Reviewing the transcript, I see a rough analogy that can be grasped in a few minutes by many people. My bank uses vacuum tubes to conduct transactions. The Internet is made up of millions of vacuum tubes, each carrying deposits of requests and withdrawals of results. This analogy is more effective than many of my attempted explanations. The speaker states that mail should be the highest priority of the tubes. Neutral pipes are essential to the development of new architectures. I agree that some email should be delivered with more urgency than non-streaming media downloads.
Were the pros of neutrality reported in terms easily grasped by politicians?
Is the chosen analogy flawed beyond any hope of effectiveness?
Was every word of speech written ahead of time by someone else?
You can download new messages, old messages, saved messages, etc. Combined with an IMAP-aware utility that can download all mail from an account (imapsync, fetchmail, whatever) you're set.
Charles H. Salzenberg, Jr.
P O Box 537
Southeastern, PA 19399
Health Market Science
2700 Horizon Dr. Ste 200
King of Prussia, PA 19406
Attn: Mark Brosso, Matt Reichert, Rich Ferris, Rob DiMarco, Dorothy O'Hara
Re: Legality and Morality of Harvesting Operations
It has recently come to my attention that that HMS is continuing the illegal and immoral
web harvesting operation that I brought to Rich Ferris's attention over a month ago, in a
conversation including Tim McCune. HMS's continued harvesting operations are a threat
to me legally, morally, and professionally.
That HMS systematically collects data from web sites without the express permission of
their owners is well known (inside HMS). Some web site operators are not pleased when
(if) they figure out that their sites are being harvested. They sometimes respond by
blocking the network addresses of the harvesting machines. This was a common problem
in harvesting when I hired on to HMS in December of 2002. At that time, the accepted
strategy for getting around such blocks was to obtain multiple web hosting accounts to act
as proxies for HMS's harvesting systems. I did not then realize that knowingly bypassing
blocks placed by web server operators was illegal. (As a result of other research, detailed
below, I now know that has been illegal all along.)
As bad as HMS's past harvesting practice was, current practice is worse... much worse.
HMS has taken a page from the spammer playbook and is, deliberately and under
management direction, hijacking thousands of vulnerable machines all over the
Internet, using them and their network bandwidth without the knowledge or
permission of their owners as unwitting accomplices in HMS's data harvesting
operation.
I have confirmed these facts in conversations with several people with first-hand
knowledge, including Tim McCune and John Marquart. I asked Tim McCune about
HMS's proxy hijacking in the presence of Rich Ferris, a vice president of HMS and a
company founder. In that conversation, Tim McCune confirmed to Rich Ferris and me
that proxy hijacking was standard practice. Shocked, I informed Tim and Rich that proxy
hijacking is very illegal and immoral. They were unmoved. I also have witnesses for other
conversations.
I have also confirmed that the Harvester source code - which I, as a Senior Programmer,
am authorized to access - includes Java code which collects lists of such vulnerable
computers, called "open proxies," from web sites that maintain lists of them. I have also
found the Java code which uses such proxies, without the permission of their owners, to
connect to the sites that HMS harvests. The offending source code was written by Rob
DiMarco, Tim McCune, and Jason Franklin.
This deplorable activity by HMS has serious legal, moral, and professional implications.
First, the legal.
I am not a lawyer, but I can read the plain English of the Pennsylvania Consolidated
Statutes, and it is clear to me that hijacking the computers of random people is a crime in
Pennsylvania. Under PSC 3933, every instance - every single instance - of hijacking an
open proxy is a misdemeanor of the first degree.
HMS is committing these misdemeanors
by the tens of thousands, under explicit management direction, and in accord with
corporate strategy. One petty theft may draw little attention; but tens of thousands of petty
thefts, all made by one company, at explicit management direction, and in accord with
company strategy, might well lead to unpleasant legal consequences. Even a small fine is
painful when multiplied by a hundred thousand.
HMS thus makes itself an attractive target
for prosecution by a state's attorney who wants to show himself tough on corporate crime.
