You don't have to think, "Oh, I'm going to the Internet to get this," versus, "I'm going to the local disk, I'm going to the local network." That was our philosophy with the browser from the very beginning. We're going to take that to a whole new level in terms of going out to get information, and yet be able to do it in such a way that you know you're getting secure information, that the right things can happen even as you go out to the internet.
Anyone remember that full-page ad in the WSJ back in 1997?
You won't know where your desktop ends and the Internet begins.
6 years later and Microsoft still thinks that's a good thing! They have never gotten past that warm and fuzzy conception of the net as Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, when it's much more like William Gibson's Sprawl.
Let's see a show of hands. How many of you think that not having a clear indication of where a piece of information came from is a good idea?
To my knowledge, no one has been sued for sharing their local garage band demo.
Perhaps you missed the point. Along with the inordinate monetary amounts, the RIAA has pursued injunctions that prevent the lawsuit victims from sharing music. Any music.
They're using their own IP as a stalking horse to dismantle sharing in general. That's the only way their artificial-scarcity-based control of the market can survive. RIAA can suffer the odd indy label here and there, because RIAA controls the largest retail outlets to the point where these indies can never hope to achieve the retail penetration of the 'mainstream'. But peer sharing is outside their control.
It's not just that they want to make money off the music they "own". They want to "own" all music.
they'll send you their "message" as the name of the user wanting approval.
That's a contextual violation, so it's not likely to work. Humans get a lot (maybe most) of their information from context. Putting a sales pitch into a field where the reader expects a name will cause most readers to just reject the whole field without thinking. The commercial you quote is comical, but that scheme only works when both ends have agreed on the code.
I have to wonder, when scanning some of the spam in my quarantine folder, what the spammers were thinking when they put complete gibberish in either the sender, subject or both. (except for the Chinese spam, which I just write off to bad list selection) If spam didn't work, there wouldn't be any. So does that tell me that J. Random Email-User not only decides to read email with gibberish in the headers, but acts on the (frequently also gibberish, except for the all-important hyperlink) contents? I guess Kornbluth really was right.
IPv6 should eliminate NATs. The people who enjoy the false security (prevention of inbound connections) that NAT provides will keep using them.
Why do you call preventing inbound connections "false security"? And how is making every device in a home face the net a good thing?
I think limiting the net-facing presence is a good idea. I like the fact that I'm in exclusive control of my incoming traffic. Besides, I can't figure out why anyone else would want to talk to my coffee maker in the first place.
The thing is, VB.NET isn't just an incremental upgrade to VB6 and Win2k/XP aren't incremental upgrades to win9x. They're very different systems using the same name.
Amen, brother! Fortunately, I got to put one of two VB apps that I maintain down this week. The other one will be retired soon. But let's talk about drivers...
I have to do some pretty fancy stepping to maintain the 9x/2K/XP drivers for our hardware on the same binary image. Soon, I'll have no choice but to use some parallel stub driver and a bit of footwork to keep at least the code base unified, if not the binary. But then there's NT. The NT driver codebase is similar only in that it talks to the same hardware. And the PHB patrol won't let me freeze the NT fork. Every bleeding-edge addition to the XP driver simply must be backported to 9x and NT. Of course, my immediate manager has never written a driver in his life, so he has no clue why I'd say that something is impossible on NT (or if not impossible, too time-intensive to be a practical goal).
As if that weren't enough, last week I got asked why we don't have Win95 drivers. We never did (the Big Acquiring Corp didn't even know we existed in the 95 days, but now they bought us and they have drivers for their stuff clear back to DOS (hell, maybe back to CP/M))), but I still had to talk fast to avoid getting saddled with writing some.
DeLorme Street Atlas hits your sweet spot dead in the middle, along with half a zillion other cool points like downloading routes and maps to your GPS, real-time moving map display, GPS radar (alerts you to points of interest as you approach them), more than a million points of interest (down to the Speedway store across the street, complete with phone number) and talking route directions delivered in real time.
Can't speak to the push-pin thing, though... haven't checked its accuracy.
