All of the time that the Fritz Hollingses have spent legislating in favor of media producers could have been spent, y'know, fixing the more important parts of our legal system.
<cynical_guy>
Would those be the parts that do not feature megabuck lobbyists or kilobuck under-the-table incentives?
</cynical_guy>
...what's the difference between polling e-mail servers and polling RSS servers?
Nothing, really, except that any scumbag spammer can put items into your email queue. Items that your email client will pull down (modulo filtering) whether you want them or not. Whereas if a RSS server serves you spam, you can decide not to poll it in the future. RSS provides guaranteed successful opt-out.
<siderant>
Always remember that advertising not only relies on, but requires push of some kind. Advertising only works when it can command your attention. If it were otherwise, no one would block pop-ups. Indeed, were it otherwise, pop-ups, interstitials and the like would have never been invented. There would have been no need.
</siderant>
I remember about 10 years ago when Borland "updated" their EULA for Turbo C++. It stopped me from upgrading past 2.0 because of the onerous restrictions. You weren't allowed to build anything that would compete with any Borland product, released or envisioned. I think there was even a restriction against free distribution of your program.
It's a typo. He meant to decry the Belkinization of the net. Probably a shill for D-Link or SMC.
Re:This is why ISPs are changing their SMTP rules?
on
P2P Spam?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
My ISP is not blocking port 25, and I have a colocated server -- but I send my mail through the ISP's relay.
Ah, but does your ISP's relay allow you to use your own domain? I could do that too, but I'd have to use frobnitz@fuse.net or some such abomination as my return address. That's not why I own a domain.
S'ok, though... DaemonPortOptions and a quick 'killall -HUP sendmail' took care of everything.
Re:Truly P2P if SOBIG.G contains the spam message
on
P2P Spam?
·
· Score: 1
It might not be just one central machine, but if the spammer wants to control his army, they have to either accept some form of communcation from him, or they have to contact him.
NNTP and alt.anonymous.messages form a dead drop that will be very hard to backtrace. The zombies don't have to contact the controller. They just have to look for command messages in a known place.
Re:This can't be right
on
P2P Spam?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Couldn't we then find out who wrote the virus just by interrogating the companies who benefit from the advertising?
Others have done this, but what they typically discover is a chain of fronts and cutouts that provide an insulating layer of plausable deniability. As soon as an investigation starts to traverse the chain, key links disolve and the trail goes cold. Besides, Mr. SoBig could easily market his zombie army's services without so much as a single customer even hearing his voice on the phone.
Re:Truly P2P if SOBIG.G contains the spam message
on
P2P Spam?
·
· Score: 1
There's no need for the SOBIG authors to control the machines after SOBIG has
been executed. They just need to include the spam message in the virus
itself.
No, that only provides a one-off spamming opportunity. The big picture is controlling a vast army of zombies to do... something. Spamming is a likely job for this army, as is DDoS. And with a zombie force big enough, the commander could throttle down the individual nodes' output to lessen the chance of discovery. I'd suspect that SoBig.G and possibly.H will be flash-flood distributions like the previous versions, but that once the zombie force is entrenched well enough, there may not even be a.I. Just thousands and thousands of hapless home machines squeezing out a slow and steady drip of spam.
On a somewhat related note, Cincinnati Bell's Fuse ISP has begun blocking port 25 outbound, most likely because of SoBig. It caused me almost 10 minutes of frustration while looking up the args to DaemonPortOptions.
It's also not true that you can copy a DVD without decrypting it first. DVDs contain data in special regions of the disc that are placed there at manufacture time. DVD burners generally cannot alter what is put there.
Which only means that consumer-grade equipment cannot copy a DVD without decryption. Real pirates have full-up DVD plants using the same technology that is used to produce the DVD in the first place. If the MPAA auditing is anything like the RIAA's, the majority of pirate DVD's could very well be coming from the same plants that produce the "genuine" product.
But there's no possibility that the MPAA could be double-dealing pirate product to boost their income, right? Right??
Though it's too late by the time you see this, 10 (yes, I said 10) commercials before the first preview in the theater could be a danger indicator. That's what I experienced leading up to T3. In retrospect, some of the commercials were better than the movie.
Now, the spammer might just say "I don't know which state they're in" - to which a judge would reply "then you shouldn't have sent them your spam."
And at a stroke, you have either prohibited legitimate bulk mailings (such as genuine opt-in mailing lists) or you have mandated the collection and retention of residential data that are affirmatively associated with a given email address.
The first one would be overturned by a big restraint of trade action.