HMS could be a stand-in for the spammers who commit the same crimes.
HMS's legal exposure is not limited to Pennsylvania. A number of the sites that HMS
harvests are run by governments of other states who would be
None of the views expressed in the website constitute the views of the Armstrong & Carosella PC law firm, or any principals or employees, or agents or experts who have been retained in any capacity in connection with the case. Information on this site is for educational purposes. Case Caption: Health Market Science, Inc. v Charles H. Salzenberg, Jr.. Court of Common Pleas of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. Case Number: 05-11918
Donate today, to the Chip Salzenberg Defense Fund. Over $40k in legal defense fees incurred since April 23, 2005. Protect yourself from the same thing happening to you. Learn from this site, mirror it. Please donate. We thank you for your help. OMITTED from the Company's Pleadings, UN-INVESTIGATED by the Detective, it caused IMMEDIATE ACTION by the CEO, READ the LETTER that started it all!
Why care?
We didn't ask for this fight but we do hope that the telecommuting community learns from it. As a well known contributor to OpenSource and perl for many years, Chip continued his efforts to protect the spirit of opensource and the internet by attempting to inform his employer...sadly it brought on serious consequences in the form of an ugly legal battle with results that can affect all employees and consultants who hook up to an employer's network. We urgently need your help. The Chip Salzenberg Defense Fund is an escrow account sponsored by the law firm of Armstrong and Carosella to help pay the mounting legal defense fees for Chip Salzenberg and his family. The funds will only be used for legal costs to defend Charles Salzenberg and his family against Health Market Science, Inc. Donations are NOT tax deductible. Thank you in advance. We would love to hear from you.
Donate by email
You may send us your email address, name, phone number and pledge amount. We will email you back a "Request for payment". You'll be able to pay by credit/debit card or using your Paypal account. Send email to: gifts@geeksunite.net.
Donate by Mail
If you would prefer to mail your donation, please send it to the following address:
Chip Salzenberg Defense Fund Escrow Care of: Armstrong & Carosella 882 S. Matlack Street Ste. 101 West Chester, PA 19382
Make Checks payable to Chip Salzenberg Defense Fund Escrow" (NOT tax deductible).
If you have questions or need additional information about making a gift to the Chip Salzenberg Defense Fund, please call 925-457-6634 or email gifts@geeksunite.net.
Using the results of a period of observation, assign a classifying neural net to distinguish water vapor reflections from the morass of noise. With human training (specifically, teaching it to distinguish RF interference from water vapor) it would very well have a chance to produce a markedly more accurate picture.
The screensaver can be firewalled in such a manner that its attacks are ineffective, while providing a free data source of destinations on the Internet currently considered "Most Wanted" by Lycos. How much would an IT department pay for a phone call if they're seen spamming?
Combine the screensaver target list with the public SIP proxy provided by Pulver's FWD service and a bulk-rate calling card: when someone's about to be attacked by Lycos, they receive a recorded call alerting them.
A headless SIP client with a custom plugin could dial the calling card service and then transfer the SIP call to the recording at the exchange (preventing, in a limited fashion, end-user spoofing of the service for nefarious purposes).
A central pool of nearly used up calling cards could be tapped for many one minute calls of "you're considered a 'Most Wanted' spammer"; for more information, call Lycos at...", each initiated by an end-user's filtered screensaver instance.
I use apt4rpm in conjunction with several repositories, which as of recently include Fedora Core 2. It's worked *great* on our server so far, with little or no migration trauma as I upgrade from the FC1 packages I've been working with. I work with non-X11 web servers, so I haven't tried Gnome or dual-booting or any of that fancy desktop stuff; once it's installed, it goes into a rack and becomes headless.
I spoke with the business owner, who'll be doing up a press release -- which will include mention of their upcoming support for hardened wood laptops; I asked if he could convert my aluminum powerbook, and he said yes.
There's some nifty console video card adapter on the market for server boxes, that puts a VGA text console on a serial port. It might be useful, if I find more I'll speak up.