Though it was 2 domains and 5 computers ago, I once had the... experience (I was going to say pleasure, but let's be honest) of trying to get Spamford to stop sending mail to my domain. He'd subscribed a harvester to the Cypherpunks list, so whenever I posted to the list, I got an autoresponder from him. It took a bit of looking, but I was able to uncover the admin addresses of several of his machines behind the front line of his domain, so I started sending invoices. He got them, too. Somewhere, I think I still have copies of some of the nastygrams he responded with. Funny, though. He never, ever, responded to my central theme of "stop sending unauthorized email to this domain." All he did was bluster and threaten to invoice me for wasting his time.
FWIW, he never sent me an invoice, and he also never paid one of mine.
The instant you come across a piece of spam in your inbox, you can flag that piece of spam to be shared. Within a few minutes, a copy of that spam (and perhaps an MD5 fingerprint taken from random but non-specific strings extracted from the spam as well) is made available to everyone via P2P.
Sitefinder is arguably useful, but no one company should have the exculsive right (or technical ability) to run such a service
You're right. Sitefinder is arguably useful. But in order to implement Sitefinder, Verisign broke the DNS system. Repeat after me, and everyone else in this thread that has said the same thing: The WWW is NOT the Internet!
Alternative interpretations of HTTP errors belong in the web browser. HTTP is only one of hundreds of services that depend on DNS. In order to scam some revenue from one of them, Verisign broke all of them.
Honestly, victim-pays. The biggest problem with email postage is, what happens if no one will sell you a stamp? The usual argument is that postage makes spamming a bad business model, but the logical extension is not to sell stamps to known spammers. That's the thin end of the wedge.
The only practical way to do email postage is with some huge beauracracy (USPS comes to mind, though it's US-centric), and would require a digital certificate to associate the stamp with the message. (spam prevention, remember?) That certificate could easily be extended into your Internet Driver's License, complete with procedures for revoking it. See where this can very easily lead?
No, thanks. SpamAssassin and procmail are no hassle. RedHat installs them by default. I'd much rather spend a few of my CPU cycles than have to pay for someone else's permission to send email.
Re:The current system is victim pays, not free ema
on
Another Whack at Spam
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· Score: 1
Please explain how you manage to get truely free email?
Have these people like John Walker, that are advocating these "control schemes" ever looked in a history book? have they ever read something like a tale of two cities?
Haven't these Slashdotters that are bemoaning an imagined advocacy ever RTFA? Consider this quote:
In this document I will provide a road map of precisely how I believe that could be done, potentially setting the stage for an authoritarian political and intellectual dark age global in scope and self-perpetuating, a disempowerment of the individual which extinguishes the very innovation and diversity of thought which have brought down so many tyrannies in the past.
I see no advocacy there. I see only an observation of that which could be, using that which is. You say you won't deal with "a company that has control issues", but you deal with a government that has those same issues, doubled in spades. Let's see you opt out of that.
If you charge actual money to use email, the Unwashed Masses will stop using email, which may or may not be a good thing. You will also require a huge bureaucracy to administer the system, which will cost more than the original "postage", so the system will sink under its own weight.
Now, what might work is to criminalize the use of spam as an advertising medium, assign responsibility to the party who profits (that being the party on whose behalf the spam is advertising) and assign half the penalties back to the people who received and reported the spam.
A C-64 was my first usable computer. The Sinclair ZX-80 was just a toy, and by the time I bought a TI 99/4A, you couldn't even find the Extended Basic cart.
At one time, I had 4 64's and a C-128 piled on one computer desk. One 64 ran my BBS. Another was a testbed that I'd expanded to 256K, using a Transactor magazine article. (never did get the 2 center banks stable, due to timing issues on the cascaded OR gates) Two more for testing cracks and running utils. And the C-128 for serious hacking.
I went through a nostalgia kick of my own a couple of years ago and started raiding eBay for Commmie stuff. Picked up a 64, a 64C and a 128, along with one each of the 1541, 1571 and 1581 drives. But the best score was a Super Snapshot V4.0, the rockingest expansion cartridge ever.