The second, ironically, would probably be welcomed by a lot of parties. It gives the big commercial concerns a mandate to collect and retain the kind of information they all lust after. A marketer's dream! And it puts that data squarely in view of programs like Total^WTerrorist Information Awareness that have already announced their intention to go data mining in non-government databases.
The problem with spam laws is that they inevitably touch far more than spam.
The law simply requires that certain types of messages (specifically, adult-oriented advertising) be accurately described in the subject. This DOES NOT limit your freedom of speech.
Do you insure that when you speak to someone in person, that your conversation's headers accurately reflect the content of that conversation?
Spam laws do affect freedom of speech, in the same manner as "Fire" vs. "Theater". But as spam does not have the same direct impact on public safety as does shouting "Fire" in the classic example, the lines of demarcation will be understandably fuzzier. That is where the problem lies. Without a precise definition (and it is very difficult to create a completely unambiguous definition of spam), the spam laws will sometimes be applied to cases that are not spam. Even worse, it is exactly that kind of abuse that could lead to the legal appointmant of a spam-classification czar, and the requirement that the czar (or his minions) pass judgement on every email that is sent.
But that shouldn't bother J. Random Email-user. After all, he need only change his outgoing SMTP settings to point to omnivore.usps.com and he'll notice nothing.
It's 2003. Is there really no reliable way to electronically identify oneself, so that you can prove you are a person with the name and age given?
What are called "Is-a-Person" credentials are certainly doable. And if Friendster required such a certified meatspace linkage, their userbase would evaporate. The (ano)nymity of the medium is a large part of its appeal. People want to be someone else, and the net is the perfect place to do that. No one knows you're a newt.
Also remember that it's a short trip from having some agency certify that you're someone to not being anyone without a certificate.
Now every corporate drone has it in his sig file, without thought.
Careful with that axe, Eugene. Some of us corporate drones get the boilerplate appended by the company mail mangler when an item is routed outside the confines of Domino.
This doesn't excuse my drone-ism, but at least I can duck the blame for the lame legalese.
Re:Spammers
on
FCC Goes WiFi
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Does anyone filter outgoing SMTP packets? That would would be almost as bad as filter packets destined for port 80!
Lots of ISPs restrict port 25 connections to their own mail servers (vis. Earthlink), ostensibly to "prevent spam". And while it does raise the bar, it does not prevent spamming. It just coerces the spammer into using the ISP's mail servers from throwaway accounts.
Some ISPs are more draconian. Basic-level AT&T Prepaid Internet appears to permit only ports 80 and 443 to connect out. Their website (unavailable to outside connections, hence no link) hints at an "Enhanced Service" that permits FTP, VPN and some other goodies in return for "providing some information", but they don't tell you how to obtain it. I just put a virtual SSH server on port 80 and added a little port and X forwarding to turn the prepaid access into a usable service.
So if a user's first post is "Hey everybody, I share your interest in foo. My stationary has unicorns on it. Hooray!". And the response is "Don't %$#'ing ever post binary attachments here again you %#$%'er!", then the user could easily decide Usenet is scary and rude and go back to the safety of their favorite web forum or mailing list.
Road Warrior meets Blade Runner meets the Terminator in claustrophobic, disease-ridden ships, all with space battles, oasis planets, and a search for the heavenly world of the gods made flesh.
I have got to get more caffiene... I read that as "Blade Warrior meets Road Runner"!
These devices have been around a while, and you're close about the function. The devices actually mimic a female mosquito, since the females avoid each other's company in favor of the typically horny male. I tried one out in Nome, Alaska in 1971. Now, Nome is famous for mosquitos that are big enough to stand flat-footed and shit in the back of a 2 1/2 ton dump truck, so the option to skip the DEET bath sounded good at the time. I have to say that the pager-sized Skeeter Skat (the device's trade name at the time) did cut down the number of bites I received. But while the females stayed away, I was surrounded by a dense cloud of males interested in the horny female I sounded like. And I'm talking dense! Dense like it was damn near impossible to breathe without inhaling a few dozen horny males.
I think the Skeeter Skat managed to skip six times before finally sinking into the nearby river.
Some years ago when I lived in Nome, Alaska, my girlfriend's mother sent her a note and left the Zip code off. It took nearly 3 months to arrive, because it had been misdirected to Saudi Arabia. The envelope was backstamped in Arabic! (backstamping is the convention of applying a postmark to the back of an envelope when a misdirected piece of mail is identified as such)
I've said it before... we need to outlaw all forms of intrusive advertising.
An attitude like that will cause some big, knuckle-dragging goon named Guido to pay you a visit some dark evening.