I'd really not mind at all, to be honest, if my ISP protected me from spammers by putting a hold on my mail if I sent too much within ten minutes. It will indeed affect them most with recurring offline batch users such as myself -- and I'm alright with that.
Yes, I'm sure you're authorized to run servers. That's normal. Please reread my comments, however, and note this key critical difference:
The outgoing mail servers for your email address are not your responsibility; they are the responsibility of your upstream. You are not the responsible party for those mail servers, and thus your personal mail server, authorized or not, may not speak authoritatively for someone else's domain name -- even if you're using an email address on that domain.
That's a very good point, and something that many administrators have been discovering in association with open wireless networks: direct outbound port 25 results in spammers having a field day with the bandwidth.
The usual cure I've seen these days is to use the authenticated (and, sometimes, SSL-encrypted) SMTP services on port 465. This works around the firewall problems and makes things a lot saner to deal with -- as well as keeping spammers from using public SMTP servers.
Now, if someone sets up a rogue SMTP server doing open relay on port 465, there's problems once more; however, requiring the authentication before a message can be sent (regardless of relay whitelists) makes this remarkably less feasible -- as well as adding a layer of identification to the Received: line of each email that is sent.
You need to be using authenticated SMTP, regardless of who's responsible.
If your provider is responsible for an email address, then they must provide you with a reasonable means of using their service to send mail, either by POP-validated SMTP or by authenticated SMTP.
If you're responsible for an email address, then you have no excuse whatsoever not to be using authenticated SMTP. Repair your outgoing mail server immediately.
Your server really *isn't* authorized, though.
on
Spoofed From: Prevention
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Purchasing server from a provider does not imply in any way that, as a customer, you have a right to represent that provider in any form. They're providing a service to you: connectivity.
One of the ways they do this is by providing inbound and outbound email services, through legitimate servers published through DNS. As a customer of the ISP, you're given rights to use those services, and they're responsible for ensuring your access to same -- that is, they're the responsible party for any given email address at their domain name(s).
You wish to configure your home mail server to appear as a legitimate server for outbound mail coming from another party's domain name(s); as a customer and not an administrator, I don't understand your presumption that you have a right to do so.
This is one of the key points of SPF that is going to start a lot of debate: if you purchase an email address from a provider other than yourself, you are not responsible for the outgoing mail servers for that address. Setting up and running your own mail server does not change this situation; there is no software you can run that will make your personal server the responsible party for someone else's domain name.
Since you're already running mail services, it's just a short step away to activate DNS services, available at no cost to you on virtually any platform that your own mail server will run on.
I currently host my domain with Domain Discover, at $35 a year; there's registration servers out there for as cheap as $7 a year. My $35/year domain is cheaper than a $5/month ($60/year) email account with a local Internet provider.
The primary purpose of SPF is to provide a positive authentication check for messages, to confirm that they have been sent through the outgoing mail server listed as a responsible party for the email address in question. It is inconceivable to me that any provider would bestow upon end-users the power to be a responsible party; partners, perhaps, but not individuals. While exceptions may occur, I don't feel that your situation should be one of them.
Start a movement to fill out SEC complains, then, in order to counter-weigh the stock implosion that appears to be at hand. Perhaps they can be caught mid-crash, peered at, and held up as a BAD COMPANY. Anyone in the world can file a complaint through the SEC about SCO. Tell your friends.
The p2p networks are considering a possible move agianst the RIAA in response to this by using recently enacted anti-spam laws."
(more)
One advantage of not being totally decentralized is that you have influence, legally. Now the Internet community can actively use the laws it's helped pass. There needs to be more of this kind of thing; it just takes a few more votes. Participate!
I propose a modification to Slashdot, such that users who have logged in and provided a name, address, and 9-digit zip code (in the united states) or a 6-digit post code (in the united kingdom) are shown a new link with articles: Contact your representative.