Purchased in January of 1992, this case has held 4 different mobos and at least six drives of various vintage. It's now my home mailserver (redhat), kitted with a P233 mobo, 3 assorted IDE drives (one of which is a whopping 2 GB) and a 10/100 NIC of unknown lineage. It's still on the original AT-style power supply, which has run 24/7 for about 95% of its life.
Actually, I'm waiting for spammers to sue us for restrain of trade when we write about spam filters.
T'ain't funny, McGee. The DNC list was first struck down as a free speech infringement. It's not impossible that someone, somewhere will finally argue their way to the conclusion that a right to free speech implies a responsibility to listen. I've already seen that argument used, thankfully not (yet) in court.
But apparently, there's only two operational Cinerama theatres left in the world... [the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood] and the one at the Motion Picture Museum in Bradford, UK.
It seems that the Seattle Cinerama theater is once again operational, thanks to Paul Allen. That's the theater in which I first saw 2001, sitting in one of the "four perfect seats".
You have a static IP, yes? I don't, and frankly it's not worth the escalation to business-class service (which, for ZoomTown, means paying more for essentially the same service) when I can just use the SMTP server at my domain host.
Interesting approach to the Essential Problem
on
Spoofed From: Prevention
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· Score: 4, Interesting
That problem, of course, is how to authenticate the entry point into the mail transport system. When the relay sequence is carried in-band, as with SMTP, spoofing the entry point is trivial. But even imagining an advanced system, where routing records are carried out of band and all relay points mutually authenticate, locking down the entry point is still a hard problem. If nothing else, Sam Spammer simply impersonates a server that's passing in-transit messages and forges the upstream transit records. Unless mail is redefined to be passed only by persistent hosts, the system has to allow for previous transit points to be offline except when actually passing traffic. That means authenticating back upstream won't always be possible, thus obscuring the forged transit records.
Possibly, the system could require authentication all the way back to the message originator, but that implies some central repository of mail originator credentials (again, to allow for transient connections), which would have to be is-a-person credentials to be of any use in tracking and punishing spammers. Since TANSTAAFL, that means to send mail, you have to buy an admission pass for the network. That implies an infrastructure to issue and validate these credentials, as well as no provisions for unlinked mail nyms. Big Brother USPS, anyone?
It's a safe bet that dynamic DNS services will instantly pounce upon this as something worth paying for (and they'd be right). But more to the point, the problem with using your ISP's SMTP is that you generally have to be joeuser@isp.com instead of joeuser@joeuser.net. Don't know about you, but I want my From: line to use my domain, not the ISP's.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's see a show of hands. How many of you think that not having a clear indication of where a piece of information came from is a good idea?
Anyone?
Anyone?
Nope, even Ferris won't bite on this one.
They're using their own IP as a stalking horse to dismantle sharing in general. That's the only way their artificial-scarcity-based control of the market can survive. RIAA can suffer the odd indy label here and there, because RIAA controls the largest retail outlets to the point where these indies can never hope to achieve the retail penetration of the 'mainstream'. But peer sharing is outside their control.
It's not just that they want to make money off the music they "own". They want to "own" all music.
I have to wonder, when scanning some of the spam in my quarantine folder, what the spammers were thinking when they put complete gibberish in either the sender, subject or both. (except for the Chinese spam, which I just write off to bad list selection) If spam didn't work, there wouldn't be any. So does that tell me that J. Random Email-User not only decides to read email with gibberish in the headers, but acts on the (frequently also gibberish, except for the all-important hyperlink) contents? I guess Kornbluth really was right.
Why do you call preventing inbound connections "false security"? And how is making every device in a home face the net a good thing?
I think limiting the net-facing presence is a good idea. I like the fact that I'm in exclusive control of my incoming traffic. Besides, I can't figure out why anyone else would want to talk to my coffee maker in the first place.