Good as the idea might sound, you'd be going up against an industry worth more than many small countries. As the largest and most successful parasite in history, advertising will be very hard to kill, and even harder to restrict. As soon as you "outlaw intrusive advertising", you get mired in the minutae of defining "intrusive". You can bet that there will be more than a few deep-pocketed lobbyists who'd like to contribute to that definition.
What a grand idea! Hold the sellers responsible. In fact, make the penalties really large, but drop them completely in return for identifying the spammer *and* accepting a restraining order preventing them from using or contracting to use bulk email in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
Would those be the parts that do not feature megabuck lobbyists or kilobuck under-the-table incentives?
</cynical_guy>
Mailinator may be interesting, but there is a rich vein of irony at the top of the page: ads for bulk-mailing software/services.
<siderant>
Always remember that advertising not only relies on, but requires push of some kind. Advertising only works when it can command your attention. If it were otherwise, no one would block pop-ups. Indeed, were it otherwise, pop-ups, interstitials and the like would have never been invented. There would have been no need.
</siderant>
I remember about 10 years ago when Borland "updated" their EULA for Turbo C++. It stopped me from upgrading past 2.0 because of the onerous restrictions. You weren't allowed to build anything that would compete with any Borland product, released or envisioned. I think there was even a restriction against free distribution of your program.
Did you mean to type http://www.pdf417.com/?
S'ok, though... DaemonPortOptions and a quick 'killall -HUP sendmail' took care of everything.
On a somewhat related note, Cincinnati Bell's Fuse ISP has begun blocking port 25 outbound, most likely because of SoBig. It caused me almost 10 minutes of frustration while looking up the args to DaemonPortOptions.
But there's no possibility that the MPAA could be double-dealing pirate product to boost their income, right? Right??
Though it's too late by the time you see this, 10 (yes, I said 10) commercials before the first preview in the theater could be a danger indicator. That's what I experienced leading up to T3. In retrospect, some of the commercials were better than the movie.
The first one would be overturned by a big restraint of trade action.
The second, ironically, would probably be welcomed by a lot of parties. It gives the big commercial concerns a mandate to collect and retain the kind of information they all lust after. A marketer's dream! And it puts that data squarely in view of programs like Total^WTerrorist Information Awareness that have already announced their intention to go data mining in non-government databases.
The problem with spam laws is that they inevitably touch far more than spam.
Spam laws do affect freedom of speech, in the same manner as "Fire" vs. "Theater". But as spam does not have the same direct impact on public safety as does shouting "Fire" in the classic example, the lines of demarcation will be understandably fuzzier. That is where the problem lies. Without a precise definition (and it is very difficult to create a completely unambiguous definition of spam), the spam laws will sometimes be applied to cases that are not spam. Even worse, it is exactly that kind of abuse that could lead to the legal appointmant of a spam-classification czar, and the requirement that the czar (or his minions) pass judgement on every email that is sent.
But that shouldn't bother J. Random Email-user. After all, he need only change his outgoing SMTP settings to point to omnivore.usps.com and he'll notice nothing.
Also remember that it's a short trip from having some agency certify that you're someone to not being anyone without a certificate.
"Your papers, please..."
This doesn't excuse my drone-ism, but at least I can duck the blame for the lame legalese.
Some ISPs are more draconian. Basic-level AT&T Prepaid Internet appears to permit only ports 80 and 443 to connect out. Their website (unavailable to outside connections, hence no link) hints at an "Enhanced Service" that permits FTP, VPN and some other goodies in return for "providing some information", but they don't tell you how to obtain it. I just put a virtual SSH server on port 80 and added a little port and X forwarding to turn the prepaid access into a usable service.
Aieee! The images! The images!!
I think the Skeeter Skat managed to skip six times before finally sinking into the nearby river.
Some years ago when I lived in Nome, Alaska, my girlfriend's mother sent her a note and left the Zip code off. It took nearly 3 months to arrive, because it had been misdirected to Saudi Arabia. The envelope was backstamped in Arabic! (backstamping is the convention of applying a postmark to the back of an envelope when a misdirected piece of mail is identified as such)
Good as the idea might sound, you'd be going up against an industry worth more than many small countries. As the largest and most successful parasite in history, advertising will be very hard to kill, and even harder to restrict. As soon as you "outlaw intrusive advertising", you get mired in the minutae of defining "intrusive". You can bet that there will be more than a few deep-pocketed lobbyists who'd like to contribute to that definition.
Or you could pick the better tool for the job.
What a grand idea! Hold the sellers responsible. In fact, make the penalties really large, but drop them completely in return for identifying the spammer *and* accepting a restraining order preventing them from using or contracting to use bulk email in the future.