Now the Slashdot effect serves to enable millions of hits a day with the chance to vote. The last figure I remember was hearing was 30,000 unique visitors a day; imagine if ten percent of them each send one fax to their representative. Suddenly they're hearing the voices of three thousand Slashdot users, clearly, once a day.
Now do it more often. For every article. And support the United Kingom efforts, too. Other countries, too; perhaps a distributed network of Slashdot users with modems.
Give the people and dogs smart name tags , and have your dogs exchange your "business card" with the other smart name tags. Publish the FOAF url in it, so you can immediately check for compatibility and give the new information to the dogs.
Instruct the feral robots to find other people with compatible personalities , but to stay near you. They'll roam around, seeking people whose interests relate to yours.
For bonus points, add solar panels to generate power as it roams around, and electronic boundaries to keep it in safe areas, away from motor traffic.
I've been trying to study the directions in technology required to make a book such as this happen.
I'm not interested in teaching english as much as math, though. If I could tell my thin electronic math book to open to the "integrals" chapter and show me my class notes from last week, I'd be set.
Voice recognition isn't infeasible.
Do answers in the textbook, upload them to the teacher for electronic annotation; return the annotations to the student's textbook, they correct their work -- and the answer -- and the teacher approves the problem.
I can map out technological ways to build this, thanks to watching Slashdot for a couple years.
Given time, or an unexpected infusion of money, I'll be able to make something like this happen.
Is there somewhere I can contribute my help? I don't have the driving force myself to tear this problem apart and build it, yet.
I've many more, but not the time to index them here; requests via email, or look, in time, to a project I haven't yet described that tracks these:)
If email sent to a given address is carbon copied at your end to an Email->Fax gateway, then their spam emails are indeed being sent to a Fax machine and are protected by the law.
The trick is to redirect messages that seem to be spam; you'll get the occasional false positive, which is totally fine; at the end of the day, you shred the positives and pick a spam to write up a small claim about.
Hell, you could profit off of this, with the quantity of spam that's out there. Make a living off of receiving spam, perhaps.
If it was accepted as a valid use of the law, that'd destroy the spammers pretty quickly, with the effort of Slashdot behind those fax machines.
Imagine the force of Slashdot behind an initiative to print out and submit a small claim for at least one spam a day, per user. Thousands of claims would be filed in a single day against the same small set of companies. Some spam companies pull you off their list if you bring legal action against them, so a few hundred Slashdot users stop getting spammed by someone.
Repeat this daily for a month; you can also file multiple suits per day, if you have time. The sky's the limit (and your 100% recycled printer paper). Make some friends at the court; people will consider you a superhero if you help shut down spamming as a profitable enterprise.
I hope this case is validated; if so, there's ways to make people listen. Perhaps file a thousand small claims in a thousand courts on a single day, providing attached to the claim a list of all thousand courts. Send a press release to the major papers (and the local papers), tv & radio at 12pm after the filings, and see what happens.
What is the line in the sand separating a Perl script and Mozilla, in this situation?
Both collect data from the web, process it, and display it in a form understandable by the user. It just happens that one is more popular than the other.
If I was to rewrite that module to use AppleScript under OS X to go to their website, fill in the form, and save the image to my hard drive in a desired location, could they say I was violating their terms of service?
I'm using a web browser to access their service; it so happens that my preferred interface to that web browser is through AppleScript, instead of through the mouse and keyboard. Does that make it unacceptable to use their site
HOWTO: Configuring Exchange to publish Free/Busy
on
Apple Releases iCal
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
This useful document explains how to configure an Exchange server to allow the publishing and searching of Free/Busy information, and how to configure Outlook clients to use the F/B information.
You could theoretically then configure iCal to use that same F/B publishing location -- at which point, iCal becomes a client for Outlook calendar sharing.
Not a bad thing, really, and certainly useful information to have around.
