minutes ago before the TTL on the DNS expired, now it's some zombie PCs in France?
Give me, a non-gov IT professional, a team of 10 people of my choosing, fund me with one single million dollars and some travel vouchers, and agree to keep the project going for one year. A lot of these assholes will be out of business inside of 6 months, with many of their contemporaries scared shitless of becoming the next statistic. No fatalities, just a lot of people behind bars. But the federal government doesn't work that way because as many of us are well aware, it isn't profitable to run an IT department. They'd rather hire 1,000 guys who may or may not be able to tell you which of (XM|XP|XTC) is a version of Windows, at $50K a year apiece, then bitch and moan that they can't stop the problem with $50mil so they can justify a bigger budget next year.
America is spending more money per day in Iraq than it would take to adequately investigate, build cases against, and convict all of the prolific spammers in the entire world.
No, I don't often wonder why these problems haven't been solved. The federal government has been tasked with solving them, and that's all the why I need.
NOAA is the single remaining government agency that I still trust implicitly. DHS is nearly the polar opposite. I'm not sure what to make of a collaboration between them, but I'm encouraged by the fact that they're taking input from regular citizens. No doubt NOAA is behind that initiative.
There has been tremendous pressure from commercial weather interests to devalue the NOAA/NWS, to decrease its funding, to cripple its information distribution, in favor of making people pay to get the sort of weather data that NOAA has been distributing for free ever since they were chartered. I'm happy to see that new programs with public participation and cooperation are still being created. WX data is crucial for everyone, let's keep it open and free and public.
I don't care how many people are in your enterprise; when you create a resource for the public (like MSDN), publish your entire API references etc. there, your URIs should not be changing every month. I've had the same experience as the OP, where I'll bookmark something on MSDN and try to pull it up merely a few weeks later, only to hit a 404. Even the MSKB URIs keep changing around. "This article (876543) was previously known as 'Q876543'" and such tripe. Pick a consistent gosh-darned convention and stick with it. It seems to have something to do with constant reorganization of their "tree" navigation structure, but whatever the cause, it's damned annoying.
Five years ago, I could go to http://php.net/fsockopen and be taken to the documentation for that function. The same URI works today. There's no reason that I shouldn't be able to go to http://microsoft.com/api/win32/wsastartup and rely on that URI to point wherever Microsoft has decided that documentation wants to go today...
Sorry, couldn't help it.
Nah, they'd just have to have some moby disks.
I'm in Comcast's Memphis market and haven't yet had any problems with BitTorrent. I don't doubt that the filter will probably be rolled out to all service areas, though, if it proves reliable and doesn't get them sued.
1) The sender pays to mail the junk that shows up in your postal mailbox. With spam, the cost is effectively offloaded to the recipient in terms of higher ISP fees, etc. There's also the theory that the bulk-mailers keep first class postage rates lower than they otherwise would be, by subsidizing a large part of the postal operation.
2) There's actually a reliable way to "opt out" of almost all junk postal mail, by contacting the DMA and requesting that its members stop mailing you.
3) Junk postal mail is sent through a legal and legitimate channel with established regulators who have guns and actually track down fraud and scammers.
There's really no sense buying the junky bootlegs on a street corner. I honestly don't understand how any for-profit duplicators make it these days. It was one thing in the age of VHS tapes, but in our current environment, it's far easier for the average consumer to get his hands on a legitimate, high quality copy (and "back it up") than it's worth attempting to purchase a counterfeit copy.
Alas, the penalties for downloading (or uploading) a movie via, say, BitTorrent are tens of times more harsh than the penalties for buying or selling a counterfeit DVD on the street, or for just shoplifting the damned thing. So I guess I don't understand why these guys get into the business. They'd face less potential jail time if they set up a rape/murder cartel.
If you were getting 404s, you were actually hitting a server, so you were seeing something other than the DNS outage. Probably a coincidence.
Would you rather they hire Roland Piquepaille as an editor?
I notice you're a subscriber. That gives us a little more right to bitch, but on the other hand, it shows that we're okay with the way things are because we're more than happy to toss some money in the tip jar now and then. If you're really not that happy with how things are going anymore, pull your subscription. Me, I'm not going to renew mine once it's used up.
Uh, watching it for free over-the-air?
Just pick up the nearest telephone and state your problem; the issue will be patched in the next release.
Leaking the uranium was the second most serious violation. Leaking the fact that there had been a uranium leak was the most serious violation...
OK, then; who's going to sign up for internet access with company C, knowing that they cater to the lowest common denominator and give everyone shit bandwidth? That sounds more like company V, who already exists and is generally the only option for many people.
OK, here's the point I'm trying to make.
Consider that there's company V. Company V owns the phone lines. They sell DSL connections to their subscribers, giddy little consumers who are happy to pay whatever company V would like to charge.
Along comes company C. Company C claims "we won't mess with your connection! You will get Google, and YouTube, and MySpace, and Fox News, and everything at the same speed. We will never throttle anything or attempt to meter it based on content! We are all about net neutrality!" And subscribers flock to company C, as they would tend to do in a free market.
However, company C has to buy their connectivity from company V. And company V never made any agreement with company C's subscribers about how their traffic might be throttled. Suddenly, company C is trying their best to provide "all connections are equal" access to their subscribers, but company V keeps interfering. Company C's subscribers who try to load videos from YouTube find it difficult, though they can load videos from Fox News in real-time. And who's to blame? Does company C suck, or is company V holding a brother down?
I wouldn't want to be company C when this shitstorm erupts. I wish Copowi the best of luck, and I hope they get EFF on their side, but I predict they're going to sink like a lead tuna.
I know good and well what "net neutrality" means. How do you offer such, as an ISP, when you don't own any infrastructure and you have to piggyback on the big boys? If you're offering DSL over lines that really belong to Verizon or SBC, how can you promise your customers that all connections are equal?
It ain't gonna work.
They don't own any fiber. The access that they can deliver is at the mercy of the telcos who provision their lines. And while they claim that presently they have cushy arrangements which allow them to do whatever the fuck they want with the bandwidth as long as they pay for it... Who guarantees that agreement will remain in place? The first time a Copowi user turns into a warez pup, what's to say the local DSLAMs won't just "dry up?"
Cute idea. I wish it could work. Ain't gonna survive in our current sad state of Intellectual-Property-uber-alles, especially when one single entity owns the last mile in just about every jurisdiction of this country. Sure, I'd like to start up my own "I don't give a fuck" ISP, too. If only I owned a fiber run to everybody's house, it would be a piece of cake.