I have to do some pretty fancy stepping to maintain the 9x/2K/XP drivers for our hardware on the same binary image. Soon, I'll have no choice but to use some parallel stub driver and a bit of footwork to keep at least the code base unified, if not the binary. But then there's NT. The NT driver codebase is similar only in that it talks to the same hardware. And the PHB patrol won't let me freeze the NT fork. Every bleeding-edge addition to the XP driver simply must be backported to 9x and NT. Of course, my immediate manager has never written a driver in his life, so he has no clue why I'd say that something is impossible on NT (or if not impossible, too time-intensive to be a practical goal).
As if that weren't enough, last week I got asked why we don't have Win95 drivers. We never did (the Big Acquiring Corp didn't even know we existed in the 95 days, but now they bought us and they have drivers for their stuff clear back to DOS (hell, maybe back to CP/M))), but I still had to talk fast to avoid getting saddled with writing some.
MapsOnUs used to be my favorite, but I gotta say... MapQuest gives exit numbers in the routes, which makes freeway navigation loads easier.
Can't speak to the push-pin thing, though... haven't checked its accuracy.
FWIW, he never sent me an invoice, and he also never paid one of mine.
That was all Pat Harrington Jr's idea, wasn't it?
Alternative interpretations of HTTP errors belong in the web browser. HTTP is only one of hundreds of services that depend on DNS. In order to scam some revenue from one of them, Verisign broke all of them.
Now do you get it?
The only practical way to do email postage is with some huge beauracracy (USPS comes to mind, though it's US-centric), and would require a digital certificate to associate the stamp with the message. (spam prevention, remember?) That certificate could easily be extended into your Internet Driver's License, complete with procedures for revoking it. See where this can very easily lead?
No, thanks. SpamAssassin and procmail are no hassle. RedHat installs them by default. I'd much rather spend a few of my CPU cycles than have to pay for someone else's permission to send email.
Haven't these Slashdotters that are bemoaning an imagined advocacy ever RTFA? Consider this quote:
I see no advocacy there. I see only an observation of that which could be, using that which is. You say you won't deal with "a company that has control issues", but you deal with a government that has those same issues, doubled in spades. Let's see you opt out of that.Now, what might work is to criminalize the use of spam as an advertising medium, assign responsibility to the party who profits (that being the party on whose behalf the spam is advertising) and assign half the penalties back to the people who received and reported the spam.
* ^X-Spam-Tag: YES
! reporting.authority.com
At one time, I had 4 64's and a C-128 piled on one computer desk. One 64 ran my BBS. Another was a testbed that I'd expanded to 256K, using a Transactor magazine article. (never did get the 2 center banks stable, due to timing issues on the cascaded OR gates) Two more for testing cracks and running utils. And the C-128 for serious hacking.
I went through a nostalgia kick of my own a couple of years ago and started raiding eBay for Commmie stuff. Picked up a 64, a 64C and a 128, along with one each of the 1541, 1571 and 1581 drives. But the best score was a Super Snapshot V4.0, the rockingest expansion cartridge ever.
Purchased in January of 1992, this case has held 4 different mobos and at least six drives of various vintage. It's now my home mailserver (redhat), kitted with a P233 mobo, 3 assorted IDE drives (one of which is a whopping 2 GB) and a 10/100 NIC of unknown lineage. It's still on the original AT-style power supply, which has run 24/7 for about 95% of its life.
You have a static IP, yes? I don't, and frankly it's not worth the escalation to business-class service (which, for ZoomTown, means paying more for essentially the same service) when I can just use the SMTP server at my domain host.
Possibly, the system could require authentication all the way back to the message originator, but that implies some central repository of mail originator credentials (again, to allow for transient connections), which would have to be is-a-person credentials to be of any use in tracking and punishing spammers. Since TANSTAAFL, that means to send mail, you have to buy an admission pass for the network. That implies an infrastructure to issue and validate these credentials, as well as no provisions for unlinked mail nyms. Big Brother USPS, anyone?
It's a safe bet that dynamic DNS services will instantly pounce upon this as something worth paying for (and they'd be right). But more to the point, the problem with using your ISP's SMTP is that you generally have to be joeuser@isp.com instead of joeuser@joeuser.net. Don't know about you, but I want my From: line to use my domain, not the ISP's.