Slashdot Mirror
Reviewing the transcript, I see a rough analogy that can be grasped in a few minutes by many people. My bank uses vacuum tubes to conduct transactions. The Internet is made up of millions of vacuum tubes, each carrying deposits of requests and withdrawals of results. This analogy is more effective than many of my attempted explanations. The speaker states that mail should be the highest priority of the tubes. Neutral pipes are essential to the development of new architectures. I agree that some email should be delivered with more urgency than non-streaming media downloads.
Were the pros of neutrality reported in terms easily grasped by politicians?
Is the chosen analogy flawed beyond any hope of effectiveness?
Was every word of speech written ahead of time by someone else?
http://members.aol.com/adamkb/aol/mailfaq/imap/
You can download new messages, old messages, saved messages, etc. Combined with an IMAP-aware utility that can download all mail from an account (imapsync, fetchmail, whatever) you're set.
Charles H. Salzenberg, Jr.
P O Box 537
Southeastern, PA 19399
Health Market Science
2700 Horizon Dr. Ste 200
King of Prussia, PA 19406
Attn: Mark Brosso, Matt Reichert, Rich Ferris, Rob DiMarco, Dorothy O'Hara
Re: Legality and Morality of Harvesting Operations
It has recently come to my attention that that HMS is continuing the illegal and immoral web harvesting operation that I brought to Rich Ferris's attention over a month ago, in a conversation including Tim McCune. HMS's continued harvesting operations are a threat to me legally, morally, and professionally.
That HMS systematically collects data from web sites without the express permission of their owners is well known (inside HMS). Some web site operators are not pleased when (if) they figure out that their sites are being harvested. They sometimes respond by blocking the network addresses of the harvesting machines. This was a common problem in harvesting when I hired on to HMS in December of 2002. At that time, the accepted strategy for getting around such blocks was to obtain multiple web hosting accounts to act as proxies for HMS's harvesting systems. I did not then realize that knowingly bypassing blocks placed by web server operators was illegal. (As a result of other research, detailed below, I now know that has been illegal all along.)
As bad as HMS's past harvesting practice was, current practice is worse ... much worse.
HMS has taken a page from the spammer playbook and is, deliberately and under
management direction, hijacking thousands of vulnerable machines all over the
Internet, using them and their network bandwidth without the knowledge or
permission of their owners as unwitting accomplices in HMS's data harvesting
operation.
I have confirmed these facts in conversations with several people with first-hand knowledge, including Tim McCune and John Marquart. I asked Tim McCune about HMS's proxy hijacking in the presence of Rich Ferris, a vice president of HMS and a company founder. In that conversation, Tim McCune confirmed to Rich Ferris and me that proxy hijacking was standard practice. Shocked, I informed Tim and Rich that proxy hijacking is very illegal and immoral. They were unmoved. I also have witnesses for other conversations.
I have also confirmed that the Harvester source code - which I, as a Senior Programmer, am authorized to access - includes Java code which collects lists of such vulnerable computers, called "open proxies," from web sites that maintain lists of them. I have also found the Java code which uses such proxies, without the permission of their owners, to connect to the sites that HMS harvests. The offending source code was written by Rob DiMarco, Tim McCune, and Jason Franklin.
This deplorable activity by HMS has serious legal, moral, and professional implications.
First, the legal.
I am not a lawyer, but I can read the plain English of the Pennsylvania Consolidated Statutes, and it is clear to me that hijacking the computers of random people is a crime in Pennsylvania. Under PSC 3933, every instance - every single instance - of hijacking an open proxy is a misdemeanor of the first degree.
HMS is committing these misdemeanors by the tens of thousands, under explicit management direction, and in accord with corporate strategy. One petty theft may draw little attention; but tens of thousands of petty thefts, all made by one company, at explicit management direction, and in accord with company strategy, might well lead to unpleasant legal consequences. Even a small fine is painful when multiplied by a hundred thousand.
HMS thus makes itself an attractive target for prosecution by a state's attorney who wants to show himself tough on corporate crime. HMS could be a stand-in for the spammers who commit the same crimes.
HMS's legal exposure is not limited to Pennsylvania. A number of the sites that HMS harvests are run by governments of other states who would be
None of the views expressed in the website constitute the views of the Armstrong & Carosella PC law firm, or any
principals or employees, or agents or experts who have been retained in any capacity in connection with the case.
Information on this site is for educational purposes. Case Caption: Health Market Science, Inc. v Charles H. Salzenberg, Jr..
Court of Common Pleas of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. Case Number: 05-11918
Donate today, to the
Chip Salzenberg Defense Fund. Over $40k in legal defense fees incurred since April 23, 2005.
Protect yourself from the same thing happening to you. Learn from this site, mirror it. Please donate. We thank you for your help.
OMITTED from the Company's Pleadings,
UN-INVESTIGATED by the Detective,
it caused IMMEDIATE ACTION by the CEO,
READ the LETTER that started it all!
Why care?
We didn't ask for this fight but we do hope that the telecommuting community learns from it. As a well known contributor to OpenSource and perl for many years, Chip continued his efforts to protect the spirit of opensource and the internet by attempting to inform his employer...sadly it brought on serious consequences in the form of an ugly legal battle with results that can affect all employees and consultants who hook up to an employer's network. We urgently need your help. The Chip Salzenberg Defense Fund is an escrow account sponsored by the law firm of Armstrong and Carosella to help pay the mounting legal defense fees for Chip Salzenberg and his family. The funds will only be used for legal costs to defend Charles Salzenberg and his family against Health Market Science, Inc. Donations are NOT tax deductible. Thank you in advance. We would love to hear from you.
Donate by email
You may send us your email address, name, phone number and pledge amount. We will email you back a "Request for payment".
You'll be able to pay by credit/debit card or using your Paypal account. Send email to: gifts@geeksunite.net.
Donate by Mail
If you would prefer to mail your donation, please send it to the following address:
Chip Salzenberg Defense Fund Escrow
Care of: Armstrong & Carosella
882 S. Matlack Street
Ste. 101
West Chester, PA 19382
Make Checks payable to Chip Salzenberg Defense Fund Escrow" (NOT tax deductible).
If you have questions or need additional information about making a gift to the Chip Salzenberg Defense Fund,
please call 925-457-6634 or email gifts@geeksunite.net.
Using the results of a period of observation, assign a classifying neural net to distinguish water vapor reflections from the morass of noise. With human training (specifically, teaching it to distinguish RF interference from water vapor) it would very well have a chance to produce a markedly more accurate picture.
The screensaver can be firewalled in such a manner that its attacks are ineffective, while providing a free data source of destinations on the Internet currently considered "Most Wanted" by Lycos. How much would an IT department pay for a phone call if they're seen spamming?
...", each initiated by an end-user's filtered screensaver instance.
Combine the screensaver target list with the public SIP proxy provided by Pulver's FWD service and a bulk-rate calling card: when someone's about to be attacked by Lycos, they receive a recorded call alerting them.
A headless SIP client with a custom plugin could dial the calling card service and then transfer the SIP call to the recording at the exchange (preventing, in a limited fashion, end-user spoofing of the service for nefarious purposes).
A central pool of nearly used up calling cards could be tapped for many one minute calls of "you're considered a 'Most Wanted' spammer"; for more information, call Lycos at
http://www.hfml.sci.kun.nl.nyud.net:8090/levitati
Check out the Infoshop story (found via Google News). Turns out Rackspace has indeed been instructed not to comment on this.
I use apt4rpm in conjunction with several repositories, which as of recently include Fedora Core 2. It's worked *great* on our server so far, with little or no migration trauma as I upgrade from the FC1 packages I've been working with. I work with non-X11 web servers, so I haven't tried Gnome or dual-booting or any of that fancy desktop stuff; once it's installed, it goes into a rack and becomes headless.
I spoke with the business owner, who'll be doing up a press release -- which will include mention of their upcoming support for hardened wood laptops; I asked if he could convert my aluminum powerbook, and he said yes.
There's some nifty console video card adapter on the market for server boxes, that puts a VGA text console on a serial port. It might be useful, if I find more I'll speak up.
How many birds are killed, maimed, or otherwise injured per day in the vicinity of airplanes and airports?
I'd really not mind at all, to be honest, if my ISP protected me from spammers by putting a hold on my mail if I sent too much within ten minutes. It will indeed affect them most with recurring offline batch users such as myself -- and I'm alright with that.
The outgoing mail servers for your email address are not your responsibility; they are the responsibility of your upstream. You are not the responsible party for those mail servers, and thus your personal mail server, authorized or not, may not speak authoritatively for someone else's domain name -- even if you're using an email address on that domain.
That's a very good point, and something that many administrators have been discovering in association with open wireless networks: direct outbound port 25 results in spammers having a field day with the bandwidth.
The usual cure I've seen these days is to use the authenticated (and, sometimes, SSL-encrypted) SMTP services on port 465. This works around the firewall problems and makes things a lot saner to deal with -- as well as keeping spammers from using public SMTP servers.
Now, if someone sets up a rogue SMTP server doing open relay on port 465, there's problems once more; however, requiring the authentication before a message can be sent (regardless of relay whitelists) makes this remarkably less feasible -- as well as adding a layer of identification to the Received: line of each email that is sent.
If your provider is responsible for an email address, then they must provide you with a reasonable means of using their service to send mail, either by POP-validated SMTP or by authenticated SMTP.
If you're responsible for an email address, then you have no excuse whatsoever not to be using authenticated SMTP. Repair your outgoing mail server immediately.
One of the ways they do this is by providing inbound and outbound email services, through legitimate servers published through DNS. As a customer of the ISP, you're given rights to use those services, and they're responsible for ensuring your access to same -- that is, they're the responsible party for any given email address at their domain name(s).
You wish to configure your home mail server to appear as a legitimate server for outbound mail coming from another party's domain name(s); as a customer and not an administrator, I don't understand your presumption that you have a right to do so.
This is one of the key points of SPF that is going to start a lot of debate: if you purchase an email address from a provider other than yourself, you are not responsible for the outgoing mail servers for that address. Setting up and running your own mail server does not change this situation; there is no software you can run that will make your personal server the responsible party for someone else's domain name.
Since you're already running mail services, it's just a short step away to activate DNS services, available at no cost to you on virtually any platform that your own mail server will run on.
I currently host my domain with Domain Discover, at $35 a year; there's registration servers out there for as cheap as $7 a year. My $35/year domain is cheaper than a $5/month ($60/year) email account with a local Internet provider.
The primary purpose of SPF is to provide a positive authentication check for messages, to confirm that they have been sent through the outgoing mail server listed as a responsible party for the email address in question. It is inconceivable to me that any provider would bestow upon end-users the power to be a responsible party; partners, perhaps, but not individuals. While exceptions may occur, I don't feel that your situation should be one of them.
Put your email address in the slashdot article, unescaped. Don't include stopwords like "spam", "nospam", "gov", "fcc", "fte", etc. Don't use +, -, _.
Start a movement to fill out SEC complains, then, in order to counter-weigh the stock implosion that appears to be at hand. Perhaps they can be caught mid-crash, peered at, and held up as a BAD COMPANY. Anyone in the world can file a complaint through the SEC about SCO. Tell your friends.
Link: http://www.sec.gov/complaint/cf942sec7040.htm
The article Slashdot your representative has been reposted from floating atoll ; please see the site for updates, responses, etc.
One advantage of not being totally decentralized is that you have influence, legally. Now the Internet community can actively use the laws it's helped pass. There needs to be more of this kind of thing; it just takes a few more votes. Participate!
I propose a modification to Slashdot, such that users who have logged in and provided a name, address, and 9-digit zip code (in the united states) or a 6-digit post code (in the united kingdom) are shown a new link with articles: Contact your representative.
Now the Slashdot effect serves to enable millions of hits a day with the chance to vote. The last figure I remember was hearing was 30,000 unique visitors a day; imagine if ten percent of them each send one fax to their representative. Suddenly they're hearing the voices of three thousand Slashdot users, clearly, once a day.
Now do it more often. For every article. And support the United Kingom efforts, too. Other countries, too; perhaps a distributed network of Slashdot users with modems.
Take an army of the recently-described feral hunting robots . To each robot, add a GPS chip and wireless mesh networking .
Give the people and dogs smart name tags , and have your dogs exchange your "business card" with the other smart name tags. Publish the FOAF url in it, so you can immediately check for compatibility and give the new information to the dogs.
Study the discovered FOAF files , each describing individual traits ("attributes").
Instruct the feral robots to find other people with compatible personalities , but to stay near you. They'll roam around, seeking people whose interests relate to yours.
For bonus points, add solar panels to generate power as it roams around, and electronic boundaries to keep it in safe areas, away from motor traffic.
I've been trying to study the directions in technology required to make a book such as this happen.
:)
I'm not interested in teaching english as much as math, though. If I could tell my thin electronic math book to open to the "integrals" chapter and show me my class notes from last week, I'd be set.
Voice recognition isn't infeasible.
Do answers in the textbook, upload them to the teacher for electronic annotation; return the annotations to the student's textbook, they correct their work -- and the answer -- and the teacher approves the problem.
I can map out technological ways to build this, thanks to watching Slashdot for a couple years.
Given time, or an unexpected infusion of money, I'll be able to make something like this happen.
Is there somewhere I can contribute my help? I don't have the driving force myself to tear this problem apart and build it, yet.
I've many more, but not the time to index them here; requests via email, or look, in time, to a project I haven't yet described that tracks these
If email sent to a given address is carbon copied at your end to an Email->Fax gateway, then their spam emails are indeed being sent to a Fax machine and are protected by the law.
The trick is to redirect messages that seem to be spam; you'll get the occasional false positive, which is totally fine; at the end of the day, you shred the positives and pick a spam to write up a small claim about.
Hell, you could profit off of this, with the quantity of spam that's out there. Make a living off of receiving spam, perhaps.
If it was accepted as a valid use of the law, that'd destroy the spammers pretty quickly, with the effort of Slashdot behind those fax machines.
Imagine the force of Slashdot behind an initiative to print out and submit a small claim for at least one spam a day, per user. Thousands of claims would be filed in a single day against the same small set of companies. Some spam companies pull you off their list if you bring legal action against them, so a few hundred Slashdot users stop getting spammed by someone.
Repeat this daily for a month; you can also file multiple suits per day, if you have time. The sky's the limit (and your 100% recycled printer paper). Make some friends at the court; people will consider you a superhero if you help shut down spamming as a profitable enterprise.
I hope this case is validated; if so, there's ways to make people listen. Perhaps file a thousand small claims in a thousand courts on a single day, providing attached to the claim a list of all thousand courts. Send a press release to the major papers (and the local papers), tv & radio at 12pm after the filings, and see what happens.
The way to end spam is to make it unprofitable.
What is the line in the sand separating a Perl script and Mozilla, in this situation?
Both collect data from the web, process it, and display it in a form understandable by the user. It just happens that one is more popular than the other.
If I was to rewrite that module to use AppleScript under OS X to go to their website, fill in the form, and save the image to my hard drive in a desired location, could they say I was violating their terms of service?
I'm using a web browser to access their service; it so happens that my preferred interface to that web browser is through AppleScript, instead of through the mouse and keyboard. Does that make it unacceptable to use their site
http://www.microsoft.com/office/ork/2000/five/70t3 _4.htm
This useful document explains how to configure an Exchange server to allow the publishing and searching of Free/Busy information, and how to configure Outlook clients to use the F/B information.
You could theoretically then configure iCal to use that same F/B publishing location -- at which point, iCal becomes a client for Outlook calendar sharing.
Not a bad thing, really, and certainly useful information to have around.